Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [22]
Mrs. Wilkerson suspected plagiarism. Zoltan confessed, thinking it was a funny rather than a serious thing he’d done. To him, plagiarism was what Trout would have called a mopery, “indecent exposure in the presence of a blind person of the same sex.”
Mrs. Wilkerson decided to teach Zoltan a lesson. She had him write, “I STOLE PROPERTY FROM KILGORE TROUT,” on the blackboard while the class watched. Then, for the next week, she made him wear a shirt cardboard with the letter P on it, hung on his chest from around his neck, whenever he was in her classroom. She could get the piss sued out of her for doing that to a student nowadays. But then was then, and now is now.
The inspiration for what Mrs. Wilkerson did to young Zoltan Pepper was of course The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In that one, a woman has to wear a big A for adultery on her bosom because she let a man not her husband ejaculate in her birth canal. She won’t tell what his name is. He’s a preacher!
Since Dudley Prince said it was a bag lady who had put the story in the trash receptacle out front, Zoltan didn’t consider the possibility that it had been Trout himself. “It could have been his daughter or granddaughter,” he speculated. “Trout himself must have died years ago. I certainly hope so, and may his soul rot in Hell.”
But Trout was right next door! He was feeling just great! He was so relieved at having gotten rid of “The Sisters B-36” that he had started another story. He had been completing a story every ten days, on average, since he was fourteen. That was thirty-six a year, say. This one could have been his twenty-five-hundredth! It wasn’t set on another planet. It was set in the office of a psychiatrist in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The name of the shrink was the name of the story, too, which was “Dr. Schadenfreude.” This doctor had his patients lie on a couch and talk, all right, but they could ramble on only about dumb or crazy things that had happened to total strangers in supermarket tabloids or on TV talk shows.
If a patient accidentally said “I” or “me” or “my” or “myself” or “mine,” Dr. Schadenfreude went ape. He leapt out of his overstuffed leather chair. He stamped his feet. He flapped his arms.
He put his livid face directly over the patient. He snarled and barked things like this: “When will you ever learn that nobody cares anything about you, you, you, you boring, insignificant piece of poop? Your whole problem is you think you matter! Get over that, or sashay your stuck-up butt the hell out of here!”
18
A bum on a cot next to Trout’s asked him what he was writing. It was the opening paragraph of “Dr. Schadenfreude.” Trout said it was a story. The bum said maybe Trout could get some money from the people next door. When Trout heard it was the American Academy of Arts and Letters next door, he said, “It might as well be a Chinese barber college as far as I’m concerned. I don’t write literature. Literature is all those la-di-da monkeys next door care about.
“Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper,” he went on. “Wonderful! As though the planet weren’t already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!”
The only people next door, actually, of course, were Monica and Zoltan Pepper, and the three-man day shift of armed guards, headed by Dudley Prince. Monica had given her office and janitorial staffs the day off for last-minute Christmas shopping. As it happened, they were all Christian or agnostic or apostate.
The night shift of armed guards would be entirely Muslim. As Trout would write at Xanadu, in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: “Muslims do not believe in Santa Claus.”
“In my entire career as a writer,” said Trout in the former Museum of the American Indian, “I created only one living, breathing, three-dimensional character. I did it with my ding-dong in a birth canal. Ting-a-ling!” He was referring to his son Leon, the deserter from the United States Marines in time of war, subsequently