Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [13]
"Um," said Harry.
"Don’t you want to see what my favorite scene is?" she said.
So Harry had to open the book to the red ribbon.
Helene got close to him, and read a line of Juliet’s. " ’How cam’st thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?’ " she read. " ’The orchard walls are high and hard to climb, and the place death, considering who thou art, if any of my kinsmen find thee here.’ " She pointed to the next line. "Now, look what Romeo says," she said.
"Um," said Harry.
"Read what Romeo says," said Helene.
Harry cleared his throat. He didn’t want to read the line, but he had to. " ’With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls,’ " he read out loud in his everyday voice. But then a change came over him. " ’For stony limits cannot hold love out,’ " he read, and he straightened up, and eight years dropped away from him, and he was brave and gay. " ’And what love can do, that dares love attempt,’ " he read, " ’therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.’ "
" ’If they do see thee they will murther thee,’ " said Helene, and she started him walking toward the wings.
" ’Alack!’ " said Harry, " ’there lies more peril in thine eye than twenty of their swords.’ " Helene led him toward the backstage exit. " ’Look thou but sweet,’ " said Harry, " ’and I am proof against their enmity.’ "
" ’I would not for the world they saw thee here,’ " said Helene, and that was the last we heard. The two of them were out the door and gone.
They never did show up at the cast party. One week later they were married.
They seem very happy, although they’re kind of strange from time to time, depending on which play they’re reading to each other at the time.
I dropped into the phone company office the other day, on account of the billing machine was making dumb mistakes again. I asked her what plays she and Harry’d been reading lately.
"In the past week," she said, "I’ve been married to Othello, been loved by Faust and been kidnaped by Paris. Wouldn’t you say I was the luckiest girl in town?"
I said I thought so, and I told her most of the women in town thought so too.
"They had their chance," she said.
"Most of’em couldn’t stand the excitement," I said. And I told her I’d been asked to direct another play. I asked if she and Harry would be available for the cast. She gave me a big smile and said, "Who are we this time?"
(1961)
WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE
So PETE CROCKER, the sheriff of Barnstable County, which was the whole of Cape Cod, came into the Federal Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis one May afternoon—and he told the two six-foot Hostesses there that they weren’t to be alarmed, but that a notorious nothinghead named Billy the Poet was believed headed for the Cape.
A nothinghead was a person who refused to take his ethical birth-control pills three times a day. The penalty for that was $10,000 and ten years in jail.
This was at a time when the population of Earth was 17 billion human beings. That was far too many mammals that big for a planet that small. The people were virtually packed together like drupelets.
Drupelets are the pulpy little knobs that compose the outside of a raspberry.
So the World Government was making a two-pronged attack on overpopulation. One pronging was the encouragement of ethical suicide, which consisted of going to the nearest Suicide Parlor and asking a Hostess to kill you painlessly while you lay on a Barcalounger. The other pronging was compulsory ethical birth control.
The sheriff told the Hostesses, who were pretty, tough-minded, highly intelligent girls, that roadblocks were being set up and house-to-house searches were being conducted to catch Billy the Poet. The main difficulty was that the police didn’t know what he looked like. The few people who had seen him and known him for what he was were women—and they disagreed fantastically as to his height, his hair color, his voice, his weight, the color of his skin.
"I don’t need to remind you girls," the sheriff went on, "that a nothinghead is very sensitive from the waist down. If Billy the Poet