© Natural History magazine
Winter, 2001

''The Only Game in Town''
-- Kurt Vonnegut

One time my painter daughter, Edith, having become a grownup with her own kids and so on, blurted out something she had kept bottled up inside her for years. ''I hate Cezanne,'' she said. I did the same sort of thing with my big brother Bernie, dead now, an MIT Ph.D. physical chemist who got interested in the weather. I was maybe fifty, which would have made him sixty. And we were under the whale that was suspended from a ceiling in the American Museum of Natural History. And I suddenly blurted out ''I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Do you?'' That was like yelling in the Sistine Chapel that the paintings were all a lot of bushwa.

As a professional storyteller, I told Bernie, I couldn’t imagine a series of family crises in which the only survivors were those whose butts blinked on and off, as in the case of lightning bugs, or who had buzzers in their tails and hypodermic needles loaded with nerve poison in their mouths, as in the case of rattlesnakes.

There under the whale, Bernie and I played out a scene not unlike the one in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, in which Alyosha, the man of faith, responds to the bitter antagonism of his rationalist brother, Ivan. He hears Ivan out and then kisses him. Bernie didn’t kiss me, but he did put a hand on my shoulder and stared deep into my eyes. And then he said, ''It’s the only game in town.''

Many readers may be familiar with the old joke on which my brother’s ''kiss,'' if I may call it that, was based. A guy with the gambling sickness loses his shirt every night in a poker game. Somebody tells him that the game is crooked, rigged to send him to the poorhouse. And he says, haggardly, ''I know, I know. But it’s the only game in town.''

© Natural History magazine, Winter 2001

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