Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

  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 a 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 Barnstable Village on Cape Cod, where my first wife, Jane Marie Vonnegut, nee 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 frost-bite.

  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 a clef: As though there were a God in Heaven after all, it is Der Fuhrer 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. Albert 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."