I DIDN'T KNOW if Hiroshi had seen the show on his monitor or not. I wasn't about to ask. We were not pals.

I was willing to be a pal, if that was part of the job. I believe he moved me in next door to him with the idea that it was time he had a pal. My guess is that he never had had a pal. No sooner had I become his neighbor, I think, than he decided he didn't want a pal after all. That didn't have anything to do with what I was or how I acted. To him, I think, a pal was like a piece of merchandise heavily promoted at Christmas, say. Why junk up his life with such a c.u.mbersome contraption and all its accessories merely because it was advertised?

So he went on hiking alone and boating alone and eating alone, which was OK with me. I had a rich social life across the lake.

BUT THE DAY after the doc.u.mentary was shown, late in the afternoon, about suppertime, I was rowing for sh.o.r.e in my fibergla.s.s umiak, headed for the mud beach in front of our 2 houses in the ghost town. I had been fishing. I hadn't been to Scipio. My own 2 great pals Over there, Muriel Peck and Damon Stern, were on vacation. They wouldn't be back until Freshman Orientation Week, before the start of the fall semester.

The Warden was waiting for me on the beach, looking out at me in my crazy boat like a mother who had been worried to death about where her little boy had gone. Had I failed to keep a date with him? No. We had never had a date. My best supposition was that Mildred or Margaret had tried to burn 1 of our houses down.

But he said to me as I disembarked, "There is something you should know about me."

There was no pressing reason why I should know anything about him. We didn't work as a team up at the prison. He didn't care what or how I taught up there.

"I was in Hiroshima when it was bombed," he said.

I am sure there was an implied equation there: The bombing of Hiroshima was as unforgivable and as typically human as the Rape of Nanking.

So I heard about his going into a ditch after a ball when he was a schoolboy, about his straightening up to find that n.o.body was alive but him.

And on and on.

When he was through with that story he said to me, "I thought you should know."

I SAID EARLIER that I had a sudden attack of psychosomatic hives when Rob Roy Fenstermaker told me that he had been busted for molesting children. That wasn't my first such attack. The first was when Hiroshi told me about being atom-bombed. I suddenly itched all over, and scratching wouldn't help.

And I said to Hiroshi what I would say to Rob Roy: "I thank you for sharing that with me."

This was an expression, if I am not mistaken, which originated in California.

I WAS TEMPTED to show Hiroshi "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore." I'm glad I didn't. I might now be feeling a little bit responsible for his suicide. He might have left a note saying: "The Elders of Tralfamadore win again!"

Only I and the author of that story, if he is still alive, would have known what he meant by that.

THE MOST TROUBLING part of his tale about the vaporization of all he knew and loved had to do with the edge of the area of the blast. There were all these people dying in agony. And he was only a little boy, remember.

That must have been for him like walking down the Appian Way back in 71 B.C., when 6,000 n.o.bodies had just been crucified there. Some little kid or maybe a lot of little kids may have walked down that road back then. What could a little kid say on such an occasion? "Daddy, I think I have to go to the bathroom"?

IT SO HAPPENS that my lawyer is on a first-name basis with our Amba.s.sador to j.a.pan, former Senator Randolph Nakayama of California. They are of different generations, but my lawyer was a roommate of the Senator's son at Reed College out in Portland, Oregon, the town where Tex bought his trusty rifle.

My lawyer told me that both sets of the Senator's racially j.a.panese grandparents, one set immigrants, the other set native Californians, were put into a concentration camp when this country got into the Finale Rack. The camp, incidentally, was only a few kilometers west of the Donner Pa.s.s, named in honor of White cannibals. The feeling back then was that anybody with j.a.panese genes inside our borders was probably less loyal to the United States Const.i.tution than to Hirohito, the Emperor of j.a.pan.

The Senator's father, however, served in an infantry battalion composed entirely of young Americans of j.a.panese extraction, which became our most decorated unit taking part in the Italian Campaign during, again, the Finale Rack.

So I asked my lawyer to find out from the Amba.s.sador if Hiroshi had left a note, and if there had been an autopsy performed to determine whether or not the deceased had ingested some foreign substance that might have made hara-kiri easier. I don't know whether to call this friendship or morbid curiosity.

The answer came back that there was no note, and that there had been no autopsy, since the cause of death was so horribly obvious. There was this detail: A little girl who didn't know him was the first person of any age or s.e.x to see what he had chosen to do to himself.

She ran and told her mama.

BACK WHEN WE were neighbors, I asked the Warden why he never left this valley, why he didn't get away from the prison and me and the ignorant young guards and the bells across the lake and all the rest of it. He had years of leave time he had never used.

He said, "I would only meet more people."

"You don't like any kind of people?" I said. We were talking in a sort of joshing mode, so I could ask him that.

"I wish I had been born a bird instead," he said. "I wish we had all been born birds instead."

HE NEVER KILLED anybody and had the s.e.x life of a calf kept alive for its veal alone.

I have lived more vividly, and I promised to tell at the end of this book the number I would like engraved on my tombstone, a number that represents both my 100-percent-legal military kills and my adulteries.

If people hear of the number at the end and its double significance, some will turn to the end to learn the number in order to decide that it is too small or too big or just about right or whatever without reading the book. But I have devised a lock to thwart them. I have concealed its oddly shaped key in a problem that only those who have read the whole book will have no trouble solving.

So: Take the year Eugene Debs died.

SUBTRACT THE t.i.tLE of the science fiction movie based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke which I saw twice in Vietnam. Do not panic. This will give you a negative number, but Arabs in olden times taught us how to deal with such.

Add the year of Hitler's birth. There! Everything is nice and positive again. If you have done everything right so far, you should have the year in which Napoleon was banished to Elba and the metronome was invented, neither event, however, discussed in this book.

Add the gestation period of an opossum expressed in days. That isn't in the book, either, so I make you a gift of it. The number is 12. That will bring you to the year in which Thomas Jefferson, the former slave owner, died and James Fenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans, The Last of the Mohicans, which wasn't set in this valley but might as well have been. which wasn't set in this valley but might as well have been.

Divide by the square root of 4.

Subtract 100 times 9.

Add the greatest number of children known to have come from the womb of just 1 woman, and there you are, by gosh.

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JUST BECAUSE SOME of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

THE END.

Books by Kurt Vonnegut

PLAYER PIANO.

THE SIRENS OF t.i.tAN.

MOTHER NIGHT.

CAT'S CRADLE G.o.d BLESS YOU, MR. MR. ROSEWATER ROSEWATER.

WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE.

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS.

WAMPETERS, FOMA & GRANFALLOONS.

SLAPSTICK.

JAILBIRD.

PALM SUNDAY.

DEADEYE d.i.c.k.

GALAPAGOS.

BLUEBEARD.

HOCUS POCUS.

FATES WORSE THAN DEATH.

TIMEQUAKE.

BAGOMBO SNUFF BOX.