Timequake

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.

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

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’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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.