Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

  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 ftuited 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 scupid! 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 luckless 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 t
he timequake 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 (1555-1626), 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 oste
nsibly 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 faut 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.