Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition
Page 37
“You,” said Daphne.
“Pardon me?”
“Send it to you.”
Caleb gave her an officious smile. “The regulations suggest a relative or close friend.”
“Aren’t you my close friend?” asked Daphne. “You’re life and death to me. Who could be closer than that?”
“In a sense, I suppose. I’m flattered that you should say so. Shall we be serious now? To whom should the bond be sent?”
“To you.”
“That, I’m afraid, would be impossible.” This was a man, understand who was numb from the waist down, thanks to ethical birth control. And this was a woman who had stopped taking the pills. Legally, she was a narcotics addict. The not-taking of the pills had come to be classified, thanks to a tortuous series of interlocking Supreme Court decision, had become a threat to society. People who did not take their pills behaved intolerably.
Through a tortuous series of Supreme Court decisions, a diet free of the pills had come to be classified as an extremely dangerous narcotic. Daphne Erlich was hopelessly hooked on nothing. She was a nothing-head.
Caleb Warren was such an innocent about narcotics that he recognized none of the sordid symptoms of nothing-headedness which Daphne displayed. He sensed that Daphne was vaguely unusual, but supposed she was feverish, was possibly comingdown with the three-day flu.
When Daphne said that she had decided not to die after all, Caleb felt a twinge of disappointment. The receptionist had already reported Daphne’s name to the computers. As far as the machines were concerned, she was as good as dead, her displacement above-ground was as good as vacated. If she now required the machines to declare that displacement reoccupied, the machines were going to want to know why.
They would know where to go for an answer, too. They would go to the expediter on Daphne’s case.
“You’re the boss—” said Caleb, but that was only a careful beginning to a speech which, ideally, would end with Daphne’s allowing herself to be strapped into the Barca-lounger in the Blue Room, which was for carbon-monoxide enthusiasts.
Outside the Ethical Suicide parlor was a mock-up of a great thermometer. It was twenty feet high, and was calibrated in billions of persons from zero to twenty billion persons. A strip broad ribbon of red plastic, which could be shortened or lengthened from a spool at the bottom, ran up a slot in the middle, was meant to look like a column of liquid in the thermometer. The top of the ribbon marked the population of the world on any given day, give or take about ten million souls.
Down near the bottom was a golden arrow indicating what, ideally, the population of the planet should be, if it was going to last much longer, which was two billion souls.
The thermometer was constructed so that it could be read from either side, by people passing by and by people in Caleb Warren’s office. It was almost all that could be seen from Caleb’s office, it was so close to his window. That was his view. And his window faced west, and the plastic ribbon was translucent, so that from noon on a band of red light began to creep toward his office, eventually came inside, climbed over his desk, and by sunset was a luriedly lovely decoration on his east wall.
It was about three in the afternoon when Daphne decided that she wouldn’t die after all. The red band band had crossed the room, was inching up the baseboard. It would eventually rich a portraut of J. Edgar Nation, the father of ethical birth control, the inventor of the pills everybody had to take. If you didn’t take them, and you were caught, the penalty was a ten thousand dollar fine and ten years in prison, with no chance of parole. A recent public opinion survey had revealed that sixty-two per cent of the people thought death should be the penalty.
Next to Nation’s picture was an artist’s conception of what Cape Cod would look like if its population, which was seven million, could be cut to one million. There were woods and fields meadows and marshes ponds and beaches, and houses with yards.
“If I died,” said Daphne, “how much would the thermometer go down?”
“Some,” said Caleb.
“An inch?”
“Heavens no.”
“A half an inch?”
“Not quite.”
“You want me to tell you what the answer is, or do you know? I figured it out before I came in here.”
“So?”
“Every inch is 166,666,666 people.”
Caleb nodded. It wasn’t a figure he liked to give out, because it made one death so deaths, when considered individually, so insignificant. “That happens to be true, but a statistic like that can be misleading.
· · ·
Tony Comstock is the lead character in these next drafts, married, as required by law, to his “fat, dirty wife,” Candy, with whom he shares a bloodless affection. These references to hygiene (“Nobody cared. This was 1971”) seem to be a comment by the author on the decline in standards of public appearance in the 1960s, a trend that offended the aristocratic side of his sensibility. Candy is a town gossip, excited to tell her husband about a “narcotics” raid in Barnstable Village, of the kind Vonnegut must have heard about often in those days on the Cape. “Law enforcement was the principal entertainment of the time,” the anonymous narrator says of this society of passive voyeurs.
Instead of alcohol or pot or acid, however, a teacher and some students from the local high school have been caught with distilled water, the most contraband of substances in this medicated age. They face felony charges and serious jail time—many people even favor the death penalty for such egregious behavior. Drawing upon clichés from his time as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau, Vonnegut notes that authorities are on the trail of the distilled water kingpin, “Mr. Big.” This is the germ of the fugitive troublemaker “Billy the Poet” in the published story.
Tony the actor is a member of the Barnstable Comedy Club, and we learn about its production of J. Edgar Nation, a dramatic retelling of the origins of Ethical Birth Control. Scientists and religious leaders discuss the moral dangers of ordinary methods of contraception. “What God had in mind, obviously,” Vonnegut writes tongue-in-cheek, “was reproduction or nothing.” This was an experiment in exposition by the author which he abandoned as perhaps too clumsy.
Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
When Tony Comstock came home from his job at the Ethical Suicide Parlor, his wife Candy told him that narcotics agents had caught a high school history teacher with two-hundred and fifty gallons of distilled water behind a secret panel in his rumpus room, in West Milton, only eight miles away. “Only eight miles away,” she said again.
“That’s close,” Tony agreed. They shook hands limply. Candy was very fat, and not very clean. Tony wasn’t very clean either, had a two-day beard. Nobody cared. This was 1971.
“I wish there was some way they could give him more than ten years,” Candy went on. She was complaining about the law that set the maximum sentence for illegal possession of distilled water at ten years. That was the minimum, too, with no chance for parole. “When a man is entrusted with young people, and he betrays that trust and lures them down in his basement for orgies, I think the death penalty should be automatic.”
“Orgies?”
“What else would you call it, where a man sits around with students of both sexes, and they all drink distilled water?
Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tony Comstock was an expediter in an Ethical Suicide Parlor next door to a Howard Johnson’s in Hyannis, Massachusetts. There was a Howard Johnson’s for every square mile of land on the face of the earth, and they were all socialized, and next door to every Howard Johnson’s was an Ethical Suicide Parlor. The Howard Johnson’s had an orange roof, and the Ethical Suicide Parlor had a purple roof, but they were both the Government. Everything was the Government. The population of the earth was seventeen billion souls.
Tony’s job was to make sure that people who had volunteered to die didn’
t change their minds at the last minute. He Tony was lucky or unlucky to have a job, depending on how you feel about work. Most people didn’t have jobs because the machines did everything so well. Most people just consumed. And most people didn’t take much pride in their appearance any more, but Tony did. It was important for him to look nice, because his job had such deep religious and public relations implications.
This was way far in the future—twenty fourteen years from now.
A nice appearance was so important in Tony’s profession that he declined to wear shinguards and safety shoes. Most other people wore them when they went out, since they couldn’t feel anything from the waist down. and They could sustain serious leg of foot injuries without even realizing it. They were numb from the waist down because of chemicals in the drinking water. It was world law that everybody had to have those chemicals in his or her drinking water, as the case might be. So everybody felt like balsa wood from the waist on down. You could bark your shins and bleed to death, if you didn’t wear shinguards, and never even know you were dying.
Actually, there were four separate chemicals in everybody’s drinking water, each one with a distinct purpose. One prevented tooth decay, and another one prevented cancer, and the third one prevented cario-vascular diseases, and the fourth one was the only form of birth control that religious leaders around the world could accept. It was the fourth chemical that made everybody feel like balsa wood from the waist down.
And it was the third chemical that made it easy for the police to make sure a suspect was drinking from the public water supply, was getting all the chemicals the law required. The third chemical made everybody piss blue.
Tony was married, as required by law. Everybody over twenty-one was married, as required by law. One spring afternoon, when Tony came home from the Ethical Suicide Parlor, his fat, dirty wife, whose name was Candy, reminded him that he couldn’t play fart around with his model railroad layout in the basement that night. She had on all sorts of equipment. After supper, she said, they were going to be host and hostess to people who wanted to try out for parts in a play the Barnstable Comedy Club, and amateur acting organization, was going to put on.
Tony was president of the club. He was also the best actor in it. It was his acting ability that had gotten him the job in the Ethical Suicide Parlor. Every day he had to tell people how wonderful Heaven was. And, of course, he didn’t know the first thing about life after death. Nobody did. And the people who were about to die knew he couldn’t possibly know what anything about it, but he was such a good actor he made them listen. To hear him tell it, Heaven was all gold and diamonds and music Andre Lawrence Welk and Billy Graham, and the atmosphere was like the air coming out of the back door of a bakery.
He was really something.
During supper, which was fish flour fritters and seaweed, Tony’s wife talked about what she always talked about, which was distilled water and the crazy things it made people do. The penalty for drinking distilled water instead of water with all the chemicals in it was ten thousand dollars and ten years in jail. That was the maximum, and the minimum, too. A person convicted of drinking distilled water had no chace of parole.
But lots of people drank it anyway, and enough of them were arrested or went berserk to give Candy at least a thrill a day. She was twittering and twanging at supper now about a distilled water orgy of high school students down in New Jersey. Twenty-six boys and girls from excellent families had been caught in a basement with twenty-four quarts of distilled water in bottles labeled innocently gin and vodka. One of the main effects of distilled water, of course, was that, if you drank enough of it, you stopped being numb from the waist down.
“They have an A.P.B. out for the man who sold it to ’em,” said Candy. “They know who it was.” The “A.P.B.”, of course, was an all points bulletin. Candy had a complete and expert police vacabulary. Everybody did. Law enforcement was the principal entertainment of the time. “If it wasn’t for crime and punishment,” Candy said one time, “I’d be bored to tears.” She was anything but bored now, said that the police didn’t simply want to catch one more small-time distilled water peddlar. They were going to catch the peddlar, all right, but they were going to make him tell them the identity of “Mr. Big.” Mr. Big was always in the news. He was supposed to be the king of the distilled water racket, making millions out of degrading the innocent.
They never caught him, by the way. The hunt goes on.
The play the Barnstable Comedy Club was going to put on was named as straight-forwardly as a spotted dog named Spot. It was called “J. Edgar Nation,” and was based on the true facts about the life of that man. J. Edgar Nation, of course, was the humble Michigan druggist who developed the anti-erotic drug that everybody had to take now, the one that made everybody numb from the waist down.
As was brought out in the play, J. Edgar Nation had no idea his discovery was going to become the chief civilizing agent of the world. He simply wished to bring morality to the monkey house of the Grand Rapids zoo. The idea came to him when he and his wife and his fourteen children went strolling through the zoo after Easter services, saw a monkey put his hands on his private parts.
In the play, the monkeyhouse scene was only referred to. It would have been a difficult thing to actually stage, would have called for midgets or children in monkey suits and so on. So the play opened with the family back home for a traditional feast of ham, with nobody able to eat it.
The next scene was supposedly in the Contemplation Room of the United Nations Building in New York City, which has as its central feature a philodendron with a spotlight on it. No such scene actually took place in that room, but the arguments in the play are taken word for word from newspaper reports of the time.
In the play, six famous scientists from all over the world come into the Contemplation Room, arguing about various forms of birth control to keep the world from being overpopulated, and they find six famous religious leaders from all over the world who are all praying around the philodendron, each in his own way, that the world will not enter a period of even greater sexual license. The religious people are afraid, with very good reason, of course, that, if birth control becomes universal, people will copulate for pleasure all the time, which was the last thing God had in mind. What God had in mind, obviously, was reproduction or nothing.
In the play, the argle-bargle between the two factions goes back and forth, posing the eternal riddle. “Which is worse, famine and pestilence or libertinism?” And then the Secretary General of the United Nations comes in with a newspaper. He reads out loud a story of how morality has been brought to the monkey house in Grand Rapids. Thanks to chemicals in their drinking water, the monkeys are fully capable of reproducing. But they don’t do verh mcuh because there’s absolutely no pleasure in it any more.”
There is a stunned silence. And then the religious people have to admit, if these chemicals work on human beings, they could very well be moral.
Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tony Comstock was an expediter in an Ethical Suicide Parlor next door to a Howard Johnson’s in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. There was a Howard Johnson’s for every square mile of land on the face of the earth, and next door to every Howard Johsnon’s was an Ethical Suicide Parlor. The Howard Johnson’ses had orange roofs, and the Ethical Suicide Parlors mad purple roofs. Tony’s job as an expediter was to make sure that people who had volunteered to die didn’t change their minds at the last minute.
Tony was married, as required by law. He came home from work on day in the spring of 1977, and, as he shook hands squeamishly with his fat, dirty wife Candy, she told him about the big raid by narcotics agents in Barnstable Village, only six miles away. They had caught a high school history teacher with twenty gallons of distilled water in bottles innocently labeled Vodka and Gin.
“Right here on quaint little old Cape Cod,” said Candy.
“Um,” said Tony, scratching hims
elf. He supposed it was about time to change his underwear, which he’d been wearing night and day for two weeks now.
· · ·
Finally, the “Nancy Warren” drafts below, which did not get very far, do achieve the important work of moving a female to the center of the story. Nancy is an exemplary employee of the Ethical Suicide Service who “loved her job.” She is appropriately striking in appearance, another “trinket redhead” with “enormous eyes and lips like sofa pillows,” resplendent in her “purple jump suit” (to match the tile roof of the parlor) and black cavalry boots. Though she looks young she is actually 116 years old, and is a virgin. This early Nancy lacks the depth and attitude of the character we will meet in the published story.
Nancy Warren
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Nancy Warren was a trinket redhead with enormous eyes and lips like sofa pillows. Her figure was adorable in the purple jump suit and black cavalry boots of the Ethical Suicide Service. She was a hostess in an Ethical Suicide Parlor next door to a Howard Johnson’s in Hyannis, Massachusetts. She loved the job.
Nancy was a virgin. She was also a Tri-Delt.
Every day at noon she would wash up and go to the Howard Johnson’s for a hamburger with everything and a Hojo Cola. There were fifty thousand Howard Johnsons’ spotted all over 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 type of cola there was. And next door to every Howard Johnson’s was an Ethical Suicide Parlor, popularly known as an “Easy Go.” The Howard Johnson’s
Nancy Warren was a trinket redhead with enormous eyes and lips like sofa pillows. Her figure was adorable in the purple jump suit and black cavalry boots of the Ethical Suicide Service. She was a hostess in an Ethical Suicide Parlor next door to a Howard Johnson’s in Hyannis, Massachusetts. She loved the job.