Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

Clyde Carter and Dr. Fender ran out into the reception area, so that they could see, too. There were no locked doors anywhere in the prison. Fender could have kept right on running outside, if he wanted to. Clyde didn't have a gun, and neither did any of the other guards. If Fender had made a, break for it, maybe somebody would have tried to tackle him;; but I doubt it. It would have been the first attempted escape from the prison in its twenty-six-year history, and nobody would have had any clear idea as to what to do.

I was incurious about the arrival of Virgil Greathouse. His arrival, like the arrival of any new prisoner, would be a public execution of sorts. I did not want to watch him or anybody become less than a man. So I was all alone in the supply room. I was grateful for the accident of privacy. I took advantage of it. I performed what was perhaps the most obscenely intimate physical act of my life. I gave birth to a broken, querulous little old man by doing this: by putting on my civilian clothes.

There were white broadcloth underpants and calf-length, ribbed black socks from the Tally-ho Gentleman's Shop in Chevy Chase. There was a white Arrow shirt from Garfinckel's Department Store in Washington. There was the Brooks Brothers suit from New York City, and a regimental-stripe tie and black shoes from there, too. The laces on both shoes were broken and mended with square knots. Fender obviously had not taken a close look at them, or there would have been new laces in those shoes.

The necktie was the most antique item. I had actually worn it during the Second World War. Imagine that. An Englishman I was working with on medical supply schemes, for the D-Day landings told me that the tie identified me as an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

"You were wiped out in the Second Battle of the Somme in the First World War," he said, "and now, in this show, you've been wiped out again at El Alamein. You might say, 'Not the luckiest regiment in the world.' "

The stripe scheme is this: A broad band of pale blue is bordered by a narrow band of forest-green above and orange below. I am wearing that tie on this very day, as I sit here in my office in the Down Home Records Division of the RAMJAC Corporation.

When Clyde Carter and Dr. Fender returned to the supply room, I was a civilian again. I felt as dazed and shy and tremble-legged as any other newborn creature. I did not yet know what I looked like. There was one full-length mirror in the supply room, but its face was turned to the wall. Fender always turned it to the wall when a new arrival was expected. This was another example of Fender's delicacy. The new arrival, if he did not wish to, did not have to see at once how he had been transformed by a prison uniform.

Clyde's and Fender's faces, however, were mirrors enough to tell me that I was something less than a gay boulevardier on the order of, say, the late Maurice Chevalier. They were quick to cover their pity with horseplay; but not quick enough.

Fender pretended to be my valet in an embassy somewhere. "Good morning, Mr. Ambassador. Another crisp and bright day," he said. "The queen is expecting you for lunch at one."

Clyde said that it sure was easy to spot a Harvard man, that they all had that certain something. But neither Friend made a move to turn the mirror around, so I did it myself.

Here is who I saw reflected: a scrawny old janitor of Slavic extraction. He was unused to wearing a suit and a tie. His shirt collar was much too large for him, and so was his suit, which fit him like a circus tent. He looked unhappy — on his way to a relative's funeral, perhaps. At no point was there any harmony between himself and the suit. He may have found his clothes in a rich man's ash can.

Peace.

I sat now on an unsheltered park bench by the highway in front of the prison. I was waiting for the bus. I had beside me a tan canvas-and-leather suitcase designed for Army officers. It had been my constant companion in Europe during my glory days. Draped over it was an old trenchcoat, also from my glory days. I was all alone. The bus was late. Every so often I would pat the pockets of my suitcoat, making sure that I had my release papers, my government voucher for a one-way, tourist-class flight from Atlanta to New York City, my money, and my Doctor of Mixology degree. The sun beat down on me.

I had three hundred and twelve dollars and eleven cents. Two hundred and fifty of that was in the form of a government check, which could not easily be stolen from me. It was all my own money. After all the meticulous adding and subtracting that had gone on relative to my assets since my arrest, that much, to the penny, was incontrovertibly mine: three hundred and twelve dollars and eleven cents.

So here I was going out into the Free Enterprise System again. Here I was cut loose from the protection and nurture of the federal government again.

The last time this had happened to me was Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-three, two years after Leland Clewes went to prison for perjury. Dozens of other witnesses had been found to testify against him by then — and more damagingly, too. All I had ever accused him of was membership in the Communist Party before the war, which I would have thought was about as damning for a member of the Depression generation as having stood in a breadline. But others were willing to swear that Clewes had continued to be a communist throughout the war, and had passed secret information to agents of the Soviet Union. I was flabbergasted.

That was certainly news to me, and may not even have been true. The most I had wanted from Clewes was an admission that I had told the truth about something that really didn't matter much. God knows I did not want to see him ruined and sent to jail. And the most I expected for myself was that I would be sorry for the rest of my life, would never feel quite right about myself ever again, because of what I had accidentally done to him. Otherwise, I thought, life could be expected to go on much as before.

True: I had been transferred to a less-sensitive job in the Defense Department, tabulating the likes and dislikes of soldiers of various major American races and religions, and from various educational and economic backgrounds, for various sorts of field rations, some of them new and experimental. Work of that sort, now done brainlessly and eyelessly and handlessly and at the speed of light by computers, was still being done largely by hand in those days. I and my staff now seem as archaic to me as Christian monks illuminating manuscripts with paintbrushes and gold leaf and quills.

And true: People who dealt with me at work, both inferiors and superiors, became more formal, more coldly correct, when dealing with me. They had no time anymore, seemingly, for jokes, for stories about the war. Every conversation was schnip-schnap! Then it was time to get back to work. I ascribed this at the time, and even told my poor wife that I admired it, to the spirit of the new, lean, keen, highly mobile and thoroughly professional Armed Forces we were shaping. They were to be a thunderbolt with which we could vaporize any new, would-be Hitler, anywhere in the world. No sooner had the people of a country lost their freedom, than the United States of America would arrive to give it back again.

And true: Ruth's and my social life was somewhat less vivid than the one I had promised her in Nuremberg. I had projected for her a telephone in our home that would never stop ringing, with old comrades of mine on the other end. They would want to eat and drink and talk all night. They would be in the primes of their lives in government service, in their late thirties or early forties, like me — so able and experienced and diplomatic and clever, and at bottom as hard as nails, that they would be the real heads and the guts of their organizations, no matter where in the hierarchy they were supposed to be. I promised Ruth that they would be blowing in from big jobs in Moscow, in Tokyo, in her home town in Vienna, in Jakarta and Timbuktu, and God knows where. What tales they would have to tell us about the world, about what was really going on! We would laugh and have another drink, and so on. And local people, of course, would importune us for our colorful, cosmopolitan company and for our inside information as well.