Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [49]
The best thing to be when free will kicks in, probably, is a Mbuti, a Pygmy in a rain forest in Zaire, Africa.
Two hundred yards from my hotel was the husk of what used to be the throbbing heart of the city, its turgid auricles and ventricles. I mean its passenger railroad station. It was completed in 1880. Only two trains a day stop there now.
I myself was antique enough to remember as terrific music the hissing and rolling thunder of steam locomotives, and their mournful whistles, and the metronomic clicks of wheels on joints in the rails, and the apparent rise and fall, thanks to the Doppler effect, of the pitch of warning bells at crossings.
I remembered labor history, too, because the first effective strikes by American working people for better pay, and more respect, and safer working conditions, were called against the railroads. And then against owners of coal mines and steel mills and textile mills, and on and on. Much blood was shed in what appeared to most members of my generation of American writers to be battles as worth fighting as any against a foreign enemy.
The optimism that infused so much of our writing was based on our belief that after Magna Carta, and then the Declaration of Independence, and then the Bill of Rights, and then the Emancipation Proclamation, and then Article XIX of the Constitution, which in 1920 entitled women to vote, some scheme for economic justice could also be devised. That was the logical next step.
And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution:
Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity.
Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage.
What we have created instead, as customers and employees and investors, is mountains of paper wealth so enormous that a handful of people in charge of them can take millions and billions for themselves without hurting anyone. Apparently.
Many members of my generation are disappointed.
46
Can you believe it? Kilgore Trout, who never even saw a stage play until he got to Xanadu, not only wrote a play after he got home from our war, which was World War Two, but he copyrighted it! I have just retrieved it from the memory banks of the Library of Congress, and it is entitled The Wrinkled Old Family Retainer.
It is like a birthday present from my computer here in the Sinclair Lewis Suite at Xanadu. Wow! The date yesterday was November 11th, 2010. I have just turned eighty-eight, or ninety-eight, if you want to count the rerun. My wife, Monica Pepper Vonnegut, says eighty-eight is a very lucky number, and so is ninety-eight. She is heavily into numerology.
My darling daughter Lily will turn twenty-eight on December 15th! Who ever thought I would live to see that day?
The Wrinkled Old Family Retainer is about a wedding. The bride is Mirabile Dictu, a virgin. The groom is Flagrante Delicto, a heartless womanizer.
Sotto Voce, a male guest standing at the fringe of the ceremony, says out of the corner of his mouth to a guy standing next to him, “I don’t bother with all this. I simply find a woman who hates me, and I give her a house.”
And the other guy says, as the groom is kissing the bride, “All women are psychotic. All men are jerks.”
The eponymous wrinkled old family retainer, crying his rheumy eyes out behind a potted palm, is Scrotum.
Monica is still obsessed by the mystery of who left a cigar smoldering beneath the smoke alarm in the picture gallery of the Academy minutes before free will kicked in again. That was more than nine years ago! Who cares? What difference can knowing that make? That’s like knowing what the white stuff in bird poop is.
What Kilgore Trout did with that cigar was scrooch it out in the saucer. He scrooched and scrooched and scrooched it, by his own admission to Monica and me, as though it were responsible not only for the yelling of the smoke