Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [83]
Susan and I arrived just in time to join in the cheering as a big elm crashed down on our sedan.
"Kee-runch!" said Susan, and I laughed until my stomach hurt.
"Get Fred," Lew said urgently. "He’s gonna miss seeing the barn go!"
"H’mm?" Fred said from the fireplace.
"Aw, Fred, you missed it," Marion said.
"Now we’re really gonna see something," Eddie yelled. "The power line’s going to get it this time. Look at that poplar lean!
The poplar leaned closer, closer, closer to the power line; and then a gust brought it down in a hail of sparks and a tangle of wires. The lights in the house went off.
Now there was only the sound of the wind. "How come nobody cheered?" Lew said faintly. "The euphio—it’s off!"
A horrible groan came from the fireplace. "God, I think I’ve got a concussion."
Marion knelt by her husband and wailed. "Darling, my poor darling—what happened to you?"
I looked at the woman I had my arms around—a dreadful, dirty old hag, with red eyes sunk deep in her head, and hair like Medusa’s. "Ugh," I said, and turned away in disgust.
"Honey," wept the witch, "it’s me—Susan."
Moans filled the air, and pitiful cries for food and water. Suddenly the room had become terribly cold. Only a moment before I had imagined I was in the tropics.
"Who’s got my damn’ pistol?" the trooper said bleakly.
A Western Union boy I hadn’t noticed before was sitting in a corner, miserably leafing through a pile of telegrams and making clucking noises.
I shuddered. "I’ll bet it’s Sunday morning," I said. "We’ve been here twelve hours!" It was Monday morning.
The Western Union boy was thunderstruck. "Sunday morning? I walked in here on a Sunday night." He stared around the room. "Looks like them newsreels of Buchenwald, don’t it?"
The chief of the Beaver Patrol, with the incredible stamina of the young, was the hero of the day. He fell in his men in two ranks, haranguing them like an old Army top-kick. While the rest of us lay draped around the room, whimpering about hunger, cold, and thirst, the patrol started the furnace again, brought blankets, applied compresses to Fred’s head and countless barked shins, blocked off the broken window, and made buckets of cocoa and coffee.
Within two hours of the time that the power and the euphio went off, the house was warm and we had eaten. The serious respiratory cases—the parents who had sat near the broken window for twenty-four hours—had been pumped full of penicillin and hauled off to the hospital. The milkman, the Western Union boy, and the trooper had refused treatment and gone home. The Beaver Patrol had saluted smartly and left. Outside, repairmen were working on the power line. Only the original group remained—Lew, Fred, and Marion, Susan and myself, and Eddie. Fred, it turned out, had some pretty important-looking contusions and abrasions, but no concussion.
Susan had fallen asleep right after eating. Now she stirred. "What happened?"
"Happiness," I told her. "Incomparable, continuous happiness—happiness by the kilowatt."
Lew Harrison, who looked like an anarchist with his red eyes and fierce black beard, had been writing furiously in one corner of the room. "That’s good—happiness by the kilowatt," he said. "Buy your happiness the way you buy light."
"Contract happiness the way you contract influenza," Fred said. He sneezed.
Lew ignored him. "It’s a campaign, see? The first ad is for the long-hairs: ’The price of one book, which may be a disappointment, will buy you sixty hours of euphio. Euphio never disappoints.’ Then we’d hit the middle class with the next one—"
"In the groin?" Fred said.
"What’s the matter with you people?" Lew said. "You act as though the experiment had failed."
"Pneumonia and malnutrition are what we’d hoped for?" Marion said.
"We had a cross section of America in this room, and we made every last person happy," Lew said. "Not for just an hour, not for just a day, but for two days without a break." He arose reverently from his chair. "So what we do to keep it from killing the euphio fans is to