Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [37]
32
I say in speeches in 1996, halfway through the rerun to 2001, that I became a student in the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago after World War Two. I say jokingly that I never should have studied that subject, because I can’t stand primitive people. They’re so scupid! The real reason my interest in the study of man as an animal flagged was that my wife Jane Marie Cox Vonnegut, who would die as Jane Marie Cox Yarmolinsky, gave birth to a baby named Mark. We needed bucks.
Jane herself, a Swarthmore Phi Beta Kappa, had won a full scholarship in the university’s Russian Department. When she got pregnant with Mark, she resigned the scholarship. We found the head of the Russian Department in the library, I remember, and my wife told this melancholy refugee from Stalinism that she had to quit because she had become infected with progeny.
Even without a computer, I can never forget what he said to Jane: “My dear Mrs. Vonnegut, pregnancy is the beginning, not the end, of life.”
The point I want to make, though, is that one course I took required me to read and then be ready to discuss A Study of History by the English historian Arnold Toynbee, who is up in Heaven now. He wrote about challenges and responses, saying that various civilizations persisted or failed depending on whether or not the challenges they faced were just too much for them. He gave examples.
The same might be said for individuals who would like to behave heroically, and most strikingly in the case of Kilgore Trout on the afternoon and evening of February 13th, 2001, after free will kicked in. If he had been in the area of Times Square, or near the entrance or exit of a major bridge or tunnel, or at an airport, where pilots, as they had learned to do during the rerun, had expected their planes to take off or land safely of their own accord, the challenge would have been too much not only for Trout but for anyone else.
What Trout beheld when he came out of the shelter in response to the crash next door was a horrifying scene all right, but the cast was small. The dead and dying were widely scattered, rather than heaped or enclosed in a burning or crumpled airplane or bus. They were still individuals. Alive or dead, they still had personalities, with stories to read in their faces and clothes.
Vehicular traffic on that stretch of West 155th Street, way-the-hell-and-gone uptown and leading nowhere, was at any time of day virtually nonexistent. This made the roaring hook-and-ladder a solo entertainer, as Trout watched gravity drag it ass-backward in the direction of the Hudson River. He was so free to think about the luckless fire truck in detail, despite the racket coming from busier thoroughfares, that he concluded calmly, as he would tell me at Xanadu, that one of three explanations for its helplessness had to be the right one: Either its gearshift was in reverse or neutral, or the drive shaft had snapped, or the clutch was shot.
He did not panic. His experiences as a forward observer for the artillery had taught him that panic only made things worse. He would say at Xanadu: “In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.
True enough, he didn’t panic. At the same time, though, he had yet to realize that he alone was ambulatory and wide awake. He had figured out the bare bones of what the Universe itself had done, contracted and then expanded. That was the easy part. What was actually happening, except for its actuality, might easily have been the ink-on-paper consequences of a premise for a story he himself had written and torn to pieces, and flushed down a toilet in a bus terminal or whatever, years ago.
Unlike Dudley Prince, Trout hadn’t even earned a High School Equivalency Certificate, but he bore at least one surprising resemblance to my big brother Bernie, who has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from MIT. Bernie and Trout had both, since their earliest adolescence, played games