Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [27]
Zoltan had the limo that afternoon. He was on his way to pick up Monica. She was awaiting Zoltan’s arrival when the timequake struck. He would get as far as ringing the Academy doorbell before he was zapped back to February 17th, 1991. He would be ten years younger and whole again!
Talk about getting a reaction from a doorbell!
When the rerun was over, though, and free will kicked in again, everybody and everything were exactly where they had been when the timequake struck. So Zoltan was paraplegic again in a wheelchair, ringing the doorbell again. He didn’t realize that it was all of a sudden up to him to decide what his finger was going to do next. His finger, for want of instructions from him or anything else, went on ringing and ringing the doorbell.
That’s what it was doing when Zoltan was smacked by a runaway fire truck. The driver of the truck hadn’t realized yet that it was up to him to steer the thing.
As Trout wrote in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: “It was free will that did all the damage. The timequake and its aftershocks didn’t snap as much as a single strand in a spider’s web, unless some other force had snapped that strand the first time through.”
Monica was working on the budget for Xanadu when the timequake struck. The endowment of that writers’ retreat up in Point Zion, Rhode Island, the Julius King Bowen Foundation, was administered by the Academy. Julius King Bowen, who died before Monica was born, was a never-married white man who made a fortune during the 1920s and early 1930s with stories and lectures about the hilarious, but touching, too, efforts by American black people to imitate successful American white people, so they could be successful, too.
A cast-iron historical marker on the border between Point Zion’s public beach and Xanadu said the mansion had been Bowen’s home and place of work from 1922 until his death in 1936. It said President Warren G. Harding had proclaimed Bowen “Laughter Laureate of the United States, Master of Darky Dialects, and Heir to the Crown of King of Humor Once Worn by Mark Twain.”
As Trout would point out to me when I read that marker in 2001: “Warren G. Harding sired an illegitimate daughter by ejaculating in the birth canal of a stenographer in a broom closet at the White House.”
23
When Trout was zapped back to a line outside a blood bank in San Diego, California, in 1991, he could remember how his story about the guy with his head between his legs and his ding-dong atop his neck, “Albert Hardy,” would end. But he couldn’t write that finale for ten years, until free will kicked in again. Albert Hardy would be blown to pieces while a soldier in the Second Battle of the Somme in World War One.
Albert Hardy’s dogtags wouldn’t be found. His body parts would be reassembled as though he had been like everybody else, with his head atop his neck. He couldn’t be given back his ding-dong. To be perfectly frank, his ding-dong wouldn’t have been what you might call the subject of an exhaustive search.
Albert Hardy would be buried under an Eternal Flame in France, in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, “normal at last.”
I myself was zapped back to this house near the tip of Long Island, New York, where I am writing now, halfway through the rerun. In 1991, as now, I was gazing at a list of all I’d published, and wondering, “How the hell did I do that?”
I was feeling as I feel now, like whalers Herman Melville described, who didn’t talk anymore. They had said absolutely everything they could ever say.
I told Trout in 2001 about a redheaded boyhood friend