Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "In the past week," she said, "I've been married to Othello, been loved by Faust and been kidnaped by Paris. Wouldn't you say I was the luckiest girl in town?"

  I said I thought so, and I told her most of the women in town thought so too.

  "They had their chance," she said.

  "Most of'em couldn't stand the excitement," I said. And I told her I'd been asked to direct another play. I asked if she and Harry would be available for the cast. She gave me a big smile and said, "Who are we this time?"

  (1961)

  WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE

  So PETE CROCKER, the sheriff of Barnstable County, which was the whole of Cape Cod, came into the Federal Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis one May afternoon--and he told the two six-foot Hostesses there that they weren't to be alarmed, but that a notorious nothinghead named Billy the Poet was believed headed for the Cape.

  A nothinghead was a person who refused to take his ethical birth-control pills three times a day. The penalty for that was $10,000 and ten years in jail.

  This was at a time when the population of Earth was 17 billion human beings. That was far too many mammals that big for a planet that small. The people were virtually packed together like drupelets.

  Drupelets are the pulpy little knobs that compose the outside of a raspberry.

  So the World Government was making a two-pronged attack on overpopulation. One pronging was the encouragement of ethical suicide, which consisted of going to the nearest Suicide Parlor and asking a Hostess to kill you painlessly while you lay on a Barcalounger. The other pronging was compulsory ethical birth control.

  The sheriff told the Hostesses, who were pretty, tough-minded, highly intelligent girls, that roadblocks were being set up and house-to-house searches were being conducted to catch Billy the Poet. The main difficulty was that the police didn't know what he looked like. The few people who had seen him and known him for what he was were women--and they disagreed fantastically as to his height, his hair color, his voice, his weight, the color of his skin.

  "I don't need to remind you girls," the sheriff went on, "that a nothinghead is very sensitive from the waist down. If Billy the Poet somehow slips in here and starts making trouble, one good kick in the right place will do wonders."

  He was referring to the fact that ethical birth-control pills, the only legal form of birth control, made people numb from the waist down.

  Most men said their bottom halves felt like cold iron or balsa-wood. Most women said their bottom halves felt like wet cotton or stale ginger ale. The pills were so effective that you could blindfold a man who had taken one, tell him to recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him in the balls while he was doing it, and he wouldn't miss a syllable.

  The pills were ethical because they didn't interfere with a person's ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex.

  Thus did science and morals go hand in hand.

  The two Hostesses there in Hyannis were Nancy McLuhan and Mary Kraft. Nancy was a strawberry blonde. Mary was a glossy brunette. Their uniforms were white lipstick, heavy eye makeup, purple body stockings with nothing underneath, and black-leather boots. They ran a small operation--with only six suicide booths. In a really good week, say the one before Christmas, they might put sixty people to sleep. It was done with a hypodermic syringe.

  "My main message to you girls," said Sheriff Crocker, "is that everything's well under control. You can just go about your business here."

  "Didn't you leave out part of your main message?" Nancy asked him.

  "I don't get you."

  "I didn't hear you say he was probably headed straight for us."

  He shrugged in clumsy innocence. "We don't know that for sure."

  "I thought that was all anybody did know about Billy the Poet: that he specializes in deflowering Hostesses in Ethical Suicide Parlors." Nancy was a virgin. All Hostesses were virgins. They also had to hold advanced degrees in psychology and nursing. They also had to be plump and rosy, and at least six feet tall.

  America had changed in many ways, but it had yet to adopt the metric system.

  Nancy McLuhan was burned up that the sheriff would try to protect her and Mary from the full truth about Billy the Poet--as though they might panic if they heard it. She told the sheriff so.

  "How long do you think a girl would last in the E. S. S.," she said, meaning the Ethical Suicide Service, "if she scared that easy?"

  The sheriff took a step backward, pulled in his chin. "Not very long, I guess."

  "That's very true," said Nancy, closing the distance between them and offering him a sniff of the edge of her hand, which was poised for a karate chop. All Hostesses were experts at judo and karate. "If you'd like to find out how helpless we are, just come toward me, pretending you're Billy the Poet."

  The sheriff shook his head, gave her a glassy smile. "I'd rather not."

  "That's the smartest thing you've said today," said Nancy, turning her back on him while Mary laughed. "We're not scared--we're angry. Or we're not even that. He isn't worth that. We're bored. How boring that he should come a great distance, should cause all this fuss, in order to--" She let the sentence die there. "It's just too absurd."

  "I'm not as mad at him as I am at the women who let him do it to them without a struggle"--said Mary--"who let him do it and then couldn't tell the police what he looked like. Suicide Hostesses at that!"

  "Somebody hasn't been keeping up with her karate," said Nancy.

  It wasn't just Billy the Poet who was attracted to Hostesses in Ethical Suicide Parlors. All nothingheads were. Bombed out of their skulls with the sex madness that came from taking nothing, they thought the white lips and big eyes and body stocking and boots of a Hostess spelled sex, sex, sex.

  The truth was, of course, that sex was the last thing any Hostess ever had in mind.

  "If Billy follows his usual M.O.," said the sheriff, "he'll study your habits and the neighborhood. And then he'll pick one or the other of you and he'll send her a dirty poem in the mail. "

  "Charming," said Nancy.

  "He has also been known to use the telephone."

  "How brave," said Nancy. Over the sheriffs shoulder, she could see the mailman coming.

  A blue light went on over the door of a booth for which Nancy was responsible. The person in there wanted something. It was the only booth in use at the time.

  The sheriff asked her if there was a possibility that the person in there was Billy the Poet, and Nancy said, "Well, if it is, I can break his neck with my thumb and forefinger."

  "Foxy Grandpa," said Mary, who'd seen him, too. A Foxy Grandpa was any old man, cute and senile, who quibbled and joked and reminisced for hours before he let a Hostess put him to sleep.

  Nancy groaned. "We've spent the past two hours trying to decide on a last meal."

  And then the mailman came in with just one letter. It was addressed to Nancy in smeary pencil. She was splendid with anger and disgust as she opened it, knowing it would be a piece of filth from Billy.

  She was right. Inside the envelope was a poem. It wasn't an original poem. It was a song from olden days that had taken on new meanings since the numbness of ethical birth control had become universal. It went like this, in smeary pencil again:

  We were walking through the park, A-goosing statues in the dark. If Sherman's horse can take it, So can you.

  When Nancy came into the suicide booth to see what he wanted, the Foxy Grandpa was lying on the mint-green Barcalounger, where hundreds had died so peacefully over the years. He was studying the menu from the Howard Johnson's next door and beating time to the Muzak coming from the loudspeaker on the lemon-yellow wall. The room was painted cinder block. There was one barred window with a Venetian blind.

  There was a Howard Johnson's next door to every Ethical Suicide Parlor, and vice versa. The Howard Johnson's had an orange roof and the Suicide Parlor had a purple roof, but they were both the
Government. Practically everything was the Government.

  Practically everything was automated, too. Nancy and Mary and the sheriff were lucky to have jobs. Most people didn't. The average citizen moped around home and watched television, which was the Government. Every fifteen minutes his television would urge him to vote intelligently or consume intelligently, or worship in the church of his choice, or love his fellowmen, or obey the laws--or pay a call to the nearest Ethical Suicide Parlor and find out how friendly and understanding a Hostess could be.

  The Foxy Grandpa was something of a rarity, since he was marked by old age, was bald, was shaky, had spots on his hands. Most people looked twenty-two, thanks to anti-aging shots they took twice a year. That the old man looked old was proof that the shots had been discovered after his sweet bird of youth had flown.

  "Have we decided on a last supper yet?" Nancy asked him. She heard peevishness in her own voice, heard herself betray her exasperation with Billy the Poet, her boredom with the old man. She was ashamed, for this was unprofessional of her. "The breaded veal cutlet is very good."

  The old man cocked his head. With the greedy cunning of second childhood, he had caught her being unprofessional, unkind, and he was going to punish her for it. "You don't sound very friendly. I thought you were all supposed to be friendly. I thought this was supposed to be a pleasant place to come.

  "I beg your pardon," she said. "If I seem unfriendly, it has nothing to do with you."

  "I thought maybe I bored you."

  "No, no," she said gamely, "not at all. You certainly know some very interesting history." Among other things, the Foxy Grandpa claimed to have known J. Edgar Nation, the Grand Rapids druggist who was the father of ethical birth control.

  "Then look like you're interested," he told her. He could get away with that sort of impudence. The thing was, he could leave any time he wanted to, right up to the moment he asked for the needle--and he had to ask for the needle. That was the law.

  Nancy's art, and the art of every Hostess, was to see that volunteers didn't leave, to coax and wheedle and flatter them patiently, every step of the way.

  So Nancy had to sit down there in the booth, to pretend to marvel at the freshness of the yarn the old man told, a story everybody knew, about how J. Edgar Nation happened to experiment with ethical birth control.

  "He didn't have the slightest idea his pills would be taken by human beings someday," said the Foxy Grandpa. "His dream was to introduce morality into the monkey house at the Grand Rapids Zoo. Did you realize that?" he inquired severely.

  "No. No, I didn't. That's very interesting."

  "He and his eleven kids went to church one Easter. And the day was so nice and the Easter service had been so beautiful and pure that they decided to take a walk through the zoo, and they were just walking on clouds."

  "Um." The scene described was lifted from a play that was performed on television every Easter.

  The Foxy Grandpa shoehorned himself into the scene, had himself chat with the Nations just before they got to the monkey house. " 'Good morning, Mr. Nation,' I said to him. 'It certainly is a nice morning.' 'And a good morning to you, Mr. Howard,' he said to me. 'There is nothing like an Easter morning to make a man feel clean and reborn and at one with God's intentions.' "

  "Um." Nancy could hear the telephone ringing faintly, naggingly, through the nearly soundproof door.

  "So we went on to the monkey house together, and what do you think we saw?"

  "I can't imagine." Somebody had answered the phone.

  "We saw a monkey playing with his private parts!"

  "No!"

  "Yes! and J. Edgar Nation was so upset he Went straight home and he started developing a pill that would make monkeys in the springtime fit things for a Christian family to see."

  There was a knock on the door.

  "Yes--?" said Nancy.

  "Nancy," said Mary, "telephone for you."

  When Nancy came out of the booth, she found the sheriff choking on little squeals of law-enforcement delight. The telephone was tapped by agents hidden in the Howard Johnson's. Billy the Poet was believed to be on the line. His call had been traced. Police were already on their way to grab him.

  "Keep him on, keep him on," the sheriff whispered to Nancy, and he gave her the telephone as though it were solid gold.

  "Yes--?" said Nancy.

  "Nancy McLuhan?" said a man. His voice was disguised. He might have been speaking through a kazoo. "I'm calling for a mutual friend."

  "Oh?"

  "He asked me to deliver a message."

  "I see."

  "It's a poem."

  "All right."

  "Ready?"

  "Ready." Nancy could hear sirens screaming in the background of the call.

  The caller must have heard the sirens, too, but he recited the poem without any emotion. It went like this:

  "Soak yourself in Jergen's Lotion.

  Here comes the one-man population explosion."

  They got him. Nancy heard it all--the thumping and clumping, the argle-bargle and cries.

  The depression she felt as she hung up was glandular. Her brave body had prepared for a fight that was not to be.

  The sheriff bounded out of the Suicide Parlor, in such a hurry to see the famous criminal he'd helped catch that a sheaf of papers fell from the pocket of his trench coat.

  Mary picked them up, called after the sheriff. He halted for a moment, said the papers didn't matter any more, asked her if maybe she wouldn't like to come along. There was a flurry between the two girls, with Nancy persuading Mary to go, declaring that she had no curiosity about Billy. So Mary left, irrelevantly handing the sheaf to Nancy.

  The sheaf proved to be photocopies of poems Billy had sent to Hostesses in other places. Nancy read the top one. It made much of a peculiar side effect of ethical birth-control pills: They not only made people numb--they also made people piss blue. The poem was called What the Somethinghead Said to the Suicide Hostess, and it went like this:

  I did not sow, I did not spin,

  And thanks to pills I did not sin.

  I loved the crowds, the stink, the noise.

  And when I peed, I peed turquoise.

  I ate beneath a roof of orange;

  Swung with progress like a door hinge.

  'Neath purple roof I've come today

  To piss my azure life away.

  Virgin hostess, death's recruiter,

  Life is cute, but you are cuter.

  Mourn my pecker, purple daughter--

  All it passed was sky-blue water.

  "You never heard that story before--about how J. Edgar Nation came to invent ethical birth control?" the Foxy Grandpa wanted to know. His voice cracked.

  "Never did," lied Nancy.

  "I thought everybody knew that."

  "It was news to me."

  "When he got through with the monkey house, you couldn't tell it from the Michigan Supreme Court. Meanwhile, there was this crisis going on in the United Nations. The people who understood science said people had to quit reproducing so much, and the people who understood morals said society would collapse if people used sex for nothing but pleasure."

  The Foxy Grandpa got off his Barcalounger, went over to the window, pried two slats of the blind apart. There wasn't much to see out there. The view was blocked by the backside of a mocked-up thermometer twenty feet high, which faced the street. It was calibrated in billions of people on Earth, from zero to twenty. The make-believe column of liquid was a strip of translucent red plastic. It showed how many people there were on Earth. Very close to the bottom was a black arrow that showed what the scientists thought the population ought to be.

  The Foxy Grandpa was looking at the setting sun through that red plastic, and through the blind, too, so that his face was banded with shadows and red.

  "Tell me--" he said, "when I die, how much will that thermometer go down? A foot?"

  "No."

  "An inch?"

  "N
ot quite."

  "You know what the answer is, don't you?" he said, and he faced her. The senility had vanished from his voice and eyes. "One inch on that thing equals 83,333 people. You knew that, didn't you?"

  "That--that might be true," said Nancy, "but that isn't the right way to look at it, in my opinion."

  He didn't ask her what the right way was, in her opinion. He completed a thought of his own, instead. "I'll tell you something else that's true: I'm Billy the Poet, and you're a very good-looking woman."

  With one hand, he drew a snub-nosed revolver from his belt. With the other, he peeled off his bald dome and wrinkled forehead, which proved to be rubber. Now he looked twenty-two.

  "The police will want to know exactly what I look like when this is all over," he told Nancy with a malicious grin. "In case you're not good at describing people, and it's surprising how many women aren't:

  I'm five foot two,

  With eyes of blue,

  With Brown hair to my shoulders--

  A manly elf

  So full of self

  The ladies say he smolders."

  Billy was ten inches shorter than Nancy was. She had about forty pounds on him. She told him he didn't have a chance, but Nancy was much mistaken. He had unbolted the bars on the window the night before and he made her go out the window and then down a manhole that was hidden from the street by the big thermometer.

  He took her down into the sewers of Hyannis. He knew where he was going. He had a flashlight and a map. Nancy had to go before him along the narrow catwalk, her own shadow dancing mockingly in the lead. She tried to guess where they were, relative to the real world above. She guessed correctly when they passed under the Howard Johnson's, guessed from noises she heard. The machinery that processed and served the food there was silent. But, so people wouldn't feel too lonesome when eating there, the designers had provided sound effects for the kitchen. It was these Nancy heard--a tape recording of the clashing of silverware and the laughter of Negroes and Puerto Ricans.

  After that she was lost. Billy had very little to say to her other than "Right," or, "Left," or "Don't try anything funny, Juno, or I'll blow your great big fucking head off."

  Only once did they have anything resembling a conversation. Billy began it, and ended it, too. "What in hell is a girl with hips like yours doing selling death?" he asked her from behind.