"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 tip 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 deja 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 on 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.
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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 deja 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 a Line,
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 deja 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 attacks 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. The 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 plac
e, 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 dif ferential 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.
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