The Ministry for the Future

41

In the twelfth year of continuous drought our city ran out of water. Of course we had been warned it would happen, but even in droughts some rain occasionally falls, and with conservation and fallowing of agriculture and construction of new reservoirs, and pipelines to distant watersheds, and digging of deeper wells and all the rest of those efforts, we had always squeaked through. And that in itself made us think it would keep on going that way. But one September there was an earthquake, not a very strong one, but apparently enough to shift something in the aquifer below us, and very quickly all the wells went dry; and the reservoirs were already dry; and the neighboring watersheds connected to us by pipeline were dry. Nothing came out of the taps. September 11, 2034.

Our city is home to about a million people. About a third of those had moved to town in the last decade, and were living in cardboard shacks in the hilly districts on the west side; this was partly another result of the drought. They were already living without running water, buying it in hundred-liter barrels or just cans and jugs. The rest of us were in houses and used to water coming out of the tap, of course. So on this day there was no question that the housed residents were most distressed by the change; for the poor in the hills it wasn’t a change, except in this sense: there was no longer any water to buy either.

In our part of the world you can only live a couple of days without water. I suppose that’s true everywhere. And this cessation of water, despite all the warnings and preparations, was sudden. Taps running, perhaps weakly, but running; then on September 11, not.

Panic, of course. Hoarding, for sure—if one could do it! Many of us had already filled our bathtubs, but that wasn’t going to last long. A rush to the city’s river, but it was still dry, in fact drier than ever. And then, no other choice, none at all: a rush to the public buildings. To the football stadium, the government house, and places like that. We needed a solution.

In from the coast came trucks with water from the desalination plants. Also a convoy appeared from inland; these vehicles included water trucks, also mobile machines that could suck water from the air, even dry air like ours. Humidity of ten percent feels dry as bone on the skin, but that air still has a lot of water in it. Luckily for us.

It had to be done in an orderly way. That was clear to everyone. You could fight your way to the front of the line, but to what effect? There was nothing there to grab; whatever water there was in the city was guarded by the military. The army and police were out in force. They directed people to stadiums and indoor assembly places like gymnasiums and libraries, and assembly halls of all kinds, and ordered us to get into lines, and water was brought to these places in heavily guarded trucks, and there was nothing to do then but wait your turn with your containers, and receive your allotted amount and then start conserving it.

Everything relied on the whole system working. If it didn’t we would die, one way or the other, from thirst or from fighting each other. This was all completely clear to everyone but the crazies among us. There are always such people, but in this case they were outnumbered a hundred to one at least, and subdued by the police if they made trouble. For the rest of us, it came down to this: we had to trust our society to work well enough to save us. As it had never worked very well before, this was a big leap of faith, for sure. No one was confident. But it was the system or death. So we congregated in the places announced over the radio and online and on the streets themselves, and waited our turn.

Water kept coming into the city on trucks, or was dragged out of the air by the machines. The initial allotments were ridiculously small. We had enough to drink, but not enough to cook with. Quickly we learned to drink any water we did use for cooking, treating it as a soup. Conservation was taken to ridiculous levels; many bought filters said to clarify urine back to potable water. Sure, why not; we bought some too. But other methods of conservation were a bit more practical. Those filters don’t last very long.

It was sobering in all this to see how many we were. You congregate the whole population into just a few places, you see how many you are. And all of them strangers. In a city of a million you know something like, what, a hundred people? And maybe five hundred faces, at most a thousand. So you know at most one person in a thousand. Walk into a full football stadium, where you all have come to file through the line with your water jugs in hand or on dollies, water being so amazingly heavy—and you see that everyone there is a stranger. You are alone in a city of strangers. That’s every day of your life! We saw that undeniably, right there with our own eyes. Alone in the city. Just a few friends, a family of sorts, these friends make, but so few, and them all lost in the larger crowd, doing business elsewhere. Well, people hung together with those they knew, sure, to go get water. Possibly to protect each other from the crazies, if someone lost it or whatever. But that seldom happened. We were so afraid that we behaved well, that was how bad it was. Mostly we went with friends just for the company. Because it was very strange to see with your own eyes that you live among strangers. Even though every night of your life, when you go to a restaurant and don’t see anyone you know, that’s the same thing—those are strangers.

But they are your fellow citizens! This is what makes it less than desolating—your fellow citizens are a real thing, a real feeling.

Seeing this, my friend Charlotte pointed something out to me one day as we stood in line waiting for a refill, feeling unwashed and parched and apprehensive, Charlotte’s usual cynical sardonic attitude now almost jaunty, almost amused—she gestured at the line in front of us and said, Remember what Margaret Thatcher said? There is no such thing as society!

We laughed out loud. For a while we couldn’t stop laughing. Fuck Margaret Thatcher, I said when I could catch my breath. And I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real. A smelly mass of unwashed anxious citizens, no doubt about it. But a society for sure. It’s a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognize that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers, I say this unequivocally. Ignorant fools. That kind of stupidity should be put in jail.

Then on the twenty-third day of our crisis, on October 4, it rained. Not just the ambivalent sea mist we often get in the fall, but a real storm, out of nowhere. How we collected that rainwater! Individually and civicly, the rain fell on our heads and in our containers, and I don’t think a single drop of it made it downstream in our little river out of the city limits. We caught it all. And we danced, yes, of course. It was carnival for sure. Even though we knew it wasn’t the total solution, not even close, as the drought was forecast to continue, and we still didn’t have a good plan—nevertheless, we danced in the rain.