Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [17]
Sodium said enough was enough, that any further testimony would be coals to Newcastle. It made a motion that all chemicals involved in medical research combine whenever possible to create ever more powerful antibiotics. These in turn would cause disease organisms to evolve new strains that were resistant to them.
In no time, Sodium predicted, every human ailment, including acne and jock itch, would be not only incurable but fatal. “All humans will die,” said Sodium, according to Trout. “As they were at the birth of the Universe, all elements will be free of sin again.”
Iron and Magnesium seconded Sodium’s motion. Phosphorus called for a vote. The motion was passed by acclamation.
13
Kilgore Trout was right next door to the American Academy of Arts and Letters on Christmas Eve, 2000, when Zoltan Pepper said to his wife that people were now getting their heads handed to them with tweezers instead of on platters. Trout couldn’t hear him. There was a thick masonry wall between them as the paraplegic composer ranted on about the seeming mania for making people compete with machines that were smarter than they were.
Pepper asked this rhetorical question: “Why is it so important that we all be humiliated, with such ingenuity and at such great expense? We never thought we were such hot stuff in the first place.”
Trout was sitting on his cot in a shelter for homeless men that was once the Museum of the American Indian. Arguably the most prolific writer of short stories in history, he had been caught by the police in a sweep of the New York Public Library down at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. He and about thirty others who had been living there, what Trout called “sacred cattle,” were carted off in a black school bus and deposited in the shelter way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street.
The Museum of the American Indian had moved the detritus of overwhelmed aborigines, and dioramas of how they lived before the shit hit the fan, into a safer neighborhood downtown, five years before Trout arrived.
He was eighty-four years old now, having passed another milestone on November 11th, 2000. He would die on Labor Day, 2001, still eighty-four. But by then the timequake would have given him and all the rest of us an unexpected bonus, if you can call it that, of another ten years.
He would write of the rerun when it was over, in a never-to-be-finished memoir entitled My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: “Listen, if it isn’t a timequake dragging us through knothole after knothole, it’s something else just as mean and powerful.”
“This was a man,” I said in Timequake One, “an only child, whose father, a college professor in Northampton, Massachusetts, murdered his mother when the man was only twelve years old.”
I said Trout had been a hobo, throwing away his stories instead of offering them to publications, since the autumn of 1975. I said that was after he received news of the death of his own only child, Leon, a deserter from the United States Marine Corps. Leon, I said, was accidentally decapitated in a shipyard accident in Sweden, where he had been granted political asylum and was working as a welder.
I said Trout was fifty-nine when he hit the road, never to have a home again until he was given, when he was about to die, the Ernest Hemingway Suite at the Rhode Island writers’ retreat called Xanadu.
When Trout checked into the former Museum of the American Indian, a former reminder of the most extensive and persistent genocide known to history, “The Sisters B-36” was burning a hole in his pocket, so to speak. He had finished the story at the Public Library downtown, but the police had taken him into custody before he could get rid of it.
So he kept his war-surplus Navy overcoat on when he told the clerk at the shelter that his name was Vincent van Gogh, and that he had no living relatives. Then he went