Welcome to the monkey house by Kurt Vonnegut

stratosphere.
    "Oh," said his mother. "There must be somebody left."
    "Nope," said Fuller. "I spent the whole morning on the phone, ma. I might as well have been back in Korea. Nobody home."
    "I can't believe it," she said. "Why, you couldn't walk down rain Street without being almost trampled by friends."
    "Ma," said Fuller hollowly, "after I ran out of numbers to call, you know what I did? I went down to the drugstore, ma, and just sat there by the soda fountain, waiting for somebody to walk in—somebody I knew maybe just even a little. Ma," he said in anguish, "all I knew was poor old Bearse Hinkley. I'm not kidding you one bit." He stood, crumpling his napkin into a ball. "Ma, will you please excuse me?"
    "Yes. Of course," she said. "Where are you going now?" She beamed. "Out to call on some nice girl, I hope?"
    Fuller threw the napkin down. "I'm going to get a cigar!" he said. "I don't know any girls. They're all married too."
    His mother paled. "I—I see," she said. "I—I didn't even know you smoked."
    "Ma," said Fuller tautly, "can't you get it through your head? I been away for eighteen months, ma—eighteen months!"
    "It is a long time, isn't it?" said his mother, humbled by his passion. "Well, you go get your cigar." She touched his arm. "And please don't feel so lonesome. You just wait. Your life will be so full of people again, you won't know which one to turn to. And, before you know it, you'll meet some pretty young girl, and you'll be married too."
    "I don't intend to get married for some time, mother," said Fuller stuffily. "Not until I get through divinity school."
    "Divinity school!" said his mother. "When did you decide that?"
    "This noon," said Fuller. "What happened this noon?"
    "I had kind of a religious experience, ma," he said. "Something just made me speak out."
    "About what?" she said, bewildered.
    In Fuller's buzzing head there whirled a rhapsody of Susannas. He saw again all the professional temptresses who had tormented him in Korea, who had beckoned from makeshift bed-sheet movie screens, from curling pinups on damp tent walls, from ragged magazines in sandbagged pits. The Susannas had made fortunes, beckoning to lonely Corporal Fullers everywhere—beckoning with stunning beauty, beckoning the Fullers to come nowhere for nothing.
    The wraith of a Puritan ancestor, stiff-necked, dressed in black, took possession of Fuller's tongue. Fuller spoke with a voice that came across the centuries, the voice of a witch hanger, a voice redolent with frustration, self-righteousness, and doom.
    "What did I speak out against?" he said. "Temp-ta-tion."
    Fuller's cigar in the night was a beacon warning carefree, frivolous people away. It was plainly a cigar smoked in anger. Even the moths had sense enough to stay away. Like a restless, searching red eye, it went up and down every street in the village, coming to rest at last, a wet, dead butt, before the firehouse.
    Bearse Hinkley, the old pharmacist, sat at the wheel of the pumper, his eyes glazed with nostalgia—nostalgia for the days when he had been young enough to drive. And on his face, for all to see, was a dream of one more catastrophe, with all the young men away, when an old man or nobody would drive the pumper to glory one more time. He spent warm evenings there, behind the wheel—and had for years.
    "Want a light for that thing?" he said to Corporal Fuller, seeing the dead cigar between Fuller's lips.
    "No, thanks, Mr. Hinkley," he said. "All the pleasure's out of it."
    "Beats me how anybody finds any pleasure in cigars in the first place," said the old man.
    "Matter of taste," said Fuller. "No accounting for tastes."
    "One man's meat's another man's poison," said Hinkley. "Live and let live, I always say." He glanced at the ceiling. Above it was the fragrant nest of Susanna and her black cat. "Me? All my pleasures are looking at what used to be pleasures."
    Fuller looked at the ceiling, too, meeting die unmentioned issue squarely. "If you were