I undertook to explain the deeper significance of the cat's cradle, since Newt seemed disinclined to go through that song and dance again.

And Castle nodded sagely. "So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn't agree more."

"Do you _really_ agree?" I asked. "A minute ago you said something about Jesus."

"Who?" said, Castle.

"Jesus Christ?"

"Oh," said Castle. "_Him_." He shrugged. "People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."

"I see." I knew I wasn't going to have an easy time writing a popular article about him. I was going to have to concentrate on his saintly deeds and ignore entirely the satanic things he thought and said.

"You may quote me:" he said. "Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing."

He leaned down and he shook little Newt's painty hand. "Right?"

Newt nodded, seeming to suspect momentarily that the case had been a little overstated. "Right."

And then the saint marched to Newt's painting and took it from its easel. He beamed at us all. "Garbage--like everything else."

And he threw the painting off the cantilevered terrace. It sailed out on an updraft, stalled, boomeranged back, sliced into the waterfall.

There was nothing little Newt could say.

Angela spoke first. "You've got paint all over your face, honey. Go wash it off."

Aspirin and Boko-maru 77

"Tell me, Doctor," I said to Julian Castle, "how is 'Papa' Monzano?"

"How would I know?"

"I thought you'd probably been treating him."

"We don't speak . . ." Castle smiled. "He doesn't speak to me, that is. The last thing he said to me, which was about three years ago, was that the only thing that kept me off the hook was my American citizenship."

"What have you done to offend him? You come down here and with your own money found a free hospital for his people . . ."

"'Papa' doesn't like the way we treat the whole patient," said Castle, "particularly the whole patient when he's dying. At the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle, we administer the last rites of the Bokononist Church to those who want them."

"What are the rites like?"

"Very simple. They start with a responsive reading. You want to respond?"

"I'm not that close to death just now, if you don't mind."

He gave me a grisly wink. "You're wise to be cautious. People taking the last rites have a way of dying on cue. I think we could keep you from going all the way, though, if we didn't touch feet."

"Feet?"

He told me about the Bokononist attitude relative to feet.

"That explains something I saw in the hotel." I told him about the two painters on the window sill.

"It works, you know," he said. "People who do that really do feel better about each other and the world."

"Um."

"_Boko-maru_."

"Sir?"

"That's what the foot business is called," said Castle. "It works. I'm grateful for things that work. Not many things _do_ work, you know."

"I suppose not."

"I couldn't possibly run that hospital of mine if it weren't for aspirin and _boko-maru_."

"I gather," I said, "that there are still several Bokononists on the island, despite the laws, despite the _hy-u-o-ook-kuh_ . . ."

He laughed. "You haven't caught on, yet?"

"To what?"

"Everybody on San Lorenzo is a devout Bokononist, the _hy-u-o-ook-kuh_ notwithstanding."

Ring of Steel 78

"When Bokonon and McCabe took over this miserable country years ago," said Julian Castle, "they threw out the priests. And then Bokonon, cynically and playfully, invented a new religion."

"I know," I said.

"Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies."

"How did he come to be an outlaw?"

"It was his own idea. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang. He wrote a little poem about it, incidentally."

Castle quoted this poem, which does not appear in _The Books of Bokonon_:

So I said good-bye to government,

And I gave my reason:

That a really good religion