Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (47 page)

Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Before he met Daphne Erlich, Caleb Warren was a tall and attractive expediter for the Ethical Suicide Parloer next to the Howard Johnson’s in Hyannis, Massachusetts. There were fifty-thousand Howard Johnson’s on the face of the earth, and they were all socialized. Hojo Cola was the only kind of cola there was.
Think about that
. And next door to every Joward Johnson’s was an Ethical Suicide Parlor, popularly known as the “Easy Go.”

The Howard Johnson’s had an orange roof, and the Ethical Suicide Parlor had a purple roof, but they were both the property of the World Government. Almost everything was.

This was far, far in the future—about twenty years from now. The population of the world was fifteen billion souls. It was stabilized at that figure, thanks to ethical suicide and ethical birth control.

Daphne Erlich came into Caleb Warren’s Ethical Suicide Parlor,
his Easy Go
, one
spring
morning, and said she was ready to die. She said she
couldn’t decide
between cyanide and carbon-monoxide. She had narrowed it down to those two, she said. There were eight flavors to choose from.

Caleb had never seen her before,.
He
treated her like anybody else. His job, essentially, was
that of
to be
a recruiting sergeant
or travel agent
for Paradise. Diseases didn’t amount to anything any more, and
private automobiles and
war was a
were
things of the past, and people didn’t leave the safety of their homes much any more. Most people didn’t work, since the machines did everything so much better than they did. Most people stayed home, and tried to be intelligent consumers. So death was mainly an enterprise for volunteers, for real enthusiasts for the afterlife.

Superficially, Daphne
Erlich
looked like any ordinary
female suicide
volunteer—or like any ordinary
female
world citizen
of either sex
, for that matter. She wasn’t remarkably clean, and her hair was the fright wig that was popular among males and females alike, and she wore
the
shin-guards and box-toed safety shoes and heavily quilted trousers—
like
as
did
most unemployed men and women of the day. All this protection from the waist down was a reasonable response to the ethical birth-control pills everybody had to take. The pills didn’t actually make men and women sterile, which was what made them ethical. People who took them, which was supposed to be everybody, were still capable of reproducing. They simply didn’t feel much like doing it, since they were numb from the waist down.

From the waist down, they felt like balsa wood,
or, as some people put it, “like gingerale.”
They protected themselves below the waist because they could might at any time receive a serious injury and not do anything about it—for the simple reason that they did not know they were sounded.

“Well—” said Caleb, “we have brochures on cyanide and CO one—and perhaps you should read them, but I don’t think there’s anything in either one you don’t know.” Everybody knew everything there was to know about the eight
ethical
ways to go. Casual visitors to Caleb’s Hyannis Easy Go carried away a thousand brochures a week. They were free, of course. There was also a booming black market in brochures which cost money, and which contained certain facts about the eight flavors of death which the World Government had not seen fit to disclose.

Caleb acknowledged the outlaw brochures casually, saying to Daphne, “I am not telling you the news, I’m sure, when I suggest that cyanide burns for a second or two, and that carbon monoxide causes a splitting headache which has been known to last for three minutes or more. If you aren’t quite clear as to what a second is and what a minute is, I’d be glad to show you. I have a stopwatch with a very long second-hand.”

He really did have a stopwatch. He might well have left it on the top of his desk, which was eye-rest green, since most serious suicides became eager to know how long a second really lasted, how long a minute really lasted. But he kept it in a drawer, made quite a ceremony of taking it out of hiding, of starting the sweep second hand on its way, of clicking it off again, of putting it back in the drawer.

The watch was from his wife Candy, by the way. He had a wife. Everybody over twenty-one had a wife. That was the law. If you wanted a a particular woman
to be your wife, and she wanted you to be her husband, the two of you could get married. If you hadn’t found somebody by the time you were twenty-one, and if nobody had found you, then the World Government assigned you somebody to marry. Niney-two per cent of the people had spouses who had been assigned.

Caleb Warren and his wife Candy had chosen each other, belonged to the eight per cent. The slang for a couple like that was “
L
Ove Bugs.”

“I guess I’ll take the headache,” said Daphne.

“You’re the boss,” said Caleb. “And to whom shall we send
the
love token?” He was referring to the five-hundred dollar Government bond that would be sent to anyone designated by the suicide volunteer.

“You,” said Daphne.

“Pardon me?”

“Send it to you.”

Caleb gave her an officious smile. “The regulations suggest a relative or close friend.”

“Aren’t you my close friend?” asked Daphne. “You’re life and death to me. Who could be closer than
that
?”

“In a sense, I suppose. I’m flattered that you should say so. Shall we be serious now? To whom should the bond be sent?”

“To you.”

“That, I’m afraid, would be impossible.” This was a man, understand who was numb from the waist down, thanks to ethical birth control. And this was a woman who had stopped taking the pills. Legally, she was a narcotics addict. The not-taking of the pills
had come to be classified, thanks to a tortuous series of interlocking Supreme Court decision
, had become a threat to society. People who did not take their pills behaved intolerably.

Through a tortuous series of Supreme Court decisions, a diet free of the pills had come to be classified as an extremely dangerous narcotic. Daphne Erlich was hopelessly hooked on nothing.
She was a nothing-head
.

Caleb Warren was such an innocent about narcotics that he recognized none of the sordid symptoms of nothing-headedness which Daphne displayed. He sensed that Daphne was vaguely unusual,
but
supposed she was feverish, was possibly comingdown with the three-day flu.

When Daphne said that she had decided not to die after all, Caleb felt a twinge of disappointment. The receptionist had already reported Daphne’s name to the computers. As far as the machines were concerned, she was as good as dead, her displacement above-ground was as good as vacated. If she now required the machines to declare that displacement reoccupied, the machines were going to want to know why.

They would know where to go for an answer, too. They would go to the expediter on Daphne’s case.

“You’re the boss—” said Caleb, but that was only a careful beginning to a speech which, ideally, would end with Daphne’s allowing herself to be strapped into the Barca-lounger in the Blue Room, which was for carbon-monoxide enthusiasts.

Outside the Ethical Suicide parlor was a mock-up of a great thermometer. It was twenty feet high,
and was calibrated
in billions of persons
from zero to twenty billion persons. A
strip
broad ribbon
of red plastic, which could be shortened or lengthened from a spool at the bottom, ran up a slot in the middle, was meant to look like a column of liquid in the thermometer. The top of the ribbon marked the population of the world on any given day, give or take about ten million souls.

Down near the bottom was a golden arrow indicating what, ideally, the population of the planet should be, if it was going to last much longer, which was two billion souls.

The thermometer was constructed so that it could be read from either side, by people passing by and by people in Caleb Warren’s office. It was almost all that could be seen from Caleb’s office, it was so close to his window. That was his view. And his window faced west, and the plastic ribbon was translucent, so that from noon on a band of red light began to creep toward his office, eventually came inside, climbed over his desk, and by sunset was a luriedly lovely decoration on his east wall.

It was about three in the afternoon when Daphne decided that she wouldn’t die after all. The red band band had crossed the room, was inching up the baseboard. It would eventually rich a portraut of J. Edgar Nation, the father of ethical birth control, the inventor of the pills everybody had to take. If you didn’t take them, and you were caught, the penalty was a ten thousand dollar fine and ten years in prison, with no chance of parole.
A recent public opinion survey had revealed that sixty-two per cent of the people thought death should be the penalty
.

Next to Nation’s picture was an artist’s conception of what Cape Cod would look like if its population,
which was seven million, could be cut to one million. There were woods and fields
meadows
and marshes
ponds
and beaches, and houses with yards.

“If I died,” said Daphne, “how much would the thermometer go down?”

“Some,” said Caleb.

“An inch?”

“Heavens no.”

“A half an inch?”

“Not quite.”

“You want me to tell you what the answer is, or do you know? I figured it out before I came in here.”

“So?”

“Every inch is 166,666,666 people.”

Caleb nodded. It wasn’t a figure he liked to give out, because it made
one death so
deaths, when considered individually, so insignificant. “That happens to be true, but a statistic like that can be misleading.