Bagombo Snuff Box (33 page)

The trooper left. He came back a few minutes later.

“He’s still on the line?” said Annie.

“No, ma’am,” said the trooper. “He gave me a message for
you.”

“Oh, boy,” said Annie. “This should really be good.”

“It’s a message from your parents, too,” the trooper said to
Rice.

“I can hardly wait to hear it,” said Rice.

“The message is this,” said the trooper, keeping his face
blankly official, “you are to come home in your own car whenever you feel like
it. When you get home, they want you to get married and start being happy as
soon as possible.”

Annie and Rice crept home in the old blue Ford, with baby
shoes dangling from the rearview mirror, with a pile of comic books on the
burst backseat. They came home on the main highways. Nobody was looking for
them anymore.

Their radio was on, and every news broadcast told the world
the splendid news: Annie and Rice were to be married at once. True love had
won another stunning victory.

By the time the lovers reached the Indiana border, they had
heard the news of their indescribable happiness a dozen times. They were
beginning to look like department store clerks on Christmas Eve, jangled and exhausted
by relentless tidings of great joy.

Rice turned off the radio. Annie gave an involuntary sigh of
relief. They hadn’t talked much on the trip home. There didn’t seem to be
anything to talk about: everything was so settled—everything was so, as they
say in business, finalized.

Annie and Rice got into a traffic jam in Indianapolis and
were locked for stoplight after stoplight next to a car in which a baby was
howling. The parents of the child were very young. The wife was scolding her
husband, and the husband looked ready to uproot the steering wheel and brain
her with it.

Rice turned on the radio again, and this is what the song on
the radio said:

We certainly fooled them,

The ones who said our love wasn’t true.

Now, forever and ever,

You’ve got me, and I’ve got you.

In almost a frenzy, with Annie’s nerves winding ever
tighter, Rice changed stations again and again. Every station bawled of either
victories or the persecution of teenage love. And that’s what the radio was
bawling about when the old blue Ford stopped beneath the porte cochere of the
Governor’s Mansion.

Only one person came out to greet them, and that was the policeman
who guarded the door. “Congratulations, sir... madam,” he said blandly.

“Thank you,” said Rice. He turned everything off with the
ignition key. The last illusion of adventure died as the radio tubes lost their
glow and the engine cooled.

The policeman opened the door on Annie’s side. The door gave
a rusty screech. Two loose jelly beans wobbled out the door and fell to the
immaculate blacktop below.

Annie, still in the car, looked down at the jelly beans. One
was green. The other was white. There were bits of lint stuck to them. “Rice?”
she said.

“Hm?” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t go through with it.”

Rice made a sound like a faraway freight whistle. He was
grateful for release.

“Could we talk alone, please?” Annie said to the policeman.

“Beg your pardon,” said the policeman as he withdrew.

“Would it have worked?” said Annie.

Rice shrugged. “For a little while.”

“You know what?” said Annie.

“What?” said Rice.

“We’re too young,” said Annie.

“Not too young to be in love,” said Rice.

“No,” said Annie, “not too young to be in love. Just too
young for about everything else there is that goes with love.” She kissed him. “Good-bye,
Rice. I love you.”

“I love you,” he said.

She got out, and Rice drove away.

As he drove away, the radio came on. It was playing an old
song now, and the words were these:

Now’s the time for sweet good-bye

To what could never be,

To promises we ne’er could keep,

To a magic you and me.

If we should try to prove our love,

Our love would be in danger.

Let’s put our love beyond all harm.

Good-bye—sweet, gentle stranger.

Everything was perfectly swell. There were no prisons, no
slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.

All diseases were conquered. So was old age.

Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.

The population of the United States was stabilized at forty
million souls.

One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man
named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the
only man waiting. Not many people were born each day anymore.

Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population
whose average age was one hundred twenty-nine.

X rays had revealed that his wife was going to have
triplets. The children would be his first.

Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his
hands. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible.
His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and
demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls.
The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths.

The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as
a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die.

A sardonic old man, about two hundred years old, sat on a
stepladder, painting a mural he did not like. Back in the days when people aged
visibly, his age would have been guessed at thirty-five or so. Aging had
touched him that much before the cure for aging was found.

The mural he was working on depicted a very neat garden. Men
and women in white, doctors and nurses, turned the soil, planted seedlings,
sprayed bugs, spread fertilizer. Men and women in purple uniforms pulled up
weeds, cut down plants that were old and sickly, raked leaves, carried refuse
to trash burners.

Never, never, never—not even in medieval Holland or old Japan—had
a garden been more formal, been better tended. Every plant had all the loam,
light, water, air, and nourishment it could use.

A hospital orderly came down the corridor, singing under his
breath a popular song:

If you don’t like my kisses, honey,

Here’s what I will do:

I’ll go see a girl in purple,

Kiss this sad world toodle-oo.

If you don’t want my lovin,

Why should I take up all this space?

I’ll get off this old planet,

Let some sweet baby have my place.

The orderly looked in at the mural and the muralist. “Looks
so real,” he said, “I can practically imagine I’m standing in the middle of it.”

“What makes you think you’re not in it?” said the painter.
He gave a satiric smile. “It’s called The Happy Garden of Life, you know.”

“That’s good of Dr. Hitz,” said the orderly.

He was referring to one of the male figures in white, whose
head was a portrait of Dr. Benjamin Hitz, the hospital’s chief obstetrician.
Hitz was a blindingly handsome man.

“Lot of faces still to fill in,” said the orderly. He meant
that the faces of many of the figures in the mural were blank. All blanks were
to be filled with portraits of important people either on the hospital staff or
from the Chicago office of the Federal Bureau of Termination.

“Must be nice to be able to make pictures that look like something,”
said the orderly.

The painter’s face curdled with scorn. “You think I’m proud
of this drab? You think this is my idea of what life really looks like?”

“What’s your idea of what life looks like?”

The painter gestured at a foul dropcloth. “There’s a good picture
of it,” he said. “Frame that, and you’ll have a picture a damn sight more
honest than this one.”

“You’re a gloomy old duck, aren’t you?” said the orderly.

“Is that a crime?” said the painter.

“If you don’t like it here, Grandpa—” The orderly finished
the thought with the trick telephone number that people who didn’t want to live
anymore were supposed to call. The zero in the telephone number he pronounced
“naught.”

The number was 2BR02B.

It was the telephone number of an institution whose fanciful
sobriquets included ‘Automat,”

“Birdland,”

“Cannery,”

“Catbox,”

“Delouser,”

“Easy Go,”

“Good-bye, Mother,”

“Happy Hooligan,”

“Kiss Me Quick,”

“Lucky Pierre,”

“Sheepdip,”

“Waring Blender,”

“Weep No More,” and “Why Worry?”

“To Be or Not to Be” was the telephone number of the municipal
gas chambers of the Federal Bureau of Termination.

The painter thumbed his nose at the orderly. “When I decide
it’s time to go,” he said, “it won’t be at the Sheepdip.”

“A do-it-yourselfer, eh?” said the orderly. “Messy business,
Grandpa.

Why don’t you have a little consideration for the people who
have to clean up after you?”

The painter expressed with an obscenity his lack of concern
for the tribulations of his survivors. “The world could do with a good deal
more mess, if you ask me,” he said.

The orderly laughed and moved on.

Wehling, the waiting father, mumbled something without raising
his head. And then he fell silent again.

A coarse, formidable woman strode into the waiting room on
spike heels. Her shoes, stockings, trench coat, bag, and overseas cap were all
purple, a purple the painter called “the color of grapes on Judgment Day”

The medallion on her purple musette bag was the seal of the
Service Division of the Federal Bureau of Termination, an eagle perched on a
turnstile.

The woman had a lot of facial hair—an unmistakable mustache,
in fact. A curious thing about gas chamber hostesses was that no matter how
lovely and feminine they were when recruited, they all sprouted mustaches
within five years or so.

“Is this where I’m supposed to come?” she asked the painter.

“A lot would depend on what your business was,” he said. “You
aren’t about to have a baby, are you?”

“They told me I was supposed to pose for some picture,” she
said. “My name’s Leora Duncan.” She waited.

‘And you dunk people,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“Skip it,” he said.

“That sure is a beautiful picture,” she said. “Looks just
like heaven or something.”

“Or something,” said the painter. He took a list of names
from his smock pocket. “Duncan, Duncan, Duncan,” he said, scanning the list. “Yes—here
you are. You’re entitled to be immortalized. See any faceless body here you’d
like me to stick your head on? We’ve got a few choice ones left.”

She studied the mural. “Gee,” she said, “they’re all the
same to me. I don’t know anything about art.”

“A body’s a body, eh?” he said. ‘All righty. As a master of
the fine art, I recommend this body here.” He indicated the faceless figure of
a woman who was carrying dried stalks to a trash burner.

“Well,” said Leora Duncan, “that’s more the disposal people,
isn’t it? I mean, I’m in service. I don’t do any disposing.”

The painter clapped his hands in mock delight. “You say you
don’t know anything about art, and then you prove in the next breath that you
do know more about it than I do! Of course the sheaf carrier is wrong for a
hostess! A snipper, a pruner—that’s more your line.” He pointed to a figure in
purple who was sawing a dead branch from an apple tree. “How about her?” he
said. “‘You like her at all?”

“Gosh—” she said, and she blushed and became humble. “That—that
puts me right next to Dr. Hitz.”

“That upsets you?” he said.

“Good gravy, no!” she said. “It’s—it’s just such an honor.”

‘Ah, you admire him, eh?” he said.

“Who doesn’t admire him?” she said, worshipping the portrait
of Hitz. It was the portrait of a tanned, white-haired, omnipotent Zeus, two
hundred forty years old. “Who doesn’t admire him?” she said again. “He was
responsible for setting up the very first gas chamber in Chicago.”

“Nothing would please me more,” said the painter, “than to
put you next to him for all time. Sawing off a limb—that strikes you as
appropriate?”

“That is kind of like what I do,” she said. She was demure
about what she did. What she did was make people comfortable while she killed
them.

And while Leora Duncan was posing for her portrait, into the
waiting room bounded Dr. Hitz himself. He was seven feet tall, and he boomed
with, importance, accomplishments, and the joy of living.

“Well, Miss Duncan! Miss Duncan!” he said, and he made a
joke. “What are you doing here? This isn’t where the people leave. This is where
they come in!”

“We’re going to be in the same picture together,” she said
shyly.

“Good!” said Dr. Hitz. “And say, isn’t that some picture?”

“I sure am honored to be in it with you,” she said.

“Let me tell you, I’m honored to be in it with you. Without
women like you, this wonderful world we’ve got wouldn’t be possible.”

He saluted her and moved toward the door that led to the
delivery rooms. “Guess what was just born,” he said. “I can’t,” she said.

“Triplets!” he said.

“Triplets!” she said. She was exclaiming over the legal implications
of triplets.

The law said that no newborn child could survive unless the
parents of the child could find someone who would volunteer to die. Triplets,
if they were all to live, called for three volunteers.

“Do the parents have three volunteers?” said Leora Duncan.

“Last I heard,” said Dr. Hitz, “they had one, and were
trying to scrape another two up.”

“I don’t think they made it,” she said. “Nobody made three appointments
with us. Nothing but singles going through today, unless somebody called in
after I left. What’s the name?”

“Wehling,” said the waiting father, sitting up, red-eyed and
frowzy. “Edward K. Wehling, Jr., is the name of the happy father-to-be.”