Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [80]
There was Harvard again.
All the auditing stories that Einstein heard were told by Americans. He had chosen to settle in the American part of heaven. Understandably, he had mixed feelings about Europeans, since he was a Jew. But it wasn’t only Americans who were being audited. Pakistanis and pygmies from the Philippines and even communists had to go through the very same thing.
It was in character for Einstein to be offended first by the mathematics of the system the auditors wanted everybody to be so grateful for. He calculated that if every person on Earth took full advantage of every opportunity, became a millionaire and then a billionaire and so on, the paper wealth on that one little planet would exceed the worth of all the minerals in the universe in a matter of three months or so. Also: There would be nobody left to do any useful work.
So he sent God a note. It assumed that God had no idea what sorts of rubbish His auditors were talking. It accused the auditors rather than God of cruelly deceiving new arrivals about the opportunities they had had on Earth. He tried to guess the auditors’ motives. He wondered if they might not be sadists.
The story ended abruptly. Einstein did not get to see God. But God sent out an archangel who was boiling mad. He told Einstein that if he continued to destroy ghosts’ respect for the audits, he was going to take Einstein’s fiddle away from him for all eternity. So Einstein never discussed the audits with anybody ever again. His fiddle meant more to him than anything.
The story was certainly a slam at God, suggesting that He was capable of using a cheap subterfuge like the audits to get out of being blamed for how hard economic life was down here.
I made my mind a blank.
But then it started singing about Sally in the garden again.
Mary Kathleen O’Looney, exercising her cosmic powers as Mrs. Jack Graham, had meanwhile telephoned Arpad Leen, the top man at RAMJAC. She ordered him to find out what the police had done with me, and to send the toughest lawyer in New York City to rescue me, no matter what the cost.
He was to make me a RAMJAC vice-president after that. While she was at it, she said, she had a list of other good people who were to be rounded up and also made vice-presidents. These were the people I had told her about, of course—the strangers who had been so nice to me.
She also ordered him to tell Doris Kramm, the old secretary at The American Harp Company, that she didn’t have to retire, no matter how old she was.
Yes, and there in my padded cell I told myself a joke I had read in The Harvard Lampoon when a freshman. It had amazed me back then because it seemed so dirty. When I became the President’s special advisor on youth affairs, and had to read college humor again, I discovered that the joke was still being published many times a year—unchanged. This was it:
SHE: How dare you kiss me like that?
HE: I was just trying to find out who ate all the macaroons.
So I had a good laugh about that there in solitary. But then I began to crack. I could not stop saying to myself, “Macaroons, macaroons, macaroons …”
Things got much worse after that. I sobbed. I bounced myself off the walls. I took a crap in a corner. I dropped the bowling trophy on the top of the crap.
I screamed a poem I had learned in grammar school:
Don’t care if I do die,
Do die, do die!
Like to make the juice fly,
Juice fly, juice fly!
I may even have masturbated. Why not? We old folks have much richer sex lives than most young people imagine.
I eventually collapsed.
At seven o’clock that night the toughest attorney in New York entered the police station upstairs.