Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [105]
Like a plain damn fool, I believed them.
They’ll have a tough time getting me into that thing again—ever. Taking that wreck out certainly made it plain why Konigswasser discovered how people could do without their bodies. That old one of his practically drives you out. Ulcers, headaches, arthritis, fallen arches—a nose like a pruning hook, piggy little eyes, and a complexion like a used steamer trunk. He was and still is the sweetest person you’d ever want to know, but, back when he was stuck with that body, nobody got close enough to find out.
We tried to get Konigswasser back into his old body to lead us when we first started having the Pioneers’ Day Parades, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it, so we always have to flatter some poor boob into taking on the job. Konigswasser marches, all right, but as a six-foot cowboy who can bend beer cans double between his thumb and middle finger.
Konigswasser is just like a kid with that body. He never gets tired of bending beer cans with it, and we all have to stand around in our bodies after the parade, and watch as though we were very impressed.
I don’t suppose he could bend very much of anything back in the old days.
Nobody mentions it to him, since he’s the grand old man of the Amphibious Age, but he plays hell with bodies. Almost every time he takes one out, he busts it, showing off. Then somebody has to get into a surgeon’s body and sew it up again.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful of Konigswasser. As a matter of fact, it’s a respectful thing to say that somebody is childish in certain ways, because it’s people like that who seem to get all the big ideas.
There is a picture of him in the old days down at the Historical Society, and you can see from that that he never did grow up as far as keeping up his appearance went—doing what little he could with the rattle-trap body Nature had issued him.
His hair was down below his collar, he wore his pants so low that his heels wore through the legs above the cuffs, and the lining of his coat hung down in festoons all around the bottom. And he’d forget meals, and go out into the cold or wet without enough clothes on, and he would never notice sickness until it almost killed him. He was what we used to call absent-minded. Looking back now, of course, we say he was starting to be amphibious.
Konigswasser was a mathematician, and he did all his living with his mind. The body he had to haul around with that wonderful mind was about as much use to him as a flatcar of scrap-iron. Whenever he got sick and had to pay some attention to his body, he’d rant somewhat like this:
"The mind is the only thing about human beings that’s worth anything. Why does it have to be tied to a bag of skin, blood, hair, meat, bones, and tubes? No wonder people can’t get anything done, stuck for life with a parasite that has to be stuffed with food and protected from weather and germs all the time. And the fool thing wears out anyway—no matter how much you stuff and protect it!
"Who," he wanted to know, "really wants one of the things? What’s so wonderful about protoplasm that we’ve got to carry so damned many pounds of it with us wherever we go?
"Trouble with the world," said Konigswasser, "isn’t too many people—it’s too many bodies."
When his teeth went bad on him, and he had to have them all out, and he couldn’t get a set of dentures that were at all comfortable, he wrote in his diary, "If living matter was able to evolve enough to get out of the ocean, which was really quite a pleasant place to live, it certainly ought to be able to take another step and get out of bodies, which are pure nuisances when you stop to think about them."
He wasn’t a prude about bodies, understand, and he wasn’t jealous of people who had better ones than he did. He just thought bodies were a lot more trouble than they were worth.
He didn’t have great hopes that people would really evolve out of their bodies in his time.