Breakfast of Champions

6






DWAYNE HOOVER sat in the used Plymouth Fury in his own vacant lot for an hour, listening to West Virginia. He was told about health insurance for pennies a day, about how to get better performance from his car. He was told what to do about constipation. He was offered a Bible which had everything that God or Jesus had actually said out loud printed in red capital letters. He was offered a plant which would attract and eat disease-carrying insects in his home.
All this was stored away in Dwayne’s memory, in case he should need it later on. He had all kinds of stuff in there.


While Dwayne sat there so alone, the oldest inhabitant of Midland City was dying in the County Hospital, at the foot of Fairchild Boulevard, which was nine miles away. She was Mary Young. She was one hundred and eight years old. She was black. Mary Young’s parents had been human slaves in Kentucky.
There was a tiny connection between Mary Young and Dwayne Hoover. She did the laundry for Dwayne’s family for a few months, back when Dwayne was a little boy. She told Bible stories and stories about slavery to little Dwayne. She told him about a public hanging of a white man she had seen in Cincinnati, when she was a little girl.


A black intern at the County Hospital now watched Mary Young die of pneumonia.
The intern did not know her. He had been in Midland City for only a week. He wasn’t even a fellow-American, although he had taken his medical degree at Harvard. He was an Indaro. He was a Nigerian. His name was Cyprian Ukwende. He felt no kinship with Mary or with any American blacks. He felt kinship only with Indaros.
As she died, Mary was as alone on the planet as were Dwayne Hoover or Kilgore Trout. She had never reproduced. There were no friends or relatives to watch her die. So she spoke her very last words on the planet to Cyprian Ukwende. She did not have enough breath left to make her vocal cords buzz. She could only move her lips noiselessly.
Here is all she had to say about death: “Oh my, oh my.”


Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a small cloud of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed the cheek of Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away.
Dwayne heard a tired voice from somewhere behind his head, even though no one was back there. It said this to Dwayne: “Oh my, oh my.”


Dwayne’s bad chemicals now made him put his car in gear. He drove out of the vacant lot, proceeded sedately down Union Avenue, which paralleled the Interstate.
He went past his principal place of business, which was Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village, and he turned into the parking lot of the new Holiday Inn next door. Dwayne owned a third of the Inn—in partnership with Midland City’s leading orthodontist, Dr. Alfred Maritimo, and Bill Miller, who was Chairman of the Parole Board at the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown, among other things.
Dwayne went up the Inn’s back steps to the roof without meeting anybody. There was a full moon. There were two full moons. The new Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts was a translucent sphere on stilts, and it was illuminated from the inside now—and it looked like a moon.


Dwayne gazed over the sleeping city. He had been born there. He had spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage only two miles from where he stood. He had been adopted and educated there.
He owned not only the Pontiac agency and a piece of the new Holiday Inn. He owned three Burger Chefs, too, and five coin-operated car washes, and pieces of the Sugar Creek Drive-in Theatre, Radio Station WMCY, the Three Maples Par-Three Golf Course, and seventeen hundred shares of common stock in Barrytron, Limited, a local electronics firm. He owned dozens of vacant lots. He was on the Board of Directors of the Midland County National Bank.
But now Midland City looked unfamiliar and frightening to Dwayne. “Where am I?” he said.
He even forgot that his wife Celia had committed suicide, for instance, by eating Drāno—a mixture of sodium hydroxide and aluminum flakes, which was meant to clear drains. Celia became a small volcano, since she was composed of the same sorts of substances which commonly clogged drains.
Dwayne even forgot that his only child, a son, had grown up to be a notorious homosexual. His name was George, but everybody called him “Bunny.” He played piano in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn.
“Where am I?” said Dwayne.