Free Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut Page A

and there wasn’t anybody home anymore—or when your friend Terry Kitchen started painting his best pictures with his spray gun, and you looked into his eyes and there wasn’t anybody home anymore.”
    I gave up. I switched off this electric typewriter. Where did I learn to touch-type? I had taken a course in typing after the war, when I thought I was going to become a businessman.
    I sat back in this chair and I closed my eyes. Ironies go right over her head, and especially those relating to privacy, but I tried one anyway. “I’m all
ears,”
I said.
    “I never told you the very last thing Abe said before he died, did I?” she said.
    “Never did,” I agreed.
    “That was what I was thinking about that first day—when you came down on the beach,” she said.
    “O.K.,” I said.
    At the very end, her brain-surgeon husband couldn’t talk anymore, but he could still scrawl short messages with his left hand, although he was normally right handed. His left hand was all he had left that still worked a little bit.
    According to Circe, this was his ultimate communiqué: “I was a radio repairman.”
    “Either his damaged brain believed that this was a literal truth,” she said, “or he had come to the conclusion that all the brains he had operated on were basically just receivers of signals from someplace else. Do you get the concept?”
    “I think I do,” I said.
    “Just because music comes from a little box we call a radio,” she said, and here she came over and rapped me on my pate with her knuckles as though it were a radio, “that doesn’t mean there’s a symphony orchestra inside.”
    “What’s that got to do with Father and Terry Kitchen?” I said.
    “Maybe, when they suddenly started doing somethingthey’d never done before, and their personalities changed, too—” she said, “maybe they had started picking up signals from another station, which had very different ideas about what they should say and do.”

    I have since tried out this human-beings-as-nothing-but-radio-receivers theory on Paul Slazinger, and he toyed with it some. “So Green River Cemetery is full of busted radios,” he mused, “and the transmitters they were tuned to still go on and on.”
    “That’s the theory,” I said.
    He said that all he’d been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he’d never heard before. He said, too, that toward the end of his marriage to Barbira Mencken, the actress, she acted “as though she was wearing headphones and listening to the
1812 Overture
in stereo. That’s when she was becoming a real actress, and not just another pretty girl onstage that everybody liked a lot. She wasn’t even ‘Barbara’ anymore. All of a sudden she was ‘Bar-beer-ah!’”
    He said that the first he heard of the name change was during the divorce proceedings, when her lawyer referred to her as “Barbira,” and spelled it for the court stenographer.
    Out in the courthouse corridor afterwards, Slazinger asked her: “Whatever happened to Barbara?”
    She said Barbara was dead!
    So Slazinger said to her: “Then what on Earth did we waste all this money on lawyers for?”

    I said that I had seen the same sort of thing happen to Terry Kitchen the first time he played with a spray rig, shooting bursts of red automobile paint at an old piece of beaverboard he’d leaned against the potato barn. All of a sudden, he, too, was like somebody listening through headphones to a perfectly wonderful radio station I couldn’t hear.
    Red was the only color he had to play with. We’d gotten two cans of the red paint along with the spray rig, which we’d bought from an automobile repair shop in Montauk a couple of hours before. “Just
look
at it! Just
look
at it!” he’d say, after every burst.
    “He’d just about given up on being a painter, and was going into law practice with his father before we got that spray