Unready to Wear

"Unready to Wear" is a short story first published in Galaxy Science Fiction in April 1953 and reprinted in Canary in a Cat House in 1961, Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968, the first volume of Library of America's Vonnegut set in 2012, and Complete Stories in 2017.

Plot Summary

A former business owner recounts how he and his wife Madge first became amphibious, in the new sense of the word. The technique was first discovered by Dr. Ellis Konigswasser, a mathematician who often complained that the human body was a debilitating parasite on the mind. He saw a body's need for food, sleep, health, and its inevitable breakdown as the primary problem facing people. Once thinking about this while walking to a zoo, he accidentally found he could walk out of his body, leaving it behind. At first he returned to it to write, study, do a "few odd jobs", and maintain it, but otherwise left it in his closet. He determined that the trick was to start walking one direction and control the psyche to start going another, which meant a person couldn't do it standing still. His book on the technique sold two million copies, and for two years many people followed his example.

When Madge learned that she was dying, she and her husband learned the technique and were among the first five thousand to turn amphibious. Like most of the "oldsters", the two have never quite cut their attachment to their old bodily lives. The husband still borrows a body from the storage centers now and then to maintain his business equipment and Madge, like many women, borrows a body more often to "doll it up in clothes, and look at herself in a mirror". Often when they borrow bodies "for old times' sake", Madge will pick a body for her husband, usually a tall blonde, that matches her own body choice. Every year, the Amphibious Pioneers' Society holds a large Pioneers' Day Parade and one person is given the "honor" of heading the parade in the body of Dr. Konigswasser, with its "[u]lcers, headaches, arthritis, fallen arches". Konigswasser himself marches in the body of "a six-foot cowboy who can bend beer cans double between his thumb and middle finger". The parades often lead to fights, since no one is used to the pains and demands of a body anymore, giving everyone a bad temper.

The parade celebrates those who first became amphibious before those who stayed in bodies banned the technique and declared themselves at war. They resent that the amphibians can spy on them at any time and have constructed numerous ineffective devices to try to detect them. One year, Madge's husband got in a fight with the parade marshal, so he and Madge left their bodies to "have a look at the enemy". They find a newly constructed body storage center and Madge is tempted by a six-foot tall, copper-skined body stored next to a blonde field marshal in uniform. The moment she enters, she finds the body's ankles are tied and she's unable to escape when soldiers suddenly appear and capture her. Her husband attempts to enter the field marshal's body, only to be captured as well.

The two are subjected to a televised show trial for desertion, where it is argued that they have run from their human responsibilities, which encourages the end of ambition and progress. Madge's husband replies that it's merely the end of deprivation, want, and fear—means by which those in bodies keep their power over others—leading the judge to end the television transmission. Angrily, Madge's husband declares that even though the amphibious had not been fighting before, they would now. He bluffs that the courtroom is filled with amphibians who will occupied everyone's bodies and walk them off a cliff unless they were released. Unaware that only one person can occupy a body at a time, they are released, and Madge demands that in restitution that copper-skinned body be sent to her. The two return for the end of the parade, and the parade marshal apologizes to Madge's husband, who wonders if the next generation won't even bother to get into bodies from time to time, while now and then he still gets "gloomy" over his pay-toilet business it took him thirty years to build.