Timequake Read online

  When a little Boobooling was reading a book, a grownup might interrupt to say, depending on what was happening in the book, "Isn't that sad? The little girl's nice little dog has just been run over by a garbage truck. Doesn't that make you want to cry?" Or the grownup might say, about a very different sort of story, "Isn't that funny? When that conceited old rich man stepped on a nim-nim peel and fell into an open manhole, didn't that make you practically pop a gut laughing?"

  A nim-nim was a banana-like fruit on Booboo.

  An immature Boobooling taken to an art gallery might be asked about a certain painting whether the woman in it was really smiling or not. Couldn't she be sad about something, and still look that way? Is she married, do you think? Does she have a kid? Is she nice to it? Where do you think she's going next? Does she want to go?

  If there was a bowl of fruit in the painting, a grownup might ask, "Don't those nim-nims look good enough to eat? Yummy yum yum!"

  These examples of Boobooling pedagogy aren't mine. They're Kilgore Trout's.

  Thus were the brains of most, but not quite all, Booboolings made to grow circuits, microchips, if you like, which on Earth would be called imaginations. Yes, and it was precisely because a vast majority of Booboolings had imaginations that two of the B-36 sisters, the short story writer and the painter, were so beloved.

  The bad sister had an imagination, all right, but not in the field of art appreciation. She wouldn't read books or go to art galleries. She spent every spare minute when she was little in the garden of a lunatic asylum next door. The psychos in the garden were believed to be harmless, so her keeping them company was regarded as a laudably compassionate activity. But the nuts taught her thermodynamics and calculus and so on.

  When the bad sister was a young woman, she and the nuts worked up designs for television cameras and transmitters and receivers. Then she got money from her very rich mom to manufacture and market these satanic devices, which made imaginations redundant. They were instantly popular because the shows were so attractive and no thinking was involved.

  She made a lot of money, but what really pleased her was that her two sisters were starting to feel like something the cat drug in. Young Booboolings didn't see any point in developing imaginations anymore, since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of jazzy shit. They would look at a printed page or a painting and wonder how anybody could have gotten his or her rocks off looking at things that simple and dead.

  The bad sister's name was Nim-nim. When her parents named her that, they had no idea how unsweet she was going to be. And TV wasn't the half of it! She was as unpopular as ever because she was as boring as ever, so she invented automobiles and computers and barbed wire and flamethrowers and land mines and machine guns and so on. That's how pissed off she was.

  New generations of Booboolings grew up without imaginations. Their appetites for diversions from boredom were perfectly satisfied by all the crap Nim-nim was selling them. Why not? What the heck.

  Without imaginations, though, they couldn't do what their ancestors had done, which was read interesting, heart-warming stories in the faces of one another. So, according to Kilgore Trout, "Booboolings became among the most merciless creatures in the local family of galaxies."

  6

  Trout said at the clambake in 2001 that life was undeniably preposterous. "But our brains are big enough to let us adapt to the inevitable pratfalls and buffoonery," he went on, "by means of manmade epiphanies like this one." He meant the clambake on a beach under a starry sky. "If this isn't nice, what is?" he said.

  He declared the corn on the cob, steamed in seaweed with lobsters and clams, to be heavenly. He added, "And don't all the ladies look like angels tonight!" He was feasting on corn on the cob and women as ideas. He couldn't eat the corn because the upper plate of his false teeth was insecure. His long-term relationships with women had been disasters. In the only love story he ever attempted, "Kiss Me Again," he had written, "There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time."

  The moral at the end of that story is this: "Men are jerks. Women are psychotic."

  Chief among manmade epiphanies for me have been stage plays. Trout called them "artificial timequakes." He said, "Before Earthlings knew there were such things as timequakes in Nature, they invented them." And it's true. Actors know everything they are going to say and do, and how everything is going to come out in the end, for good or ill, when the curtain goes up on Act One, Scene One. Yet they have no choice but to behave as though the future were a mystery.

  Yes, and when the timequake of 2001 zapped us back to 1991, it made ten years of our pasts ten years of our futures, so we could remember everything we had to say and do again when the time came.

  Keep this in mind at the start of the next rerun after the next timequake: The show must go on!

  The artificial timequake that has moved me most so far this year is an old one. It is Our Town, by the late Thornton Wilder. I had already watched it with undiminished satisfaction maybe five or six times. And then this spring my thirteen-year-old daughter, dear Lily, was cast as a talking dead person in the graveyard of Grover's Corners in a school production of that innocent, sentimental masterpiece.

  The play zapped Lily and her schoolmates from the evening of the performance back to May 7th, 1901! Timequake! They were robots of Thornton Wilder's imaginary past until the curtain came down after the funeral of the heroine Emily in the very last scene. Only then could they live in 1996 again. Only then could they again decide for themselves what to say or do next. Only then could they exercise free will again.

  I reflected sadly that night, with Lily pretending to be a dead grownup, that I would be seventy-eight when she graduated from high school, and eighty-two when she graduated from college, and so on. Talk about remembering the future!

  What hit me really hard that night, though, was the character Emily's farewell in the last scene, after the mourners have gone back down the hill to their village, having buried her. She says, "Good-by, good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

  "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?"

  I myself become a sort of Emily every time I hear that speech. I haven't died yet, but there is a place, as seemingly safe and simple, as learnable, as acceptable as Grover's Corners at the turn of the century, with ticking clocks and Mama and Papa and hot baths and new-ironed clothes and all the rest of it, to which I've already said good-by, good-by, one hell of a long time ago now.

  Here's what that was: the first seven years of my life, before the shit hit the fan, first the Great Depression and then World War Two.

  They say the first thing to go when you're old is your legs or your eyesight. It isn't true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.

  Now I find myself maundering about parts of plays hardly anybody knows or cares about anymore, such as the graveyard scene in Our Town, or the poker game in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, or what Willy Loman's wife said after that tragically ordinary, clumsily gallant American committed suicide in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

  She said, "Attention must be paid."

  In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois said as she was taken away to a madhouse, after she was raped by her sister's husband, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

  Those speeches, those situations, those people, became emotional and ethical landmarks for me in my early manhood, and remain such in the summer of 1996. That is because I was immobilized in a congregation of rapt fellow human beings in a theater when I first saw and heard them.

  They would have made no more impression on me than Monday Night Football, had I been alone eating nachos and gazing into the face of a cathode-ray
tube.

  In the early days of television, when there were only half a dozen channels at most, significant, well-written dramas on a cathode-ray tube could still make us feel like members of an attentive congregation, alone at home as we might be. There was a high probability back then, with so few shows to choose from, that friends and neighbors were watching the same show we were watching, still finding TV a whizbang miracle.

  We might even call up a friend that very night, and ask a question to which we already knew the answer: "Did you see that? Wow!"

  No more.

  7

  I wouldn't have missed the Great Depression or my part in World War Two for anything. Trout asserted at the clambake that our war would live forever in show biz, as other wars would not, because of the uniforms of the Nazis.

  He commented unfavorably on the camouflage suits our own generals wear nowadays on TV, when they describe our blasting the bejesus out of some Third World country because of petroleum. "I can't imagine," he said, "any part of the world where such garish pajamas would make a soldier less rather than more visible.

  "We are evidently preparing," he said, "to fight World War Three in the midst of an enormous Spanish omelet."

  He asked what relatives of mine had been wounded in wars. As far as I knew, only one. That was my great-grandfather Peter Lieber, an immigrant who became a brewer in Indianapolis after being wounded in one leg during our Civil War. He was a Freethinker, which is to say a skeptic about conventional religious beliefs, as had been Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and so on. And as would be Kilgore Trout and I.

  I told Trout that Peter Lieber's Anglo-American company commander gave his men, all Freethinkers from Germany, Christian religious tracts for inspiration. Trout responded by giving his own revision of the Book of Genesis.

  Fortunately, I had a tape recorder, which I turned on.

  "Please stop eating and pay attention," he said. "This is important." He paused to press the upper plate of his false teeth against the roof of his mouth with the ball of his left thumb. It would come unstuck again every two minutes or so. He was left-handed, as was I until my parents made me switch, and as are my daughters Edith and Lily, or, as we call them affectionately, Edie Bucket and Lolly-boo.

  "In the beginning there was absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing," he said. "But nothing implies something, just as up implies down and sweet implies sour, as man implies woman and drunk implies sober and happy implies sad. I hate to tell you this, friends and neighbors, but we are teensy-weensy implications in an enormous implication. If you don't like it here, why don't you go back to where you came from?

  "The first something to be implied by all the nothing," he said, "was in fact two somethings, who were God and Satan. God was male. Satan was female. They implied each other, and hence were peers in the emerging power structure, which was itself nothing but an implication. Power was implied by weakness."

  "God created the heaven and the earth," the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer went on. "And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the point? She didn't say anything at first.

  "But Satan began to worry about God when He said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. She had to wonder, 'What in heck does He think He's doing? How far does He intend to go, and does He expect me to help Him take care of all this crazy stuff?'

  "And then the shit really hit the fan. God made man and woman, beautiful little miniatures of Him and her, and turned them loose to see what might become of them. The Garden of Eden," said Trout, "might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games."

  "Satan," he said, "couldn't undo anything God had done. She could at least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She could see what He couldn't: To be alive was to be either bored or scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards and dice, and how to fuck, and recipes for beer and wine and whiskey, and pictures of different plants that were smokable, and so on. And instructions on how to make music and sing and dance real crazy, real sexy. And how to spout blasphemy when they stubbed their toes.

  "Satan had a serpent give Eve the apple. Eve took a bite and handed it to Adam. He took a bite, and then they fucked."

  "I grant you," said Trout, "that some of the ideas in the apple had catastrophic side effects for a minority of those who tried them." Let it be noted here that Trout himself was not an alcoholic, a junkie, a gambler, or a sex fiend. He just wrote.

  "All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases," he concluded. "And her record for promoting nostrums with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day."

  8

  Side effects of Satan's booze recipes have played a deleterious part in the lives and deaths of many great American writers. In Timequake One, I envisioned a writers' retreat called Xanadu, where each of the four guest suites was named in honor of an American winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature. The Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O'Neill were on the second floor of the mansion. The Sinclair Lewis was on the third. The John Steinbeck was in the carriage house.

  Kilgore Trout exclaimed upon arriving at Xanadu, two weeks after free will kicked in again, "All four of your ink-on-paper heroes were certifiable alcoholics!"

  Gambling ruined William Saroyan. A combination of booze and gambling did in the journalist Alvin Davis, a much-missed friend of mine. I asked Al one time what was the biggest kick he got from games of chance. He said it came after he had lost all his money in an around-the-clock poker game.

  He went back after a few hours with money he had gotten wherever he could get it, from a friend, from hocking something, from a loanshark. And he sat down at the table and said, "Deal me in."

  The late British philosopher Bertrand Russell said he lost friends to one of three addictions: alcohol or religion or chess. Kilgore Trout was hooked on making idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines, with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp, of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.

  I have been married twice, divorced once. Both my wives, Jane and now Jill, have said on occasion that I am much like Trout in that regard.

  My mother was addicted to being rich, to servants and unlimited charge accounts, to giving lavish dinner parties, to taking frequent first-class trips to Europe. So one might say she was tormented by withdrawal symptoms all through the Great Depression.

  She was acculturated!

  Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology, or being conquered by another country or political faction, can do that to people quicker than you can say "Jack Robinson."

  As Trout wrote in his "An American Family Marooned on the Planet Pluto": "Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous." He said in conversation at the 2001 clambake: "If I hadn't learned how to live without a culture and a society, acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times."

  In Timequake One, I had Trout discard his "The Sisters B-36" in a lidless wire trash receptacle chained to a fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street in Manhattan, two doors west of Broadway. This was on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 2000, supposedly fifty-one days before the timequake zapped everybody and everything back to 1991.

  The members of the Academy, I said, who were addicted to making old-fashioned art in old-fashioned ways, without computers, were expe
riencing acculturation. They were like the two artistic sisters on the matriarchal planet Booboo in the Crab Nebula.

  There really is an American Academy of Arts and Letters. Its palatial headquarters are where I placed them in Timequake One. There really is a fire hydrant out front. There really is a library inside, and an art gallery and reception halls and meeting rooms and staff offices, and a very grand auditorium.

  By an act of Congress passed in 1916, the Academy can have no more than 250 members, American citizens, all of whom have distinguished themselves as novelists, dramatists, poets, historians, essayists, critics, composers of music, architects, painters, or sculptors. Their ranks are regularly diminished by the Grim Reaper, by death. A task of the survivors is to nominate and then, by secret ballot, elect persons to fill the vacancies.

  Among the Academy's founders were old-fashioned writers such as Henry Adams and William and Henry James, and Samuel Clemens, and the old-fashioned composer Edward MacDowell. Their audiences were necessarily small. Their own brains were all they had to work with.

  I said in Timequake One that by the year 2000, crafts-people of their sort had become "as quaint," in the opinion of the general public, "as contemporary makers in New England tourist towns of the toy windmills known since colonial times as whirligigs."

  9

  Founders of the Academy at the turn of the century were contemporaneous with Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of, among other things, sound recordings and motion pictures. Before World War Two, though, these schemes for holding the attention of millions all over the world were only squawking or flickering lampoons of life itself.