Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [37]
IF I HAD access to GRIOT™ now, I might ask it what might have happened to Marilyn Shaw if Sam Wakefield hadn’t rescued her. But the escaped convicts smashed up the one in the Pavilion soon after I showed them how to work it.
They hated it, and I didn’t blame them. I was immediately sorry that I had let them know of its existence. One by one they punched in their race and age and what their parents did, if they knew, and how long they’d gone to school and what drugs they’d taken and so on, and GRIOT™ sent them straight to jail to serve long sentences.
I HAVE NO idea how much GRIOT™ back then may have known about Vietnam nurses. The manufacturers claimed then as now that no program in stores was more than 3 months old, and so every program was right up-to-date about what had really happened to this or that sort of person at the time you bought it. The programmers, supposedly, were constantly updating GRIOT™ with the news of the day about plumbers, about podiatrists, about Vietnam boat people and Mexican wetbacks, about drug smugglers, about paraplegics, about everyone you could think of within the continental limits of the United States and Canada.
There is some question now, I’ve heard, about whether GRIOT™ is as deep and up-to-date as it used to be, since Parker Brothers, the company that makes it, has been taken over by Koreans. The new owners are moving the whole operation to Indonesia, where labor costs next to nothing. They say they will keep up with American news by satellite.
One wonders.
I DON’T NEED any help from GRIOT™ to know that Marilyn Shaw had a much rougher war than I did. All the soldiers she had to deal with were wounded, and all of them expected of her what was more often than not impossible: that she make them whole again.
I know that she was married, and that her husband back home divorced her and married somebody else while she was still over there, and that she didn’t care. She and Sam Wakefield may have been lovers over there. I never asked.
That seems likely. After the war he went looking for her and found her taking a course in Computer Science at New York University. She didn’t want to be a nurse anymore. He told her that maybe she should try being a teacher instead. She asked him if there was a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous in Scipio, and he said there was.
After he shot himself, Marilyn, Professor Shaw, fell off the wagon for about a week. She disappeared, and I was given the job of finding her. I discovered her downtown, drunk and asleep on a pool table in the back room of the Black Cat Café. She was drooling on the felt. One hand was on the cue ball, as though she meant to throw it at something when she regained consciousness.
AS FAR AS I know, she never took another drink.
GRIOT™? IN THE old days anyway, before the Koreans promised to make Parker Brothers lean and mean in Indonesia, didn’t come up with the same biography every time you gave it a certain set of facts. Like life itself, it offered a variety of possibilities, spitting out endings according to what the odds for winning or losing or whatever were known to be.
After GRIOT™ put me on Skid Row 15 years ago, I had it try again. I did a little better, but not as well as I was doing here. It had me stay in the Army and become an instructor at West Point, but unhappy and bored. I lost my wife again, and still drank too much, and had a succession of woman friends who soon got sick of me and my depressions. And I died of cirrhosis of the liver a second time.
GRIOT™ DIDN’T HAVE many alternatives to jail for the escaped convicts, though. If it came up with a parole, it soon put the ex-con back in a cage again.
THE SAME THING happened if GRIOT™ was told that the jailbird was Hispanic. It was somewhat more optimistic about Whites,