While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “They need a good girl at the airplane factory,” said Marie.

  “I never saw a better one,” I said.

  “They’re not ashamed of their girls over at the airplane factory,” said Marie. “They have picnics and Christmas parties and wedding showers and all kinds of things, and the foremen and the vice presidents and the works manager and the comptroller and all come to the parties and dance with the girls and have a fine time. My girlfriend gets taken out regularly everywhere by the comptroller.”

  “What’s the comptroller?” said Robert, fighting for time.

  “I don’t know,” said Marie, “except he works for a living, and he isn’t any closet lover.”

  Robert was stung speechless.

  “Man or mouse?” I said, bringing the issue back into focus.

  Robert chewed his lip, and at last murmured something we couldn’t understand.

  “What was that?” said Marie.

  “Mouse,” said Robert with a sigh. “I said mouse.”

  “Mouse,” said Marie softly.

  “Don’t say it that way,” said Robert desolately.

  “What other way is there to say mouse?” said Marie. “Good night.”

  I followed her out into the hall. “Well,” I said, “it’s been rough on him, but—”

  “Marie—” said Robert, appearing in the doorway, wan. “You wouldn’t like it. You’d hate it. You’d have a terrible time. Everybody has a terrible time. That’s why I said mouse.”

  “As long as there’s music,” said Marie, “and the gentleman is proud of his lady, nothing else matters.”

  “Um,” said Robert. He disappeared into the sitting room again, and we heard the couch springs creak.

  “You were saying—?” said Marie.

  “I was saying it was a rough thing to put him through,” I said to Marie, “but it’ll do him a world of good in the long run. This will eat into him for years, and there’s a good chance he’ll become the first rounded human being in Pisquontuit history. A long, slow, profound double take.”

  “Listen,” said Marie. “He’s talking to himself. What’s he saying?”

  “Mouse, mouse, mouse,” said Robert. “Mouse, mouse—”

  “We’ve lit the fuse,” I whispered, “on a spiritual time bomb.”

  “Mouse, man, mouse, man—” said Robert.

  “Couple of years from now,” I said, “kaboom!”

  “Man!” shouted Robert. “Man, man, man!” He was on his feet, charging out into the hall. “Man!” he said savagely, and he bent Marie over backwards, kissing her hotly. He straightened her up and pulled her after him down the stairs to the second floor.

  I followed them down, appalled.

  “Robert,” gasped Marie. “Please, what’s going on?”

  Robert pounded on his parents’ bedroom door. “You’ll see,” he said. “I’m going to tell all the world you’re mine!”

  “Robert—listen,” I said, “maybe you ought to cool off first, and—”

  “Aha! The great mouse exposer!” he said wildly. He knocked me down. “How was that for a mouse tap?” He pounded on the door again. “Out of the sack in there!”

  “I don’t want to be yours,” said Marie.

  “We’ll go out West somewhere,” said Robert, “and raise Herefords or soybeans.”

  “I just wanted to go to a Yacht Club dance,” piped Marie fearfully.

  “Don’t you understand?” said Robert. “I’m yours!”

  “But I’m his,” said Marie, pointing to me. She twisted away from Robert and ran upstairs to her room, with Robert on her heels. She slammed her door and locked it.

  I stood slowly, rubbing my bruised cheek.

  Mr. and Mrs. Brewer’s bedroom door opened suddenly. Mr. Brewer stood in the doorway, glaring at me, his tongue between his teeth. “Well?” he said.

  “I uh—up wupp,” I said. I smiled glassily. “Never mind, sir.”

  “Never mind!” he bellowed. “You beat on the door like the world’s coming to an end, and now you say never mind. Are you drunk?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Well, neither am I,” he said. “My mind’s clear as a bell, and you’re fired.” He slammed the door.

  I went back to Robert’s and my suite and began packing. Robert was lying on the couch again, staring at the ceiling.

  “She’s packing, too,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “I guess you’ll be getting married, eh?”

  “Looks that way. I’ll have to find another job.”

  “Count your blessings,” he said. “Here, but for the grace of God, lie you.”

  “Calmed down, have you?” I said.

  “I’m still through with Pisquontuit,” he said.

  “I think you’re wise,” I said.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if you and Marie would do me a little favor before you leave?”

  “Name it.”

  “I’d kind of like to dance her down the steps.” Robert’s eyes grew narrow and smoldered again, as they had when I’d surprised him tangoing by himself. “You know,” he said, “like Fred Astaire.”

  “You bet,” I said. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  The volume of the phonograph was turned up high, and all twenty-six rooms of the Brewer cottage pulsed at dawn with the rhythm of the tango.

  Robert and Marie, a handsome couple, dipped lowly and twisted their toes as they descended the spiral staircase. I followed with Marie’s and my luggage.

  Again Mr. Brewer burst from his bedroom, his tongue between his teeth. “Bubs! What does this mean?”

  Robert’s reply to his father’s question, I realize with each job application form I fill out, was unnecessarily heroic. Had we left it unsaid, Mr. Brewer’s attitude toward me might have softened in time. But now, when I write his name down as my last employer, I smear it with the ball of my thumb, hoping that prospective employers will take my honest smile as reference enough.

  “It means, sir,” said Robert, “that you should thank my two friends here for raising your son from the dead.”

  (illustration credit 11)

  BOMAR

  There were no windows in the Stockholders’ Records Section of the Treasurer’s Department of the American Forge and Foundry Company. But the soft, sweet music from the loudspeaker on the green wall by the clock, music that increased the section’s productivity by 3 percent, kept pace with the seasons, and provided windows of a sort for the staff—Bud Carmody and Lou Sterling, and Nancy Daily.

  The loudspeaker was playing spring songs when Carmody and Sterling left the sixty-four-year-old Miss Daily in charge, and went out for morning coffee.

  Both were lighthearted, unhaunted by ambition as they sauntered along the factory street to the main gate, outside of which was the Acme Grille. It had been made clear to both of them that they didn’t have the priceless stuff of which executives were made. So, unlike so many wide-eyed and hustling men all around them, they were free to dress comfortably and inexpensively, and go out for coffee as often as they pleased.

  They also had a field of humor that was closed to those with big futures in the organization. They could make jokes about the American Forge and Foundry Company, its products, its executives, and its stockholders.

  Carmody, who was forty-five, was theoretically in charge of the section, of young Sterling, Miss Daily, and the files. But he was spiritually an anarchist, and never gave orders. He was a tall, thin dreamer, who prided himself on being creative rather than domineering, and his energies went into stuffing the suggestion box, decorating the office for holidays, and collecting limericks, which he kept in a locked file in his desk.

  Carmody had been lonely and a little sour, as wave after wave of enterprising young men passed him on the ladder of success. But then the twenty-eight-year-old Sterling, also tall, thin, and dreamy, had joined the section after unappreciated performances in other departments, and life in the section had become vibrant. Carmody and Sterling
stimulated each other to new peaks in creativity—and out of the incredibly fruitful union of their talents had come many things, the richest being the myth of Bomar Fessenden III.

  There really was a Bomar Fessenden III, and he was a stockholder of the company, but neither Carmody nor Sterling knew anything about him save the number of shares he owned, one hundred, and his home address, 5889 Seaview Terrace, Great Neck, Long Island, New York. But Bomar’s splendid name had caught Sterling’s fancy. He started talking knowingly about the debauched life Fessenden led with the dividends the section mailed to him, claiming Fessenden as an old friend, a fraternity brother who wrote regularly from fleshpots around the world—Acapulco, Palm Beach, Nice, Capri … Carmody had been charmed by the myth, and had contributed heavily to it.

  “Some day!” said Carmody, as they walked through the main gate. “Too bad Bomar Fessenden III isn’t here to see it.”

  “That’s one of the many reasons I would never trade places with Bomar,” said Sterling. “Not for all his wealth and comfort and beautiful women. He never gets to see the seasons come and go.”

  “Cut off from life, that’s what Bomar is,” said Carmody. “He might as well be dead. When winter comes, what does he do?”

  “Bomar runs away from it,” said Sterling. “Pathetic. He runs away from everything. I just got a card from him saying he’s pulling out of Buenos Aires because of the dampness.”

  “And all the time, what Bomar is really running away from is himself, the futility of his whole existence,” said Carmody, sliding into a booth in the Acme Grille. “But his hollowness still pursues him as certainly as his dividend checks.”

  “Two crumb-buns and draw two, black,” said Sterling to the waitress.

  “By golly,” said Carmody, “I wonder what old Bomar wouldn’t give to be here with us right now, making plain, wholesome talk with plain, wholesome people over plain, wholesome food?”

  “Plenty,” said Sterling. “I can read that between the lines in his letters. There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.”

  “That’ll be twenty-five apiece,” said the waitress.

  “Twenty-five!” said Carmody incredulously.

  “Coffee’s done went up a nickel,” said the waitress.

  Carmody smiled wanly. “So, for peace of mind, Bomar’s got to pay a nickel more.” He threw a quarter down on the table. “Damn the expense!”

  “This is our day to howl,” said Sterling. “Have another crumb-bun.”

  “Who’s Bomar?” said the waitress. “All the time you talk about Bomar.”

  “Who is Bomar?” said Sterling. He looked at her pityingly. “Bomar? Bomar Fessenden III? Ask anybody!”

  “Ask Miss Daily,” said Carmody gleefully. “If you really want to get an earful about Bomar, ask Miss Daily. She can’t think about anything else.”

  “Ask her what she thinks of Bomar’s latest girlfriend,” said Sterling.

  Carmody pursed his lips in imitation of Miss Daily, and imitated her voice. “That hussy from the Copacabana!”

  Poor Miss Daily, who had been with the company for thirty-nine years, had been assigned to the Stockholders’ Records Section only a month before, and believed everything Sterling and Carmody told her about Bomar.

  Carmody continued his expert imitation of Miss Daily. “There ought to be laws against somebody like Bomar having all that money, and throwing it around like it was water, with so many people going hungry everywhere,” he said indignantly. “If I were a man, I’d go to wherever Bomar was, push his stuck-up old butler aside, and give him the thrashing of his life.”

  “What’s the butler’s name?” said Sterling.

  “Dawson?” said Carmody. He shook his head. “Redfield? No, no, not Redfield.”

  “Come on, man—think,” said Sterling. “You made him up.”

  “Perkins? Nope, no. Slipped my mind completely.” He smiled and shrugged. “No matter. Miss Daily will remember. She hasn’t forgotten a shred of the whole ugly story that is the life of Bomar Fessenden III.”

  “Oh,” said Carmody vaguely, displaying his leadership, as he and Sterling returned to the basement office after coffee. “They’re here. Guess we might as well fall to, huh?”

  The office was filled with cardboard boxes containing the spring dividend checks, which the section would compare with the most up-to-date information on the whereabouts of and number of shares held by the company’s thousands of owners. Miss Daily, tiny and shy, bright-eyed as a chicken, was sorting through the contents of one of the boxes.

  “We don’t have to go over them all, Miss Daily,” said Carmody. “Just the ones with recent changes of address or changes in holdings.”

  “I know,” said Miss Daily. “I’ve got the list on my desk.”

  “Good. Fine,” said Carmody. “I see you’re already in ‘F.’ Do you mean to say that in the short time Mr. Sterling and I have been gone, you’ve gotten that far?”

  “I was looking up our fine Mr. Bomar Fessenden III,” said Miss Daily grimly.

  “Everything square with my old pal?” said Sterling.

  Miss Daily was white with resentment. “Yes,” she said crisply, “quite. Two hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “Spit in the ocean,” said Sterling. “I doubt if Bomar even knows he owns a piece of this company, it’s such a little piece. The big money comes in from Standard Oil, DuPont, General Motors, and all that.”

  “A hundred shares!” said Miss Daily. “You call that a little piece?”

  “Well, that’s only worth ten thousand dollars, after all,” said Carmody patiently, “take or leave a hundred. The necklace he gave to Carmella down in Buenos Aires cost more than that.”

  “You mean Juanita,” said Miss Daily.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Carmody. “I meant Juanita.”

  “Carmella was the bullfighter’s daughter in Mexico City,” said Miss Daily. “She got the Cadillac.”

  “Of course,” said Sterling to Carmody, reproachfully, “how could you get Carmella and Juanita confused?”

  “Stupid of me,” said Carmody.

  “They’re not at all alike,” said Miss Daily.

  “Well, he’s through with Juanita anyway,” said Sterling. “He’s left Buenos Aires. It got damp.”

  “Mercy me—damp!” said Miss Daily with bitter sarcasm. “It’s more than a body can put up with!”

  “What else has Bomar got to say for himself?” said Carmody.

  “Oh—he’s in Monte Carlo now. Flew up. Got a new girl now. Fifi. Met her while he was playing roulette. He says he dropped five thousand watching her instead of keeping his mind on the game,” said Sterling.

  Carmody chuckled appreciatively. “What a card, Bomar.”

  Miss Daily snorted.

  “Now, now, Miss Daily, you mustn’t get mad at Bomar,” said Sterling. “He’s just playful and high-spirited is all. We’d all live high, if we could.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Miss Daily hotly. “It’s the wickedest thing I ever heard of. That nasty boy—and here we are, sending him more money, money he won’t even notice, so he can throw it away. It isn’t Christian. I wish I were already retired, so I wouldn’t have to face doing this.”

  “Grit your teeth, the way Mr. Sterling and I do,” said Carmody.

  “Bite the bullet, Miss Daily,” said Sterling.

  Two weeks later, Carmody and his protégé, Sterling, were in the Acme Grille, with Carmody speaking to Sterling sternly for the first time in their relationship.

  “Man, you’ve killed the goose that laid the golden eggs,” said Carmody. “You’re weak. You succumbed to temptation.”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” said Sterling miserably. “I can see that now. I over-did. I wasn’t myself. Twenty-four-hour flu.”

  “Overdid!” said Carmody. “You had Bomar charter the Queen Eliza
beth.”

  “Madcap Bomar,” said Sterling ruefully. “When she doubted it, I tried to turn it into a joke.”

  “You turned the whole thing into a joke. When she started cross-examining you about everything we’d ever told her about Bomar, you went all to pieces.”

  “It was a lot of material to keep track of,” said Sterling. “What can I say, after I’ve said I’m sorry? What gets me is how hard it hit her.”

  “Of course it hit her hard. She’s humiliated, and it takes a big piece out of her life. The lonely old soul took to Bomar like a cannibal to a fat Baptist missionary. She loved Bomar, he made her feel so righteous. Now you’ve taken Bomar from her—and from us, boy.”

  “I didn’t admit we’d made the whole thing up.”

  “It was plain enough. The only thing that would convince her now would be for Bomar to show up in the flesh.”

  Sterling stirred his coffee thoughtfully. “Well—is that utterly inconceivable?”

  “Not utterly,” Carmody admitted.

  “There—you see?” said Sterling. “It’s always darkest before the dawn. Think of what it would mean to Miss Daily to be able to square off Bomar Fessenden III, to his face! In three more months she retires after forty years of service. What a way to wind it up!”

  Carmody nodded interestedly, and chewed. “Your crumb-bun taste a little funny?”

  “Order a crumb-bun, you get a crumb-bun,” said Sterling. “Now, about Bomar: he should be fat and dissipated, short and insolent—”

  “With a sports coat down to his knees,” said Carmody, “a tie like the flag of Liberia, and gum-soles as thick as fruitcakes.”

  Miss Daily was absent from the office when Carmody and Sterling returned after an extensive search for a replica of the Bomar Fessenden III of their imaginations. They’d found their man in a supply room of the Research and Development Laboratory, and bought his services for five dollars. His name was Stanley Broom, and, as Bomar, he was perfect.

  “He doesn’t have to act worthless,” said Sterling happily, “he is worthless.”