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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

“If this isn’t nice, what is?” he said.

To quote Kilgore Trout:

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.