Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [31]
Are two hemispheres better than one? I know anecdotal evidence isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit scientifically, but a great-grandfather of mine on my mother’s side switched hemispheres in time to be wounded in the leg as a soldier for the Union in our notoriously uncivil Civil War. His name was Peter Lieber. Peter Lieber bought a brewery in Indianapolis, and it prospered. A brew of his won a Gold Medal at the Paris Exposition of 1889. Its secret ingredient was coffee.
But Peter Lieber gave the brewery to his son Albert, my maternal grandfather, and he went back to his original hemisphere. He decided he liked that one better. And I am told there is a photograph often used in our textbooks that supposedly shows immigrants disembarking here, but actually they are getting on a ship to go back to where they came from.
This hemisphere is no bed of roses. My mother committed suicide in this one, and then my brother-in-law went off an open drawbridge in a railroad train.
27
The first story Trout had to rewrite after the timequake zapped him back to 1991, he told me, was called “Dog’s Breakfast.” It was about a mad scientist named Fleon Sunoco, who was doing research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Sunoco believed really smart people had little radio receivers in their heads, and were getting their bright ideas from somewhere else.
“The smarties had to be getting outside help,” Trout said to me at Xanadu. While impersonating the mad Sunoco, Trout himself seemed convinced that there was a great big computer somewhere, which, by means of radio, had told Pythagoras about right triangles, and Newton about gravity, and Darwin about evolution, and Pasteur about germs, and Einstein about relativity, and on and on.
“That computer, wherever it is, whatever it is, while pretending to help us, may actually be trying to kill us dummies with too much to think about,” said Kilgore Trout.
Trout said he hadn’t minded writing “Dog’s Breakfast” again, or the three hundred or more stories he redid and threw away before free will kicked in again. “Write or rewrite, it’s all the same to me,” he said. “At the age of four score and four, I am as amazed and entertained as I was when I was only fourteen, and discovered that if I put the tip of a pen on paper, it would write a story of its own accord.
“Wonder why I tell people that my name is Vincent van Gogh?” he asked. And I had better explain that the real Vincent van Gogh was a Dutchman who painted in the south of France, whose pictures are now numbered among the world’s most precious treasures, but who in his own lifetime sold only two of them. “It isn’t only because he, like me, took no pride in his appearance and disgusted women, although that surely has to be factored in,” said Trout.
“The main thing about van Gogh and me,” said Trout, “is that he painted pictures that astonished him with their importance, even though nobody else thought they were worth a damn, and I write stories that astonish me, even though nobody else thinks they’re worth a damn.
“How lucky can you get?”
Trout was the only appreciative audience he needed for what he was and did. That let him accept the conditions of the rerun as unsurprising. It was just more foolishness in the world outside his own, and no more worthy of his respect than wars or economic collapses or plagues, or tidal waves, or TV stars, or what you will.
He was capable of being such a rational hero in the neighborhood of the Academy the instant free will kicked in again, because, in my opinion, Trout, unlike most of the rest of us, had found no significant differences between life as déjà vu and life as original material.
As for how little he was affected by the rerun, as compared with the hell it had been for most of the rest of us, he wrote in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: “I didn’t need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. I already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books.”
For the record: Dr. Fleon Sunoco at the