Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [83]
“I don’t believe it, either,” he said. “I do know this, though: 10 percent of the people inside these walls still have minds, but there is nothing for those minds to play with. So this place is twice as painful for them as it is for the rest. A good teacher just might be able to give their minds new toys, Math or Astronomy or History, or who knows what, which would make the passage of time just a little bit more bearable. What do you think?”
“You’re the boss,” I said.
HE REALLY WAS the boss, too. He had made such a financial success of Athena that his corporate superiors allowed him to be completely autonomous. They had contracted with the State to take care of prisoners for only 2 thirds as much money per capita as the State had spent when it owned the place. That was about as much as it would have cost to send a convict to medical school or Tarkington. By importing cheap, young, short-term, nonunion labor, and by getting supplies from the lowest bidders rather than from the Mafia and so on, Hiroshi Matsumoto had cut the per capita cost to less than half of what it used to be.
He didn’t miss a trick. When I went to work for him, he had just bought a state-of-the-art crematorium for the prison. Before that, a Mafia-owned crematorium on the outskirts of Rochester, in back of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, across the highway from the National Guard Armory, had had a monopoly on cremating Athena’s unclaimed bodies.
After the Japanese bought Athena, though, the Mob doubled their prices, using the AIDS epidemic as an excuse. They had to take extra precautions, they said. They wanted double even if the prison provided a doctor’s certificate guaranteeing that a body was AIDS-free, and the cause of death, as anybody could see, was some sort of knife or garrote or blunt instrument.
THERE WASN’T A Japanese manufacturer of crematoria, so Warden Matsumoto bought one from A. J. Topf und Sohn in Essen, Germany. This was the same outfit that had made the ovens for Auschwitz in its heyday.
The postwar Topf models all had state-of-the-art smoke scrubbers on their smokestacks, so people in Scipio, unlike the people living near Auschwitz, never knew that they had a busy corpse carbonizer in the neighborhood.
We could have been gassing and incinerating convicts over there around the clock, and who would know?
WHO WOULD CARE?
A WHILE BACK I mentioned that Lowell Chung’s mother died of tetanus. I want to say before I forget that tetanus might have a real future in astronautics, since it becomes an extremely rugged spore when life becomes intolerable.
I HAVEN’T NOMINATED AIDS viruses as promising intergalactic rock jockeys, since, at their present state of development, they can’t survive for long outside a living human body.
Concerted efforts to kill them with new poisons, though, if only partially successful, could change all that.
THE MAFIA CREMATORIUM behind the Meadowdale Cinema Complex has all this valley’s prison business again. Some of the convicts who stayed in or near Athena after the great escape, rather than attack Scipio across the ice, felt that at least they could bust up the A. J. Topf und Sohn crematorium.
The Meadowdale Cinema Complex itself has gone belly up, since so few people can afford to own an automobile anymore.
Same thing with the shopping malls.
ONE THING INTERESTING to me, although I don’t know quite what to make of it, is that the Mafia never sells anything to foreigners. While everybody else who has inherited or built a real business can’t wait to sell out and take early retirement, the Mafia holds on to everything. Thus does the paving business, for example, remain a strictly American enterprise.
Same thing with wholesale meat and napkins and tablecloths for restaurants.
I TOLD THE Warden right up front that I had been canned by Tarkington. I explained that the charges against me for sexual irregularities were a smokescreen. The Trustees were really angry about my having wobbled the students’ faith in the intelligence and decency of