Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [13]
9
Founders of the Academy at the turn of the century were contemporaneous with Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of, among other things, sound recordings and motion pictures. Before World War Two, though, these schemes for holding the attention of millions all over the world were only squawking or flickering lampoons of life itself.
The Academy occupied its present home, designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White, and paid for by the philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington, in 1923. In that year, the American inventor Lee De Forest demonstrated apparatus that made possible the addition of sound to motion pictures.
I had a scene in Timequake One, set in the office of Monica Pepper, fictitious Executive Secretary of the Academy, on Christmas Eve, 2000. That was the afternoon on which Kilgore Trout put “The Sisters B-36” in the lidless wire trash receptacle out front, again, fifty-one days before the timequake struck.
Mrs. Pepper, wife of the wheelchair-ridden composer Zoltan Pepper, bore a striking resemblance to my late sister Allie, who hated life so much. Allie died of cancer of the everything way back in 1958, when I was thirty-six and she was forty-one, hounded by bill collectors to the very end. Both women were pretty blondes, which was OK. But they were six-foot-two! Both women were permanently acculturated in adolescence, since nowhere on Earth, save among the Watusis, did it make any sense for a woman to be that tall.
Both women were unlucky. Allie married a nice guy who lost all their money and then some in dumb businesses. Monica Pepper was the reason her husband Zoltan was paralyzed from the waist down. Two years earlier, she had accidentally landed on top of him in a swimming pool out in Aspen, Colorado. At least Allie had to die so deep in debt, and with four sons to raise, only once. After the timequake struck, Monica Pepper would have to swan-dive on top of her husband a second time.
Monica and Zoltan were talking in her office at the Academy that Christmas Eve, 2000. Zoltan was crying and laughing simultaneously. They were the same age, forty, which made them baby boomers. They didn’t have any kids. Because of her, his ding-dong didn’t work anymore. Zoltan was crying and laughing about that, certainly, but mostly about a tone-deaf kid next door, who had composed and orchestrated an acceptable, if derivative, string quartet in the manner of Beethoven, with the help of a new computer program called Wolfgang.
Nothing would do but that the father of the obnoxious kid show Zoltan the sheet music his son’s printer had spit out that morning and ask him if it was any good or not.
As though Zoltan weren’t sufficiently destabilized emotionally by legs and a ding-dong that didn’t work anymore, his older brother Frank, an architect, had committed suicide after a nearly identical blow to his self-respect only a month earlier. Yes, and Frank Pepper would eventually be popped out of his grave by the timequake, so he could blow his brains out while his wife and three kids watched a second time.
Here’s the thing: Frank went to the drugstore for condoms or chewing gum or whatever, and the pharmacist told him that his sixteen-year-old daughter had become an architect and was thinking of dropping out of high school because it was such a waste of time. She had designed a recreation center for teenagers in depressed neighborhoods with the help of a new computer program the school had bought for its vocational students, dummies who weren’t going to anything but junior colleges. It was called Palladio.
Frank went to a computer store, and asked if he could try out Palladio before buying it. He doubted very much that it could help anyone with his native talent and education. So right there in the store, and in a period of no more than half an hour, Palladio gave him what he had asked it for, working drawings that would enable a contractor