While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

by Kurt Vonnegut

  By the tenth time Amy had typed the same letter, she felt as though she were drowning. She put the project aside, temporarily, and, for the sake of variety, slipped another record from her in-box onto her Dictaphone spindle.

  She rested her fingers on the keyboard, on a, s, d, and f, on j, k, l, and ;, awaiting orders from the record. But the only sound from the record was a shushing sound, like the sound of the sea in a seashell.

  After many seconds, a soft, deep, sweetly wheedling voice spoke in Amy’s ear, spoke from the record.

  “I read about you girls on the bulletin board,” said the voice. “Says you girls belong to anybody with access to a Dictaphone.” The voice laughed quietly. “I got access to a Dictaphone.”

  The record scratched on in another long silence.

  “I’m cold and sick and lonely and hungry, Miss,” said the voice at last. There was a cough. “I’m feverish, and I’m dying, Miss. Guess everybody will be real glad when I’m dead.”

  Another silence, another cough.

  “All I ever did wrong was not let anybody push me around, Miss,” said the voice. “Somewhere, somewhere, maybe there’s a girl who thinks a boy shouldn’t be shot or starved or locked up like an animal. Somewhere, maybe there’s a girl who’s got a heart left inside her.

  “Somewhere,” said the voice, “maybe there’s a girl with a heart, who’d bring this boy something to eat, and some bandages, and give him a chance to live a little while longer.

  “Maybe,” said the voice, “she’s got a heart of ice, and she’ll go tell the police, so they can shoot this boy, and she can be real proud and happy.

  “Miss,” said the voice to my wife-to-be, “I’m going to tell you where I’ve been and where I’ll be when you hear this. You can do anything you want with me—save me or get me killed, or plain let me die. I’ll be in building 227.” The voice laughed quietly again. “I’ll be back of a barrel. Isn’t much of a building, Miss. You won’t have any trouble finding me in it.”

  The record ended.

  Amy imagined herself cradling Larry Barrow’s curly head in her round, soft arms.

  “There, there,” she murmured. “There, there.” Tears filled her eyes.

  A hand dropped on Amy’s shoulder. It was Miss Hostetter’s hand. “Didn’t you hear me say ting-a-ling for the coffee break?” she said.

  “No,” said Amy.

  “I’ve been watching you, Amy,” said Miss Hostetter. “You’ve just been listening. You haven’t been typing. Is there something strange about that record?”

  “Perfectly ordinary record,” said Amy.

  “You looked so upset.”

  “I’m all right. I’m fine,” said Amy tensely.

  “I’m your big sister,” said Miss Hostetter. “If there’s anything—”

  “I don’t want a big sister!” said Amy passionately.

  Miss Hostetter bit her lip, turned white, and stalked into the recreation room.

  Furtively, Amy wrapped Larry Barrow’s record in face tissues, and hid it in the bottom drawer of her desk, with her hand cream, face cream, lipstick, powder, rouge, perfume, nail polish, manicure scissors, nail file, nail buffer, eyebrow pencil, tweezers, bobby pins, vitamin tablets, needle and thread, eyedrops, brush, and comb.

  She closed the drawer, and looked up to see the baleful eyes of Miss Hostetter, who watched her through a screen of milling girls in the doorway of the recreation room, watched her over a cup of steaming coffee and a saucer with two little cookies on it.

  Amy smiled at her glassily, and went into the recreation room. “Ping-pong, anybody?” said Amy, fighting to keep her voice even.

  She received a dozen merry challenges, and, during the recreation period, she daydreamed to the took-took of the ping-pong ball instead of the tack-tack of her typewriter.

  * * *

  At five, whistles blew triumphantly in the works and all over Pittsburgh.

  My wife-to-be had spent the afternoon in a suppressed frenzy of fear, excitement, and love. Her wastebasket was stuffed with mistakes. She hadn’t dared to play Barrow’s record again, or even to exchange a glance with Miss Hostetter, for fear of giving away her terrible secret.

  Now, at five, André Kostelanetz and Mantovani and the blowers of the heating system were turned off. The mail girls came into the girl pool with trays of cylinders to be transcribed first thing in the morning. They emptied withered flowers from the vases on the desks. They would bring fresh flowers from the company hothouse in the morning. The girl pool became whirlpools around a dozen coatracks. In separate whirlpools, Amy and Miss Hostetter pulled on their cloth coats.

  The girl pool became a river, flowing down the fireproof iron stairway into the company street. At the very end of the river was my wife-to-be.

  Amy stopped, and the river left her behind, in the little cyclones of fly ash, in the canyon walled by numbered building façades.

  Amy returned to the girl pool. The only light now came from the orange fires of furnaces in the distance.

  Trembling, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk, and found the record gone.

  Stunned and angry, she opened Miss Hostetter’s bottom drawer. The record was there. The only other objects in the green steel bin were a bottle of Mercurochrome and a clipping from the Montezuma Minutes, entitled, “Creed of a Woman of Montezuma.” “I am a Woman of Montezuma,” the creed began, “hand in hand with Men, marching to a Better Tomorrow under the three banners of God, Country, and Company, bearing the proud shield of Service.”

  Amy wailed in anguish. She ran out of the girl pool, down the iron stairway, and down the company street to the main gate, to the headquarters of the company police. She was sure Miss Hostetter was there, proudly telling the police what she’d learned from the record.

  The headquarters of the company police were in one corner of a great reception room by the main gate. Around the walls of the room were exhibits of the company’s products and methods. In its center was a stand, where a fat concessionaire sold candy, tobacco, and magazines.

  A tall woman in a cloth coat was talking animatedly to the policeman on duty.

  “Miss Hostetter!” said Amy breathlessly, coming up behind her.

  The woman turned to look curiously at my wife-to-be, and then returned her attention to the policeman. She was not Miss Hostetter. She was a visitor, who had taken a tour of the works and lost her purse inside.

  “It could have been lost or stolen just anywhere,” said the woman, “where all that terrible noise was, with all the hot steel and sparks; where that big hammer came crashing down; where that scientist showed us his whatchamacallit in his laboratory—anywhere! Maybe that killer who’s running around wild in there snatched it while I wasn’t looking.”

  “Lady,” said the policeman patiently, “it’s almost sure he’s dead. And he isn’t after purses, if he is alive. He’s after something to eat. He’s after life.” He smiled grimly. “But he isn’t going to get it—not for long.”

  The corners of my wife-to-be’s sweet red mouth pulled down involuntarily.

  Somewhere out in the works, dogs bayed.

  “Hear that?” said the policeman with satisfaction. “They got dogs looking for him now. If he’s got your purse, lady, which he doesn’t, we’ll have it back in jig time.”

  Amy looked around the big room for Miss Hostetter. Miss Hostetter wasn’t there. Helplessness weakened Amy, and she sat down on a hard bench before a display entitled, “Can Silicones Solve Your Problems?”

  Depression settled over Amy. She recognized it for what it was—the depression she always felt when a good movie ended. The theater lights were coming on, taking from her elation and importance and love she really had no claim to. She was only a spectator—one of many.

  “Hear them dogs?” said the concessionaire to a customer behind Amy. “Special kind, I heard. Bloodhounds are the gentlest dogs alive, but the ones they’ve got after Barrow are half coonhound. They can teach that kind to be tough—to take care o
f the tough customers.”

  Amy stood suddenly, and went to the candy counter. “I want a chocolate bar,” she said, “the big kind, the twenty-five-cent kind. And a Butterfinger and a Coconut Mounds bar, and one of those caramel things—and some peanuts.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” said the concessionaire. “Going to have yourself a real banquet, aren’t you? Just watch out you don’t hurt that complexion with too much sweets—that’s all.”

  * * *

  Amy hurried back into the works, and squeezed into a crowded company bus. She was the only girl on the bus. The rest were men on the evening shift. When they saw my wife-to-be, they grew heavily polite and attentive.

  “Could you please let me out at building 227?” said Amy to the driver. “I don’t know where it is.”

  “Don’t know as I know where it is, either,” said the driver. “Don’t get much call for that one.” He took a dog-eared map of the works down from the sun visor.

  “You don’t get any call for that one,” said a passenger. “Nothing in 227 but a bunch of lanterns, some barrels of sand, and maybe a potbellied stove. You don’t want 227, Miss.”

  “A man called the girl pool for a stenographer to work late,” said Amy. “I thought he said 227.” She looked at the driver’s map, and saw the driver’s finger pointing to a tiny square all by itself in the middle of the railroad yard, building 227. There was a big building fairly near to it, on the edge of the yard, building 224. “He might have said building 224,” said Amy.

  “Oh sure!” said the driver happily. “Shipping Department. That’s the one you want.”

  All on board sighed with relief, and looked with affectionate pride at the pretty little Southern girl they were taking such good care of.

  Amy was now the last passenger on the bus. The bus was crossing the wasteland between the heart of the works and the railroad yard, a tundra of slag heaps and rusting scrap. Out in the wasteland, away from the street, was a constellation of dancing flashlight beams.

  “The cops and the dogs,” said the driver to Amy.

  “Oh?” said Amy absently.

  “Started from the office where he broke in last night,” said the driver. “The way the dogs are talking it up, they must be pretty close to him.”

  Amy nodded. My wife-to-be was talking to Miss Hostetter in her imagination. “If you’ve told the police,” she was saying, “you’ve killed him, just as sure as if you’d aimed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. Don’t you understand? Don’t you care? Haven’t you got an ounce of womanhood in you?”

  Two minutes later, the driver let Amy off at the Shipping Department.

  When the bus was gone, Amy walked out into the night, and stood on the edge of the railroad yard, a sea of cinders sprinkled with twinkling red, green, and yellow signal lights, and streaked with glinting rails.

  As Amy’s eyes grew used to the night, her heart beat harder, and from the many hulking forms she chose one, a small, squat building that was almost certainly building 227—where a dying man had said he’d be waiting for a girl with a heart.

  The world dropped away, and the night seemed to snatch Amy up and spin her like a top, and she was running across the cinders to the building. The building loomed, and my wife-to-be stopped against its weathered clapboards, panting, and trying to listen above the roaring of blood at her temples.

  Someone moved inside, and sighed.

  Amy worked her way along the outside wall to the door. The padlock and hasp had been pried from the old wood.

  Amy knocked on the door. “Hello,” she whispered, “I brought you something to eat.”

  Amy heard an intake of breath, nothing more.

  She pushed open the door.

  In the wedge of frail gray light let in by the door stood Miss Hostetter.

  Each woman seemed to look through the other, to wish her out of existence. Their expressions were blank.

  “Where is he?” said Amy at last.

  “Dead,” said Miss Hostetter, “dead—behind the barrels.”

  Amy began an aimless, shuffling walk about the room, and stopped when she was as far from Miss Hostetter as she could get, her back to the older woman. “Dead?” she murmured.

  “As a mackerel,” said Miss Hostetter.

  “Don’t talk about him that way!” said my wife-to-be.

  “That’s how dead he is,” said Miss Hostetter.

  Amy turned to face Miss Hostetter angrily. “You had no business taking my record.”

  “It was anybody’s record,” said Miss Hostetter. “Besides, I didn’t think you had the nerve to do anything about it.”

  “Well, I did,” said Amy, “and I thought the least I could expect was to be alone. I thought you’d gone to the police.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” said Miss Hostetter. “You should have expected me to be here—you of all people.”

  “Nothing ever surprised me more,” said Amy.

  “You sent me here, dear,” said Miss Hostetter. Her face looked for a moment as though it would soften. But her muscles tightened, and the austere lines of her face held firm. “You’ve said a lot of things about my life, Amy, and I heard them all. They all hurt, and here I am.” She looked down at her hands, and worked her fast and accurate fingers slowly. “Am I still a ghost? Does this crazy trip out here to see a dead man make me not a ghost anymore?”

  Tears filled the eyes of my wife-to-be. “Oh, Miss Hostetter,” she said, “I’m so sorry if I hurt you. You’re not a ghost, really you’re not. You never were.” She was overwhelmed with pity for the stark, lonesome woman. “You’re full of love and mercy, Miss Hostetter, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Miss Hostetter gave no sign that the words moved her. “And what brought you here, Amy?”

  “I loved him,” said Amy. The pride of a woman in love straightened her back and colored her cheeks and made her feel beautiful and important again. “I loved him.”

  Miss Hostetter shook her homely head sadly. “If you loved him,” she said, “take a look at him. He has a lovable knife in his lovable lap, and a lovable grin that will turn your hair white.”

  Amy’s hand went up to her throat. “Oh.”

  “At least we’re friends now, aren’t we, Amy?” said Miss Hostetter. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” said Amy limply. She managed a wan smile. “That’s a great deal.”

  “We’d better leave,” said Miss Hostetter. “Here come the men and the dogs.”

  The two left building 227 as the men and the dogs zigzagged across the wasteland a quarter of a mile away.

  The two caught a company bus in front of the Shipping Department, and said nothing to each other during the long, dead trip back to the main gate.

  At the main gate, it was time for them to part, each to her own bus stop. With effort, they managed to speak.

  “Goodbye,” said Amy.

  “See you in the morning,” said Miss Hostetter.

  “It’s so hard for a girl to know what to do,” said my wife-to-be, swept by longing and a feeling of weakness.

  “I don’t think it’s supposed to be easy,” said Miss Hostetter. “I don’t think it ever was easy.”

  Amy nodded soberly.

  “And Amy,” said Miss Hostetter, laying her hand on Amy’s arm, “don’t be mad at the company. They can’t help it if they want their letters nicely typed.”

  “I’ll try not,” said Amy.

  “Somewhere,” said Miss Hostetter, “a nice young man is looking for a nice young woman like you, and tomorrow’s another day.

  “What we both need now,” said Miss Hostetter, fading, ghost-like, into the smoke and cold of Pittsburgh, “is a good, hot bath.”

  When Amy scuffed through the fog to her bus stop, ghost-like, she found me standing there, ghost-like.

  With dignity, we each pretended that the other was not there.

  When suddenly, my wife-to-be was overwhelmed with the terror that she’d held off so long, she burst into tears
and leaned against me, and I patted her back.

  “My gosh,” I said, “another human being.”

  “You’ll never know how human,” she said.

  “Maybe I will,” I said. “I could try.”

  I did try, and I do try, and I give you the toast of a happy man: May the warm springs of the girl pool never run dry.

  (illustration credit 7)

  RUTH

  The two women nodded formally across the apartment’s threshold. They were lonely women, widows; one middle-aged and the other young. Their meeting now—ostensibly to defeat their loneliness—only emphasized how solitary each was.

  Ruth, the young woman, had travelled a thousand miles for this meeting with a stranger; had endured the clatter and soot and itch of a railroad coach from springtime in an Army town in Georgia to a factory town in a still-frozen New York valley. Now she wondered why it had seemed so right, so imperative that she come. This heavy, elderly woman, who blocked the door and smiled only with difficulty, had seemed in her letters to want this, too.

  “So you’re the woman who married my Ted,” said the older woman coolly.

  Ruth tried to imagine herself with a married son, and supposed she might have phrased the question in the same way. She set her bags down in the hall. She had expected to sweep into the apartment amid affectionate greetings, warm herself by a radiator, freshen up, and then begin to talk of Ted. Instead, her husband’s mother seemed intent on examining her before letting her in. “Yes, Mrs. Faulkner,” said Ruth, “we had five months together before he went overseas.” Under the woman’s critical stare, she found herself adding, almost defensively, “A happy five months.”

  “Ted was all I had,” said Mrs. Faulkner. She said it as though it were a reproach.

  “He was a fine man,” said Ruth uneasily.

  “My little boy,” said Mrs. Faulkner. It was an aside to an unseen, sympathetic audience. She shrugged. “You must be cold. Do come in, Miss Hurley.” Hurley was Ruth’s maiden name.