It’s the winter of 2000, and I’m visiting the Twin Towers in New York with my family. The walls in the observation floor are decorated with painted designs, including a fragment of a Vonnegut quote: “… skyscraper national park …” Some time after the towers go down, I think about how I had stood on the roof, and how I had stared at that quote. I wonder how Vonnegut is processing the whole event, and whether he even knows his words were painted on the wall.

I’m taking an essay writing class with Nora Crow at Smith College through the local “Five College Consortium” rules. Smith announces that it will be getting Kurt Vonnegut as a writer in residence the following semester, and Nora compares this to a school basketball team calling in Michael Jordan to help coach. Nora urges me to take Vonnegut’s master class or, barring that, visit him to get his input on an essay I wrote for her class, “A Short Biography of the Antichrist.” (Our assignment had been to write a biography, and it was the only assignment I had found boring. I wrote a fairly straight-up paper about Aleister Crowley, the mystic. When I arrived at class and realized everyone else made it not-boring, I refused to hand in the paper and said that I’d be rewriting it even if it meant getting a zero on the project. Nora was impressed with the result, and I think it endeared me to her.) The Smith English office tells me that only Smith students can get into the master class, and I realize I will have a hard time faking that I belong there, as my kind are in short supply at Smith.

Mr. MacKerron assigns us Slaughterhouse 5 to read in my high school AP English class. One of the major essay questions on the AP is just begging to be answered with a lengthy hand-scrawled treatise on one of my favorite books. I feel somewhat subversive, writing about science-fiction on a standardized test about “literature.” I get a 5/5 on the exam, but the test doesn’t get me out of my college writing class like I expected it to. (Fortunately, it turns out to be a good class.)

I’m in a fiction writing class at Smith. My fellow students have been visiting Kurt Vonnegut to show him their writing; some left their meetings with him in tears, and most left perturbed at best. One woman returns to class from her meeting with Vonnegut in high spirits, convinced that they are best buddies; she is the student whose writing nobody else in class seems to like. I haven’t written any fiction I’m really proud of yet, so I visit Kurt Vonnegut with my biography of the Antichrist in hand. I wait outside Vonnegut’s office with another guy, who (I discover with some bitterness) is a Hampshire student actually enrolled in the master class. After the Hampshire guy goes in, I go in and Vonnegut suggests that I should leave him the essay and come back in a week. I do so. He says that he’s more into fiction than essays and asks whether I’d considered doing the essay as fiction. I say it was for an essay-writing class, so it hadn’t really occurred to me. He nods. It’s interesting talking about religion, he says, and the essay kind of reminds him of an old joke: a man falls from a cliff and grabs onto a branch. “Help! Is there anybody there!” the man yells. The voice of God calls down from the heavens, “Let go, my child, and I will catch you.” The man pauses and says, “Anybody else?” I laugh, and say that this reminds me of a joke, which I relate. Kurt Vonnegut laughs. We spend awhile telling jokes and talking about religion and culture. I leave in a good mood, then realize I got no feedback on my writing at all.

It’s my fourth year of grad school. I’ve given up studying English literature in favor of communication. I hear that Kurt Vonnegut has passed away, and I hope that he forgives me for my awkwardly written tribute.