Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [23]
“If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Trout said, “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in.”
Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn’t peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.
19
Strictly speaking, many of Trout’s stories, except for their unbelievable characters, weren’t science fiction at all. “Dr. Schadenfreude” wasn’t, unless one is humorless enough to regard psychiatry as a science. The one he deposited in the Academy’s trash receptacle after “Dr. Schadenfreude,” with the timequake drawing ever nearer, “Bunker Bingo Party,” was a roman à clef.
That one was set in Adolf Hitler’s commodious bombproof bunker underneath the ruins of Berlin, Germany, at the end of World War Two in Europe. In that story, Trout calls his war, and my war, also, “Western Civilization’s second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.” He did that in conversations, too, one time adding in my presence, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, please try again.”
Tanks and infantry of the Soviet Union are only a few hundred yards away from the bunker’s iron door up at street level. “Hitler, trapped below, the most loathsome human being who ever lived,” wrote Trout, “doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. He is down there with his mistress Eva Braun and a few close friends, including Joseph Goebbels, his Minister of Propaganda, and Goebbels’s wife and kids.”
For want of anything else remotely decisive to do, Hitler proposes marriage to Eva. She accepts!
At this point in the story, Trout asked this rhetorical question, an aside with a paragraph all to itself:
“What the heck?”
Everybody forgets his or her troubles during the marriage ceremony. After the groom kisses the bride, though, the party goes flat again. “Goebbels has a clubfoot,” Trout wrote. “But Goebbels has always had a clubfoot. That is not the problem.”
Goebbels remembers that his kids have brought the game of Bingo with them. It was captured intact from American troops during the Battle of the Bulge some four months earlier. I myself was captured intact during that battle. Germany, in order to conserve its resources, has stopped making its own Bingo games. Because of that, and because the grownups in the bunker have been so busy during the rise of Hitler, and now his fall, the Goebbels kids are the only ones who know how the game is played. They learned from a neighbor kid, whose family owned a prewar Bingo set.
There is this amazing scene in the story: A boy and a girl, explaining the rules of Bingo, become the center of the Universe for Nazis in full regalia, including a gaga Adolf Hitler.
That we have a copy of “Bunker Bingo Party,” and copies of the four other stories Trout threw away in front of the Academy before the timequake hit, is due to Dudley Prince. The first time through, when the decade was original material, he continued to believe, as Monica Pepper did not, that a bag lady was using the trash receptacle for a mailbox, knowing he would be watching her crazy dances through the whoozit in the steel front door.
Prince retrieved each story and pondered it, hoping to discover some important message from a higher power encoded therein. After work, rerun or not, this was a lonely African-American.
20
In the summer of 2001 at Xanadu, Dudley Prince handed Trout the sheaf of stories, which Trout had expected the Department of Sanitation to incinerate or bury or drop in the ocean far offshore before anyone other than himself had read them. By his own account to me, Trout riffled through the scruffy pages with distaste, while seated tailor-fashion and naked on his king-size bed in the Ernest Hemingway Suite. The day was