Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut

  But I simply closed the drawer again. I didn't want to go right back downstairs again. There was no telephone in my room. I would say something in the morning.

  I was exhausted, I found. It was not yet curtain time in all the theaters down below, but I could hardly keep my eyes open. So I pulled my window-shade down, and I put myself to bed. Off I went, as my son used to say when he was little, "to seepy-bye," which is to say, "to sleep."

  I dreamed that I was in an easy chair at the Harvard Club of New York, only four blocks away. I was not young again. I was not a jailbird, however, but a very successful man--the head of a medium-size foundation, perhaps, or assistant secretary of the interior, or executive director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, or some such thing. I really would have been some such thing in my sunset years, I honestly believe, if I had not testified against Leland Clewes in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine.

  It was a compensatory dream. How I loved it. My clothes were in perfect repair. My wife was still alive. I was sipping brandy and coffee after a fine supper with several other members of the Class of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five. One detail from real life carried over into the dream: I was proud that I did not smoke anymore.

  But then I absentmindedly accepted a cigarette. It was simply one more civilized satisfaction to go with the good talk and my warm belly and all. "Yes, yes--" I said, recalling some youthful shenanigans. I chuckled, eyes twinkling. I put the cigarette to my lips. A friend held a match to it. I inhaled the smoke right down to the soles of my feet.

  In the dream I collapsed to the floor in convulsions. In real life I fell out of my bed at the Hotel Arapahoe. In the dream my damp, innocent pink lungs shriveled into two black raisins. Bitter brown tar seeped from my ears and nostrils.

  But worst of all was the shame.

  Even as I was beginning to perceive that I was not in the Harvard Club, and that old classmates were not sitting forward in their leather chairs and looking down at me, and even after I found I could still gulp down air and it would nourish me--even then I was still strangling on shame.

  I had just squandered the very last thing I had to be proud of in life: the fact that I did not smoke anymore.

  And as I came awake, I examined my hands in the light that billowed up from Times Square and then bounced down on me from my freshly painted ceiling. I spread my fingers and turned my hands this way and that, as a magician might have done. I was showing an imaginary audience that the cigarette I had held only a moment before had now vanished into thin air.

  But I, as magician, was as mystified as the audience as to what had become of the cigarette. I got up off the floor, woozy with disgrace, and I looked around everywhere for a cigarette's tell-tale red eye.

  But there was no red eye.

  I sat down on the edge of my bed, wide awake at last, and drenched in sweat. I took an inventory of my condition. Yes, I had gotten out of prison only that morning. Yes, I had sat in the smoking section of the airplane, but had felt no wish to smoke. Yes, I was now on the top floor of the Hotel Arapahoe.

  No, there was no cigarette anywhere.

  As for the pursuit of happiness on this planet: I was as happy as any human being in history.

  "Thank God," I thought, "that cigarette was only a dream."

  12

  AT SIX O'CLOCK on the following morning, which was the prison's time for rising, I walked out into a city stunned by its own innocence. Nobody was doing anything bad to anybody anywhere. It was even hard to imagine badness. Why would anybody be bad?

  It seemed doubtful that any great number of people lived here anymore. The few of us around might have been tourists in Angkor Wat, wondering sweetly about the religion and commerce that had caused people to erect such a city. And what had made all those people, obviously so excited for a while, decide to go away again?

  Commerce would have to be reinvented. I offered a news dealer two dimes, bits of silverfoil as weightless as lint, for a copy of The New York Times. If he had refused, I would have understood perfectly. But he gave me a Times, and then he watched me closely, clearly wondering what I proposed to do with all that paper spattered with ink.

  Eight thousand years before, I might have been a Phoenician sailor who had beached his boat on sand in Normandy, and who was now offering a man painted blue two bronze spearheads for the fur hat he wore. He was thinking: "Who is this crazy man?" And I was thinking: "Who is this crazy man?"

  I had a whimsical idea: I thought of calling the secretary of the treasury, Kermit Winkler, a man who had graduated from Harvard two years after me, and saying this to him: "I just tried out two of your dimes on Times Square, and they Worked like a dream. It looks like another great day for the coinage!"

  I encountered a baby-faced policeman. He was as uncertain about his role in the city as I was. He looked at me sheepishly, as though there were every chance that I was the policeman and he was the old bum. Who could be sure of anything that early in the day?

  I looked at my reflection in the black marble facade of a shuttered record store. Little did I dream that I would soon be a mogul of the recording industry, with gold and platinum recordings of moronic cacophony on my office wall.

  There was something odd about the position of my arms in my reflection. I pondered it. I appeared to be cradling a baby. And then I understood that this was harmonious with my mood, that I was actually carrying what little future I thought I had as though it were a baby. I showed the baby the tops of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, the lions in front of the Public Library. I carried it into an entrance to Grand Central Station, where, if we tired of the city, we could buy a ticket to simply anywhere.

  Little did I dream that I would soon be scuttling through the catacombs beneath the station, and that I would learn the secret purpose of The RAMJAC Corporation down there.

  The baby and I headed back west again. If we had kept going east, we would have soon delivered ourselves to Tudor City, where my son lived. We did not want to see him. Yes, and we paused before the window of a store that offered wicker picnic hampers--fitted out with Thermos bottles and tin boxes for sandwiches and so on. There was also a bicycle. I assumed that I could still ride a bicycle. I told the baby in my mind that we might buy a hamper and a bicycle and ride out on an abandoned dock some nice day and eat chicken sandwiches and wash them down with lemonade, while seagulls soared and keened overhead. I was beginning to feel hungry. Back in prison I would have been full of coffee and oatmeal by then.

  I passed the Century Association on West Forty-third Street, a gentleman's club where, shortly after the Second World War, I had once been the luncheon guest of Peter Gibney, the composer, a Harvard classmate of mine. I was never invited back. I would have given anything now to be a bartender in there, but Gibney was still alive and probably still a member. We had had a falling out, you might say, after I testified against Leland Clewes. Gibney sent me a picture postcard, so that my wife and the postman could read the message, too.

  "Dear shithead," it said, "why don't you crawl back under a damp rock somewhere?" The picture was of the Mona Lisa, with that strange smile of hers.

  Down the block was the Coffee Shop of the Hotel Royalton, and I made for that. The Royalton, incidentally, like the Arapahoe, was a Hospitality Associates, Ltd., hotel; which is to say, a RAMJAC hotel. By the time I reached the coffee-shop door, however, my self-confidence had collapsed. Panic had taken its place. I believed that I was the ugliest, dirtiest little old bum in Manhattan. If I went into the coffee shop, everybody would be nauseated. They would throw me out and tell me to go to the Bowery, where I belonged.

  But I somehow found the courage to go in anyway--and imagine my surprise! It was as though I had died and gone to heaven! A waitress said to me, "Honeybunch, you sit right down, and I'll bring you your coffee right away." I hadn't said anything to her.

  So I did sit down, and everywhere I looked I saw customers of every description being received with love. To the waitr
ess everybody was "honeybunch" and "darling" and "dear." It was like an emergency ward after a great catastrophe. It did not matter what race or class the victims belonged to. They were all given the same miracle drug, which was coffee. The catastrophe in this case, of course, was that the sun had come up again.

  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.

  I had the feeling that if Frankenstein's monster crashed into the coffee shop through a brick wall, all anybody would say to him was, "You sit down here, Lambchop, and I'll bring you your coffee right away."

  The profit motive was not operating. The transactions were on the order of sixty-eight cents, a dollar ten, two dollars and sixty-three ... I would find out later that the man who ran the cash register was the owner, but he would not stay at his post to rake the money in. He wanted to cook and wait on people, too, so that the waitresses and cooks kept having to say to him, "That's my customer, Frank. Get back to the cash register," or "I'm the cook here, Frank. What's this mess you've started here? Get back to the cash register," and so on.

  His full name was Frank Ubriaco. He is now executive vice-president of the McDonald's Hamburgers Division of The RAMJAC Corporation.

  I could not help noticing that he had a withered right hand. It looked as though it had been mummified, although he could still use his fingers some. I asked my waitress about it. She said he had literally French-fried that hand about a year ago. He accidentally dropped his wristwatch into a vat of boiling cooking oil. Before he realized what he was doing, he had plunged his hand into the oil, trying to rescue the watch, which was a very expensive Bulova Accutron.

  So out into the city I went again, feeling much improved.

  I sat down to read my newspaper in Bryant Park, behind the Public Library at Forty-second Street. My belly was full and as warm as a stove. It was no novelty for me to read The New York Times. About half the inmates back at the prison had mail subscriptions to the Times, and to The Wall Street Journal, too, and Time and Newsweek and Sports Illustrated, too, and on and on. And People. I subscribed to nothing, since the prison trash baskets were forever stuffed with periodicals of every kind.

  There was a sign over every trash basket in prison, incidentally, which said, "Please!" Underneath that word was an arrow that pointed straight down.

  In leafing through the Times, I saw that my son, Walter Stankiewicz, ne Starbuck, was reviewing the autobiography of a Swedish motion-picture star. Walter seemed to like it a lot. I gathered that she had had her ups and downs.

  What I particularly wanted to read, though, was the Times's account of its having been taken over by The RAMJAC Corporation. 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. The chairman of the board of RAMJAC, Arpad Leen, said in the story that RAMJAC contemplated no changes in personnel or editorial policy. He pointed out that all publications taken over by RAMJAC in the past, including those of Time Inc., and been allowed to go on as they wished, without any interference from RAMJAC.

  "Nothing has changed but the ownership," he said. And I must say, as a former RAMJAC executive myself, that we didn't change companies we take over very much. If one of them started to die, of course--then our curiosity was aroused.

  The story said that the publisher of the Times had received a handwritten note from Mrs. Jack Graham "... welcoming him to the RAMJAC family." It said she hoped he would stay on in his present capacity. Beneath the signature were the prints of all her fingers and thumbs. There could be no question about the letter's being genuine.

  I looked about myself in Bryant Park. Lilies of the valley had raised their little bells above the winter-killed ivy and glassine envelopes that bordered the walks. My wife Ruth and I had had lilies of the valley and ivy growing under the flowering crab apple tree in the front yard of our little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

  I spoke to the lilies of the valley. "Good morning," I said.

  Yes, and I must have gone into a defensive trance again. Three hours passed without my budging from the bench.

  I was aroused at last by a portable radio that was turned up loud. The young man carrying it sat down on a bench facing mine. He appeared to be Hispanic. I did not learn his name. If he had done me some kindness, he might now be an executive in The RAMJAC Corporation. The radio was tuned to the news. The newscaster said that the air quality that day was unacceptable.

  Imagine that: unacceptable air.

  The young man did not appear to be listening to his own radio. He may not even have understood English. The newscaster spoke with a barking sort of hilarity, as though life were a comical steeplechase, with unconventional steeds and hazards and vehicles involved. He made me feel that even I was a contestant--in a bathtub drawn by three aardvarks, perhaps. I had as good a chance as anybody to win.

  He told about another man in the steeplechase, who had been sentenced to die in an electric chair in Texas. The doomed man had instructed his lawyers to fight anybody, including the governor and the President of the United States, who might want to grant him a stay of execution. The thing he wanted more than anything in life, evidently, was death in the electric chair.

  Two joggers came down the path between me and the radio. They were a man and a woman in identical orange-and-gold sweatsuits and matching shoes. I already knew about the jogging craze. We had had many joggers in prison. I found them smug.

  About the young man and his radio. I decided that he had bought the thing as a prosthetic device, as an artificial enthusiasm for the planet. He paid as little attention to it as I paid to my false front tooth. I have since seen several young men like that in groups--with their radios tuned to different stations, with their radios engaged in a spirited conversation. The young men themselves, perhaps having been told nothing but "shut up" all their lives, had nothing to say.

  But now the young man's radio said something so horrifying that I got off my bench, left the park, and joined the throng of Free Enterprisers charging along Forty-second Street toward Fifth Avenue.

  The story was this: An imbecilic young female drug addict from my home state of Ohio, about nineteen years old, had had a baby whose father was unknown. Social workers put her and the baby into a hotel not unlike the Arapahoe. She bought a full-grown German shepherd police dog for protection, but she forgot to feed it. Then she went out one night on some unspecified errand, and she left the dog to guard the baby. When she got back, she found that the dog had killed the baby and eaten part of it.

  What a time to be alive!

  So there I was marching as purposefully as anybody toward Fifth Avenue. According to plan, I began to study the faces coming at me, looking for a familiar one that might be of some use to me. I was prepared to be patient. It would be like panning for gold, I thought, like looking for a glint of the precious in a dish of sand.

  When I had got no farther than the curb at Fifth Avenue, though, my warning systems went off ear-splittingly: "Beep, beep, beep! Honk, honk, honk! Rowrr, rowrr, rowrr!"

  Positive identification had been made!

  Corning right at me was the husk of the man who had stolen Sarah Wyatt from me, the man I had ruined back in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. He had not seen me
yet. He was Leland Clewes!

  He had lost all his hair, and his feet were capsizing in broken shoes, and the cuffs of his trousers were frayed, and his right arm appeared to have died. Dangling at the end of it was a battered sample case. Clewes had become an unsuccessful salesman, as I would find out later, of advertising matchbooks and calendars.

  He is nowadays, incidentally, a vice-president in the Diamond Match Division of The RAMJAC Corporation.

  In spite of all that had happened to him, though, his face, as he came toward me, was illuminated as always with an adolescent, goofy good will. He had worn that expression even in a photograph of his entering prison in Georgia, with the warden looking up at him as the secretary of state used to do. When Clewes was young, older men were always looking up at him as though to say, "That's my boy."

  Now he saw me!

  The eye contact nearly electrocuted me. I might as well have stuck my nose into a lamp socket!

  I went right past him and in the opposite direction. I had nothing to say to him, and no wish to stand and listen to all the terrible things he was entitled to say to me.

  When I gained the curb, though, and the lights changed, and we were separated by moving cars, I dared to look back at him.

  Clewes was facing me. Plainly, he had not yet come up with a name for me. He pointed at me with his free hand, indicating that he knew I had figured in his life in some way. And then he made that finger twitch like a metronome, ticking off possible names for me. This was fun for him. His feet were apart, his knees were bent, and his expression said that he remembered this much, anyway: We had been involved years ago in some sort of wildness, in a boyish prank of some kind.

  I was hypnotized.

  As luck would have it, there were religious fanatics behind him, barefoot and chanting and dancing in saffron robes. Thus did he appear to be a leading man in a musical comedy.