Timequake

Ernest Hemingway in 1952 published in Life magazine a long short story called "The Old Man and the Sea." It was about a Cuban Fisherman who hadn't caught anything for 84 days. The Cuban hooked an enormous marlin. He killed it and lashed it alongside his little boat. Before he could get it to shore, though, sharks bit off all the meat on the skeleton.

I was living in Barnstable Village on Cape Cod when the story appeared. I asked a neighboring commercial fisherman what he thought of it. He said the hero was an idiot. He should have hacked off the best chunks of meat and put them in the bottom of the boat, and left the rest of the carcass for the sharks.

It could be that the sharks Hemingway had in mind were critics who hadn't much liked his first novel in ten years, Across the River and Into the Trees, published two years earlier. As far as I know, he never said so. But the marlin could have been that novel.

And then I found myself in the winter of 1996 the creator of a novel which did not work, which had no point, which had never wanted to be written in the first place. Merde! I had spent nearly a decade on that ungrateful fish, if you will. It wasn't even fit for shark chum.

I had recently turned 73. My mother made it to 52, my father to 72. Hemingway almost made it to 62. I had lived too long! What was I to do?

Answer: Fillet the fish. Throw the rest away.

The premise of the novel, titled Timequake One, was that a timequake, a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during a past decade, for good or ill, a second time. It was déjà vu that wouldn't quit for ten long years. You couldn't complain about life's being nothing but old stuff, or ask if just you were going nuts or if everybody was going nuts.

There was absolutely nothing you could say during the rerun if you hadn't said it the first time through the decade. You couldn't even save your own life or that of a loved one if you had failed to do that the first time through.

I had the timequake zap everybody and everything in an instant from February 13th, 2001 back to February 17th, 1991. Then we all had to get back to 2001 the hard way, minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again, getting the clap again. You name it!

Only when people got back to when the timequake hit did they stop being robots of their pasts. As the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout said, "Only when free will kicked in again could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction."

Trout doesn't really exist. He has been my alter ego in several of my other novels. But most of what I have chosen to preserve from Timequake One has to do with his adventures and opinions. I have salvaged a few of the thousands of stories he wrote between 1931, when he was 14, and 2001, when he died at the age of 84. A hobo for much of his life, he died in luxury in the Ernest Hemingway Suite of the writers' retreat Xanadu in the summer resort village of Point Zion, Rhode Island. That's nice to know.

His very first story, he told me as he was dying, was set in Camelot, the court of King Arthur in Britain: Merlin the Court Magician casts a spell that allows him to equip the Knights of the Round Table with Thompson submachine guns and drums of .45-caliber dumdums.

Sir Galahad, the purest in heart and mind, familiarizes himself with this new virtue-compelling appliance. While doing so, he puts a slug through the Holy Grail and makes Swiss cheese of Queen Guinevere.

•

Here is what Trout said when he realized that the ten-year rerun was over, that he and everybody else were suddenly obligated to think of new stuff to do, to be creative again: "Oh, Lordy! I am much too old and experienced to start playing Russian roulette with free will again."

Yes, and I myself was a character in Timequake One, making a cameo appearance at a clambake on the beach at the writers' retreat Xanadu in the summer of 2001, six months after the end of the rerun, six months after free will kicked in again.

I was there with several fictitious persons from the book, including Kilgore Trout. I was privileged to hear the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer describe for us, and then demonstrate, the special place of Earthlings in the cosmic scheme of things.

In Timequake One, Kilgore Trout wrote a story about an atom bomb. Because of the timequake, he had to write it twice. The ten-year rerun following the timequake, remember, made him and me, and you, and everybody else, do everything we'd done from February 17th, 1991, to February 13th, 2001, a second time.

Trout didn't mind writing it again. Rerun or not, he could tune out the crock of shit being alive was as long as he was scribbling, head down, with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad.

He called the story "No Laughing Matter." He threw it away before anybody else could see it, and then had to throw it away again during the rerun. At the clambake at the end of Timequake One, in the summer of the year 2001, after free will kicked in again, Trout said this about all the stories he had torn to pieces and flushed down toilets, or tossed into trash-strewn vacant lots, or whatever: "Easy come, easy go."

"No Laughing Matter" got its title from what a judge in the story said during a top-secret court-martial of the crew of the American bomber Joy's Pride, on the Pacific island of Banalulu, one month after the end of World War Two.

Joy's Pride itself was perfectly OK, and in a hangar there on Banalulu. It was named in honor of the pilot's mother, Joy Peterson, a nurse in obstetrics at a hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas. Pride had a double meaning. It meant self-respect. It meant a lion family, too.

Here's the thing: After an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and then another one was dropped on Nagasaki, Joy's Pride was ordered to drop yet another one on Yokohama, on a couple of million "little yellow bastards." The little yellow bastards were called "little yellow bastards" back then. It was wartime. Trout described the third atom bomb like this: "A purple motherfucker as big as a boiler in the basement of a midsize junior high school."

It was too big to fit inside the bomb bay. It was slung underneath the plane's belly, and cleared the runway by a foot when Joy's Pride took off into the wild blue yonder.

As the plane neared its target, the pilot mused out loud on the intercom that his mother, the obstetrics nurse, would be a celebrity back home after they did what they were about to do. The bomber Enola Gay, and the woman in whose honor it was named, had become as famous as movie stars after it dropped its load on Hiroshima. Yokohama was twice as populous as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The more the pilot thought about it, though, the surer he was that his sweet widowed mother could never tell reporters she was happy that her son's airplane had killed a world's record number of civilians all at once.

•

Trout's story reminds me of the time my late great-aunt Emma Vonnegut said she hated the Chinese. Her late son-in-law Kerfuit Stewart, who used to own Stewart's Book Store in Louisville, Kentucky, admonished her that it was wicked to hate that many people all at once.

Whatever.

The crewmen aboard Joy's Pride, at any rate, told the pilot on the intercom that they felt much as he did. They were all alone up there in the sky. They didn't need a fighter escort, since the Japanese didn't have any airplanes left. The war was over, except for the paperwork, which was arguably the situation even before Enola Gay had cremated Hiroshima.

To quote Kilgore Trout: "This wasn't war anymore, and neither had been the obliteration of Nagasaki. This was 'Thanks to the Yanks for a job well done!' This was show biz now."

Trout said in "No Laughing Matter" that the pilot and his bombardier had felt somewhat godlike on previous missions, when they had had nothing more than incendiaries and conventional high explosives to drop on people. "But that was godlike with a little g," he wrote. "They identified themselves with minor deities who only avenged and destroyed. Up there in the sky all alone, with the purple motherfucker slung underneath their plane, they felt like the Boss God himself, who had an option which hadn't been theirs before, which was to be merciful."

Trout himself had been in World War Two, but not as an airman and not in the Pacific. He had been a forward observer for the Army field artillery in (continued on page 112)Timequake(continued from page 102) Europe, a lieutenant with binoculars and a radio, up with the Infantry or even ahead of it. He would tell batteries to the rear where their shrapnel or white phosphorus might help a lot.

He himself had certainly not been merciful, nor, by his own account, had he ever felt he should have been. I asked him at the clambake in 2001, at the writers' retreat Xanadu, what he'd done during the war, which he called "civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide."

He said without a scintilla of regret, "I made sandwiches of German soldiers between an erupting Earth and an exploding sky, and in a blizzard of razor blades."

The pilot of Joy's Pride made a U-turn way up in the sky. The purple motherfucker was still slung underneath. The pilot headed back for Banalulu. "He did it," wrote Trout, "because that is what his mother would have wanted him to do."

At the top-secret court-martial afterward, everybody was convulsed with laughter at one point in the proceedings. This caused the chief judge to bang his gavel and declare that what those on trial had done was "no laughing matter." What people found so funny was the prosecutor's description of what people did at the base when Joy's Pride came in for a landing with the purple motherfucker only a foot above the tarmac. People jumped out of windows. They peed in their pants.

"There were all kinds of collisions between different kinds of vehicles," wrote Kilgore Trout.

No sooner had the judge restored order, though, than a huge crack opened in the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It swallowed Banalulu, court-martial, Joy's Pride, unused atom bomb and all.

Trout said at the clambake in 2001 that life was undeniably preposterous. "But our brains are big enough to let us adapt to the inevitable pratfalls and buffoonery," he went on, "by means of man-made epiphanies like this one." He meant the clambake on a beach under a starry sky. "If this isn't nice, what is?" he said.

He declared the corn on the cob, steamed in seaweed with lobsters and clams, to be heavenly. He added, "And don't all the ladies look like angels tonight!" He was feasting on corn on the cob and women as ideas. He couldn't eat the corn because the upper plate of his false teeth was insecure. His long-term relationships with women had been disasters. In the only love story he ever attempted, "Kiss Me Again," he had written, "There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time."

The moral of that story is this: "Men are jerks. Women are psychotic."

I wouldn't have missed the Great Depression or my part in World War Two for anything. Trout asserted at the clambake that our war would live forever in show biz, as other wars would not, because of the uniforms of the Nazis.

He commented unfavorably on the camouflage suits our own generals wear nowadays on TV, when they describe our blasting the bejesus out of some Third World country because of petroleum. "I can't imagine," he said, "any part of the world where such garish pajamas would make a soldier less rather than more visible.

"We are evidently preparing," he said, "to fight World War Three in the midst of an enormous Spanish omelette."

•

I told Kilgore Trout at the clambake in 2001 about how my brother and sister had made Father ashamed of hunting and fishing. Trout quoted Shakespeare: " 'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!'"

Trout was self-educated, never having finished high school. I was mildly surprised, then, that he could quote Shakespeare. I asked if he had committed a lot of that remarkable author's words to memory. He said, "Yes, dear colleague, including a single sentence which describes life as lived by human beings so completely that no writer after him need ever have written another word."

"Which sentence was that, Mr. Trout?" I asked.

And he said, "'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.'"

I asked him at Xanadu in the summer of 2001 how "Ting-a-ling" had become such a frequent appoggiatura, or grace note, in his conversations. He gave me what would later turn out to have been a superficial explanation. "It was something I crowed during the war," he said, "when an artillery barrage I'd called for landed right on target: 'Ting-a-ling! Ting-a-ling!'"

About an hour later, and this was on the afternoon before the clambake, he beckoned me into his suite with a crooked finger. He closed the door behind us. "You really want to know about 'Ting-a-ling'?" he asked me.

I had been satisfied with his first account. Trout was the one who wanted me to hear much more. My innocent question earlier had triggered memories of his ghastly childhood in Northampton. He could exorcise them only by telling what they were.

"My father murdered my mother," said Kilgore Trout, "when I was 12 years old.

"Her body was in our basement," said Trout, "but all I knew was that she had disappeared. Father swore he had no idea what had become of her. He said, as wife murderers often do, that maybe she had gone to visit relatives. He killed her that morning, after I left for school.

"He got supper for the two of us that night. Father said he would report her as a missing person to the police the next morning, if we hadn't heard from her by then. He said, 'She has been very tired and nervous lately. Have you noticed that?'

"He was insane," said Trout. "How insane? He came into my bedroom at midnight. He woke me up. He said he had something important to tell me. It was nothing but a dirty joke, but this poor, sick man had come to believe it a parable about the awful blows that life had dealt him. It was about a fugitive who sought shelter from the police in the home of a woman he knew.

"Her living room had a cathedral ceiling, which is to say it went all the way up to the roof peak, with rustic rafters spanning the airspace below." Trout paused. It was as though he were as caught up in the tale as his father must have been.

He went on, there in the suite named in honor of the suicide Ernest Hemingway: "She was a widow, and he stripped himself naked while she went to fetch some of her husband's clothes. But before he could put them on, the police were hammering on the front door with their billy clubs. So the fugitive hid on top of a rafter. When the woman let in the police, though, his (continued on page 210)Timequake(continued from page 112) oversize testicles hung down in full view."

Trout paused again.

"The police asked the woman where the guy was. The woman said she didn't know what guy they were talking about," said Trout. "One of the cops saw the testicles hanging down from the rafter and asked what they were. She said they were Chinese temple bells. He believed her. He said he had always wanted to hear Chinese temple bells.

"He gave them a whack with his billy club, but there was no sound. So he hit them again, a lot harder, a whole lot harder. Do you know what the guy on the rafter shrieked?" Trout asked me.

I said I didn't.

"He shrieked, 'Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch!'"

Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.

With some trepidation, I told Trout in the summer of 2001 about my advice to a man soon to be expelled from prison. He asked if I had heard from this person again, if I knew what had become of him in the intervening five years, or in the intervening ten years, if we wanted to count the rerun. I hadn't and didn't.

He asked if I myself had ever tried to join a church, just for the hell of it, to find out what that was like. He had. The closest I ever came to that, I said, was when my second-wife-to-be, Jill Krementz, and I thought it would be cute, and also ritzy, to be married in the Little Church Around the Corner, a Disneyesque Episcopal house of worship on East 29th Street off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

"When they found out I was a divorced person," I said, "they prescribed all sorts of penitent services I was to perform before I would be clean enough to be married there."

"There you are," said Trout. "Imagine all the chickenshit you'd have to go through if you were an ex-con. And if that poor son of a bitch who wrote you really did find a church to accept him, he could easily be back in prison."

"For what?" I said. "For robbing the poor box?"

"No," said Trout, "for delighting Jesus Christ by shooting dead a doctor coming to work in an abortion mill."

I am so old that I can remember when the word fuck was thought to be so full of bad magic that no respectable publication would print it. Another old joke: "Don't say 'fuck' in front of the b-a-b-y."

A word just as full of poison, supposedly, but which could be spoken in polite company, provided the speaker's tone implied fear and loathing, was Communism, denoting an activity as commonly and innocently practiced in many primitive societies as fucking.

So it was a particularly elegant commentary on the patriotism and the nice-Nellyism during the deliberately insane Vietnam war when the satirist Paul Krassner printed red-white-and-blue bumper stickers that said Fuck communism!

•

And Kilgore Trout said at the clambake, with Laurel and Hardy in a rowboat only 50 yards offshore, that young people liked movies with a lot of shooting because the movies showed that dying didn't hurt at all, that people with guns could be thought of as "freelance anesthetists."

He was so happy! He was so popular! He was all dolled up in the tuxedo and boiled shirt and crimson cummerbund and bow tie that had belonged to Zoltan Pepper. I stood behind him in his suite in order to tie the tie for him, just as my big brother had done for me before I myself could tie a bow tie.

There on the beach, whatever Trout said produced laughter and applause. He couldn't believe it! He said the pyramids and Stonehenge were built in a time of very feeble gravity, when boulders could be tossed around like sofa pillows, and people loved it. They begged for more. He gave them the line from "Kiss Me Again": "There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time. Ting-a-ling?" People told him he was as witty as Oscar Wilde!

Understand, the biggest audience this man had had before the clambake was an artillery battery, when he was a forward spotter in Europe during World War Two.

"Ting-a-ling! If this isn't nice, what is?" he exclaimed to us all.

I called back to him from the rear of the crowd: "You've been sick, Mr. Trout, but now you're well again, and there's work to do."

My lecture agent, Janet Cosby, was there.

At ten o'clock the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer announced it was his bedtime. There was one last thing he wanted to say to us, to his family. Like a magician seeking a volunteer from the audience, he asked someone to stand beside him and do what he said. I held up my hand. "Me, please, me," I said.

The crowd fell quiet as I took my place to his right.

"The Universe has expanded so enormously," he said, "with the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history, like the Pony Express.

"I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesn't matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don't twinkle, they are either planets or satellites. Tonight we are not interested in planets or satellites."

I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart. One was Polaris. I have no idea what the other one was. For all I knew, it was Puke, Trout's star the size of a BB.

"Do they twinkle?" he said.

"Yes, they do," I said.

"Promise?" he said.

"Cross my heart," I said.

"Excellent! Ting-a-ling!" he said. "Now then: Whatever heavenly bodies those two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands or millions of years. Ting-a-ling? But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other."

"OK," I said, "I did it."

"It took a second, do you think?" he said.

"No more," I said.

"Even if you'd taken an hour," he said, "something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light."

"What was it?" I said.

"Your awareness," he said. "That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness."

Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that enchanted evening.

All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: "I have thought of a better word than awareness," he said. "Let us call it soul." He paused.

"Ting-a-ling?" he said.

"Her body was in our basement," said Trout, "but all I knew was that she had disappeared."