Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

  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 Univ
ersity 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 facade. 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 outre 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. B
ut 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 a preacher!