Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [20]
His behavior was so outré that a genuine bag lady passing by asked him, “Are you OK, honey?”
To which Trout replied with all possible gusto, “Ting-a-ling! Ting-a-ling!”
When Trout returned to the shelter, though, the armed guard Dudley Prince unbolted the steel front door and, motivated by boredom and curiosity, retrieved the manuscript. He wanted to know what it was a bag lady, with every reason to commit suicide, one would think, had deep-sixed so ecstatically.
16
Here, for whatever it may be worth, and from Timequake One, is Kilgore Trout’s explanation of the timequake and its aftershocks, the rerun, excerpted from his unfinished memoir My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot:
“The timequake of 2001 was a cosmic charley horse in the sinews of Destiny. At what was in New York City 2:27 p.m. on February 13th of that year, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?
“It fibrillated with indecision. Maybe it should have a family reunion back where it all began, and then make a great big BANG again.
“It suddenly shrunk ten years. It zapped me and everybody else back to February 17th, 1991, what was for me 7:51 a.m., and a line outside a blood bank in San Diego, California.
“For reasons best known to itself, though, the Universe canceled the family reunion, for the nonce at least. It resumed expansion. Which faction, if any, cast the deciding votes on whether to expand or shrink, I cannot say. Despite my having lived for eighty-four years, or ninety-four, if you want to count the rerun, many questions about the Universe remain for me unanswered.
“That the rerun lasted ten years, short a mere four days, some are saying now, is proof that there is a God, and that He is on the Decimal System. He has ten fingers and ten toes, just as we do, they say, and uses them when He does arithmetic.
“I have my doubts. I can’t help it. That’s the way I am. Even if my father, the ornithologist Professor Raymond Trout of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, hadn’t murdered my mother, a housewife and poet, I believe I would have been that way. Then again, I have never made a serious study of the different religions, and so am unqualified to comment. About all I know for certain is that devout Muslims do not believe in Santa Claus.”
On the first of the two Christmas Eves, 2000, the still religious African-American armed guard Dudley Prince thought Trout’s “The Sisters B-36” just might be a message for the Academy from God Himself. What happened to the planet Booboo, after all, wasn’t a whole lot different from what seemed to be happening to his own planet, and especially to his employers, what was left of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street, two doors west of Broadway.
Trout got to know Prince, just as he got to know Monica Pepper and me, after the rerun ended and free will had kicked in again. Because of what the timequake had done to Prince, he had become as contemptuous of the idea of a wise and just God as my sister Allie had been. Allie opined one time, not just about her life but everybody’s life, “If there is a God, He sure hates people. That’s all I can say.”
When Trout heard about how seriously Prince had taken “The Sisters B-36” on the first Christmas Eve, 2000, about how Prince believed a bag lady had put on such a show while throwing the yellow manuscript pages away to ensure that Prince would wonder what they were and retrieve them, the old science fiction writer commented: “Perfectly understandable, Dudley. For anybody who could believe in God, as you once did, it would be a piece of cake to