first is the night after his daughter's wedding in 1967; Billy gets up out of bed, unable to sleep. He knows that the flying saucer will come for him soon. He wanders into his daughter's empty bedroom, the phone rings, and on the other end is a drunk. It is unusual that Billy claims he can almost to smell the mustard gas and roses on his breath over the phone. This detail emerges through a kind of empathy that seems to connect otherwise unrelated moments in the narration. This drunk goes back to the one from Chapter 1: he is the author, Kurt Vonnegut, who in his middle age has a tendency to make drunken phon
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