2 B R O 2 B

2 B R O 2 B, by Kurt Vonnegut

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Title: 2 B R O 2 B
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Release Date: May 3, 2007 [EBook #21279]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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2BR02_B
By Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Transcriber note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If, January
1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.

copyright on this publication was renewed.

Got a problem? Just pick up the phone. It solved them all--and all the
same way!
2 B R 0 2 B
by KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

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 a day any more.
Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average
age was one hundred and 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 hand. 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 nor 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 still blank. All blanks were to be
filled with portraits of important people on either 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
daub?" he said. "You think this is my idea of what life really looks
like?"
"What's your idea of what life looks like?" said the orderly.
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