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.

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.

The play zapped Lily and her schoolmates from the evening of the performance back to May 7th, 1901! Timequake!

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

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.

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.

All three of the sisters were beautiful, so went Trout’s tale, but only two of them were popular, one a picture painter and the other a short story writer.

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.”

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!