While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [5]
The only person who wasn’t going along with the act, who wasn’t being a boob for the pleasure of it, was the kid who’d guessed there was a midget inside. He was sore about being wrong, and his big ambition was to bust up the act with truth—Truth with a capital T. He’ll grow up to be a scientist someday. “All right,” the kid said, “if there isn’t a midget in there, then I know exactly how it works.”
“How, honey?” said Jenny. She was all ears for whatever bright little thing this kid was going to say. She really burned him up.
“Radio controls!” the kid said.
“Oooooo!” said Jenny. She was thrilled. “That would be a grand way to do it!”
The kid turned purple. “You can joke around all you want,” he said, “but that’s the answer and you know it.” He challenged George. “What’s your explanation?” he said.
“Three thousand years ago,” said George, “the sultan of Alla-Bakar fell in love with the wisest, most affectionate, most beautiful woman who ever lived. She was Jenny, a slave girl.
“The old sultan knew there would be constant bloodshed in his kingdom,” said George, “because men who saw Jenny always went mad for her love. So the old sultan had his court magician take Jenny’s spirit out of her body and put it in a bottle. This he locked up in his treasury.
“In 1933,” said George, “Lionel O. Heartline, president of the General Household Appliances Company, bought a curious bottle while on a business trip to fabled Baghdad. He brought it home, opened it, and out came the spirit of Jenny—three thousand years old. I was working in the Research Laboratory of GH at the time, and Mr. Heartline asked me what I could provide in the way of a new body for Jenny. So I rigged the shell of a refrigerator with a face, a voice, and feet—and with spirit controls, which work on Jenny’s willpower alone.”
It was such a silly story, I forgot it as soon as I’d chuckled at it. It took me weeks to realize that George wasn’t just hamming it up when he told the story from his heart. He was getting as close to the truth about Jenny as he ever dared get. He was getting close to it with poetry.
“And, hey presto!—here she is,” said George.
“Baloney!” the scientific kid yelled. But the audience wasn’t with him, never would be.
Jenny let out a big sigh, thinking about those three thousand years in a bottle. “Well,” she said, “that part of my life’s all over now. No use crying over spilt milk. On with the show.”
She slunk into the Mart, and everybody but George and I toddled right in behind her.
George, still controlling her with his toes, ducked into the cab of the moving van. I followed him and stuck my head in the window. There he was, the top of his trick shoes rippling while his toes made Jenny talk a blue streak in the Mart. At nine o’clock on a sunshiny morning he was taking a big drink from a bottle of booze.
When his eyes stopped watering and his throat stopped stinging he said to me, “What you looking at me that way for, Sonny Jim? Didn’t you see me drink my orange juice first like a good boy? It isn’t as though I was drinking before breakfast.”
“Excuse me,” I said. I got away from the truck to give him time to pull himself together, and to give me time, too.
“When I saw that beautiful GHA refrigerator in the Research Laboratory,” Jenny was saying in the Mart, “I said to George, ‘That’s the flawless white body for me.’ ” She glanced at me and then at George, and she shut up and her party smile went away for a couple of seconds. Then she cleared her throat and went on. “Where was I?” she said.
George wasn’t about to get out of the cab. He was staring through the windshield now at something very depressing five thousand miles away. He was ready to spend the whole day like that.
Jenny finally ran out of small talk, and she came to the door and called him. “Honey,” she called, “are you coming in pretty soon?”
“Keep your shirt on,” George said. He didn’t look at her.
“Is