Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Actually, the Sri Lankan would be rescued by a police launch about two hours later. He would be found clinging to a bell buoy off Governor's Island. The papers the next morning would describe him as "incoherent." I can believe it.

  There was no one to question me at once. I was going to have to be locked up for a while. The police station was so busy that there wasn't even an ordinary cell for me. I was given a chair in the corridor outside the cells. It was there that the rioters insulted me from behind bars, imagining that I would enjoy nothing so much as making love to them.

  I was eventually taken to a padded cell in the basement. It was designed to hold a maniac until an ambulance could come for her or him. There wasn't a toilet in there, because a maniac might try to bash his or her brains out on a toilet's rim. There was no cot, no chair. I would have to sit or lie on the padded floor. Oddly enough, the only piece of furniture was a large bowling trophy, which somebody had stored in there. I got to know it well.

  So there I was back in a quiet basement again.

  And, as had happened to me when I was the President's special advisor on youth affairs, I was forgotten again.

  I was accidentally left there from noon until eight o'clock that night, without food or water, or a toilet or the slightest sound from the outside--on what was to have been my first full day of freedom. Thus began a test of my character that I failed.

  I thought about Mary Kathleen and all she had been through. I still did not know that she was Mrs. Jack Graham, but she had told me something else very interesting about herself: After I left Harvard, after I stopped answering her letters or even thinking much about her anymore, she hitchhiked to Kentucky, where Kenneth Whistler was still working as a miner and an organizer. She arrived at sundown at the shack where he was living alone. The place was unlocked, having nothing inside worth stealing. Whistler was still at work. Mary Kathleen had brought food with her. When Whistler came home, there was smoke coming out of his chimney. There was a hot meal waiting for him inside.

  That was how she got down into the coalfields. And that was how she happened, when Kenneth Whistler became violent late at night because of alcohol, to run out into the moonlit street of a shantytown and into the arms of a young mining engineer. He was, of course, Jack Graham.

  And then I regaled myself with a story by my prison friend Dr. Robert Fender, which he had published under the name of "Kilgore Trout." It was called "Asleep at the Switch." It was about a huge reception center outside the Pearly Gates of heaven--filled with computers and staffed by people who had been certified public accountants or investment counselors or business managers back on Earth.

  You could not get into heaven until you had submitted to a full review of how well you had handled the business opportunities God, through His angels, had offered to you on Earth.

  All day long and in every cubicle you could hear the experts saying with utmost weariness to people who had missed this opportunity and then that one: "And there you were, asleep at the switch again."

  How much time had I spent in solitary by then? I will make a guess: five minutes.

  "Asleep at the Switch" was quite a sacrilegious story. The hero was the ghost of Albert Einstein. He himself was so little interested in wealth that he scarcely heard what his auditor had to say to him. It was some sort of balderdash about how he could have become a billionaire, if only he had gotten a second mortgage on his house in Bern, Switzerland, in Nineteen-hundred and Five, and invested the money in known uranium deposits before telling the world that E=Mc2.

  "But there you were--asleep at the switch again," said the auditor.

  "Yes," said Einstein politely, "it does seem rather typical."

  "So you see," said the auditor, "life really was quite fair. You did have a remarkable number of opportunities, whether you took them or not."

  "Yes, I see that now," said Einstein.

  "Would you mind saying that in so many words?" said the auditor.

  "Saying what?" said Einstein.

  "That life was fair."

  "Life was fair," said Einstein.

  "If you don't really mean it," said the auditor, "I have many more examples to show you. For instance, just forgetting atomic energy: If you had simply taken the money you put into a savings bank when you were at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and you had put it, starting in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty, say, into IBM and Polaroid and Xerox--even though you had only five more years to live--" The auditor raised his eyes suggestively, inviting Einstein to show how smart he could be.

  "I would have been rich?" said Einstein.

  "'Comfortable,' shall we say?" said the auditor smugly. "But there you were again--" And again his eyebrows went up.

  "Asleep at the switch?" asked Einstein hopefully.

  The auditor stood and extended his hand, which Einstein accepted unenthusiastically. "So you see, Doctor Einstein," he said, "we can't blame God for everything, now can we?" He handed Einstein his pass through the Pearly Gates. "Good to have you aboard," he said.

  So into heaven Einstein went, carrying his beloved fiddle. He thought no more about the audit. He was a veteran of countless border crossings by then. There had always been senseless questions to answer, empty promises to make, meaningless documents to sign.

  But once inside heaven Einstein encountered ghost after ghost who was sick about what his or her audit had shown. One husband and wife team, which had committed suicide after losing everything in a chicken farm in New Hampshire, had been told that they had been living the whole time over the largest deposit of nickel in the world.

  A fourteen-year-old Harlem child who had been killed in a gang fight was told about a two-carat diamond ring that lay for weeks at the bottom of a catch basin he passed every day. It was flawless and had not been reported as stolen. If he had sold it for only a tenth of its value, four hundred dollars, say, according to his auditor, and speculated in commodities futures, especially in cocoa at that time, he could have moved his mother and sisters and himself into a Park Avenue condominium and sent himself to Andover and then to Harvard after that.

  There was Harvard again.

  All the auditing stories that Einstein heard were told by Americans. He had chosen to settle in the American part of heaven. Understandably, he had mixed feelings about Europeans, since he was a Jew. But it wasn't only Americans who were being audited. Pakistanis and pygmies from the Philippines and even communists had to go through the very same thing.

  It was in character for Einstein to be offended first by the mathematics of the system the auditors wanted everybody to be so grateful for. He calculated that if every person on Earth took full advantage of every opportunity, became a millionaire and then a billionaire and so on, the paper wealth on that one little planet would exceed the worth of all the minerals in the universe in a matter of three months or so. Also: There would be nobody left to do any useful work.

  So he sent God a note. It assumed that God had no idea what sorts of rubbish His auditors were talking. It accused the auditors rather than God of cruelly deceiving new arrivals about the opportunities they had had on Earth. He tried to guess the auditors' motives. He wondered if they might not be sadists.

  The story ended abruptly. Einstein did not get to see God. But God sent out an archangel who was boiling mad. He told Einstein that if he continued to destroy ghosts' respect for the audits, he was going to take Einstein's fiddle away from him for all eternity. So Einstein never discussed the audits with anybody ever again. His fiddle meant more to him than anything.

  The story was certainly a slam at God, suggesting that He was capable of using a cheap subterfuge like the audits to get out of being blamed for how hard economic life was down here.

  I made my mind a blank.

  But then it started singing about Sally in the garden again.

  Mary Kathleen O'Looney, exercising her cosmic powers as Mrs. Jack Graham, had meanwhile telephoned Arpad Leen, the top man at RAMJAC. She ordered him to find out
what the police had done with me, and to send the toughest lawyer in New York City to rescue me, no matter what the cost.

  He was to make me a RAMJAC vice-president after that. While she was at it, she said, she had a list of other good people who were to be rounded up and also made vice-presidents. These were the people I had told her about, of course--the strangers who had been so nice to me.

  She also ordered him to tell Doris Kramm, the old secretary at The American Harp Company, that she didn't have to retire, no matter how old she was.

  Yes, and there in my padded cell I told myself a joke I had read in The Harvard Lampoon when a freshman. It had amazed me back then because it seemed so dirty. When I became the President's special advisor on youth affairs, and had to read college humor again, I discovered that the joke was still being published many times a year--unchanged. This was it:

  SHE: How dare you kiss me like that?

  HE: I was just trying to find out who ate all the macaroons.

  So I had a good laugh about that there in solitary. But then I began to crack. I could not stop saying to myself, "Macaroons, macaroons, macaroons ..."

  Things got much worse after that. I sobbed. I bounced myself off the walls. I took a crap in a corner. I dropped the bowling trophy on the top of the crap.

  I screamed a poem I had learned in grammar school:

  Don't care if I do die,

  Do die, do die!

  Like to make the juice fly,

  Juice fly, juice fly!

  I may even have masturbated. Why not? We old folks have much richer sex lives than most young people imagine.

  I eventually collapsed.

  At seven o'clock that night the toughest attorney in New York entered the police station upstairs. He had traced me that far. He was a famous man, known to be extremely ferocious and humorless in prosecuting or defending almost anyone. The police were thunderstruck when such a dreaded celebrity appeared. He demanded to know what had become of me.

  Nobody knew. There was no record anywhere of my having been released or transferred elsewhere. My lawyer knew I hadn't gone home, because he had already asked after me there. Mary Kathleen had told Arpad Leen and Leen had told the lawyer that I lived at the Arapahoe.

  They could not even find out what I had been arrested for.

  So all the cells were checked. I wasn't in any of them, of course. The people who had brought me in and the man who had locked me up had all gone off-duty. None of them could be reached at home.

  But then the detective who was trying to placate my lawyer remembered the cell downstairs and decided to have a look inside it, just in case.

  When the key turned in the lock, I was lying on my stomach like a dog in a kennel, facing the door. My stocking feet extended in the direction of the bowling trophy and the crap. I had removed my shoes for some reason.

  When the detective opened the door, he was appalled to see me, realizing how long I must have been in there. The City of New York had accidentally committed a very serious crime against me.

  "Mr. Starbuck--?" he asked anxiously.

  I said nothing. I did sit up. I no longer cared where I was or what might happen next. I was like a hooked fish that had done all the fighting it could. Whatever was on the other end of the line was welcome to reel me in.

  When the detective said, "Your lawyer is here," I did not protest even inwardly that nobody knew I was in jail, that I had no lawyer, no friends, no anything. So be it: My lawyer was there.

  Now the lawyer showed himself. It would not have surprised me if he had been a unicorn. He was, in fact, almost that fantastic--a man who, when only twenty-six years old, had been chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Investigating Committee, whose chairman was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the most spectacular hunter of disloyal Americans since World War Two.

  He was in his late forties now--but still unsmiling and nervously shrewd. During the McCarthy Era, which came after Leland Clewes and I had made such fools of ourselves, I had hated and feared this man. He was on my side now.

  "Mr. Starbuck," he said, "I am here to represent you, if you want me to. I have been retained on your behalf by The RAMJAC Corporation. Roy M. Cohn is my name."

  What a miracle-worker he was!

  I was out of the police station and into a waiting limousine before you could say, "Habeas corpus!"

  Cohn, having delivered me to the limousine, did not himself get in. He wished me well without shaking my hand, and was gone. He never touched me, never gave any indication that he knew that I, too, had played a very public part in American history in olden times.

  So there I was in a limousine again. Why not? Anything was possible in a dream. Hadn't Roy M. Cohn just gotten me out of jail, and hadn't I left my shoes behind? So why shouldn't the dream go on--and have Leland Clewes and Israel Edel, the night clerk at the Arapahoe, already sitting in the back of the limousine, with a space between them for me? This it did.

  They nodded to me uneasily. They, too, felt that life wasn't making good sense just now.

  What was going on, of course, was that the limousine was cruising around Manhattan like a schoolbus, picking up people Mary Kathleen O'Looney had told Arpad Leen to hire as RAMJAC vice-presidents. This was Leen's personal limousine. It was what I have since learned is called a "stretch" limousine. The American Harp Company could have used the backseat for a showroom.

  Clewes and Edel and the next person we were going to pick up had all been telephoned personally by Leen--after some of his assistants had found out more about who they were and where they were. Leland Clewes had been found in the phonebook. Edel had been found behind the desk at the Arapahoe. One of the assistants had gone to the Coffee Shop of the Royalton to ask for the name of a person who worked there and had a French-fried hand.

  Other calls had gone to Georgia--one to the RAMJAC regional office, asking if they had a chauffeur named Cleveland Lawes working for them, and another to the Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility at Finletter Air Force Base, asking if they had a guard named Clyde Carter and a prisoner named Dr. Robert Fender there.

  Clewes asked me if I understood what was going on.

  "No," I said. "This is just the dream of a jailbird. It's not supposed to make sense."

  Clewes asked me what had happened to my shoes.

  "I left them in the padded cell," I said.

  "You were in a padded cell?" he said.

  "It's very nice," I said. "You can't possibly hurt yourself."

  A man in the front seat next to the chauffeur now turned his face to us. I knew him, too. He had been one of the lawyers who had escorted Virgil Greathouse into prison on the morning before. He was Arpad Leen's lawyer, too. He was worried about my having lost my shoes. He said we would go back to the police station and get them.

  "Not on your life!" I said. "They've found out by now that I threw the bowling trophy down in the shit, and they'll just arrest me again."

  Edel and Clewes now drew away from me some.

  "This has to be a dream," said Clewes.

  "Be my guest," I said. "The more the merrier."

  "Gentlemen, gentlemen--" said the lawyer genially. "Please, you mustn't worry so. You are about to be offered the opportunity of your lives."

  "When the hell did she see me?" said Edel. "What was the wonderful thing she saw me do?"

  "We may never know," said the lawyer. "She seldom explains herself, and she's a mistress of disguise. She could be anybody."

  "Maybe she was that big black pimp that came in after you last night," Edel said to me. "I was nice to him. He was eight feet tall."

  "I missed him," I said.

  "You're lucky," said Edel.

  "You two know each other?" said Clewes.

  "Since childhood!" I said. I was going to blow this dream wide open by absolutely refusing to take it seriously. I was damn well going to get back to my bed at the Arapahoe or my cot in prison. I didn't care which.

  Maybe I could even wake up in the bedroom o
f my little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and my wife would still be alive.

  "I can promise you she wasn't the tall pimp," said the lawyer. "That much we can be sure of: Whatever she looks like, she is not tall."

  "Who isn't tall?" I said.

  "Mrs. Jack Graham," said the lawyer.

  "Sorry I asked," I said.

  "You must have done her some sort of favor, too," the lawyer said to me, "or done something she saw and admired."

  "It's my Boy Scout training," I said.

  So we came to a stop in front of a rundown apartment building on the Upper West Side. Out came Frank Ubriaco, the owner of the Coffee Shop. He was dressed for the dream in a pale-blue velvet suit and green-and-white cowboy boots with high, high heels. His French-fried hand was elegantly sheathed in a white kid glove. Clewes pulled down a jumpseat for him.

  I said hello to him.

  "Who are you?" he said.

  "You served me breakfast this morning," I said.

  "I served everybody breakfast this morning," he said.

  "You know him, too?" said Clewes.

  "This is my town," I said. I addressed the lawyer, more convinced than ever that this was a dream, and I told him, "All right--let's pick up my mother next."

  He echoed me uncertainly. "Your mother?"

  "Sure. Why not? Everybody else is here," I said.

  He wanted to be cooperative. "Mr. Leen didn't say anything specific about your not bringing anybody else along. You'd like to bring your mother?"

  "Very much," I said.

  "Where is she?" he said.

  "In a cemetery in Cleveland," I said, "but that shouldn't slow you down."

  He thereafter avoided direct conversations with me.

  When we got underway again, Ubriaco asked those of us in the backseat who we were.

  Clewes and Edel introduced themselves. I declined to do so.

  "They're all people who caught the eye of Mrs. Graham, just as you did," said the lawyer.

  "You guys know her?" Ubriaco asked Clewes and Edel and me.

  We all shrugged.

  "Jesus Christ," said Ubriaco. "This better be a pretty good job you got to offer. I like what I do."