The Ninth Configuration Read Online Free PDF Page B

And you know why they did it? Because they were bastards. Every mean insensitive grown-up bastard started as a bastard. Show me a kid who tortures caterpillars and I’ll show you a son of a bitch. Do you approve? I crave approval. I need approval. I would rather have approval than a jelly roll with yogurt. Incidentally, have you noticed that Groper never showers? It’s because we’d see the caterpillar blood on his legs! The hateful bastard!
    He’s a regular Santa Claus: every Christmas he jumps in his sled and delivers napalm to the poor. That son of a bitch. A dumb stray dog with a coiled-up tail came up and whined and licked his shoe one day on the drawbridge, and Groper right away whipped out a jack-knife and sliced the dog’s tail off, cropped it real close, and the dog is screaming and going crazy and then Groper says he helped it on account of the fleas; they collect in the tail. Christ, he’s up to his knees in caterpillar blood! You know, he used to be a writer for Time magazine and for years he always talked in captions: he was always saying, ‘After the melon, a grape,’ and things like that in the fucking mess hall. Also, he loved to say ‘brouhaha.’ But that was in the old days, Hud. I mean, now he only does it when he drinks. The poor slob was a colonel once, did you know that? Then he said ‘brouhaha’ in front of MacArthur and they busted him back to major. Wake up. Are you awake?” The astronaut turned for a look at Kane.
    “Yes, I’m awake,” said Kane.
    “So I see; but you were nodding, Catherine Earnshaw.” Cutshaw flopped over on his back once again and then queried, “What do you think of asps?”
    “Asps?”
    “You are absolutely incapable of giving a man a straight answer!”
    Cutshaw produced a lollipop from a pocket and began to lick at it noisily.
    “Cutshaw, why do you wear that armband?”
    “Because I’m in mourning.”
    “For whom?”
    “For God.” Cutshaw sat up, removed the flippers and threw them down. “That’s right.” Now he threw away the lollipop. “I don’t belong to the God Is Alive and Living in Argentina Club.” Cutshaw stood up and began to pace in agitation. “Basta! No more talk about God! Wrap it up, that’s enough. Let’s get back to psychiatry.” He paused by the desk. “That reminds me. Some psychiatrist! You haven’t even asked me if I have obsessions.”
    “Do you?”
    “Yes, I do. I hate feet. Christ, I can’t stand the sight of them. How could a so-called beautiful God give us ugly padding things like feet!”
    “So you can walk.”
    “I don’t want to walk, I want to fly! Feet are disfiguring and disgraceful.” Cutshaw looked down at his own bare feet, strode over to the couch, sat down and tugged the flippers back on. “If God exists,” he said, “he’s a fink. Or more likely a foot: a giant, omniscient, omnipotent Foot. Do you think that is blasphemous?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “I believe that I capitalized the F.”
    The astronaut studied Kane as though attempting to evaluate him. “How many times,” he asked him finally, “can a person break a shish kebab skewer in half?” He stood up on the couch, reached out for the mounted head of a boar, and gripping its tusks, began to sway gently back and forth in midair. “Everything has parts,” he continued, in that posture. “The skewer has parts. Now, how many times can I break it in half? An infinite number of times or only a limited number of times? If the answer’s an infinite number of times, then the skewer must be infinite. Which is moose piss, why don’t we face it. But if I can only cut the skewer in half for a limited number of times… if I get down to a piece of skewer that can no longer be cut in half-I mean, assuming I were Foot and could do anything I wanted-then I’m down to a piece of skewer that has no parts. But if it has no parts, it can’t exist! Am I right? No. I see it in your eyes. You think I’m a crazy old man.”
    “Not at all,”