Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

  We replied that we didn't think so. We expected the USSR to try to become more like the USA, with freedom of speech and religion, and fair trials and honestly elected officials, and so on. We, in turn, would try to do what they claimed to be doing, which was to distribute goods and services and opportunities more fairly: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." That sort of thing.

  Occam's Razor.

  And then O'Hare and I, not much more than kids actually, went into an undefended barn there in the springtime countryside. We wanted something to eat, anything to eat. But we found a wounded and obviously dying captain of the notoriously heartless Nazi Schutzstaffel, the SS, in a haymow instead. He might easily, until very recently, have been in charge of tormenting and planning the extinction of some of the death camp survivors not far away.

  Like all members of the SS, and like all death camp survivors as well, this captain presumably had a serial number tattooed on his arm. Want to talk about postwar irony? There was a lot of that.

  He asked O'Hare and me to go away. He would soon be dead, and said he looked forward to being such. As we prepared to depart, not feeling much about him one way or the other, he cleared his throat, signaling that he had something more to say after all. This was the last-words business again. If he had any, who but us could hear them?

  "I have just wasted the past ten years of my life," he said.

  You want to talk about a timequake?

  36

  My wife thinks I think I'm such hot stuff. She's wrong. I don't think I'm such hot stuff.

  My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy.

  That's how I feel.

  When the City of London wanted to give Shaw its Order of Merit, he thanked them for it, but said he had already given it to himself.

  I would have accepted it. I would have recognized the opportunity for a world-class joke, but would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in.

  Let that be my epitaph.

  In the waning summer of 1996, I ask myself if there were ideas I once held that I should now repudiate. I consider the example set by my father's only brother, Uncle Alex, the childless, Harvard-educated Indianapolis insurance salesman. He had me reading high-level socialist writers like Shaw and Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs and John Dos Passos when I was a teenager, along with making model airplanes and jerking off. After World War Two, Uncle Alex became as politically conservative as the Archangel Gabriel.

  But I still like what O'Hare and I said to German soldiers right after we were liberated: That America was going to become more socialist, was going to try harder to give everybody work to do, and to ensure that our children, at least, weren't hungry or cold or illiterate or scared to death.

  Lotsa luck!

  I still quote Eugene Debs (1855-1926), late of Terre Haute, Indiana, five times the Socialist Party's candidate for President, in every speech:

  "While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

  In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap.

  Which it is not.

  37

  Kilgore Trout's rugged jungle sandals crunched on crystal fragments from the fallen chandelier as he loped across the face of the fallen steel front door and frame, which said "UCK AR." Since there were crystal shards atop the door and frame instead of underneath them, a forensic scientist would have had to testify in a lawsuit, if one had ever been filed against the crooked contractor, that, the crook's handiwork fell first. The chandelier must have dangled for a second or so before letting gravity do to it what gravity apparently would have liked to do to simply everything.

  The smoke alarm in the picture gallery was still ringing, "presumably," Trout would later say, "continuing to do so of its own free will." He was joking, making fun, as was his wont, of the idea that there had ever been free will for anyone or anything, rerun or not.

  The Academy doorbell had clammed up the moment Zoltan Pepper was hit by the fire truck. Trout's words again: "Quoth the doorbell with its silence, 'No comment at this time.' "

  Trout himself, as I've said, was nevertheless espousing free will when he entered the Academy, and was invoking the Judeo-Christian deity as well: "Wake up! For God's sake, wake up, wake up! Free will! Free will!"

  He would say at Xanadu that even if he had been a hero that afternoon and night, his entering the Academy, "pretending," in his words, "to be Paul Revere in the space-time continuum," had been "an act of sheer cowardice."

  He was seeking shelter from the growing din on Broadway, half a block away, and from the sounds of really serious explosions from other parts of the city. A mile and a half to the south, near Grant's Tomb, a massive Department of Sanitation truck, for want of sincere steering, plowed through the lobby of a condominium and into the apartment of the building superintendent. It knocked over his gas range. The ruptured pipe of that major appliance filled the stairwell and elevator shaft of the six-story structure with methane laced with skunk smell. Most of the tenants were on Social Security.

  And then KA-BOOM!

  "An accident waiting to happen," as Kilgore Trout would say at Xanadu.

  The old science fiction writer wanted to galvanize the armed and uniformed Dudley Prince into action, he later confessed, so that he himself wouldn't have to do anything more. "Free will! Free will! Fire! Fire!" he shouted at Prince.

  Prince did not move a muscle. He batted his eyes, but those were reflexes, and not free will, like me and the chicken noodle soup. One thing Prince was thinking, by his own account, was that if he moved a muscle, he might find himself in the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Facility at Athena back in 1991 again.

  Understandable!

  So Trout bypassed Prince for the moment, confessedly still looking out for numero uno. A smoke alarm was raising hell. if the building was really on fire, and the fire could not be brought under control, then Trout was going to have to find someplace else where a senior citizen could hunker down until whatever was going on outside died down some.

  He found a lit cigar resting on a saucer in the picture gallery. The cigar, although illegal everywhere in New York County, was not yet, and probably never would be, a danger to anyone but itself. Its midpoint was centered in the saucer, so it wasn't going anywhere else as it oxidized. But the smoke alarm was yelling about the end of civilization as we had known it.

  Trout, in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot, would synthesize what he should have said to the smoke alarm that afternoon: "Nonsense! Get a grip on yourself, you brainless nervous breakdown."

  Here's the spooky part: There wasn't anybody but Trout in the gallery!

  Could it be that the American Academy of Arts and Letters was haunted by poltergeists?

  38

  I got a good letter today, Friday, August 23rd, 1996, from a young stranger named Jeff Mihalich, one would guess of Serb or Croat descent, who is majoring in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Jeff says he enjoyed his physics course in high school, and got top grades, but "ever since I have had physics at the university I have had much trouble with it. This was a huge blow to me because I was used to doing well in school. I thought there was nothing I couldn't do if I just wanted it bad enough."

  My reply will go like this: "You might want to read the picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. The epiphany at the end, as
I recall, is that we shouldn't be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform.

  "As for the charms of physics: Two of the most entertaining subjects taught in high school or college are mechanics and optics. Beyond these playful disciplines, however, lie mind games as dependent on native talent as playing the French horn or chess.

  "Of native talent itself I say in speeches: 'If you go to a big city, and a university is a big city, you are bound to run into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Stay home, stay home.' "

  To put it another way: No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak.

  A boyhood friend of mine, William H. C. "Skip" Failey, who died four months ago and is up in Heaven now, had good reason when a high school sophomore to think of himself as unbeatable at Ping-Pong. I am no slouch at Ping-Pong myself, but I wouldn't play against Skip. He put so much spin on his serve that no matter how I tried to return it, I already knew it would go up my nose or out the window or back to the factory, anywhere but on the table.

  When Skip was a junior, though, he played a classmate of ours, Roger Downs. Skip said afterward, "Roger cut me a new asshole."

  Thirty-five years after that, I was lecturing at a university in Colorado, and who should be in the audience but Roger Downs! Roger had become a businessperson out that way, and a respected competitor on the Senior Men's Tennis Circuit. So I congratulated him on having given Skip a table tennis lesson so long ago.

  Roger was eager to hear anything Skip might have said after that showdown. I said, "Skip said you cut him a new asshole."

  Roger was enormously satisfied, as well he might have been.

  I did not ask, but the surgical metaphor could not have been unfamiliar to him. Furthermore, life being the Darwinian experiment, or "crock of shit," as Trout liked to call it, Roger himself had surely departed more than one tennis tournament having, like Skip, undergone a colostomy to his self-regard.

  More news of this day in August, halfway through the rerun, as yet another autumn draws near: My big brother Bernie, the born scientist who may know more about the electrification of thunderstorms than anyone, has an invariably fatal cancer, too far advanced to be daunted by the Three Horsemen of the Oncologic Apocalypse, Surgery, Chemotherapy, and Radiation.

  Bernie still feels fine.

  It is much too early to talk about, but when he dies, God forbid, I don't think his ashes should be put in Crown Hill Cemetery with James Whitcomb Riley and John Dillinger, who belonged only to Indiana. Bernie belongs to the World.

  Bernie's ashes should be scattered over the dome of a towering thunderhead.

  39

  So there was Roger Downs of Indianapolis in Colorado. Here am I, of Indianapolis, on the South Fork of Long Island. The ashes of my Indianapolis wife Jane Marie Cox are mixed with the roots of a flowering cherry tree, unmarked, in Barnstable Village, Massachusetts. The branches of that tree can be seen from the ell that Ted Adler rebuilt from scratch, after which he asked, "How the hell did I do that?"

  The Best Man at Jane's and my wedding in Indianapolis, Benjamin Hitz of Indianapolis, is a widower now in Santa Barbara, California. Ben dated an Indianapolis cousin of mine several times this spring. She is a widow on the seacoast of Maryland, and my sister died in New Jersey, and my brother, although he doesn't feel like it yet, is dying in Albany, New York.

  My boyhood pal David Craig, who made a radio in a German tank stop playing popular music during World War Two, is a builder in New Orleans. My cousin Emmy, whose dad told me I was a man at last when I came home from war, and who was my lab partner in physics class at Shortridge High School, lives only about thirty miles east of Dave in Louisiana.

  Diaspora!

  Why did so many of us bug out of a city built by our ancestors, where our family names were respected, whose streets and speech were so familiar, and where, as I said at Butler University last June, there was indeed the best and worst of Western Civilization?

  Adventure!

  It may be, too, that we wanted to escape the powerful pull, not of gravity, which is everywhere, but of Crown Hill Cemetery.

  Crown Hill got my sister Allie. It didn't get Jane. It won't get my big brother Bernie. It won't get me.

  I lectured in 1990 at a university in southern Ohio. They put me up in a motel nearby. When I returned to the motel after my speech, and was having my customary scotch and soda so I would sleep like a baby, which is the way I like to sleep, the bar was congenially populated by obviously local old people who seemed to really like each other. They had a lot to laugh about. They were all comedians.

  I asked the bartender who they were. He said they were the fiftieth reunion of the Class of 1940 of Zanesville High School. It sure looked nice. It sure looked right. I was in the Class of 1940 at Shortridge High School, and was then skipping my own reunion.

  Those people might have been characters out of Our Town by Thornton Wilder, as sweet a play as can ever be.

  They and I were so old that we could remember when it didn't matter all that much economically whether you did or didn't go to college. You could still amount to something. And I told my father back then that maybe I didn't want to become a chemist like my big brother Bernie. I could save him a ton of money if I went to work for a newspaper instead.

  Understand: I could go to college only if I took the same sorts of courses my brother had. Father and Bernie were agreed on that. Any other sort of higher education was what they both called ornamental. They laughed at Uncle Alex the insurance salesman because his education at Harvard had been so ornamental.

  Father said I had better talk to his close friend Fred Bates Johnson, a lawyer who as a young man had been a reporter for the now defunct Democratic daily The Indianapolis Times.

  I knew Mr. Johnson pretty well. Father and I used to go hunting for rabbits and birds with him down in Brown County, before Allie cried so much we had to give it up. He asked me there in his office, leaning back in his swivel chair, his eyes slits, how I planned to begin my career as a journalist.

  "Well, sir," I said, "I thought maybe I could get a job on The Culver Citizen and work there for three or four years. I know the area pretty well." Culver was on Lake Maxincuckee in northern Indiana. We used to have a summer cottage on that lake.

  "And then?" he said.

  "With that much experience," I said, "I should be able to get a job with a much bigger paper, maybe in Richmond or Kokomo."

  "And then?" he said.

  "After maybe five years on a paper like that," I said, "I think I'd be ready to take a shot at Indianapolis."

  "You'll have to excuse me," he said, "but I have to make a phone call."

  "Of course," I said.

  He swiveled around so his back was to me when he made the call. He spoke softly, but I wasn't trying to overhear. I figured it was none of my business.

  He hung up the phone and swiveled around to face me again. "Congratulations!" he said. "You have a job on The Indianapolis Times."

  40

  I went to college in faraway Ithaca, New York, instead of going to work for The Indianapolis Times. Ever since, I, like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

  I think now, with the clambake at Xanadu only five years away, about a man I might have been, spending his adult life among those he went to high school with, loving and hating, as had his parents and grandparents, a town that was his own.

  He's gone!

  Full fathom five he lies;

  Of his bones are coral made:

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  He would have known several jokes I know, like the one Fred Bates Johnson told one time, whe
n he and Father and I, just a kid, and some others, were hunting down in Brown County. According to Fred, a bunch of guys like us went hunting for deer and moose up in Canada. Somebody had to do the cooking, or they would all starve to death.

  They drew straws to see who would cook while the others hunted from dawn to dusk. To make the joke more immediate, Fred said it was Father who got the short straw. Father could cook. Mother couldn't. She was proud she couldn't cook, and wouldn't wash dishes and so on. I liked to go over to other kids' houses, where their mothers did those things.

  The hunters agreed that anybody who complained about Father's cooking became the cook. So Father prepared worse and worse meals, while the others were having one hell of a good time in the forest. No matter how awful a supper was, though, the hunters pronounced it lip-smacking delicious, clapping Father on the back and so on.

  After they marched off one morning, Father found a pile of fresh moose poop outside. He fried it in motor oil. That night he served it as steaming patties.

  The first guy to taste one spit it out. He couldn't help himself! He spluttered, "Jesus Christ! That tastes like moose poop fried in motor oil!"

  But then he added, "But good, but good!"

  I think Mother was raised to be so useless because her father Albert Lieber, the brewer and speculator, believed that America was going to have an aristocracy based on the European model. Proofs of membership in such a caste over there, and so it would be over here, too, he must have reasoned, were wives and daughters who were ornamental.

  41

  I don't think I missed the boat when I failed to write a novel about Albert Lieber, and how he was largely responsible for my mother's suicide on Mother's Day Eve, 1944. German-Americans in Indianapolis lack universality. They have never been sympathetically, or even villainously, stereotyped in movies or books or plays. I would have had to explain them from scratch.