Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (46 page)

One of the people Mr. Garball saved, of course, was the woman who became his wife and then his widow. She is now chairman of the Board of Directors of Greta Garbo International, and supposedly the highest paid woman executive in the world.

She must be pretty used to the widow business by now. When I first met her she was the widow of a department store Santa Claus named Kirby J. Welsbach.

Mr. Garball and I gassed him six days before Christmas. He sticks in my mind because he and Mr. Garball had such a row about it. Welsbach wanted to be put to sleep in his Santa Claus suit, and Mr. Garbell refused. “We are not in business to help the dying mock the living,” Mr. Garbell told him. “If satire is your motive, kindly take your custom and your costume elsewhere. Old Saint Nick will not be gassed in here.”

Welsbach went away, saying he was going to shoot himself in the Santa Claus suit in front of the information booth at Marshall Field’s.

But he never did it.

He came back to us two days later, meek as a lamb, wearing an ordinary business suit. We did the job without further ado.

Six months later his widow showed up at the shop.

She was wearing a very tight black dress, and she smelled like a gangster funeral. She was twenty-five or so.

She was very pretty, in a greedy, heartless way. “I am Ariadne Welsbach,” she said. “I’d like to talk to the manager, please. I don’t want to live any more.”

Ariadne Welsbach came in during the early June slack period. We hadn’t reported a phone booth accident to the police for more than a week.

Mr. Garball had a bad case of spring fever. He couldn’t keep his mind on business. He wasn’t accepting any customers, no matter how hopeless they were. He was sending absolutely everybody out to have another go at life, and I hate to think of what happened to some of those poor souls.

When Ariadne Welsbach came into the shop. I was all alone, greasing the Chrysler and trying to find a rattle in the trunk. Mr. Garball was very sensitive to little things. The rattle had been bothering the life out of him when he drove the Chrysler to and from work.

“I’m sorry, Lady,” I said, “but the boss isn’t in. He’s across the street at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. Why don’t you fill out a release form while I go get him?”

It’s interesting about that release form. All the modern Greta Garballs still use it, word for word, and Mr. Garball made it up himself, without the help of a lawyer. It says that the customer realizes that there are many dangers on the premises. It says that the customer has been warned about them, and that the customer has been ordered to leave. And it says that the customer has decided to
stay anyway, and that the management is not responsible for any accidents that may happen to the customer.

That thing has been tested all the way to the Supreme Court eight times. It is so air-tight that Mr. Garball and I didn’t even have to go to coroner’s inquests. We just mailed in photostats of the forms.

“It says here that this has to be witnessed by a notary public,” said Ariadne Welsbach. “That mean I have to go out and find one?”

“Mr. Garball is a notary public,” I said. “I’ll go across the street and get him. But I might as well warn you, he won’t take your business. He isn’t accepting any customers.”

“He’ll accept me when he hears my story,” she said. “There is nothing sadder in the springtime in all this world than a young woman no man can stand to touch.”

Mr. Garball got her in the front seat of the Chrysler with him. That was where he liked to do his talking to customers. He had the radio going softly. He was hell on batteries, having the radio on all the time.

“Now what makes you think you’re not physically attractive to men, young lady?” he said. He was still bubbling with all the fun he had been having with the Arthur Murray girls. He had a big kidding thing going with the girls over there. He was always offering them free ethical suicides in exchange for free dancing lessons. “Nobody can dance all the time, girls,” he used to say. “Come on over to my shop, and I’ll show you another way to make the time go.”

We actually gassed one of the girls once, but that wasn’t any joke. Life had really been lousy to her, and it was time she gave up. And we didn’t do the job free, either. We charged her the standard fifty dollars.

We had to. It was a city ordinance that we had to charge everybody the full fee[.]

Easy Go
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Caleb Warren was a lanky and dead attractive expediter for an Ethical Suicide Parlor next door to a Howard Johnson’s in Hyannis, Massachusetts. War was a thing of the past, and disease didn’t amount to much any more, and neither did old age—so death was an enterprise for volunteers.

The population of Earth was seventeen billion
human beings
, which was far too many mammals that size for a planet that size. The people were jammed together like drupelets. Drupelets are the knobs on raspberries.

So the World Government was attempting to reduce the population to a more reasonable figure. They were pronging the problem two different ways. One pronging was ethical suicide. The other pronging was ethical birth control.

Caleb was lucky or unlucky to have a job, depending on how you feel about work
.

There were fifty-thousand Howard Johnsons’ in the world, and they were all socialized. Everything was socialized. Howard Johnsons’ were the only places to eat out, and Hojo Cola was the only kind of cola there was. And next door to every Howard
Johnson’s was an Ethical Suicide Parlor, popularly knows as an “Easy Go.”

Going
really
actually
was easy in an Easy go. As Caleb Warren
said
explained
many times a day, dying hurt no more than the very beginnings of a toothache, when you couldn’t be sure whether you really had a toothache or not. Caleb was a sort of recruiting officer for Paradise.

The Howard Johnsons’ all had orange roofs. The Ethical Suicide Parlors all had purple roofs. Anybody who volunteered to die
for the afterlife
got to send a five-hundred dollar savings bond to anybody he liked. He also got to order at Government expense absolutely anything on the Howard Johnson’s menu.

Caleb was thirty years old, had been an expediter for eight years. He had kept a record of all the last meals people had ordered. Ninety two per cent of the people asked for a Three-D, which was a glorified hamburger, and a Hojo Cola.
This was also what Caleb always had for lunch.

Caleb
Warren
finished up his lunch now. It was springtime on Cape Cod. He stuck his credit card into the robot cashier, which told him it was a nice day and offered him a toothpick flavored with wintergreen. The cashier was connected to weather instruments on the roof, so that when it talked about the weather it really knew what it was talking about.

The cashier also asked
him
Caleb
if he had taken his ethical birth control pill, and reminded him that the penalty for not taking one every day was ten years in prison, with no chance for parole. It added chattily that many people favored the death penalty for non-taking, though that seemed extreme
to the cashier. This was a lollipop-shaped device,
incidentally
, painted to look like a
lime
lollipop, with an oron pipe for a stick and a spherical aluminum head on level with Caleb’s belt buckly.

As Caleb stepped out
into springtime
, the cashier called after him that he should be careful not to bark his shins. Shin-barking was a serious hazard of the times, since the ethical birth-control pills made people numb from the waist down.
They
People
could bark their shins, or otherwise injure themselves below the belt, and lose a lot of blood without even knowing it. For this reason, both men and women generally wore thickly-quilted trousers. What made the pills ethical, and the patriarchs of religions around the world agreed on this, was that they they left people free to reproduce. There just wasn’t any pleasure in it any more. There was an old saw to the effect that the pills made the bottom half of a man feel like balsa wood, and the bottom half of a woman feel like gingerale.

There was a side-effect of the pills, too, that was certainly a boon to law-enforcement officers: they made you piss blue. And there were plenty of songs and jokes and so on about that. Caleb had learned a naughty ditty about that in grade school, and it was running through his head as he crossed the asphalt between the Hojo and the Easy Go. He had once known a dozen versers or more. Now he remembered only two:

As he reached the end of the second verse, he
was joined by a female stranger
, by a trinket redhead with very large eyes.
She was scarcely taller than the robot cashier
. She said her name was Daphne Early, and that she wanted to die. She had decided, she said, on either carbon monoxide or cyanide. Death came in eight flavors at the Easy Go.

She took his arm, which he had offered only accidentally, and clouds of perfume came from the neck of her quilted, cylindrical clothes. Her bi-logical age was thirty-four, she told him. Her aging has been stopped at that point—in the year of the discovery of the age-arresting chemical,-anti-gerasone.