Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

  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 wheelchair. 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 snap 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 book 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 Woodstock 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 monopolar 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.