(Source: thevolatilemolotov)

I have seen my own death many times.

I have described it to a tape recorder. 

“I, Billy Pilgrim, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976.”

The tape is locked up in my safe-deposit box at the Ilium Merchants National Bank and Trust. 

At the time of my death, I am in Chicago.  My home is still in Ilium.  I am speaking in front of a capacity audience in a baseball park, which is covered by a geodesic dome.  I am speaking about flying saucers and the truths of time.  

I tell the crowd my death will be in an hour.  ”It is high time I was dead.  Many years ago, a certain man promised to have me killed.  He is an old man now, living not far from here.  He has read all the publicity associated with my appearance in your fair city.  He is insane.  Tonight he will keep his promise.”

There are protests from the crowd.

“If you protest, if you think death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said.  Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.”

The police offer to stay, to stand in a circle around me and protect me all night. “No, no, it is time for me to be dead for a little while- and then live again.”

So it goes.  It is simply a violet light and a hum.  There isn’t anybody else there.  Not even Billy Pilgrim is there.  

Earthlings are great explainers. Maybe everyone will finally understand what the Tralfamadorians see if they watch this. 

(Source: theintelligentidiot, via what-protects-our-hearts)

I went back to work this morning.  My assistants have kept the business nicely.  They were surprised to see me as they had been thoughtfully told by my daughter that I may never practice again.  I went to my examining room and asked them to send in the first patient.  They sent in a twelve year-old boy and his widowed mother.  

They were new to town and so I asked them a little about themselves.  They told me the boy’s father had died in the five-day batter for Hill 875 near Dakto in Vietnam. So it goes. 

I examined the boy’s eyes and told him of my travels to Tralfamadore.  I assured him that his father was alive and well in another time, in moments that the boy would surely see again and again.  I thought it was quite a comforting thought.

The widowed mother left the room for a moment and the receptionist called my daughter.  

“Father, Father, Father- what are we going to do with you?”

My daughter is worried about me.

My house is empty and I need to work on my letters to the Ilium News Leader about Tralfamadore. The knowledge I have brought back to Earth with me will finally bring people into the light - they’ll see the truth.  My feet are blue and ivory. My heart is glowing coals.  Barbara, my daughter, is ringing the doorbell upstairs but I have to keep working.  This will be a new beginning for all humankind.  Barbara has opened the door and she’s calling out for me.  I won’t answer.  She’ll check here last.  

I tell her I didn’t hear her.  She has the afternoon paper in her hand, the one with my first published letter.  She yells at me telling me I have brain damage from the plane crash, that none of it is true.  She says I’m making a laughing stock of myself and everyone I associate with.  She thinks I’m senile, even though I’m only forty-six.  She has become such a bitchy flibbertigibbet at only twenty-one.  She thinks with her mother gone and my “insanity” that she is now the head of the family.  

I know there are many lost and wretched Earthling souls because they cannot see as well as my little green friends.  

“Father, Father, Father- what are we going to do with you?” 

Apparently the oil burner is out.  Barbara calls the oil-burner man to start the heat again.  She sends me to bed.

The first time I came unstuck in time was in 1944, during the war and long before my trip to Tralfamadore.  The Tralfamadorians didn’t have anything to do with me becoming unstuck, they just gave me insights into what was happening. 

I was a chaplain’s assistant in the war.  I didn’t have any weapons or medals - I was just a figure of fun for the American Army. I played hymns from my childhood on a little black organ which was waterproof.  It had thirty-eight keys and two pedals.  I also had a portable altar lined with crimson plush.

It was a Sunday morning.  My chaplain and I had gathered a congregation of about fifty soldiers on a Carolina hillside.  An umpire appeared.  There were umpires everywhere, men who said who was winning or losing the theoretical battle, who was alive and who was dead. 

The umpire told us the congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by the theoretical enemy.  We were all theoretically dead.  We were theoretical corpses and we laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal. 

That was a great Tralfamadorian adventure.  To be dead and eat at the same time. 

They communicate telepathically. The Tralfamadores have no voice boxes. They talked to me through some sort of computer with any electric organ that made Earthling speech sounds.

The night of my daughter’s wedding day.

I cannot sleep.  I am forty-four and it is 1967.  The flying saucer will come and I will hear the melodious owl that is not an owl.  The saucer will seem to come from nowhere, traveling through time and space.  I will hear the owl song and the purple light will beam down to paralyze me.  I will be forced to hold on to the ladder that comes down and then my time with the Tralfamadorians will begin.  

The electric clock on the stove says there is still one hour.  I turned on the T.V.  There was a movie about American bombers in WWII.  I came slightly unstuck in time and so watched the movie backwards, then forwards again.  A few German fighter planes flew at American planes full of holes and wounded men backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen.  They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.  

The formation flew over a German city that was in flames.  The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them in cylindrical steel containers, and lifted them into the bellies of the planes.  The Germans below had miraculous devices, long steel tubes, that sucked more fragments from the crewmen and planes.  German fighters came up again over France and made everything and everybody as good as new. 

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the US, where factories separated the dangerous contents into minerals.  Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work.  They were then shipped to specialists in remote areas.  It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.  

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, I suppose.  That wasn’t in the movie, but everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve. 

And then came time to leave. 

"God grant me
the serenity to accept
the things I cannot change,
courage
to change the things I can,
and wisdom always
to tell the difference."

The prayer framed in my office that reminds me to keep going.  There isn’t much to living.  Among the things I cannot change are the past, the present, and the future. 

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral.  All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. 

It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. 

When a Tralfamadore sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say was the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”

I was kidnapped on the night of my daughter’s wedding, but I wasn’t missed.  The Tralfamadorians took me through a time warp, and so could’ve been there for years but only away from Earth for about a millisecond. 

They are two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber’s friends.  Their suction cups are on the ground, and their shafts, which are extremely flexible, usually point to the sky.  At the top of each shaft is a little hand with a green eye in its palm.  The creatures are friendly, and they can see in four dimensions.  They pity us Earthlings for being able to see only three.  They have many wonderful things to teach us, especially about time. 

But more about that to come later. 

(Source: )