"She's gone, and the past is trivia I scribble on these fucking  notes" -Leonard Shelby, in Memento Kurt Vonnegut's  Slaughter-House Five opens with the words: "Listen, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time". His world is disjointed, he slips from disconnected moment to disconnected moment. Leonard Shelby, the protagonist of memento (Guy Pearce), has a similar problem. He can make no new memories. Shelby knows that his wife was raped and  murdered  by someone named John G. He knows that he was injured in the attack, and that his wounds left him without a short term memory. And he knows that he his searching for the killer. For anything more than that he must trust the notes he has written himself. He has pockets filled with scraps of paper, covered with bits of information he will need. The really important stuff he has tattooed on his body to make notes you can't lose. He carries a polaroid so he can remember who people are, and what he needs to know