Timequake Read online

The Academy occupied its present home, designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White, and paid for by the philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington, in 1923. In that year, the American inventor Lee De Forest demonstrated apparatus that made possible the addition of sound to motion pictures.

  I had a scene in Timequake One, set in the office of Monica Pepper, fictitious Executive Secretary of the Academy, on Christmas Eve, 2000. That was the afternoon on which Kilgore Trout put "The Sisters B-36" in the lidless wire trash receptacle out front, again, fifty-one days before the timequake struck.

  Mrs. Pepper, wife of the wheelchair-ridden composer Zoltan Pepper, bore a striking resemblance to my late sister Allie, who hated life so much. Allie died of cancer of the everything way back in 1958, when I was thirty-six and she was forty-one, hounded by bill collectors to the very end. Both women were pretty blondes, which was OK. But they were six-foot-two! Both women were permanently acculturated in adolescence, since nowhere on Earth, save among the Watusis, did it make any sense for a woman to be that tall.

  Both women were unlucky. Allie married a nice guy who lost all their money and then some in dumb businesses. Monica Pepper was the reason her husband Zoltan was paralyzed from the waist down. Two years earlier, she had accidentally landed on top of him in a swimming pool out in Aspen, Colorado. At least Allie had to die so deep in debt, and with four sons to raise, only once. After the timequake struck, Monica Pepper would have to swan-dive on top of her husband a second time.

  Monica and Zoltan were talking in her office at the Academy that Christmas Eve, 2000. Zoltan was crying and laughing simultaneously. They were the same age, forty, which made them baby boomers. They didn't have any kids. Because of her, his ding-dong didn't work anymore. Zoltan was crying and laughing about that, certainly, but mostly about a tone-deaf kid next door, who had composed and orchestrated an acceptable, if derivative, string quartet in the manner of Beethoven, with the help of a new computer program called Wolfgang.

  Nothing would do but that the father of the obnoxious kid show Zoltan the sheet music his son's printer had spit out that morning and ask him if it was any good or not.

  As though Zoltan weren't sufficiently destabilized emotionally by legs and a ding-dong that didn't work anymore, his older brother Frank, an architect, had committed suicide after a nearly identical blow to his self-respect only a month earlier. Yes, and Frank Pepper would eventually be popped out of his grave by the timequake, so he could blow his brains out while his wife and three kids watched a second time.

  Here's the thing: Frank went to the drugstore for condoms or chewing gum or whatever, and the pharmacist told him that his sixteen-year-old daughter had become an architect and was thinking of dropping out of high school because it was such a waste of time. She had designed a recreation center for teenagers in depressed neighborhoods with the help of a new computer program the school had bought for its vocational students, dummies who weren't going to anything but junior colleges. It was called Palladio.

  Frank went to a computer store, and asked if he could try out Palladio before buying it. He doubted very much that it could help anyone with his native talent and education. So right there in the store, and in a period of no more than half an hour, Palladio gave him what he had asked it for, working drawings that would enable a contractor to build a three-story parking garage in the manner of Thomas Jefferson.

  Frank had made up the craziest assignment he could think of, confident that Palladio would tell him to take his custom elsewhere. But it didn't! It presented him with menu after menu, asking how many cars, and in what city, because of various local building codes, and whether trucks would be allowed to use it, too, and on and on. It even asked about surrounding buildings, and whether Jeffersonian architecture would be in harmony with them. It offered to give him alternative plans in the manner of Michael Graves or I. M. Pei.

  It gave him plans for the wiring and plumbing, and ballpark estimates of what it would cost to build in any part of the world he cared to name.

  So Frank went home and killed himself the first time.

  Laughing and crying there in his wife's office at the Academy on the first of two Christmas Eves, 2000, Zoltan Pepper said this to his pretty but gawky wife: "It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweeters now."

  He was speaking, of course, of microchips.

  10

  Allie died in New Jersey. She and her husband, Jim, also a native Hoosier, are buried whole in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. So is James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet, a never-married lush. So is John Dillinger, the beloved bank robber of the 1930s. So are our parents, Kurt and Edith, and Father's kid brother Alex Vonnegut, the Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who said, whenever life was good, "If this isn't nice, what is?" So are two previous generations of our parents' forebears : a brewer, an architect, merchants and musicians, and their wives, of course.

  Full house!

  John Dillinger, a farm boy, escaped from jail once brandishing a wooden pistol he had whittled from a broken washtub slat. He blackened it with shoe polish! He was so entertaining. While on the run, robbing banks and vanishing into the boondocks, Dillinger wrote Henry Ford a fan letter. He thanked the old anti-Semite for making such fast and agile getaway cars!

  It was possible to get away from the police back then if you were a better driver with a better car. Talk about fair play! Talk about what we say we want for everyone in America: a level playing field! And Dillinger robbed only the rich and strong, banks with armed guards, and in person.

  Dillinger wasn't a simpering, sly swindler. He was an athlete.

  In the slavering search for subversive literature on the shelves of our public schools, which will never stop, the two most subversive tales of all remain untouched, wholly unsuspected. One is the story of Robin Hood. As ill educated as John Dillinger was, that was surely his inspiration: a reputable blueprint for what a real man might do with life.

  The minds of children in intellectually humble American homes back then weren't swamped with countless stories from TV sets. They heard or read only a few stories, and so could remember them, and maybe learn something from them. Everywhere in the English-speaking world, one of those was "Cinderella." Another was "The Ugly Duckling." Another was the story of Robin Hood.

  And another, as disrespectful of established authority as the story of Robin Hood, which "Cinderella" and "The Ugly Duckling" are not, is the life of Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament.

  G-men, under orders from J. Edgar Hoover, the unmarried homosexual director of the FBI, shot Dillinger dead, simply executed him as he came out of a movie theater with a date. He hadn't pulled a gun, or lunged or dived, or tried to run away. He was like anybody else coming out into the real world after a movie, awakening from enchantment. He was killed because he had for too long made G-men, all of whom then wore fedoras, look non compos mentis, like nincompoops.

  That was in 1934. I was eleven. Allie was sixteen. Allie wept and raged, and we both reviled Dillinger's date at the movie. This bitch, and there was nothing else to call her, tipped off the feds about where Dillinger would be that night. She said she would be wearing an orange dress. The nondescript gink by her side when she came out would be the man the gay director of the FBI had branded Public Enemy Number One.

  She was Hungarian. As the old saying goes: "If you have a Hungarian for a friend, you don't need an enemy."

  Allie later had her picture taken with Dillinger's big tombstone at Crown Hill, not far from the fence on West Thirty-eighth Street. I myself came upon it from time to time, while shooting crows with a .22 semiautomatic rifle our gun-nut father gave me for my birthday. Crows back then were classified as enemies of mankind. Given half a chance, they would eat our corn.

  One kid I knew shot a golden eagle. You should have seen the wingspread!

  Allie hated hunting so much that I sto
pped doing it, and so did Father. As I've written elsewhere, he had become a gun nut and hunter in order to prove that he wasn't effeminate, even though he was in the arts, an architect and a painter and potter. In public lectures, I myself often say, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts."

  Father supposed he could still demonstrate his manhood by fishing. But then my big brother Bernie spoiled that for him, too, saying it was as though he were smashing up Swiss pocketwatches, or some other exquisitely engineered little pieces of machinery.

  I told Kilgore Trout at the clambake in 2001 about how my brother and sister had made Father ashamed of hunting and fishing. He quoted Shakespeare: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!"

  Trout was self-educated, never having finished high school. I was mildly surprised, then, that he could quote Shakespeare. I asked if he had committed a lot of that remarkable author's words to memory. He said, "Yes, dear colleague, including a single sentence which describes life as lived by human beings so completely that no writer after him need ever have written another word."

  "Which sentence was that, Mr. Trout?" I asked.

  And he said, " 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.' "

  11

  I wrote a letter to an old friend last spring about why I evidently couldn't write publishable fiction anymore, after trying and failing to do that for many years. He is Edward Muir, a poet and advertising man my age living in Scars-dale. In my novel Cat's Cradle, I say that anybody whose life keeps tangling up with yours for no logical reason is likely a member of your karass, a team God has formed to get something done for Him. Ed Muir is surely a member of my karass.

  Listen to this: When I was at the University of Chicago after World War Two, Ed was there, although we did not meet. When I went to Schenectady, New York, to be a publicist for the General Electric Company, Ed went there to be a teacher at Union College. When I quit GE and moved to Cape Cod, he showed up there as a recruiter for the Great Books Program. At last we met, and whether in the service of God or not, my first wife Jane and I became leaders of a Great Books group.

  And when he took an advertising job in Boston, so did I, not knowing he had done that. When Ed's first marriage broke up, so did mine, and now we're both in New York. My point, though, is as follows: When I sent him a letter about my case of writer's block, he made it look like a poem and returned it.

  He left off my salutation and the first few lines, which were in praise of Reader's Block by David Markson, who had been his student at Union College. I said David shouldn't thank Fate for letting him write such a good book in a time when large numbers of people could no longer be wowed by a novel, no matter how excellent. Something like that. I don't have a copy of my letter as prose. As a poem, though, this is its appearance:

  And no thanks to Fate.

  When we're gone, there won't be anybody

  Sufficiently excited by ink on paper

  To realize how good it is.

  I have this ailment not unlike

  Ambulatory pneumonia, which might be called

  Ambulatory writer's block.

  I cover paper with words every day,

  But the stories never go anywhere

  I find worth going.

  Slaughterhouse-Five has been turned

  Into an opera by a young German,

  And will have its premiere in Munich this June.

  I'm not going there either.

  Not interested.

  I am fond of Occam's Razor,

  Or the Law of Parsimony, which suggests

  That the simplest explanation of a phenomenon

  Is usually the most trustworthy.

  And I now believe, with David's help,

  That writer's block is finding out

  How lives of loved ones really ended

  Instead of the way we hoped they would end

  With the help of our body English.

  Fiction is body English.

  Whatever.

  It was nice of Ed to do that. Another nice story about him is from his days as a road man for Great Books. He is a minor poet, publishing occasionally in The Atlantic Monthly and suchlike. His name, though, is nearly identical with that of the major poet Edwin Muir, a Scotsman who died in 1959. Hazily sophisticated people sometimes asked him if he was the poet, meaning Edwin.

  One time, when Ed told a woman he wasn't the poet, she expressed deep disappointment. She said one of her favorite poems was "The Poet Covers His Child." Get a load of this: It was the American Ed Muir who wrote that poem.

  12

  I wish I'd written Our Town. I wish I'd invented Rollerblades.

  I asked A. E. Hotchner, a friend and biographer of the late Ernest Hemingway, if Hemingway had ever shot a human being, not counting himself. Hotchner said, "No."

  I asked the late great German novelist Heinrich Boll what the basic flaw was in the German character. He said, "Obedience."

  I asked one of my adopted nephews what he thought of my dancing. He said, "Acceptable."

  When I took a job in Boston as an advertising copywriter, because I was broke, an account executive asked me what kind of name Vonnegut was. I said, "German." He said, "Germans killed six million of my cousins."

  You want to know why I don't have AIDS, why I'm not HIV-positive like so many other people? I don't fuck around. It's as simple as that.

  Trout said this was the story on why AIDS and new strains of syph and clap and the blueballs were making the rounds like Avon ladies run amok: On September 1st of 1945, immediately after the end of World War Two, representatives of all the chemical elements held a meeting on the planet Tralfamadore. They were there to protest some of their members' having been incorporated into the bodies of big, sloppy, stinky organisms as cruel and stupid as human beings.

  Elements such as Polonium and Ytterbium, which had never been essential parts of human beings, were nonetheless outraged that any chemicals should be so misused.

  Carbon, although an embarrassed veteran of countless massacres throughout history, focused the attention of the meeting on the public execution of only one man, accused of treason in fifteenth-century England. He was hanged until almost dead. He was revived. His abdomen was slit open.

  The executioner pulled out a loop of his intestines. He dangled the loop before the man's face and burned it with a torch here and there. The loop was still attached to the rest of the man's insides. The executioner and his assistants tied a horse to each of his four limbs.

  They whipped the horses, which ripped the man into four jagged pieces. These were hung on display from meathooks in a marketplace.

  It had been agreed before the meeting was called to order that no one was to tell of terrible things grownup human beings had done to children, according to Trout. Several delegates threatened to boycott the meeting if they were expected to sit still while listening to tales that sickening. What would be the point?

  "What grownups had done to grownups left no doubt that the human race should be exterminated," said Trout. "Rehashing ad nauseam what grownups had done to children would be gilding the lily, so to speak."

  Nitrogen wept about its involuntary servitude as parts of Nazi guards and physicians in death camps during World War Two. Potassium told hair-raising stories about the Spanish Inquisition, and Calcium about the Roman Games, and Oxygen about black African slavery.

  Sodium said enough was enough, that any further testimony would be coals to Newcastle. It made a motion that all chemicals involved in medical research combine whenever possible to create ever more powerful antibiotics. These in turn would cause disease organisms to evolve new strains that were resistant to them.

  In no time, Sodium predicted, every human ailment, including acne and jock itch, would be not only incurable but fatal. "All humans will die," said Sodium, according to Trout. "As they were at the birth of the Universe, all el
ements will be free of sin again."

  Iron and Magnesium seconded Sodium's motion. Phosphorus called for a vote. The motion was passed by acclamation.

  13

  Kilgore Trout was right next door to the American Academy of Arts and Letters on Christmas Eve, 2000, when Zoltan Pepper said to his wife that people were now getting their heads handed to them with tweezers instead of on platters. Trout couldn't hear him. There was a thick masonry wall between them as the paraplegic composer ranted on about the seeming mania for making people compete with machines that were smarter than they were.

  Pepper asked this rhetorical question: "Why is it so important that we all be humiliated, with such ingenuity and at such great expense? We never thought we were such hot stuff in the first place."

  Trout was sitting on his cot in a shelter for homeless men that was once the Museum of the American Indian. Arguably the most prolific writer of short stories in history, he had been caught by the police in a sweep of the New York Public Library down at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. He and about thirty others who had been living there, what Trout called "sacred cattle," were carted off in a black school bus and deposited in the shelter way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street.

  The Museum of the American Indian had moved the detritus of overwhelmed aborigines, and dioramas of how they lived before the shit hit the fan, into a safer neighborhood downtown, five years before Trout arrived.

  He was eighty-four years old now, having passed another milestone on November 11th, 2000. He would die on Labor Day, 2001, still eighty-four. But by then the timequake would have given him and all the rest of us an unexpected bonus, if you can call it that, of another ten years.