Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.”

My mother, as I have said ad nauseam in other books, had declined to go on living, since she could no longer be what she had been at the time of her marriage—one of the richest women in town.

I have since taught there, briefly and without distinction—while my own home was going to pieces. I confided that to one of my students—that my home was going to pieces. To which he made this reply: “It shows.”

So he set up a council of seven workers, who were to recommend to the board of directors what the wages and working conditions should be. The board, without any prodding from anybody, had already declared that there would no longer be any seasonal layoffs, even in such a seasonal industry, and that there would be vacations with pay, and that medical care for workers and their dependents would be free, and that there would be sick pay and a retirement plan, and that the ultimate goal of the company was that, through a stock-bonus plan, it become the property of the workers. “It went bust,” said Uncle Alex, with a certain grim, Darwinian satisfaction. My father said nothing. He may not have been listening.

So the windows were opened and the sharpshooters laid their rifles in their cradles of different kinds. Who were the four sharpshooters, really—and was there really such a trade? There was less work for sharpshooters than there was for hangmen at the time. Not one of the four had ever been hired in this capacity before, nor was he likely, unless war came, to be paid for such work ever again. One was a part-time Pinkerton agent, and the other three were his friends.

“It will not work,” he thought. “It cannot work.” It did not work.

A fighter plane leaped up from the tip of a nearby runway, destroyed enough energy to heat one hundred homes for a thousand years, tore the sky to shreds.

Mother and daughter, no doubt embarrassed by Mr. McCone’s terrible speech impediment, and even more dismayed, perhaps, by his wanting to do nothing with his life but read books all day long, were seldom home.

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

They were looking for people who were not where they were supposed to be, now that civilization was being started up again. They were seeking deserters from every imaginable army, including the American one, and war criminals not yet apprehended, and lunatics and common criminals, who had simply sauntered from the approaching front lines, and citizens of the Soviet Union, who had defected to the Germans or been captured by them, who would be imprisoned or killed, if they went back home. Russians were supposed, no matter what, to go back to Russia; Poles were supposed to go back to Poland; Hungarians to Hungary; Estonians to Estonia; and on and on. Everybody, no matter what, was supposed to go home.

She believed, and was entitled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. They could only create meaningless tragedies, she said, since they weren’t nearly intelligent enough to accomplish all the good they meant to do. We were a disease, she said, which had evolved on one tiny cinder in the universe, but could spread and spread. “How can you speak of love to a woman,” she asked me early in our courtship, “who feels that it would be just as well if nobody had babies anymore, if the human race did not go on?” “Because I know you don’t really believe that,” I replied. “Ruth—look at how full of life you are!” It was true. There was no movement or sound she made that was not at least accidentally flirtatious—and what is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

I asked her once if she had ever sought the consolations of religion in the concentration camp. “No,” she said. “I knew God would never come near such a place. So did the Nazis. That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis,” she said. “They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away.”

My lawyers said that I still owed them one hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars. Maybe so. Anything was possible.

jailbirds

Those were our salad days, when we were green in judgment.

“You can now sell your considerable skills, Mr. Starbuck, for their true value in the open marketplace of the Free Enterprise System. Happy hunting! Good luck!”

“They wanted me back, you know,” he told me, “because they were so embarrassed. They couldn’t stand it that even one American, even a black one, would think for even a minute that maybe America wasn’t the best country in the world.”

He said that the President of the United States ought to be given a wheel like that at his inauguration, to remind him and everybody else that all he could do was pretend to steer.

“Money is so strange,” she said. “Does it make any sense to you?” “No,” I said. “The people who’ve got it, and the people who don’t—” she mused. “I don’t think anybody understands what’s really going on.” “Some people must,” I said. I no longer believe that.

I thought to myself, “My goodness—these waitresses and cooks are as unjudgmental as the birds and lizards on the Galapagos Islands, off Ecuador.” I was able to make the comparison because I had read about those peaceful islands in prison, in a National Geographic loaned to me by the former lieutenant governor of Wyoming. The creatures there had had no enemies, natural or unnatural, for thousands of years. The idea of anybody’s wanting to hurt them was inconceivable to them. So a person coming ashore there could walk right up to an animal and unscrew its head, if he wanted to. The animal would have no plan for such an occasion. And all the other animals would simply stand around and watch, unable to draw any lessons for themselves from what was going on. A person could unscrew the head of every animal on an island, if that was his idea of business or fun.

The event might as well have been an epidemic of cholera in Bangladesh. It was given three inches of space on the bottom corner of an inside page.

Noses are merciful that way. They will report that something smells awful. If the owner of a nose stays around anyway, the nose concludes that the smell isn’t so bad after all. It shuts itself off, deferring to superior wisdom. Thus is it possible to eat Limburger cheese—or to hug the stinking wreckage of an old sweetheart at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.

She asked me if I had seen any acts of kindness anywhere. I reflected on this and I realized that I had encountered almost nothing but kindness since leaving prison. I told her so. “Then it’s the way I look,” she said. This was surely so. There was a limit to how much reproachful ugliness most people could bear to look at, and Mary Kathleen and all her shopping-bag sisters had exceeded that limit.

“Nature sympathized,” he said, looking straight at Mary Kathleen and me in the front row. He laughed. Mary Kathleen and I did not laugh with him. Neither did anybody else in the audience. His laugh was a chilling laugh about how little Nature ever cares about what human beings think is going on.

I knelt by the pool and swirled my hand in the water, curious about the temperature, which was soupy. When I withdrew my hand and considered its wetness, I had to admit to myself that the wet was undreamlike. My hand was really wet and would remain so for some time, unless I did something about it.

“The war was won by fighters, Walter. All the rest was dreams.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “You couldn’t help it that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed—so you were a good man just the same.”

I have tried to explain to my little dog that her master must go away for a while—because he violated Section 190.30. I have told her that laws are written to be obeyed. She understands nothing. She loves my voice. All news from me is good news. She wags her tail.

The economy is a thoughtless weather system—and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing.

I observe how profoundly serious Nature has made her about a rubber ice-cream cone—brown rubber cone, pink rubber ice cream. I have to wonder what equally ridiculous commitments to bits of trash I myself have made. Not that it matters at all. We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.