Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition
Page 36
So when Mr. Garball said to a customer, “Brother, I have heard your tales of woe, and I give you my word of honor that self-destruction is not for you,” it was impressive. Chances are that just about the time he was saying that to a rejected customer an accepted customer would be going out the back door feet first.
One of the people Mr. Garball saved, of course, was the woman who became his wife and then his widow. She is now chairman of the Board of Directors of Greta Garbo International, and supposedly the highest paid woman executive in the world.
She must be pretty used to the widow business by now. When I first met her she was the widow of a department store Santa Claus named Kirby J. Welsbach.
Mr. Garball and I gassed him six days before Christmas. He sticks in my mind because he and Mr. Garball had such a row about it. Welsbach wanted to be put to sleep in his Santa Claus suit, and Mr. Garbell refused. “We are not in business to help the dying mock the living,” Mr. Garbell told him. “If satire is your motive, kindly take your custom and your costume elsewhere. Old Saint Nick will not be gassed in here.”
Welsbach went away, saying he was going to shoot himself in the Santa Claus suit in front of the information booth at Marshall Field’s.
But he never did it.
He came back to us two days later, meek as a lamb, wearing an ordinary business suit. We did the job without further ado.
Six months later his widow showed up at the shop.
She was wearing a very tight black dress, and she smelled like a gangster funeral. She was twenty-five or so.
She was very pretty, in a greedy, heartless way. “I am Ariadne Welsbach,” she said. “I’d like to talk to the manager, please. I don’t want to live any more.”
Ariadne Welsbach came in during the early June slack period. We hadn’t reported a phone booth accident to the police for more than a week.
Mr. Garball had a bad case of spring fever. He couldn’t keep his mind on business. He wasn’t accepting any customers, no matter how hopeless they were. He was sending absolutely everybody out to have another go at life, and I hate to think of what happened to some of those poor souls.
When Ariadne Welsbach came into the shop. I was all alone, greasing the Chrysler and trying to find a rattle in the trunk. Mr. Garball was very sensitive to little things. The rattle had been bothering the life out of him when he drove the Chrysler to and from work.
“I’m sorry, Lady,” I said, “but the boss isn’t in. He’s across the street at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. Why don’t you fill out a release form while I go get him?”
It’s interesting about that release form. All the modern Greta Garballs still use it, word for word, and Mr. Garball made it up himself, without the help of a lawyer. It says that the customer realizes that there are many dangers on the premises. It says that the customer has been warned about them, and that the customer has been ordered to leave. And it says that the customer has decided to stay anyway, and that the management is not responsible for any accidents that may happen to the customer.
That thing has been tested all the way to the Supreme Court eight times. It is so air-tight that Mr. Garball and I didn’t even have to go to coroner’s inquests. We just mailed in photostats of the forms.
“It says here that this has to be witnessed by a notary public,” said Ariadne Welsbach. “That mean I have to go out and find one?”
“Mr. Garball is a notary public,” I said. “I’ll go across the street and get him. But I might as well warn you, he won’t take your business. He isn’t accepting any customers.”
“He’ll accept me when he hears my story,” she said. “There is nothing sadder in the springtime in all this world than a young woman no man can stand to touch.”
Mr. Garball got her in the front seat of the Chrysler with him. That was where he liked to do his talking to customers. He had the radio going softly. He was hell on batteries, having the radio on all the time.
“Now what makes you think you’re not physically attractive to men, young lady?” he said. He was still bubbling with all the fun he had been having with the Arthur Murray girls. He had a big kidding thing going with the girls over there. He was always offering them free ethical suicides in exchange for free dancing lessons. “Nobody can dance all the time, girls,” he used to say. “Come on over to my shop, and I’ll show you another way to make the time go.”
We actually gassed one of the girls once, but that wasn’t any joke. Life had really been lousy to her, and it was time she gave up. And we didn’t do the job free, either. We charged her the standard fifty dollars.
We had to. It was a city ordinance that we had to charge everybody the full fee[.]
3. LOOKING FOR BILLY AND NANCY
In other variants Vonnegut shifts gears and locales, and the World Government apparatus familiar to fans of the finished “Monkey House” story begins to appear as a key unlocking the way forward. He experiments with different protagonists—Caleb Warren, Tony Comstock, Nancy Warren, each a “recruiting officer for the afterlife” at the Hyannis parlor on the Cape, employed by the state (“Everything was socialized”) to persuade people to do away with themselves in the public interest. Each appears youthful and carefully packaged, accessorized in colorful garb. They are accomplished actors, trained in describing to clients the benefits of painless death and “how pleasant heaven was.” They were lucky to have jobs in an age when “machines did almost everything better than people did”—a bedrock Vonnegut concern since his first novel, 1952’s Player Piano.
In this next version we meet Caleb, “a lanky and dead attractive expediter,” doing his part to shepherd volunteers through the death process, which is now paired with “Ethical Birth Control” as part of a comprehensive population reduction program. And, needless to say, “going actually was easy in an Easy Go.”
Caleb keeps a record of last meals, an absurd exercise since choices are limited to the menu of the chain restaurant next door. “Hojo Cola,” Vonnegut explains in his typical staccato deadpan, “was the only kind of cola there was.” As Caleb finishes his lunch, the mechanical cashier, a robot as programmed and strange-looking as any Tralfamadorian, engages him in pseudo small talk. It warned him not to “bark his shins,” a hazard for people numb from the waist down, the chief effect of the pills everyone took. Vonnegut stages the beginning of a confrontation between Caleb and Daphne Early, a “trinket redhead.” Following another of his storytelling rules, Vonnegut introduces her as a character who wants something.
Easy Go
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Caleb Warren was a lanky and dead attractive expediter for an Ethical Suicide Parlor next door to a Howard Johnson’s in Hyannis, Massachusetts. War was a thing of the past, and disease didn’t amount to much any more, and neither did old age—so death was an enterprise for volunteers.
The population of Earth was seventeen billion human beings, which was far too many mammals that size for a planet that size. The people were jammed together like drupelets. Drupelets are the knobs on raspberries.
So the World Government was attempting to reduce the population to a more reasonable figure. They were pronging the problem two different ways. One pronging was ethical suicide. The other pronging was ethical birth control.
Caleb was lucky or unlucky to have a job, depending on how you feel about work.
There were fifty-thousand Howard Johnsons’ in the world, and they were all socialized. Everything was socialized. Howard Johnsons’ were the only places to eat out, and Hojo Cola was the only kind of cola there was. And next door to every Howard Johnson’s was an Ethical Suicide Parlor, popularly knows as an “Easy Go.”
Going really actually was easy in an Easy go. As Caleb Warren said explained many times a day, dying hurt no more than the very beginnings of a toothache, when you couldn’t be sure whether you really had a toothache or not. Caleb was a sort of recruiting officer for Paradise.
The Howard Johnsons’ all had orange roofs. The Ethical Suicide P
arlors all had purple roofs. Anybody who volunteered to die for the afterlife got to send a five-hundred dollar savings bond to anybody he liked. He also got to order at Government expense absolutely anything on the Howard Johnson’s menu.
Caleb was thirty years old, had been an expediter for eight years. He had kept a record of all the last meals people had ordered. Ninety two per cent of the people asked for a Three-D, which was a glorified hamburger, and a Hojo Cola. This was also what Caleb always had for lunch.
Caleb Warren finished up his lunch now. It was springtime on Cape Cod. He stuck his credit card into the robot cashier, which told him it was a nice day and offered him a toothpick flavored with wintergreen. The cashier was connected to weather instruments on the roof, so that when it talked about the weather it really knew what it was talking about.
The cashier also asked him Caleb if he had taken his ethical birth control pill, and reminded him that the penalty for not taking one every day was ten years in prison, with no chance for parole. It added chattily that many people favored the death penalty for non-taking, though that seemed extreme to the cashier. This was a lollipop-shaped device, incidentally, painted to look like a lime lollipop, with an oron pipe for a stick and a spherical aluminum head on level with Caleb’s belt buckly.
As Caleb stepped out into springtime, the cashier called after him that he should be careful not to bark his shins. Shin-barking was a serious hazard of the times, since the ethical birth-control pills made people numb from the waist down. They People could bark their shins, or otherwise injure themselves below the belt, and lose a lot of blood without even knowing it. For this reason, both men and women generally wore thickly-quilted trousers. What made the pills ethical, and the patriarchs of religions around the world agreed on this, was that they they left people free to reproduce. There just wasn’t any pleasure in it any more. There was an old saw to the effect that the pills made the bottom half of a man feel like balsa wood, and the bottom half of a woman feel like gingerale.
There was a side-effect of the pills, too, that was certainly a boon to law-enforcement officers: they made you piss blue. And there were plenty of songs and jokes and so on about that. Caleb had learned a naughty ditty about that in grade school, and it was running through his head as he crossed the asphalt between the Hojo and the Easy Go. He had once known a dozen versers or more. Now he remembered only two:
I do did not sow,
I do did not spin,
And, thanks to drugs
I do did not sin.
I loved the crowds,
The smog, the noise,
And when I peed
I peed turquoise.
I eat ate beneath
An orange roof.
I voted, I smiled.
I tell told the truth.
Neath purple roof
I’ll go someday I’ve gone today
To piss my sky
Blue life away.
As he reached the end of the second verse, he was joined by a female stranger, by a trinket redhead with very large eyes. She was scarcely taller than the robot cashier. She said her name was Daphne Early, and that she wanted to die. She had decided, she said, on either carbon monoxide or cyanide. Death came in eight flavors at the Easy Go.
She took his arm, which he had offered only accidentally, and clouds of perfume came from the neck of her quilted, cylindrical clothes. Her bi-logical age was thirty-four, she told him. Her aging has been stopped at that point—in the year of the discovery of the age-arresting chemical,-anti-gerasone.
· · ·
The next variant, “Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar,” opens with the information that Daphne somehow “ruined” Caleb, a man once content in his job selling the afterlife. She first came into his parlor like any other customer. “Her hair was the fright wig that was popular among males and females alike,” in this time “far, far into the future—about twenty years from now.” She is dangerous because she is a “nothing-head,” a person who refused to take the mandatory numbing pills. We have glimmers now of the resistance underground of the final story, confirmed by a black market in brochures with facts about the side effects of the eight flavors of death “which the World Government had not seen fit to disclose.”
Caleb maintains his courteous demeanor, but is troubled when Daphne balks at the threshold of her final exit. Her case had already been reported to the computers, and “as far as the machines are concerned she was as good as dead.” Vonnegut elaborates new details about the franchised parlors, among them the garish population thermometer that reduces each life to insignificance. Greta Garball would be appalled. And we see a portrait in Caleb’s office of J. Edgar Nation, “the father of ethical birth control.” The pieces of the final story are coming together, even as this draft fades out.
Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Before he met Daphne Erlich, Caleb Warren was a tall and attractive expediter for the Ethical Suicide Parloer next to the Howard Johnson’s in Hyannis, Massachusetts. There were fifty-thousand Howard Johnson’s on the face of the earth, and they were all socialized. Hojo Cola was the only kind of cola there was. Think about that. And next door to every Joward Johnson’s was an Ethical Suicide Parlor, popularly known as the “Easy Go.”
The Howard Johnson’s had an orange roof, and the Ethical Suicide Parlor had a purple roof, but they were both the property of the World Government. Almost everything was.
This was far, far in the future—about twenty years from now. The population of the world was fifteen billion souls. It was stabilized at that figure, thanks to ethical suicide and ethical birth control.
Daphne Erlich came into Caleb Warren’s Ethical Suicide Parlor, his Easy Go, one spring morning, and said she was ready to die. She said she couldn’t decide between cyanide and carbon-monoxide. She had narrowed it down to those two, she said. There were eight flavors to choose from.
Caleb had never seen her before,. He treated her like anybody else. His job, essentially, was that of to be a recruiting sergeant or travel agent for Paradise. Diseases didn’t amount to anything any more, and private automobiles and war was a were things of the past, and people didn’t leave the safety of their homes much any more. Most people didn’t work, since the machines did everything so much better than they did. Most people stayed home, and tried to be intelligent consumers. So death was mainly an enterprise for volunteers, for real enthusiasts for the afterlife.
Superficially, Daphne Erlich looked like any ordinary female suicide volunteer—or like any ordinary female world citizen of either sex, for that matter. She wasn’t remarkably clean, and her hair was the fright wig that was popular among males and females alike, and she wore the shin-guards and box-toed safety shoes and heavily quilted trousers—like as did most unemployed men and women of the day. All this protection from the waist down was a reasonable response to the ethical birth-control pills everybody had to take. The pills didn’t actually make men and women sterile, which was what made them ethical. People who took them, which was supposed to be everybody, were still capable of reproducing. They simply didn’t feel much like doing it, since they were numb from the waist down.
From the waist down, they felt like balsa wood, or, as some people put it, “like gingerale.” They protected themselves below the waist because they could might at any time receive a serious injury and not do anything about it—for the simple reason that they did not know they were sounded.
“Well—” said Caleb, “we have brochures on cyanide and CO one—and perhaps you should read them, but I don’t think there’s anything in either one you don’t know.” Everybody knew everything there was to know about the eight ethical ways to go. Casual visitors to Caleb’s Hyannis Easy Go carried away a thousand brochures a week. They were free, of course. There was also a booming black market in brochures which cost money, and which contained certain facts about the eight flavors of death which the World Government had not seen fit to disclose.
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br /> Caleb acknowledged the outlaw brochures casually, saying to Daphne, “I am not telling you the news, I’m sure, when I suggest that cyanide burns for a second or two, and that carbon monoxide causes a splitting headache which has been known to last for three minutes or more. If you aren’t quite clear as to what a second is and what a minute is, I’d be glad to show you. I have a stopwatch with a very long second-hand.”
He really did have a stopwatch. He might well have left it on the top of his desk, which was eye-rest green, since most serious suicides became eager to know how long a second really lasted, how long a minute really lasted. But he kept it in a drawer, made quite a ceremony of taking it out of hiding, of starting the sweep second hand on its way, of clicking it off again, of putting it back in the drawer.
The watch was from his wife Candy, by the way. He had a wife. Everybody over twenty-one had a wife. That was the law. If you wanted a a particular woman to be your wife, and she wanted you to be her husband, the two of you could get married. If you hadn’t found somebody by the time you were twenty-one, and if nobody had found you, then the World Government assigned you somebody to marry. Niney-two per cent of the people had spouses who had been assigned.
Caleb Warren and his wife Candy had chosen each other, belonged to the eight per cent. The slang for a couple like that was “LOve Bugs.”
“I guess I’ll take the headache,” said Daphne.
“You’re the boss,” said Caleb. “And to whom shall we send the love token?” He was referring to the five-hundred dollar Government bond that would be sent to anyone designated by the suicide volunteer.