Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [18]
When he got back into the shelter, after an absence of ten minutes, the clerk said to him, “Where have you been? We all sure missed you, Vince.” And he told him where his cot was. It was butted up against the companion wall between the shelter and the Academy.
On the Academy side of the wall, hanging over the rosewood desk of Monica Pepper, was a painting of a bleached cow’s skull on a desert floor, by Georgia O’Keeffe. On Trout’s side, right over the head of his cot, was a poster telling him never to stick his ding-dong into anything without first putting on a condom.
After the timequake hit, and then the rerun was finally over, and free will had kicked in again, Trout and Monica would get to know each other. Her desk, incidentally, had once belonged to the novelist Henry James. Her chair had once belonged to the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.
When Trout realized how close his cot had been to her desk during the fifty-one days before the timequake struck, he would remark as follows: “If I’d had a bazooka, I could have blown a hole in the wall between us. If I hadn’t killed one or both of us, I could have asked you, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like that?’ ”
14
A bum on a cot next to Trout’s at the shelter wished him a Merry Christmas. Trout replied, “Ting-a-ling! Ting-a-ling!”
It was only by chance that his reply was appropriate to the holiday, alluding, one might suppose, to the bells of Santa Claus’s sleigh on a rooftop. But Trout would have said “Ting-a-ling” to anybody who offered him an empty greeting, such as “How’s it goin’?” or “Nice day” or whatever, no matter what the season.
Depending on his body language and tone of voice and social circumstances, he could indeed make it mean “And a merry Christmas to you, too.” But it would also mean, like the Hawaiian’s aloha, “Hello” or “Good-bye.” The old science fiction writer could make it mean “Please” or “Thanks” as well, or “Yes” or “No,” or “I couldn’t agree with you more,” or “If your brains were dynamite, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”
I asked him at Xanadu in the summer of 2001 how “Ting-a-ling” had become such a frequent appoggiatura, or grace note, in his conversations. He gave me what would later turn out to have been a superficial explanation. “It was something I crowed during the war,” he said, “when an artillery barrage I’d called for landed right on target: ‘Ting-a-ling! Ting-a-ling!’ ”
About an hour later, and this was on the afternoon before the clambake, he beckoned me into his suite with a crooked finger. He closed the door behind us. “You really want to know about ‘Ting-a-ling’?” he asked me.
I had been satisfied with his first account. Trout was the one who wanted me to hear much more. My innocent question earlier had triggered memories of his ghastly childhood in Northampton. He could exorcise them only by telling what they were.
“My father murdered my mother,” said Kilgore Trout, “when I was twelve years old.”
“Her body was in our basement,” said Trout, “but all I knew was that she had disappeared. Father swore he had no idea what had become of her. He said, as wife-murderers often do, that maybe she had gone to visit relatives. He killed her that morning, after I left for school.
“He got supper for the two of us that night. Father said he would report her as a missing person to the police the next morning, if we hadn’t heard from her by then. He said, ‘She has been very tired and nervous lately. Have you noticed that?’ ”
“He was insane,” said Trout. “How insane? He came into my bedroom at midnight. He woke me up. He said he had something important to tell me. It was nothing but a dirty joke, but this poor, sick man had come to believe it a parable about the awful blows that life had dealt him. It was about a fugitive