Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [34]
No problem!
People in Europe and Africa and Asia were in darkness when free will kicked in. Most of them were in bed or sitting down somewhere. Not nearly as many of them fell down in their hemisphere as fell down in ours, where a clear majority was wide awake.
A person walking in either hemisphere was commonly off balance, leaning in the direction he or she was going, and with most of his or her weight unevenly distributed between his or her feet. When free will kicked in, he or she of course fell down, and stayed down, even in the middle of a street with onrushing traffic, because of Post-Timequake Apathy.
You can imagine what the bottoms of staircases and escalators, in the Western Hemisphere in particular, looked like after free will kicked in.
That’s the New World for you!
My sister Allie in real life, which for her lasted only forty-one years, God rest her soul, thought falling down was one of the funniest things people could do. I don’t mean people who fell on account of strokes or heart attacks or snapped hamstrings or whatever. I am talking about people ten years old or older, of any race and either sex, and in reasonably good physical condition, who, on a day like any other day, all of a sudden fell down.
When Allie was dying for sure, with not long to go, I could still fill her with joy, could give her an epiphany, if you like, by talking about somebody falling down. My story couldn’t be from the movies or hearsay. It had to be about a rude reminder of the power of gravity that I myself had witnessed.
Only one of my stories was about a professional entertainer. It was from back when I was lucky enough to see the death throes of vaudeville on the stage of the Apollo Theater in Indianapolis. A perfectly wonderful man, my kind of saint, as a regular part of his act at one point fell into the orchestra pit, and then climbed back onto the stage wearing the big bass drum.
All my other stories, which Allie never tired of hearing until she was dead as a doornail, involved amateurs.
30
One time when Allie was maybe fifteen and I was ten, she heard somebody fall down our basement stairs: Bloompity, bloomp, bloomp. She thought it was I, so she stood at the top of the stairs laughing her fool head off. This would have been 1932, three years into the Great Depression.
But it wasn’t I. It was a guy from the gas company, who had come to read the meter. He came clumping out of the basement all bunged up, and absolutely furious.
Another time, when Allie was sixteen or older, since she was driving a car with me as a passenger, we saw a woman come out of a stopped streetcar horizontally, headfirst and parallel to the pavement. Her heels had caught somehow.
As I’ve written elsewhere, and said in interviews, Allie and I laughed for years about that woman. She wasn’t seriously hurt. She got back on her feet OK.
One thing that only I saw, but which Allie liked to hear about anyhow, was a guy who offered to teach a beautiful woman not his wife how to do the Tango. It was at the tail end of a cocktail party that had pretty much petered out.
I don’t think the man’s wife was there. I can’t imagine he would have made the offer if his wife had been there. He was not a professional dance instructor. There were maybe ten people in all there, including the host and hostess. This was in the days of phonographs. The host and hostess had made the tactical mistake of putting an acetate recording of Tango music on their phonograph.
So this guy, his eyes flashing, his nostrils flaring, took this beautiful woman in his arms, and he fell down.
Yes, and all the people falling