Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition
Page 38
Nancy was a virgin.
The pop War was a thing of the past, and diseases didn’t amount to anything any more, and neither did aging. Nancy was a hundred and sixteen years old, and she looked twenty-two. So death was an enterprise for volunteers. Nancy was encouraged people to volunteer. She was a darling recruiting officer for Paradise.
Nancy Warren
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Nancy Warren was a beautiful hostess for an Ethical Suicide Parlor next door to a Howard Johnson’s in Hyannis, Massachusetts. War was a thing of the past, and diseases didn’t amount to anything any more, and neither did aging. So death was an enterprise for volunteers. Nancy was a sort of recruiting officer for Paradise. She loved the work.
The population of Earth was seventeen billion human beings, far too many mammals that big for a planet that small. The people were jammed together like drupelets. Drupelets are the pulpy knobs on raspberries.
So the World Government was reducing the population to a more reasonable figure with a two-ronged attack. One prong was ethical suicide. The other prong was ethical birth control.
Ethical suicide consisted of asking the Government to kill you.
Nancy was a virgin.
Nancy 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 had a doctor’s degree in psychology.
That was ethical because
Ethical birth control consisted of swallowing pills which didn’t actually interfere with your pro-creative powers. They didn’t interfere with nature, which was what made them so ethical. They simply took all the pleasure out of sex.
They also made you piss blue, which made it easy for the police to catch people who weren’t taking them. Not taking the pills was classified as a narcotic. People who didn’t take the pills were called “nothing-heads”. The penalty for being a nothing-head was twenty years in prison, with no chance for parole.
Thus did science and morals go hand-in-hand.
Nancy Warren was a virgin.
Nancy Warren was a trinket red-head with an adorable figure, enormous eyes, and lips like sofa pillows. At a time when most people looked like something the cat drug in, Nancy was brilliantly groomed in the uniform of the Ethical Suicide Service. The uniform was purple stretch material that covered and revealed her from neck to knee, a 1/2urple jump suit which fitted like a second sk which looked painted on, and black cavalry boots with jingling spurs.
Nancy was lucky to have a job, or unlucky to have one, depending upon how you feel about work. Most people didn’t have jobs. They simply stayed home and tried to consume and vote intelligently, and learn the new songs. Machines did almost everything better than people could. This included sports. The world high-jumping record was fourteen miles.
Nancy was a sort of travel agent recruiting officer for Paradise, encouraging people to die, comforting them while they did it. There were three other hostesses in the Hyannis operation, and two men who did the actual killing. She loved her job.
· · ·
From these elements we can see that Kurt Vonnegut was on his way to “Welcome to the Monkey House” in the form with which we are familiar. The finished story has drama and farce, vivid characters and social commentary, a thought-provoking, if unresolved, ending. The sweat and cigarettes that went into the job leave no trace, the endless bashing and dead ends along the way are not apparent. It is time now to move on to another building project.
For
Knox Burger
Ten days older than I am.
He has been a very good
father to me.
BY KURT VONNEGUT
A Man Without a Country
Armageddon in Retrospect
Bagombo Snuff Box
Between Time and Timbuktu
Bluebeard
Breakfast of Champions
Canary in a Cat House
Cat’s Cradle
Deadeye Dick
Fates Worse Than Death
Galápagos
God Bless You, Mr. Kevorkian
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Hocus Pocus
Jailbird
Like Shaking Hands with God (with Lee Stringer)
Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction
Mother Night
Palm Sunday
Player Piano
The Sirens of Titan
Slapstick
Slaughterhouse-Five
Timequake
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Welcome to the Monkey House
“Splendidly assembled … familiar, funny, cranky … chronicling [Vonnegut’s] life in real time.”
—Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Review
This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence, written over a sixty-year period, brims with mordant humor and openhearted humanism. Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and always alive with the unique point of view that made him the true cultural heir to Mark Twain, these letters comprise the autobiography Kurt Vonnegut never wrote.
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