Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "I see," said Helmholtz.

  "Like listening to music?" said Helmholtz to Jim brightly, as they rode to school in Helmholtz's car.

  Jim said nothing. He was stroking his mustache and sideburns, which he had not shaved off.

  "Ever drum with the fingers or keep time with your feet?" said Helmholtz. He had noticed that Jim's boots were decorated with chains that had no function but to jingle as he walked.

  Jim sighed with ennui.

  "Or whistle?" said Helmholtz. "If you do any of those things, it's just like picking up the keys to a whole new world-- a world as beautiful as any world can be."

  Jim gave a soft Bronx cheer.

  "There!" said Helmholtz. "You've illustrated the basic principle of the family of brass wind instruments. The glorious voice of every one of them starts with a buzz on the lips."

  The seat springs of Helmholtz's old car creaked under Jim, as Jim shifted his weight. Helmholtz took this as a sign of interest, and he turned to smile in comradely fashion. But Jim had shifted his weight in order to get a cigarette from inside his tight leather jacket.

  Helmholtz was too upset to comment at once. It was only at the end of the ride, as he turned into the teachers' parking lot, that he thought of something to say.

  "Sometimes," said Helmholtz, "I get so lonely and disgusted, I don't see how I can stand it. I feel like doing all kinds of crazy things, just for the heck of it--things that might even be bad for me."

  Jim blew a smoke ring expertly.

  "And then!" said Helmholtz. He snapped his fingers and honked his horn. "And then, Jim, I remember I've got at least one tiny corner of the universe I can make just the way I want it! I can go to it and gloat over it until I'm brand-new and happy again."

  "Aren't you the lucky one?" said Jim. He yawned.

  "I am, for a fact," said Helmholtz. "My corner of the universe happens to be the air around my band. I can fill it with music. Mr. Beeler, in zoology, has his butterflies. Mr. Trottman, in physics, has his pendulum and tuning forks. Making sure everybody has a corner like that is about the biggest job we teachers have. I--"

  The car door opened and slammed, and Jim was gone. Helmholtz stamped out Jim's cigarette and buried it under the gravel of the parking lot.

  Helmholtz's first class of the morning was C Band, where beginners thumped and wheezed and tooted as best they could, and looked down the long, long, long road through B Band to A Band, the Lincoln High School Ten Square Band, the finest band in the world.

  Helmholtz stepped onto the podium and raised his baton. "You are better than you think," he said. "A-one, a-two, a-three." Down came the baton.

  C Band set out in its quest for beauty--set out like a rusty switch engine, with valves stuck, pipes clogged, unions leaking, bearings dry.

  Helmholtz was still smiling at the end of the hour, because he'd heard in his mind the music as it was going to be someday. His throat was raw, for he had been singing with the band for the whole hour. He stepped into the hall for a drink from the fountain.

  As he drank, he heard the jingling of chains. He looked up at Jim Donnini. Rivers of students flowed between classrooms, pausing in friendly eddies, flowing on again. Jim was alone. When he paused, it wasn't to greet anyone, but to polish the toes of his boots on his trousers legs. He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down.

  "Hello, Jim," said Helmholtz. "Say, I was just thinking about you. We've got a lot of clubs and teams that meet after school. And that's a good way to get to know a lot of people."

  Jim measured Helmholtz carefully with his eyes. "Maybe I don't want to know a lot of people," he said. "Ever think of that?" He set his feet down hard to make his chains jingle as he walked away.

  When Helmholtz returned to the podium for a rehearsal of B Band, there was a note waiting for him, calling him to a special faculty meeting.

  The meeting was about vandalism.

  Someone had broken into the school and wrecked the office of Mr. Crane, head of the English Department. The poor man's treasures--books, diplomas, snapshots of England, the beginnings of eleven novels--had been ripped and crumpled, mixed, dumped and trampled, and drenched with ink.

  Helmholtz was sickened. He couldn't believe it. He couldn't bring himself to think about it. It didn't become real to him until late that night, in a dream. In the dream Helmholtz saw a boy with barracuda teeth, with claws like baling hooks. The monster climbed into a window of the high school and dropped to the floor of the band rehearsal room. The monster clawed to shreds the heads of the biggest drum in the state. Helmholtz woke up howling. There was nothing to do but dress and go to the school.

  At two in the morning, Helmholtz caressed the drum heads in the band rehearsal room, with the night watchman looking on. He rolled the drum back and forth on its cart, and he turned the light inside on and off, on and off. The drum was unharmed. The night watchman left to make his rounds.

  The band's treasure house was safe. With the contentment of a miser counting his money, Helmholtz fondled the rest of the instruments, one by one. And then he began to polish the sousaphones. As he polished, he could hear the great horns roaring, could see them flashing in the sunlight, with the Stars and Stripes and the banner of Lincoln High going before.

  "Yump-yump, tiddle-tiddle, yump-yump, tiddle-tiddle!" sang Helmholtz happily. "Yump-yump-yump, ra-a-a-a-a-a, yump-yump, yump-yump--boom!"

  As he paused to choose the next number for his imaginary band to play, he heard a furtive noise in the chemistry laboratory next door. Helmholtz sneaked into the hall, jerked open the laboratory door, and flashed on the lights. Jim Donnini had a bottle of acid in either hand. He was splashing acid over the periodic table of the elements, over the blackboards covered with formulas, over the bust of Lavoisier. The scene was the most repulsive thing Helmholtz could have looked upon.

  Jim smiled with thin bravado.

  "Get out," said Helmholtz.

  "What're you gonna do?" said Jim.

  "Clean up. Save what I can," said Helmholtz dazedly. He picked up a wad of cotton waste and began wiping up the acid.

  "You gonna call the cops?" said Jim.

  "I--I don't know," said Helmholtz. "No thoughts come. If I'd caught you hurting the bass drum, I think I would have killed you with a single blow. But I wouldn't have had any intelligent thoughts about what you were--what you thought you were doing."

  "It's about time this place got set on its ear," said Jim.

  "Is it?" said Helmholtz. "That must be so, if one of our students wants to murder it."

  "What good is it?" said Jim.

  "Not much good, I guess," said Helmholtz. "It's just the best thing human beings ever managed to do." He was helpless, talking to himself He had a bag of tricks for making boys behave like men--tricks that played on boyish fears and dreams and loves. But here was a boy without fear, without dreams, without love.

  "If you smashed up all the schools," said Helmholtz, "we wouldn't have any hope left."

  "What hope?" said Jim.

  "The hope that everybody will be glad he's alive," said Helmholtz. "Even you."

  "That's a laugh," said Jim. "All I ever got out of this dump was a hard time. So what're you gonna do?"

  "I have to do something, don't I?" said Helmholtz.

  "I don't care what you do," said Jim.

  "I know," said Helmholtz. "I know." He marched Jim into his tiny office off the band rehearsal room. He dialed the telephone number of the principal's home. Numbly, he waited for the bell to get the old man from his bed.

  Jim dusted his boots with a rag.

  Helmholtz suddenly dropped the telephone into its cradle before the principal could answer. "Isn't there anything you care about but ripping, hacking, bending, rending, smashing, bashing?" he cried. "Anything? Anything but those boots?"

  "Go on! Call up whoever you're gonna call," said Jim.

  Helmholtz opened a lock
er and took a trumpet from it. He thrust the trumpet into Jim's arms. "There!" he said, puffing with emotion. "There's my treasure. It's the dearest thing I own. I give it to you to smash. I won't move a muscle to stop you. You can have the added pleasure of watching my heart break while you do it."

  Jim looked at him oddly. He laid down the trumpet.

  "Go on!" said Helmholtz. "If the world has treated you so badly, it deserves to have the trumpet smashed!"

  "I--" said Jim. Helmholtz grabbed his belt, put a foot behind him, and dumped him on the floor.

  Helmholtz pulled Jim's boots off and threw them into a corner. "There!" said Helmholtz savagely. He jerked the boy to his feet again and thrust the trumpet into his arms once more.

  Jim Donnini was barefoot now. He had lost his socks with his boots. The boy looked down. The feet that had once seemed big black clubs were narrow as chicken wings now-- bony and blue, and not quite clean.

  The boy shivered, then quaked. Each quake seemed to shake something loose inside, until, at last, there was no boy left. No boy at all. Jim's head lolled, as though he waited only for death.

  Helmholtz was overwhelmed by remorse. He threw his arms around the boy. "Jim! Jim--listen to me, boy!"

  Jim stopped quaking.

  "You know what you've got there--the trumpet?" said Helmholtz. "You know what's special about it?"

  Jim only sighed.

  "It belonged to John Philip Sousa!" said Helmholtz. He rocked and shook Jim gently, trying to bring him back to life. "I'll trade it to you, Jim--for your boots. It's yours, Jim! John Philip Sousa's trumpet is yours! It's worth hundreds of dollars, Jim--thousands!''

  Jim laid his head on Helmholtz's breast.

  "It's better than boots, Jim," said Helmholtz. "You can learn to play it. You're somebody, Jim. You're the boy with John Philip Sousa's trumpet!"

  Helmholtz released Jim slowly, sure the boy would topple. Jim didn't fall. He stood alone. The trumpet was still in his arms.

  "I'll take you home, Jim," said Helmholtz. "Be a good boy and I won't say a word about tonight. Polish your trumpet, and learn to be a good boy."

  "Can I have my boots?" said Jim dully.

  "No," said Helmholtz. "I don't think they're good for you."

  He drove Jim home. He opened the car windows and the air seemed to refresh the boy. He let him out at Quinn's restaurant. The soft pats of Jim's bare feet on the sidewalk echoed down the empty street. He climbed through a window, and into his bedroom behind the kitchen. And all was still.

  The next morning the waddling clanking, muddy machines were making the vision of Bert Quinn come true. They were smoothing off the place where the hill had been behind the restaurant. They were making it as level as a billiard table.

  Helmholtz sat in a booth again. Quinn joined him again. Jim mopped again. Jim kept his eyes down, refusing to notice Helmholtz. And he didn't seem to care when a surf of suds broke over the toes of his small and narrow brown Oxfords.

  "Eating out two mornings in a row?" said Quinn. "Something wrong at home?"

  "My wife's still out of town," said Helmholtz.

  "While the cat's away--" said Quinn. He winked.

  "When the cat's away," said Helmholtz, "this mouse gets lonesome."

  Quinn leaned forward. "Is that what got you out of bed in the middle of the night, Helmholtz? Loneliness?" He jerked his head at Jim. "Kid! Go get Mr. Helmholtz his horn."

  Jim raised his head, and Helmholtz saw that his eyes were oysterlike again. He marched away to get the trumpet.

  Quinn now showed that he was excited and angry. "You take away his boots and give him a horn, and I'm not supposed to get curious?" he said. "I'm not supposed to start asking questions? I'm not supposed to find out you caught him taking the school apart? You'd make a lousy crook, Helmholtz. You'd leave your baton, sheet music, and your driver's license at the scene of the crime."

  "I don't think about hiding clues," said Helmholtz. "I just do what I do. I was going to tell you."

  Quinn's feet danced and his shoes squeaked like mice. "Yes?" he said. "Well, I've got some news for you too."

  "What is that?" said Helmholtz uneasily.

  "It's all over with Jim and me," said Quinn. "Last night was the payoff. I'm sending him back where he came from."

  "To another string of foster homes?" said Helmholtz weakly.

  "Whatever the experts figure out to do with a kid like that." Quinn sat back, exhaled noisily, and went limp with relief

  "You can't," said Helmholtz.

  "I can," said Quinn.

  "That will be the end of him," said Helmholtz. "He can't stand to be thrown away like that one more time."

  "He can't feel anything," said Quinn. "I can't help him; I can't hurt him. Nobody can. There isn't a nerve in him."

  "A bundle of scar tissue," said Helmholtz.

  The bundle of scar tissue returned with the trumpet. Impassively, he laid it on the table in front of Helmholtz.

  Helmholtz forced a smile. "It's yours, Jim," he said. "I gave it to you."

  "Take it while you got the chance, Helmholtz," said Quinn. "He doesn't want it. All he'll do is swap it for a knife or a pack of cigarettes."

  "He doesn't know what it is, yet," said Helmholtz. "It takes a while to find out."

  "Is it any good?" said Quinn.

  "Any good?" said Helmholtz, not believing his ears. "Any good?" He didn't see how anyone could look at the instrument and not be warmed and dazzled by it. "Any good?" he murmured. "It belonged to John Philip Sousa."

  Quinn blinked stupidly. "Who?"

  Helmholtz's hands fluttered on the table top like the wings of a dying bird. "Who was John Philip Sousa?" he piped. No more words came. The subject was too big for a tired man to cover. The dying bird expired and lay still.

  After a long silence, Helmholtz picked up the trumpet. He kissed the cold mouthpiece and pumped the valves in a dream of a brilliant cadenza. Over the bell of the instrument, Helmholtz saw Jim Donnini's face, seemingly floating in space--all but deaf and blind. Now Helmholtz saw the futility of men and their treasures. He had thought that his greatest treasure, the trumpet, could buy a soul for Jim. The trumpet was worthless.

  Deliberately, Helmholtz hammered the trumpet against the table edge. He bent it around a coat tree. He handed the wreck to Quinn.

  "Ya busted it," said Quinn, amazed. "Why'dja do that? What's that prove?"

  "I--I don't know," said Helmholtz. A terrible blasphemy rumbled deep in him, like the warning of a volcano. And then, irresistibly, out it came. "Life is no damn good," said Helmholtz. His face twisted as he fought back tears and shame.

  Helmholtz, the mountain that walked like a man, was falling apart. Jim Donnini's eyes filled with pity and alarm. They came alive. They became human. Helmholtz had got a message through. Quinn looked at Jim, and something like hope flickered for the first time in his bitterly lonely old face.

  Two weeks later, a new semester began at Lincoln High.

  In the band rehearsal room, the members of C Band were waiting for their leader--were waiting for their destinies as musicians to unfold.

  Helmholtz stepped onto the podium, and rattled his baton against his music stand. "The Voices of Spring," he said. "Everybody hear that? The Voices of Spring?"

  There were rustling sounds as the musicians put the music on their stands. In the pregnant silence that followed their readiness, Helmholtz glanced at Jim Donnini, who sat on the last seat of the worst trumpet section of the worst band in school.

  His trumpet, John Philip Sousa's trumpet, George M. Helmholtz's trumpet, had been repaired.

  "Think of it this way," said Helmholtz. "Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it."

  A small cry of despair came from Jim Donnini. It was meant to be private, but it pierced every ear with its poignancy.

  "How?" said Jim.

  "Love yourself," said Helmholtz, "and make your instrument sing about it. A-one,
a-two, a-three." Down came his baton.

  (1955)

  THE MANNED MISSILES

  I, MIKHAIL IVANKOV, stone mason in the village of Ilba in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, greet you and pity you, Charles Ashland, petroleum merchant in Titusville, Florida, in the United States of America. I grasp your hand.

  The first true space man was my son, Major Stepan Ivankov. The second was your son, Captain Bryant Ashland. They will be forgotten only when men no longer look up at the sky. They are like the moon and the planets and the sun and the stars.

  I do not speak English. I speak these words in Russian, from my heart, and my surviving son, Alexei, writes them down in English. He studies English in school and German also. He likes English best. He admires your Jack London and your O. Henry and your Mark Twain. Alexei is seventeen. He is going to be a scientist like his brother Stepan.

  He wants me to tell you that he is going to work on science for peace, not war. He wants me to tell you also that he does not hate the memory of your son. He understands that your son was ordered to do what he did. He is talking very much, and would like to compose this letter himself. He thinks that a man forty-nine is a very old man, and he does not think that a very old man who can do nothing but put one stone on top of another can say the right things about young men who die in space.

  If he wishes, he can write a letter of his own about the deaths of Stepan and your son. This is my letter, and I will get Aksinia, Stepan's widow, to read it to me to make sure Alexei has made it say exactly what I wish it to say. Aksinia, too, understands English very well. She is a physician for children. She is beautiful. She works very hard so she can forget sometimes her grief for Stepan.

  I will tell you a joke, Mr. Ashland. When the second baby moon of the U.S.S.R. went up with a dog in it, we whispered that it was not really a dog inside, but Prokhor Ivanoff, a dairy manager who had been arrested for theft two days before. It was only a joke, but it made me think what a terrible punishment it would be to send a human being up there. I could not stop thinking about that. I dreamed about it at night, and I dreamed that it was myself who was being punished.

  I would have asked my elder son Stepan about life in space, but he was far away in Guryev, on the Caspian Sea. So I asked my younger son. Alexei laughed at my fears of space. He said that a man could be made very comfortable up there. He said that many young men would be going up there soon. First they would ride in baby moons. Then they would go to the moon itself Then they would go to other planets. He laughed at me, because only an old man would worry about such simple trips.