Aliens and Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’

This Week’s Winner

Lorenzo Tañedo intended to submit a less whimsical piece on his favorite book, although he claims – as he always had – that aliens ate his homework.

Last night, I was abducted by aliens.
But that’s not the important part. For those of you who are too distracted by that statement to read on, let me describe the experience, just to get it out of the way.

Around 10 p.m. Just took a shower, set my alarm clock, jumped into bed. If you’ve watched The X-Files, then you should be intimately familiar with that scene where Mulder’s sister gets abducted. Yep, it was all there – bright lights, frozen time, eerie floating – except for the creepy music. From thereon, I don’t remember much, except saying to myself, please, please, please, if they do anal probes, let them have lube. And then, whoosh, I was whisked away, presumably on a sleek silver craft.

I found myself in the dark, spoken to by voices that seemed to bounce off the walls (again, I presumed there were walls somewhere that confined me). And the voices asked, "When will this race of men strike against our fair civilization?"

I scoffed at the question. I would not answer. My loyalty was to my family, my country, my planet.

And then they played some horrible Yanni music, and I broke.

I begged my captors to hear me out. I asked them what it was they knew about nuclear bombs, about our World War, and they told me that they watched Saving Private Ryan several times. I told them that I thought Tom Hanks sucked. They let up on the Yanni for just a second, and then cranked up some full-on Enya. (Apparently, that was the worst thing I could have said. Tom Hanks was such an institution to them they even greeted each other by saying "Tom Hanks to you!") I squealed in pain, and when they turned Enya down, I said that if they wanted to know about our war, they should read Slaughterhouse Five.

"Tell us about this book."

And I did. I could not take anymore New World music.

They asked me if it was TearLaugher. (Incidentally, their race has media that contain feelings so intensely sad that not only do they cry themselves to unconsciousness, but they wake up laughing dry because nothing left in their being can feel sad anymore.)

I tried to answer them, and then I realized that I didn’t even know what it was about anymore. I distinctly remembered Vonnegut saying that before he wrote the book, he intended it to be anti-war, to which a friend quickly retorted that he’d be better off attempting an anti-glacier endeavor. What his friend meant, of course, was that going up against some things are just utterly futile. The image was not lost on the aliens. Apparently they have an idiom, which is oceanflush. From what I gathered, it meant the exact same thing.

I told them that after I first read it, I couldn’t stop saying "So it goes…" They asked me to explain. I said that in the book, a race of benign yet mildly apathetic aliens abduct the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. The abduction later caused Billy to come unstuck in time – he would jump from one point in his life, say, his time in a zoo on Trafalmadore, to say, the war front, to say, even his own death. This race of creatures which Billy calls Trafalmadorians experienced four dimensions (the fourth being time), and as such, experienced time not as a linear progression as in, past, present, future, but all at once, repeating indefinitely. So, for example, if a human were to see the stars as sparkling dots in the sky, these Trafalmadorians would see an endless spaghetti of lights in the cosmos (the universe of course, ever-expanding, such that where our stars are today isn’t exactly where they were four million years ago, nor where they will be in the next million millennia). Similarly, people, for example, were not simple two-legged creatures, but centipedes, millipedes, with hundreds of legs for every moment in their lives – from infancy, to childhood, and so on. So, if someone were to die, they wouldn’t really be dead, they would simply be alive somewhere else in time. In which case, the alien race would say, "So it goes…"

I explained to them that this idea of time as not temporal, but rather, as forever, has greater and more profound implications. Think about it. If the progression of events came to you as the message would in a telegram, wherein one statement came interrupted by stops, and none of these stops prevented you from seeing what came after, or what came before, then you would be infinitely wiser for it.

My alien inquisitors still could not see my point.

"How?"

In order to make them see, I asked if they believed in God.

"We believe in donuts, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good donuts."

So I said, if your donuts are all-good and all-knowing, why is it that they allow you to do bad things? I told them that perhaps if there are donuts, then these donuts, like the Trafalmadorians, experience time simultaneously. In which case, they can know that you are going to do something bad because they’ve seen it, even if you haven’t, as you may understand, done it yet. It’s not a matter of their stopping you from doing bad things, because to them, you’ve always done them. What you are doing, you’ve always done, you always will do. As far as your limited wisdom would go, it’s just a matter of time till you yourselves see it. And maybe the secret of their infinite benevolence is that they were infinitely accepting.

My captors clicked their elbows (which is to say, they nodded).

I don’t know what war is; I’ve never fought one. Still, I appreciated how Vonnegut reconciled the senseless destruction of Dresden – that is, he didn’t, he couldn’t. I loved how his protagonist Billy, as lily-livered, dim-witted, ill-prepared for life as he is, is able to survive the war by somehow Forrest Gump-ing through one horrible scenario (from the Battle of the Bulge, to being captured by Nazis, to being held in a POW camp, and so on) to another, accepting everything for what it is, and moving on. My inquisitors appreciated that idiom: Forrest Gump-ing.

Maybe, I proposed, all this rhyme and reason is just surrounding noise. Or, as Vonnegut would have it, maybe, when thousands are killed and everything else is burned to ashes, all anyone can say is "Poo-too-weet," as a bird does right after the firebombing.

"Does anything mean anything anymore?"

I couldn’t answer. I always had an inkling that sometimes, choice is letting go, accepting the things that are far greater and far more immovable than yourself, and knowledge is trusting that you can’t possibly know everything, but still believing that things will be OK; how people who live for the moment have precisely just that, moments, tiny pieces of their infinitesimal lives, whereas people who just keep living are the ones who were really on to something.

"You want to know when you’re going to die, if men are going to be the end of you? Does it matter? You want to make sense of hows and whys and if and buts? Does it really matter to you? Why? So you can feel sad about your miserable deaths?"

I could sense that my captors were feeling sheepish. They asked me if I was resigned to my utter powerlessness, if, as they would put it, farts came from anywhere, anytime, and all I could do was smell them.

"Today I had cereal and milk for breakfast, and I wholeheartedly chose that. That was all me. But if I were to die tomorrow or be anal probed tonight, and if I were to be concerned with only one or two or three possible occurrences in my life filled with infinitely possible occurrences, all I would have in my life would be:

1. Enzo, age 23, abducted by aliens, anal probed, didn’t like it much.

2. Enzo, age 24, died saving family and loved ones in a smoky, flaming cruise ship going down somewhere in the Pacific, didn’t mind much.

But, as Vonnegut is trying to imply, I am more than that. And while horrible and undeniable things, which are far beyond my reach and understanding, are going to happen to me, the fact is there is more to me than that, filling my life, even the ugly parts, with dignity. Billy Pilgrim, for one, has an empty, wretched life filled with one misfortune after another, and yet, he is made to understand that his life is not just a narration of his misfortunes. He understood because he accepted.

They asked me if such an outlook in life is mad.

Some people who have read Slaughterhouse-Five propose that Billy was not, in fact, abducted, nor was he ever unstuck in time. They say he went mad, that his mind was fragmented by the horrible things he experienced, so much so that he could never live a normal life again, and it was only with his delusions of time-travel that he could cope.

As for me, I’d rather have my delusions.

I woke up in bed, as intact as intact could be.

My younger sister’s Slaughterhouse-Five was gone.