Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Many members of my generation are disappointed.

  46

  Can you believe it? Kilgore Trout, who never even saw a stage play until he got to Xanadu, not only wrote a play after he got home from our war, which was World War Two, but he copyrighted it! I have just retrieved it from the memory banks of the Library of Congress, and it is entitled The Wrinkled Old Family Retainer.

  It is like a birthday present from my computer here in the Sinclair Lewis Suite at Xanadu. Wow! The date yesterday was November 11th, 2010. I have just turned eighty-eight, or ninety-eight, if you want to count the rerun. My wife, Monica Pepper Vonnegut, says eighty-eight is a very lucky number, and so is ninety-eight. She is heavily into numerology.

  My darling daughter Lily will turn twenty-eight on December 15th! Who ever thought I would live to see that day?

  The Wrinkled Old Family Retainer is about a wedding. The bride is Mirabile Dictu, a virgin. The groom is Flagrante Delicto, a heartless womanizer.

  Sotto Voce, a male guest standing at the fringe of the ceremony, says out of the corner of his mouth to a guy standing next to him, "I don't bother with all this. I simply find a woman who hates me, and I give her a house."

  And the other guy says, as the groom is kissing the bride, "All women are psychotic. All men are jerks."

  The eponymous wrinkled old family retainer, crying his rheumy eyes out behind a potted palm, is Scrotum.

  Monica is still obsessed by the mystery of who left a cigar smoldering beneath the smoke alarm in the picture gallery of the Academy minutes before free will kicked in again. That was more than nine years ago! Who cares? What difference can knowing that make? That's like knowing what the white stuff in bird poop is.

  What Kilgore Trout did with that cigar was scrooch it out in the saucer. He scrooched and scrooched and scrooched it, by his own admission to Monica and me, as though it were responsible not only for the yelling of the smoke alarm, but for all the din outside as well.

  "The wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the oil," he said.

  He realized the absurdity of what he was doing, he said, only when, as he took a painting down from the wall, preparing to hit the alarm with a corner of the frame, the alarm fell silent of its own accord.

  He hung up the painting again, and even made sure it was hanging straight. "That seemed somehow important, that the picture was nice and straight," he said, "and evenly spaced from the others. At least I could make that little part of the chaotic Universe exactly as it should be. I was grateful for the opportunity to do that."

  He returned to the entrance hall, expecting the armed guard to be awakening from his torpor. But Dudley Prince was still a statue, still convinced that, if he budged, he would find himself back in prison again.

  Trout again confronted him, saying, "Wake up! Wake up! You've got free will again, and there's work to do!" And so on.

  Nothing.

  Trout had an inspiration! Instead of trying to sell the concept of free will, which he himself didn't believe in, he said this: "You've been very sick! Now you're well again. You've been very sick! Now you're well again."

  That mantra worked!

  Trout could have been a great advertising man. The same has been said of Jesus Christ. The basis of every great advertisement is a credible promise. Jesus promised better times in an afterlife. Trout was promising the same thing in the here and now.

  Dudley Prince's spiritual rigor mortis began to thaw! Trout hastened his recovery by telling him to snap his fingers and stamp his feet, and stick out his tongue and wiggle his butt, and so on.

  Trout, who had never even earned a High School Equivalency Certificate, had nonetheless become a real-life Dr. Frankenstein!

  47

  Uncle Alex Vonnegut, who said we should exclaim out loud whenever we were accidentally happy, was considered a fool by his wife, Aunt Raye. He certainly started out as a fool when a spanking-new freshman at Harvard. Uncle Alex was asked to explain in an essay why he had come to Harvard all the way from Indianapolis. By his own gleeful account, he wrote, "Because my big brother is at MIT."

  He never had a kid, and never owned a gun. He owned a lot of books, though, and kept buying new ones, and giving me those he thought were particularly well done. It was an ordeal for him to find this book or that one, so he could read some particularly magical passage aloud to me. Here's why: His wife Aunt Raye, who was said to be artistic, arranged his library according to the size and color of the volumes, and stairstep style.

  So he might say of a collection of essays by his hero H. L. Mencken, "I think it was green, and about this high."

  His sister, my aunt Irma, said to me one time when I was a grownup, "All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women." Her two brothers were sure as heck scared of her.

  Listen: A Harvard education for my Uncle Alex wasn't the trophy of a micromanaged Darwinian victory over others that it is today. His father, the architect Bernard Vonnegut, sent him there in order that he might become civilized, which he did indeed become, although fabulously henpecked, and nothing more than a life insurance salesman.

  I am eternally grateful to him, and indirectly to what Harvard used to be, I suppose, for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else may be going on.

  It now appears that books in the form so beloved by Uncle Alex and me, hinged and unlocked boxes, packed with leaves speckled by ink, are obsolescent. My grandchildren are already doing much of their reading from words projected on the face of a video screen.

  Please, please, please wait just a minute!

  At the time of their invention, books were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, albeit fabricated from scarcely modified substances found in forest and field and animals, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

  48

  It is piquant to me that one of the greatest poets and one of the greatest playwrights of this century would both deny that they were from the Middle West, specifically from St. Louis, Missouri. I mean T. S. Eliot, who wound up sounding like the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Tennessee Williams, a product of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Iowa, who wound up sounding like Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind.

  True enough, Williams was born in Mississippi, but moved to St. Louis when he was seven. And it was he who named himself Tennessee when he was twenty-seven. Before he did that to himself, he was Tom.

  Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, pronounced PEEROO. "Night and Day"? "Begin the Beguine"? Not bad, not bad.

  Kilgore Trout was born in a hospital in Bermuda, near where his father, Raymond, was gathering material for a follow-up on his doctoral dissertation on the last of the Bermuda Erns. The sole remaining rookery of those great blue birds, the largest of all pelagic raptors, was on Dead Man's Rock, an otherwise uninhabited lava steeple in the center of the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Trout was in fact conceived on Dead Man's Rock during his parents' honeymoon.

  What was particularly interesting about these erns was that the female birds, and not anything people had done, so far as anybody could tell, were to blame for the rapidly dwindling population. In the past, and presumably for thousands of years, the females had hatched their eggs, and tended the young, and finally taught them to fly by kicking them off the top of the steeple.

  But when Raymond Trout went there as a doctoral candidate with his bride, he found that the females had taken to bowdlerizing the nurturing process by kicking the eggs off the top of the steeple.

  Thus did Kilgore Trout's father providentially become a specialist, thanks to the female Bermuda Erns' initiative, or whatever you want to call it, in evolutionary mechanisms
governing fates of species, mechanisms other than the Occam's Razor of Darwin's Natural Selection.

  Nothing would do, then, but that the Trout family, when little Kilgore was nine, spend the summer of 1926 camped on the shore of Disappointment Lake in inland Nova Scotia. The Dalhousie Woodpeckers in that area had quit the brain-rattling business of pecking wood, and were feasting on the plentiful blackflies on the backs of deer and moose instead.

  Dalhousies, of course, are the commonest woodpeckers in eastern Canada, mainly, ranging from Newfoundland to Manitoba, and from Hudson Bay to Detroit, Michigan. Only those around Disappointment Lake, however, identical with the rest in plumage and beak size and shape, and so on, had stopped getting at bugs the hard way, digging them out one at a time, from holes the bugs had made or found in tree trunks.

  They were first observed gorging on blackflies in 1916, with World War One going on in the other hemisphere. The Disappointment Lake Dalhousies, however, were not subjected to observation year after year before that, or since. This was because the clouds of voracious blackflies, often resembling little tornadoes, according to Trout, made the apostate Dalhousies' habitat virtually uninhabitable by human beings.

  So the Trout family spent the summer up there dressed like beekeepers night and day, in gloves, in long-sleeved shirts tied at the wrists, and long pants tied at the ankles, in wide-brimmed hats draped with gauze, to protect their heads and necks, no matter how hellishly hot the weather. Father, mother, and son dragged the camping gear and a heavy motion picture camera and tripod to the marshy campsite while harnessed to a travois.

  Dr. Trout expected to film nothing more than ordinary Dalhousies, indistinguishable from other Dalhousies, but pecking at the backs of deer and moose instead of tree trunks. Such simple pictures would have been exciting enough, showing that lower animals were capable of cultural as well as biological evolution. One might have extrapolated from them the supposition that one bird in the flock was a sort of Albert Einstein, so to speak, having theorized and then proved that blackflies were as nutritious as anything that could be dug out of a tree trunk.

  Was Dr. Trout ever in for a surprise, though! Not only were these birds obscenely fat, and thus easy prey for predators. They were exploding, too! Spores from a tree fungus growing near Dalhousie nests found an opportunity to become a new disease in the intestinal tracts of the overweight birds, thanks to certain chemicals in the bodies of blackflies.

  The new life-style of the fungus inside the birds at one point triggered the sudden release of quantities of carbon dioxide so copious that the birds blew up! One Dalhousie, perhaps the last veteran of the Disappointment Lake experiment, would explode a year later in a park in Detroit, Michigan, setting off the second-worst race riot in the Motor City's history.

  49

  Trout wrote a story one time about another race riot. It was on a planet twice as big as Earth, orbiting Puke, a star the size of a BB, two billion years ago.

  I asked my big brother Bernie in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and this was long before the period of the rerun, whether he believed in Darwin's theory of evolution. He said he did, and I asked how come, and he said, "Because it's the only game in town."

  Bernie's reply is the tag line of yet another joke from long ago, like "Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch!" It seems a guy is off to play cards, and a friend tells him the game is crooked. The guy says, "Yeah, I know, but it's the only game in town."

  I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation, but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin's theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747.

  No matter what is doing the creating, I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous.

  And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding-dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly: "Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!"

  Kilgore Trout, the ornithologist's son, wrote in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: "The Fiduciary is a mythological bird. It has never existed in Nature, never could, never will."

  Trout is the only person who ever said a fiduciary was any sort of bird. The noun (from the Latin fiducia, confidence, trust) in fact identifies a sort of Homo sapiens who will conserve the property, and nowadays especially paper or computer representations of wealth, belonging to other people, including the treasuries of their governments.

  He or she or it cannot exist, thanks to the brain and the ding-dong, et cetera. So we have in this summer of 1996, rerun or not, and as always, faithless custodians of capital making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety.

  For Christ's sake, let's help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it is.

  Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.

  Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

  Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

  Yes, and any dream of taking better care of our people might as well be a transvestite hermaphrodite without some scheme for giving us all the support and companionship of extended families, within which sharing and compassion are more plausible than in an enormous nation, and a Fiduciary may not be as mythical as the Roc and the Phoenix after all.

  50

  I am so old that I can remember when the word fuck was thought to be so full of bad magic that no respectable publication would print it. Another old joke: "Don't say 'fuck' in front of the B-A-B-Y."

  A word just as full of poison, supposedly, but which could be spoken in polite company, provided the speaker's tone implied fear and loathing, was Communism, denoting an activity as commonly and innocently practiced in many primitive societies as fucking.

  So it was a particularly elegant commentary on the patriotism and nice-nellyism during the deliberately insane Vietnam War when the satirist Paul Krassner printed red-white-and-blue bumper stickers that said FUCK COMMUNISM!

  My novel Slaughterhouse-Five was attacked back then for containing the word motherfucker. In an early episode, somebody takes a shot at four American soldiers caught behind the German lines. One American snarls at another one, who, as I say, has never fucked anyone, "Get your head down, you dumb motherfucker."

  Ever since those words were published, mothers of sons have had to wear chastity belts while doing housework.

  I of course understand that the widespread revulsion inspired even now, and perhaps forever, by the word Communism is a sane response to the cruelties and stupidities of the dictators of the USSR, who called themselves, hey presto, Communists, just as Hitler called himself, hey presto, a Christian.

  To children of the Great Depression, however, it still seems a mild shame to outlaw from polite thought, because of the crimes of tyrants, a word that in the beginning described for us nothing more than a possibly reasonable alternative to the Wall Street crapshoot.

  Yes, and the word Socialist was the second S in USSR, so good-bye, Socialism along with Communism, good-bye to the soul of Eugene Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana, where the moonlight's shining bright along the Wabash. From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay.

  "While there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

  The Great Depression was a time for discussing all sorts of alternatives to the Wall Street crapshoot, which had suddenly killed so many businesses, including banks. The crapshoot left millions and millions of Americans without any way to pay for food and shelter and clothing.

  So what?

  That was almost a century ago, if you want
to count the rerun. Forget it! Practically everybody who was alive back then is deader than a mackerel. Happy Socialism to them in the Afterlife!

  What matters now is that, on the afternoon of February 13th, 2001, Kilgore Trout roused Dudley Prince from his Post-Timequake Apathy. Trout urged him to speak, to say anything, no matter how nonsensical. Trout suggested he say, "I pledge allegiance to the flag," or whatever, to prove to himself thereby that he was again in charge of his own destiny.

  Prince spoke groggily at first. He didn't pledge allegiance, but indicated instead that he was trying to understand everything Trout had said to him so far. He said, "You told me I had something."

  "You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do," said Trout.

  "Before that," said Prince. "You said I had something."

  "Forget it," said Trout. "I was all excited. I wasn't making sense."

  "I still want to know what you said I had," said Prince.

  "I said you had free will," said Trout.

  "Free will, free will, free will," echoed Prince with wry wonderment. "I always wondered what it was I had. Now I got a name for it."

  "Please forget what I said," said Trout. "There are lives to save!"

  "You know what you can do with free will?" said Prince.

  "No," said Trout.

  "You can stuff it up your ass," said Prince.

  51

  When I liken Trout there in the entrance hall of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awakening Dudley Prince from PTA, to Dr. Frankenstein, I am alluding of course to the antihero of the novel Frankenstein--or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, second wife of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In that book, the scientist Frankenstein puts a bunch of body parts from different corpses together in the shape of a man.