Breakfast of Champions: Chapter 23–Epilogue

The Creator programmed robots to abuse it for millions of years, so it would be a poisonous, festering cheese when you got here.

They have committed every possible atrocity and every possible kindness unfeelingly, automatically, inevitably, to get a reaction from Y-O-U.

“Every time you went into the library,” said the book, “the Creator of the Universe held His breath. With such a higgledy-piggledy cultural smorgasbord before you, what would you, with your free will, choose?”

“Every time you went into the library,” said the book, “the Creator of the Universe held His breath. With such a higgledy-piggledy cultural smorgasbord before you, what would you, with your free will, choose?”

Dwayne got to his feet now, having wolfed down tens of thousands of words of such solipsistic whimsey in ten minutes or so.

He walked stiffly over to the piano bar. What made him stiff was his awe of his own strength and righteousness.

He was going to respond to his new understanding of life with finesse, for an audience of two—himself and his Creator.

Bunny did not resist him, even though Bunny’s face was being mangled horribly.

Dwayne was subdued on the median divider by two State Policemen who happened by.

The person who answered this incantation was a person who had never played hide-and-seek in his life.

He mentioned a few, too, who had been energetic and punctual, and he winked at Wayne, and he said this: “They were programmed that way.”

And Wayne vaulted onto the bed of a very unusual truck, which had been built on the chassis of a 1962 Cadillac limousine.

Dwayne regarded coal miners and workers on assembly lines and so forth as slaves, no matter what color they were.

And just as motherless Dwayne Hoover was berating motherless Wayne Hoobler in the used car lot, a man who had actually killed his mother was preparing to land in a chartered plane at Will Fairchild Memorial Airport, on the other side of the Interstate.

It reminded him of how his mother had looked when he saw her through the bleary eyes of infancy.

Eddie Key had begun to store in his mind the names and adventures of ancestors on both his mother’s and father’s sides of his family when he was only six years old. As he sat in the front of the disaster vehicle, looking out through the windshield, he had the feeling that he himself was a vehicle, and that his eyes were windshields through which his progenitors could look, if they wished to.

Eddie Key’s familiarity with a teeming past made life much more interesting to him than it was to Dwayne, for instance, or to me, or to Kilgore Trout, or to almost any white person in Midland City that day.

When he trundled her outside, there was a fairsize crowd which had drifted out of the cocktail lounge and the kitchen of the new Holiday Inn.

And Dwayne went cantering over to the concrete trough by the Interstate, and he spat Kilgore Trout’s fingertip into Sugar Creek.

But he had spared Wayne Hoobler, at least. Wayne was back among the used cars again, unscathed.

Dwayne actually lost money on the transaction, making adjustments and replacing parts in an attempt to mollify Breedlove.

I could go on and on with the intimate details about the various lives of people on the super-ambulance, but what good is more information?

The people he had injured so unjustly would sue him so vengefully that he would be rendered destitute.

“Hey man, hey man, hey man,” he wheedled.

Trout was, like so many Earthlings, a fully automatic boob when a pathological personality like Elgin Washington told him what to want, what to do.

Elgin Washington perceived that he had caught yet another human being without really meaning to. It was not in his nature to let one go without making him feel in some way diminished, in some way a fool.

He closed his eyes as though thinking hard, then he earnestly said, “I think I may be dying.”

And I got out of the car to stretch my legs, which was another soigné thing to do. I was among factories and warehouses.

And I mooned philosophically at the murky battlements of the old Keedsler Mansion, on the other side of Fairchild Boulevard.

I was almost indifferent to his approach, although we had momentous things to say to one another about my having created him.

The company’s monogram and motto hung in the night sky behind Kilgore Trout, whose eyes were wild.

“Mr. Trout,” I said from the unlighted interior of the car, “you have nothing to fear. I bring you tidings of great joy.”

My view of the lights of the County Hospital was garbled by beads of water.

As I approached him from the driver’s side of the car, I swiveled my feet some, so that my footsteps were not only deliberate but gritty, too.

I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come. Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoi freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career.