Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [79]
That was how she got down into the coalfields. And that was how she happened, when Kenneth Whistler became violent late at night because of alcohol, to run out into the moonlit street of a shantytown and into the arms of a young mining engineer. He was, of course, Jack Graham.
And then I regaled myself with a story by my prison friend Dr. Robert Fender, which he had published under the name of “Kilgore Trout.” It was called “Asleep at the Switch.” It was about a huge reception center outside the Pearly Gates of heaven—filled with computers and staffed by people who had been certified public accountants or investment counselors or business managers back on Earth.
You could not get into heaven until you had submitted to a full review of how well you had handled the business opportunities God, through His angels, had offered to you on Earth.
All day long and in every cubicle you could hear the experts saying with utmost weariness to people who had missed this opportunity and then that one: “And there you were, asleep at the switch again.”
How much time had I spent in solitary by then? I will make a guess: five minutes.
“Asleep at the Switch” was quite a sacrilegious story. The hero was the ghost of Albert Einstein. He himself was so little interested in wealth that he scarcely heard what his auditor had to say to him. It was some sort of balderdash about how he could have become a billionaire, if only he had gotten a second mortgage on his house in Bern, Switzerland, in Nineteen-hundred and Five, and invested the money in known uranium deposits before telling the world that E=Mc2.
“But there you were—asleep at the switch again,” said the auditor.
“Yes,” said Einstein politely, “it does seem rather typical.”
“So you see,” said the auditor, “life really was quite fair. You did have a remarkable number of opportunities, whether you took them or not.”
“Yes, I see that now,” said Einstein.
“Would you mind saying that in so many words?” said the auditor.
“Saying what?” said Einstein.
“That life was fair.”
“Life was fair,” said Einstein.
“If you don’t really mean it,” said the auditor, “I have many more examples to show you. For instance, just forgetting atomic energy: If you had simply taken the money you put into a savings bank when you were at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and you had put it, starting in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty, say, into IBM and Polaroid and Xerox—even though you had only five more years to live—” The auditor raised his eyes suggestively, inviting Einstein to show how smart he could be.
“I would have been rich?” said Einstein.
“‘Comfortable,’ shall we say?” said the auditor smugly. “But there you were again—” And again his eyebrows went up.
“Asleep at the switch?” asked Einstein hopefully.
The auditor stood and extended his hand, which Einstein accepted unenthusiastically. “So you see, Doctor Einstein,” he said, “we can’t blame God for everything, now can we?” He handed Einstein his pass through the Pearly Gates. “Good to have you aboard,” he said.
So into heaven Einstein went, carrying his beloved fiddle. He thought no more about the audit. He was a veteran of countless border crossings by then. There had always been senseless questions to answer, empty promises to make, meaningless documents to sign.
But once inside heaven Einstein encountered ghost after ghost who was sick about what his or her audit had shown. One husband and wife team, which had committed suicide after losing everything in a chicken farm in New Hampshire, had been told that they had been living the whole time over the largest deposit of nickel in the world.
A fourteen-year-old Harlem child who had been killed in a gang fight was told about a two-carat diamond ring that lay for weeks