Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

"Virgil Greathouse is no more and no less my brother than you or any other man," he said. "I will try to save him from hell, just as I am now trying to save you from hell." He then quoted the harrowing thing that Jesus, according to Saint Matthew, had promised to say in the Person of God to sinners on Judgment Day.

This is it: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

These words appalled me then, and they appall me now. They are surely the inspiration for the notorious cruelty of Christians.

"Jesus may have said that," I told Larkin, "but it is so unlike most of what else He said that I have to conclude that He was slightly crazy that day."

Larkin stepped back and he cocked his head in mock admiration. "I have seen some rough-tough babies in my time," he said, "but you really take the prize. You've turned every friend you ever had against you, with all your flip-flops through the years, and now you insult the last Person who still might be willing to help you, who is Jesus Christ."

I said nothing. I wished he would go away.

"Name me one friend you've got left," he said.

I thought to myself that Dr. Ben Shapiro, my best man, would have remained my friend, no matter what — might have come for me there at prison in his car and taken me to his home. But that was sentimental speculation on my part. He had gone to Israel long ago and gotten himself killed in the Six Day War. I had heard that there was a primary school named in his honor in Tel Aviv.

"Name one," Emil Larkin persisted.

"Bob Fender," I said. This was the only lifer in the prison, the only American to have been convicted of treason during the Korean War. He was Doctor Fender, since he held a degree in veterinary science. He was the chief clerk in the supply room where I would soon be given my civilian clothes. There was always music in the supply room, for Fender was allowed to play records of the French chanteuse, Edith Piaf, all day long. He was a science-fiction writer of some note, publishing many stories a year under various pseudonyms, including "Frank X. Barlow" and "Kilgore Trout."

"Bob Fender is everybody's friend and nobody's friend," said Larkin.

"Clyde Carter is my friend," I said.

"I am talking about people on the outside," said Larkin. "Who's waiting outside to help you? Nobody. Not even your own son."

"We'll see," I said.

"You're going to New York?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

"Why New York?" he said.

"It's famous for its hospitality to friendless, penniless immigrants who wish to become millionaires," I said.

"You're going to ask your son for help, even though he's never even written you the whole time you've been here?" he said. He was the mail clerk for my building, so he knew all about my mail.

"If he ever finds out I'm in the same city with him, it will be purely by accident," I said. The last words Walter had ever said to me were at his mother's burial in a small Jewish cemetery in Chevy Chase. That she should be buried in such a place and in such company was entirely my idea — the idea of an old man suddenly all alone. Ruth would have said, correctly, that it was a crazy thing to do.

She was buried in a plain pine box that cost one hundred and fifty-six dollars. Atop that box I placed a bough, broken not cut, from our flowering crab apple tree.

A rabbi prayed over her in Hebrew, a language she had never learned, although she must have had endless opportunities to learn it in the concentration camp.

Our son said this to me, before showing his back to me and the open pit and hastening to a waiting taxicab: "I pity you, but I can never love you. As far as I am concerned, you killed this poor woman. I can't think of you anymore as a father or as any sort of relative. I never want to see or hear of you again."

Strong stuff.

My prison daydream of New York City did suppose, however, that there were still old acquaintances, although I could not name them, who might help me to get a job. It is a hard daydream to let go of — that one has friends. Those who would have remained my friends, if life had gone a little: bit better for me, would have been mainly in New York. I imagined that, if I were to prowl midtown Manhattan day after day, from the theater district on the west to the United Nations on the east, and from the Public Library on the south to the Plaza Hotel on the north, and past all the foundations and publishing houses and bookstores and clothiers for gentlemen and clubs for gentlemen and expensive hotels and restaurants in between, I would surely meet somebody who knew me, who remembered what a good man I used to be, who did not especially despise me — who would use his influence to get me a job tending bar somewhere.

I would plead with him shamelessly, and rub his nose in my Doctor of Mixology degree.

If I saw my son coming, so went the daydream, I would show him my back until he was safely by.

"Well," said Larkin, "Jesus tells me not to give up on anybody, but I'm close to giving up on you. You're just going to sit there, staring straight ahead, no matter what I say."

"Afraid so," I said.

"I never saw anybody more determined to be a geek than you are," he said.

A geek, of course, is a man who lies in a cage on a bed of filthy straw in a carnival freak-show and bites the heads off live chickens and makes subhuman noises, and is billed as having been raised by wild animals in the jungles of Borneo. He has sunk as low as a human being can sink in the American social order, except for his final resting place in a potter's field.

Now Larkin, frustrated, let some of his old maliciousness show. "That's what Chuck Colson called you in the White House: 'The Geek', " he said.

"I'm sure," I said.

"Nixon never respected you," he said. "He just felt sorry for you. That's why he gave you the job."

"I know," I said.

"You didn't even have to come to work," he said.

"I know," I said.

"That's why we gave you the office without any windows and without anybody else around — so you'd catch on that you didn't even have to come to work."

"I tried to be of use anyway," I said. "I hope your Jesus can forgive me for that."

"If you're just going to make fun of Jesus, maybe you better not talk about Him at all," he said.

"Fine," I said. "You brought Him up."

"Do you know when you started to be a geek?" he said.

I knew exactly when the downward dive of my life began, when my wings were broken forever, when I realized that I would never soar again. That event was the most painful subject imaginable to me. I could not bear to think about it yet again, so I said to Larkin, looking him in the eye at last, "In the name of mercy, please leave this poor old man alone."

He was elated. "By golly — I finally got through the thick Harvard hide of Walter F. Starbuck," he said. "I touched a nerve, didn't I?"

"You touched a nerve," I said.

"Now we're getting somewhere," he said.

"I hope not," I said, and I stared at the wall again.

"I was just a little boy in kneepants in Petoskey, Michigan, when I first heard your voice," he said.

"I'm sure," I said.

"It was on the radio. My father made me and my little sister sit by the radio and listen hard. 'You listen hard,' he said. 'You're hearing history made.' "

The year would have been Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. I had just returned to Washington with my little human family. We had just moved into our brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with its flowering crab apple tree. It was autumn. There were tart little apples on the tree. My wife Ruth was about to make jelly out of them, as she would do every year. Where was my voice coming from, that it should have been heard by little Emil Larkin in Petoskey? From a committee room in the House of Representatives. With a brutal bouquet of radio microphones before me I was being questioned, principally by a young congressman from California named Richard M. Nixon, about my previous associations with communists, and about my present loyalty to the United States.