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Harrison
Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut
(1961) From West Valley College http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html
THE
YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal
before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter
than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was
stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the
211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing
vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some
things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance,
still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy
month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old
son, Harrison, away.
It was
tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard.
Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think
about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was
way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was
required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government
transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some
sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their
brains.
George
and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but
she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the
television screen were ballerinas.
A
buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits
from a burglar alarm.
“That
was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.
“Huh?”
said George.
“That
dance – it was nice,” said Hazel.
“Yup,”
said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t
really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They
were burdened with sashweights and bags of
birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and
graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.
George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be
handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his
ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George
winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel
saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself she had to ask George what
the latest sound had been.
“Sounded
like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.
“I’d
think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said
Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”
“Um,”
said George.
“Only,
if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel,
as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a
woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana
Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on
Sunday – just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”
“I
could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.
“Well –
maybe make ‘em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d
make a good Handicapper General.”
“Good
as anybody else,” said George.
“Who
knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.
“Right,”
said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was
now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped
that.
“Boy!”
said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”
It was
such a doozy that George was white and trembling
and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had
collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
“All of
a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the
sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the
pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot
in canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the
bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me
for a while.”
George
weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice
it any more. It’s just a part of me.
“You
been so tired lately – kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some
way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a
few of them lead balls. Just a few.”
“Two
years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,”
said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”
“If you
could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean
– you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”
“If I
tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other
people’d get away with it and pretty soon we’d be
right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody
else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
“I’d
hate it,” said Hazel.
“There
you are,” said George. “The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you
think happens to society?”
If Hazel
hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t
have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
“Reckon
it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.
“What
would?” said George blankly.
“Society,”
said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?”
“Who
knows?” said George.
The
television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t
clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like
all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and
in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and
gentlemen – ”
He
finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
“That’s
all right –” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He
tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice
raise for trying so hard.”
“Ladies
and gentlemen” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been
extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was
easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers,
for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.
And she
had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a
woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me – ” she said, and she began again, making her voice
absolutely uncompetitive.
“Harrison
Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from
jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government.
He is a genius and an athlete, is under–handicapped, and should be regarded
as extremely dangerous.”
A
police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen – upside
down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture
showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet
and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest
of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever worn
heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H–G men could
think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a
tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The
spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap
metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a
certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to
strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of
life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to
offset his good looks, the H–G men required that he wear at all times a red
rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even
white teeth with black caps at snaggle–tooth
random.
“If you
see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason
with him.”
There
was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams
and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The
photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as
though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George
Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have – for
many was the time his own home had danced to the
same crashing tune. “My God –” said George, “that must be Harrison!”
The
realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile
collision in his head.
When
George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A
living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking,
clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of
the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians,
musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to
die.
“I am
the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must
do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
“Even
as I stand here –” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened
– I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what
I can become!”
Harrison
tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps
guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison’s
scrap–iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison
thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness.
The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles
against the wall.
He
flung away his rubber–ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor,
the god of thunder.
“I
shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people.
“Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her
throne!”
A
moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison
plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps
with marvelous delicacy. Last of all, he removed her mask.
She was
blindingly beautiful.
“Now”
said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the
word dance? Music!” he commanded.
The
musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of
their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you
barons and dukes and earls.”
The
music began. It was normal at first – cheap, silly, false. But Harrison
snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang
the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The
music began again and was much improved.
Harrison
and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while – listened gravely,
as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They
shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison
placed his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist, letting her sense the
weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And
then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not
only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws
of motion as well.
They
reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They
leaped like deer on the moon.
The
studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer
to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.
They
kissed it.
And
then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended
in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long
time.
It was
then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper
General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She
fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the
floor.
Diana
Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at
the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back
on.
It was
then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned
out.
Hazel
turned to comment about the blackout to George.
But
George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George
came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And
then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,”
she said,
“What
about?” he said.
“I
forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”
“What
was it?” he said.
“It’s
all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.
“Forget
sad things,” said George.
“I
always do,” said Hazel.
“That’s
my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in
his head.
“Gee –
I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.
“You
can say that again,” said George.
“Gee –”
said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.” WVC Philosophy Home Page | WVC
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