Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and Studied
biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he
served in Europe and, as a prisoner of war in Germany, witnessed the
destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired
his classic novel Slaughterhouse 5. He is the author of thirteen other
novels, a collection of stories and three non-fiction books. He lives
in New York City.


Published by Vintage 1998

4 6 8 10 9 7 5

Copyright (c) Kurt Vonnegut 1997

The right of Kurt Vonnegut to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988

Published by arrangement with G.P. Putnam's Sons, a division of the
Putnam Berkeley Group, Inc. New York

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way
of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise
circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without
a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1997

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In memory of Seymour Lawrence, a romantic and great publisher of
curious tales told with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp



Ernest Hemingway in 1952 published in Life magazine a long short story
called The Old Man and the Sea. It was about a Cuban fisherman who
hadn't caught anything for eighty-four days. The Cuban hooked an
enormous marlin. He killed it and lashed it alongside his little boat.
Before he could get it to shore, though, sharks bit off all the meat
on the skeleton.

I was living in Barnstable Village on Cape Cod when the story
appeared. I asked a neighboring commercial fisherman what he thought
of it. He said the hero was an idiot. He should have hacked off the
best chunks of meat and put them in the bottom of the boat, and left
the rest of the carcass for the sharks.

It could be that the sharks Hemingway had in mind were critics who
hadn't much liked his first novel in ten years, Across the River and
into the Trees, published two years earlier. As far as I know, he
never said so. But the marlin could have been that novel.

And then I found myself in the winter of 1996 the creator of a novel
which did not work, which had no point, which had never wanted to be
written in the first place. Merde! I had spent nearly a decade on that
ungrateful fish, if you will. It wasn't even fit for shark chum.

I had recently turned seventy-three. My mother made it to fifty-two,
my father to seventy-two. Hemingway almost made it to sixty-two. I had
lived too long! What was I to do?

Answer: Fillet the fish. Throw the rest away.


This I did in the summer and autumn of 1996. Yesterday, November 11th
of that year, I turned seventy-four. Seventy-four!

Johannes Brahms quit composing symphonies when he was fifty-five.
Enough! My architect father was sick and tired of architecture when he
was fifty-five. Enough! American male novelists have done their best
work by then. Enough! Fifty-five is along time ago for me now. Have
pity!

My great big fish, which stunk so, was entitled Timequake. Let us
think of it as Timequake One. And let us think of this one, a stew
made from its best parts mixed with thoughts and experiences during
the past seven months or so, as Timequake Two.

Hokay?


The premise of Timequake One was that a timequake, a sudden glitch in
the space-time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly
what they'd done during a past decade, for good or ill, a second time.
It was déjà vu that wouldn't quit for ten long years. You couldn't
complain about life's being nothing but old stuff, or ask if just you
were going nuts or if everybody was going nuts.

There was absolutely nothing you could say during the rerun, if you
hadn't said it the first time through the decade. You couldn't even
save your own life or that of a loved one, if you had failed to do
that the first time through.


I had the timequake zap everybody and everything in an instant from
February 13th, 2001, back to February 17th, 1991. Then we all had to
get back to 2001 the hard way, minute by minute, hour by hour, year by
year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person
again, getting the clap again. You name it!

Only when people got back to when the timequake hit did they stop
being robots of their pasts. As the old science fiction writer Kilgore
Trout said, "Only when free will kicked in again could they stop
running obstacle courses of their own construction.''


Trout doesn't really exist. He has been my alter ego in several of my
other novels. But most of what I have chosen to preserve from
Timequake One has to do with his adventures and opinions. I have
salvaged a few of the thousands of stories he wrote between 1931, when
he was fourteen, and 2001, when he died at the age of eighty-four. A
hobo for much of his life, he died in luxury in the Ernest Hemingway
Suite of the writers' retreat Xanadu in the summer resort village of
Point Zion, Rhode Island. That's nice to know.

His very first story, he told me as he was dying, was set in Camelot,
the court of King Arthur in Britain: Merlin the Court Magician casts a
spell that allows him to equip the Knights of the Round Table with
Thompson submachine guns and drums of .45-caliber dumdums.

Sir Galahad, the purest in heart and mind, familiarizes himself with
this new virtue-compelling appliance. While doing so, he puts a slug
through the Holy Grail and makes a Swiss cheese of Queen Guinevere.


Here is what Trout said when he realized that the ten-year rerun was
over, that he and everybody else were suddenly obligated to think of
new stuff to do, to be creative again: "Oh, Lordy! I am much too old
and experienced to start playing Russian roulette with free will
again."

Yes, and I myself was a character in Timequake One, making a cameo
appearance at a clambake on the beach at the writers' retreat Xanadu
in the summer of 2001, six months after the end of the rerun, six
months after free will kicked in again.

I was there with several fictitious persons from, the book, including
Kilgore Trout. I was privileged to hear the old, long-out-of-print
science fiction writer describe for us, and then demonstrate, the
special place of Earthlings in the cosmic scheme of things.


So now my last book is done, with the exception of this preface. Today
is November 12th, 1996, about nine months, I would guess, from its
publication date, from its emergence from the birth canal of a
printing press. There is no rush. The gestation period for a baby
Indian elephant is more than twice that long.

The gestation period for a baby opossum, friends and neighbors, is
twelve days.


I have pretended in this book that I will still be alive for the
clambake in 2001. In chapter 46,1 imagine myself as still alive in
2010. Sometimes I say I'm in 1996, where I really am, and sometimes I
say I am in the midst of a rerun following a timequake, without making
clear distinctions between the two situations.

I must be nuts.

1





Call me Junior. My six grown kids do. Three are adopted nephews, three
are my own. They call me Junior behind my back. They think I don't
know that.


I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make
people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked
if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, "The Beatles
did."

It appears to me that the most highly evolved Earthling creatures find
being alive embarrassing or much worse. Never mind cases of extreme
discomfort, such as idealists' being crucified. Two important women in
my life, my mother and my only sister, Alice, or Allie, in Heaven now,
hated life and said so. Allie would cry out, "I give up! I give up!"

The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself
and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me,
that he wrote as follows: "I have never wanted any released friend of
mine restored to life since I reached manhood.'" That is in an essay
on the sudden death of his daughter Jean a few days earlier. Among
those he wouldn't have resurrected were Jean, and another daughter,
Susy, and his beloved wife, and his best friend, Henry Rogers.

Twain didn't live to see World War One, but still he felt that way.


Jesus said how awful life was, in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed
are they that mourn,'' and "Blessed are the meek," and "Blessed are
they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness."

Henry David Thoreau said most famously, "The mass of men lead lives of
quiet desperation."

So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and air and
topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both
industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For
practically everybody, the end of the world can't come soon enough.

My father, Kurt Senior, an Indianapolis architect who had cancer, and
whose wife had committed suicide some fifteen years earlier, was
arrested for running a red light in his hometown. It turned out that
he hadn't had a driver's license for twenty years!

You know what he told the arresting officer? "So shoot me," he said.


The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used
to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This
was it: "Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!"

That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as
cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim
of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin
Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof
enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer
Kilgore Trout, "being alive is a crock of shit."

2





Imagine this: A great American university gives up football in the
name of sanity. It turns its vacant stadium into a bomb factory. So
much for sanity. Shades of Kilgore Trout.

I am speaking of my alma mater, the University of Chicago. In December
of 1942, long before I got there, the first chain reaction of uranium
on Earth was compelled by scientists underneath the stands of Stagg
Field. Their intent was to demonstrate the feasibility of an atomic
bomb. We were at war with Germany and Japan.


Fifty-three years later, on August 6th, 1995, there was a gathering in
the chapel of my university to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of
the detonation of the first atomic bomb, over the city of Hiroshima,
Japan. I was there.

One of the speakers was the physicist Leo Seren. He had participated
in the successful experiment under the lifeless sports facility so
long ago. Get this: He apologised for having done that!

Somebody should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet
where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never
having to say you're sorry.


Now imagine this: A man creates a hydrogen bomb for a paranoid Soviet
Union, makes sure it will work, and then wins a Nobel Peace Prize!
This real-life character, worthy of a story by Kilgore Trout, was the
late physicist Andrei Sakharov.

He won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of
nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a
pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while
married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay
with a mate that cracked?

"Anything interesting happen at work today, Honeybunch?"

"Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with
that kid with chicken pox? "


Andrei Sakharov was a sort of saint in 1975, a sort that is no longer
celebrated, now that the Cold War is over. He was a dissident in the
Soviet Union. He called for an end to the development and testing of
nuclear weapons, and also for more freedoms for his people. He was
kicked out of the USSR's Academy of Sciences. He was exiled from
Moscow to a whistlestop on the permafrost.

He was not allowed to go to Oslo to receive his Peace Prize. His
pediatrician wife, Elena Bonner, accepted it for him there. But isn't
it time for us to ask now if she, or any pediatrician or healer,
wasn't more deserving of a Peace Prize than anyone who had a hand in
creating an H-bomb for any kind of government anywhere?

Human rights? What could be more indifferent to the rights of any form
of life than an H-bomb?


Sakharov was in June of 1987 awarded an honorary doctorate by Staten
Island College in New York City. Once again his government wouldn't
let him accept in person. So I was asked to do that for him.

All I had to do was deliver a message he had sent. This was it: "Don't
give up on nuclear energy." I spoke it like a robot.

I was so polite! But this was one year after this crazy planet's most
deadly nuclear calamity so far, at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Children all
over northern Europe will be sickened or worse for years to come by
that release of radiation. Plenty of work for pediatricians!

More heartening to me than Sakharov's cockamamie exhortation was the
behavior of firemen in Schenectady, New York, after Chernobyl. I used
to work in Schenectady. The firemen sent a letter to their brother
firemen over there, congratulating them on their courage and
selflessness while trying to save lives and property.

Hooray for firemen!

Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be
saints in emergencies.

Hooray for firemen.

3





In Timequake One, Kilgore Trout wrote a story about an atom bomb.
Because of the timequake, he had to write it twice. The ten-year rerun
following the timequake, remember, made him and me, and you, and
everybody else, do everything we'd done from February 17th, 1991, to
February 12lth, 2001, a second time.

Trout didn't mind writing it again. Rerun or not, he could tune out
the crock of shit being alive was as long as he was scribbling, head
down, with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad.

He called the story "No Laughing Matter." He threw it away before
anybody else could see it, and then had to throw it away again during
the rerun. At the clambake at the end of Timequake One, in the summer
of the year 2001, after free will kicked in again, Trout said this
about all the stories he had torn to pieces and flushed down toilets,
or tossed into trash-strewn vacant lots, or whatever: "Easy come, easy
go."


"No Laughing Matter" got its title from what a judge in the story said
during a top-secret court-martial of the crew of the American bomber
Joy's Pride, on the Pacific island of Banalulu, one month after the
end of World War Two.

Joy's Pride itself was perfectly OK, and in a hangar there on
Banalulu. It was named in honor of the pilot's mother, Joy Peterson, a
nurse in obstetrics in a hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas. Pride had
a double meaning. It meant self-respect. It meant a lion family, too.

Here's the thing: After an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and
then another one was dropped on Nagasaki, Joy's Pride was ordered to
drop yet another one on Yokohama, on a couple of million "little
yellow bastards." The little yellow bastards were called "little
yellow bastards" back then. It was wartime. Trout described the third
atom bomb like this: "A purple motherfucker as big as a boiler in the
basement of a mid-size junior high school."

It was too big to fit inside the bomb bay. It was slung underneath the
plane's belly, and cleared the runway by a foot when Joy's Pride took
off into the wild blue yonder.


As the plane neared its target, the pilot mused out loud on the
intercom that his mother, the obstetrics nurse, would be a celebrity
back home after they did what they were about to do. The bomber Enola
Gay, and the woman in whose honor it was named, had become as famous
as movie stars after it dropped its load on Hiroshima. Yokohama was
twice as populous as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The more the pilot thought about it, though, the surer he was that his
sweet widowed mother could never tell reporters she was happy that her
son's airplane had killed a world's record number of civilians all at
once.


Trout's story reminds me of the time my late great-aunt Emma Vonnegut
said she hated the Chinese. Her late son-in-law Kerfuit Stewart, who
used to own Stewart's Book Store in Louisville, Kentucky, admonished
her that it was wicked to hate that many people all at once.


Whatever.

The crewmen aboard Joy's Pride, at any rate, told the pilot on the
intercom that they felt much as he did. They were all alone up there
in the sky. They didn't need a fighter escort, since the Japanese
didn't have any airplanes left. The war was over, except for the
paperwork, arguably the situation even before Enola Gay cremated
Hiroshima.

To quote Kilgore Trout: "This wasn't war anymore, and neither had been
the obliteration of Nagasaki. This was 'Thanks to the Yanks for a job
well done!' This was show biz now."


Trout said in "No Laughing Matter" that the pilot and his bombardier
had felt somewhat godlike on previous missions, when they had had
nothing more than incendiaries and conventional high explosives to
drop on people. "But that was godlike with a little g" he wrote. "They
identified themselves with minor deities who only avenged and
destroyed. Up there in the sky all alone, with the purple motherfucker
slung underneath their plane, they felt like the Boss God Himself, who
had an option which hadn't been theirs before, which was to be
merciful."

Trout himself had been in World War Two, but not as an airman and not
in the Pacific. He had been a forward observer for the Army field
artillery in Europe, a lieutenant with binoculars and a radio, up with
the infantry or even ahead of it. He would tell batteries to the rear
where their shrapnel or white phosphorus or whatever might help a lot.

He himself had certainly not been merciful, nor, by his own account,
had he ever felt he should have been. I asked him at the clambake in
2001, at the writers' retreat Xanadu, what he'd done during the war,
which he called "civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit
suicide.''

He said without a scintilla of regret, "I made sandwiches of German
soldiers between an erupting Earth and an exploding sky, and in a
blizzard of razor blades."


The pilot of Joy's Pride made a U-turn way up in the sky. The purple
motherfucker was still slung underneath. The pilot headed back for
Banalulu. "He did it," wrote Trout, "because that is what his mother
would have wanted him to do."

At the top-secret court-martial afterward, everybody was convulsed
with laughter at one point in the proceedings. This caused the chief
judge to bang his gavel and declare that what those on trial had done
was "no laughing matter." What people found so funny was the
prosecutor's description of what people did at the base when Joy's
Pride came in for a landing with the purple motherfucker only a foot
above the tarmac. People jumped out of windows. They peed in their
pants.

"There were all kinds of collisions between different kinds of
vehicles," wrote Kilgore Trout.

No sooner had the judge restored order, though, than a huge crack
opened in the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It swallowed Banalulu,
court-martial, Joy's Pride, unused atom bomb and all.

4





When excellent German novelist and graphic artist Günter Grass heard
that I was born in 1922, he said to me, "There are no males in Europe
your age for you to talk to." He himself was a kid during Kilgore
Trout's and my war, as were Elie Wiesel and Jerzy Kosinski and Milos
Forman, and on and on. I was lucky to be born over here instead of
over there, and white and middle-class, and into a house full of books
and pictures, and into a large extended family, which exists no more.


I heard the poet Robert Pinsky give a reading this summer, in which he
apologized didactically for having had a much nicer life than normal.
I should do that, too.

At least I seized the opportunity this past May to thank my
birthplace, as a graduation speaker at Butler University. I said, "If
I had it to do all over, I would choose to be born again in a hospital
in Indianapolis. I would choose to spend my childhood again at 4365
North Illinois Street, about ten blocks from here, and to again be a
product of that city's public schools.

"I would again take courses in bacteriology and qualitative analysis
in the summer school of Butler University.

"It was all here for me, just as it has all been for you, the best and
the worst of Western Civilization, if you cared to pay attention:
music, finance, government, architecture, law and sculpture and
painting, history and medicine and athletics and every son of science,
and books, books, books, and teachers and role models.

"People so smart you can't believe it, and people so dumb you can't
believe it. People so nice you can't believe it, and people so mean
you can't believe it."


I gave advice, too. I said, "My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a
Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North
Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that
when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it

"He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe
drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the
aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch
anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really
well in the house next door.

"Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: 'If
this isn't nice, what is?' "


Another way I was lucky: for the first thirty-three years of my life,
telling short stories with ink on paper was a major American industry.
Although I then had a wife and two children, it made good business
sense for me to quit my job as a publicity man for General Electric,
with health insurance and a retirement plan. I could make more money
selling stories to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's, weekly
magazines full of ads, which published five short stories and an
installment of a cliff-hanging serial in every issue.

Those were just the top-paying buyers of what I could produce. There
were so many other magazines hungry for fiction that the market for
stories was like a pinball machine. When I mailed off a story to my
agent, I could be pretty sure somebody would pay me something for it,
even though it might be rejected again and again.

But not long after I moved my family from Schenectady, New York, to
Cape Cod, television, a much better buy for advertisers than
magazines, made playing short story pinball for a living obsolete.

[graphic of Saab dealership notepaper]


I commuted from the Cape to Boston to work for an   industrial
advertising agency, and then became a dealer in Saab automobiles, and
then taught high school English in a private school for seriously
fucked-up rich kids.

My son the doctor Mark Vonnegut, who wrote a swell book about his
going crazy in the 1960s, and then graduated from Harvard Medical
School, had an exhibition of his watercolors in Milton,
Massachusetts, this summer. A reporter asked him what it had been like
to grow up with a famous father.

Mark replied, "When I was growing up, my father was a car salesman who
couldn't get a job teaching at Cape Cod Junior College."

5





I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were
money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in
it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one
another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J. D. Salinger or John
Cheever or John Collier or John O'Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery
O'Connor or whomever, which had appeared in a magazine in the past few
days.

No more.


All I do with short story ideas now is rough them out, credit them to
Kilgore Trout, and put them in a novel. Here's the start of another
one hacked from the carcass of Timequake One, and entitled "The
Sisters B-36": "On the matriarchal planet Booboo in the Crab Nebula,
there were three sisters whose last name was B-36. It could be only a
coincidence that their family name was also that of an Earthling
airplane designed to drop bombs on civilian populations with corrupt
leaderships. Earth and Booboo were too far apart to ever communicate."

Another coincidence: The written language of Booboo was like English
on Earth, in that it consisted of idiosyncratic arrangements in
horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and
about eight punctuation marks.

All three of the sisters were beautiful, so went Trout's tale, but
only two of them were popular, one a picture painter and the other a
short story writer. Nobody could stand the third one, who was a
scientist. She was so boring! All she could talk about was
thermodynamics. She was envious. Her secret ambition was to make her
two artistic sisters feel, to use a favorite expression of Trout's,
"like something the cat drug in."


Trout said Booboolings were among the most adaptable creatures in the
local family of galaxies. This was thanks to their great big brains,
which could be programmed to do or not do, and feel or not feel, just
about anything. You name it!

The programming wasn't done surgically or electrically, or by any
other sort of neurological intrusiveness. It was done socially, with
nothing but talk, talk, talk. Grownups would speak to little
Booboolings favorably about presumably appropriate and desirable
feelings and deeds. The brains of the youngsters would respond by
growing circuits that made civilized pleasures and behavior automatic.

It seemed a good idea, for example, when nothing much was really going
on, for Booboolings to be beneficially excited by minimal stimuli,
such as idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six
phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and eight or so punctuation marks, or
dabs of pigment on flat surfaces in frames.

When a little Boobooling was reading a book, a grownup might interrupt
to say, depending on what was happening in the book, "Isn't that sad?
The little girl's nice little dog has just been run over by a garbage
truck. Doesn't that make you want to cry?" Or the grownup might say,
about a very different sort of story, "Isn't that funny? When that
conceited old rich man stepped on a nim-nim peel and fell into an open
manhole, didn't that make you practically pop a gut laughing?"

A nim-nim was a banana-like fruit on Booboo.


An immature Boobooling taken to an art gallery might be asked about a
certain painting whether the woman in it was really smiling or not.
Couldn't she be sad about something, and still look that way? Is she
married, do you think? Does she have a kid? Is she nice to it? Where
do you think she's going next? Does she want to go?

If there was a bowl of fruit in the painting, a grownup might ask,
"Don't those nim-nims look good enough to eat? Yummy yum yum!"

These examples of Boobooling pedagogy aren't mine. They're Kilgore
Trout's.


Thus were the brains of most, but not quite all, Booboolings made to
grow circuits, microchips, if you like, which on Earth would be called
imaginations. Yes, and it was precisely because a vast majority of
Booboolings had imaginations that two of the B-36 sisters, the short
story writer and the painter, were so beloved.

The bad sister had an imagination, all right, but not in the field of
art appreciation. She wouldn't read books or go to art galleries. She
spent every spare minute when she was little in the garden of a
lunatic asylum next door. The psychos in the garden were believed to
be harmless, so her keeping them company was regarded as a laudably
compassionate activity. But the nuts taught her thermodynamics and
calculus and so on.

When the bad sister was a young woman, she and the nuts worked up
designs for television cameras and transmitters and receivers. Then
she got money from her very rich mom to manufacture and market these
satanic devices, which made imaginations redundant. They were
instantly popular because the shows were so attractive and no thinking
was involved.

She made a lot of money, but what really pleased her was that her two
sisters were starting to feel like something the cat drug in. Young
Booboolings didn't see any point in developing imaginations anymore,
since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of
jazzy shit. They would look at a printed page or a painting and wonder
how anybody could have gotten his or her rocks off looking at things
that simple and dead.


The bad sister's name was Nim-nim. When her parents named her that,
they had no idea how unsweet she was going to be. And TV wasn't the
half of it! She was as unpopular as ever because she was as boring as
ever, so she invented automobiles and computers and barbed wire and
flamethrowers and land mines and machine guns and so on. That's how
pissed off she was.

New generations of Booboolings grew up without imaginations. Their
appetites for diversions from boredom were perfectly satisfied by all
the crap Nim-nim was selling them. Why not? What the heck.  Without
imaginations, though, they couldn't do what their ancestors had done,
which was read interesting, heartwarming stories in the faces of one
another. So, according to Kilgore Trout, "Booboolings became among the
most merciless creatures in the local family of galaxies."

6





Trout said at the clambake in 2001 that life was undeniably
preposterous. "But our brains are big enough to let us adapt to the
inevitable pratfalls and buffoonery," he went on, "by means of manmade
epiphanies like this one." He meant the clambake on a beach under a
starry sky. "If this isn't nice, what is?" he said.

He declared the corn on the cob, steamed in seaweed with lobsters and
clams, to be heavenly. He added, "And don't all the ladies look like
angels tonight!" He was feasting on corn on the cob and women as
ideas. He couldn't eat the corn because the upper plate of his false
teeth was insecure. His long-term relationships with women had been
disasters. In the only love story he ever attempted, "Kiss Me Again,"
he had written, "There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what
she looks like for any appreciable length of time."

The moral at the end of that story is this: "Men are jerks. Women are
psychotic."


Chief among manmade epiphanies for me have been stage plays. Trout
called them "artificial timequakes." He said, "Before Earthlings knew
there were such things as timequakes in Nature, they invented them."
And it's true. Actors know everything they are going to say and do,
and how everything is going to come out in the end, for good or ill,
when the curtain goes up on Act One, Scene One. Yet they have no
choice but to behave as though the future were a mystery.

Yes, and when the timequake of 2001 zapped us back to 1991, it made
ten years of our pasts ten years of our futures, so we could remember
everything we had to say and do again when the time came.

Keep this in mind at the start of the next rerun after the next
time-quake: The show must go on!


The artificial timequake that has moved me most so far this year is an
old one. It is Our Town, by the late Thornton Wilder, I had already
watched it with undiminished satisfaction maybe five or six times. And
then this spring my thirteen-year-old daughter, dear Lily, was cast as
a talking dead person in the graveyard of Grover's Corners in a school
production of that innocent, sentimental masterpiece.

The play zapped Lily and her schoolmates from the evening of the
performance back to May 7th, 1901! Timequake! They were robots of
Thornton Wilder's imaginary past until the curtain came down after the
funeral of the heroine Emily in the very last scene. Only then could
they live in 1996 again. Only then could they again decide for
themselves what to say or do next. Only then could they exercise free
will again.

I reflected sadly that night, with Lily pretending to be a dead
grownup, that I would be seventy-eight when she graduated from high
school, and eighty-two when she graduated from college, and so on.
Talk about remembering the future!

What hit me really hard that night, though, was the character Emily's
farewell in the last scene, after the mourners have gone back down the
hill to their village, having buried her. She says, "Good-by, good-by,
world. Good-by, Grover's Corners . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to
clocks ticking . . . and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And
new-ironed dresses and hot baths . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh,
earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? - every,
every minute?"


I myself become a sort of Emily every time I hear that speech. I
haven't died yet, but there is a place, as seemingly safe and simple,
as learnable, as acceptable as Grover's Corners at the turn of the
century, with ticking clocks and Mama and Papa and hot baths and
new-ironed clothes and all the rest of it, to which I've already said
good-by, good-by, one hell of a long time ago now.

Here's what that was: the first seven years of my life, before the
shit hit the fan, first the Great Depression and then World War Two.


They say the first thing to go when you're old is your legs or your
eyesight. It isn't true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.

Now I find myself maundering about parts of plays hardly anybody knows
or cares about anymore, such as the graveyard scene in Our Town, or
the poker game in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, or
what Willy Loman's wife said after that tragically ordinary, clumsily
gallant American committed suicide in Arthur Miller's Death of a
Salesman.

She said, "Attention must be paid."

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois said as she was taken away
to a madhouse, after she was raped by her sister's husband, "I have
always depended on the kindness of strangers."

Those speeches, those situations, those people, became emotional and
ethical landmarks for me in my early manhood, and remain such in the
summer of 1996. That is because I was immobilized in a congregation of
rapt fellow human beings in a theater when I first saw and heard them.

They would have made no more impression on me than Monday Night
Football, had I been alone eating nachos and gazing into the face of a
cathode-ray tube.


In the early days of television, when there were only half a dozen
channels at most, significant, well-written dramas on a cathode-ray
tube could still make us feel like members of an attentive
congregation, alone at home as we might be. There was a high
probability back then, with so few shows to choose from, that friends
and neighbors were watching the same show we were watching, still
finding TV a whizbang miracle.

We might even call up a friend that very night, and ask a question to
which we already knew the answer: "Did you see that? Wow!"

No more.

7





I wouldn't have missed the Great Depression or my part in World War
Two for anything. Trout asserted at the clambake that our war would
live forever in show biz, as other wars would not, because of the
uniforms of the Nazis.

He commented unfavorably on the camouflage suits our own generals wear
nowadays on TV, when they describe our blasting the bejesus out of
some Third World country because of petroleum. "I can't imagine," he
said, "any part of the world where such garish pajamas would make a
soldier less rather than more visible.

"We are evidently preparing," he said, "to fight World War Three in
the midst of an enormous Spanish omelet."


He asked what relatives of mine had been wounded in wars. As far as I
knew, only one. That was my great-grandfather Peter Lieber, an
immigrant who became a brewer in Indianapolis after being wounded in
one leg during our Civil War. He was a Freethinker, which is to say a
skeptic about conventional religious beliefs, as had been Voltaire and
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and so on. And as would be
Kilgore Trout and I.

I told Trout that Peter Lieber's Anglo-American company commander gave
his men, all Freethinkers from Germany, Christian religious tracts for
inspiration. Trout responded by giving his own revision of the Book of
Genesis.

Fortunately, I had a tape recorder, which I turned on.


"Please stop eating and pay attention," he said. "This is important."
He paused to press the upper plate of his false teeth against: the
roof of his mouth with the ball of his left thumb. It would come
unstuck again every two minutes or so. He was left-handed, as was I
until my parents made me switch, and as are my daughters Edith and
Lily, or, as we call them affectionately, Edie Bucket and Lolly-boo.

"In the beginning there was absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing" he
said. "But nothing implies something, just as up implies down and
sweet implies sour, as man implies woman and drunk implies sober and
happy implies sad. I hate to tell you this, friends and neighbors, but
we are teensy-weensy implications in an enormous implication. If you
don't like it here, why don't you go back to where you came from?

"The first something to be implied by all the nothing," he said, "was
in fact two somethings, who were God and Satan. God was male. Satan
was female. They implied each other, and hence were peers in the
emerging power structure, which was itself nothing but an implication.
Power was implied by weakness."


"God created the heaven and the earth," the old, long-out-of-print
science fiction writer went on. "And the earth was without form, and
void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this
herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action.
What was the point? She didn't say anything at first.

"But Satan began to worry about God when He said, 'Let there be
light,' and there was light. She had to wonder, 'What in heck does He
think He's doing? How far does He intend to go, and does He expect me
to help Him take care of all this crazy stuff?'

"And then the shit really hit the fan. God made man and woman,
beautiful little miniatures of Him and her, and turned them loose to
see what might become of them. The Garden of Eden," said Trout, "might
be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games."


"Satan," he said, "couldn't undo anything God had done. She could at
least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She
could see what He couldn't: To be alive was to be either bored or
scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that
might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards
and dice, and how to fuck, and recipes for beer and wine and whiskey,
and pictures of different plants that were smokable, and so on. And
instructions on how to make music and sing and dance real crazy, real
sexy. And how to spout blasphemy when they stubbed their toes.

"Satan had a serpent give Eve the apple. Eve took a bite and handed it
to Adam. He took a bite, and then they fucked."


"I grant you," said Trout, "that some of the ideas in the apple had
catastrophic side effects for a minority of those who tried them." Let
it be noted here that Trout himself was not an alcoholic, a junkie, a
gambler, or a sex fiend. He just wrote.

"All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases," he
concluded. "And her record for promoting nostrutms with occasionally
dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable
pharmaceutical houses of the present day."

8





Side effects of Satan's booze recipes have played a deleterious part
in the lives and deaths of many great American writers. In Timequake
One, I envisioned a writers' retreat called Xanadu, where each of the
four guest suites was named in honor of an American winner of a Nobel
Prize for Literature. The Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O'Neill were on
the second floor of the mansion. The Sinclair Lewis was on the third.
The John Steinbeck was in the carriage house.

Kilgore Trout exclaimed upon arriving at Xanadu, two weeks after free
will kicked in again, "All four of your ink-on-paper heroes were
certifiable alcoholics!"

Gambling ruined William Saroyan. A combination of booze and gambling
did in the journalist Alvin Davis, a much-missed friend of mine. I
asked Al one time what was the biggest kick he got from games of
chance. He said it came after he had lost all his money in an
around-the-clock poker game.

He went back after a few hours with money he had gotten wherever he
could get it, from a friend, from hocking something, from a
loan-shark. And he sat down at the table and said, "Deal me in."


The late British philosopher Bertrand Russell said he lost friends to
one of three addictions: alcohol or religion or chess. Kilgore Trout
was hooked on making idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines,
with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp, of twenty-six phonetic
symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. He was a
black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of
his.

I have been married twice, divorced once. Both my wives, Jane and now
Jill, have said on occasion that I am much like Trout in that regard.


My mother was addicted to being rich, to servants and unlimited charge
accounts, to giving lavish dinner parties, to taking frequent
first-class trips to Europe. So one might say she was tormented by
withdrawal symptoms all through the Great Depression.

She was acculturated!

Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer
treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the
outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology,
or being conquered by another country or political faction, can do
that to people quicker than you can say "Jack Robinson."

As Trout wrote in his "An American Family Marooned on the Planet
Pluto": "Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the
discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become
ridiculous." He said in conversation at the 2001 clambake: "If I
hadn't learned how to live without a culture and a society,
acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times."


In Timequake One, I had Trout discard his "The Sisters B-36" in a
lidless wire trash receptacle chained to a fire hydrant in front of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, way-the-hell-and-gone up on
West 155th Street in Manhattan, two doors west of Broadway. This was
on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 2000, supposedly fifty-one days
before the timequake zapped everybody and everything back to 1991.

The members of the Academy, I said, who were addicted to making
old-fashioned art in old-fashioned ways, without computers, were
experiencing acculturation. They were like the two artistic sisters on
the matriarchal planet Booboo in the Crab Nebula.


There really is an American Academy of Arts and Letters. Its palatial
headquarters are where I placed them in Timequake One. There really is
a fire hydrant out front. There really is a library inside, and an art
gallery and reception halls and meeting rooms and staff offices, and a
very grand auditorium.

By an act of Congress passed in 1916, the Academy can have no more
than 250 members, American citizens, all of whom have distinguished
themselves as novelists, dramatists, poets, historians, essayists,
critics, composers of music, architects, painters, or sculptors. Their
ranks are regularly diminished by the Grim Reaper, by death. A task of
the survivors is to nominate and then, by secret ballot, elect persons
to fill the vacancies.


Among the Academy's founders were old-fashioned writers such as Henry
Adams and William and Henry James, and Samuel Clemens, and the
old-fashioned composer Edward MacDowell. Their audiences were
necessarily small. Their own brains were all they had to work with.

I said in Timequake One that by the year 2000, craftspeople of their
sort had become "as quaint," in the opinion of the general public, "as
contemporary makers in New England tourist towns of the toy windmills
known since colonial times as whirligigs."

9





Founders of the Academy at the turn of the century were
contemporaneous with Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of, among other
things, sound recordings and motion pictures. Before World War Two,
though, these schemes for holding the attention of millions all over
the world were only squawking or flickering lampoons of life itself.

The Academy occupied its present home, designed by the firm of McKim,
Mead & White, and paid for by the philanthropist Archer Milton
Huntington, in 1923. In that year, the American inventor Lee De Forest
demonstrated apparatus that made possible the addition of sound to
motion pictures.


I had a scene in Timequake One, set in the office of Monica Pepper,
fictitious Executive Secretary of the Academy, on Christmas Eve, 2000.
That was the afternoon on which Kilgore Trout put "The Sisters B-36"
in the lidless wire trash receptacle out front, again, fifty-one days
before the timequake struck.

Mrs. Pepper, wife of the wheelchair-ridden composer Zoltan Pepper,
bore a striking resemblance to my late sister Allie, who hated life so
much. Allie died of cancer of the everything way back in 1958, when I
was thirty-six and she was forty-one, hounded by bill collectors to
the very end. Both women were pretty blondes, which was OK. But they
were six-foot-two! Both women were permanently acculturated in
adolescence, since nowhere on Earth, save among the Watusis, did it
make any sense for a woman to be that tall.

Both women were unlucky. Allie married a nice guy who lost all their
money and then some in dumb businesses. Monica Pepper was the reason
her husband Zoltan was paralyzed from the waist down. Two years
earlier, she had accidentally landed on top of him in a swimming pool
out in Aspen, Colorado. At least Allie had to die so deep in debt, and
with four sons to raise, only once. After the timequake struck, Monica
Pepper would have to swan-dive on top of her husband a second time.


Monica and Zoltan were talking in her office at the Academy that
Christmas Eve, 2000. Zoltan was crying and laughing simultaneously.
They were the same age, forty, which made them baby boomers. They
didn't have any kids. Because of her, his ding-dong didn't work
anymore. Zoltan was crying and laughing about that, certainly, but
mostly about a tone-deaf kid next door, who had composed and
orchestrated an acceptable, if derivative, string quartet in the
manner of Beethoven, with the help of a new computer program called
Wolfgang.

Nothing would do but that the father of the obnoxious kid show Zoltan
the sheet music his son's printer had spit out that morning and ask
him if it was any good or not.


As though Zoltan weren't sufficiently destabilized emotionally by legs
and a ding-dong that didn't work anymore, his older brother Frank, an
architect, had committed suicide after a nearly identical blow to his
self-respect only a month earlier. Yes, and Frank Pepper would
eventually be popped out of his grave by the timequake, so he could
blow his brains out while his wife and three kids watched a second
time.

Here's the thing: Frank went to the drugstore for condoms or chewing
gum or whatever, and the pharmacist told him that his sixteen-year-old
daughter had become an architect and was thinking of dropping out of
high school because it was such a waste of time. She had designed a
recreation center for teenagers in depressed neighborhoods with the
help of a new computer program the school had bought for its
vocational students, dummies who weren't going to anything but junior
colleges. It was called Palladio.

Frank went to a computer store, and asked if he could try out Palladio
before buying it. He doubted very much that it could help anyone with
his native talent and education. So right there in the store, and in a
period of no more than half an hour, Palladio gave him what he had
asked it for, working drawings that would enable a contractor to build
a three-story parking garage in the manner of Thomas Jefferson.

Frank had made up the craziest assignment he could think of, confident
that Palladio would tell him to take his custom elsewhere. But it
didn't! It presented him with menu after menu, asking how many cars,
and in what city, because of various local building codes, and whether
trucks would be allowed to use it, too, and on and on. It even asked
about surrounding buildings, and whether Jeffersonian architecture
would be in harmony with them. It offered to give him alternative
plans in the manner of Michael Graves or I. M. Pei.

It gave him plans for the wiring and plumbing, and ballpark estimates
of what it would cost to build in any part of the world he cared to
name.

So Frank went home and killed himself the first time.


Laughing and crying there in his wife's office at the Academy on the
first of two Christmas Eves, 2000, Zoltan Pepper said this to his
pretty but gawky wife: "It used to be said of a man who had suffered a
catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his
head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now."

He was speaking, of course, of microchips.

10





Allie died in New Jersey. She and her husband, Jim, also a native
Hoosier, are buried whole in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. So
is James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet, a never-married lush. So is
John Dillinger, the beloved bank robber of the 1930s. So are our
parents, Kurt and Edith, and Father's kid brother Alex Vonnegut, the
Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who said, whenever life was
good, "If this isn't nice, what is?" So are two previous generations
of our parents' forebears: a brewer, an architect, merchants and
musicians, and their wives, of course. 

Full house!


John Dillinger, a farm boy, escaped from jail once brandishing a
wooden pistol he had whittled from a broken washtub slat. He blackened
it with shoe polish! He was so entertaining. While on the run, robbing
banks and vanishing into the boondocks, Dillinger wrote Henry Ford a
fan letter. He thanked the old anti-Semite for making such fast and
agile getaway cars!

It was possible to get away from the police back then if you were a
better driver with a better car. Talk about fair play! Talk about what
we say we want for everyone in America: a level playing field! And
Dillinger robbed only the rich and strong, banks with armed guards,
and in person.

Dillinger wasn't a simpering, sly swindler. He was an athlete.


In the slavering search for subversive literature on the shelves of
our public schools, which will never stop, the two most subversive
tales of all remain untouched, wholly unsuspected. One is the story of
Robin Hood. As ill educated as John Dillinger was, that was surely his
inspiration: a reputable blueprint for what a real man might do with
life.

The minds of children in intellectually humble American homes back
then weren't swamped with countless stories from TV sets. They heard
or read only a few stories, and so could remember them, and maybe
learn something from them. Everywhere in the English-speaking world,
one of those was "Cinderella." Another was "The Ugly Duckling."
Another was the story of Robin Hood.

And another, as disrespectful of established authority as the story of
Robin Hood, which "Cinderella" and "The Ugly Duckling" are not, is the
life of Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament.


G-men, under orders from J. Edgar Hoover, the unmarried homosexual
director of the FBI, shot Dillinger dead, simply executed him as he
came out of a movie theater with a date. He hadn't pulled a gun, or
lunged or dived, or tried to run away. He was like anybody else coming
out into the real world after a movie, awakening from enchantment. He
was killed because he had for too long made G-men, all of whom then
wore fedoras, look non compos mentis, like nincompoops.

That was in 1934. I was eleven. Allie was sixteen. Allie wept and
raged, and we both reviled Dillinger's date at the movie. This bitch,
and there was nothing else to call her, tipped off the feds about
where Dillinger would be that night. She said she would be wearing an
orange dress. The nondescript gink by her side when she came out would
be the man the gay director of the FBI had branded Public Enemy Number
One.

She was Hungarian. As the old saying goes: "If you have a Hungarian
for a friend, you don't need an enemy."


Allie later had her picture taken with Dillinger's big tombstone at
Crown Hill, not far from the fence on West Thirty-eighth Street. I
myself came upon it from time to time, while shooting crows with a .22
semiautomatic rifle our gun-nut father gave me for my birthday. Crows
back then were classified as enemies of mankind. Given half a chance,
they would eat our corn.

One kid I knew shot a golden eagle. You should have seen the
wing-spread!

Allie hated hunting so much that I stopped doing it, and so did
Father. As I've written elsewhere, he had become a gun nut and hunter
in order to prove that he wasn't effeminate, even though he was in the
arts, an architect and a painter and potter. In public lectures, I
myself often say, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you
don't have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go
into the arts."

Father supposed he could still demonstrate his manhood by fishing. But
then my big brother Bernie spoiled that for him, too, saying it was as
though he were smashing up Swiss pocketwatches, or some other
exquisitely engineered little pieces of machinery.


I told Kilgore Trout at the clambake in 2001 about how my brother and
sister had made Father ashamed of hunting and fishing. He quoted
Shakespeare: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a
thankless child!"

Trout was self-educated, never having finished high school. I was
mildly surprised, then, that he could quote Shakespeare. I asked if he
had committed a lot of that remarkable author's words to memory. He
said, "Yes, dear colleague, including a single sentence which
describes life as lived by human beings so completely that no writer
after him need ever have written another word."

"Which sentence was that, Mr. Trout?" I asked.

And he said, " 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women
merely players.' "

11





I wrote a letter to an old friend last spring about why I evidently
couldn't write publishable fiction anymore, after trying and failing
to do that for many years. He is Edward Muir, a poet and advertising
man my age living in Scarsdale. In my novel Cat's Cradle, I say that
anybody whose life keeps tangling up with yours for no logical reason
is likely a member of your karass, a team God has formed to get
something done for Him. Ed Muir is surely a member of my karass.

Listen to this: When I was at the University of Chicago after World
War Two, Ed was there, although we did not meet. When I went to
Schenectady, New York, to be a publicist for the General Electric
Company, Ed went there to be a teacher at Union College. When I quit
GE and moved to Cape Cod, he showed up there as a recruiter for the
Great Books Program. At last we met, and whether in the service of God
or not, my first wife Jane and I became leaders of a Great Books
group.


And when he took an advertising job in Boston, so did I, not knowing
he had done that. When Ed's first marriage broke up, so did mine, and
now we're both in New York. My point, though, is as follows: When I
sent him a letter about my case of writer's block, he made it look
like a poem and returned it.

He left off my salutation and the first few lines, which were in
praise of Reader's Block by David Markson, who had been his student at
Union College. I said David shouldn't thank Fate for letting him write
such a good book in a time when large numbers of people could no
longer be wowed by a novel, no matter how excellent. Something like
that. I don't have a copy of my letter as prose. As a poem, though,
this is its appearance:

And no thanks to Fate.  When we're gone, there won't be anybody
Sufficiently excited by ink on paper To realise how good it is.

I have this ailment not unlike Ambulatory pneumonia, which might be
called Ambulatory writer's block.

I cover paper with words every day, But the stories never go anywhere
I find worth going.

Slaughterhouse-Five has been turned Into an opera by a young German,
And will have its premiere in Munich this June.  I'm not going there
either.  Not interested.


I am fond of Occam's Razor, Or the Law of Parsimony, which suggests
That the simplest explanation of a phenomenon Is usually the most
trustworthy.

And I now believe, with David's help, That writer's block is finding
out How lives of loved ones really ended Instead of the way we hoped
they would end With the help of our body English.  Fiction is body
English.


Whatever.


It was nice of Ed to do that. Another nice story about him is from his
days as a road man for Great Books. He is a minor poet, publishing
occasionally in The Atlantic Monthly and suchlike. His name, though,
is nearly identical with that of the major poet Edwin Muir, a Scotsman
who died in 1959. Hazily sophisticated people sometimes asked him if
he was the poet, meaning Edwin.

One time, when Ed told a woman he wasn't the poet, she expressed deep
disappointment. She said one of her favorite poems was "The Poet
Covers His Child." Get a load of this: It was the American Ed Muir who
wrote that poem.

12





I wish I'd written Our Town. I wish I'd invented Rollerblades.


I asked A. E. Hotchner, a friend and biographer of the late Ernest
Hemingway, if Hemingway had ever shot a human being, not counting
himself. Hotchner said, "No."


I asked the late great German novelist Heinrich Boll what the basic
flaw was in the German character. He said, "Obedience."


I asked one of my adopted nephews what he thought of my dancing. He
said, "Acceptable."


When I took a job in Boston as an advertising copywriter, because I
was broke, an account executive asked me what kind of name Vonnegut
was. I said, "German." He said, "Germans killed six million of my
cousins."


You want to know why I don't have AIDS, why I'm not HIV-positive like
so many other people? I don't fuck around. It's as simple as that.

Trout said this was the story on why AIDS and new strains of syph and
clap and the blueballs were making the rounds like Avon ladies run
amok: On September 1st of 1945, immediately after the end of World War
Two, representatives of all the chemical elements held a meeting on
the planet Tralfamadore. They were there to protest some of their
members' having been incorporated into the bodies of big, sloppy,
stinky organisms as cruel and stupid as human beings.

Elements such as Polonium and Ytterbium, which had never been
essential parts of human beings, were nonetheless outraged that any
chemicals should be so misused.


Carbon, although an embarrassed veteran of countless massacres
throughout history, focused the attention of the meeting on the public
execution of only one man, accused of treason in fifteenth-century
England. He was hanged until almost dead. He was revived. His abdomen
was slit open.

The executioner pulled out a loop of his intestines. He dangled the
loop before the man's face and burned it with a torch here and there.
The loop was still attached to the rest of the man's insides. The
executioner and his assistants tied a horse to each of his four limbs.

They whipped the horses, which ripped the man into four jagged pieces.
These were hung on display from meathooks in a marketplace.


It had been agreed before the meeting was called to order that no one
was to tell of terrible things grown-up human beings had done to
children, according to Trout. Several delegates threatened to boycott
the meeting if they were expected to sit still while listening to
tales that sickening. What would be the point?

"What grownups had done to grownups left no doubt that the human race
should be exterminated," said Trout. "Rehashing ad nauseam what
grownups had done to children would be gilding the lily, so to speak."


Nitrogen wept about its involuntary servitude as parts of Nazi guards
and physicians in death camps during World War Two. Potassium told
hair-raising stories about the Spanish Inquisition, and Calcium about
the Roman Games, and Oxygen about black African slavery.

Sodium said enough was enough, that any further testimony would be
coals to Newcastle. It made a motion that all chemicals involved in
medical research combine whenever possible to create ever more
powerful antibiotics. These in turn would cause disease organisms to
evolve new strains that were resistant to them.

In no time, Sodium predicted, every human ailment, including acne and
jock itch, would be not only incurable but fatal. "All humans will
die," said Sodium, according to Trout. "As they were at the birth of
the Universe, all elements will be free of sin again."


Iron and Magnesium seconded Sodium's motion. Phosphorus called for a
vote. The motion was passed by acclamation.

13





Kilgore Trout was right next door to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters on Christmas Eve, 2000, when Zoltan Pepper said to his wife
that people were now getting their heads handed to them with tweezers
instead of on platters. Trout couldn't hear him. There was a thick
masonry wall between them as the paraplegic composer ranted on about
the seeming mania for making people compete with machines that were
smarter than they were.

Pepper asked this rhetorical question: "Why is it so important that we
all be humiliated, with such ingenuity and at such great expense? We
never thought we were such hot stuff in the first place."


Trout was sitting on his cot in a shelter for homeless men that was
once the Museum of the American Indian. Arguably the most prolific
writer of short stories in history, he had been caught by the police
in a sweep of the New York Public Library down at Fifth Avenue and
Forty-second Street. He and about thirty others who had been living
there, what Trout called "sacred cattle," were carted off in a black
school bus and deposited in the shelter way-the-hell-and-gone up on
West 155th Street.

The Museum of the American Indian had moved the detritus of
overwhelmed aborigines, and dioramas of how they lived before the shit
hit the fan, into a safer neighborhood downtown, five years before
Trout arrived.

He was eighty-four years old now, having passed another milestone on
November 11th, 2000. He would the on Labor Day, 2001, still
eighty-four. But by then the timequake would have given him and all
the rest of us an unexpected bonus, if you can call it that, of
another ten years.

He would write of the rerun when it was over, in a
never-to-be-finished memoir entitled My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot:
"Listen, if it isn't a timequake dragging us through knothole after
knothole, it's something else just as mean and powerful."


"This was a man," I said in Timequake One, "an only child, whose
father, a college professor in Northampton, Massachusetts, murdered
his mother when the man was only twelve years old."

I said Trout had been a hobo, throwing away his stories instead of
offering them to publications, since the autumn of 1975. I said that
was after he received news of the death of his own only child, Leon, a
deserter from the United States Marine Corps. Leon, I said, was
accidentally decapitated in a shipyard accident in Sweden, where he
had been granted political asylum and was working as a welder.

I said Trout was fifty-nine when he hit the road, never to have a home
again until he was given, when he was about to die, the Ernest
Hemingway Suite at the Rhode Island writers' retreat called Xanadu.


When Trout checked into the former Museum of the American Indian, a
former reminder of the most extensive and persistent genocide known to
history, "The Sisters B-36" was burning a hole in his pocket, so to
speak. He had finished the story at the Public Library downtown, but
the police had taken him into custody before he could get rid of it.

So he kept his war-surplus Navy overcoat on when he told the clerk at
the shelter that his name was Vincent van Gogh, and that he had no
living relatives. Then he went outdoors again, and it was cold enough
to freeze the balls off a brass monkey out there, and he put the
manuscript into the lidless wire trash receptacle, which was chained
and padlocked to a fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters.

When he got back into the shelter, after an absence of ten minutes,
the clerk said to him, "Where have you been? We all sure missed you,
Vince." And he told him where his cot was. It was butted up against
the companion wall between the shelter and the Academy.

On the Academy side of the wall, hanging over the rosewood desk of
Monica Pepper, was a painting of a bleached cow's skull on a desert
floor, by Georgia O'Keeffe. On Trout's side, right over the head of
his cot, was a poster telling him never to stick his ding-dong into
anything without first putting on a condom.


After the timequake hit, and then the rerun was finally over, and free
will had kicked in again, Trout and Monica would get to know each
other. Her desk, incidentally, had once belonged to the novelist Henry
James. Her chair had once belonged to the composer and conductor
Leonard Bernstein.

When Trout realized how close his cot had been to her desk during the
fifty-one days before the timequake struck, he would remark as
follows: "If I'd had a bazooka, I could have blown a hole in the wall
between us. If I hadn't killed one or both of us, I could have asked
you, 'What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like that?' "

14





A bum on a cot next to Trout's at the shelter wished him a Merry
Christmas. Trout replied, "Ting-a-ling! Ting-a-ling!"

It was only by chance that his reply was appropriate to the holiday,
alluding, one might suppose, to the bells of Santa Claus's sleigh on a
rooftop. But Trout would have said "Ting-a-ling" to anybody who
offered him an empty greeting, such as "How's it goin'?" or "Nice day"
or whatever, no matter what the season.

Depending on his body language and tone of voice and social
circumstances, he could indeed make it mean "And a merry Christmas to
you, too." But it would also mean, like the Hawaiian's aloha, "Hello"
or "Good-bye." The old science fiction writer could make it mean
"Please" or "Thanks" as well, or "Yes" or "No," or "I couldn't agree
with you more," or "If your brains were dynamite, there wouldn't be
enough to blow your hat off."


I asked him at Xanadu in the summer of 2001 how "Ting-a-ling" had
become such a frequent appoggiatura, or grace note, in his
conversations. He gave me what would later turn out to have been a
superficial explanation. "It was something I crowed during the war,"
he said, "when an artillery barrage I'd called for landed right on
target: 'Ting-a-ling! Ting-a-ling!' "

About an hour later, and this was on the afternoon before the
clambake, he beckoned me into his suite with a crooked finger. He
closed the door behind us. "You really want to know about
'Ting-a-ling'?" he asked me.

I had been satisfied with his first account. Trout was the one who
wanted me to hear much more. My innocent question earlier had
triggered memories of his ghastly childhood in Northampton. He could
exorcise them only by telling what they were.

"My father murdered my mother," said Kilgore Trout, "when I was twelve
years old."


"Her body was in our basement," said Trout, "but all I knew was that
she had disappeared. Father swore he had no idea what had become of
her. He said, as wife-murderers often do, that maybe she had gone to
visit relatives. He killed her that morning, after I left for school.

"He got supper for the two of us that night. Father said he would
report her as a missing person to the police the next morning, if we
hadn't heard from her by then. He said, 'She has been very tired and
nervous lately. Have you noticed that?' "


"He was insane," said Trout. "How insane? He came into my bedroom at
midnight. He woke me up. He said he had something important to tell
me. It was nothing but a dirty joke, but this poor, sick man had come
to believe it a parable about the awful blows that life had dealt him.
It was about a fugitive who sought shelter from the police in the home
of a woman he knew.

"Her living room had a cathedral ceiling, which is to say it went all
the way up to the roof peak, with rustic rafters spanning the air
space below." Trout paused. It was as though he were as caught up in
the tale as his father must have been.

He went on, there in the suite named in honor of the suicide Ernest
Hemingway: "She was a widow, and he stripped himself naked while she
went to fetch some of her husband's clothes. But before he could put
them on, the police were hammering on the front door with their billy
clubs. So the fugitive hid on top of a rafter. When the woman let in
the police, though, his oversize testicles hung down in full view."

Trout paused again.


"The police asked the woman where the guy was. The woman said she
didn't know what guy they were talking about," said Trout. "One of the
cops saw the testicles hanging down from a rafter and asked what they
were. She said they were Chinese temple bells. He believed her. He
said he 'd always wanted to hear Chinese temple bells.

"He gave them a whack with his billy club, but there was no sound. So
he hit them again, a lot harder, a whole lot harder. Do you know what
the guy on the rafter shrieked?" Trout asked me.

I said I didn't.

"He shrieked, 'TING-A-LING, YOU SON OF A BITCH!' "

15





The Academy should have moved its staff and treasures to a safer
neighborhood when the Museum of the American Indian did so with its
genocide mementos. It was still stuck way-the-hell-and-gone uptown,
amid nothing but people with lives not worth living for miles in every
direction, because its dwindling and demoralized membership couldn't
bestir itself to OK a move.

To be perfectly frank, the only people who cared what became of the
Academy were its staff, office workers, cleaning and maintenance
people, and armed guards. Nor were most of them enraptured by
old-fashioned art practices. They needed the jobs, no matter how
pointless the work might be, and so were reminiscent of people during
the Great Depression of the 1930s, who celebrated when they got any
kind of work at all.

Trout characterized the sort of work he was able to get back then as
"cleaning birdshit out of cuckoo clocks."


The Academy's Executive Secretary certainly needed the work. Monica
Pepper, who looked so much like my sister Allie, was the sole support
of herself and her husband Zoltan, whom she had rendered hors de
combat with a swan dive. So she had fortified the building by
replacing the wooden front door with half-inch steel armorplate,
fitted with a whoozit, or peephole, which could also be closed and
locked.

She had done all she could to make the place look as abandoned and
looted as the ruins of Columbia University two miles to the south. The
windows, like the front door, were shuttered with steel, and the
shutters were concealed in turn by rough plywood painted black and
camouflaged with graffiti, which ran continuously across the whole
façade. The staff had done the garish artwork. Monica herself had
spray-painted "FUCK ART!" in orange and purple across the steel front
door.


It so happened that an African-American armed guard named Dudley
Prince was looking out through that door's whoozit when Trout put "The
Sisters B-36" in the trash receptacle out front. Bums interacting with
the receptacle were no novelty, God knows, but Trout, whom Prince
mistook for a bag lady rather than a bag gentleman, put on an unusual
show out there.

Here's the thing about Trout's appearance from a distance: Instead of
trousers, he wore three layers of thermal underwear, revealing the
shapes of his calves below the hem of his unisex war-surplus Navy
overcoat. Yes, and he wore sandals rather than boots, another
seemingly feminine touch, as was his babushka, fashioned from a crib
blanket printed with red balloons and blue teddy bears.

Trout was out there talking to and gesturing at the lidless wire
basket as though it were an editor in an old-fashioned book-publishing
house, and as though his four-page handwritten yellow manuscript were
a great novel, sure to sell like hotcakes. He wasn't remotely crazy.
He would later say of his performance: "It was the world that had
suffered the nervous breakdown. I was just having fun in a nightmare,
arguing with an imaginary editor about the advertising budget, and
about who should play whom in the movie, and personal appearances on
TV shows and so on, perfectly harmless funny stuff."

His behavior was so outré that a genuine bag lady passing by asked
him, "Are you OK, honey?"

To which Trout replied with all possible gusto, "Ting-a-ling!
Ting-a-ling!"


When Trout returned to the shelter, though, the armed guard Dudley
Prince unbolted the steel front door and, motivated, by boredom and
curiosity, retrieved the manuscript. He wanted to know what it was a
bag lady, with every reason to commit suicide, one would think, had
deep-sixed so ecstatically.

16





Here, for whatever it may be worth, and from Timequake One, is Kilgore
Trout's explanation of the timequake and its aftershocks, the rerun,
excerpted from his unfinished memoir My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot.

"The timequake of 2001 was a cosmic charley horse in the sinews of
Destiny. At what was in New York City 2:27 p.m. on February 13th of
that year, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should
it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?

"It fibrillated with indecision. Maybe it should have a family reunion
back where it all began, and then make a great big BANG again.

"It suddenly shrunk ten years. It zapped me and everybody else back to
February 17th, 1991, what was for me 7:51 a.m., and a line outside a
blood bank in San Diego, California.

"For reasons best known to itself, though, the Universe canceled the
family reunion, for the nonce at least. It resumed expansion. Which
faction, if any, cast the deciding votes on whether to expand or
shrink, I cannot say. Despite my having lived for eighty-four years,
or ninety-four, if you want to count the rerun, many questions, about
the Universe remain for me unanswered.

"That the rerun lasted ten years, short a mere four days., some are
saying now, is proof that there is a God, and that He is on the
Decimal System. He has ten fingers and ten toes, just as we do, they
say, and uses them when He does arithmetic.

"I have my doubts. I can't help it. That's the way I am. Even if my
father, the ornithologist Professor Raymond Trout of Smith College in
Northampton, Massachusetts, hadn't murdered my mother, a housewife and
poet, I believe I would have been that way. Then again, I have never
made a serious study of the different religions, and so am unqualified
to comment. About all I know for certain is that devout Muslims do not
believe in Santa Claus."


On the first of the two Christmas Eves, 2000, the still religious
African-American armed guard Dudley Prince thought Trout's "The
Sisters B-36" just might be a message for the Academy from God
Himself. What happened to the planet Booboo, after all, wasn't a whole
lot different from what seemed to be happening to his own planet, and
especially to his employers, what was left of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street, two
doors west of Broadway.

Trout got to know Prince, just as he got to know Monica Pepper and me,
after the rerun ended and free will had kicked in again. Because of
what the timequake had done to Prince, he had become as contemptuous
of the idea of a wise and just God as my sister Allie had been. Allie
opined one time, not just about her life but everybody's life, "If
there is a God, He sure hates people. That's all I can say."

When Trout heard about how seriously Prince had taken "The Sisters
B-36" on the first Christmas Eve, 2000, about how Prince believed a
bag lady had put on such a show while throwing the yellow manuscript
pages away to ensure that Prince would wonder what they were and
retrieve them, the old science fiction writer commented: "Perfectly
understandable, Dudley. For anybody who could believe in God, as you
once did, it would be a piece of cake to believe in the planet
Booboo."


Get a load of what was going to happen to Dudley Prince, a monumental
figure of authority and decency in the uniform of the security company
that protected the beleaguered Academy around the clock, a holstered
pistol at his hip, only fifty-one days from the first of the two
Christmas Eves, 2000: The timequake was going to zap him back into a
solitary confinement cell, into the hole, within the walls and towers
of the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Facility at
Athena, sixty miles south of his hometown of Rochester, where he used
to own a little video rental store.

To be sure, the timequake had made him ten years younger, but that was
no break in his case. It meant he was again serving two consecutive
life sentences, without hope of parole, for the rape and murder of a
ten-year-old girl of Chinese-American and Italian-American parentage,
Kimberly Wang, in a Rochester crack house, of which he was entirely
innocent!


Granted, at the start of the rerun Dudley Prince could remember, as
could the rest of us, everything that was going to happen to him
during the next ten years. He knew that in seven years he would be
exonerated by DNA tests of dried ejaculate material on the victim's
panties. This exculpatory evidence would again be found languishing in
a glassine envelope in the walk-in vault of the District Attorney who
had framed him in the hopes of being nominated for Governor.

And, oh yes, that same DA would be found wearing cement overshoes on
the bottom of Lake Cayuga in just six more years. Prince meanwhile was
going to have to earn a High School Equivalency Certificate again, and
make Jesus the center of his life again, and on and on.


And then, after he was sprung again, he would have to go on TV talk
shows again with other people who had been wrongly incarcerated and
then rightly exonerated, to say prison was the luckiest thing that
ever happened to him because he found Jesus there.

17





On either one of the two Christmas Eves, 2000, and it didn't matter
which, except for people's opinions of what was going on, the
ex-jailbird Dudley Prince delivered "The Sisters B-36" to Monica
Pepper's office. Her husband Zoltan in his wheelchair was predicting
the end of literacy in the not-too-distant future.

"The prophet Mohammed couldn't do it," Zoltan was saying. "Jesus,
Mary, and Joseph probably couldn't do it, Mary Magdalen couldn't do
it. The Emperor Charlemagne confessed he couldn't do it. It was just
too hard! Nobody in the whole Western Hemisphere could do it, not even
the sophisticated Mayas and Incas and Aztecs could imagine how to do
it, until the Europeans came.

"Most Europeans back then couldn't read and write, either. The few who
could were specialists. I promise you, sweetheart, thanks to TV that
will very soon be the case again."

And then Dudley Prince said, rerun or not, "Excuse me, but I think
maybe somebody is trying to tell us something.''


Monica read "The Sisters B-36" quickly, with increasing impatience,
and declared it ridiculous. She handed it to her husband. But he got
no further than the name of the author before he became electrified.
"My God, my God," he exclaimed, "after a quarter of a century of
perfect silence, Kilgore Trout has come into my life again!"

Here's the explanation of Zoltan Pepper's reaction: When Zoltan was a
high school sophomore in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he copied a story
from one of his father's collection of old science fiction magazines.
He submitted it to his English teacher, Mrs. Florence Wilkerson, as
his own creation. It was one of the last stories Kilgore Trout would
ever submit to a publisher. By the time Zoltan was a sophomore, Trout
was a bum.

The plagiarized story was about a planet in another galaxy, where the
little green people, each with only one eye in the middle of his or
her forehead, could get food only if they could sell goods or services
to somebody else. The planet ran out of customers, and nobody could
think of anything sensible to do about that. All the little green
people starved to death.

Mrs. Wilkerson suspected plagiarism. Zoltan confessed, thinking it was
a funny rather than a serious thing he'd done. To him, plagiarism was
what Trout would have called a mopery, "indecent exposure in the
presence of a blind person of the same sex."


Mrs. Wilkerson decided to teach Zoltan a lesson. She had him write, "I
STOLE PROPERTY FROM KILGORE TROUT," on the blackboard while the class
watched. Then, for the next week, she made him wear a shirt cardboard
with the letter P on it, hung on his chest from around his neck,
whenever he was in her classroom. She could get the piss sued out of
her for doing that to a student nowadays. But then was then, and now
is now.

The inspiration for what Mrs. Wilkerson did to young Zoltan Pepper was
of course The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In that one, a
woman has to wear a big A for adultery on her bosom because she let a
man not her husband ejaculate in her birth canal. She won't tell what
his name is. He's preacher!


Since Dudley Prince said it was a bag lady who had put the story in
the trash receptacle out front, Zoltan didn't consider the possibility
that it had been Trout himself. "It could have been his daughter or
granddaughter," he speculated. "Trout himself must have died years
ago. I certainly hope so, and may his soul rot in Hell."

But Trout was right next door! He was feeling just great! He was so
relieved at having gotten rid of "The Sisters B-36" that he had
started another story. He had been completing a story every ten days,
on average, since he was fourteen. That was thirty-six a year, say.
This one could have been his twenty-five-hundredth! It wasn't set on
another planet. It was set in the office of a psychiatrist in St.
Paul, Minnesota.

The name of the shrink was the name of the story, too, which was "Dr.
Schadenfreude." This doctor had his patients lie on a couch and talk,
all right, but they could ramble on only about dumb or crazy things
that had happened to total strangers in supermarket tabloids or on TV
talk shows.

If a patient accidentally said "I" or "me" or "my" or "myself" or
"mine," Dr. Schadenfreude went ape. He leapt out of his overstuffed
leather chair. He stamped his feet. He flapped his arms.

He put his livid face directly over the patient. He snarled and barked
things like this: "When will you ever learn that nobody cares anything
about you, you, you, you boring, insignificant piece of poop? Your
whole problem is you think you matter! Get over that, or sashay your
stuck-up butt the hell out of here!"

18





A bum on a cot next to Trout's asked him what he was writing. It was
the opening paragraph of "Dr. Schadenfreude." Trout said it was a
story. The bum said maybe Trout could get some money from the people
next door. When Trout heard it was the American Academy of Arts and
Letters next door, he said, "It might as well be a Chinese barber
college as far as I'm concerned. I don't write literature. Literature
is all those la-di-da monkeys next door care about.

"Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing,
three-dimensional characters with ink on paper," he went on.
"Wonderful! As though the planet weren't already dying because it has
three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional
characters!"

The only people next door, actually, of course, were Monica and Zoltan
Pepper, and the three-man day shift of armed guards, headed by Dudley
Prince. Monica had given her office and janitorial staffs the day off
for last-minute Christmas shopping. As it happened!, they were all
Christian or agnostic or apostate.

The night shift of armed guards would be entirely Muslim. As Trout
would write at Xanadu, in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: "Muslims do
not believe in Santa Claus."


"In my entire career as a writer," said Trout in the former Museum of
the American Indian, "I created only one living, breathing,
three-dimensional character. I did it with my ding-dong in a birth
canal. Ting-a-ling!" He was referring to his son Leon, the deserter
from the United States Marines in time of war, subsequently
decapitated in a Swedish shipyard.

"If I'd wasted my time creating characters," Trout said, "I would
never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really
matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and
cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and
heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in."


Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he
created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against
so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It
was generic among writers of science fiction.

19





Strictly speaking, many of Trout's stories, except for their
unbelievable characters, weren't science fiction at all. "Dr.
Schadenfreude" wasn't, unless one is humorless enough to regard
psychiatry as a science. The one he deposited in the Academy's trash
receptacle after "Dr. Schadenfreude," with the timequake drawing ever
nearer, "Bunker Bingo Party," was a roman à clef.

That one was set in Adolf Hitler's commodious bombproof bunker
underneath the ruins of Berlin, Germany, at the end of World War Two
in Europe. In that story, Trout calls his war, and my war, also,
"Western Civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit
suicide." He did that in conversations, too, one time adding in my
presence, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, please try again."

Tanks and infantry of the Soviet Union are only a few hundred yards
away from the bunker's iron door up at street level. "Hitler, trapped
below, the most loathsome human being who ever lived," wrote Trout,
"doesn't know whether to shit or go blind. He is down there with his
mistress Eva Braun and a few close friends, including Joseph Goebbels,
his Minister of Propaganda, and Goebbels's wife and kids."

For want of anything else remotely decisive to do, Hitler proposes
marriage to Eva. She accepts!

At this point in the story, Trout asked this rhetorical question, an
aside with a paragraph all to itself:

"What the heck?"


Everybody forgets his or her troubles during the marriage ceremony.
After the groom kisses the bride, though, the party goes flat again.
"Goebbels has a clubfoot," Trout wrote. "But Goebbels has always had a
clubfoot. That is not the problem."

Goebbels remembers that his kids have brought the game of Bingo with
them. It was captured intact from American troops during the Battle of
the Bulge some four months earlier. I myself was captured intact
during that battle. Germany, in order to conserve its resources, has
stopped making its own Bingo games. Because of that, and because the
grownups in the bunker have been so busy during the rise of Hitler,
and now his fall, the Goebbels kids are the only ones who know how the
game is played. They learned from a neighbor kid, whose family owned a
prewar Bingo set.

There is this amazing scene in the story: A boy and a girl, explaining
the rules of Bingo, become the center of the Universe for Nazis in
full regalia, including a gaga Adolf Hitler.


That we have a copy of "Bunker Bingo Party," and copies of the four
other stories Trout threw away in front of the Academy before the
timequake hit, is due to Dudley Prince. The first time through, when
the decade was original material, he continued to believe, as Monica
Pepper did not, that a bag lady was using the trash receptacle for a
mailbox, knowing he would be watching her crazy dances through the
whoozit in the steel front door.

Prince retrieved each story and pondered it, hoping to discover some
important message from a higher power encoded therein. After work,
rerun or not, this was a lonely African-American.

20





In the summer of 2001 at Xanadu, Dudley Prince handed Trout the sheaf
of stories, which Trout had expected the Department of Sanitation to
incinerate or bury or drop in the ocean far offshore before anyone
other than himself had read them. By his own account to me, Trout
riffled through the scruffy pages with distaste, while seated
tailor-fashion and naked on his king-size bed in the Ernest Hemingway
Suite. The day was hot. He was fresh from his Jacuzzi.

But then his gaze fell upon the scene in which two anti-Semitic
children teach Bingo to high-ranking Nazis in their madly theatrical
uniforms. In amazed admiration for something brilliant he himself had
written, and Trout had never thought of himself as worth a hill of
beans as a writer, he praised the scene as an echo of this prophecy
from the Book of Isaiah:

"The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie
down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling
together; and a little child shall lead them."


A fatling is any young animal fattened for slaughter.


"I read that scene," Trout told me and Monica, "and I asked myself,
'How the hell did I do that?'"

That wasn't the first time I'd heard a person who had done a
remarkable piece of work ask that delightful question. Back in the
1960s, long, long before the timequake, I had a great big old house in
Barn-stable Village on Cape Cod, where my first wife, Jane Marie
Vonnegut, née Cox, and I were raising four boys and two girls. The ell
where I did my writing was falling down.

I had it pulled all the way down and hauled away. I hired my friend
Ted Adler, a skilled man-of-all-work my age, to build me a new one
like the old one. Ted alone built the forms for the footings. Ted
supervised the pouring of concrete from a ready-mix truck. He
personally laid concrete blocks atop the footings. He framed the
superstructure, put on the sheathing and siding, and shingled the roof
and wired the place. He hung the windows and doors. He nailed up and
jointed the Sheetrock inside.

The Sheetrock was the last step. I myself would do the exterior and
interior painting. I told Ted I wanted to do at least that much, or he
would have done that, too. When he himself had finished, and he had
taken all the scraps I didn't want for kindling to the dump, he had me
stand next to him outside and look at my new ell from thirty feet
away.

And then, he asked it: "How the hell did I do that?"


That question remains for me in the summer of 1996 one of my three
favorite quotations. Two of the three are questions rather than good
advice of any kind. The second is Jesus Christ's "Who is it they say I
am?"

The third is from my son Mark, pediatrician and watercolorist and sax
player. I've already quoted him in another book: "We are here to help
each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

One might protest, "My dear Dr. Vonnegut, we can't all be
pediatricians."


In "Bunker Bingo Party," the Nazis participate in Bingo, with the
Minister of Propaganda, arguably the most effective communicator in
history, calling out the coordinates of winning or losing squares on
the players' cards. The game proves as analgesic for war criminals in
deep doodoo as it continues to be for harmless old biddies at church
fairs.

Several of the war criminals wear an Iron Cross, awarded only to
Germans who have demonstrated battlefield fearlessness so excessive as
to be classifiable as psychopathic. Hitler wears one. He won it as a
corporal in Western Civilization's first unsuccessful attempt to
commit suicide.

I was a PFC during the second botched effort to end it all. Like
Ernest Hemingway, I never shot a human being. Maybe Hitler never did
that big trick, either. He didn't get his country's highest decoration
for killing a lot of people. He got it for being such a brave
messenger. Not everybody on a battlefield is supposed to concentrate
on nothing but killing. I myself was an intelligence and
reconnaissance scout, going places our side hadn't occupied, looking
for enemies. I wasn't supposed to fight them if I found them. I was
supposed to stay unnoticed and alive, so I could tell my superiors
where they were, and what it looked like they were doing.

It was wintertime, and I myself was awarded my country's second-lowest
decoration, a Purple Heart for frostbite.


When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and
he bellowed, "You're a man now!"

I damn near killed my first German.


To return to Trout's roman à clef: As though there were a God in
Heaven after all, it is Der Führer who shouts "BINGO!" Adolf Hitler
wins! He says incredulously, in German, of course, "I can't believe
it. I've never played this game before, and yet I've won, I've won!
What can this be but a miracle?" He is a Roman Catholic.

He rises from his chair at the table. His eyes are still fixed on the
winning card before him, according to Trout, "as if it were a shred
from the Shroud of Turin." This prick asks, "What can this mean but
that things aren't as bad as we thought they were?"

Eva Braun spoils the moment by swallowing a capsule of cyanide.
Goebbels's wife gave it to her for a wedding present. Frau Goebbels
had more capsules than she needed for her immediate family. Trout
wrote of Eva Braun, "Her only crime was to have allowed a monster to
ejaculate in her birth canal. These things happen to the best of
women."

A Communistic 240-millimeter howitzer shell explodes atop the bunker.
Flakes of calcimine from the shaken ceiling shower down on the
deafened occupants. Hitler himself makes a joke, demonstrating that he
still has his sense of humor. "It snows," he says. That is a poetic
way of saying, too, it is high time he killed himself, unless he wants
to become a caged superstar in a traveling freak show, along with the
bearded lady and the geek.

He puts a pistol to his head. Everybody says, "Nein, nein, nein." He
convinces everyone that shooting himself is the dignified thing to do.
What should his last words be? He says, "How about 'I regret nothing'?
"

Goebbels replies that such a statement would be appropriate, but that
the Parisian cabaret performer Edith Piaf has made a worldwide
reputation by singing those same words in French for decades. "Her
sobriquet," says Goebbels, "is 'Little Sparrow.' You don't want to be
remembered as a little sparrow, or I miss my guess."

Hitler still hasn't lost his sense of humor. He says, "How about
'BINGO'?"

But he is tired. He puts the pistol to his head again. He says, "I
never asked to be born in the first place."

The pistol goes "BANG!"

21





I am Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, whose
headquarters in Amherst, New York, I have never seen. I succeeded the
late author and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that functionless
capacity. That we have an organization, a boring business, is to let
others know we are numerous. We would prefer to live our lives as
Humanists and not talk about it, or think more about it than we think
about breathing.

Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation
of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe
has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the
highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our
community.


Are we enemies of members of organized religions? No. My great war
buddy Bernard V. O'Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic
during World War Two. I didn't like that. I thought that was too much
to lose.

I had never had faith like that, because I had been raised by
interesting and moral people who, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin
Franklin, were nonetheless skeptics about what preachers said was
going on. But I knew Bernie had lost something important and
honorable.

Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so
much.


I spoke at a Humanist Association memorial service for Dr. Asimov a
few years back. I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the
funniest thing I could have said to an audience of Humanists. I rolled
them in the aisles. The room was like the court-martial scene in
Trout's "No Laughing Matter," right before the floor of the Pacific
Ocean swallowed up the third atomic bomb and Joy's Pride and all the
rest of it.

When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me,
"He's up in Heaven now."


I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another
book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone
as an afterlife.

I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and Bingo games.


Yesterday, Wednesday, July 3rd, 1996, I received a well-written letter
from a man who never asked to be born in the first place, and who has
been a captive of our nonpareil correctional facilities, first as a
juvenile offender and then as an adult offender, for many years. He is
about to be released into a world where he has no friends or
relatives. Free will is about to kick in again, after a hiatus of a
good deal more than a decade. What should he do?

I, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, wrote back
today, "Join a church." I said this because what such a grown-up waif
needs more than anything is something like a family.


I couldn't recommend Humanism for such a person. I wouldn't do so for
the great majority of the planet's population.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis,
said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of
religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably
middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture
enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the Humanists'
Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman
Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more
frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion
was for them.


With some trepidation, I told Trout in the summer of 2001 about my
advice to the man soon to be expelled from prison. He asked if I had
heard from this person again, if I knew what had become of him in the
intervening five years, or in the intervening ten years, if we wanted
to count the rerun. I hadn't and didn't.

He asked if I myself had ever tried to join a church, just for the
hell of it, to find out what that was like. He had. The closest I ever
came to that, I said, was when my second-wife-to-be, Jill Krementz,
and I thought it would be cute, and also ritzy, to be married in the
Little Church Around the Corner, a Disneyesque Episcopal house of
worship on East Twenty-ninth Street off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

"When they found out I was a divorced person," I said, "they
prescribed all sorts of penitent services I was to perform before I
was clean enough to be married there."

"There you are," said Trout. "Imagine all the chickenshit you'd have
to go through if you were an ex-con. And if that poor son of a bitch
who wrote you really did find a church to accept him, he could easily
be back in prison."

"For what?" I said. "For robbing the poor box?"

"No," said Trout, "for delighting Jesus Christ by shooting dead a
doctor coming to work in an abortion mill."

22





I forget what I was doing on the afternoon of February 13th, 2001,
when the timequake struck. It couldn't have been much. I sure as heck
wasn't writing another book. I was seventy-eight, for heaven's sakes!
My daughter Lily was eighteen!

Old Kilgore Trout was still writing, though. Seated on his cot at the
shelter, where everybody thought his name was Vincent van Gogh, he had
just begun a story about a working-class Londoner, Albert Hardy, also
the name of the story. Albeit Hardy was born in 1896, with his head
between his legs, and his genitalia sprouting out of the top of his
neck, which looked "like a zucchini."

Albert's parents taught him to walk on his hands and eat with his
feet. That was so they could conceal his private parts with trousers.
The private parts weren't excessively large like the testicles of the
fugitive in Trout's father's Ting-a-ling parable. That wasn't the
point.


Monica Pepper was at her desk next door, only feet away, but they
still hadn't met. She and Dudley Prince and her husband still believed
the depositor of stories in the trash receptacle out front was an old
woman, so she couldn't possibly live next door. Their best guess was
that she came from the shelter for battered old people over on Convent
Avenue, or the detox center in the parish house down at the Cathedral
of Saint John the Divine, which was unisex.

Monica's own home, and Zoltan's, was an apartment down in Turtle Bay,
a safe neighborhood seven miles away, comfortingly close to the United
Nations. She came and went from work in her own chauffeur-driven
limousine, which was modified to accommodate Zoltan's wheel-chair. The
Academy was fabulously well-to-do. Money was not a problem. Thanks to
lavish gifts from old-fashioned art lovers in the past, it was richer
than several members of the United Nations, including, surely, Mali,
Swaziland, and Luxembourg.

Zoltan had the limo that afternoon. He was on his way to pick up
Monica. She was awaiting Zoltan's arrival when the timequake struck.
He would get as far as ringing the Academy doorbell before he was
zapped back to February 17th, 1991. He would be ten years younger and
whole again!

Talk about getting a reaction from a doorbell!

When the rerun was over, though, and free will kicked in again,
everybody and everything were exactly where they had been when the
timequake struck. So Zoltan was paraplegic again in a wheelchair,
ringing the doorbell again. He didn't realize that it was all of a
sudden up to him to decide what his finger was going to do next. His
finger, for want of instructions from him or anything else, went on
ringing and ringing the doorbell.

That's what it was doing when Zoltan was smacked by a runaway fire
truck. The driver of the truck hadn't realized yet that it was up to
him to steer the thing.


As Trout wrote in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: "It was free will
that did all the damage. The timequake and its aftershocks didn't map
as much as a single strand in a spider's web, unless some other force
had snapped that strand the first time through."


Monica was working on the budget for Xanadu when the timequake struck.
The endowment of that writers' retreat up in Point Zion, Rhode Island,
the Julius King Bowen Foundation, was administered by the Academy.
Julius King Bowen, who died before Monica was born, was a
never-married white man who made a fortune during the 1920s and early
1930s with stories and lectures about the hilarious, but touching,
too, efforts by American black people to imitate successful American
white people, so they could be successful, too.

A cast-iron historical marker on the border between Point Zion's
public beach and Xanadu said the mansion had been Bowen's home and
place of work from 1922 until his death in 1936. It said President
Warren G. Harding had proclaimed Bowen "Laughter Laureate of the
United States, Master of Darky Dialects, and Heir to the Crown of King
of Humor Once Worn by Mark Twain."


As Trout would point out to me when I read that marker in 2001:
"Warren G. Harding sired an illegitimate daughter by ejaculating in
the birth canal of a stenographer in a broom closet at the White
House."

23





When Trout was zapped back to a line outside a blood bank in San
Diego, California, in 1991, he could remember how his story about the
guy with his head between his legs and his ding-dong atop his neck,
"Albert Hardy," would end. But he couldn't write that finale for ten
years, until free will kicked in again. Albert Hardy would be blown to
pieces while a soldier in the Second Battle of the Somme in World War
One.

Albert Hardy's dogtags wouldn't be found. His body parts would be
reassembled as though he had been like everybody else, with his head
atop his neck. He couldn't be given back his ding-dong. To be
perfectly frank, his ding-dong wouldn't have been what you might call
the subject of an exhaustive search.

Albert Hardy would be buried under an Eternal Flame in France, in the
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, "normal at last."


I myself was zapped back to this house near the tip of Long Island,
New York, where I am writing now, halfway through the rerun. In 1991,
as now, I was gazing at a list of all I'd published, and wondering,
"How the hell did I do that?"

I was feeling as I feel now, like whalers Herman Melville described,
who didn't talk anymore. They had said absolutely everything they
could ever say.


I told Trout in 2001 about a redheaded boyhood friend of mine, David
Craig, now a builder in New Orleans, Louisiana, who won a Bronze Star
in our war for knocking out a German tank in Normandy. He and a buddy
came upon this steel monster parked all alone in a woods. Its engine
wasn't running. There wasn't anybody outside. A radio was playing
popular music inside.

Dave and his buddy fetched a bazooka. When they got back, the tank was
still there. A radio was still playing music inside. They shot the
tank with the bazooka. Germans didn't pop out of the turret. The radio
stopped playing. That was all. That was it.

Dave and his buddy skedaddled away from there.

Trout said it sounded to him as though my boyhood friend's Bronze Star
was well deserved. "He almost certainly killed people as well as a
radio," he said, "thus sparing them years of disappointments and
tedium in civilian life. He made it possible for them, to quote the
English poet A. E. Housman, to 'die in their glory and never be old.'
"


Trout paused, secured his upper plate with his left thumb, and then
went on: "I could have written a best-seller, if I'd had the patience
to create three-dimensional characters. The Bible may be the Greatest
Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about
a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside
wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it
is still a novelty."


I was reminded of Steve Adams, one of my sister Allie 's three sons my
first wife Jane and I adopted after Allie's unlucky husband Jim died
in a railroad train that went off an open drawbridge in New Jersey,
and then, two days later, Allie died of cancer of the everything.

When Steve came home to Cape Cod for Christmas vacation from his
freshman year at Dartmouth, he was close to tears because he had just
read, having been forced to do so by a professor, A Farewell to Arms,
by Ernest Hemingway.

Steve, now a middle-aged comedy writer for movies and TV, was so
gorgeously wrecked back then that I was moved to reread what it was
that had done this to him. A Farewell to Arms turned out to be an
attack on the institution of marriage. Hemingway's hero is wounded in
war. He and his nurse fall in love. They honeymoon far away from the
battlefields, consuming the best food and wine, without having been
married first. She gets pregnant, proving, as if it could be doubted,
that he is indeed all man.

She and the baby die, so he doesn't have to get a regular job and a
house and life insurance and all that crap, and he has such beautiful
memories.

I said to Steve, "The tears Hemingway has made you want to shed are
tears of relief! It looked like the guy was going to have to get
married and settle down. But then he didn't have to. Whew! What a
close shave!"


Trout said he could think of only one other book that despised
matrimony as much as A Farewell to Arms.

 "Name it," I said.

He said it was a hook by Henry David Thoreau, called Walden.

"Loved it," I said.

24





I say in lectures in 1996 that fifty percent or more of American
marriages go bust because most of us no longer have extended families.
When you marry somebody now, all you get is one person.

I say that when couples fight, it isn't about money or sex or power.
What they're really saying is, "You're not enough people!"

Sigmund Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women
want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.


I thank Trout for the concept of the man-woman hour as a unit of
measurement of marital intimacy. This is an hour during which a
husband and wife are close enough to be aware of each other, and for
one to say something to the other without yelling, if he or she feels
like it. Trout says in his story "Golden Wedding" that they needn't
feel like saying anything in order to credit themselves with a
man-woman hour.

"Golden Wedding" is another story Dudley Prince rescued from the trash
receptacle before the timequake. It is about a florist who tries to
increase his business by convincing people who both work at home, or
who spend long hours together running a Ma-and-Pa joint, that they are
entitled to celebrate several wedding anniversaries a year.

He calculates that an average couple with separate places of work logs
four man-woman hours each weekday, and sixteen of them on weekends.
Being sound asleep with each other doesn't count. This gives him a
standard man-woman week of thirty-six man-woman hours.

He multiplies that by fifty-two. This gives him, when rounded off, a
standard man-woman year of eighteen hundred man-woman hours. He
advertises that any couple that has accumulated this many man-woman
hours is entitled to celebrate an anniversary, and to receive flowers
and appropriate presents, even if it took them only twenty weeks to do
it!

If couples keep piling up man-woman hours like that, as my wives and I
have done in both my marriages, they can easily celebrate their Ruby
Anniversary in only twenty years, and their Golden in twenty-five!


I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still
can't get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave
wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that
lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the
apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that
apple, though, is making jazz.

25





Allie's husband Jim Adams really did go off an open drawbridge in a
railroad train two days before Allie died in a hospital. Stranger than
fiction!

Jim had plunged them deep in debt by manufacturing a toy of his own
invention. It was a corked rubber balloon with a blob of permanently
malleable clay inside. It was clay with a skin!

The face of a clown was printed on the balloon. You could make it open
its mouth wide with your fingers, or make its nose protrude or its
eyes sink in. Jim called it Putty Puss. Putty Puss never became
popular. Moreover, Putty Puss amassed enormous debts for its
manufacture and advertising.

Allie and Jim, Indianapolis people in New Jersey, had four boys and no
girls. One of the boys was a mewling infant, and none of these people
had asked to be born in the first place.


Boys and girls of our family often come into this world, as did Allie,
with natural gifts for drawing and painting and sculpting and so on.

Jane's and my two daughters, Edith and Nanette, are middle-aged
professional artists who have shows and sell pictures. So does our son
the doctor Mark. So do I. Allie could have done that, too, if she had
been willing to work hard and hustle some. But as I have reported
elsewhere, she said, "Just because you're talented, that doesn't mean
you have to do something; with it."

I say in my novel Bluebeard, "Beware of gods bearing gifts." I think I
had Allie in mind when I wrote that, and Allie in mind again when, in
Timequake One, I had Monica Pepper spray-paint "FUCK ART!" in orange
and purple across the steel front door of the Academy. Allie didn't
know there was such an institution as the Academy, I'm almost sure,
but she would have been happy to see those words emblazoned anywhere.

Our father the architect was so full of ecstatic baloney about any
work of art Allie made when she was growing up, as though she were the
new Michelangelo, that she was shamed. She wasn't stupid and she
wasn't tasteless. Father, without meaning to do so rubbed her nose in
how limited her gifts were, and so spoiled any modest pleasure that
she, not expecting too much, might have found in using them.

Allie may have felt patronized, too, lavishly praised for very little
because she was a pretty girl. Only men could become great artists.


When I was ten, and Allie was fifteen, and our big brother Bernie the
born scientist was eighteen, I said at supper one night that women
weren't even the best cooks or clothing makers. Men were. And Mother
dumped a pitcher of water over my head. 

But Mother was as full of baloney about Allie's prospects for marrying
a rich man, and how important it was for Allie to do so, as Father was
about the art she did. During the Great Depression, financial
sacrifices were made to send Allie to school with Hoosier heiresses at
Tudor Hall, School for Girls, or Two-Door Hell, Dump for Dames, four
blocks south of Shortridge High School, where she could have received
what I received, a free and much richer and more democratic and madly
heterosexual education.

The parents of my first wife Jane, Harvey and Riah Cox, did the same
thing: sent their only daughter to Tudor Hall, and bought her rich
girls' clothes, and maintained for her sake membership in the
Wood-stock Golf and Country Club they could ill afford, so she could
marry a man whose family had money and power.

When the Great Depression and then World War Two were over, the idea
that a man from a rich and powerful Indianapolis family would be
allowed to marry a woman whose family didn't have a pot to piss in, as
long as she had the manners and tastes of a rich girl, turned out to
be as dumb as trying to sell balloons with blobs of moistened clay
inside.

Business is business.


The best Allie could do for a husband was Jim Adams, a beautiful,
charming, funny hunk with no money and no profession, who had served
in Army Public Relations during the war. The best Jane could do, and
it was a time of panic for unmarried women, was a guy who came home a
PFC, who had been flunking all his courses at Cornell when he went off
to war, and who didn't have a clue as to what to do next, now that
free will had kicked in again.

Get this: Not only did Jane have rich girls' manners and clothes. She
was a Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore, and had been the outstanding
writer there!

I thought maybe I could be some kind of half-assed scientist, since
that had been my education.

26





In the third edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, the
English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) speaks of "that
willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes
poetic faith." This acceptance of balderdash is essential to the
enjoyment of poems, and of novels and short stories, and of dramas,
too. Some assertions by writers, however, are simply too preposterous
to be believed.

Who, for example, could believe Kilgore Trout when he wrote as follows
in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: "There is a planet in the Solar
System where the people are so stupid they didn't catch on for a
million years that there was another half to their planet. They didn't
figure that out until five hundred years ago! Only five hundred years
ago! And yet they are now calling themselves Homo sapiens.

"Dumb? You want to talk dumb? The people in one of the halves were so
dumb, they didn't have an alphabet! They hadn't invented the wheel
yet!"

Give us a break, Mr. Trout.


He appears to be heaping scorn in particular on Native Americans, who
have already been adequately penalized, one would think, for their
stupidity. According to Noam Chomsky, a professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where my brother, my father, and my
grandfather all earned advanced degrees, but where my maternal uncle
Pete Lieber flunked out: "Current estimates suggest that there may
have been about 80 million Native Americans in Latin America when
Columbus 'discovered' the continent - as we say - and about 12 to 15
million more north of the Rio Grande."

Chomsky continues: "By 1650, about 95 percent of the population of
Latin America had been wiped out, and by the time the continental
borders of the United States had been established, some 200,000 were
left of the indigenous population."

In my opinion, Trout, far from giving yet another high colonic to our
aborigines, is raising the question, perhaps too subtly, of whether
great discoveries, such as the existence of another hemisphere, or of
accessible atomic energy, really make people any happier than they
were before.


I myself say atomic energy has made people unhappier than they were
before, and that having to live in a two-hemisphere planet has made
our aborigines a lot less happy, without making the wheel-and-alphabet
people who "discovered" them any fonder of being alive than they were
before.

Then again, I am a monopolar depressive descended from mono-polar
depressives. That's how come I write so good.


Are two hemispheres better than one? I know anecdotal evidence isn't
worth a pitcher of warm spit scientifically, but a great-grandfather
of mine on my mother's side switched hemispheres in time to be wounded
in the leg as a soldier for the Union in our notoriously uncivil Civil
War. His name was Peter Lieber. Peter Lieber bought a brewery in
Indianapolis, and it prospered. A brew of his won a Gold Medal at the
Paris Exposition of 1889. Its secret ingredient was coffee.

But Peter Lieber gave the brewery to his son Albert, my maternal
grandfather, and he went back to his original hemisphere. He decided
he liked that one better. And I am told there is a photograph often
used in our textbooks that supposedly shows immigrants disembarking
here, but actually they are getting on a ship to go back to where they
came from.

This hemisphere is no bed of roses. My mother committed suicide in
this one, and then my brother-in-law went off an open drawbridge in a
railroad train.

27





The first story Trout had to rewrite after the timequake zapped him
back to 1991, he told me, was called "Dog's Breakfast." It was about a
mad scientist named Fleon Sunoco, who was doing research at the
National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Sunoco
believed really smart people had little radio receivers in their
heads, and were getting their bright ideas from somewhere else.

"The smarties had to be getting outside help" Trout said to me at
Xanadu. While impersonating the mad Sunoco, Trout himself seemed
convinced that there was a great big computer somewhere, which, by
means of radio, had told Pythagoras about right triangles, and Newton
about gravity, and Darwin about evolution, and Pasteur about germs,
and Einstein about relativity, and on and on.

"That computer, wherever it is, whatever it is, while pretending to
help us, may actually be trying to kill us dummies with too much to
think about," said Kilgore Trout.


Trout said he hadn't minded writing "Dog's Breakfast" again, or the
three hundred or more stories he redid and threw away before free will
kicked in again. "Write or rewrite, it's all the same to me," he said.
"At the age of four score and four, I am as amazed and entertained as
I was when I was only fourteen, and discovered that if I put the rip
of a pen on paper, it would write a story of its own accord.

"Wonder why I tell people that my name is Vincent van Gogh?" he asked.
And I had better explain that the real Vincent van Gogh was a Dutchman
who painted in the south of France, whose pictures are now numbered
among the world's most precious treasures, but who in his own lifetime
sold only two of them. "It isn't only because he, like me, took no
pride in his appearance and disgusted women, although that surely has
to be factored in," said Trout.

"The main thing about van Gogh and me," said Trout, "is that he
painted pictures that astonished him with their importance, even
though nobody else thought they were worth a damn, and I write stories
that astonish me, even though nobody else thinks they're worth a damn.

"How lucky can you get?"


Trout was the only appreciative audience he needed for what he was and
did. That let him accept the conditions of the rerun as unsurprising.
It was just more foolishness in the world outside his own, and no more
worthy of his respect than wars or economic collapses or plagues, or
tidal waves, or TV stars, or what you will.

He was capable of being such a rational hero in the neighborhood of
the Academy the instant free will kicked in again, because, in my
opinion, Trout, unlike most of the rest of us, had found no
significant differences between life as déjà vu and life as original
material.

As for how little he was affected by the rerun, as compared with the
hell it had been for most of the rest of us, he wrote in My Ten Years
an Automatic Pilot: "I didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive
was a crock of shit. I already knew that from my childhood and
crucifixes and history books."


For the record: Dr. Fleon Sunoco at the NIH, who is independently
rich, hires grave robbers to bring him the brains of deceased members
of Mensa, a nationwide club for persons with high Intelligence
Quotients, or IQs, as determined by standardized tests of verbal and
nonverbal skills, tests which pit the testees against the Joe and Jane
Sixpacks, against the Lumpenproletariat.

His ghouls also bring him brains of people who died in really stupid
accidents, crossing busy streets against the light, starting charcoal
fires at cookouts with gasoline, and so on, for comparison. So as not
to arouse suspicion, they deliver the fresh brains one at a time in
buckets stolen from a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.
Needless to say, Sunoco's supervisors have no idea what he's really
doing when he works late night after night.

They do notice how much he likes fried chicken, apparently, ordering
it by the bucket, and that he never offers anybody else some. They
also wonder how he stays so skinny. During regular working hours, he
does what he is paid to do, which is develop a birth control pill that
takes all the pleasure out of sex, so teenagers won't copulate.

At night, though, with nobody around, he slices up high-IQ brains,
looking for little radios. He doesn't think Mensa members had them
inserted surgically. He thinks they were born with them, so the
receivers have to be made of meat. Sunoco has written in his secret
journal: "There is no way an unassisted human brain, which is nothing
more than a dog's breakfast, three and a half pounds of blood-soaked
sponge, could have written 'Stardust,' let alone Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony."


One night he finds an unexplained little snot-colored bump, no larger
than a mustard seed, in the inner ear of a Mensa member, who as a
junior high schooler had won spelling bee after spelling bee. Eureka!

He reexamines the inner ear of a moron who was killed when, she was
grabbing door handles of fast-moving vehicles while wearing
Rollerblades. Neither of her inner ears has a snot-colored bump.
Eureka!


Sunoco examines fifty more brains, half from people so stupid you
couldn't believe it, half from people so smart you couldn't believe
it. Only the inner ears of the rocket scientists, so to speak, have
bumps. The bumps have to have been the reason the smarties were so
good at taking IQ tests. An extra piece of tissue that little, and as
nothing but tissue, couldn't possibly have been much more help than a
pimple. It has to be a radio! And radios like that have to be feeding
correct answers to questions, no matter how recondite, to Mensas and
Phi Beta Kappas, and to quiz show contestants.

This is a Nobel Prize-type discovery! So, even before he has
published, Fleon Sunoco goes out and buys himself a suit of tails for
Stockholm.

28





Trout said: "Fleon Sunoco jumped to his death into the National
Institutes of Health parking lot. He was wearing his new suit of
tails, which would never get to Stockholm.

"He realized that his discovery proved that he didn't deserve credit
for making it. He was hoist by his own petard! Anybody who did
anything as wonderful as what he had done couldn't possibly have done
it with just a human brain, with nothing but the dog's breakfast in
his braincase. He could have done it only with outside help."


When free will kicked in after a ten-year hiatus, Trout made the
transition from déjà vu to unlimited opportunities almost seamlessly.
The rerun brought him back to the point in the space-time continuum
when he was again beginning his story about the British soldier whose
head was where his ding-dong should have been and whose ding-dong was
where his head should have been.

Without warning and silently, the rerun stopped.

This was one heck of a moment for anyone operating a form of
self-propelled transportation, or who was a passenger in one, or who
stood in the path of one. For ten years, machinery, like people, had
been doing whatever it had done the first time through the decade,
often with fatal results, to be sure. As Trout wrote in My Ten years
on Automatic Pilot: "Rerun or not, modern transportation is a game of
inches." The second time through, though, the hiccuping Universe, not
humanity, was responsible for any and all fatalities. People might
look as though they were steering something, but they weren't really
steering. They couldn't steer.

Quoting Trout again: "The horse knew the way home." But when the rerun
ended, the horse, which might actually have been anything from a motor
scooter to a jumbo jet, didn't know the way home anymore. People were
going to have to tell it what to do next, if it wasn't going to be an
utterly amoral plaything of Newton's Laws of Motion.


Trout, on his cot next door to the Academy, was operating nothing more
dangerous or headstrong than a ballpoint pen. When free will kicked
in, he simply went on writing. He finished the story. The wings of a
narrative, begging to be told, had carried its author over what was
for most of us a yawning abyss.

Only after he had completed his own absorbing business, the story, was
Trout at liberty to notice what the outside world, or, indeed, the
Universe, might be doing now, if anything. And as a man without a
culture or a society, he was uniquely free to apply Occam's Razor, or,
if you like, the Law of Parsimony, to virtually any situation, to wit:
The simplest explanation of a phenomenon is, nine times out of ten,
say, truer than a really fancy one.

Trout's ruminations about how he had been able to finish a story whose
completion had been so long opposed were uncomplicated by conventional
paradigms of what life was all about, and what the Universe can or
cannot do, and so on. Thus was the old science fiction writer able to
go directly to this simple truth: That everybody had been going
through what he had been going through for the past ten years, that he
hadn't gone nuts or died and gone to hell, and that the Universe had
shrunk a little bit, but had then resumed expansion, making everybody
and everything a robot of their own past, and demonstrating,
incidentally, that the past was unmalleable and indestructible, to
wit:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your
Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your
Tears wash out a Word of it.


And then, on what was the afternoon of February 13th, 2001, in New
York City, way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street, and
everywhere, free will had all of a sudden kicked in again.

29





I, too, went from déjà vu to unlimited opportunities in a series of
actions that were continuous. An outside observer might have said I
exercised free will the instant it became available. But here's the
thing: I had dumped a cup of very hot chicken noodle soup into my lap,
and had jumped out of my chair, and was with my bare hands sweeping
the scalding broth and noodles from the front of my trousers right
before the timequake struck. That's what I had to be doing again at
the end of the rerun.

When free will kicked in, I simply kept on trying to get the soup off
me before it could seep all the way through to my underwear. Trout
said, quite correctly, that my actions had been reflexes, and not
sufficiently creative to be considered acts of free will.

"If you'd been thinking," he said, "you would have unzipped your pants
and dropped them around your ankles, since they were already soaked
with soup. No amount of frenzied brushing of the surface of your pants
was going to stop the soup from seeping all the way through to your
underwear."


Trout was surely among the first people in the whole wide world, and
not just way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street, to realize
that free will had kicked in. This was very interesting to him, as it
certainly wasn't to many others. Most other people, after the
relentless reprise of their mistakes and bad luck and hollow victories
during the past ten years, had, in Trout's words, "stopped giving a
shit what was going on, or what was liable to happen next." This
syndrome would eventually be given a name: Post-Timequake Apathy, or
PTA.

Trout now performed an experiment that many of us had tried to perform
at the start of the rerun. He said nonsensical things on purpose, and
out loud, like, "Boop-boop-a-doop, dingle-dangle, artsy-fartsy, wah,
wah," and so on. We all tried to say things on that order back in the
second 1991, hoping to prove we could still say or do whatever we
liked, if we tried hard enough. We couldn't, of course. But when Trout
tried to say, "Blue mink bifocals," or whatever, after the rerun, of
course he could.

No problem!


People in Europe and Africa and Asia were in darkness when free will
kicked in. Most of them were in bed or sitting down somewhere. Not
nearly as many of them fell down in their hemisphere as fell down in
ours, where a clear majority was wide awake.

A person walking in either hemisphere was commonly off balance,
leaning in the direction he or she was going, and with most of his or
her weight unevenly distributed between his or her feet. When free
will kicked in, he or she of course fell down, and stayed down, even
in the middle of a street with onrushing traffic, because of
Post-Timequake Apathy.

You can imagine what the bottoms of staircases and escalators, in the
Western Hemisphere in particular, looked like after free will kicked
in.


That's the New World for you!


My sister Allie in real life, which for her lasted only forty-one
years, God rest her soul, thought falling down was one of the funniest
things people could do. I don't mean people who fell on account of
strokes or heart attack or snapped hamstrings or whatever. I am
talking about people ten years old or older, of any race and either
sex, and in reasonably good physical condition, who, on a day like any
other day, all of a sudden fell down.

When Allie was dying for sure, with not long to go, I could still fill
her with joy, could give her an epiphany, if you like, by talking
about somebody falling down. My story couldn't be from the movies or
hearsay. It had to be about a rude reminder of the power of gravity
that I myself had witnessed.

Only one of my stories was about a professional entertainer. It was
from back when I was lucky enough to see the death throes of
vaudeville on the stage of the Apollo Theater in Indianapolis. A
perfectly wonderful man, my kind of saint, as a regular part of his
act at one point fell into the orchestra pit, and then climbed back
onto the stage wearing the big bass drum.

All my other stories, which Allie never tired of hearing until she was
dead as a doornail, involved amateurs.

30





One time when Allie was maybe fifteen and I was ten, she heard
somebody fall down our basement stairs: Bloompity, bloomp, bloomp. She
thought it was I, so she stood at the top of the stairs laughing her
fool head off. This would have been 1932, three years into the Great
Depression.

But it wasn't I. It was a guy from the gas company, who had come to
read the meter. He came clumping out of the basement all bunged up,
and absolutely furious.


Another time, when Allie was sixteen or older, since she was driving a
car with me as a passenger, we saw a woman come out of a stopped
streetcar horizontally, headfirst and parallel to the pavement. Her
heels had caught somehow.

As I've written elsewhere, and said in interviews, Allie and I laughed
for years about that woman. She wasn't seriously hurt. She got back on
her feet OK.

One thing that only I saw, but which Allie liked to hear about anyhow,
was a guy who offered to teach a beautiful woman not his wife how to
do the Tango. It was at the tail end of a cocktail party that had
pretty much petered out.

I don't think the man's wife was there. I can't imagine he would have
made the offer if his wife had been there. He was not a professional
dance instructor. There were maybe ten people in all there, including
the host and hostess. This was in the days of phonographs. The host
and hostess had made the tactical mistake of putting an acetate
recording of Tango music on their phonograph.

So this guy, his eyes flashing, his nostrils flaring, took this
beautiful woman in his arms, and he fell down.


Yes, and all the people falling down in Timequake One, and now in this
book, are like "FUCK ART!" spray-painted across the steel front door
of the Academy. They are homage to my sister Allie. They are Allie's
kind of porno: people deprived of dignified postures by gravity
instead of sex.


Here is a verse from a song popular during the Great Depression:

Papa came home late last night.  Mama said, "Pop, you 're tight." When
he tried to find the light, He faw down and go boom!


That the impulse to laugh at healthy people who nonetheless fall down
is by no means universal, however, was brought to my attention
unpleasantly at a performance of Swan Lake by the Royal Ballet in
London, England. I was in the audience with my daughter Nanny, who was
about sixteen then. She is forty-one now, in the summer of 1996. That
must have been twenty-five years ago now!

A ballerina, dancing on her toes, went deedly-deedly-deedly into the
wings as she was supposed to do. But then there was a sound backstage
as though she had put her foot in a bucket and then gone down an iron
stairway with her foot still in the bucket

I instantly laughed like hell.

I was the only person to do so.


A similar incident happened at a performance of the Indianapolis
Symphony Orchestra when I was a kid. It didn't involve me, though, and
it wasn't about laughter. There was this piece of music that was
getting louder and louder, and was supposed to stop all of a sudden.

There was this woman in the same row with me, maybe ten seats away.
She was talking to a friend during the crescendo, and she had to get
louder and louder, too. This music stopped. She shrieked, "I FRY MINE
IN BUTTER!"

31





My daughter Nanny and I went to Westminster Abbey the day after I
became a pariah at the Royal Ballet. She was thunderstruck when she
came face to face with the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton. At her age, and
in that same place, my big brother Bernie, a born scientist who can't
draw or paint for sour apples, would have shit an even bigger brick.

And well might any educated person excrete a sizable chunk of masonry
when contemplating the tremendously truthful ideas this ordinary
mortal, seemingly, uttered, with no more to go by, as far as we know,
than signals from his dog's breakfast, from his three and a half
pounds of blood-soaked sponge. This one naked ape invented
differential calculus! He invented the reflecting telescope! He
discovered and explained how a prism breaks a beam of sunlight into
its constituent colors! He detected and wrote down previously unknown
laws governing motion and gravity and optics!

Give us a break!

"Calling Dr. Fleon Sunoco! Sharpen your microtome. Do we ever have a
brain for you!"


My daughter Nanny has a son, Max, who is twelve now, in 1996, halfway
through the rerun. He will be seventeen when Kilgore Trout dies. This
past April, Max wrote for school a really swell report on Sir Isaac
Newton, a superman so ordinary in appearance. It told me something I
hadn't known before: That Newton was advised by those who were his
nominal supervisors to take time out from the hard truths of science
to brush up on theology.

I like to think they did this not because they were foolish, but to
remind him of how comforting and encouraging the make-believe of
religion can be for common folk.

To quote from Kilgore Trout's story "Empire State," which is about a
meteor the size and shape of the Manhattan skyscraper, approaching
Earth point-first at a steady fifty-four miles an hour: "Science never
cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too
awful."


And the truth about that situation all over the world will never be
worse than it was during the first couple of hours after the rerun
stopped. Oh sure, there were millions of pedestrians lying on the
ground because the weight on their feet had been unevenly distributed
when free will kicked in. But most of them were pretty much OK, except
for those who had been near the tops of escalators or stairways. Most
were no worse hurt than the woman Allie and I saw come shooting out of
a streetcar headfirst.

The real mayhem was wrought, as I said before, by self-propelled forms
of transportation, of which there were none, of course, inside the
former Museum of the American Indian. Things stayed peaceful in there,
even as the crashing of vehicles and the cries of the injured and
dying reached the climax of a crescendo outside.  "I fry mine in
butter!" indeed.


The bums, or "sacred cattle," as Trout called them, had been seated or
prone or supine when the timequake struck. That was how they were when
the rerun ended. How could free will hurt them?

Trout would say of them afterward: "Even before the timequake, they
had exhibited symptoms indistinguishable from those of PTA."

Only Trout jumped to his feet when a berserk fire truck, a
hook-and-ladder, smacked the entrance of the Academy with its right
front bumper and kept on going. What it did after that had nothing to
do with people, and could have nothing to do with people. The sudden
reduction of its velocity by its brush with the Academy caused the
gaga firepersons aboard to hurtle through the air at the velocity it
had reached going downhill from Broadway before it hit. Trout's best
guess, based on how far the firepersons flew, was about fifty miles an
hour.

Thus slowed and depopulated, the emergency vehicle made a sharp left
turn into a cemetery across the street from the Academy. It started up
a steep slope. It stopped short of the crest, and then rolled
backward. The collision with the Academy had knocked its gearshift
into neutral!

Momentum alone had carried it up the slope. The mighty motor roared.
Its throttle was stuck. But the only opposition it could offer to
gravity was the inertia of its own mass. It wasn't connected by the
drive shaft to the back wheels anymore!

Listen to this: Gravity dragged the bellowing red monster back down
into West 155th Street, and then ass-backward toward the Hudson River.


The rescue vehicle's blow to the Academy was so severe, albeit
glancing, that it caused a crystal chandelier to drop to the floor of
the foyer.

The fancy light fixture missed the armed guard Dudley Prince by
inches. If he hadn't been standing upright, his weight equally
distributed between his feet when free will kicked in, he would have
fallen prone in the direction he was facing, toward the front door.
The chandelier would have killed him!

You want to talk about luck? When the timequake struck, Monica
Pepper's paraplegic husband was ringing the doorbell. Dudley Prince
was about to go to the steel front door. Before he could take a step
in that direction, though, a smoke alarm went off in the picture
gallery behind him. He froze. Which way to go?

So when free will kicked in, he was on the horns of the same dilemma.
The smoke alarm behind him had saved his life!

When Trout learned of the miraculous escape from death by chandelier,
thanks to a smoke alarm, he quoted Katharine Lee Bates, speaking
rather than singing:

O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple
mountain majesties Above the fruited plain!  America! America!  God
shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to
shining sea.


The uniformed ex-convict, thanks to PTA, was a motivationally kaput
statue when Kilgore Trout scampered in through the entrance, which was
no longer blocked, minutes after the harsh rules of free will had been
reinstated. Trout was shouting, "Wake up! For God's sake, wake up!
Free will! Free will!"

Not only was the steel front door lying flat on the floor, bearing the
enigmatic message "UCK AR," so Trout had to lope across it to reach
Prince. It was still hinged and locked to the door frame. The door
frame itself had let go on impact. It had parted from the surrounding
masonry. The door and its hinges and bolts and whoozit were to all
practical purposes as good as new, their frame had offered so little
resistance to the berserk hook-and-ladder.

The contractor who installed the door and frame had cut corners when
it came to securing the frame to the masonry. He had been a crook! As
Trout would later say of him, and it might have been said of all
corner-cutting contractors: "The wonder was that he could sleep at
night!"

32





I say in speeches in 1996, halfway through the rerun to 2001, that I
became a student in the Anthropology Department of the University of
Chicago after World War Two. I say jokingly that I never should have
studied that subject, because I can't stand primitive people. They're
so stupid! The real reason my interest in the study of man as an
animal flagged was that my wife Jane Marie Cox Vonnegut, who would die
as Jane Marie Cox Yarmolinsky, gave birth to a baby named Mark. We
needed bucks.

Jane herself, a Swarthmore Phi Beta Kappa, had won a full scholarship
in the university's Russian Department. When she got pregnant with
Mark, she resigned the scholarship. We found the head of the Russian
Department in the library, I remember, and my wife told this
melancholy refugee from Stalinism that she had to quit because she had
become infected with progeny.

Even without a computer, I can never forget what he said to Jane: "My
dear Mrs. Vonnegut, pregnancy is the beginning, not the end, of life."


The point I want to make, though, is that one course I took required
me to read and then be ready to discuss A Study of History by the
English historian Arnold Toynbee, who is up in Heaven now. He wrote
about challenges and responses, saying that various civilizations
persisted or failed depending on whether or not the challenges they
faced were just too much for them. He gave examples.

The same might be said for individuals who would like to behave
heroically, and most strikingly in the case of Kilgore Trout on the
afternoon and evening of February 13th, 2001, after free will kicked
in. If he had been in the area of Times Square, or near the entrance
or exit of a major bridge or tunnel, or at an airport, where pilots,
as they had learned to do during the rerun, had expected their planes
to take off or land safely of their own accord, the challenge would
have been too much not only for Trout but for anyone else.

What Trout beheld when he came out of the shelter in response to the
crash next door was a horrifying scene all right, but the cast was
small. The dead and dying were widely scattered, rather than heaped or
enclosed in a burning or crumpled airplane or bus. They were still
individuals. Alive or dead, they still had personalities, with stories
to read in their faces and clothes.

Vehicular traffic on that stretch of West 155th Street,
way-the-hell-and-gone uptown and leading nowhere, was at any time of
day virtually nonexistent. This made the roaring hook-and-ladder a
solo entertainer, as Trout watched gravity drag it ass-backward in the
direction of the Hudson River. He was so free to think about the
lucklless fire truck in detail, despite the racket coming from busier
thoroughfares, that he concluded calmly, as he would tell me at
Xanadu, that one of three explanations for its helplessness had to be
the right one: Either its gearshift was in reverse or neutral, or the
drive shaft had snapped, or the clutch was shot.


He did not panic. His experiences as a forward observer for the
artillery had taught him that panic only made things worse. He would
say at Xanadu: "In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make
hopeless situations worse."

True enough, he didn't panic. At the same time, though, he had yet to
realize that he alone was ambulatory and wide awake. He had figured
out the bare bones of what the Universe itself had done, contracted
and then expanded. That was the easy part. What was actually
happening, except for its actuality, might easily have been the
ink-on-paper consequences of a premise for a story he himself had
written and torn to pieces, and flushed down a toilet in a bus
terminal or whatever, years ago.

Unlike Dudley Prince, Trout hadn't even earned a High School
Equivalency Certificate, but he bore at least one surprising
resemblance to my big brother Bernie, who has a Ph.D. in physical
chemistry from MIT. Bernie and Trout had both, since their earliest
adolescence, played games in their heads that began with this
question: "If such-and-such were the case in our surroundings, what
then, what then?"


What Trout had failed to extrapolate from the premise of the
time-quake and rerun, in the relative peace of the far end of West
155th Street, was that everybody for miles around was immobilized, if
not by death or serious injury, then by PTA. He wasted precious
minutes waiting for the arrival of healthy young ambulance crews and
policepersons and more firepersons, and disaster specialists from the
Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who would take
care of things.

Please remember, for God's sake: He was eighty-fucking-four years old!
Since he shaved every day, he was often mistaken for a bag lady rather
than a bag gentleman, even without his baby-blanket babushka, and so
incapable of inspiring any respect whatsoever. As for his sandals: At
least they were tough. They were made of the same material as the
brake shoes on the Apollo 11 spacecraft, which had delivered Neil
Armstrong to the Moon, where he was the first human being ever to walk
on it, in 1969.

The sandals were government surplus from the Vietnam War, the only war
we ever lost, and during which Trout's only child Leon had been a
deserter. American soldiers on patrol in that conflict wore the
sandals over their lightweight jungle boots. They did that because the
enemy used to stick spikes pointed upward, and dipped in shit so as to
cause serious infections, in paths leading through the jungle.


Trout, so reluctant to play Russian roulette with free will again at
his age, and especially with the lives of others at stake, finally
realized that, for better or worse, he had better get his ass in gear.
But what could he do?

33





My father often misquoted Shakespeare, but I never saw him read a
book.


Yes, and I am here to suggest that the greatest writer in the English
language so far was Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1526), and not the Bard of
Avon (1564-1616). Poetry was certainly in the air back then. Try this:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.  He maketh me to lie down
in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.  He
restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his
name's sake.  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy
staff they comfort me.  Thou preparest a table before me in the
presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup
runneth over.  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days
of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.


Lancelot Andrewes was the chief translator and paraphraser among the
scholars who gave us the King James Bible.


Did Kilgore Trout ever write poems? So far as I know, he wrote only
one. He did it on the penultimate day of his life. He was fully aware
that the Grim Reaper was coming, and coming soon. It is helpful to
know that there is a tupelo tree between the mansion and the carriage
house at Xanadu.

Wrote Trout:

When the tupelo Goes poop-a-lo, I'll come back to youp-a-lo.

34





My first wife Jane and my sister Allie had mothers who went nuts from
time to time. Jane and Allie were graduates of Tudor Hall and had once
been two of the prettiest, merriest girls at the Woodstock Golf and
Country Club. All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or
otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into
this.

Jane and Allie missed the timequake, thank goodness. My guess is that
Jane would have found some goodness in the rerun. Allie would not
have. Jane was life-loving and optimistic, a scrapper against
carcinoma to the very end. Allie's last words expressed relief, and
nothing more. They were, as I've recorded elsewhere, "No pain, no
pain." I didn't hear her say it, and neither did our big brother
Bernie. A male hospital attendant, with a foreign accent, relayed
those words to us via telephone.

I don't know what Jane's last words may have been. I've asked. She was
Adam Yarmolinsky's wife by then, not mine. Jane evidently slipped away
without speaking, not realizing that she wouldn't be coming up for air
again. At her funeral, in an Episcopal church in Washington, D.C.,
Adam said to those gathered that her favorite exclamation was, "I
can't wait!"

What Jane anticipated with such joy again and again was some event
involving one or more of our six children, now all adults with
children of their own: a psychiatric nurse, a comedy writer, a
pediatrician, a painter, an airline pilot, and a printmaker.


I did not speak at her Episcopal obsequy. I wasn't up to it.
Everything I had to say was for her ears alone, and she was gone. The
last conversation we had, we two old friends from Indianapolis, was
two weeks before she died. It was on the telephone. She was in
Washington, D.C., where the Yarmolinskys had their home. I was in
Manhattan, and married, as I still am, to the photographer and writer
Jill Krementz.

I don't know which of us initiated the call, whose nickel it was. It
could have been either one of us. Whoever it was, it turned out that
the point of the call was to say good-bye.

Our son the doctor Mark would say after she died that he himself would
never have submitted to all the medical procedures she acquiesced to
in order to stay alive as long as she could, to go on saying, her eyes
shining, "I can't wait!"


Our last conversation was intimate. Jane asked me, as though I knew,
what would determine the exact moment of her death. She may have felt
like a character in a book by me. In a sense she was. During our
twenty-two years of marriage, I had decided where we were going next,
to Chicago, to Schenectady, to Cape Cod. It was my work that
determined what we did next. She never had a job. Raising six kids was
enough for her.

I told her on the telephone that a sunburned, raffish, bored but not
unhappy ten-year-old boy, whom we did not know, would be standing on
the gravel slope of the boat-launching ramp at the foot of Scudder's
Lane. He would gaze out at nothing in particular, birds, boats, or
whatever, in the harbor of Barnstable, Cape Cod.

At the head of Scudder's Lane, on Route 6A, one-tenth of a mile from
the boat-launching ramp, is the big old house where we cared for our
son and two daughters and three sons of my sister's until they were
grownups. Our daughter Edith and her builder husband, John Squibb, and
their small sons, Will and Buck, live there now.

I told Jane that this boy, with nothing better to do, would pick up a
stone, as boys will. He would arc it over the harbor. When the stone
hit the water, she would die.


Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive
seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a
Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy
years at Swarthmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam,
who remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and
Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her.

35





Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore,
have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly,
higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over
it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or
doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly
right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're
done.

I am a basher. Most men are bashers, and most women are swoopers.
Again: Somebody should look into this. It may be that writers of
either sex are born to be swoopers or bashers. I visited Rockefeller
University recently, and they are seeking and finding more and more
genes that tend to make us behave this way or that: way, just as a
rerun after a timequake would do. Even before that visit, it had
appeared to me that Jane's and my children and Allie's and Jim's
children, while not alike as grownups, had each become the sort of
grownups they practically had to be.

All six are OK.

Then again, all six have had countless opportunities to be OK. If you
can believe what you read in the papers, or what you hear and see on
TV and the Information Superhighway, most people don't.


Writers who are swoopers, it seems to me, find it wonderful that
people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without
wondering why or how people are alive in the first place.

Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient
as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences,
cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under
fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to
these eternal questions: "What in heck should we be doing? What in
heck is really going on?"


If bashers are unwilling to settle for the basher Voltaire's "Il fout
cultiver notre jardin" that leaves the politics of human rights, which
I am prepared to discuss. I begin with a couple of true stories from
the end of Trout's and my war in Europe.

Here's the thing: For a few days after Germany surrendered, on May
7th, 1945, having been directly or indirectly responsible for the
deaths of maybe forty million people, there was a pocket of anarchy
south of Dresden, near the Czech border, which had yet to be occupied
and policed by troops of the Soviet Union. I was in it, and have
described it some in my novel Bluebeard. Thousands of prisoners of war
like myself had been turned loose there, along with death camp
survivors with tattooed arms, and lunatics and convicted felons and
Gypsies, and who knows what else.

Get this: There were also German troops there, still armed but
humbled, and looking for anybody but the Soviet Union to surrender to.
My particular war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare and I talked to some of
them.

O'Hare, having become a lawyer for both the prosecution and the
defense in later life, is up in Heaven now. Back then, though, we
could both hear the Germans saying that America would now have to do
what they had been doing, which was to fight the godless Communists.

We replied that we didn't think so. We expected the USSR to try to
become more like the USA, with freedom of speech and religion, and
fair trials and honestly elected officials, and so on. We, in turn,
would try to do what they claimed to be doing, which was to distribute
goods and services and opportunities more fairly: "From each according
to his abilities, to each according to his needs." That sort of thing.

Occam's Razor.


And then O'Hare and I, not much more than kids actually, went into an
undefended barn there in the springtime countryside. We wanted
something to eat, anything to eat. But we found a wounded and
obviously dying captain of the notoriously heartless Nazi
Schutzstaffel, the SS, in a haymow instead. He might easily, until
very recently, have been in charge of tormenting and planning the
extinction of some of the death camp survivors not far away.

Like all members of the SS, and like all death camp survivors as well,
this captain presumably had a serial number tattooed on his arm. Want
to talk about postwar irony? There was a lot of that.

He asked O'Hare and me to go away. He would soon be dead, and said he
looked forward to being such. As we prepared to depart, not feeling
much about him one way or the other, he cleared his throat, signaling
that he had something more to say after all. This was the last-words
business again. If he had any, who but us could hear them?

"I have just wasted the past ten years of my life," he said.

You want to talk about a timequake?

36





My wife thinks I think I'm such hot stuff. She's wrong. I don't think
I'm such hot stuff.

My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny
playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he
sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having
lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as
a reasonably competent office boy.

That's how I feel.


When the City of London wanted to give Shaw its Order of Merit, he
thanked them for it, but said he had already given it to himself.

I would have accepted it. I would have recognized the opportunity for
a world-class joke, but would never allow myself to be funny at the
cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in.

Let that be my epitaph.


In the waning summer of 1996,1 ask myself if there were ideas I once
held that I should now repudiate. I consider the example set by my
father's only brother, Uncle Alex, the childless, Harvard-educated
Indianapolis insurance salesman. He had me reading high-level
socialist writers like Shaw and Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs and John
Dos Passos when I was a teenager, along with making model airplanes
and jerking off. After World War Two, Uncle Alex became as politically
conservative as the Archangel Gabriel.

But I still like what O'Hare and I said to German soldiers right after
we were liberated: That America was going to become more socialist,
was going to try harder to give everybody work to do, and to ensure
that our children, at least, weren't hungry or cold or illiterate or
scared to death.

Lotsa luck!


I still quote Eugene Debs (1855-1926), late of Terre Haute, Indiana,
five times the Socialist Party's candidate for President, in every
speech:

"While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal
element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that
he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start
to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny.
But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the
Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited
horsecrap.

Which it is not.

37





Kilgore Trout's rugged jungle sandals crunched on crystal fragments
from the fallen chandelier as he loped across the face of the fallen
steel front door and frame, which said "UCK AR." Since there were
crystal shards atop the door and frame instead of underneath them, a
forensic scientist would have had to testify in a lawsuit, if one had
ever been filed against the crooked contractor, that the crook's
handiwork fell first. The chandelier must have dangled for a second or
so before letting gravity do to it what gravity apparently would have
liked to do to simply everything.

The smoke alarm in the picture gallery was still ringing,
"presumably," Trout would later say, "continuing to do so of its own
free will." He was joking, making fun, as was his wont, of the idea
that there had ever been free will for anyone or anything, rerun or
not.

The Academy doorbell had clammed up the moment Zoltan Pepper was hit
by the fire truck. Trout's words again: "Quoth the doorbell with its
silence, 'No comment at this time.' "

Trout himself, as I've said, was nevertheless espousing free will when
he entered the Academy, and was invoking; the Judeo-Christian deity as
well: "Wake up! For God's sake, wake up, wake up! Free will! Free
will!"


He would say at Xanadu that even if he had been a hero that afternoon
and night, his entering the Academy, "pretending," in his words, "to
be Paul Revere in the space-time continuum," had been "an act of sheer
cowardice."

He was seeking shelter from the growing din on Broadway, half a block
away, and from the sounds of really serious explosions from other
parts of the city. A mile and a half to the south, near Grant's Tomb,
a massive Department of Sanitation truck, for want of sincere
steering, plowed through the lobby of a condominium and into the
apartment of the building superintendent. It knocked over his gas
range. The ruptured pipe of that major appliance filled the stairwell
and elevator shaft of the six-story structure with methane laced with
skunk smell. Most of the tenants were on Social Security.

And then KA-BOOM!

"An accident wailing to happen," as Kilgore Trout would say at Xanadu.


The old science fiction writer wanted to galvanize the armed and
uniformed Dudley Prince into action, he later confessed, so that he
himself wouldn't have to do anything more. "Free will! Free will!
Fire! Fire!" he shouted at Prince.

Prince did not move a muscle. He batted his eyes, but those were
reflexes, and not free will, like me and the chicken noodle soup. One
thing Prince was thinking, by his own account, was that if he moved a
muscle, he might find himself in the New York State Maximum Security
Adult Correctional Facility at Athena back in 1991 again.
Understandable!


So Trout bypassed Prince for the moment, confessedly still looking out
for numero uno. A. smoke alarm was raising hell. If the building was
really on fire, and the fire could not be brought under control, then
Trout was going to have to find someplace else where a senior citizen
could hunker down until whatever was going on outside died down some.

He found a lit cigar resting on a saucer in the picture gallery. The
cigar, although illegal everywhere in New York County, was not yet,
and probably never would be, a danger to anyone but itself. Its
midpoint was centered in the saucer, so it wasn't going anywhere else
as it oxidized. But the smoke alarm was yelling about the end of
civilization as we had known it.

Trout, in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot, would synthesize what he
should have said to the smoke alarm that afternoon: "Nonsense! Get a
grip on yourself, you brainless nervous breakdown."

Here's the spooky part: There wasn't anybody but Trout in the gallery!

Could it be that the American Academy of Arts and Letters was haunted
by poltergeists?

38





I got a good letter today, Friday, August 23rd, 1996, from a young
stranger named Jeff Mihalich, one would guess of Serb or Croat
descent, who is majoring in physics at the University of Illinois at
Urbana. Jeff says he enjoyed his physics course in high school, and
got top grades, but "ever since I have had physics at the university I
have had much trouble with it. This was a huge blow to me because I
was used to doing well in school. I thought there was nothing I
couldn't do if I just wanted it bad enough."

My reply will go like this: "You might want to read the picaresque
novel The Adventures of Angle March by Saul Bellow. The epiphany at
the end, as I recall, is that we shouldn't be seeking harrowing
challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we
were apparently born to perform.

"As for tthe charms of physics: Two of the most entertaining subjects
taught in high school or college are mechanics and optics. Beyond
these playful disciplines, however, lie mind games as dependent on
native talent as playing the French horn or chess.

"Of native talent itself I say in speeches: 'If you go to a big city,
and a university is a big city, you are bound to run into Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart. Stay home, stay home.' "


To put it another way: No matter what a young person thinks he or she
is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to
run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new
asshole, so to speak.

A boyhood friend of mine, William H. C. "Skip" Failey, who died four
months ago and is up in Heaven now, had good reason when a high school
sophomore to think of himself as unbeatable at Ping-Pong. I am no
slouch at Ping-Pong myself, but I wouldn't play against Skip. He put
so much spin on his serve that no matter how I tried to return it, I
already knew it would go up my nose or out the window or back to the
factory, anywhere but on the table.

When Skip was a junior, though, he played a classmate of ours, Roger
Downs. Skip said afterward, "Roger cut me a new asshole."


Thirty-five years after that, I was lecturing at a university in
Colorado, and who should be in the audience but Roger Downs! Roger had
become a businessperson out that way, and a respected competitor on
the Senior Men's Tennis Circuit. So I congratulated him on having
given Skip a table tennis lesson so long ago.

Roger was eager to hear anything Skip might have said after that
showdown. I said, "Skip said you cut him a new asshole."

Roger was enormously satisfied, as well he might have been.

I did not ask, but the surgical metaphor could not have been
unfamiliar to him. Furthermore, life being the Darwinian experiment,
or "crock of shit," as Trout liked to call it, Roger himself had
surely departed more than one tennis tournament having, like Skip,
undergone a colostomy to his self-regard.


More news of this day in August, halfway through the rerun, as yet
another autumn draws near: My big brother Bernie, the born scientist
who may know more about the electrification of thunderstorms than
anyone, has an invariably fatal cancer, too far advanced to be daunted
by the Three Horsemen of the Oncologic Apocalypse, Surgery,
Chemotherapy, and Radiation.

Bernie still feels fine.

It is much too early to talk about, but when he dies, God forbid, I
don't think his ashes should be put in Crown Hill Cemetery with James
Whitcomb Riley and John Dillinger, who belonged only to Indiana.
Bernie belongs to the World.

Bernie's ashes should be scattered over the dome of a towering
thunderhead.

39





So there was Roger Downs of Indianapolis in Colorado. Here am I, of
Indianapolis, on the South Fork of Long Island. The ashes of my
Indianapolis wife Jane Marie Cox are mixed with the roots of a
flowering cherry tree, unmarked, in Barnstable Village, Massachusetts.
The branches of that tree can be seen from the ell that Ted Adler
rebuilt from scratch, after which he asked, "How the hell did I do
that?"

The Best Man at Jane's and my wedding in Indianapolis, Benjamin Hitz
of Indianapolis, is a widower now in Santa Barbara, California. Ben
dated an Indianapolis cousin of mine several times this spring. She is
a widow on the seacoast of Maryland, and my sister died in New Jersey,
and my brother, although he doesn't feel like it yet, is dying in
Albany, New York.

My boyhood pal David Craig, who made a radio in a German tank stop
playing popular music during World War Two, is a builder in New
Orleans. My cousin Emmy, whose dad told me I was a man at last when I
came home from war, and who was my lab partner in physics class at
Shortridge High School, lives only about thirty miles east of Dave in
Louisiana.

Diaspora!


Why did so many of us bug out of a city built by our ancestors, where
our family names were respected, whose streets and speech were so
familiar, and where, as I said at Butler University last June, there
was indeed the best and worst of Western Civilization?

Adventure!


It may be, too, that we wanted to escape the powerful pull, not of
gravity, which is everywhere, but of Crown Hill Cemetery.

Crown Hill got my sister Allie. It didn't get Jane. It won't get my
big brother Bernie. It won't get me.


I lectured in 1990 at a university in southern Ohio. They put me up in
a motel nearby. When I returned to the motel after my speech, and was
having my customary scotch and soda so I would sleep like a baby,
which is the way I like to sleep, the bar was congenially populated by
obviously local old people who seemed to really like each other. They
had a lot to laugh about. They were all comedians.

I asked the bartender who they were. He said they were the fiftieth
reunion of the Class of 1940 of Zanesville High School. It sure looked
nice. It sure looked right. I was in the Class of 1940 at Shortridge
High School, and was then skipping my own reunion.

Those people might have been characters out of Our Town by Thornton
Wilder, as sweet a play as can ever be.


They and I were so old that we could remember when it didn't matter
all that much economically whether you did or didn't go to college.
You could still amount to something. And I told my father back then
that maybe I didn't want to become a chemist like my big brother
Bernie. I could save him a ton of money if I went to work for a
newspaper instead.

Understand: I could go to college only if I took the same sorts of
courses my brother had. Father and Bernie were agreed on that. Any
other sort of higher education was what they both called ornamental.
They laughed at Uncle Alex the insurance salesman because his
education at Harvard had been so ornamental.

Father said I had better talk to his close friend Fred Bates Johnson,
a lawyer who as a young man had been a reporter for the now defunct
Democratic daily The Indianapolis Times.


I knew Mr. Johnson pretty well. Father and I used to go hunting for
rabbits and birds with him down in Brown County, before Allie cried so
much we had to give it up. He asked me there in his office, leaning
back in his swivel chair, his eyes slits, how I planned to begin my
career as a journalist.

"Well, sir," I said, "I thought maybe I could get a job on The Culver
Citizen and work there for three or four years. I know the area pretty
well." Culver was on Lake Maxincuckee in northern Indiana. We used to
have a summer cottage on that lake.

"And then?" he said.

"With that much experience," I said, "I should be able to get a job
with a much bigger paper, maybe in Richmond or Kokomo."

"And then?" he said.

"After maybe five years on a paper like that," I said, "I think I'd be
ready to take a shot at Indianapolis."

"You'll have to excuse me," he said, "but I have to make a phone
call."

"Of course," I said.

He swiveled around so his back was to me when he made the call. He
spoke softly, but I wasn't trying to overhear. I figured it was none
of my business.

He hung up the phone and swiveled around to face me again.
"Congratulations! " he said. "You have a job on The Indianapolis
Times."

40





I went to college in faraway Ithaca, New York, instead of going to
work for The Indianapolis Times. Ever since, I, like Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire, have always depended on the kindness of
strangers.

I think now, with the clambake at Xanadu only five years away, about a
man I might have been, spending his adult life among those he went to
high school with, loving and hating, as had his parents and
grandparents, a town that was his own.

He's gone!

Full fathom five he lies; Of his bones are coral made: Those are
pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth
suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.


He would have known several jokes I know, like the one Fred Bates
Johnson told one time, when he and Father and I, just a kid, and some
others, were hunting down in Brown County. According to Fred, a bunch
of guys like us went hunting for deer and moose up in Canada. Somebody
had to do the cooking, or they would all starve to death.

They drew straws to see who would cook while the others hunted from
dawn to dusk. To make the joke more immediate, Fred said it was Father
who got the short straw. Father could cook. Mother couldn't. She was
proud she couldn't cook, and wouldn't wash dishes and so on. I liked
to go over to other kids' houses, where their mothers did those
things.

The hunters agreed that anybody who complained about Father's cooking
became the cook. So Father prepared worse and worse meals, while the
others were having one hell of a good time in the forest. No matter
how awful a supper was, though, the hunters pronounced it lip-smacking
delicious, clapping Father on the back and so on.

After they marched off one morning, Father found a pile of fresh moose
poop outside. He fried it in motor oil. That night he served it as
steaming patties.

The first guy to taste one spit it out. He couldn't help himself! He
spluttered, "Jesus Christ! That tastes like moose poop fried in motor
oil!"

But then he added, "But good, but good!"


I think Mother was raised to be so useless because her father Albert
Lieber, the brewer and speculator, believed that America was going to
have an aristocracy based on the European model. Proofs of membership
in such a caste over there, and so it would be over here, too, he must
have reasoned, were wives and daughters who were ornamental.

41





I don't think I missed the boat when I failed to write a novel about
Albert Lieber, and how he was largely responsible for my mother's
suicide on Mother's Day Eve, 1944. German-Americans in Indianapolis
lack universality. They have never been sympathetically, or even
villainously, stereotyped in movies or books or plays. I would have
had to explain them from scratch.

Lotsa luck!

The great critic H. L. Mencken, himself a German-American, but living
all his life in Baltimore, Maryland, confessed that he had difficulty
in concentrating on the novels of Willa Cather. Try as he might, he
couldn't really care a whole lot about Czech immigrants in Nebraska.

Same problem.


I will say for the record that my grandfather Albert Lieber's first
wife, Alice, née Barus, namesake of my sister Allie, died giving birth
to her third child, who was Uncle Rudy. Mother was her first. The
middle child was Uncle Pete, who flunked out of MIT, but who
nonetheless sired a nuclear scientist, my cousin Albert in Del Mar,
California. Cousin Albert reports that he has just gone blind.

It isn't radiation that has made cousin Albeit blind. It is something
else, which could have happened to anybody, in or out of science.
Cousin Albert himself has sired a non-nuclear-type scientist, a
computer whiz.

As Kilgore Trout used to exclaim from time to time, "Life goes on!"


The point I want to make is that Mother's father, the brewer,
Republican big shot, and neo-aristocratic bon vivant, married a
violinist after his first wife died. She turned out to be clinically
bughouse. Face it! Some women are! She hated his kids with a passion.
She was jealous of his love for them. She wanted to be the whole show.
Some women do!

This female bat out of hell, who could play a fiddle like nobody's
business, abused Mother and Uncle Pete and Uncle Rudy so ferociously,
both physically and mentally, during their formative years, before
Grandfather Lieber divorced her, that they never got over it.

If there had been a significant body of potential book-buyers who
might care about rich German-Americans in Indianapolis, it would have
been a piece of cake for me to bang out a roman-fleuve demonstrating
that my grandfather in fact murdered my mother, albeit very slowly, by
double-crossing her so long ago.

"Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch!"

Working tide: Gone With the Wind.


When Mother married my father, a young architect in moderate
circumstances, politicians and saloonkeepers annd the cream of
Indianapolis German-American society gave them a treasure trove of
crystal and linens and china and silver, and even some gold.

Scheherazade!

Who could doubt then that even Indiana had its own hereditary
aristocracy, with useless possessions to rival those of horses' asses
in the other hemisphere?

It all seemed like a lot of junk to my brother and my sister and our
father and me during the Great Depression. It is now as widely
dispersed as the Class of 1940 of Shortridge High School.

Auf Wiedersehen.

42





I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a
general public. In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake,
people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and
don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of
three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the
lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire
hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

OK, I could handle that. But after I had a character change and/or
learn something and/or apologize, that left the cast standing around
with their thumbs up their asses. That is no way to tell a reader the
show is over.

In my salad days, when I was green in judgment, and never having asked
to be born in the first place, I sought the advice of my then literary
agent as to how to end stories without killing all the characters. He
had been fiction editor of an important magazine, and a story
consultant for a Hollywood studio as well.

He said, "Nothing could be simpler, dear boy: The hero mounts his
horse and rides off into the sunset."

Many years later, he would kill himself on purpose with a twelve-gauge
shotgun.


Another friend and client of his said he couldn't possibly have
committed suicide, it was so out of character.

I replied, "Even with military training, there is no way a man can
accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun."


Many years earlier, so long ago that I was a student at the University
of Chicago, I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about the arts
in general. At that time, I had no idea that I personally would go
into any sort of art.

He said, "You know what artists are?"

I didn't

"Artists,"' he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or
my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make
this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of
paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly
what they ought to be!'"

About five years after that, he did what Hitler's Minister of
Propaganda and his wife and their kids did at the end of World War
Two. He swallowed potassium cyanide.


I wrote a letter to his widow, saying how much his teachings; had
meant to me. I did not get an answer. It could be that she was
overwhelmed with grief. Then again, she may have been sore as hell at
him for taking the easy way out.


This very summer, I asked the novelist William Styron in a Chinese
restaurant how many people on the whole planet had what we had, which
was lives worth living. Between the two of us, we came up with
seventeen percent.

The next day I took a walk in midtown Manhattan with a longtime
friend, a physician who treats every sort of addict at Bellevue
Hospital. Many of his patients are homeless and HIV-positive as well.
I told him about Styron's and my figure of seventeen percent. He said
it sounded about right to him.

As I have written elsewhere, this man is a saint. I define a saint as
a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.

I asked him why half his patients at Bellevue didn't commit suicide.
He said the same question had occurred to him. He sometimes asked
them, as though it were an unremarkable part of a diagnostic routine,
if they had thoughts of self-destruction. He said that they were
almost without exception surprised and insulted by the question. An
idea that sick had never entered their heads!

It was about then that we passed an ex-patient of his who was toting a
plastic bag filled with aluminum cans he had gathered. He was one of
Kilgore Trout's "sacred cattle," somehow wonderful despite his
economic uselessness.

"Hi, Doc," he said.

43





Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop?  Answer: That is bird
poop, too.


So much for science, and how helpful it can be in these times of
environmental calamities. Chernobyl is still hotter than a Hiroshima
baby carriage. Our underarm deodorants have eaten holes in the ozone
layer. And just get a load of this: My big brother Bernie, who can't
draw for sour apples, and who at his most objectionable used to say he
didn't like paintings because they didn't do anything, just hung there
year after year, has this summer become an artist!

[graphic of a splodge-like object - a bit like a leaf]


I shit you not! This Ph.D. physical chemist from MIT is now the poor
man's Jackson Pollock! He squoozles glurp of various colors and
consistencies between two flat sheets of impermeable materials, such
as windowpanes or bathroom tiles. He pulls them apart, et voilà! This
has nothing to do with his cancer. He didn't know he had it yet, and
the malignancy was in his lungs and not his brain in any case. He was
just farting around one day, a semi-retired old geezer without a wife
to ask him what in the name of God he thought he was doing, et voilà!
Better late than never, that's all I can say. So he sent me some
black-and-white Xeroxes of his squiggly miniatures, mostly dendritic
forms, maybe trees or shrubs, maybe mushrooms or umbrellas full of
holes, but really quite interesting. Like my ballroom dancing, they
were acceptable. He has since sent me multicolored originals, which I
like a lot.


The message he sent me along with the Xeroxes, though, wasn't about
unexpected happiness. It was an unreconstructed technocrat's challenge
to the artsy-fartsy, of which I was a prime exemplar. "Is this art or
not?" he asked. He couldn't have put that question so jeeringly fifty
years ago, of course, before the founding of the first wholly American
school of painting, Abstract Expressionism, and the deification in
particular of Jack the Dripper, Jackson Pollock, who also couldn't
draw for sour apples.

Bernie said, too, that a very interesting scientific phenomenon was
involved, having to do, he left me to guess, with how different glurps
behave when squoozled this way and that, with nowhere to go but up or
down or sideways. If the artsy-fartsy world had no use for his
pictures, he seemed to imply, his pictures could still point the way
to better lubricants or suntan lotions, or who knows what? The all-new
Preparation H!

He would not sign his pictures, he said, or admit publicly that he had
made them, or describe how they were made. He plainly expected
puffed-up critics to sweat bullets and excrete sizable chunks of
masonry when trying to answer his cunningly innocent question: "Art or
not?"


I was pleased to reply with an epistle which was frankly vengeful,
since he and Father had screwed me out of a liberal arts college
education: "Dear Brother: This is almost like telling you about the
birds and the bees," I began. "There are many good people who are
beneficially stimulated by some, but not all, manmade arrangements of
colors and shapes on flat surfaces, essentially nonsense.

"You yourself are gratified by some music, arrangements of noises, and
again essentially nonsense. If I were to kick a bucket down the cellar
stairs, and then say to you that the racket I had made was
philosophically on a par with The Magic Flute, this would not be the
beginning of a long and upsetting debate. An utterly satisfactory and
complete response on your part would be, 'I like what Mozart did, and
I hate what the bucket did."

"Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either
you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why
afterward. You don't have to say anything.

"You are a justly revered experimentalist, dear Brother. If you really
want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, 'art or not,' you
must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers
like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. Let me know
what happens."


I went on: "People capable of liking some paintings or prints or
whatever can rarely do so without knowing some-thing about the artist.
Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art
is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot
to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for
seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for
rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?

"There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom
we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of
whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France.

"I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention
without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the
viewer's mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures,
and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there
goes the ball game.

"Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their
pictureness."


I went on: "There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real
picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the
surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to
say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second
time.

"Good luck, and love as always," I wrote. And I signed my name.

44





I myself paint pictures on sheets of acetate with black India ink. An
artist half my age, Joe Petro III, who lives and works in Lexington,
Kentucky, prints them by means of the silk-screen process. I paint a
separate acetate sheet, again in opaque black, for each color I want
Joe to use. I do not see my pictures, which I have painted in black
alone, in color until Joe has printed them, one color at a time.

I make negatives for his positives.

There may be easier, quicker, and cheaper ways to create pictures.
They might leave us more time for golf, and for making model airplanes
and whacking off. We should look into that. Joe's studio looks like
something out of the Middle Ages.


I can't thank Joe enough for having me make negatives for his
positives after the little radio in my head stopped receiving messages
from wherever it is the bright ideas come from. Art is so absorbing.

It is a sopper-upper.


Listen: Only three weeks ago at this writing, on September 6th, 1996,
Joe and I opened a show of twenty-six of our prints in the 1/1 Gallery
in Denver, Colorado. A local microbrewery, Wynkoop, bottled a special
beer for the occasion. The label was one of my self-portraits. The
name of the beer was Kurt's Mile-High Malt.

[graphic of the front of a beer bottle label]


You think that wasn't fun? Try this: The beer, at my suggestion, was
lightly flavored with coffee. What was so great about that? It tasted
really good, for one thing, but it was also an homage to my maternal
grandfather Albert Lieber, who was a brewer until he was put out of
business by Prohibition in 1920. The secret ingredient in the beer
that won a Gold Medal for the Indianapolis Brewery at the Paris
Exposition of 1889 was coffee!

Ting-a-ling!

[graphic of the back of a beer bottle label]


That still wasn't enough fun out there in Denver? OK, how about the
fact that the name of the owner of the Wynkoop Brewing Company, a guy
about Joe's age, was John Hickenlooper? So what? Only this: When I
went to Cornell University to become a chemist fifty-six years ago, I
was made a fraternity brother of a man named John Hickenlooper.

Ting-a-ling?

This was his son! My fraternity brother had died when this son was
only seven. I knew more about him than his own son did! I was able to
tell this young Denver brewer that his dad, in partnership with
another Delta Upsilon brother, John Locke, sold candy and soft drinks
and cigarettes out of a big closet at the top of the stairs on the
second floor of the fraternity house.

They christened it Hickenlooper's Lockenkar. We called it
Locken-looper's Hickenbar, and Barkenhicker's Loopenlock, and
Lockenbarker's Loopenhick, and so on.

Happy days! We thought we'd live forever.


Old beer in new bottles. Old jokes in new people.


I told young John Hickenlooper a joke his dad taught me. It worked
like this: His dad would say to me, no matter where we were, "Are you
a member of the Turtle Club?" I had no choice but to bellow at the top
of my lungs, "YOU BET YOUR ASS I AM!"

I could do the same thing to his dad. On some particularly solemn and
sacred occasion, such as the swearing in of new fraternity brothers, I
might whisper to him, "Are you a member of the Turtle Club?" He would
have no choice but to bellow at the top of his lungs, "YOU BET YOUR
ASS I AM!"

45





Another old joke: "Hello, my name is Spalding. No doubt you've played
with my balls." It doesn't work anymore because Spalding is no longer
a major manufacturer of athletic equipment, just as Lieber Gold Medal
Beer is no longer a popular recreational drug in the Middle West, and
just as the Vonnegut Hardware Company is no longer a manufacturer and
retailer of durable and eminently practical goods out that way.

The hardware company was put out of business fair and squaire by
livelier competitors. The Indianapolis Brewery was shut down by
Article XVIII of the United States Constitution, which declared in
1919 that the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating
liquors was against the law.

The Indianapolis humorist Kin Hubbard said about: Prohibition that it
was "better than no liquor at all." Intoxicating liquors did not
become lawful again until 1933. By then, the bootlegger Al Capone
owned Chicago, and Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a
murdered-President-to-be, was a multimillionaire.


At the daybreak that followed the opening of Joe Petro III's and my
show in Denver, a Sunday, I awoke alone in a room in the oldest hotel
there, the Oxford. I knew where I was and how I had gotten there. It
wasn't as though I had been drunk as a hooty-owl on Grandfather's beer
the night before.

I dressed and stepped outside. Nobody else I could see was up yet.
There were no moving vehicles. If free will had chosen to kick in
again at that moment, and I had been off balance and so fallen down,
nobody would have run over me.

The best thing to be when free will kicks in, probably, is a Mbuti, a
Pygmy in a rain forest in Zaire, Africa.


Two hundred yards from my hotel was the husk of what used to be the
throbbing heart of the city, its turgid auricles and ventricles. I
mean its passenger railroad station. It was completed in 1880. Only
two trains a day stop there now.

I myself was antique enough to remember as terrific music the hissing
and rolling thunder of steam locomotives, and their mournful whistles,
and the metronomic clicks of wheels on joints in the rails, and the
apparent rise and fall, thanks to the Doppler effect, of the pitch of
warning bells at crossings.

I remembered labor history, too, because the first effective strikes
by American working people for better pay, and more respect, and safer
working conditions, were called against the railroads. And then
against owners of coal mines and steel mills and textile mills, and on
and on. Much blood was shed in what appeared to most members of my
generation of American writers to be battles as worth fighting as any
against a foreign enemy.

The optimism that infused so much of our writing was based on our
belief that after Magna Carta, and then the Declaration of
Independence, and then the Bill of Rights, and then the Emancipation
Proclamation, and then Article XIX of the Constitution, which in 1920
entitled women to vote, some scheme for economic justice could also be
devised. That was the logical next step.

And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to
the Constitution:

Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared
for until maturity.

Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work
to do, at a living wage.


What we have created instead, as customers and employees and
investors, is mountains of paper wealth so enormous that a handful of
people in charge of them can take millions and billions for themselves
without hurting anyone. Apparently.

Many members of my generation are disappointed.

46





Can you believe it? Kilgore Trout, who never even saw a stage play
until he got to Xanadu, not only wrote a play after he got home from
our war, which was World War Two, but he copyrighted it! I have just
retrieved it from the memory banks of the Library of Congress, and it
is entitled The Wrinkled Old Family Retainer.

It is like a birthday present from my computer here in the Sinclair
Lewis Suite at Xanadu. Wow! The date yesterday was November 11th,
2010. I have just turned eighty-eight, or ninety-eight, if you want to
count the rerun. My wife, Monica Pepper Vonnegut, says eighty-eight is
a very lucky number, and so is ninety-eight. She is heavily into
numerology.

My darling daughter Lily will turn twenty-eight on December 15th! Who
ever thought I would live to see that day?


The Wrinkled Old Family Retainer is about a wedding. The bride is
Mirabile Dictu, a virgin. The groom is Flagrante Delicto, a heartless
womanizer.

Sotto Voce, a male guest standing at the fringe of the ceremony, says
out of the corner of his mouth to a guy standing next to him, "I don't
bother with all this. I simply find a woman who hates me, and I give
her a house."

And the other guy says, as the groom is kissing the bride, "All women
are psychotic. All men are jerks."

The eponymous wrinkled old family retainer, crying his rheumy eyes out
behind a potted palm, is Scrotum.


Monica is still obsessed by the mystery of who left a cigar smoldering
beneath the smoke alarm in the picture gallery of the Academy minutes
before free will kicked in again. That was more than nine years ago!
Who cares? What difference can knowing that make? That's like knowing
what the white stuff in bird poop is.

What Kilgore Trout did with that cigar was scrooch it out in the
saucer. He scrooched and scrooched and scrooched it, by his own
admission to Monica and me, as though it were responsible not only for
the yelling of the smoke alarm, but for all the din outside as well.

"The wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the oil," he said.


He realized the absurdity of what he was doing, he said, only when, as
he took a painting down from the wall, preparing to hit the alarm with
a corner of the frame, the alarm fell silent of its own accord.

He hung up the painting again, and even made sure it was hanging
straight. "That seemed somehow important, that the picture was nice
and straight," he said, "and evenly spaced from the others. At least I
could make that little part of the chaotic Universe exactly as it
should be. I was grateful for the opportunity to do that."

He returned to the entrance hall, expecting the armed guard to be
awakening from his torpor. But Dudley Prince was still a statue, still
convinced that, if he budged, he would find himself back in prison
again.

Trout again confronted him, saying, "Wake up! Wake up! You've got free
will again, and there's work to do!" And so on.

Nothing.

Trout had an inspiration! Instead of trying to sell the concept of
free will, which he himself didn't believe in, he said this: "You've
been very sick! Now you're well again. You've been very sick! Now
you're well again."

That mantra worked!

Trout could have been a great advertising man. The same has been said
of Jesus Christ. The basis of every great advertisement is a credible
promise. Jesus promised better times in an afterlife. Trout was
promising the same thing in the here and now.

Dudley Prince's spiritual rigor mortis began to thaw! Trout hastened
his recovery by telling him to snap his fingers and stamp his feet,
and stick out his tongue and wiggle his butt, and so on.

Trout, who had never even earned a High School Equivalency
Certificate, had nonetheless become a real-life Dr. Frankenstein!

47





Uncle Alex Vonnegut, who said we should exclaim out loud whenever we
were accidentally happy, was considered a fool by his wife, Aunt Raye.
He certainly started out as a fool when a spanking-new freshman at
Harvard. Uncle Alex was asked to explain in an essay why he had come
to Harvard all the way from Indianapolis. By his own gleeful account,
he wrote, "Because my big brother is at MIT."

He never had a kid, and never owned a gun. He owned a lot of books,
though, and kept buying new ones, and giving me those he thought were
particularly well done. It was an ordeal for him to find this book or
that one, so he could read some particularly magical passage aloud to
me. Here's why: His wife Aunt Raye, who was said to be autistic,
arranged his library according to the size and color of the volumes,
and stairstep style.

So he might say of a collection of essays by his hero H. L. Mencken,
"I think it was green, and about this high."


His sister, my aunt Irma, said to me one time when I was a grownup,
"All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women." Her two brothers were
sure as heck scared of her.


Listen: A Harvard education for my Uncle Alex wasn't the trophy of a
micromanaged Darwinian victory over others that it is today. His
father, the architect Bernard Vonnegut, sent him there in order that
he might become civilized, which he did indeed become, although
fabulously henpecked, and nothing more than a life insurance salesman.

I am eternally grateful to him, and indirectly to what Harvard used to
be, I suppose, for my knack of finding in great books, some of them
very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter
what else may be going on.


It now appears that books in the form so beloved by Uncle Alex and me,
hinged and unlocked boxes, packed with leaves speckled by ink, are
obsolescent. My grandchildren are already doing much of their reading
from words projected on the face of a video screen.

Please, please, please wait just a minute!

At the time of their invention, books were devices as crassly
practical for storing or transmitting language, albeit fabricated from
scarcely modified substances found in forest and field and animals, as
the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning
calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because
of their sweedy token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands
and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I
would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

48





It is piquant to me that one of the greatest poets and one of the
greatest playwrights of this century would both deny that they were
from the Middle West, specifically from St. Louis, Missouri. I mean T.
S. Eliot, who wound up sounding like the Archbishop of Canterbury, and
Tennessee Williams, a product of Washington University in St. Louis
and the University of Iowa, who wound up sounding like Ashley Wilkes
in Gone With the Wind.

True enough, Williams was born in Mississippi, but moved to St. Louis
when he was seven. And it was he who named himself Tennessee when he
was twenty-seven. Before he did that to himself, he was Tom.


Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, pronounced PEE-roo. "Night and
Day"? "Begin the Beguine"? Not bad, not bad.


Kilgore Trout was born in a hospital in Bermuda, near where his
father, Raymond, was gathering material for a follow-up on his
doctoral dissertation on the last of the Bermuda Erns. The sole
remaining rookery of those great blue birds, the largest of all
pelagic raptors, was on Dead Man's Rock, an otherwise uninhabited lava
steeple in the center of the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Trout was in
fact conceived on Dead Man's Rock during his parents' honeymoon.

What was particularly interesting about these erns was that the female
birds, and not anything people had done, so far as anybody could tell,
were to blame for the rapidly dwindling population. In the past, and
presumably for thousands of years, the females had hatched their eggs,
and tended the young, and finally taught them to fly by kicking them
off the top of the steeple.

But when Raymond Trout went there as a doctoral candidate with his
bride, he found that the females had taken to bowdlerizing the
nurturing process by kicking the eggs off the top of the steeple.


Thus did Kilgore Trout's father providentially become a specialist,
thanks to the female Bermuda Erns' initiative, or whatever you want to
call it, in evolutionary mechanisms governing fates of species,
mechanisms other than the Occam's Razor of Darwin's Natural Selection.

Nothing would do, then, but that the Trout family, when little Kilgore
was nine, spend the summer of 1926 camped on the shore of
Disappointment Lake in inland Nova Scotia. The Dalhousie Woodpeckers
in that area had quit the brain-rattling business of pecking wood, and
were feasting on the plentiful blackflies on the backs of deer and
moose instead.

Dalhousies, of course, are the commonest woodpeckers in eastern
Canada, mainly, ranging from Newfoundland to Manitoba, and from Hudson
Bay to Detroit, Michigan. Only those around Disappointment Lake,
however, identical with the rest in plumage and beak size and shape,
and so on, had stopped getting at bugs the hard way, digging them out
one at a time, from holes the bugs had made or found in tree trunks.

They were first observed gorging on blackflie is in 1916, with World
War One going on in the other hemisphere. The Disappointment Lake
Dalhousies, however, were not subjected to observation year after year
before that, or since. This was because the clouds of voracious
blackflies, often resembling little tornadoes, according to Trout,
made the apostate Dalhousies' habitat virtually uninhabitable by human
beings.


So the Trout family spent the summer up there dressed like beekeepers
night and day, in gloves, in long-sleeved shirts tied at the wrists,
and long pants tied at the ankles, in wide-brimmed hats draped with
gauze, to protect their heads and necks, no matter how hellishly hot
the weather. Father, mother, and son dragged the camping gear and a
heavy motion picture camera and tripod to the marshy campsite while
harnessed to a travois.

Dr. Trout expected to film nothing more than ordinary Dalhousies,
indistinguishable from other Dalhousies, but pecking at the backs of
deer and moose instead of tree trunks. Such simple pictures would have
been exciting enough, showing that lower animals were capable of
cultural as well as biological evolution. One might have extrapolated
from them the supposition that one bird in the flock was a sort of
Albert Einstein, so to speak, having theorized and then proved that
blackflies were as nutritious as anything that could be dug out of a
tree trunk.


Was Dr. Trout ever in for a surprise, though! Not only were these
birds obscenely fat, and thus easy prey for predators. They were
exploding, too! Spores from a tree fungus growing near Dalhousie nests
found an opportunity to become a new disease in the intestinal tracts
of the overweight birds, thanks to certain chemicals in the bodies of
black-flies.

     The new life-style of the fungus inside the birds at one point
triggered the sudden release of quantities of carbon dioxide so
copious that the birds blew up! One Dalhousie, perhaps the last
veteran of the Disappointment Lake experiment, would explode a year
later in a park in Detroit, Michigan, setting off the second-worst
race riot in the Motor City's history.

49





Trout wrote a story one time about another race riot. It was on a
planet twice as big as Earth, orbiting Puke, a star the size of a BB,
two billion years ago.


I asked my big brother Bernie in the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, and this was long before the period of the rerun,
whether he believed in Darwin's theory of evolution. He said he did,
and I asked how come, and he said, "Because it's the only game in
town."

Bernie's reply is the tag line of yet another joke from long ago, like
"Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch!" It seems a guy is off to play
cards, and a friend tells him the game is crooked. The guy says,
"Yeah, I know, but it's the only game in town."


I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation, but the British
astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in
Darwin's theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a
hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747.

No matter what is doing the creating, I have to say that the giraffe
and the rhinoceros are ridiculous.

And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive
parts of the body, such as the ding-dong, of hating life while
pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly: "Somebody shoot me
while I'm happy!"


Kilgore Trout, the ornithologist's son, wrote in My Ten Years on
Automatic Pilot: "The Fiduciary is a mythological bird. It has never
existed in Nature, never could, never will."

Trout is the only person who ever said a fiduciary was any sort of
bird. The noun (from the Latin fiducia, confidence, trust) in fact
identifies a sort of Homo sapiens who will conserve the property, and
nowadays especially paper or computer representations of wealth,
belonging to other people, including the treasuries of their
governments.

He or she or it cannot exist, thanks to the brain and the ding-dong,
et cetera. So we have in this summer of 1996, rerun or not, and as
always, faithless custodians of capital making themselves
multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with
money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to
fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings
of respect and safety.

For Christ's sake, let's help more of our frightened people get
through this thing, whatever it is.


Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.

Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues
to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.


Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They
don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite
hermaphrodites.


Yes, and any dream of taking better care of our people might as well
be a transvestite hermaphrodite without some scheme for giving us all
the support and companionship of extended families, within which
sharing and compassion are more plausible than in an enormous nation,
and a Fiduciary may not be as mythical as the Roc and the Phoenix
after all.

50





I am so old that I can remember when the word fuck was thought to be
so full of bad magic that no respectable publication would print it.
Another old joke: "Don't say 'fuck' in front of the B-A-B-Y."

A word just as full of poison, supposedly, but which could be spoken
in polite company, provided the speaker's tone implied fear and
loathing, was Communism, denoting an activity as commonly and
innocently practiced in many primitive societies as fucking.

So it was a particularly elegant commentary on the patriotism and
nice-nellyism during the deliberately insane Vietnam War when the
satirist Paul Krassner printed red-white-and-blue bumper stickers that
said FUCK COMMUNISM!


My novel Slaughterhouse-Five was attacked back then for containing the
word motherfucker. In an early episode, somebody takes a shot at four
American soldiers caught behind the German lines. One American snarls
at another one, who, as I say, has never fucked anyone, "Get your head
down, you dumb motherfucker."

Ever since those words were published, mothers of sons have had to
wear chastity belts while doing housework.


I of course understand that the widespread revulsion inspired even
now, and perhaps forever, by the word Communism is a sane response to
the cruelties and stupidities of the dictators of the USSR, who called
themselves, hey presto, Communists, just as Hitler called himself, hey
presto, a Christian.

To children of the Great Depression, however, it still seems a mild
shame to outlaw from polite thought, because of the crimes of tyrants,
a word that in the beginning described for us nothing more than a
possibly reasonable alternative to the Wall Street crapshoot.


Yes, and the word Socialist was the second S in USSR, so good-bye,
Socialism along with Communism, good-bye to the soul of Eugene Debs of
Terre Haute, Indiana, where the moonlight's shining bright along the
Wabash. From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay.

"While there is a soul in prison, I am not free."


The Great Depression was a time for discussing all sorts of
alternatives to the Wall Street crapshoot, which had suddenly killed
so many businesses, including banks. The crapshoot left millions and
millions of Americans without any way to pay for food and shelter and
clothing.

So what?

That was almost a century ago, if you want to count the rerun. Forget
it! Practically everybody who was alive back then is deader than a
mackerel. Happy Socialism to them in the Afterlife!

What matters now is that, on the afternoon of February 13th, 2001,
Kilgore Trout roused Dudley Prince from his Post-Timequake Apathy.
Trout urged him to speak, to say anything, no matter how nonsensical.
Trout suggested he say, "I pledge allegiance to the flag," or
whatever, to prove to himself thereby that he was again in charge of
his own destiny.

Prince spoke groggily at first. He didn't pledge allegiance, but
indicated instead that he was trying to understand everything Trout
had said to him so far. He said, "You told me I had something."

"You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do," said
Trout.

"Before that," said Prince. "You said I had something."

"Forget it," said Trout. "I was all excited. I wasn't making sense."

"I still want to know what you said I had," said Prince.

"I said you had free will," said Trout.

"Free will, free will, free will," echoed Prince with wry wonderment.
"I always wondered what it was I had. Now I got a name for it."

"Please forget what I said," said Trout. "There are lives to save!"

"You know what you can do with free will?" said Prince.

"No," said Trout.

"You can stuff it up your ass," said Prince.

51





When I liken Trout there in the entrance hall of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, awakening Dudley Prince from PTA, to Dr.
Frankenstein, I am alluding of course to the antihero of the novel
Frankenstein - or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley, second wife of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In that
book, the scientist Frankenstein puts a bunch of body parts from
different corpses together in the shape of a man.

Frankenstein jazzes them with electricity. The results in the book are
exact opposites of those since achieved in real-life American state
penitentiaries with real-life electric chairs. Most people think
Frankenstein is the monster. He isn't. Frankenstein is the scientist.


Prometheus in Greek mythology makes the first human beings from mud.
He steals fire from Heaven and gives it to them so they can be warm
and cook, and not, one would hope, so we could incinerate all the
little yellow bastards in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are in Japan.

In chapter 2 of this wonderful book of mine, I mention a commemoration
in the chapel of the University of Chicago of the fiftieth anniversary
of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima. I said at the time that I had to
respect the opinion of my friend William Styron that the Hiroshima
bomb saved his life. Styron was then a United States Marine, training
for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, when that bomb was
dropped.

I had to add, though, that I knew a single word that proved our
democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully
rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and
children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the
word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki.


Whatever! That, too, was a long, long time ago, and ten years longer
ago than that, if you want to count the rerun. What I find worth
exclaiming about right now is the continuing applicability to the
human condition, years after free will has ceased to be a novelty, of
what jazzed Dudley Prince back to life, of what is now known generally
as Kilgore's Creed: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and
there's work to do."

Teachers in public schools across the land, I hear, say Kilgore's
Creed to students after the students have recited the Pledge of
Allegiance and the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of each school day.
Teachers say it seems to help.

A friend told me he was at a wedding where the minister said at the
climax of the ceremony: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and
there's work to do. I now pronounce you man and wife."

Another friend, a biochemist for a cat food company, said she was
staying at a hotel in Toronto, Canada, and she asked the front desk to
give her a wake-up call in the morning. She answered her phone the
next morning, and the operator said, "You were sick, but now you're
well again, and there's work to do. It's seven a.m., and the
temperature outside is thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, or zero
Celsius."


On the afternoon of February 13th, 2001, alone, and then during the
next two weeks or so, Kilgore's Creed did as much to save life on
Earth as Einstein's E equals mc squared had done to end it two
generations earlier.

Trout had Dudley Prince say the magic words to the other two armed
guards on the day shift at the Academy. They went into the former
Museum of the American Indian, and said them to the catatonic bums in
there. A goodly number of the aroused sacred cattle, maybe a third of
them, became anti-PTA evangelists in turn. Armed with nothing more
than Kilgore's Creed, these ragged veterans of unemployability fanned
out through the neighborhood to convert more living statues to lives
of usefulness, to helping the injured, or at least getting them the
hell indoors somewhere before they froze to death.


"God is in the details," Anonymous tells us in the sixteenth edition
of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. The seemingly pipsqueak detail of
what became of the armored limousine that delivered Zoltan Pepper to
be creamed by the hook-and-ladder as he rang the doorbell of the
Academy is a case in point. The limousine driver, Jerry Rivers, had
moved it fifty yards to the west, toward the Hudson River, after
unloading his paraplegic passenger and his wheelchair on the sidewalk.

That was still part of the rerun. Rerun or not, though, Jerry wasn't
to stay parked in front of the Academy, lest the luxury vehicle arouse
suspicions that the Academy might not be an abandoned building after
all. If that hadn't been the policy, the limousine would have absorbed
the impact of the fire truck, and possibly but not certainly saved the
life of Zoltan Pepper as he rang the doorbell.

But at what cost? The entrance to the Academy would not have been
broached, giving Kilgore Trout access to Dudley Prince and the other
armed guards. Trout could not have put on a spare guard's uniform he
found in there, which made him look like an authority figure. He would
not have been able to arm himself with the Academy's bazooka, with
which he knocked out the braying burglar alarms of impacted but
unoccupied parked vehicles.

52





The American Academy of Arts and Letters owned a bazooka because the
warlords who knocked over Columbia University spearheaded their attack
with a tank stolen from the Rainbow Division of the National Guard.
They were so audacious that they flew Old Glory, The Stars and
Stripes.

It is conceivable that the warlords, with whom nobody messes, any more
than anybody messes with the ten biggest corporations, consider
themselves as American as anyone. "America," wrote Kilgore Trout in
MTYOAP, "is the interplay of three hundred million Rube Goldberg
contraptions invented only yesterday.

"And you better have an extended family," he added, although he
himself had done without one between the time he was discharged from
the Army, on September 11th, 1945, and March 1st, 2001, the day he and
Monica Pepper and Dudley Prince and Jerry Rivers arrived by armored
limousine, with an overloaded trailer wallowing behind, at Xanadu.


Rube Goldberg was a newspaper cartoonist during the terminal century
of the previous Christian millennium. He drew pictures of absurdly
complex and undependable machines, employing treadmills and trapdoors
and bells and whistles, and domestic animals in harness and
blowtorches and mailmen and light bulbs, and firecrackers and mirrors
and radios and Victrolas, and pistols firing blank cartridges, and so
on, in order to accomplish some simple task, such as closing a window
blind.


Yes, and Trout harped on the human need for extended families, and I
still do, because it is so obvious that we, because we are human, need
them as much as we need proteins and carbohydrates and fats and
vitamins and essential minerals.

I have just read about a teenage father who shook his baby to death
because it couldn't control its anal sphincter yet and wouldn't stop
crying. In an extended family, there would have been other people
around, who would have rescued and comforted the baby, and the father,
too.

If the father had been raised in an extended family, he might not have
been such an awful father, or maybe not a father at all yet, because
he was still too young to be a good one, or because he was too crazy
to ever be a good one.


I was in southern Nigeria in 1970, at the very end of the Biafran War
there, on the Biafran side, the losing side, the mostly Ibo side, long
before the rerun. I met an Ibo father of a new baby. He had four
hundred relatives! Even with a losing war going on, he and his wife
were about to go on a trip, introducing the baby to all its relatives.

When the Biafran army needed replacements, big Ibo families met to
decide who should go. In peacetime, the families met to decide who
should go to college, often to Cal Tech or Oxford or Harvard, a long
way off. And then a whole family chipped in to pay for the travel and
tuition and clothing suitable for the climate and dominant society
where a kid was going next.


I met the Ibo writer Chinua Achebe over there. He is teaching and
writing at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 12504, over
here now. I asked him how the Ibos were now, with Nigeria run by a
rapacious junta which regularly hangs its critics for having much too
much free will.

Chinua said no Ibos had roles in the government, nor did they want
any. He said Ibos survived in modest businesses unlikely to bring them
into conflict with the government or its friends, which included
representatives of Shell Oil Company.

They must have held many meetings, in which ethics as well as survival
schemes were debated.

And they still send their smartest kids off to the best universities
far away.


When I celebrate the idea of a family and family values, I don't mean
a man and a woman and their kids, new in town, scared to death, and
not knowing whether to shit or go blind in the midst of economic and
technological and ecological and political chaos. I'm talking about
what so many Americans need so frantically: what I had in Indianapolis
before World War Two, and what the characters in Thornton Wilder's Our
Town had, and what the Ibos have.


In chapter 45, I proposed two amendments to the Constitution. Here are
two more, little enough to expect from life, one would think, like the
Bill of Rights:

Article XXX: Every person, upon reaching a statutory age of puberty,
shall be declared an adult in a solemn public ritual, during which he
or she must welcome his or her new responsibilities in the community,
and their attendant dignities.

Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel
that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone.

Such essential elements in an ideal diet for a human spirit, of
course, can be provided convincingly only by extended families.

53





The monster in Frankenstein - or, The Modern Prometheus turns mean
because he finds it so humiliating to be alive and yet so ugly, so
unpopular. He kills Frankenstein, who, again, is the scientist and not
the monster. And let me hasten to say that my big brother Bernie never
has been a Frankenstein-style scientist, never has worked nor would
have worked on purposely destructive devices of any sort. He hasn't
been a Pandora, either, turning loose new poisons or new diseases or
whatever. According to Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman.
She was made by the gods who were angry with Prometheus for making a
man out of mud and then stealing fire from them. Making a woman was
their revenge. They gave Pandora a box. Prometheus begged her not to
open it. She opened it. Every evil to which human flesh is heir came
out of it.

The last thing to come out of the box was hope. It flew away.


I didn't make that depressing story up. Neither did Kilgore Trout.
Ancient Greeks did.


This is the point I want to make, though: Frankenstein's monster was
unhappy and destructive, whereas the people Trout energized in the
neighborhood of the Academy, although most of them wouldn't have won
any beauty contests, were by and large cheerful and public-spirited.

I have to say most of them wouldn't have won any beauty contests.
There was at least one strikingly beautiful woman involved. That was a
member of the Academy's office staff. That was Clara Zine. Monica
Pepper is certain that Clara Zine was the one who was smoking the
cigar that set off the smoke alarm in the picture gallery. When
confronted by Monica, Clara Zine swore that in her whole life she had
never smoked a cigar, that she hated cigars, and she disappeared.

I have no idea what has become of her.


Clara Zine and Monica were tending the wounded in the former Museum of
the American Indian, which Trout had turned into a hospital, when
Monica asked Clara about the cigar, and then Clara departed in a
huffmobile.

Trout, carrying what had become his bazooka, and accompanied by Dudley
Prince and the other two armed guards, had thrown out all the bums who
were still in the shelter. They did that in order to free up the cots
for people with broken limbs or skulls or whatever, who needed and
deserved to lie down where it was warm even more than the bums did.

It was triage, such as Kilgore Trout had seen practiced on World War
Two battlefields. "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for
my country," said the American patriot Nathan Hale. "Fuck the bums!"
said the American patriot Kilgore Trout.


 It was Jerry Rivers, the chauffeur of the Peppers' stretch limousine,
however, who steered his dreamboat around wrecked vehicles and their
victims, often driving on sidewalks, to reach the studios of the
Columbia Broadcasting System down on West 52nd Street. Rivers awakened
the staff there with, "You were sick, but now you're well again, and
there's work to do." And then he got them to broadcast that same
message on both radio and TV from coast to coast.

In order to get them to do that, though, he had to tell them a lie. He
said everybody was recovering from a nerve gas attack by persons
unknown. So the first version of Kilgore 's Creed to reach millions in
the nation, and then billions in the world, was this: "This is a CBS
exclusive! There has been a nerve gas attack by persons unknown. You
were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. Make
sure all children and senior citizens are safe indoors."

54





Certainly! Mistakes were made! But Trout's silencing of automobile
burglar alarms with his bazooka wasn't one of them. If a manual is to
be written about how to behave in urban areas should there be another
timequake, and then a rerun, and then free will kicks in again, it
should recommend that every neighborhood have a bazooka, and that
responsible adults know where it is.

Mistakes? The manual should point out that vehicles themselves are not
responsible for the damage they cause, whether controlled or not.
Punishing automobiles as though they were rebellious slaves in need of
a hiding is a waste of time! Scapegoating cars and trucks and buses
still in running condition, simply because they are automobiles,
moreover, deprives rescue workers and refugees of their means of
transportation.

As Trout advises in MTYQAP: "Beating the daylights out of a stranger's
parked Dodge Intrepid may well afford fleeting relief from symptoms of
stress. When all is said and done, though, that can only leave the
life of its owner even more of a crock of shit than it was before. Do
unto others' vehicles as you would have them do unto yours.

"It is pure superstition that a motor vehicle with its ignition turned
off can start itself up without the help of a human being," he goes
on. "If, after free will kicks in, you must yank the ignition keys out
of driver-less vehicles whose engines aren't running, please, please,
please throw the keys into a mailbox, and not down a storm sewer or
into a trash-strewn vacant lot"


The biggest mistake Trout himself made, probably, was in turning the
American Academy of Arts and Letters into a morgue. The steel front
door and its frame were tacked up back in place again, to keep the
heat inside. It would have made more sense to line up the bodies
outside, where the temperature was well below freezing.

And Trout couldn't have been expected to worry about it,
way-the-hell-and-gone up there on West 155th, but some awakened member
of the Federal Aviation Administration should have realized, after all
the crashing at ground level petered out, that there were still planes
aloft on automatic pilot. Their crews and passengers, still gaga with
untreated PTA, couldn't care doodley what would happen when the fuel
ran out.

In ten minutes, or maybe an hour, or maybe three hours or whatever,
their heavier-than-air-craft, often six miles up, would cash in the
chips, would buy the farm, for all aboard.


For the Mbuti, die rain forest Pygmies of Zaire, Africa, February
13th, 2001, was in all probability a day neither more nor less amazing
than any other day, unless a rogue airplane happened to land on top of
one of them after the rerun stopped.

The worst of all aircraft when free will kicks in, of course, are
helicopters, or choppers, air screws first envisioned by the genius
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Choppers can't glide. Choppers don't
want to fly in the first place.

A safer place than a helicopter aloft is a roller coaster or a Ferris
wheel.


Yes, and when martial law was established in New York City, the former
Museum of the American Indian was turned into a barracks, and Kilgore
Trout was relieved of his bazooka, and the Academy's headquarters were
requisitioned as an officers' club, and he and Monica Pepper and
Dudley Prince and Jerry Rivers took off in the limousine for Xanadu.

Trout, the former hobo, had expensive clothing, including shoes and
socks and underwear and cuff links, and matched Louis Vuitton luggage
which had belonged to Zoltan Pepper. Everybody agreed that Monica's
husband was better off dead. What would he have had to look forward
to?


When Trout found Zoltan's flattened and elongated wheelchair in the
middle of West 155th Street, he leaned it against a tree and said it
was modern art. The two wheels had been squashed together so they
looked like one. Trout said it was a six-foot aluminum-and-leather
praying mantis, trying to ride a unicycle.

He called it The Spirit of the Twenty-first Century.

55





I met the author Dick Francis at the Kentucky Derby years ago. I knew
he had been a champion rider in steeplechases. I said he was a bigger
man than I had expected. He replied that it took a big man to "hold a
horse together" in a steeplechase. This image of his remained in the
forefront of my memory so long, I think, because life itself can seem
a lot like that: a matter of holding one's self-respect together,
instead of a horse, as one's self-respect is expected to hurdle fences
and hedges and water.

My dear thirteen-year-old daughter Lily, having become a pretty
adolescent, appears to me, as do most American adolescents, to be
holding her self-respect together the best she can in a really scary
steeplechase.


I said to the new graduates at Butler University, not much older than
Lily, that they were being called Generation X, two clicks from the
end, but that they were as much Generation A as Adam and Eve had been.
What malarkey!

Esprit de I'escalier! Better late than never! Only at this very moment
in 1996, as I am about to write the next sentence, have I realized how
meaningless the image of a Garden of Eden must have been to my young
audience, since the world was so densely populated with other secretly
frightened people, and so overplanted and rigged with both natural and
manmade booby traps.

The next sentence: I should have told them they were like Dick Francis
when Dick Francis was young, and astride an animal full of pride and
panic, in the starting gate for a steeplechase.


More: If a steed balks again and again at hazards, it is put out to
pasture. The self-respects of most middle-class American people my age
or older, and still alive, are out to pasture now, not a bad place to
be. They munch. They ruminate.

If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to
shoot it. My mother and Ernest Hemingway and my former literary agent
and Jerzy Kosinski and my reluctant thesis advisor at the University
of Chicago and Eva Braun all come to mind.

But not Kilgore Trout. His indestructible self-respect is what I loved
most about Kilgore Trout. Men loving men can happen, in peacetime as
well as war. I also loved my war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare.


Many people fail because their brains, their three-and-a-half-pound
blood-soaked sponges, their dogs' breakfasts, don't work well enough.
The cause of a failure can be as simple as that. Some people, try as
they may, can't cut the mustard! That's that!

I have a male cousin my age who was doing miserably back in Shortridge
High School. He was a hulking interior lineman, and very sweet. He
brought home an awful report card. His father asked him, "What is the
meaning of this?" My cousin responded as follows: "Don't you know,
Father? I'm dumb, I'm dumb."


Put this in your pipe and smoke it: My maternal great-uncle Carl Barus
was a founder and president of the American Physical Society. A
building at Brown University is named in his honor. Uncle Carl Barus
was a professor there for many years. I never met him. My big brother
did. Until this summer of 1996, Bernie and I had thought of him as a
serene contributor to modest but tidy increases in human understanding
of the laws of Nature.

Last June, though, I asked Bernie to tell me some specific
discoveries, however small, made by our distinguished great-uncle,
whose genes Bernie had inherited so outstandingly. Bernie's response
was anything but schnip-schnop, anything but prompt. Bernie was
bemused to realize at such a late date that Uncle Carl, while making a
career in physics attractive, had never told him about anything he
himself had accomplished.

"I'll have to look him up," said Bernie.

Hold on to your hats!


Listen: Uncle Carl, in 1900 or thereabouts, experimented with the
effects of X rays and radioactivity on condensation in a cloud
chamber, a wooden cylinder filled with a fog he himself had concocted.
He concluded and published as a certainty that ionization was
relatively unimportant in condensation.

At about the same time, friends and neighbors, the Scottish physicist
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson performed similar experiments with a cloud
chamber made of glass. The canny Scot proved that ions produced by X
rays and radioactivity had a lot to do with condensation. He
criticized Uncle Carl for ignoring contamination from the wood walls
of his chamber, for his crude method of making clouds, and for not
shielding his fog from the electrical field of his X-ray apparatus.

Wilson went on to make paths of electrically charged particles visible
to the naked eye by means of his cloud chamber. In 1927, he shared a
Nobel Prize for Physics for doing this.

Uncle Carl must have felt like something the cat drug in!

56





A Luddite to the end, as was Kilgore Trout, as was Ned Ludd, the
possibly but not certainly fictitious workman who smashed up
machinery, supposedly, in Leicestershire, England, at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, I persist in pecking away at a manual
typewriter. That still leaves me technologically several generations
ahead of William Styron and Stephen King, who, like Trout, write with
pens on yellow legal pads.

I correct my pages with pen or pencil. I have come into Manhattan on
business. I telephone a woman who has been doing my retyping for years
and years now. She doesn't have a computer, either. Maybe I should can
her. She has moved from the city to a country town. I ask her what the
weather is like out that way. I ask if there have been any unusual
birds at her bird feeder. I ask if squirrels have found a way to get
at it, and so on.

Yes, the squirrels have found a new way to get at the feeder. They can
become trapeze artists, if they have to.

She has had back trouble in the past. I ask her how her back is. She
says her back is OK. She asks how my daughter Lily is. I say Lily is
OK. She asks how old Lily is now, and I say she'll be fourteen in
December.

She says, "Fourteen! My gosh, my gosh. It seems like only yesterday
she was just a little baby."


I say I have a few more pages for her to type. She says, "Good." I
will have to mail them to her, since she doesn't have a fax. Again:
Maybe I should can her.

I am still on the third floor of our brownstone in the city, and we
don't have an elevator. So down the stairs I go with my pages,
clumpity, clumpily, clumpity. I get down to the first floor, where my
wife has her office. Her favorite reading when she was Lily's age was
stories about Nancy Drew, the girl detective.

Nancy Drew is to Jill what Kilgore Trout is to me, so Jill says,
"Where are you going?"

I say, "I am going to buy an envelope."

She says, "You are not a poor man. Why don't you buy a thousand
envelopes and put them in a closet?" She thinks she is being logical.
She has a computer. She has a fax. She has an answering machine on her
telephone, so she doesn't miss any important messages. She has a
Xerox. She has all that garbage.

I say, "I'll be back real soon."


Out into the world I go! Muggers! Autograph hounds! Junkies! People
with real jobs! Maybe an easy lay! United Nations functionaries and
diplomats!

Our house is near the UN, so there are all kinds of really
foreign-looking people getting in or out of illegally parked
limousines, doing the best they can, like all the rest of us, to hold
their self-respect together. As I saunter a half-block to the news
store on Second Avenue, which also sells stationery, I can feel, if I
so choose, because of all the foreigners, like Humphrey Bogart or
Peter Lorre in Casablanca, the third-greatest movie ever made.

The greatest movie ever, as anybody with half a brain knows, is My
Life as a Dog. The second-greatest movie ever is All About Eve.

There is a chance, moreover, that I will see Katharine Hepburn, a real
movie star! She lives only one block from us! When I speak to her, and
tell her my name, she always says, "Oh yes, you're that friend of my
brother's." I do not know her brother.

No such luck today, though, but what the heck. I am a philosopher. I
have to be.


Into the news store I go. Relatively poor people, with lives not
strikingly worth living, are lined up to buy lottery tickets or other
crap. All keep their cool. They pretend they don't know I'm a
celebrity.

The store is a Ma-and-Pa joint owned by Hindus, honest-to-God Hindus!
The woman has a teeny-weeny ruby between her eyes. That's worth a
trip. Who needs an envelope?

You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is; still a
sigh.


I know the Hindus' stock of stationery as well as they do. I didn't
study anthropology for nothing. I find one nine-by-twelve manila
envelope without assistance, remembering simultaneously a joke about
the Chicago Cubs baseball team. The Cubs were supposedly moving to the
Philippine Islands, where they would be renamed the Manila Folders.
That would have been a good joke about the Boston Red Sox, too.

I take my place at the end of the line, chatting with fellow customers
who are buying something other than lottery tickets. The lottery
ticket suckers, decorticated by hope and numerology, may as well be
victims of Post-Timequake Apathy. You could run them over with an
eighteen-wheeler. They wouldn't care.

57





From the news store I go one block south to the Postal Convenience
Station, where I am secretly in love with a woman behind the counter.
I have already put my pages in the manila envelope. I address it, and
then I take my place at the end of another long line. What I need now
is postage! Yum, yum, yum!

The woman I love there does not know I love her. You want to talk
about poker faces? When her eyes meet mine, she might as well be
looking at a cantaloupe!

Because she works sitting down, and because of the counter and the
smock she wears, all I have ever seen of her is from the neck up.
That's enough! From the neck up she is like a Thanksgiving dinner! I
don't mean she looks like a plateful of turkey and sweet potatoes and
cranberry sauce. I mean she makes me feel like that is what has just
been set before me. Dig in! Dig in!

Unadorned, I believe, her neck, and face and ears and hair would still
be Thanksgiving dinner. Every day, though, she hangs new
dingle-dangles from her ears and around her neck. Sometimes her hair
is up, sometimes it's down. Sometimes it's frizzy, sometimes it's
straight. What she can't do with just her eyes and lips! One day I'm
buying a stamp from Count Dracula's daughter! The next day she's the
Virgin Mary.

This time she's Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli. But she is a long way off
still. There are many addled old poops, no good at counting money
anymore, and immigrants talking gibberish, maddeningly imagining it to
be English, in line ahead of me.

One time I had my pocket picked in that Postal Convenience Center.
Convenient for whom?


I put the waiting time to good use. I learn about stupid bosses and
jobs I will never have, and about parts of the world I will never see,
and about diseases I hope I will never have, and about different kinds
of dogs people have owned, and so on. By means of a computer? No. I do
it by means of the lost art of conversation.

I at last have my envelope weighed and stamped by the only woman in
the whole wide world who could make me sincerely happy. With her I
wouldn't have to fake it.

I go home. I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on
Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!

58





I have taught creative writing during my seventy-three years on
automatic pilot, rerun or not. I did it first at the University of
Iowa in 1965. After that came Harvard, and then the City College of
New York. I don't do it anymore.

I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that
when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates,
should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run
really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in
fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this
with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of
twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation
marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before.

In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the
attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the
value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There
is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so
cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras! They don't
have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and
then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and
millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most
people want.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need
desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do,
care about many of the things you care about, although most people
don't care about them. You are not alone."


Steve Adams, one of my three adopted nephews, was a successful TV
comedy writer in Los Angeles, California, a few years back. His big
brother Jim is an ex-Peace Corps guy and now a psychiatric nurse. His
kid brother Kurt is a veteran pilot with Continental Airlines, with
scrambled eggs on his cap, gold braid on his sleeves. All Steve's kid
brother ever wanted to do for a living was fly. A dream came true!

Steve learned the hard way that all his jokes for TV had to be about
events that had been made much of by TV itself, and very recently. If
a joke was about something that hadn't been on TV for a month or more,
the watchers wouldn't have a clue, even though the laugh track was
laughing, as to what they themselves were supposed to laugh about.

Guess what? TV is an eraser.


Having even the immediate past erased may indeed make it more
comfortable for most people to get through this thing, whatever it is.
Jane, my first wife, won her Phi Beta Kappa key at Swarthmore College
over the objections of the History Department. She had written, and
then argued in oral examinations, that all that could be learned from
history was that history itself was absolutely nonsensical, so study
something else, like music.

I agreed with her, and so would have Kilgore Trout. But history still
hadn't been erased back then. And when I started out as a writer, I
could refer to events and personalities in the past, even the distant
past, with a reasonable expectation that a fair number of readers
would respond with some emotion, whether positive or negative, when I
mentioned them.

Case in point: The murder of the greatest President this country will
ever have, Abraham Lincoln, by the twenty-six-year-old ham actor John
Wilkes Booth.


That assassination was a major event in Timequake One. Who is there
left under the age of sixty, and not in a History Department, to give
a damn?

59





Elias Pembroke, a fictitious Rhode Island naval architect who was
Abraham Lincoln's Assistant Secretary of the Navy during our Civil
War, was a character in Timequake One. I said he made significant
contributions to the design of the power train of the ironclad warship
Monitor, but was neglectful of his wife, Julia, who fell in love with
a dashing young actor and rakehell named John Wilkes Booth.

Julia wrote love letters to Booth. A tryst was arranged for April
14th, 1863, two years before Booth shot Lincoln from behind with a
derringer. She went to New York City from Washington with a chaperone,
the alcoholic wife of an admiral, ostensibly to shop, and to escape
the tensions in the besieged capital. They checked into the hotel
where Booth was staying, and attended his performance that night, as
Marc Antony in Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare.

As Marc Antony, Booth would speak lines horrifyingly prophetic in his
case: "The evil that men do lives after them."


Julia and her chaperone went backstage afterward and congratulated not
only John Wilkes, but his brothers, Junius, who had played Brutus, and
Edwin, who had played Cassius. The three American brothers, with John
Wilkes the baby, in combination with their British father, Junius
Brutus Booth, constituted what remains to this day the greatest family
of tragedians in the history of the English-speaking stage.

John Wilkes gallantly kissed the hand of Julia, as though they had
just met, and simultaneously slipped her a packet of chloral hydrate
crystals, which would be the active ingredient in a Mickey Finn for
the chaperone.

Julia had been given to believe by Booth that all she would receive
from him when she came to his hotel room would be a single glass of
champagne, and a single kiss she would cherish for the rest of her
life after the war, back in Rhode Island, a life that would otherwise
be humdrum. Madame Bovary!

Little did Julia suspect that Booth would mousetrap her champagne,
just as she had mousetrapped her chaperone's beddy-bye slug of wartime
white lightning, with chloral hydrate.

Ting-a-ling!

Booth knocked her up! She had never had a kid before. Something was
wrong with her husband's ding-dong. She was thirty-one! The actor was
twenty-four!

Incredible?


Her husband, was delighted. She's pregnant? There was notching wrong
with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Elias Pembroke's ding-dong after
all! Anchors aweigh!

Julia returned to Pembroke, Rhode Island, a town named in honor of an
ancestor of her husband's, to have the kid. She was scared to death
that the upper rims of the kid's ears would be like those of John
Wilkes Booth, pointed like a devil's, instead of curved. But the kid
had normal ears. It was a boy. It was christened Abraham Lincoln
Pembroke.

That the only descendant of the most egomaniacal and destructive
villain in American history should bear that name did not become
supremely ironical until, exactly two years from the night Booth
ejaculated in Julia's birth canal while she was massively sedated,
Booth sent a wad of lead into Lincoln's dog's breakfast, into
Lincoln's brain.


At Xanadu in 2001, I asked Kilgore Trout for his ballpark opinion of
John Wilkes Booth. He said Booth's performance in Ford's Theater in
Washington, D.C., on the night of Good Friday, April 14th, 1865, when
he shot Lincoln and then jumped from a theater box to the stage,
breaking his leg, was "the sort of thing which is bound to happen
whenever an actor creates his own material.''

60





Julia shared her secret with no one. Did she have regrets? Of course
she did, but not about love. When she turned fifty, in 1882, she
founded as a memorial for her only love affair, however brief and
star-crossed, without saying that's what it was, an amateur acting
group, the Pembroke Mask and Wig Club.


And Abraham Lincoln Pembroke, ignorant of whose son he actually was,
in 1889 founded Indian Head Mills, which became the largest textile
mill in New England until 1947, when Abraham Lincoln Pembroke III
locked out his striking employees and moved the company to North
Carolina. Abraham Lincoln Pembroke IV subsequently sold it to an
international conglomerate, which moved it to Indonesia, and he died
of drink.

Not an actor in die bunch. Not a murderer in the bunch. No pixie ears.


Before Abraham Lincoln Pembroke III departed the town of Pembroke for
North Carolina, he knocked up an unmarried African-American housemaid,
Rosemary Smith. He paid her handsomely for her silence. He was gone
when his child Frank Smith was born.

Hold on to your hats!

Frank Smith has pointed ears! Frank Smith has to be one of the
greatest actors in the history of amateur theatricals! He is half
black, half white, and only five feet, ten inches tall. But in the
summer of 2001 he gave a stunningly convincing matinee performance in
the title role in the Pembroke Mask and Wig Club's production of Abe
Lincoln in Illinois, by Robert E. Sherwood, with Kilgore Trout doing
the sound effects!

The cast party afterward was a clambake on the beach at Xanadu. As in
the last scene of 8 1/2, the motion picture by Federico Fellini, tout
le monde was there, if not in person, then represented by look-alikes.
Monica Pepper resembled my sister Allie. The bakemaster, a local man
who is paid to stage such parties in the summertime, resembled my late
publisher Seymour Lawrence (1926-1993), who rescued me from certain
oblivion, from smithereens, by publishing Slaughterhouse-Five, and
then bringing all my previous books back into print under his
umbrella.

Kilgore Trout looked like my father.


The only sound effect Trout had to create backstage was in the last
moments of the last scene of the last act of the play, of what Trout
himself called "a manmade timequake." He was equipped with an antique
steam whistle from the heyday of Indian Head Mills. A plumber, who was
a club member and looked a lot like my brother, put the gaily mournful
whistle atop a tank of compressed air, with a valve in between. That
is what Trout was, too, in all he wrote: gaily mournful.

There were of course many club members who had no parts in Abe Lincoln
in Illinois, who would have liked at least to blow that big brass
rooster, once they saw it and then heard it blown by the plumber
himself during dress rehearsal. But the club most of all wanted Trout
to feel that he was home at last, and a vital member of an extended
family.

Not merely the club and the household staff at Xanadu, and the
chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous, which met in
the ballroom there, and the battered women and children and
grandparents who had found shelter there, were grateful for his
healing and encouraging mantra, which made bad times a coma: You were
sick, but now you 're well again, and there's work to do. The whole
world was.

61





In order that Trout not miss his cue to blow the whistle, which he was
terrified of doing, of spoiling everything for his family, the plumber
who looked like my brother stood behind him and the apparatus, his
hands on Trout's old shoulders. He would squeeze those shoulders
gently when it was time for Trout's debut in show biz.

The last scene in the play is set in the yards of the railroad station
at Springfield, Illinois. The date is February 11th, 1861. Abraham
Lincoln, in this instance played by the half-African-American
great-great-grandson of John Wilkes Booth, having just been elected
President of the United States in its darkest hour, is about to depart
his hometown by railroad, for Washington, God help him, District of
Columbia.

He says, as indeed Lincoln said: "No one, not in my situation, can
appreciate my feelings of sadness at this parting. To this place, and
the kindness of you people, I owe everything. I have lived here a
quarter of a century, and passed from a young to an old man. Here my
children have been born and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing
when or whether ever I may return.

"I am called upon to assume the Presidency at a time when eleven of
our sovereign states have announced their intention to secede from the
Union, when threats of war increase in fierceness from day to day.

"It is a grave duty which I now face. In preparing for it, I have
tried to enquire: what great principle or ideal is it that has kept
this Union so long together? And I believe that it was not the mere
matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that
sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty to the
people of this country and hope to all the world. This sentiment was
the fulfillment of an ancient dream, which men have held through all
time, that they might one day shake off their chains and find freedom
in the brotherhood of life. We gained democracy, and now there is the
question of whether it is fit to survive.

"Perhaps we have come to the dreadful day of awakening, and the dream
is ended. If so, I am afraid it must be ended forever. I cannot
believe that ever again will men have the opportunity we have had.
Perhaps we should admit that, and concede that our ideals of liberty
and equality are decadent and doomed. I have heard of an eastern
monarch who once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence which
would be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They
presented him the words, 'And this too shall pass away.'

"That is a comforting thought in time of affliction - 'And this too
shall pass away." And yet - let us believe that it is not true! Let us
live to prove that we can cultivate the natural world that is about
us, and the intellectual and moral world that is within us, so that we
may secure an individual, social and political prosperity, whose
course shall be forward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not
pass away . . . .

"I commend you to the care of the Almighty, as I hope that in your
prayers you will remember me . . . . Good-bye, my friends and
neighbors."

An actor playing the bit part of Kavanagh, an Army officer, said,
"Time to pull out, Mr. President. Better get inside the car." Lincoln
gets into the car as the crowd sings "John Brown's Body." Another
actor, cast as a brakeman, waved his lantern. 

That was when Trout was supposed to blow the whistle, and he did. As
the curtain descended, there was a sob backstage. It wasn't in the
playbook. It was ad lib. It was about beauty. It came from Kilgore
Trout.

62





Anything we said at the cast party, the clambake on the beach, was at
first hesitant and apologetic, almost as though English were our
second language. We were mourning not only Lincoln, but the death of
American eloquence.


Another look-alike there was Rosemary Smith, Mask and Wig's costume
mistress, and mother of Frank Smith, its superstar. She resembled Ida
Young, grandchild of slaves, who worked for us in Indianapolis when I
was little. Ida Young, in combination with my uncle Alex, had as much
to do with my upbringing as my parents did.

Nobody was a near double for Uncle Alex. He did not like my writing. I
dedicated The Sirens of Titan to him, and Uncle Alex said, "I suppose
the young people will like it." Nobody resembled my aunt Ella Vonnegut
Stewart, a first cousin of my father's, either. She and her husband,
Kerfuit, owned a bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky. They did not stock
my books because they found my language obscene. So it was back then,
when I was starting out.


Among other departed souls whom I would not summon back to life, if I
had had the power to do so, but who were represented by doppelgängers:
nine of my teachers at Shortridge High School, and Phoebe Hurty, who
hired me in high school to write ad copy about teenage clothing for
Blocks' Department Store, and my first wife Jane, and my mother, and
my uncle John Rauch, husband to another of Father's first cousins.
Uncle John provided me with a history of my family in America, which I
printed in Palm Sunday.

Jane's unknowing stand-in, a pert young woman who teaches biochemistry
at Rhode Island University, over at Kingston, said within my hearing,
and apropos of nothing more than that day's theatrical performance and
the setting sun: "I can't wait to see what's going to happen next."

Only the dead had doppelgängers at that party back in 2001. Arthur
Garvey Ulm, poet and Resident Secretary of Xanadu, an employee of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, was short and had a big nose,
like my war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare.


My wife Jill was among the living, thank goodness, and was there in
the flesh, as was Knox Burger, a Cornell classmate of mine. After
Western Civilization's second unsuccessful suicide attempt, Knox
became a fiction editor at Collier's, which published five short
stories every week. Knox got me a good literary agent, Colonel Kenneth
Littauer, the first pilot to strafe a trench during World War One.

Trout opined, in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot, incidentally, that
we had better start numbering timequakes the same way we numbered
World Wars and Super Bowls.


Colonel Littauer sold a dozen or more of my stories, several to Knox,
making it possible for me to quit my job with General Electric and
move with Jane and our then two kids to Cape Cod as a free-lance
writer. When the magazines went bust because of TV, Knox became an
editor of paperback originals. He published three books of mine as
such: The Sirens of Titan, Canary in a Cathouse, and Mother Night.

Knox got me started, and he kept me going until he could no longer
help me. And then Seymour Lawrence came to my rescue.


Also in the flesh at the clambake were five men half my age who made
me want to keep on going in my sunset years because of their interest
in my work. They weren't there to see me. They wanted at long last to
meet Kilgore Trout. They were Robert Weide, who in this summer of 1996
is making a movie in Montreal of Mother Night, and Marc Leeds, who
wrote and had published a witty encyclopedia of my life and work, and
Asa Pieratt and Jerome Klinkowitz, who have kept my bibliography
up-to-date and written essays about me as well, and Joe Petro III,
numbered like a World War, who taught me how to silk-screen.

My closest business associate, Don Farber, lawyer and agent, was there
with his dear wife, Anne. My closest social pal, Sidney Offit, was
there. The critic John Leonard was there, and the academicians Peter
Reed and Loree Rackstraw, and the photographer Cliff McCarthy, and
other kind strangers too numerous to mention.

The professional actors Kevin McCarthy and Nick Nolte were there.


My children and grandchildren weren't there. That was OK, perfectly
understandable. It wasn't my birthday, and I wasn't a guest of honor.
The heroes that evening were Frank Smith and Kilgore Trout. My kids
and my kids' kids had other fish to fry. Perhaps I should say my kids
and my kids' kids had other lobsters and clams and oysters and
potatoes and corn on the cob to steam in seaweed.

Whatever!

Get it right! Remember Uncle Carl Barus, and get it right!

63





This is not a Gothic novel. My late friend Borden Deal, a first-rate
southern novelist, so southern he asked his publishers not to send
review copies north of the Mason-Dixon line, also wrote Gothic novels
under a feminine nom de plume. I asked him for a definition of a
Gothic novel. He said, "A young woman goes into an old house and gets
her pants scared off."


Borden and I were in Vienna, Austria, for a congress of PEN, the
international writers' organization founded after World War One, when
he told me that. We went on to talk about the German novelist Leopold
von Sacher-Masoch, who in print found humiliation and pain so
delectable at the end of the previous century. Because of him, modern
languages have the word masochism.

Borden not only wrote serious novels and Gothics. He wrote country
music. He had his guitar back in his hotel room, and was working, he
said, on a song called "I Never Waltzed in Vienna." I miss him. I want
a look-alike for Borden at the clambake, and two luckless fishermen in
a little rowboat right offshore, dead ringers for the saints Stanley
Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

So be it.


Borden and I mused about novelists such as Masoch and the Marquis de
Sade, who had intentionally or accidentally inspired new words.
Sadism, of course, is joy while inflicting pain on others.
Sadomasochism means getting one's rocks off while hurting others,
while being hurt by others, or while hurting oneself.

Borden said doing without those words nowadays was like trying to talk
about life without words for beer or water.


The only contemporary American writer we could think of who had given
us a new word, and surely not because he is a famous pervert, which he
isn't, was Joseph Heller. The title of his first novel, Catch-22, is
defined this way in my Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: "A problematic
situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance
inherent in the problem."

Read the book!


I told Borden what Heller said in an interview when he was asked if he
feared death. Heller said he had never experienced a root-canal job.
Many people he knew had. From what they told him about it, Heller
said, he guessed he, too, could stand one, if he had to.

That was how he felt about death, he said.


That puts me in mind of a scene from a play of George Bernard Shaw's,
his manmade timequake Back to Methuselah. The whole play is ten-hours
long! The last time it was performed in its entirety was in 1922, the
year I was born.

The scene: Adam and Eve, who have been around for a long time now, are
waiting at the gate of their prosperous and peaceful and beautiful
farm for the annual visit from their landlord, God. During every
previous visit, and there have been hundreds of them by now, they
could tell Him only that everything was nice and that they were
grateful.

This time, though, Adam and Eve are all keyed up, scared but proud.
They have something new they want to talk to God about. So God shows
up, genial, big and hale and hearty, like my grandfather the brewer
Albeit Lieber. He asks if everything is satisfactory, and thinks He
knows the answer, since what He has created is as perfect as He can
make it.

Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him
that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better
if they could know that it was going to end sometime.


Chicago is a better city than New York because Chicago has alleys. The
garbage doesn't pile up on the sidewalks. Delivery vehicles don't
block main thoroughfares.


The late American novelist Nelson Algren said to the late Chilean
novelist José Donoso, when we were all teaching in the Writers'
Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1966: "It must be nice to come
from a country that long and narrow.''


You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their
numbers were. One theory of why they declined and fell is that their
plumbing was lead. The root of our word plumbing is plumbum, the Latin
word for "lead." Lead poisoning makes people stupid and lazy.

What's your excuse?


I got a sappy letter from a woman a while back. She knew I was sappy,
too, which is to say a northern Democrat. She was pregnant, and she
wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby
into a world this bad.

I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the
saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up
in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can
become a saint for her sweet child to meet.

I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look
around!


Xanthippe thought her husband, Socrates, was a fool. Aunt Raye thought
Uncle Alex was a fool. Mother thought Father was a fool. My wife
thinks I'm a fool.

I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again.
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.


And Kilgore Trout said at the clambake, with Laurel and Hardy in a
rowboat only fifty yards offshore, that young people liked movies with
a lot of shooting because they showed that dying didn't hurt at all,
that people with guns could be thought of as "free-lance
anesthetists,"

He was so happy! He was so popular! He was all dolled up in the tuxedo
and boiled shirt and crimson cummerbund and bow tie that had belonged
to Zoltan Pepper. I stood behind him in his suite in order to tie the
tie for him, just as my big brother had done for me before I myself
could tie a bow tie.

There on the beach, whatever Trout said produced laughter and
applause. He couldn't believe it! He said the pyramids and Stonehenge
were built in a time of very feeble gravity, when boulders could be
tossed around like sofa pillows, and people loved it. They begged for
more. He gave them the line from "Kiss Me Again": "There is no way a
beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable
length of time. Ting-a-ling?" People told him he was as witty as Oscar
Wilde!

Understand, the biggest audience this man had had before the clambake
was an artillery battery, when he was a forward spotter in Europe
during World War Two.

"Ting-a-ling! If this isn't nice, what is?" he exclaimed to us all.

I called back to him from the rear of the crowd: "You've been sick,
Mr. Trout, but now you're well again, and there's work to do."

My lecture agent, Janet Cosby, was there.


At ten o'clock, the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer
announced it was his bedtime. There was one last thing he wanted to
say to us, to his family. Like a magician seeking a volunteer from the
audience, he asked someone to stand beside him and do what he said. I
held up my hand. "Me, please, me," I said.

The crowd fell quiet as I took my place to his right.

"The Universe has expanded so enormously," he said, "with the
exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no
longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most
unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they
say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history, like the Pony
Express.

"I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick
two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesn't
matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don't
twinkle, they are either planets or satellites. Tonight we are not
interested in planets or satellites."

I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart. One was Polaris. I
have no idea what the other one was. For all I knew, it was Puke,
Trout's star the size of a BB.

"Do they twinkle?" he said.

"Yes they do," I said.

"Promise?" he said.

"Cross my heart," I said.

"Excellent! Ting-a-ling!" he said. "Now then: Whatever heavenly bodies
those two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become
so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take
thousands or millions of years. Ting-a-ling? But I now ask you to look
precisely at one, and then precisely at the other."

"OK," I said, "I did it."

"It took a second, do you think?" he said.

"No more," I said.

"Even if you'd taken an hour," he said, "something would have passed
between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively
speaking, a million times the speed of light."

"What was it?" I said.

"Your awareness," he said. "That is a new quality in the Universe,
which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from
now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only
energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful,
which is human awareness."

Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper
dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that
enchanted evening.

All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: "I have thought of a
better word than awareness," he said. "Let us call it soul." He
paused.

"Ting-a-ling?" he said.

EPILOGUE





My big and only brother Bernard, a widower for twenty-five years, died
after prolonged bouts with cancers, without excruciating pain, on the
morning of April 25th, 1997, at the age of eighty-two, now four days
ago. He was a Senior Research Scientist Emeritus, in the Atmospheric
Sciences Research Center of the State University of New York at
Albany, and the father of five fine sons.

I was seventy-four. Our sister Alice would have been seventy-nine. At
the time of her humbling death at the age of forty-one, I said, "What
a wonderful old lady Allie would have been." No such luck.

We were luckier with Bernard. He died the beloved, sweet, funny,
highly intelligent old geezer he deserved to become. He was enraptured
at the very end by a collection of sayings of Albert Einstein.
Example: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the
mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Another:
"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not,
however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world."

Most famously, Einstein is reputed to have said, "I shall never
believe that God plays dice with the world." Bernard was himself so
open-minded about how the universe might be dealt with that he thought
praying would help, possibly, in drastic situations. When his son
Terry had cancer of the throat, Bernie, ever the experimentalist,
prayed for his recovery. Terry indeed survived.

So it was with silver iodide, too. Bernie wondered if crystals of that
substance, so like crystals of frozen water, might not teach
supercooled droplets in clouds how to turn to ice, to snow. He tried
it. It worked.

He spent the final decade of his professional life attempting to
discredit a very old and widely respected paradigm of whence came
electrical charges in thunderstorms, and where they went, and what
they did and why. He was opposed. The last of the more than one
hundred fifty articles he wrote, to be published posthumously,
describes experiments that can demonstrate incontrovertibly whether he
was right or wrong.

Either way, he could not lose. However the experiments came out, he
would have found the results enormously entertaining. Either way, he
would have laughed like hell.

He was funnier than I am in conversation. During the Great Depression,
I learned as much about jokes while tagging after him as I did from
the comedians in movies and on the radio. I was honored that he found
me funny, too. It turned out that he had accumulated a small portfolio
of my stuff that had amused him. One item was a letter I had written
to our uncle Alex when I was twenty-five. At that time, I had
published nothing, had a wife and son, and had just come from Chicago
to work as a flack for General Electric in Schenectady, New York.

I got that job because Bernie had become a celebrity in the GE
Research Laboratory, in association with Irving Langmuir and Vincent
Schaefer, for experiments with cloud seeding, and because the company
decided to have regular newspaper people handle its publicity. At
Bernie's suggestion, GE hired me away from the Chicago City News
Bureau, where I had been a beat reporter. I had worked simultaneously
for a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago.

I thought Uncle Alex knew that Bernie and I were at GE then, and that
I was in Publicity. He didn't know!

And Uncle Alex had seen a syndicated photograph of Bernie, credited to
the Schenectady Gazette. He wrote to that paper, saying he was "a wee
bit proud" of his nephew and would like a copy of the picture. He
enclosed a dollar. The Gazette got the picture from GE, and so
forwarded the request to my new employer. My new boss, logically
enough, handed it on to me.

I replied as follows on blue GE stationery:







As you can see, I signed it "Guy Fawkes," a name infamous in British
history.

Uncle Alex was so insulted that he flipped his wig. He took the letter
to a lawyer to find out what legal steps he might take to compel an
abject apology from someone high in the company, and to make this cost
the author his job. He was going to write to the President of GE,
telling him he had an employee who did not know the value of a dollar.

Before he could take such steps, though, somebody told him who Guy
Fawkes was in history, and where I was, and that the letter was so
hilariously grotesque that it had to be a joke from me. He wanted to
kill me for making such a fool of him. I don't think he ever forgave
me, although all I intended was that he be tickled pink.

If he had sent my letter to General Electric, demanding spiritual
restitution, I would have been fired. I don't know what would then
have become of me and my wife and son. Nor would I ever have come upon
the material for my novels Player Piano and Cat's Cradle, and several
short stories.

Uncle Alex gave Bernie the Guy Fawkes letter. Bernie on his deathbed
gave it to me. Otherwise, it would have been lost forever. But there
it is.

Timequake! I am back in 1947 again, having just come to work for
General Electric, and a rerun begins. We all have to do again exactly
what we did the first time through, for good or ill.

Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never
asked to be born in the first place.


I was the baby of the family. Now I don't have anybody to show off for
anymore.


A woman who knew Bernie for only the last ten days of his life, in the
hospice at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany, described his manners while
dying as "courtly" and "elegant." What a brother!

What a language.