Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Frankenstein jazzes them with electricity. The results in the book are exact opposites of those since achieved in real-life American state penitentiaries with real-life electric chairs. Most people think Frankenstein is the monster. He isn't. Frankenstein is the scientist.

  Prometheus in Greek mythology makes the first human beings from mud. He steals fire from Heaven and gives it to them so they can be warm and cook, and not, one would hope, so we could incinerate all the little yellow bastards in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are in Japan.

  In chapter 2 of this wonderful book of mine, I mention a commemoration in the chapel of the University of Chicago of the fiftieth anniversary of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima. I said at the time that I had to respect the opinion of my friend William Styron that the Hiroshima bomb saved his life. Styron was then a United States Marine, training for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, when that bomb was dropped.

  I had to add, though, that I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki.

  Whatever! That, too, was a long, long time ago, and ten years longer ago than that, if you want to count the rerun. What I find worth exclaiming about right now is the continuing applicability to the human condition, years after free will has ceased to be a novelty, of what jazzed Dudley Prince back to life, of what is now known generally as Kilgore's Creed: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do."

  Teachers in public schools across the land, I hear, say Kilgore's Creed to students after the students have recited the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of each school day. Teachers say it seems to help.

  A friend told me he was at a wedding where the minister said at the climax of the ceremony: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. I now pronounce you man and wife."

  Another friend, a biochemist for a cat food company, said she was staying at a hotel in Toronto, Canada, and she asked the front desk to give her a wake-up call in the morning. She answered her phone the next morning, and the operator said, "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. It's seven a.m., and the temperature outside is thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, or zero Celsius."

  On the afternoon of February 13th, 2001, alone, and then during the next two weeks or so, Kilgore's Creed did as much to save life on Earth as Einstein's E equals mc squared had done to end it two generations earlier.

  Trout had Dudley Prince say the magic words to the other two armed guards on the day shift at the Academy. They went into the former Museum of the American Indian, and said them to the catatonic bums in there. A goodly number of the aroused sacred cattle, maybe a third of them, became anti-PTA evangelists in turn. Armed with nothing more than Kilgore's Creed, these ragged veterans of unemployability fanned out through the neighborhood to convert more living statues to lives of usefulness, to helping the injured, or at least getting them the hell indoors somewhere before they froze to death.

  "God is in the details," Anonymous tells us in the sixteenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. The seemingly pipsqueak detail of what became of the armored limousine that delivered Zoltan Pepper to be creamed by the hook-and-ladder as he rang the doorbell of the Academy is a case in point. The limousine driver, Jerry Rivers, had moved it fifty yards to the west, toward the Hudson River, after unloading his paraplegic passenger and his wheelchair on the sidewalk.

  That was still part of the rerun. Rerun or not, though, Jerry wasn't to stay parked in front of the Academy, lest the luxury vehicle arouse suspicions that the Academy might not be an abandoned building after all. If that hadn't been the policy, the limousine would have absorbed the impact of the fire truck, and possibly but not certainly saved the life of Zoltan Pepper as he rang the doorbell.

  But at what cost? The entrance to the Academy would not have been broached, giving Kilgore Trout access to Dudley Prince and the other armed guards. Trout could not have put on a spare guard's uniform he found in there, which made him look like an authority figure. He would not have been able to arm himself with the Academy's bazooka, with which he knocked out the braying burglar alarms of impacted but unoccupied parked vehicles.

  52

  The American Academy of Arts and Letters owned a bazooka because the warlords who knocked over Columbia University spearheaded their attack with a tank stolen from the Rainbow Division of the National Guard. They were so audacious that they flew Old Glory, The Stars and Stripes.

  It is conceivable that the warlords, with whom nobody messes, any more than anybody messes with the ten biggest corporations, consider themselves as American as anyone. "America," wrote Kilgore Trout in MTYOAP, "is the interplay of three hundred million Rube Goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday.

  "And you better have an extended family," he added, although he himself had done without one between the time he was discharged from the Army, on September 11th, 1945, and March 1st, 2001, the day he and Monica Pepper and Dudley Prince and Jerry Rivers arrived by armored limousine, with an overloaded trailer wallowing behind, at Xanadu.

  Rube Goldberg was a newspaper cartoonist during the terminal century of the previous Christian millennium. He drew pictures of absurdly complex and undependable machines, employing treadmills and trapdoors and bells and whistles, and domestic animals in harness and blowtorches and mailmen and light bulbs, and firecrackers and mirrors and radios and Victrolas, and pistols firing blank cartridges, and so on, in order to accomplish some simple task, such as closing a window blind.

  Yes, and Trout harped on the human need for extended families, and I still do, because it is so obvious that we, because we are human, need them as much as we need proteins and carbohydrates and fats and vitamins and essential minerals.

  I have just read about a teenage father who shook his baby to death because it couldn't control its anal sphincter yet and wouldn't stop crying. In an extended family, there would have been other people around, who would have rescued and comforted the baby, and the father, too.

  If the father had been raised in an extended family, he might not have been such an awful father, or maybe not a father at all yet, because he was still too young to be a good one, or because he was too crazy to ever be a good one.

  I was in southern Nigeria in 1970, at the very end of the Biafran War there, on the Biafran side, the losing side, the mostly Ibo side, long before the rerun. I met an Ibo father of a new baby. He had four hundred relatives! Even with a losing war going on, he and his wife were about to go on a trip, introducing the baby to all its relatives.

  When the Biafran army needed replacements, big Ibo families met to decide who should go. In peacetime, the families met to decide who should go to college, often to Cal Tech or Oxford or Harvard, a long way off. And then a whole family chipped in to pay for the travel and tuition and clothing suitable for the climate and dominant society where a kid was going next.

  I met the Ibo writer Chinua Achebe over there. He is teaching and writing at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 12504, over here now. I asked him how the Ibos were now, with Nigeria run by a rapacious junta which regularly hangs its critics for having much too much free will.

  Chinua said no Ibos had roles in the government, nor did they want any. He said Ibos survived in modest businesses unlikely to bring them into conflict with the government or its friends, which included representatives of Shell Oil Company.

  They must have held many meetings, in which ethics as well as survival schemes were debated.

  And they still send their smartest kids off to the best universities far away.

  When I celebrate the idea of a family and family values, I don't mean a man and a woman and their kids, new in town, scared to death, and not knowing whether to shit or go blind in the midst of economic and technological and e
cological and political chaos. I'm talking about what so many Americans need so frantically: what I had in Indianapolis before World War Two, and what the characters in Thornton Wilder's Our Town had, and what the Ibos have.

  In chapter 45, I proposed two amendments to the Constitution. Here are two more, little enough to expect from life, one would think, like the Bill of Rights:

  Article XXX: Every person, upon reaching a statutory age of puberty, shall be declared an adult in a solemn public ritual, during which he or she must welcome his or her new responsibilities in the community, and their attendant dignities.

  Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone.

  Such essential elements in an ideal diet for a human spirit, of course, can be provided convincingly only by extended families.

  53

  The monster in Frankenstein--or, The Modern Prometheus turns mean because he finds it so humiliating to be alive and yet so ugly, so unpopular. He kills Frankenstein, who, again, is the scientist and not the monster. And let me hasten to say that my big brother Bernie never has been a Frankenstein-style scientist, never has worked nor would have worked on purposely destructive devices of any sort. He hasn't been a Pandora, either, turning loose new poisons or new diseases or whatever.

  According to Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman. She was made by the gods who were angry with Prometheus for making a man out of mud and then stealing fire from them. Making a woman was their revenge. They gave Pandora a box. Prometheus begged her not to open it. She opened it. Every evil to which human flesh is heir came out of it.

  The last thing to come out of the box was hope. It flew away.

  I didn't make that depressing story up. Neither did Kilgore Trout. Ancient Greeks did.

  This is the point I want to make, though: Frankenstein's monster was unhappy and destructive, whereas the people Trout energized in the neighborhood of the Academy, although most of them wouldn't have won any beauty contests, were by and large cheerful and public-spirited.

  I have to say most of them wouldn't have won any beauty contests. There was at least one strikingly beautiful woman involved. That was a member of the Academy's office staff. That was Clara Zine. Monica Pepper is certain that Clara Zine was the one who was smoking the cigar that set off the smoke alarm in the picture gallery. When confronted by Monica, Clara Zine swore that in her whole life she had never smoked a cigar, that she hated cigars, and she disappeared.

  I have no idea what has become of her.

  Clara Zine and Monica were tending the wounded in the former Museum of the American Indian, which Trout had turned into a hospital, when Monica asked Clara about the cigar, and then Clara departed in a huffmobile.

  Trout, carrying what had become his bazooka, and accompanied by Dudley Prince and the other two armed guards, had thrown out all the bums who were still in the shelter. They did that in order to free up the cots for people with broken limbs or skulls or whatever, who needed and deserved to lie down where it was warm even more than the bums did.

  It was triage, such as Kilgore Trout had seen practiced on World War Two battlefields. "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country," said the American patriot Nathan Hale. "Fuck the bums!" said the American patriot Kilgore Trout.

  It was Jerry Rivers, the chauffeur of the Peppers' stretch limousine, however, who steered his dreamboat around wrecked vehicles and their victims, often driving on sidewalks, to reach the studios of the Columbia Broadcasting System down on West 52nd Street. Rivers awakened the staff there with, "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do." And then he got them to broadcast that same message on both radio and TV from coast to coast.

  In order to get them to do that, though, he had to tell them a lie. He said everybody was recovering from a nerve gas attack by persons unknown. So the first version of Kilgore's Creed to reach millions in the nation, and then billions in the world, was this: "This is a CBS exclusive! There has been a nerve gas attack by persons unknown. You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. Make sure all children and senior citizens are safe indoors."

  54

  Certainly! Mistakes were made! But Trout's silencing of automobile burglar alarms with his bazooka wasn't one of them. If a manual is to be written about how to behave in urban areas should there be another timequake, and then a rerun, and then free will kicks in again, it should recommend that every neighborhood have a bazooka, and that responsible adults know where it is.

  Mistakes? The manual should point out that vehicles themselves are not responsible for the damage they cause, whether controlled or not. Punishing automobiles as though they were rebellious slaves in need of a hiding is a waste of time! Scapegoating cars and trucks and buses still in running condition, simply because they are automobiles, moreover, deprives rescue workers and refugees of their means of transportation.

  As Trout advises in MTYOAP: "Beating the daylights out of a stranger's parked Dodge Intrepid may well afford fleeting relief from symptoms of stress. When all is said and done, though, that can only leave the life of its owner even more of a crock of shit than it was before. Do unto others' vehicles as you would have them do unto yours.

  "It is pure superstition that a motor vehicle with its ignition turned off can start itself up without the help of a human being," he goes on. "If, after free will kicks in, you must yank the ignition keys out of driverless vehicles whose engines aren't running, please, please, please throw the keys into a mailbox, and not down a storm sewer or into a trash-strewn vacant lot."

  The biggest mistake Trout himself made, probably, was in turning the American Academy of Arts and Letters into a morgue. The steel front door and its frame were tacked up back in place again, to keep the heat inside. It would have made more sense to line up the bodies outside, where the temperature was well below freezing.

  And Trout couldn't have been expected to worry about it, way-the-hell-and-gone up there on West 155th, but some awakened member of the Federal Aviation Administration should have realized, after all the crashing at ground level petered out, that there were still planes aloft on automatic pilot. Their crews and passengers, still gaga with untreated PTA, couldn't care doodley what would happen when the fuel ran out.

  In ten minutes, or maybe an hour, or maybe three hours or whatever, their heavier-than-aircraft, often six miles up, would cash in the chips, would buy the farm, for all aboard.

  For the Mbuti, the rain forest Pygmies of Zaire, Africa, February 13th, 2001, was in all probability a day neither more nor less amazing than any other day, unless a rogue airplane happened to land on top of one of them after the rerun stopped.

  The worst of all aircraft when free will kicks in, of course, are helicopters, or choppers, air screws first envisioned by the genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Choppers can't glide. Choppers don't want to fly in the first place.

  A safer place than a helicopter aloft is a roller coaster or a Ferris wheel.

  Yes, and when martial law was established in New York City, the former Museum of the American Indian was turned into a barracks, and Kilgore Trout was relieved of his bazooka, and the Academy's headquarters were requisitioned as an officers' club, and he and Monica Pepper and Dudley Prince and Jerry Rivers took off in the limousine for Xanadu.

  Trout, the former hobo, had expensive clothing, including shoes and socks and underwear and cuff links, and matched Louis Vuitton luggage which had belonged to Zoltan Pepper. Everybody agreed that Monica's husband was better off dead. What would he have had to look forward to?

  When Trout found Zoltan's flattened and elongated wheelchair in the middle of West 155th Street, he leaned it against a tree and said it was modern art. The two wheels had been squashed together so they looked like one. Trout said it was a six-foot aluminum-and-leather praying mantis, trying to ride a unicycle.

  He called it The Spirit of the Twenty-first Century.

 
55

  I met the author Dick Francis at the Kentucky Derby years ago. I knew he had been a champion rider in steeplechases. I said he was a bigger man than I had expected. He replied that it took a big man to "hold a horse together" in a steeplechase. This image of his remained in the forefront of my memory so long, I think, because life itself can seem a lot like that: a matter of holding one's self-respect together, instead of a horse, as one's self-respect is expected to hurdle fences and hedges and water.

  My dear thirteen-year-old daughter Lily, having become a pretty adolescent, appears to me, as do most American adolescents, to be holding her self-respect together the best she can in a really scary steeplechase.

  I said to the new graduates at Butler University, not much older than Lily, that they were being called Generation X, two clicks from the end, but that they were as much Generation A as Adam and Eve had been. What malarkey!

  Esprit de l'escalier! Better late than never! Only at this very moment in 1996, as I am about to write the next sentence, have I realized how meaningless the image of a Garden of Eden must have been to my young audience, since the world was so densely populated with other secretly frightened people, and so overplanted and rigged with both natural and manmade booby traps.

  The next sentence: I should have told them they were like Dick Francis when Dick Francis was young, and astride an animal full of pride and panic, in the starting gate for a steeplechase.

  More: If a steed balks again and again at hazards, it is put out to pasture. The self-respects of most middle-class American people my age or older, and still alive, are out to pasture now, not a bad place to be. They munch. They ruminate.