Sometimes I say I’m in 1996, where I really am, and sometimes I say I am in the midst of a rerun following a timequake, without making clear distinctions between the two situations. I must be nuts.

fucked-up rich kids. My son the doctor Mark Vonnegut, who wrote a swell book about his going crazy in the 1960s, and then graduated from Harvard Medical School, had an exhibition of his watercolors in Milton, Massachusetts, this summer.

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.

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.”

Yes, and when the timequake of 2001 zapped us back to 1991, it made ten years of our pasts ten years of our futures, so we could remember everything we had to say and do again when the time came.

All three of the sisters were beautiful, so went Trout’s tale, but only two of them were popular, one a picture painter and the other a short story writer.

When the excellent German novelist and graphic artist Günter Grass heard that I was born in 1922, he said to me, “There are no males in Europe your age for you to talk to.” He himself was a kid during Kilgore Trout’s and my war, as were Elie Wiesel and Jerzy Kosinski and Milos Forman, and on and on.

“If this isn’t nice, what is?” he said.

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 fourteen, and 2001, when he died at the age of eighty-four.