Worlds

50. Looking backward

It’s been more than twenty years now and I still remember so vividly how lonesome, how guilty I felt at that moment, Jeff’s car shrinking away down the tarmac, the smell of ozone from its motor dissipating, the people talking behind me. The silly sound of beer bottles clanking together in my bag, when I went to join them.

Even stronger is the memory of hearing his voice again, a few years later, barely audible through crashing static. He not only lived through the bombs but was one of the few people with the glandular quirk necessary to survive the plague. The acromegaly that made him so big. So he lived, at least for a while, though from what we know about life on Earth now he might have been happier dead.

My husbands and I wore talking about Earth at dinner; about Earth and food. There was no city where all three of us went, since Daniel rarely left New York and John never visited there when he was in the States. Daniel mentioned a place in the Village, the New New Delhi Deli, where Benny and I occasionally went for lunch. Kosher and Indian take-out, spicy and cheap. And now thoroughly lost, except in our memories. So many of the memories are tastes and smells; I’d even like to smell the thick city air again, not to mention the sea and the jungle.

Musty swamp and sharp smell of things burning, the morning I left I don’t remember any sense of the enormity of what was happening. I was so numb, with medicine and from the quick succession of personal shocks, that I sort of missed the end of the world.

Not the End, really, though it may have been the end as a world. When I was a girl, you heard a lot of talk about a future when most of humanity lived in the Worlds, tens of billions of happy people, with the Earth a minor backwater, a historical preserve. It seemed inevitable, since the Earth’s population was declining and ours was increasing; since our fortunes were expanding and their horizons were closing in on them. But we saw it as happening through slow evolution, not sudden catastrophe. Not war and plague.

Old Jules Hammond had a particularly offensive program last week, with a so-called historian who tap-danced over European history in the relentless pursuit of edifying parallels to our present happy situation. Interposing the Black Plague between medieval darkness and Renaissance light The World Wars between the dehumanizing Industrial Revolution and the freedom of the Space Age and Cybernetica. It bothers me that this sort of slap-happy propaganda is socially useful, maybe necessary, and that I’ll have to acquiesce in it or even actively use it.

It’s not as if I will be the first leader who ever turned her back on the truth because her people needed the comfort of fantasy. If everyone shared my sense of loss we would be paralyzed, doomed.

I have to put it behind myself literally. Live only with the present and the future. We have no real past. We live in a hollow rock surrounded by nothing. Outside of this bubble of life, night that goes on forever.

But this is true: it’s only in the night that you can see the stars.