Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Kilgore Trout looked like my father.

  The only sound effect Trout had to create backstage was in the last moments of the last scene of the last act of the play, of what Trout himself called "a manmade timequake." He was equipped with an antique steam whistle from the heyday of Indian Head Mills. A plumber, who was a club member and looked a lot like my brother, put the gaily mournful whistle atop a tank of compressed air, with a valve in between. That is what Trout was, too, in all he wrote: gaily mournful.

  There were of course many club members who had no parts in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, who would have liked at least to blow that big brass rooster, once they saw it and then heard it blown by the plumber himself during dress rehearsal. But the club most of all wanted Trout to feel that he was home at last, and a vital member of an extended family.

  Not merely the club and the household staff at Xanadu, and the chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous, which met in the ballroom there, and the battered women and children and grandparents who had found shelter there, were grateful for his healing and encouraging mantra, which made bad times a coma: You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. The whole world was.

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  In order that Trout not miss his cue to blow the whistle, which he was terrified of doing, of spoiling everything for his family, the plumber who looked like my brother stood behind him and the apparatus, his hands on Trout's old shoulders. He would squeeze those shoulders gently when it was time for Trout's debut in show biz.

  The last scene in the play is set in the yards of the railroad station at Springfield, Illinois. The date is February 11th, 1861. Abraham Lincoln, in this instance played by the half-African-American great-great-grandson of John Wilkes Booth, having just been elected President of the United States in its darkest hour, is about to depart his hometown by railroad, for Washington, God help him, District of Columbia.

  He says, as indeed Lincoln said: "No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feelings of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of you people, I owe everything. I have lived here a quarter of a century, and passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return.

  "I am called upon to assume the Presidency at a time when eleven of our sovereign states have announced their intention to secede from the Union, when threats of war increase in fierceness from day to day.

  "It is a grave duty which I now face. In preparing for it, I have tried to enquire: what great principle or ideal is it that has kept this Union so long together? And I believe that it was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty to the people of this country and hope to all the world. This sentiment was the fulfillment of an ancient dream, which men have held through all time, that they might one day shake off their chains and find freedom in the brotherhood of life. We gained democracy, and now there is the question of whether it is fit to survive.

  "Perhaps we have come to the dreadful day of awakening, and the dream is ended. If so, I am afraid it must be ended forever. I cannot believe that ever again will men have the opportunity we have had. Perhaps we should admit that, and concede that our ideals of liberty and equality are decadent and doomed. I have heard of an eastern monarch who once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence which would be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, 'And this too shall pass away.'

  "That is a comforting thought in time of affliction-- 'And this too shall pass away.' And yet--let us believe that it is not true! Let us live to prove that we can cultivate the natural world that is about us, and the intellectual and moral world that is within us, so that we may secure an individual, social and political prosperity, whose course shall be forward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away....

  "I commend you to the care of the Almighty, as I hope that in your prayers you will remember me.... Good-bye, my friends and neighbors."

  An actor playing the bit part of Kavanagh, an Army officer, said, "Time to pull out, Mr. President. Better get inside the car."

  Lincoln gets into the car as the crowd sings "John Brown's Body."

  Another actor, cast as a brakeman, waved his lantern.

  That was when Trout was supposed to blow the whistle, and he did.

  As the curtain descended, there was a sob backstage. It wasn't in the playbook. It was ad lib. It was about beauty. It came from Kilgore Trout.

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  Anything we said at the cast party, the clambake on the beach, was at first hesitant and apologetic, almost as though English were our second language. We were mourning not only Lincoln, but the death of American eloquence.

  Another look-alike there was Rosemary Smith, Mask and Wig's costume mistress, and mother of Frank Smith, its superstar. She resembled Ida Young, grandchild of slaves, who worked for us in Indianapolis when I was little. Ida Young, in combination with my uncle Alex, had as much to do with my upbringing as my parents did.

  Nobody was a near double for Uncle Alex. He did not like my writing. I dedicated The Sirens of Titan to him, and Uncle Alex said, "I suppose the young people will like it." Nobody resembled my aunt Ella Vonnegut Stewart, a first cousin of my father's, either. She and her husband, Kerfuit, owned a bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky. They did not stock my books because they found my language obscene. So it was back then, when I was starting out.

  Among other departed souls whom I would not summon back to life, if I had had the power to do so, but who were represented by doppelgangers: nine of my teachers at Shortridge High School, and Phoebe Hurty, who hired me in high school to write ad copy about teenage clothing for Blocks' Department Store, and my first wife Jane, and my mother, and my uncle John Rauch, husband to another of Father's first cousins. Uncle John provided me with a history of my family in America, which I printed in Palm Sunday.

  Jane's unknowing stand-in, a pert young woman who teaches biochemistry at Rhode Island University, over at Kingston, said within my hearing, and apropos of nothing more than that day's theatrical performance and the setting sun: "I can't wait to see what's going to happen next."

  Only the dead had doppelgangers at that party back in 2001. Arthur Garvey Ulm, poet and Resident Secretary of Xanadu, an employee of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was short and had a big nose, like my war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare.

  My wife Jill was among the living, thank goodness, and was there in the flesh, as was Knox Burger, a Cornell classmate of mine. After Western Civilization's second unsuccessful suicide attempt, Knox became a fiction editor at Collier's, which published five short stories every week. Knox got me a good literary agent, Colonel Kenneth Littauer, the first pilot to strafe a trench during World War One.

  Trout opined, in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot, incidentally, that we had better start numbering timequakes the same way we numbered World Wars and Super Bowls.

  Colonel Littauer sold a dozen or more of my stories, several to Knox, making it possible for me to quit my job with General Electric and move with Jane and our then two kids to Cape Cod as a free-lance writer. When the magazines went bust because of TV, Knox became an editor of paperback originals. He published three books of mine as such: The Sirens of Titan, Canary in a Cathouse, and Mother Night.

  Knox got me started, and he kept me going until he could no longer help me. And then Seymour Lawrence came to my rescue.

  Also in the flesh at the clambake were five men half my age who made me want to keep on going in my sunset years because of their interest in my work. They weren't there to see me. They wanted at long last to meet Kilgore Trout. They were Robert Weide, who in this summer of 1996 is making a movie in Montreal of Mother Night, and Marc Leeds, who wrote and had published a witty encyclopedia of my life and work, and Asa Pieratt and Jerome Klinkowitz, who have kept my bibliography up-to-date and written essays
about me as well, and Joe Petro III, numbered like a World War, who taught me how to silk-screen.

  My closest business associate, Don Farber, lawyer and agent, was there with his dear wife, Anne. My closest social pal, Sidney Offit, was there. The critic John Leonard was there, and the academicians Peter Reed and Loree Rackstraw, and the photographer Cliff McCarthy, and other kind strangers too numerous to mention.

  The professional actors Kevin McCarthy and Nick Nolte were there.

  My children and grandchildren weren't there. That was OK, perfectly understandable. It wasn't my birthday, and I wasn't a guest of honor. The heroes that evening were Frank Smith and Kilgore Trout. My kids and my kids' kids had other fish to fry. Perhaps I should say my kids and my kids' kids had other lobsters and clams and oysters and potatoes and corn on the cob to steam in seaweed.

  Whatever!

  Get it right! Remember Uncle Carl Barus, and get it right!

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  This is not a Gothic novel. My late friend Borden Deal, a first-rate southern novelist, so southern he asked his publishers not to send review copies north of the Mason-Dixon line, also wrote Gothic novels under a feminine nom de plume. I asked him for a definition of a Gothic novel. He said, "A young woman goes into an old house and gets her pants scared off."

  Borden and I were in Vienna, Austria, for a congress of PEN, the international writers' organization founded after World War One, when he told me that. We went on to talk about the German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who in print found humiliation and pain so delectable at the end of the previous century. Because of him, modern languages have the word masochism.

  Borden not only wrote serious novels and Gothics. He wrote country music. He had his guitar back in his hotel room, and was working, he said, on a song called "I Never Waltzed in Vienna." I miss him. I want a look-alike for Borden at the clambake, and two luckless fishermen in a little rowboat right offshore, dead ringers for the saints Stanley Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

  So be it.

  Borden and I mused about novelists such as Masoch and the Marquis de Sade, who had intentionally or accidentally inspired new words. Sadism, of course, is joy while inflicting pain on others. Sadomasochism means getting one's rocks off while hurting others, while being hurt by others, or while hurting oneself.

  Borden said doing without those words nowadays was like trying to talk about life without words for beer or water.

  The only contemporary American writer we could think of who had given us a new word, and surely not because he is a famous pervert, which he isn't, was Joseph Heller. The title of his first novel, Catch-22, is defined this way in my Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: "A problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem."

  Read the book!

  I told Borden what Heller said in an interview when he was asked if he feared death. Heller said he had never experienced a root-canal job. Many people he knew had. From what they told him about it, Heller said, he guessed he, too, could stand one, if he had to.

  That was how he felt about death, he said.

  That puts me in mind of a scene from a play of George Bernard Shaw's, his manmade timequake Back to Methuselah. The whole play is ten hours long! The last time it was performed in its entirety was in 1922, the year I was born.

  The scene: Adam and Eve, who have been around for a long time now, are waiting at the gate of their prosperous and peaceful and beautiful farm for the annual visit from their landlord, God. During every previous visit, and there have been hundreds of them by now, they could tell Him only that everything was nice and that they were grateful.

  This time, though, Adam and Eve are all keyed up, scared but proud. They have something new they want to talk to God about. So God shows up, genial, big and hale and hearty, like my grandfather the brewer Albert Lieber. He asks if everything is satisfactory, and thinks He knows the answer, since what He has created is as perfect as He can make it.

  Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.

  Chicago is a better city than New York because Chicago has alleys. The garbage doesn't pile up on the sidewalks. Delivery vehicles don't block main thoroughfares.

  The late American novelist Nelson Algren said to the late Chilean novelist Jose Donoso, when we were all teaching in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1966: "It must be nice to come from a country that long and narrow."

  You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were. One theory of why they declined and fell is that their plumbing was lead. The root of our word plumbing is plumbum, the Latin word for "lead." Lead poisoning makes people stupid and lazy.

  What's your excuse?

  I got a sappy letter from a woman a while back. She knew I was sappy, too, which is to say a northern Democrat. She was pregnant, and she wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world this bad.

  I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can become a saint for her sweet child to meet.

  I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!

  Xanthippe thought her husband, Socrates, was a fool. Aunt Raye thought Uncle Alex was a fool. Mother thought Father was a fool. My wife thinks I'm a fool.

  I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.

  And Kilgore Trout said at the clambake, with Laurel and Hardy in a rowboat only fifty yards offshore, that young people liked movies with a lot of shooting because they showed that dying didn't hurt at all, that people with guns could be thought of as "free-lance anesthetists."

  He was so happy! He was so popular! He was all dolled up in the tuxedo and boiled shirt and crimson cummerbund and bow tie that had belonged to Zoltan Pepper. I stood behind him in his suite in order to tie the tie for him, just as my big brother had done for me before I myself could tie a bow tie.

  There on the beach, whatever Trout said produced laughter and applause. He couldn't believe it! He said the pyramids and Stonehenge were built in a time of very feeble gravity, when boulders could be tossed around like sofa pillows, and people loved it. They begged for more. He gave them the line from "Kiss Me Again": "There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time. Ting-a-ling?" People told him he was as witty as Oscar Wilde!

  Understand, the biggest audience this man had had before the clambake was an artillery battery, when he was a forward spotter in Europe during World War Two.

  "Ting-a-ling! If this isn't nice, what is?" he exclaimed to us all.

  I called back to him from the rear of the crowd: "You've been sick, Mr. Trout, but now you're well again, and there's work to do."

  My lecture agent, Janet Cosby, was there.

  At ten o'clock the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer announced it was his bedtime. There was one last thing he wanted to say to us, to his family. Like a magician seeking a volunteer from the audience, he asked someone to stand beside him and do what he said. I held up my hand. "Me, please, me," I said.

  The crowd fell quiet as I took my place to his right.

  "The Universe has expanded so enormously," he said, "with the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history, like the Pony Express.

  "I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesn't matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don't twinkle, they are either planets or satellites. Ton
ight we are not interested in planets or satellites."

  I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart. One was Polaris. I have no idea what the other one was. For all I knew, it was Puke, Trout's star the size of a BB.

  "Do they twinkle?" he said.

  "Yes they do," I said.

  "Promise?" he said.

  "Cross my heart," I said.

  "Excellent! Ting-a-ling!" he said. "Now then: Whatever heavenly bodies those two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands or millions of years. Ting-a-ling? But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other."

  "OK," I said, "I did it."

  "It took a second, do you think?" he said.

  "No more," I said.

  "Even if you'd taken an hour," he said, "something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light."

  "What was it?" I said.

  "Your awareness," he said. "That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness."

  Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that enchanted evening.

  All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: "I have thought of a better word than awareness," he said. "Let us call it soul." He paused.

  "Ting-a-ling?" he said.