According to science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur in New York City on 13th February 2001. It is the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Should it expand or make a great big bang? It decides to wind the clock back a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja-vu and a total loss of free will - not to mention the torture of reliving every nanosecond of one of the tawdiest and most hollow decades. With his trademark wicked wit, Vonnegut addresses memory, suicide, the Great Depression, the loss of American eloquence, and the obsolescent thrill of reading books.
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Kurt Vonnegut
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Epilogue
Copyright
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Epub ISBN 9781446498026
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Published by Vintage 1998
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Copyright © Kurt Vonnegut 1997
Kurt Vonnegut has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
Published by arrangement with G.P. Putman’s Sons, a division of the Putnam Berkeley Group, Inc., New York
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1997
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ISBN 9780099267546
In memory of Seymour Lawrence,
a romantic and great publisher
of curious tales told with ink
on bleached and flattened wood pulp
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of war in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.
A Man Without a Country
Bagombo Snuff Box
Breakfast of Champions
Fates Worse Than Death
Hocus Pocus
Bluebeard
Galápagos
Deadeye Dick
Palm Sunday
Jailbird
Slapstick
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Slaughterhouse-Five
Welcome to the Monkey House
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Cat’s Cradle
Mother Night
The Sirens of Titan
Player Piano
Armageddon in Retrospect
Out-of-print science fiction writer Kilgore Trout
in Cohoes, New York, in 1975, having learned of
the death of hit estranged son, Leon, in a Swedish
shipyard, having given his parakeet, “Cyclone Bill,”
his freedom, and about to become a vagabond.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY IN 1952 published in Life magazine a long short story called The Old Man and the Sea. It was about a Cuban fisherman who hadn’t caught anything for eighty-four days. The Cuban hooked an enormous marlin. He killed it and lashed it alongside his little boat. Before he could get it to shore, though, sharks bit off all the meat on the skeleton.
I was living in Barnstable Village on Cape Cod when the story appeared. I asked a neighboring commercial fisherman what he thought of it. He said the hero was an idiot. He should have hacked off the best chunks of meat and put them in the bottom of the boat, and left the rest of the carcass for the sharks.
It could be that the sharks Hemingway had in mind were critics who hadn’t much liked his first novel in ten years, Across the River and into the Trees, published two years earlier. As far as I know, he never said so. But the marlin could have been that novel.
And then I found myself in the winter of 1996 the creator of a novel which did not work, which had no point, which had never wanted to be written in the first place. Merde! I had spent nearly a decade on that ungrateful fish, if you will. It wasn’t even fit for shark chum.
I had recently tamed seventy-three. My mother made it to fifty-two, my father to seventy-two. Hemingway almost made it to sixty-two. I had lived too long! What was I to do?
Answer: Fillet the fish. Throw the rest away.
This I did in the summer and autumn of 1996. Yesterday, November 11th of that year, I turned seventy-four. Seventy-four!
Johannes Brahms quit composing symphonies when he was fifty-five. Enough! My architect father was sick and tired of architecture when he was fifty-five. Enough! American male novelists have done their best work by then. Enough! Fifty-five is a long time ago for me now. Have pity!
My great big fish, which stunk so, was entitled Timequake. Let us think of it as Timequake One. And let us think of this one, a stew made from its best parts mixed with thoughts and experiences during the past seven months or so, as Timequake Two.
Hokay?
The premise of Timequake One was that a timequake, a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they’d done during a past decade, for good or ill, a second time. It was déjà vu that wouldn’t quit for ten long years. You couldn’t complain about life’s being nothing but old stuff, or ask if just you were going nuts or if everybody was going nuts.
There was absolutely nothing you could say during the rerun, if you hadn’t said it the first time through the decade. You couldn’t even save your own life or that of a loved one, if you had failed to do that the first time through.
I had the timequake zap everybody and everything in an instant from February 13th, 2001, back to February 17th, 1991. Then we all had to get back to 2001 the hard way, minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again, getting the clap again. You name it!
Only when people got back to when the timequake hit did they stop being robots of their pasts. As the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout said, “Only when free will kicked in again could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction.”
Trout doesn’t really exist. He has been my alter ego in several of my other novels. But most of what I have chosen to preserve from Timequake One has to do with his adventures and opinions. I have salvaged a few of the thousands of stories he wrote between 1931, when he was fourteen, and 2001, when he died at the age of eighty-four. A hobo for much of his life, he died in luxury in the Ernest Hemingway Suite of the writers’ retreat Xanadu in the summer resort village of Point Zion, Rhode Island. That’s nice to know.
His very first story, he told me as he was dying, was set in Camelot, the court of King Arthur in Britain: Merlin the Court Magician casts a spell that allows him to equip the Knights of the Round Table with Thompson submachine guns and drums of .45-caliber dumdums.
Sir Galahad, the purest in heart and mind, familiarizes himself with this new virtue-compelling appliance. While doing so, he puts a slug through the Holy Grail and makes a Swiss cheese of Queen Guinevere.
Here is what Trout said when he realized that the ten-year rerun was over, that he and everybody else were suddenly obligated to think of new stuff to do, to be creative again: “Oh, Lordy! I am much too old and experienced to start playing Russian roulette with free will again.”
Yes, and I myself was a character in Timequake One, making a cameo appearance at a clambake on the beach at the writers’ retreat Xanadu in the summer of 2001, six months after the end of the rerun, six months after free will kicked in again.
I was there with several fictitious persons from the book, including Kilgore Trout. I was privileged to hear the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer describe for us, and then demonstrate, the special place of Earthlings in the cosmic scheme of things.
So now my last book is done, with the exception of this preface. Today is November 12th, 1996, about nine months, I would guess, from its publication date, from its emergence from the birth canal of a printing press. There is no rush. The gestation period for a baby Indian elephant is more than twice that long.
The gestation period for a baby opossum, friends and neighbors, is twelve days.
I have pretended in this book that I will still be alive for the clambake in 2001. In chapter 46, I imagine myself as still alive in 2010. Sometimes I say I’m in 1996, where I really am, and sometimes I say I am in the midst of a rerun following a timequake, without making clear distinctions between the two situations.
I must be nuts.
CALL ME JUNIOR. My six grown kids do. Three are adopted nephews, three are my own. They call me Junior behind my back. They think I don’t know that.
I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, “The Beatles did.”
It appears to me that the most highly evolved Earthling creatures find being alive embarrassing or much worse. Never mind cases of extreme discomfort, such as idealists’ being crucified. Two important women in my life, my mother and my only sister, Alice, or Allie, in Heaven now, hated life and said so. Allie would cry out, “I give up! I give up!”
The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me, that he wrote as follows: “I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood.” That is in an essay on the sudden death of his daughter Jean a few days earlier. Among those he wouldn’t have resurrected were Jean, and another daughter, Susy, and his beloved wife, and his best friend, Henry Rogers.
Twain didn’t live to see World War One, but still he felt that way.
Jesus said how awful life was, in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are they that mourn,” and “Blessed are the meek,” and “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.”
Henry David Thoreau said most famously, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and air and topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough.
My father, Kurt Senior, an Indianapolis architect who had cancer, and whose wife had committed suicide some fifteen years earlier, was arrested for running a red light in his hometown. It turned out that he hadn’t had a driver’s license for twenty years!
You know what he told the arresting officer? “So shoot me,” he said.
The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!”
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit.”
IMAGINE THIS: A great American university gives up football in the name of sanity. It turns its vacant stadium into a bomb factory. So much for sanity. Shades of Kilgore Trout.
I am speaking of my alma mater, the University of Chicago. In December of 1942, long before I got there, the first chain reaction of uranium on Earth was compelled by scientists underneath the stands of Stagg Field. Their intent was to demonstrate the feasibility of an atomic bomb. We were at war with Germany and Japan.
Fifty-three years later, on August 6th, 1995, there was a gathering in the chapel of my university to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the detonation of the first atomic bomb, over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. I was there.
One of the speakers was the physicist Leo Seren. He had participated in the successful experiment under the lifeless sports facility so long ago. Get this: He apologized for having done that!
Somebody should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never having to say you’re sorry.
Now imagine this: A man creates a hydrogen bomb for a paranoid Soviet Union, makes sure it will work, and then wins a Nobel Peace Prize! This real-life character, worthy of a story by Kilgore Trout, was the late physicist Andrei Sakharov.
He won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay with a mate that cracked?
“Anything interesting happen at work today, Honeybunch?”
“Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?”
Andrei Sakharov was a sort of saint in 1975, a sort that is no longer celebrated, now that the Cold War is over. He was a dissident in the Soviet Union. He called for an end to the development and testing of nuclear weapons, and also for more freedoms for his people. He was kicked out of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences. He was exiled from Moscow to a whistlestop on the permafrost.
He was not allowed to go to Oslo to receive his Peace Prize. His pediatrician wife, Elena Bonner, accepted it for him there. But isn’t it time for us to ask now if she, or any pediatrician or healer, wasn’t more deserving of a Peace Prize than anyone who had a hand in creating an H-bomb for any kind of government anywhere?
Human rights? What could be more indifferent to the rights of any form of life than an H-bomb?
Sakharov was in June of 1987 awarded an honorary doctorate by Staten Island College in New York City. Once again his government wouldn’t let him accept in person. So I was asked to do that for him.
All I had to do was deliver a message he had sent. This was it: “Don’t give up on nuclear energy.” I spoke it like a robot.
I was so polite! But this was one year after this crazy planet’s most deadly nuclear calamity so far, at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Children all over northern Europe will be sickened or worse for years to come by that release of radiation. Plenty of work for pediatricians!
More heartening to me than Sakharov’s cockamamie exhortation was the behavior of firemen in Schenectady, New York, after Chernobyl. I used to work in Schenectady. The firemen sent a letter to their brother firemen over there, congratulating them on their courage and selflessness while trying to save lives and property.
Hooray for firemen!
Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.
Hooray for firemen.
IN TIMEQUAKE ONE, Kilgore Trout wrote a story about an atom bomb. Because of the timequake, he had to write it twice. The ten-year rerun following the timequake, remember, made him and me, and you, and everybody else, do everything we’d done from February 17th, 1991, to February 13th, 2001, a second time.
Trout didn’t mind writing it again. Rerun or not, he could tune out the crock of shit being alive was as long as he was scribbling, head down, with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad.
He called the story “No Laughing Matter.” He threw it away before anybody else could see it, and then had to throw it away again during the rerun. At the clambake at the end of Timequake One, in the summer of the year 2001, after free will kicked in again, Trout said this about all the stories he had torn to pieces and flushed down toilets, or tossed into trash-strewn vacant lots, or whatever: “Easy come, easy go.”
“No Laughing Matter” got its title from what a judge in the story said during a top-secret court-martial of the crew of the American bomber Joy’s Pride, on the Pacific island of Banalulu, one month after the end of World War Two.
Joy’s Pride itself was perfectly OK, and in a hangar there on Banalulu. It was named in honor of the pilot’s mother, Joy Peterson, a nurse in obstetrics in a hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas. Pride had a double meaning. It meant self-respect. It meant a lion family, too.
Here’s the thing: After an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and then another one was dropped on Nagasaki, Joy’s Pride was ordered to drop yet another one on Yokohama, on a couple of million “little yellow bastards.” The little yellow bastards were called “little yellow bastards” back then. It was wartime. Trout described the third atom bomb like this: “A purple motherfucker as big as a boiler in the basement of a mid-size junior high school.”
It was too big to fit inside the bomb bay. It was slung underneath the plane’s belly, and cleared the runway by a foot when Joy’s Pride took off into the wild blue yonder.
As the plane neared its target, the pilot mused out loud on the intercom that his mother, the obstetrics nurse, would be a celebrity back home after they did what they were about to do. The bomber Enola Gay, and the woman in whose honor it was named, had become as famous as movie stars after it dropped its load on Hiroshima. Yokohama was twice as populous as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
The more the pilot thought about it, though, the surer he was that his sweet widowed mother could never tell reporters she was happy that her son’s airplane had killed a world’s record number of civilians all at once.
Trout’s story reminds me of the time my late great-aunt Emma Vonnegut said she hated the Chinese. Her late son-in-law Kerfuit Stewart, who used to own Stewart’s Book Store in Louisville, Kentucky, admonished her that it was wicked to hate that many people all at once.
Whatever.
The crewmen aboard Joy’s Pride, at any rate, told the pilot on the intercom that they felt much as he did. They were all alone up there in the sky. They didn’t need a fighter escort, since the Japanese didn’t have any airlanes left. The war was over, except for the paperwork, arguably the situation even before Enola Gay cremated Hiroshima.
To quote Kilgore Trout: “This wasn’t war anymore, and neither had been the obliteration of Nagasaki. This was ‘Thanks to the Yanks for a job well done!’ This was show biz now.”
Trout said in “No Laughing Matter” that the pilot and his bombardier had felt somewhat godlike on previous missions, when they had had nothing more than incendiaries and conventional high explosives to drop on people. “But that was godlike with a little g,” he wrote. “They identified themselves with minor deities who only avenged and destroyed. Up there in the sky all alone, with the purple motherfucker slung underneath their plane, they felt like the Boss God Himself, who had an option which hadn’t been theirs before, which was to be merciful.”
Trout himself had been in World War Two, but not as an airman and not in the Pacific. He had been a forward observer for the Army field artillery in Europe, a lieutenant with binoculars and a radio, up with the infantry or even ahead of it. He would tell batteries to the rear where their shrapnel or white phosphorus or whatever might help a lot.
He himself had certainly not been merciful, nor, by his own account, had he ever felt he should have been. I asked him at the clambake in 2001, at the writers’ retreat Xanadu, what he’d done during the war, which he called “civilization’s second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.”
He said without a scintilla of regret, “I made sandwiches of German soldiers between an erupting Earth and an exploding sky, and in a blizzard of razor blades.”
The pilot of Joy’s Pride made a U-turn way up in the sky. The purple motherfucker was still slung underneath. The pilot headed back for Banalulu. “He did it,” wrote Trout, “because that is what his mother would have wanted him to do.”
At the top-secret court-martial afterward, everybody was convulsed with laughter at one point in the proceedings. This caused the chief judge to bang his gavel and declare that what those on trial had done was “no laughing matter.” What people found so funny was the prosecutor’s description of what people did at the base when Joy’s Pride came in for a landing with the purple motherfucker only a foot above the tarmac. People jumped out of windows. They peed in their pants.
“There were all kinds of collisions between different kinds of vehicles,” wrote Kilgore Trout.
No sooner had the judge restored order, though, than a huge crack opened in the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It swallowed Banalulu, court-martial, Joy’s Pride, unused atom bomb and all.
WHEN THE EXCELLENT German novelist and graphic artist Günter Grass heard that I was born in 1922, he said to me, “There are no males in Europe your age for you to talk to.” He himself was a kid during Kilgore Trout’s and my war, as were Elie Wiesel and Jerzy Kosinski and Milos Forman, and on and on. I was lucky to be born over here instead of over there, and white and middle-class, and into a house full of books and pictures, and into a large extended family, which exists no more.
I heard the poet Robert Pinsky give a reading this summer, in which he apologized didactically for having had a much nicer life than normal. I should do that, too.
At least I seized the opportunity this past May to thank my birthplace, as a graduation speaker at Butler University. I said, “If I had it to do all over, I would choose to be born again in a hospital in Indianapolis. I would choose to spend my childhood again at 4365 North Illinois Street, about ten blocks from here, and to again be a product of that city’s public schools.
“I would again take courses in bacteriology and qualitative analysis in the summer school of Butler University.
“It was all here for me, just as it has all been for you, the best and the worst of Western Civilization, if you cared to pay attention: music, finance, government, architecture, law and sculpture and painting, history and medicine and athletics and every sort of science, and books, books, books, and teachers and role models.
“People so smart you can’t believe it, and people so dumb you can’t believe it. People so nice you can’t believe it, and people so mean you can’t believe it”
I gave advice, too. I said, “My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said dot when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it.
“He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.
“Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’ ”
Another way I was lucky: for the first thirty-three years of my life, telling short stories with ink on paper was a major American industry. Although I then had a wife and two children, it made good business sense for me to quit my job as a publicity man for General Electric, with health insurance and a retirement plan. I could make more money selling stories to The Saturday Evening post and Collier’s, weekly magazines full of ads, which published five short stories and an installment of a cliff-hanging serial in every issue.
Those were just the top-paying buyers of what I could produce. There were so many other magazines hungry for fiction that the market for stories was like a pinball machine. When I mailed off a story to my agent, I could be pretty sure somebody would pay me something for it, even though it might be rejected again and again.
But not long after I moved my family from Schenectady, New York, to Cape Cod, television, a much better buy for advertisers than magazines, made playing short story pinball for a living obsolete.
I commuted from the Cape to Boston to work for an industrial advertising agency, and then became a dealer in Saab automobiles, and then taught high school English in a private school for seriously fucked-up rich kids.
My son the doctor Mark Vonnegut, who wrote a swell book about his going crazy in the 1960s, and then graduated from Harvard Medical School, had an exhibition of his watercolors in Milton, Massachusetts, this summer. A reporter asked him what it had been like to grow up with a famous father.
Mark replied, “When I was growing up, my father was a car salesman who couldn’t get a job teaching at Cape Cod Junior College.”
I STILL THINK up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J. D. Salinger or John Cheever or John Collier or John O’Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O’Connor or whomever, which had appeared in a magazine in the past few days.
No more.
All I do with short story ideas now is rough them out, credit them to Kilgore Trout, and put them in a novel. Here’s the start of another one hacked from the carcass of Timequake One, and entitled “The Sisters B-36”: “On the matriarchal planet Booboo in the Crab Nebula, there were three sisters whose last name was B-36. It could be only a coincidence that their family name was also that of an Earthling airplane designed to drop bombs on civilian populations with corrupt leaderships. Earth and Booboo were too far apart to ever communicate.”
Another coincidence: The written language of Booboo was like English