The World of Kurt Vonnegut: Peace in Amber Read Free Page B

her boyfriend’s next victim. But Scott is about to save my life. As most things go, he will do this more than once.
    Best friends form like fires spread. Gab turns to conversation. Familiar faces are smiled at. People have to eat, so why not grab a bite together? Like Montana Wildhack, Scott dances for a living. But it’s called ballet and wardrobe is involved, so somehow it’s more respectable. In Charleston, South Carolina, you can have a ballet studio within four blocks of a church if you want. But probably not right next door. There are limits.
    When I decide I should buy a sailboat to live on, Scott goes with me to Baltimore to sail it down the coast. Neither of us know what we’re doing as we head for Charleston around Cape Hatteras in January. Boats have disappeared to the bottom of the sea here once or twice. We soon discover this is so. And it is not the last time Scott and I will see trouble from the deck of a boat. Nor is it the last time that I am certain I will die.
    At the base of the Twin Towers, there is a glass dome called the Winter Garden. Palm trees stand there in the dead of winter, like the sea snakes of Zyx, trapped in a strange world. I wake up one day to find myself living in that dome. One moment, I’m attending college classes in Charleston. The next minute, I’m in an alien land, surrounded by strangers, trapped in a glass dome, wanting to scream and scream.
    The line to get a bagel in this place is infuriatingly slow.

    Montana bought a house in Palm Springs with her own money. Movie money. Her realtor showed her houses in the hills with nice views, but seeing out meant others could see in. She settled on a small place with a roof that needed repair, but she liked the hedge. And it had a pool, where she could lay out and feel the sun warm her flesh, touching her without touching her. Until she woke up smelling like baby oil and coconuts, a nightmare of creatures gazing in through geodesic glass, a naked stranger beside her, a horror she knew all too well.
    Montana had forgotten what it meant to own her body. She had lived a life on display, first because it felt nice, later to survive, and then to profit. She wasn’t oblivious to this trade-off. There were days when the exchange made her feel powerful, when checks came in the mail from her agent and she thought of the number of men aroused by her on-screen performances. It reminded her of that party and dancing for those college boys, going home with more money than she’d ever held.
    But then there were days in the middle of a shoot, brief moments of nakedness when the director yelled “cut” or the cameraman needed to change rolls, and the magic of the scene vanished and the characters around her faded back into actors. Here was when an assistant took a dozen paces to bring her a robe, and Montana Wildhack felt a chill. Here was the off-camera hell when the actor from the previous scene continued to touch her as if she were his. This was when they would ask her out. Tell her how great she was. The best ever.
    On Tralfamadore, she was back on display in a geodesic dome of glass that held thousands of alien viewers at bay. This was her movie set, with its lime-green kitchen appliances, yellow lounger, sofa bed, end tables, lamps. The alien zookeepers had installed a phonograph that worked and a television set that didn’t. The latter had an image painted on the curved glass screen, an image of two cowboys dueling with pistols. Montana thought she recognized the film. She’d had sex with one of the actors a few years ago when his feature career had hit the skids and hers had not yet begun. He had played a doctor, she a nurse.
    Montana remembered the trepidation she’d felt on every new shoot. Arriving at some rented house, the smell of morning coffee, a man she would perform with smiling too widely as the director introduced her. They would pump her hand, these actors, and stare at her breasts where a locket lay with its little prayer,