Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [19]
The gang member who had phoned Nancy obscenely had fooled the police into believing that they had captured Billy the Poet, which was bad for Nancy. The police didn’t know yet that Nancy was missing, two men told Billy, and a telegram had been sent to Mary Kraft in Nancy’s name, declaring that Nancy had been called to New York City on urgent family business.
That was where Nancy saw the glint of hope: Mary wouldn’t believe that telegram. Mary knew Nancy had no family in New York. Not one of the 63,000,000 people living there was a relative of Nancy’s.
The gang had deactivated the burglar-alarm system of the museum. They had also cut through a lot of the chains and ropes that were meant to keep visitors from touching anything of value. There was no mystery as to who and what had done the cutting. One of the men was armed with brutal lopping shears.
They marched Nancy into a servant’s bedroom upstairs. The man with the shears cut the ropes that fenced off the narrow bed. They put Nancy into the bed and two men held Nancy while a woman gave her a knockout shot.
Billy the Poet had disappeared.
As Nancy was going under, the woman who had given her the shot asked her how old she was.
Nancy was determined not to answer, but discovered that the drug had made her powerless not to answer. "Sixty-three," she murmured.
"How does it feel to be a virgin at sixty-three?"
Nancy heard her own answer through a velvet fog. She was amazed by the answer, wanted to protest that it couldn’t possibly be hers. "Pointless," she’d said.
Moments later, she asked the woman thickly, "What was in that needle?"
"What was in the needle, honey bunch? Why, honey bunch, they call that ’truth serum.’ "
The moon was down when Nancy woke up—but the night was still out there. The shades were drawn and there was candlelight. Nancy had never seen a lit candle before.
What awakened Nancy was a dream of mosquitoes and bees. Mosquitoes and bees were extinct. So were birds. But Nancy dreamed that millions of insects were swarming about her from the waist down. They didn’t sting. They fanned her. Nancy was a nothinghead.
She went to sleep again. When she awoke next time, she was being led into a bathroom by three women, still with stockings over their heads. The bathroom was already filled with the steam from somebody else’s bath. There were somebody else’s wet footprints crisscrossing the floor and the air reeked of pine-needle perfume.
Her will and intelligence returned as she was bathed and perfumed and dressed in a white nightgown. When the women stepped back to admire her, she said to them quietly, "I may be a nothinghead now. But that doesn’t mean I have to think like one or act like one."
Nobody argued with her.
Nancy was taken downstairs and out of the house. She fully expected to be sent down a manhole again. It would be the perfect setting for her violation by Billy, she was thinking— down in a sewer.
But they took her across the green cement, where the grass used to be, and then across the yellow cement, where the beach used to be, and then out onto the blue cement, where the harbor used to be. There were twenty-six yachts that had belonged to various Kennedys, sunk up to their water lines in blue cement. It was to the most ancient of these yachts, the Marlin, once the property of Joseph P. Kennedy, that they delivered Nancy.
It was dawn. Because of the high-rise apartments all around the Kennedy Museum, it would be an hour before any direct sunlight would reach the microcosm under the geodesic dome.
Nancy was escorted as far as the companionway to the forward cabin of the Marlin. The women pantomimed that she was expected to go down the five steps alone.
Nancy froze for the moment and so did the women. And there were two actual statues in the tableau on the bridge. Standing at the wheel was a statue of Frank Wirtanen, once skipper of the Marlin. And next to him was his