Warday

Jim Prairie Notebook

When we crossed the border into Nevada, Whitley seemed almost too drained to react, but I felt like breaking out champagne. I contented myself with a quiet sip of water from our bag.

We are now on the western edge of the Great Plains. I wish I could have gone with Captain Hargreaves when he left the train at Ogden, but his world and mine are not the same.

I contented myself with this train’s less scenic route. The going was slow and rough through the Rockies. We used old freight tracks for this part of the run. Now we are south of Denver, on our way to connect with the Southwest Limited in La Junta. Next year perhaps the Zephyr will resume its old route across Nebraska and Iowa, but not yet.

The great transcontinental migration passed through this land, and the legendary trains of the Union Pacific and the Western Pacific, their engines gleaming brass and black, their whistles stampeding the astonished buffalo.

That happened barely a hundred years ago. In the time since then, the Rockies have lost perhaps a tenth of an inch of their peaks from the ceaseless wind. Two thousand animal species have become extinct in this land, and the world that extinguished them has slipped through our fingers.

The grandsons of Buffalo Bill and Bat Masterson might well have been alive to see Warday.

We could still get dead drunk on Wild Bill Hickok’s whiskey. In a hundred years a well-sealed bottle will have lost no more than a shot to evaporation.

Long thoughts of the West. How impossibly fast it was discovered and settled. How quickly it matured and grew old.

My mind drifts away from ghost towns and empty ranches to the present, to my own work. I, who wrote books about atomic weapons, find myself writing one about a trip through atomized America. I’ve been shouted at by people who felt that writing about weapons glorified them.

Now is now, the rattling train and the night.

And the past is the past. I was sitting in a private dining room at the top of the Exxon Building in Houston when Warday occurred. My purpose was business; I was working on a book about oil exploration. My host had just lifted a cup of coffee to his lips when, from where I was sitting, his face suddenly seemed to glow with blinding, unearthly light. I closed my eyes. He pitched back, screaming.

We had just experienced the bursts going off over San Antonio, more than two hundred miles away.

It took fifteen or so minutes for the sound to reach us—a great, rolling roar that cracked most of the windows on the west side of the building.

My past had just ended. When I saw the cloud I knew at once what had happened.

I was well out of Houston before the fallout started. It was devastating when it came. The San Antonio bombs were at least as filthy with long-term radiation by-products as those that hit New York and Washington. Fission-fusion-fission bombs.

My only thought was to get on the road, away from any inhabited areas. My car radio wouldn’t work, but every time I looked west I got all the news I needed. Over the course of the day, that cloud got bigger and darker and closer. And I drove on north, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t see another such cloud over Dallas.

I stopped for gas and tried to call my wife in Austin.

There wasn’t even a dial tone.

I couldn’t reach my mother in San Antonio, either.

Reporting is a good job; you can put your heart into it. And the effort is worthwhile when you get something like the attached document. It is useful and important, and it took brave men to gather the information it contains. Even though I obtained it in Chicago, it belongs here, before we enter the great Midwestern plains.

The document concerns only the first few weeks. We have added two recent maps that show how the fallout developed at the end of one year, and which counties are still reporting live particles today.

Before the war we knew very little about secondary dissemination. It caused the famine by destroying so much stored wheat in the winter of ’88–’89, at a time when farming conditions were chaotic. The loss of the grain supply led to local consumption of vegetables that would normally have been shipped to market, and to a massive meat shortage as feed supplies went to make the unforgettable oat bread that was around by the summer of ’89.

It’s too bad there are so many live particles still around the North Central States. I wish we could have seen the Dakotas. A trainman put it very vividly when I asked to be ticketed to Rapid City or Minot. He consulted his timetable, then looked up at me.

“Them places are gone,” he said.

Documents on the National Condition

Before the war, fallout was commonly thought of as a semipermanent devastation that would at the very least doom us to death in a matter of days or weeks.

It didn’t turn out that way. It was more subtle, and it was worse. Most of us have never experienced fallout directly, at least not in what we now think of as significant quantities. Like so many of the effects of Warday, by itself fallout was for the most part survivable. But when you combined it with the economic dislocations that started with the EMP burst, you had a prescription for disaster in the farm belt, a disaster from which we have by no means recovered.

The famine came about because of the negative synergy of fallout that contaminated stored grains and cropland in late ’88 and ’89, and the economic chaos that led to the breakdown of the system of farm subsidy and capitalization.

A further synergistic effect occurred when the Cincinnati Flu broke out. It was a rough flu, but it would have been tenth-page news in 1985. Because we were already weak from malnutrition, and low-level radiation caused some immune-response suppression in many of us, the flu cut through the American population like a scythe.

So, for most of us, the drift from the sky has meant hunger and influenza, not the wasting of radiation sickness. How delighted I would have been before the war to find out that direct fallout wasn’t a very serious threat. My own war fantasies often took the form of desperate escapes from the blowing dust.

Funny, that it was so much more benign than we thought, and so much more lethal, both at the same time.

The Rising of the Land

Just before a great storm is born in the plains, there often comes a time of perfect clarity. The sky becomes sharp, and the grasstops hang motionless.

Jim and I have been looking out the window of the train a long time. The air is a deep, clear blue all the way down to the northern horizon. But the horizon itself is the color of baked clay. It is odd, something you look at very carefully. Something that makes you wonder.

We are between Topeka and Kansas City. The crop is sparse, and there are many empty fields.

All through ’88 and ’89, people left. One member of a family might get sick with some radiation-related illness or die of the flu and they would all leave, abandoning their acres to nature. But wheat and corn need tending. Left to themselves, these highly bred species do not go wild, they die. When the stalks rot or blow away, the raw dirt is exposed.

The wind has danced and eddied through the Midwest for years now, blowing the active particles about, depositing them as far south as Texas and as far east as Ohio.

It is not the kind of radiation that devastates bodies in hours—that was gone with the fireballs. It is the more insidious type that lodges in the ground or blows into the silos and the corn-cribs, and stays there.

“What’s going on?” Jim asks.

At first I don’t understand why. Then I realize the train has picked up speed. To reduce wear on equipment, Amtrak doesn’t run much over fifty or sixty, but this train is doing seventy, maybe more.

Two rows ahead, a woman rises half out of her seat, shrinking away from the window.

I am shocked when I follow her eyes to the horizon. A vast black wall has risen there like some bloated mountain range, its topmost peaks streaming hazy fingers toward us across the sky.

People shout, their pale, frightened faces pressing the glass.

The train sways, its horn sounding and sounding, and now I understand: we’re running for shelter. If this dust storm stops us, we will be exposed to the full effect of whatever radiation it bears. A railroad car is little protection.

I feel bitter against myself. How dare I leave my wife and son to take risks like this! My own motives are inscrutable to me.

The light changes. Now the sun is being covered. The clear, still air around the train turns deep red. I can see the round orb of the sun behind a billowing cloud.

Then something incredible happens: in an instant it gets pitch dark. This is not the gloom of a storm or the darkness of night. It is the impossible, thick black of a cave.

The storm wails around the car as if the whole land had risen up and was screaming at us, screaming with a rage that went right down to the center of the planet.

The conductor manages to get the lights on. The air is dirty tan, the dust already so thick we cannot see the front of the car.

We are so small in this rocking, shaking train, nothing but a few tattered bits of bone and flesh, eyes flashing in brown murk.

There is a squeal and a jerk, and the train stops.

“There’s a shelter in the Shawnee Elementary School,” one of the trainmen shouts. “Everybody out the second car. Hurry up, and take your stuff.” Shawnee is a suburb of Kansas City. I wish we had made it to the center of town.

We form a human chain across the street, our way lit by tiny orange dots that must be streetlights. Somebody in fall radiation gear is up ahead, waving a flashlight. I can hear the wind whipping his loose coverall. Then I see a black building. I am choking on dust, I can feel it getting deep into my lungs, smell the odor of dry earth, taste dirt.

As we enter the school, the wind whips through the open door, and the dust is soon thick in the hall.

“This way, keep moving, this way.” A policeman with another flashlight ushers us down some metal stairs and we find ourselves in the basement.

It’s well lit, and the roar of the storm is more distant. Still, the building shudders, and I can hear windows shattering somewhere upstairs.

All around me, sitting in neat rows on the floor, are children.

I’m stunned. I didn’t expect a functional school. But why not? Kansas City still exists. There are people who didn’t leave, and these must be their children.

“I’m your civil defense warden,” a young woman in jeans and a cream-colored shirt says. “Welcome to Shawnee Shelter Number Twelve.” She looks at us, forty-odd scared people. “I’m Joan Wilson. I teach third grade.”

Two more policemen come in. They have a geiger counter, which they proceed to sweep over our group. The ticking tells us that we have picked up a light dose.

I find that I take it like I might another blow in a place that has been hit a lot.

Other teachers have been bringing their classes down, and now the room is full. I realize from the blackboards and the desks that have been pushed aside that it is also Joan Wilson’s classroom.

“Let’s talk to her,” Jim says.

“Talk?”

“To the warden. Might be interesting.”

Also, it might take my mind off what has just happened to us.

Being triaged can make you feel very naked at a time like this.

Joan Wilson isn’t forthcoming, which is understandable, considering that she’s got eighteen third-graders to worry about, not to mention the unexpected crowd from our train and the six or seven who have come in off the street.

She will not give us an interview. We have to content ourselves with a few quick questions.

“What are living conditions like here?”

She looks at me. She does not smile. “It was getting better.”

“Do you have many dust storms?”

“This isn’t a dust storm. It’s the land, don’t you understand that?”

“The land?”

Her voice is low and fierce. “The plains themselves are blowing, right down to their core. There’s never been a dust storm like this.

But I’ll tell you something, mister. I don’t care how bad this storm is, or the next one or the one after that. I am staying here. I was born in Kansas City and I am not going to leave, and I’m not the only one. We made this place grow, and we’ll make it grow again.”

She turns away. She doesn’t want to keep talking. But there is one more question. In spite of her feelings, I must ask it. “What about the children, Miss Wilson?”

She looks at me. The air between is brown now, as if a polluted fog had crept into the room. Wind screams outside. In the distance something clatters, maybe a tin roof blowing through the streets.

“The children?”

They do not look like the kids Andrew went to school with.

They are as hard and tight as their Miss Wilson—quick, serious little people with sharp eyes. When I meet those eyes, they do not look away and they do not smile.

Soon one of the other teachers begins reading a book for the benefit of the whole student body, which counts perhaps eighty children. It is Beauty and the Beast. They listen in silence.

Kansas City—Children’s Thoughts

Essays on spring from Miss Wilson’s third grade, Shawnee Elementary School.

Documents on Limited War and the Limited Economy

The official word from the Federal Complex in L.A. on the economy was one of cautious optimism.

In fact, there is no single American economy. It is possible to define the two big ones of East and West, but beyond those there are many, many more.

As we crossed the country from the prosperous valleys of the Pacific Coast to the dark Northeastern ports, we encountered dozens of economies. Life has focused down: people don’t think in terms of long-range movement and trade anymore, outside California anyway. The concern is the farm on the hill, the plant down the street, the condition of one’s own belly.

The following three documents illustrate how we have refocused to microeconomics because of the suddenness with which the macroeconomy disintegrated and the deep consequences of the shortages that resulted.

The document on the effects of the electromagnetic pulse on Warday is in one way curious: it suggests that there has been steady recovery in such areas as communications and data processing, beginning shortly after Warday. But our lives tell us differently. Even today the overall amount of recovery seems smaller than indicated. It is probable that the document was prepared by people living and working in Los Angeles, who assumed that their local experience was being mirrored across the country, and wrote their projections accordingly.

The paper on shortages tells a central truth: the mineral resources upon which the fabrication of high-technology devices depends are no longer available in substantial quantities to the United States. In losing the electronic superstructure of our economy, we also lost the means to rebuild it, and we must now look to the outside for help.

There is also a report on the state of agriculture. If a bureaucrat could write a dirge, this is a dirge. It is about 450 words long.

With twenty-nine million dead in the famine, that is over 64,000 lives per word.

I Will

The rich farmland of northern Missouri was dusted brown, the towns were brown, the late-summer trees were hazed with dust.

Each town we passed through granted us a secret glimpse down its streets. An occasional decontamination team could be seen in white coveralls, seeking slowly along the sidewalks, or a cleanup crew with a water truck spraying the pavement. We saw into backyards where people were cleaning clothing, furniture, and each other with hoses.

And everywhere, as passengers came and went, we heard tales of the storm. It was the biggest duster in history. Winds clocked at a hundred and ten miles an hour and more in town after town.

Took roofs, cars, collapsed buildings, reduced a dozen trailer parks to pulverized aluminum.

Despite it all, we found a powerful spirit moving among the people that seemed at moments almost otherworldly, as surprising as sudden speech from a Trappist.

SYLVIE WEST, MARCELINE, MISSOURI: “I’m goin’ up the line to La Plata to see that my mother’s okay. We been in Missouri a long time, us Wests. We aren’t going anywhere. A lot of people from around here went south, down to Alabama and Georgia and Florida. There’s trouble getting into Georgia. But this is good land, and we just decided we’d stick it out. The storm? I’ve seen dust before.”

Sylvie West was the color of the land, yellow-gray. Her arms were as long and improbable as the legs of a mantis. She was missing her bottom teeth.

GEORGE KIMBALL, EDINA, MISSOURI: “It wasn’t all that hot. We got a real low dose in Edina. I’m looking at it this way—I just got myself a whole lot of good black dirt from Nebraska scot-free. Hell no, I’m not goin’ anywhere. I stayed right in Edina through the war and the famine and the flu. That’s the place for me. I’m a farmer, of course. I guess you could say I like the look of the town, and I like the people. The stayers, that is. The loafers and the new people all went south. But Missouri needs her people now, and I am not leaving,”

He carried a weathered Samsonite briefcase, which turned out to be full of warehouse receipts recertified that morning by the Knox County Radiation Board. He was on his way to Galesburg to present these receipts to the accepting agent for the Agriculture Department’s Regional Strategic Grains Allocation Commission.

His wedding ring was on his right hand, signifying his widowerhood.

ALFRED T. BENSEN, GALESBURG, ILLINOIS: “I am in the practice of law in Galesburg, Illinois. I have been in my practice for twenty-eight years, and expect to continue until the day I die. I noticed some dust. But I was working through some title questions for a client and I did not have time to deal with it. This is a man who’s been able to buy up over sixty thousand acres at auction in the past year. Abandoned farm properties. This man is twenty-eight. By the time he’s fifty, you watch. Illinois will have done for him what it’s done for millions in the past. It will have made him rich.”

He sat rigidly against his seat, his dark blue suit shiny from many ironings. He spoke as if he had memorized his lines, and been waiting for years to deliver them. Once I noticed him looking long and carefully at us, through brown, slow eyes.

GORDON LOCKHART, LASALLE, ILLINOIS: “We got a little dust, but most of the blow was south of here. I am an International Harvester dealer. As of December of this year I will be able to sell you a tractor, a combine, just about any piece of equipment you want.

What Harvester did was very smart. They just went out, over the past few years, and repossessed all the abandoned IH equipment they could lay their hands on. Meanwhile, they were getting the factories running again. Nobody was getting paid, but the company organized an employee barter co-op, so Harvester people didn’t starve, either. We have company doctors and now a company hospital, so the triage doesn’t mean a thing to us. IH people are a big, rock-solid family. We are going to make this land work for us again, maybe better than it did before. No question. Better.”

A moment later he was asleep, snoring, his head thrown back, the midmorning sun full in his face. One of the trainmen came and tried to get him to eat some soup, but after he was awakened he spent the rest of the trip staring out the window.

JOHN SAMPSON, JOLIET, ILLINOIS: “We got the prison here, and a sure sign that things are picking up is that we got more inmates.

Robbers, second-story men, mostly. No more drug dealers. That kind of petered out. Nobody wants to import drugs into a country where the money’s worthless. We don’t have many murderers, either. No car thieves. Joliet’s kind of quiet. About half the bunks are filled. We got the electric chair back, and once in a while somebody gets the juice. Illinois abides by the U.S. Supreme Court rulings, even though there isn’t any Supreme Court anymore. We still work under the old laws, just like before Warday. Why shouldn’t we? This is part of America, and it is going to stay that way.”

The other passengers kept away from Mr. Sampson. It might have been better for him to travel in ordinary clothing. His Joliet prison guard’s uniform made his fellow passengers uneasy, and he had a lonely trip.

Twenty-five miles from the Loop, we began to pass through Chicago’s suburban and then industrial outlands. The suburbs are mostly depopulated. People have moved into the city centers or rejoined the small-town economy rather than contend with the difficult transportation problems of suburban life.

Just as Chicago’s skyline appeared ahead of us, we passed a tremendous sign, red letters on a white background:

I had again that sense of strangeness, as if I had come upon the spirit of the past alive and still moving in the land. It was a little frightening, but it could also fill me with the reckless energy of boosterism gone frantic.

We moved through a sea of factories with names like Ryerson Steel, Kroehler, Burlington Northern, and Nabisco. Some of these establishments were empty, but others were running—Nabisco, as it turned out, on what must have been an all-out schedule. A fifty-car freight was sided there, being loaded. People were swarming along the loading bays where trucks once came and went, hauling boxes on trolleys to the new rail siding. Another brand-new sign was in place here: NABISCO FEEDS AMERICA. I remembered them as a cookie manufacturer, but a passenger whose brother worked there explained that the company was now producing high-protein baked goods of all kinds: breads, biscuits, noodles, and other basic foodstuffs. I could not resist asking about Oreos. The answer:

“Available on a limited basis.”

By the time we reached Union Station, we had been thoroughly indoctrinated. Word had spread through the train that we were writing a book about the present condition of the country. “We’re sick of the ‘devastated Midwest’ cliché,” Tom Walker of Chicago said. “You guys make sure you see the real Chicago. Stay in the Loop. The Loop is Chicago.”

This is true, but not in the way he meant. From our own estimates, it appears that the city has lost perhaps half of its population in the past five years. Considering the destruction of agriculture, the famine, the flu, the lack of transportation, the economic chaos, and the massive depopulation, it is amazing that the city has retained such a strong governmental organization. All that’s left is the Loop. But the Loop is a good town.

Seeing the Loop, one would never know that Chicago had lost a single citizen. It has none of the subdued intensity of San Francisco or Los Angeles. The Loop is exploding with energy. The El works, and where it goes, the city works too. In the Loop there are buses and trolleys, seemingly by the thousands. At times it seemed hard to cross a street without stepping into one.

We are quite frankly at a loss to explain why this city, in the middle of what is arguably the most harmed area in the country, is so very much alive—or why the rural population we met on the train was so uniformly determined to reconstruct. We might have felt better about it if the energy of the place had seemed deeper and stronger. There is a frantic, gasping quality to it, as if the city were a runner who is beginning to know that, no matter how much he wants to succeed, he is going to have to drop back.

People who stay in places this badly hurt do so because they are in love with them. I suspect that the only people left here are the passionate.

A lot of prewar Chicago shops are closed. Jim stated this observation to a woman on Upper Michigan Avenue. She replied, “Sure. And a lot of them are open, too.” It would be outrageous to fault Upper Michigan for being less grand than it was before the war.

Gucci and Hermes are closed, as are Neiman-Marcus and Bonwit Teller. I. Magnin is selling suits for two paper dollars, and other no-nonsense apparel. They had a good selection of imported perfume, but all of it was priced in gold. This was generally true of imports throughout the store. The two exceptions were Canadian furs and British clothing. The British sell soft goods for paper dollars; they get their American gold through direct transfer for government services and such things as the sale of automobiles.

Judging from the aggressive British presence in the store, the program of tax incentives for accepting dollars, which Number 10 Downing Street announced last summer, is beginning to work. Jim and I both hope that Neiman’s in Dallas (which is very much open) will have some British things by the time we get back.

The Gold Coast is densely populated, but it does not glitter as it once did. Many of the high-rises have a noticeable proportion of boarded windows. Glass is in short supply locally, as it is almost everywhere.

Lake Point Towers has had especially severe problems in this regard, and is no longer the uniform bronze color it once was. In addition to boardings, there are many areas of differently tinted glass, some of it even clear.

The Tribune, which we were told by a number of people missed only six days after Warday, is much in evidence. The paper I bought for a penny was in one section of sixteen pages. Here are the front-page headlines for Wednesday, September 29, 1993:

The last story went on to explain that the Chicago Art Institute had joined with museums in Boston, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh to reclaim and restore paintings and other works of art abandoned in New York.

This project has been undertaken in response to the removal by many European museums of works by their national artists from New York galleries. A team from the Louvre even dismantled the Chagall murals from the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center and took them to Paris.

At the Art Institute, we stood looking at a painting from New York. It was Van Gogh’s Starry Night, taken a week before by the Chicago reclamation team. It is grayed by soot, but beneath the haze there remains the extraordinary vision of the heart of the sky.

While at the Art Institute, we met a member of its board of directors, Chandler Gayle. He informed us that the reclamation project was essential not only to forestall further losses to Europe, but also to protect the paintings themselves, which were deteriorating rapidly.

Dr. Gayle, it turns out, is director of the Nonspecific Sclerosing Disease Research Facility at the University of Chicago. We eagerly made an appointment to interview him about NSD later in the day.

By the time we were finished at the Art Institute, it was nearly eleven-thirty. Jim and I agreed that a visit to the Board of Trade was essential, especially in view of the headline in the Tribune.

We took a bus across Adams to La Salle and walked down to the weathered Art Deco structure.

Things have changed since the war. We asked a guard about this. “Better than ever,” he snapped.

The first sign of change is the number of messengers running in and out of the building. This area is not nearly as heavily rewired as is, say, California, and the most reliable method of conveying information from rural communities about the state of farm output is by hand. These messengers would pull up in orange Americars and Consensuses with CBT markings on the doors and rush inside, bearing their field information in briefcases similar to the one carried by the farmer on the train.

The whole length of La Salle was taken up with their cars, so much so that some of them had to scramble over the roofs to get to the building. A few had walkie-talkies, but most were without such sophisticated equipment. Inside the exchange were more runners, from the big trading houses and from individual traders on the floor. The Agriculture Department is also a major trader, using such warehoused grains as it has to attempt to stabilize prices.

As we entered the gallery and looked out over the Wheat Pit, a shout rang out: “Aggie’s out! The bull’s buried Aggie!” A split second of stillness, and then there was a renewed frenzy of trading, and the clerks began racing back and forth, changing their prices on the big chalkboards that have replaced the electronic quotation devices of prewar days. November wheat went from thirty cents to thirty-two to thirty-three-and-a-half in minutes.

I noticed that some of the traders wore green hats with what looked to be a bite taken out of the rim. Later I found out that this had to do with the war. Traders so decorated had been present on the day after Warday. (The Board had already shut for the day when the nuclear exchange took place.) On that day, with no electric power and the Board’s electronic devices out of commission, trading was active but extremely difficult. About noon, the Bond Pit closed for lack of information. Then a rumor swept the pits that there had been a nuclear exchange the afternoon before. Communications were so bad that Washington had been destroyed and New York burning for eighteen hours before Chicago learned about it.

The rumor precipitated a massive run-up in prices until one of the Board managers sounded the gong and entered the pit. The exchange was closed. At that moment the pit’s oldest trader, Willie “Eat My Hat” Dobbs, collapsed and died of a stroke.

The hats are in memory of him.

We stood in the gallery, watching the wild action. By twelve-thirty the price of wheat had gone to fifty-six-and-a-quarter cents.

As we left, it reached sixty cents. The dust storm had flattened hundreds of thousands of acres of wheat just on the point of being harvested, then buried it in dust.

By the time this book is published, the consequences of the Great Dust Storm of 1993 will be old news. An Agriculture Department official at the Board said that it would lead to a tripling of bread prices by Christmas, and probably spot shortages until next year’s harvest. As to the chances of another famine, he did not feel that the loss of a crop in just one grain would lead that far. But he couldn’t be sure.

INTERVIEW P. Chandler Gayle, NSD Specialist

My name is Chandler Gayle. I am a medical doctor. I was educated at Ohio State University Medical School. I was licensed by the state of Ohio in 1980 and the state of Illinois in 1992. I engaged in the practice of medicine in Cincinnati until June of 1992. I lost my wife, brother, and four children in the flu of 1991, and after that I decided I was willing to accept a greater level of risk in my career.

I had heard that there was a dearth of research specialists working on Nonspecific Sclerosing Disease, due to what was thought to be the contagious nature of the disease. I applied to the University of Chicago for a research fellowship in this field and was sent to London to study. I was confirmed by the Crown Medical Establishment in January of this year as an NSD specialist, after a six-month residency in war-related diseases at Middlesex Hospital in London.

I will tell you what I know of NSD in layman’s terms, but before I do that, I will outline for you my experiences during the flu epidemic.

In November of 1991 we were sure the worst was over in our area. It was by then clear that we were not going to be affected much, if at all, by radiation. Our main war-related problems were malnutrition and economic disruption. Of course, we knew that the population was debilitated. We Cincinnati doctors had organized into teams and groups to attempt to cope with the tremendous demand and the lack of communications. It was at a group meeting that I first heard of an unusual case of flu. We were very concerned. From the beginning, we saw a high potential for disaster.

The etiology of the disease was suggestive of a produced, rather than a natural, factor. It occurred to us then that the Cincinnati Flu might have been released by enemy action or by an accident at a military facility in the area. It is also possible that there was a radiation-induced mutation of the common flu strain known as Influenza A. This is the sort of flu most often associated with pandemics. The serotype was unusual; usually each new serotype of this disease follows a pattern of extrapolation from the previous serotype. Only when a new serotype is radically different from the one previous can a pandemic occur, because only then is the entire population of the planet susceptible.

The Cincinnati Flu was a radically different serotype, at least four generations removed from Delhi-A, the previous serotype. We still have no way to explain this. The Spanish Flu of 1918 was probably a similar radical serotype. It could be that the presence of large, weakened populations encourages the proliferation of new influenza serotypes. We just don’t know.

This influenza caused the most dramatic pneumonic infection we have observed. Infants and the elderly usually died within six hours. A strong, middle-aged adult might linger for three or four days. The mortality rate was about sixty percent in Cincinnati, and about three out of ten people contracted the disease. What that meant in human terms was that, during the six weeks that the virus was active, we lost nearly eighty thousand people. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem, about five thousand people died in Cincinnati in 1987, the year before the war. All of a sudden we were dealing with close to two thousand new cadavers a day, and they carried a highly contagious disease. To make matters worse, seven out of ten hospital personnel and half of all mortuary and graveyard workers contracted the disease. Eight out of ten doctors contracted it. We actually had to abandon the hospitals.

The real heroes of the flu were the people who went in there on their own to help out, and not only in Cincinnati, but all over the country. All over the world, I suppose.

I have always been sorry that the flu had to start in Cincinnati, I love that town. It was my home and it was where my children were born. I would have stayed there happily for the rest of my life, if it hadn’t been for the war.

But the flu’s come and gone. We still have NSD with us. I’ll turn to my work in this area unless you two have any more questions about the flu.

JIM: I was there during the worst of it. I remember the bodies in Eden Park.

DR. GAYLE: We were desperate. That wasn’t the only public park in the world where cadavers were stored. Look, this is tough for me. I’d really prefer to go on to NSD.

JIM: Sure. Thank you for sharing what you have with us. I know it’s hard.

DR. GAYLE: NSD is one of a cluster of postwar illnesses, previously unknown, which now affect the North American population.

The combination of the radical negative alteration of the environment and the extraordinary and ceaseless stress of postwar life is believed to have caused the appearance of these diseases, of which Nonspecific Sclerosing Disease is certainly the most serious. It is a central-nervous-system disorder and is apparently caused by unknown environmental factors. Current thinking is that contagion, if any, is limited to skin contact. NSD’s early symptoms are dry, rigid skin occurring in patches, most often across the chest or abdomen. The development of massive cells leads to the “lumpy” appearance that is the familiar presenting complaint. The progress of the disease is accompanied by generalized organic deterioration.

As it spreads throughout the body, the dense, massive cell tissue causes various types of problems, ranging from interruption of ducted flows to actual destruction of organs due to compression or constriction. Death occurs sometimes as a result of a particular functional problem, such as the interruption of the heart or irreversible trachial constriction, but more often is caused by general collapse and exhaustion. The fatality rate is at present one hundred percent.

At first the disease was approached by attempting surgical excision of the lesions. This was unsuccessful because of the broad-based nature of the disorder. A given patient at diagnosis will generally support two to three hundred lesions, most of them microscopic, spread throughout the body. Subsequently, chemotherapy and radiotherapy were tried, but the lesions were not responsive. Color therapy, utilizing so-called pink light, has tended to reduce speed of spread in early-diagnosed disease.

The permissible treatment group has recently been revised by the Centers for Disease Control to include only patients under thirty years of age, employed, and with dependent children. These patients will be treated with thrice-weekly exposures to pink light and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which has proven effective in reducing itching in surface lesions. They will be allocated three hundred grains of aspirin per twenty-four hours. When they are declared in stage-three disease and unable to function, they will be offered the euthanasia option.

Euthanasia is mandatory for NSD-diagnosed children under twelve years of age. Responsible resource allocation prohibits treatment of children for this disease because there is no chance whatsoever of recovery. The extreme discomfort associated with the progress of the disease makes euthanasia the only humane alternative in childhood cases.

Patients over thirty are given the CDC publication Blessed Relief, which describes effective methods of euthanasia and explains how to stage the disease at home, so the patient can determine when further delay may lead to a non compos mentis situation developing, which would make it illegal to practice euthanasia and impossible for the patient to do it himself. There are many different types of health-care professionals capable of carrying out this type of care in a humane and dignified manner.

It is thus important that patients learn the symptoms of the third-stage preludium so that they can carry out their plans at the first sign.

The burning sensation commonly known as firepox is the most common initial sign of stage-three disease. This means that there has been invasion of the organs extensive enough to cause a buildup of uric acid in the blood. The firepox sensation occurs when acid-laden blood enters open second-stage lesions. Double vision, the seeing of flashes, hearing loud noises without known source, feeling of elation alternating with deep depression, sudden bursts of intense sexual desire, inappropriate laughter, “Pell’s sign,” continuous vomiting, and the sloughing off of skin that had seemed healthy are signs that third-stage disease is fully developed. Euthanasia should be carried out without delay at this point.

The British Relief has determined that NSD is moving through the North American population at a nonexponential rate, suggesting that the illness is induced from something in the environmental background and is not spread person to person. British Relief statisticians have found that initial outbreaks of disease may occur anywhere on the continent, without regard to the background radiation level. For example, 3.34 percent of the population of Greater Atlanta have NSD, even though G.A. enjoys a radlevel little higher than it was prewar. On the other hand, Houston, with its high radlevel, has only a 1.59-percent incidence of the disease. Chicago, with a higher radlevel than Houston, has a 5.61-percent incidence.

The possibility of an artificially induced vector—such as a delayed-activation biochemical weapon—cannot be discounted in the case of NSD any more than it can with the flu, but the spottiness of the outbreaks, and their tendency to cluster around specific small areas within the affected regions, suggests that some other factor is at work.

I guess that’s all pretty technical, but it’s the straight truth as I understand it. As yet, there is no central effort to determine the cause of Nonspecific Sclerosing Disease, because it affects a relatively small segment of the population and appears so intractable to even the most advanced attempts at analysis, much less cure.

As I said at the beginning, I am a medical doctor. I am also a recent convert to Catholicism. I converted a week after His Holiness declared that officially sanctioned voluntary euthanasia was not murder in North America and the Russian states. The chief thing I have to say is that I believe America is going to get through this. There will come a day when we doctors do not have to routinely take life, when we can help all people in need and not worry about the triage. I look forward to that day.

I have to stop now. I have a meeting with my Viral Particle Team now. Their job is to attempt to find a viral disease vector for NSD, but so far nothing has turned up.

INTERVIEW Rita Mack, Professional Rememberer

I wouldn’t say we were extinct. I wouldn’t say that. But you look around this town and you see the worst emptiness in the black neighborhoods. There was a whole world here that is gone now. I mean, a way of thinking and being alive that you would call the black way. There was a certain way of talking, a way of acting, a special kind of love. And violence, there was that too—kids running around with the guns and the knives and whatnot. But the drugs were made in white factories—I refer here to the pills—and it was white capital in the form of Mafia money that brought in heroin from Asia. The black was the consumer. The black kid was the one they paid a dollar to let them mainline him out behind the school when he was fourteen years old. And why do they do this?

They know that the black kid is strong, so the smack won’t kill him before they get the profit, and the black kid is brave and smart, so he will be a good and cunning thief, and he is sad, wrapped up in that black skin of his, and he does not much like himself, so he will not be able to resist the smooth things the smack does to his body and mind.

But that’s over, that’s all gone. You had them dying in the millions, weakest first, step right up, and they just piled them up and they put up ropes around the worst neighborhoods like the air itself had the infection, which I suppose it did. I looked at the way they treated the dead and I thought, “They act like these are cardboard people, but they aren’t, so show some respect, show some grief. They might be cardboard to you, but they had long histories in their minds, just like you do.”

I am referring to the flu now. These are my subjective impressions, you see. I consider myself a poet. I am not educated in the sense of having degrees, but in life, boy, am I educated. I have a Ph.D. in starvation and an M.D. in Cinci Flu. I know how to sing. I am a rememberer of the old songs. I remember all the old blues, the songs of black people getting along somehow in the hot sun, the backs bent beneath the weight of work and the minds flashing with music, and also the songs of the urban street world, the songs that were like knives or like molten happiness. I want to say to you, we never had a chance. We were at the bottom of the list. The thirties saw a hell of a lot of black people starve. So did the forties and the fifties. We came out of the Depression only in the sixties.

Then Martin Luther King said what was in our hearts. We knew how much we were worth, that we were sacred as all men of the earth are sacred, that we had in us the same spark of God any human being had, and we could lift up our hearts on high.

I was raised in Gulfport, Mississippi, and I remember the color line very damn well. I’m fifty-six. They pulled down the color lines in the sixties. I am stained by those memories, though, and I’ll never really believe that anybody who lived under segregation is truly free. We cooperated, black and white, in mutual humiliation. They imposed it and we endured it. Separate water fountains in the bus stations, and separate lunch counters and sitting in the back of the bus and the top of the movie theater. A thing like that stays with you. Sometimes I see lines where there aren’t any lines. Sometimes I think it’s still then. I could let it lie, but I owe this remembering to all black people who remain alive, and all human beings worth the title.

We moved to Chicago in ’63, me and Henry. Let’s see—’63 to ’73, that’s ten years. To ’83 is another ten. Eighty-four, eighty-five… we lived together in this city for twenty-eight years. Lord, I was twenty-six when I came here with that man. Lord, I was a girl!

My Henry was a fine and loyal man and he made a good living.

He was a baker. But big time, a factory baker. Sure, there was trouble. Some people didn’t like a black man in that job. Naturally—it was a good job! But Henry, he knew what he was doing, how to bake ten dozen loaves of bread in those giant ovens and never burn a one. He also knew how to hold a good job and not let it go.

As a kid he was on the migrant circuit, this and that, digging beets here and peanuts there, and picking cotton. He knew the difference between a good job and a bad job.

He got the flu, that man. He had lost forty pounds. We were living off roots and stuff. We would get some bread now and again from the city delivery. Bread and whatever else they had. Spinach one day. Collard greens another. Fried pork rind another. Then peas. You never knew. But thank the Lord for those trucks. There are good people in the world, black or white or you name it.

I spend my time working to preserve black culture. You have to hold on to things these days. The little details, they’re important. I don’t have any numbers to back me up, but I’ll bet way more than half the black people are dead and gone. Right here in Chicago, you see all these empty black neighborhoods. So many! Where are those people? They sure as hell didn’t retire to the country!

We were the poorest, we starved first and worst. Because we starved the worst, we were the weakest, so the flu hit us the hardest. Look, I lost my husband. I lost my children. But a lot of whites had the same thing happen. The difference is, I also lost everybody I knew, and everybody at work, and all but a few of the people who lived around me. So now my life is full of new faces, and not a lot of them are black. And that is certainly not the white experience.

Whites, you talk to them, and they lost a family member here, a friend there. I’m talking about loss on a different scale. The church I belonged to, for example—there are just thirty of us left, out of a congregation of a couple of hundred. Not to say they all died, but half of them did. The rest, they moved away, most of them looking for work or relatives or just a better color of sky.

Whites look sort of surprised nowadays when they see this big coal-tar black woman, which is me, coming along. I see it time after time when I go down to the Loop. A Negro. A black. One of them.

Before Warday they’d sort of close up on you. Look right through you. Like you didn’t matter, or they wished you didn’t matter. Now they just look and look. You can see that they are fascinated by your black face. I look at them, and in my heart I say, “I am looking at you with two million eyes, for my face is a million black faces, and the look I am giving you is the reproach of a million souls.”

I hear the whole world singing in my memories. You’ll never guess it, but I sing for my supper now. You’ll ask, “How can this furious woman possibly be an entertainer?” But that’s what I am.

An entertainer. You ever hear of the Cotton Club on State? Well, I am the star attraction, practically. I sing for them. I am memory for them. Blacks and whites come. They mix together more easily now, probably because the whites no longer feel so threatened.

There I stand, on that little stage in that boozy and smoky hall, and I sing out all the sorrow that is in my soul. I sing until it hangs in the air around me and I am so sad I could die because that’s the blues, but inside me where nobody can see there is God’s glory, and that’s the part of the blues they never talked about, but the part that’s most important. The blues are true music of the human heart, the truest on earth, I think. How can we give up on the people who created this, and say they have no genius? Black genius doesn’t have names attached to it. Black genius is not named Leonardo da Vinci or J. Robert Oppenheimer. Black genius flows in black blood, and has to do with pain.

I say we had a worse time than you did. Sure, why not? We were living from hand to mouth, most of us. Black meant poor. It also meant noble, and it meant good and full of joy that maybe had no business in there with the pain.

Am I angry? No, not anymore. I am working and there is food on my table. I’m singing for my supper. Every night before I go to sleep, I remember Henry. I had a picture of him, but it got lost.

My profession is to remember my people, and spread my memories among those who remain. I do it in songs. That is what they are for.

Anger

As we crossed Indiana on our way to Cleveland, the character of the passenger complement began to change. The train was still almost empty, but there was something familiar about the people.

They pushed and shoved and muttered. They were noticeably more tattered than the passengers on the run from Kansas City to Chicago had been.

I recognized an accent, the harsh nasal twang of my old home-town. Refugees from New York have settled all through Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Jim went up and down the train and found that these people were almost exclusively former citizens of the Bronx, with a scattering of Manhattanites. Most of them were laborers, a few professionals. They were traveling for many different reasons: to visit or seek relatives; to look for work; to buy things such as clothing, car parts, or furniture, in Cleveland. None of them were making long-distance journeys. Although many expressed a desire to return to New York, those who had tried said that there was no way around the Army cordon.

Why the Army would cordon off what remained of New York was a puzzling question, one we were very eager to answer. It couldn’t be radiation, not after five years. Of course, the radlevel will be higher by far than prewar, but we live with that in other places.

On the train there was a certain amount of talk about the World Series, which was being held this year at Fenway Park between the Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Pirates. We hadn’t encountered much talk of sports on our trip. Dallas doesn’t have a baseball team and we were running too hard in California to find out about sports.

Nobody on the train was going to the Series, but a lot of people were eager to see what the Plain Dealer had to say about it when they got to Cleveland.

We met one woman who was of special interest to me, as she was triaged and sick. She was going to Cleveland to visit a popular alternate practitioner, a witch named Terry Burford. I had been eager to interview an alternate practitioner, especially a witch. Since Warday our concept of witchcraft has, of course, changed radically, as they have begun to make themselves public as midwives, herbalists, and healers. How effective they are I do not know, but it seemed important to meet a modern practitioner, since so many of us may eventually depend on one for medical help.

Also on the train was one individual whose dress alone marked him as unusual and therefore of definite interest to us. We first saw this tall, elegant man heading from the sleeper to the diner.

He was completely out of place on the train. Jim got out his recorder and we followed him into the dining car.

His name was Jack Harper. He was an exchange officer with the Royal Bank of Canada at Toronto. He told us: “I am working on the development of the American Automobile Industry Refinance Plan with the Barclay’s Consortium, our bank, and the New Bank of North America. We’re developing a private gold backing for a currency to be issued by the big three automakers themselves. We feel that the best way to deal with the problem of restarting the industry is to attract as many skilled workers back to the Detroit area as we can, rather than attempt to move the plants south. We are hoping that the prospect of being paid in a gold-backed currency will satisfy the concerns about nonpaid work that made them migrate in the first place, and we are guaranteeing a year’s supply of Canadian beef to every registered member of the UAW who comes back. The combination of not getting paid and then getting hit by the famine has made these men extremely suspicious of their former employers.”

The waiter came up and Mr. Harper ordered his lunch. The train had two meals available: soup and salad, or hamburger. Mr. Harper ordered one of each, only to be told that there was a consumption restriction of one to a passenger.

“I hate the bloody States! Too bad there’s no flight from Chicago to Detroit. It would have taken half an hour and I wouldn’t be facing lunch in this diner.” He smiled tightly, but there was venom in his voice.

“Why do you hate us?”

“You mean you really can’t think why? That’s not surprising. I’ll tell you, the U.S. practically caused Canada to be destroyed. We were completely cocked up by Warday. The bank—you cannot imagine the anarchy. We lost not only our main computer but all our supporting computers as well. At the moment of the electro, we had about eight million in cash just evaporate, lost in the middle of electronic transfer. Within an hour the whole banking hall was filled with people shouting and waving paper records. We didn’t know what we were doing or where we stood. It was madness, terrible madness. And it was caused by the United States and the damned missiles and the damned war. The phones were out, the lights were out, even the lockboxes were unavailable because the electronic locking mechanism was on the fritz.

“Canada had one hell of a time because of your little twenty-minute war, let me tell you. Then there was the Russian business in Alaska Territory, to add panic to the whole affair.”

“What Russian business, and what is Alaska Territory?”

“It used to be the state of Alaska until you ceded it to us last year.”

“We gave you Alaska?”

“The treaty was signed in L.A. and Ottawa in June of 1992. We interned the Soviet naval units that had docked in Anchorage, and it was decided in Ottawa that our national security depended upon our remaining in Alaska. We paid you thirty-five million gold dollars, so you needn’t quibble.”

This did not seem like a very good price to us. “What about Prudhoe Bay? What about the Alaska Pipeline?”

“It ends in Vancouver. Now, if I may, I’d like to attempt my lunch. What sort of grain do you suppose this false hamburger is made of?”

“Soy.”

“I’d say oatmeal, from the taste of the thing. The meat is indistinguishable from the bread. Oh, waiter!” The waiter came over.

“Bring me a half-bottle of Beaujolais, please.”

“We have Coca-Cola, sir.”

“Bottled?”

“Fountain, sir.”

“Sad it’s not bottled. I really don’t want to get the damned Uncle Sam Jump yet again.”

I recalled laughing to Mexican friends about the Aztec Two-Step. If they were as hurt and embarrassed as I felt, they concealed it well.

“What do Canadians think about the U.S. now?” Jim asked.

“About the U.S. as a country? Very little, because it isn’t one. We deal with half a dozen separate governments down here. Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio are one country we deal with a lot. It has four governors and on the whole is fairly disunited, but we deal with it. We also deal with the South, which has its de facto capital in Atlanta. There are other states, of course, but if you get Georgia on your side, they go along. We have a great amount of business with New England, of course. The Bostonians and the Vermonters are the two most vociferous lots. Then the states of Washington and Oregon are an independent entity. They have a joint legislature but two governors, so that can be complicated. California is the easiest. Governor Campbell is the beginning and end of power there.”

“What sort of dealing do you do?”

“Canada in general, or just us bankers?”

“You personally.”

“I do financings, mostly. We offer Commonwealth pounds, Canadian dollars, British pounds, and gold, generally in return for substantial equity ownership, which we then sell on the American Trades Exchange in London.”

“The American Trades Exchange?”

“It makes a market for persons wishing to buy and sell instruments of ownership in American plants and equipment, trademarks, patents, and proprietary secrets. For example, one can buy a complete set of plans for the Boeing 747, including all supporting documentation, wiring diagrams, and subordinate electronic equipment schematics, and the right to use them, on that exchange. The 747 plans are going for eight million dollars gold or equivalent. I know this because a Canadian company has been attempting to buy them. We are financial guarantors in part of the deal. My involvement is in establishing acceptable currency equivalencies for the gold. Excuse me.” He called the waiter. “Will you take this back and give me the soup, please? Amtrak really ought to get hold of some meat, if you want to have hamburgers on your menu.”

The waiter took back the partially eaten hamburger and returned with the soup.

“It’s not hot. I want it scalding. Boiled, do you understand?” He turned to us. “Sorry. Where were we?”

I had a question that was a little off the subject of banking, but after our experience in California, I was eager to know the answer.

“Is the Canadian border patrolled?”

He smiled. “Very, very carefully. And it isn’t because we don’t like you, mind, or don’t want you coming over, but rather for your own protection. There are Canadians, I’ll tell you frankly, who are perfectly capable of violence against you Americans. So we think the passport/visa system is really best. They’ve pretty well cleared out the refugees that came into Saskatchewan and Manitoba from the Dakotas, so that particular disturbance is over. You’ve got to understand, it was your war and our country was just incidentally thrown into chaos in the process.” He waved his soup spoon. “Let me ask you a question, and since I’ve been so frank with you, be frank with me. Before you encountered me, did you ever for even one moment think of what had happened to Canada? Of what we were going through because of you? Even that we were there? Did you?”

We had to admit the truth: we had not.

Jack Harper smiled his tight smile and went back to his soup.

INTERVIEW Terry Burford, Midwife and Witch

I’m working toward delivering a baby a day. Right now I do about three or four a week. At the moment I’ve got fifty-eight patients in the midwifery and about two hundred in my general practice. I’ve got thirty psychiatric patients divided into four groups. Also, I have my own coven, Rosewood, and I’m elder of four covens that have hived off from Rosewood. I keep office hours from seven to seven, and I always visit my patients in the home. I can’t really work on anybody unless I know them and what kind of energies there are in their home environment, and preferably at work also.

I’ll take a fee of a dime for an office examination or fifteen cents for a home visit, plus ten cents to a dollar for the various preparations I might prescribe. Rosewood does healing rituals for free. I offer a complete midwifery service, with counseling and support throughout the pregnancy, for three dollars, which includes the delivery. If the child is defective or born dead, the fee is refundable. I lose about a third of the babies and one mother out of ten. My losses are almost always due to complications resulting from radiation exposure. I do euthanasias on profoundly crippled or retarded newborns for free. Also, I do abortion counseling and perform abortions.

I have been a witch since I was ten years old. My mom was a witch, and her mom before her, all the way back, but I went to Ohio State and NYU, where I got an M.S. in clinical psychology. I am a Jungian analyst, with a strong Wiccan override. Prewar, my kind of practice would have been on the periphery of society, but things have changed so much that people are flocking to us witches now, primarily for healing and midwifery. I am a good herbalist, and I really can accomplish a lot with my medicants. And herbs can give you the kind of dramatic cure that an antibiotic can achieve—if you can get an antibiotic.

My practice as a witch is also my faith. I follow the old pre-Christian religion. We worship the Earth as a Goddess, and Her male manifestation, the Horned God. Our emphasis on ecstatic union with the planet has accounted for the postwar growth of the Wiccan movement. As most Wiccans tend to be antihierarchical, we also feel comfortable with the Destructuralists—more than one witch is also a Destructuralist.

We work from our own homegrown rituals. Many covens follow various public traditions, such as the Adlerian method started by Margot Adler in ’88, and the older Starhawk method. I am a “fam-trad” witch in that my craft comes from an old tradition in my own family. To join one of my covens requires a two-year apprenticeship. Right now we have four trainees for Rosewood—all we can take at one time—and a waiting list of sixty.

Our lives are hard and our hours are long. Twenty-hour days are not unusual. Take the day before yesterday. Here’s how it went:

3:55 A.M. My assistant, Kathy Geiger, wakes me up. Betty Cotton has come to term. Kathy has already gone to the Cottons’ house and examined Betty. She is nearly fully dilated. I grab my instrument and herb cases and we are on our way. We’ve just bought a new Chrysler vanagon, so it’s no longer necessary to go pedaling through the streets of Cleveland on a bike. For the past year, Cleveland has had a good fuel supply. Gas is twenty cents a gallon here, which is certainly higher than you’d like, but we manage.

I find Betty and her husbands managing her contractions very well. I use a modified Lamaze technique. These are very special people, in that they are totally radiation-free. Betty is one of the few people in the United States who had a bomb shelter, and she remained in it for a month after Warday, so even though Cleveland got a dusting from the Dakota strikes, she was not affected. Both of her husbands are from the deep South, Mike from Gulfport and Teddy from Savannah, so they are clean too. The chances of a mutant are very small. Betty also owns a geiger counter, which she uses to clean up hot spots in her immediate environment. This is her sixth child, so things are pretty well organized around here.

The whole family is participating. The twins are boiling water, the middle kids minding the youngest, and the oldest daughter, Tabitha, is playing soothing music on her guitar. A good scene, and they get a boy of five pounds eleven ounces, healthy and strong.

All I do is bathe him and get him breathing and give him to Betty and give her a cup of raspberry leaf and borage flower tea to promote lactation. Then I take off to grab some more sleep after making sure that we aren’t going to have any hemorrhage, that nobody’s got fever, and Betty’s blood pressure is good. Betty Cotton—matriarch to a family of six kids and two husbands. I wish I had more as strong and happy as that bunch.

6:50 A.M. I wake up again and eat a bowl of boiled oats and drink some ground ivy and wild mint tea. My office is already full.

First patient is a cancer case who’s been triaged. He comes for counseling, staging of his disease, and visualization therapy. VT works well for certain cancers, especially tumors of the cerebral cortex, but Joe T.’s bone cancer is proving resistant to our best efforts. He is in great pain. I have been prescribing wild lettuce juice rubbed in at pressure points—armpits especially—for its narcotic effect, but the pain is now breaking through even this drug, which is one of the strongest in my pharmacopoeia. I notice that he is coughing. His disease has spread to his lungs or he has acquired a secondary pneumonia. I tell Joe that he probably has at most a couple more months. He will suffer great agony. I recommend that he let me help him to sleep. His wife comes into the treatment room and the three of us agree. I know not to draw these things out. Joe could go to the hospital for euthanasia, but they would probably make him wait another week. Also, they do not do it with the same atmosphere of love and support. Kathy calls the Rosewooders who are available and we go together to the ritual space we have built at the back of the house. This is a large, pleasant room, full of sun from the skylights. There are flowers in vases. We take Joe to the big lounger and he lies back on it. I pour a tincture of henbane in his ear. His wife of twenty years sits beside him. They gaze at one another, talk a little. They cry. The henbane tincture is very powerful. When we see he is beginning to lose consciousness, we begin to sing. We sing “Deep River,” then one of our own songs, “Joy in the Morning.” Sometime during the last song, Joe’s eyes roll back and he coughs three times, quite violently. His wife calls him once, then again, louder. Then she bows her head.

7:45 A.M. I see a child with persistent diarrhea. A manual examination of his abdomen indicates gas. The transverse colon is tender. A rectal feels clear. Still, there aren’t any intestinal bugs going around and he has been eating his usual diet. He isn’t triaged, so I call the hospital and order up a colon study, and refer it to my Project Partnership M.D., Dr. Stanford Gittleson. Sandy will see the boy at three o’clock this afternoon. The sonograms of the child’s colon will be in his hands by then. I say a silent prayer, Goddess grant that all this child needs is a little sumac root and peppermint tea.

7:55 A.M. I see an elderly woman whose symptoms suggest NSD. I prescribe a depurative tea of burdock root and red clover blossom and a cataplasm of comfrey leaf, which we currently have available. One of the coveners takes her into the instruction room to teach her the use of the medicants and give her supplies. Because she is over sixty, I do not charge her. I will wait until the disease progresses a little more before I tell her what she has.

Over the next four hours I see thirty more patients. Then I stop for a lunch of soybean soup and a glass of milk. Afterward I drink a cup of bee balm tea and read the Plain Dealer. There were two fires in Cleveland last night. Since insurance ended, the number of fires in this country has decreased dramatically.

2:00 P.M. I fill out my daily report for the Relief. Mainly, the English want to know about any contagious diseases. Except for a possible with the little boy I referred to Sandy, I don’t have any.

Unless NSD is contagious. If the English or the Research Group in Chicago know the answer to that question, they certainly aren’t telling us.

I’d like a bath, but there’s no time for that. I wash my hands instead, and then it’s time to meet one of my psychotherapy groups. Since Warday the number of people in therapy has dropped by more than half. I think most of us work so hard we don’t have time to be crazy. And nobody in this group is actually insane, not in the classic sense. There are ten members, five of them with touch neurosis, which is one of the more common current problems. There are many people who have developed a pathological terror of touching things because of the threat of hidden radiation. Two of my male patients suffer from impotence. Again, fear is a strong factor here. I have two women who have recently discovered they are gene-damaged, and one who is trying to cope with being triaged at the age of twenty-six, as a result of drinking strontium 90 in some milk she got last year in Dallas. Everybody is scared of milk because of the way cows concentrate strontium 90, but it has become a vitally important food. Milk, eggs, dairy products, soybeans, corn, and oats are our staples nowadys. Some chicken, but eggs are now too important to justify the slaughter of potential layers.

One of the things that sets people back nowadays is poor nutrition. I try to teach modern nutrition techniques, how to adjust to a reduced-protein diet. I get a lot of people coming in worrying about leukemia or anemia, who simply aren’t eating right. Vitamin C and D deficiencies are most common, followed by proteins and amino acids. I can usually tell by looking at people or talking to them what their general deficiency problem is.

Most of the people in the afternoon group suffer from lack of good nutrition as much as anything else. People in therapy also tend to be the rigid personalities. This is an era of extreme change, and these are people who are afraid of change. Deep panic reactions are common. Most of them have very vivid memories of prewar times, and they are clinging to them. In better-adjusted people, prewar memories are always kind of hazy.

3:30 P.M. I go from the therapy group to the daily business meeting of the coven. One of our problems is record-keeping. We have applied to the Relief for a computer, but so far no response.

They’ve been granting small computers to certain types of farms, so we decide to look into that program. For a suburban community like Shaker Heights, we have a big farm, seven acres. Two are in herbs and the rest in corn, soybeans, and vegetables. We’re even trying to grow watermelons in a semi-sheltered environment we’ve built, though they are officially an illegal crop here because of the likelihood of failure. As an experimental effort, they are tolerated.

We also have a geiger counter, and run a radiation program. I have the whole property checked every day.

4:00 P.M. I start on my housecalls, taking along Kirby Gentry, who assists me in this part of the practice and is going to take it over sometime soon. In the ideal world, I would devote myself to ritual, meditation, one-on-one counseling, and critical procedures such as deliveries and euthanasias. But this is hardly the ideal world, so we get in the vanagon and set out. First stop is the Barkers’, where the little girl has chicken pox with a secondary staph infection. On the way in, I see that the Relief has quarantined the house. The little girl, Dotty, is really bad. I have prescribed applications of juice of sundew to the areas of most severe eruption, but I can see only slight improvement. This is one of the few herbs with a staph-effective antibiotic. The kid has acquired secondary pruritis from scratching. Her fever is 106. She is delirious and suffering agonies from itching. I think we might very well lose this child. I make sure her fingernails are trimmed back so that she won’t break her skin so much. Then Kirby and I give her a bath in butter-fat soap and water. She screams from the cold. We reapply a paste of myrrh, golden seal, and cayenne to the sites of infection and make sure she is comfortable. The mother tells us that the children’s clinic won’t accept her daughter because of the risk of contagion, but they have promised to send antibiotics if I approve. I sign the form.

Next stop is a house where both husband and wife have NSD.

Their three children will soon be on what the English call the “orphaned list.” We are getting to know these kids, because they will be in the fostering program we do with the Diocese of Cleveland and the Council of Churches.

We do five more housecalls, and we find a situation where a diagnosis of tuberculosis is highly probable. Yesterday I gave scratch tests to Mr. and Mrs. Malone, and they are both positive.

They also have hacking coughs and look generally debilitated. I have no choice but to isolate them and call the Relief. TB is a serious contagion, and we cannot risk letting it spread to the general population. The supply of curative drugs like Isoniazid is too limited to run that risk. The Malones will be hospitalized. Even though Hank Malone is triaged, he will get drug therapy, primarily because the disease is so contagious and long-term hospitalization is too expensive. I encourage them as best I can, explaining that if a triaged person is going to get seriously ill, TB is his best choice, because all cases are treated.

Now it’s six. I’m tired. I go home and sit down to dine with Kirby and four other witches. We eat, as usual, in silence, too exhausted to talk, too hungry to want to.

RUMORS The Garden of Eden

We had been traveling on trains almost continuously. To vary our experience, we took Trailways from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. It’s a three-hour-and-ten-minute journey over the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes, both of which are in rather poor condition. There is considerable shoulder erosion, and what the bus driver called “settling,” which makes the road look wrinkled and feel as if the bus is a boat on a choppy sea.

We asked a number of passengers if they had heard anything about a part of the country being a Garden of Eden.

They certainly had.

TOM MOON: “Hawaii, where I took a vacation in 1977, is now a Garden of Eden. The islands were annexed by Japan in 1989. All non-Asians were forced to return to the States. The official language of Hawaii is now Japanese. There is no rationing and people are getting rich off Jap tourists. The Japanese consider American food the height of luxury, and have kept McDonald’s and Burger King open. Cokes and Pepsis and milkshakes are readily available.

You can go to a twenty-course luau for a dollar. There are theaters that play only old American movies, and the local television stations rerun old network tapes, complete with all commercials, which the Japanese love.”

FACT: Hawaii remains a part of the United States. There is, of course, a substantial Japanese presence, and the Royal Navy maintains its Western Pacific Fleet HQ there. The local fast-food establishments are closed—as they are everywhere—due more to a lack of cheap meat and soy protein from the mainland than to any local economic difficulty. The local Coca-Cola bottler has recently begun to get syrup again, and is expecting to restart production soon. As far as television stations are concerned, forget it. The functional parts were shipped to California years ago, which is one of the reasons L.A. and San Francisco have TV themselves. This is quite a sore point with Hawaiians, by the way. Rationing is worse than it is stateside because of the island’s limited ability to grow grains and maintain its own herds. If you don’t like breadfruit and pineapple, do not go to Hawaii.

JOAN R. HAMNER: “There is a Garden of Eden on the Texas coast. The British have built a new port to supply Europeans in the States with luxuries we Americans can’t get. This city has a huge entertainment complex where they show first-run European movies and plays. The Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Shakespeare Company come. In this port there is a four-star French restaurant. Americans are not allowed, but only Europeans and Japanese. The city is all new.”

FACT: There is no such city in Texas, and we suspect that it doesn’t exist at all. Walter Tevis placed a similar city somewhere on the Pacific Coast, but almost in the same breath discounted the story as a rumor.

CARL DIETRICH: “Seattle is a Garden of Eden. The Japanese have taken over the state of Washington and are soon going to be turning out such things as high-pulse electromagnetic motors in the old Boeing facilities. They are planning to retrain former Boeing employees, to take advantage of the cheap labor. Soon the United States won’t even need roads because of the off-road cars and stuff they will make. Also, the Japanese are now basing their fishing fleet there instead of in the home islands. As a matter of fact, things are so good in Washington that immigration is out and you will be turned back at the border.”

FACT: We are not aware of any major Japanese presence in the Pacific Northwest. This area has become a thriving agricultural and shepherding community. Vegetables, apples, and mutton from the state of Washington are beginning to be exported to other parts of the country, particularly California.

The Boeing facilities are not functioning at the present time, although company spokesmen maintain that they will be producing the 800 series of aircraft there in the future. They will be powered by conventional jets.

VERNA MCDUFF: “Litchfield County, Connecticut, is a Garden of Eden. Rich survival freaks escaped into Litchfield County right after Warday and have formed a separate country, which has been recognized by Great Britain and Japan. It is about the size of Liechtenstein. It has its own gold currency and its own form of government, which is based on family status. The Europeans allow it to exist because these old families have such long-standing ties with them. Many of them own parts of the world’s great companies, such as Phillips-IBM and Lever House. Litchfield has a fully functional telephone system and satellite TV from Europe, and is full of luxury European cars such as Daimler-Benz 4WDs and Leyland Stars. Unemployment in Litchfield is zero, and there is no such thing as malnutrition or birth defects. The living standard is even better than it was prewar.”

FACT: We learned in White Plains that Litchfield County has a population of about a thousand, roughly twenty percent of whom are triaged because of Warday exposures. The county hospital was closed in 1991 due to a lack of doctors, leaving only alternate practitioners and religious organizations to serve the population.

INTERVIEW Amy Carver, Teacher

Well, I feel stranger than I thought I would, doing this. Although it’s nice to talk about yourself. Ever since I got Joan Wilson’s letter from Kansas City about you guys, thoughts have been running through my head about what I would say. I hope I can do the whole thing without talking about the World Series. But the Pirates won the first game, so we’re all very, very excited.

Let’s see. I’m supposed to identify myself? Yes? Oh, you’re going to be totally silent. What is this, some kind of psychological thing? You’re smiling. Is it? Are you really psychologists? Are you British? Joan said you were from Dallas.

Well, anyway, I am Amy Hill Carver. I teach junior high at the Baldwin New School in Baldwin, Pennsylvania. This school was reorganized in 1991, and serves as the central educational facility for all the surrounding suburbs.

I am thirty-seven years of age. Before Warday I was a freelance writer. I had done work for all the major women’s magazines—Cosmo, Good Housekeeping, Bazaar, The Journal, all of them.

And then your next question is where was I on Warday. Well, I was on my way to Killington, Vermont, to ski. I was thirty-two years old, making good money, single, and there had been an early snowfall. So off I went for a long weekend. I heard nothing, saw nothing. The car radio went off. I thought, thank you, Mr. Ford. I continued on to Killington. When I got to the Holiday Inn, it turned out that all the radios and TVs were out in the whole place. There was an uproar. Nobody knew what had happened.

I skied anyway, all that afternoon. I remember it was powdery and not very settled, but it was still fun. I’ve never skied since, not after that day. So that’s where I was on Warday. Skiing.

It wasn’t until the next day that people started saying stuff—New York had been bombed, there had been a nuclear accident, a reactor explosion, that sort of thing. We saw a couple of helicopters. The out-of-town papers didn’t get delivered. The second morning of my trip, I found the dining room of the hotel closed. No breakfast, and no explanations. That scared me. So I headed for home, which was New York.

I was in Hartford when I started seeing this immense black cloud to the south. It wasn’t a mushroom cloud or anything. Just a huge black thing like a giant blob or something. By the time I was in Middletown, it was all the way across the southern sky.

It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. I stopped in Middletown and asked about it at the gas station. The man said there had been a bomb. He told me not to go any farther, because New York was burning.

I remember I just stood there staring at that old man. There was nothing to say. The radios and TVs were out. Many car ignitions were out. Even so, cars were streaming up from the south.

And there was that cloud.

I stayed that night in Middletown—I was very lucky to get a motel room. Refugees were all over the place. When I got to the room, I found that there were six other people in it already. Two of them had these disgusting swellings, one all over his back and one on his face. I did not know then what flash burns look like if they’re left untreated. I learned, though.

When the sun went down, we saw that the cloud was full of lightning. I decided then and there to stay inside the motel as long as I could. Other people did too. We were scared there was radiation.

We had a very hard time. Food ran out. My car got stolen. I lived at that motel for months. Nobody knew what to do. The manager kept a tab, but he couldn’t get the bank to pay him on his credit-card chits. Then the bank closed. Food got really scarce. I used to get a slice of bread and make it into soup, seasoned with salt and pepper. No, wait a minute, that was months later. In the famine.

What saved me was staying in that motel as long as I did. I’m over thirty, single and childless. I didn’t get much of a dose. I don’t think I’m in a high-risk cancer situation. I have a little cluster of B cells on my nose, but they slough off as rapidly as they form, which is a good sign. Even if they do become cancerous, they will treat me because skin cancers are curable.

I was in that motel for six months. We became a family. The Brentwood Middletown Motel People. We had deaths and a marriage, and we foraged together during the food shortage.

One day a man came through, traveling from the West. He said Pittsburgh was good. There was food, and the people were okay.

Outsiders were welcome there. So I thought, why not? Our motel family was down to ten or twelve people. We’d gone through the worst winter of our lives together, and we were ready to say good-bye. You don’t necessarily want to stay with people you endured hell with. Every time you look at them, you see the past.

It took me two weeks to get to Pittsburgh. I hitched, took the bus, took the train.

You know, talking about Warday has a funny effect on me. I used to be very unemotional about it. But now I think about it in terms of humanity. And places. Not that motel. My beautiful prewar places. I had a loft in SoHo, can you believe it? A big white loft with the kitchen in the middle of the space. Light on three sides. I could see the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building. I remember the way the brick streets looked in the rain. I remember my friends. And my editors and co-workers. Cassie Stewart. I loved Cassie. She was full of laughter and fun. Sometimes I dream about those people. Cassie and Mindy and Janice and all the people at Cosmopolitan. That was really my best market. I did sort of self-help articles. “Glamorize Yourself for that Special Him”—that sort of thing.

In those days I wanted to be a novelist. I dreamed of being a female William Kotzwinkle. Do you remember him? He was a novelist in those days. He did this novel called Fata Morgana that was practically unknown. But it was simply wonderful. I always wanted to write like him. And Swimmer in the Secret Sea, which Redbook published in ’76. I was working on a novel called Shadowgirl.

It was about a woman who thinks she is a shadow. About how she discovers she is real, and this basically destroys her. Before that, her life was a fairy tale of submission. Easy, but dangerously self-defeating. I had about three hundred pages done, and my agent really liked it. God knows where it is now. I must say, I do fantasize about going back to Manhattan and seeing what my old place is like. I bought my loft for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Forty thousand dollars down. My parents bought it. I hired a locator, a guy here in Baldwin, and he found out they’d died during the famine. I felt awful about it. For a while I had this nightmare where they are sitting in the kitchen in our house. It’s a sunny morning and the birds are singing and the apple tree outside is blooming. Only the kitchen doesn’t smell like bacon and eggs and coffee. And I look at them, and they are human skeletons.

I couldn’t help them, I know that. The locator got the state of New Jersey to issue me a provisional deed to their house. It’s a ruin, I guess. Nobody lives in Morristown, New Jersey, anymore.

I have gotten to the point where I say, Amy, you just get through today. Or this morning. Or this minute. Whatever. I just want to survive the next ten minutes.

I love my job. Teaching is so very important. It’s incredible to realize, but some of the very small children in the Baldwin Elementary School were born after Warday. They’re going to grow up without reference to the old world. They’ll never know what it was like.

So what are we teaching your children these days, you ask? Actually, most of the parents don’t ask. They’re too tired. The people of Pittsburgh work very, very hard. We’re highly organized. This is a free-enterprise town, but we really do a lot of cooperating with one another. Our area is the most radiation-free in the whole Midwest. West of here, they got the dust from the missile fields.

Pittsburgh is an important place because it’s healthy and strong. There is a lot of farming toward the Pennsylvania border and in eastern Ohio, just this side of the radiation areas. I heard there was this giant dust storm out there recently, but it didn’t get as far as Canton, so we’re okay. Pittsburgh sends its own agents to the farms in Ohio and Pennsylvania and West Virginia to buy up food. We have a unique system. The whole city is on a co-op food plan, the Greater Pittsburgh Sustenance Program. The program figures out what we need and where to get it, and allocates the food by person. We all have these ration cards. You can get hung in the Allegheny County Jail for a class-one ration violation. That’s if you steal food and sell it. That’s the worst. To give you an idea of how well put together we are, the Relief has designated us a Prime Recovery Area, meaning that we get such things as computers for the school and demonstrable-need programs like Sustenance. We also get extra shipments of medical supplies.

In junior high, we teach land management and radiation control, animal husbandry, principles of small-scale farming, FAN-TIX, reading skills, and business math. The kids endure it all, except FAN-TIX, which of course they love. And the new Phillips and Apple computers are great fun. We get feeds from the British via satellite, which is a great improvement because now the kids can communicate with students in England. They can have conversations, and it means a lot to them to know that somewhere across the sea, there is an unhurt world full of people who care about us.

I remember when we just assumed Europe had been hit. During the famine, for example. The world was ending, I thought then.

One evening a funny-looking jet flew over the school and we thought, oh God, the Russians. We lost the war and now the Russians have come.

All night there were planes landing at the airport, which is only a couple of miles away from us here in Baldwin. We hadn’t seen a plane in six months. Boy, was this place in an uproar! I’ll never forget, we were planning to surrender the town. I went out there with half the rest of the people and we saw all these planes on the runway with target insignia on the side. Most of us were on foot, a few in trucks and cars. We were coming up the road to the terminal when a man in a white uniform came out with a bullhorn and called out, “We are a Royal Air Force Relief Support Unit. We are friends.”

The RAF! I just sat down in the road and cried. They came over and checked us for radiation. When they found we were clean, they sent up a cheer.

They were all in white uniforms. They’d come up from Atlanta.

They gave us kippers. They had zillions of kippers that had been salted in Ireland and packed for export in plastic bags, so they were totally uncontaminated. We filled our pockets with kippers and went home.

One of the most vivid memories I have is of those kippers. They were so good. I’d never had one before in my life.

You know, another thing I’d like to tell the rest of the world about the people of Baldwin is this: we work hard, but we also have lots of fun. We have a rugby team and a baseball team and a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe and a little theater and reading clubs and a thriving 4-H. Pittsburgh has the only satellite uplink in the Midwest, and we have been allocated short-wave receivers so we get the BBC North American service. As a teacher, the one special allocation I get is books and computer programs.

Which, by the way, reminds me of my Prince Andrew story, because it has to do with books. How long have I been talking? I’m getting hoarse! But this is really fun. I haven’t actually sat down and talked like this before. Not ever, just talked and talked.

Now I have to tell you I was really impressed with Prince Andrew last June. We were so excited. I remember Martha Dorris—she’s our Relief General Officer—got the RAF to give us shoe polish so we could get ourselves fit to see the Prince. Shoe polish!

We hadn’t polished a shoe for at least two years. But we shined ’em up for the Prince. The English were hilarious about the visit.

Or, as they put it in their bulletins, The Visit. Polished shoes. Best clothes. He came to inspect a farm, the school, the Relief operation. He was here for two hours, which was considered a great honor. Most places he only stayed half an hour.

I must say that before he came I was not all that overawed.

This is America, after all. We don’t have a king. But I was totally won over by what happened at the school. We had all been out to watch the royal plane arrive, of course. The most beautiful white airplane. To see that huge Airbus and the royal entourage, you would not have known that there had ever been a war. Here is the world turned on its ear, and the royals are going on just as always, like saying it’s all going to be all right. Civilization isn’t over.

The Visit was a totally self-contained production. First a band came marching down the stairs. Then they rolled out their own red carpet. Then a bunch of officers came along and saluted while some lords and generals came down. Then came the High Commissioner of the North American Relief. He had flown in from Toronto. He was dressed in a blue uniform, and did he ever look imposing! Then the Prince. He was in white. In my imagination I had visualized him as a very big man. But he was normal size. He moved quickly. They played “God Save the King.” We sang “America the Beautiful.” Then “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then he met the local Relief officials. Martha was very poised, but she was shaking like a leaf.

We teachers and the kids rushed back to the school. We had been selected for inspection, I think, mainly because we’re so close to the airport. I thought it would be a very formal thing. But he spent half an hour sitting on a chair in the auditorium, asking questions. What is the most important thing you are learning here? Tell me about the curriculum. Is it useful? Is it interesting?

He asked how well heated the school was. He asked after the health of the children. He went to the infirmary and read the records and inspected the medicine chest. He issued a Royal Warrant for tablet ampicillin, and we have never been without it since.

After he left, an equerry arrived with two suitcases of books.

They were a gift from the Prince. He asked that we read one poem each day from The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and suggested that we form a Shakespeare society, which we have done.

Of course, I know there are people who resent the British, but without them I think the United States would really have had a very hard time. When it came time for them to repay their debt for our help and support through two world wars, they didn’t hesitate.

I will never forget that.

INTERVIEW Charles Kohl, Student

I go to the Baldwin New School. My birthday is June eighth. I’m eleven. I like my school. There is always plenty of everything. We have all the sports stuff we want. I could have ten lockers if I wanted. We all stay just in the South Building. The senior high is on the top floor, we’re on the second floor, and the elementary school is downstairs.

I go to school in the winter. From April to October, me and my family work to tear down houses on our land so we can increase acreage. We have some apple trees, and we grow corn and green beans and stuff. When we lived in New Jersey we had so many scrubdowns I got allergic to the soap Mom used to make. Mom and Dad tried to move to New Mexico, but this guy from the Relief said we were crazy, it was very bad there, because there was a revolution.

When I got TB, they gave me pills at the hospital. There are kids, like in Texas or somewhere like that, who probably die if they get sick. We pray in school that God will keep us.

Dad was a stockbroker before the war. He will not talk about those times, except he says he worked in an office. Dad is strong. I used to think it was stock-breaking, like breaking horses, but Mom says it was a numbers job.

The United States is my favorite country. Of course, I love the King because of all the good things the Crown has done for us.

When Prince Andrew came here, I saw him. England must be a great place, and my ambition is to go there. My dad says they still use his stock skills there, so he might be transferred to London someday. He put our names on the list. If we go before I am fourteen, I could get to be a British subject and have my own computer. They also have frozen food there. I would like to be a pilot. But the United States is the greatest country in the world, Dad says, although that is not right, Miss Carver says. She says we had a hard time but we will get back. One time there were aircraft carriers as big as our school.

We have big plants here. There are problems with furnaces and controls and fuel and all kinds of stuff, so they can hardly go, although I saw smoke last week coming out of the Bethlehem Number One.

Dad says life is to work from six to six, eat from six to seven, read from seven to nine, and sleep the rest of the time. Mom has NSD, but she thinks she will be better. I think when she puts mineral oil on her tummy it is better. Miss Carver says I should love her and pray for her.

Our school computers are tied into the international information network. I am working on a program to defeat the holds so we can find out more about the world. Miss Carver says okay, but store my programs on disks, not in the internal memory, and officially she doesn’t know what I am doing. When a hold is imposed, it is always preceded by a synalog coding. It looks like it is coming in from the master program, but actually the master is just instructing your computer not to access the information. So I am revising our data-capture program to also capture the synalogs in the dump. That way I can find out their command sequences and probably get to where our program will automatically issue defeats anytime it sees a synalog being imposed.

Miss Carver wants to find out a lot of things she says are behind the holds. Miss Carver is from New York and she wants to know why people still can’t go back. Also, she wants to know about Russia and China.

There is this guy in our high school named Buddy Toro who tries to scuzz me half the time when I am on the computer. He will chat into my work and scoop whatever I am doing. Then he’ll alter my programs and superimpose something so my stuff comes out weird, like I’m supposed to have a geomorphic drawing but the earth looks like a pear and I get a C. He only goes after me. Our dads have trouble together. They are both on the Baldwin Council, and they are on opposite sides. The Relief wants the city to keep food allocation, but Dad thinks it should go back to the state government, which we do not at the moment have. We have to get a new one, Dad says.

I have a girlfriend. She is Stacy Boyce and I like her because not only can she play rugby football, she is really neat. We are writing a saga together on our class computers. Fifth grade has a new Phillips that is really fast. It accesses ten kilobytes in the time it takes our Epson to do one. If they wanted to, they could pull up a thousand pages all at once and do instant correlations. Anyway, she is Morgan Le Fay in this saga and I am King Arthur, and we love each other even though we are brother and sister. Last night in the saga I kissed her, and she comes back, “save.” That was so beautiful.

I gave her hard copy this morning, and she turned all red and said she would keep it forever. Her dad and mine were brokers together when, as my mom says, America was still young.

But we are young now, Stacy and me.

A Wanderer

East of Pittsburgh there are mountains, then there are farms, then there are fields full of wild growth, and a tumbledown look to the towns. Not many people are aboard the Empire State, the train that runs from Pittsburgh to Albany via Scranton. We are carsick and uncomfortable. This was not a passenger line before the war, and the roadbed is brutal. I doubt that we’re going much more than forty.

We reach Scranton after midnight. There is a cold, wet wind blowing out of the northwest. The air is fresh, with a tang of woodsmoke. We are leaving the train here, shifting to Trailways.

To pare some hours off our journey, we’ll take the bus across 84 to Poughkeepsie, then catch a midmorning train down to the end of the line in White Plains, the headquarters of the New York Military Area.

The terminal is empty, lit by a single light. There are no streetlights in this neighborhood, and we are forced to rely on a map, reading street signs as best we can.

The Trailways station is more active. People camp here and there in the waiting room. Somebody is playing a dulcimer quite well, but I do not recognize the tune.

The restaurant is open, selling cheese sandwiches, cherry pie, and a local brand of yogurt I eat a slice of the pie, which is far less sweet than what used to be sold in bus stations. We get coffee, which is generally made from toasted grain these days, and this is no exception. But it’s hot.

There is one other passenger on the Poughkeepsie bus, a small woman of delicate beauty. Her eyes are large and dark, her lips full, her brown hair framing her soft face, which is as pale as a shadow.

She tells us she is on her way back to Boston. Her family lives in Scranton, but she is in school at Harvard. She is studying twentieth-century English literature. I am delighted. It was a discipline I thought might have been abandoned in the rush to prepare people for practical careers. “I’ve applied to read at Oxford or Cambridge, but I doubt I’ll make it. There are a thousand American applications a semester, just for my field. They take six in modern literature.”

“What’s it like at Harvard?” Jim asks.

“Difficult, in the sense of physical survival. I’m a senior. I arrived there in the fall of ’88, right? I was just starting my freshman year when the war happened. I stayed there because it was obviously mad to try to get back to Scranton. I couldn’t even make a phone call home for months. I wrote, but the letters never got through. Harvard was in total chaos. People were leaving—students, professors, administrators. Trying to get home, wherever their homes were. Northeastern University, which is in the Fenway in Boston, officially closed. There were all kinds of problems there. The students rioted when they couldn’t get food. I heard that there were shootings in the Fenway. In any case, one can now get a former student apartment there for next to nothing.

“Harvard was a bit better off than Northeastern. We thought of the war as an awful sort of irony, because there had actually been a joint U.S.-Soviet physics conclave in session on campus when the war was fought, the first such conclave in years. The Russians tried to leave the next day. They set out for Logan Airport on foot, finally, even though it was obviously hopeless. Nobody ever saw them again.

“The famine caused riots in Boston, which grew so serious that the campus had to be sealed off. I found myself in the peculiar position of studying for my finals while doing guard duty in the Yard. I was lucky to fall only a semester behind. Despite everything, Harvard was still dutifully failing people at the usual alarming rate.

“Those times were very dramatic and dangerous. The worst problem was food. We ate odd things. The various kitchens kept coming up with jointly prepared meals. Pickles, corned beef, Wheaties, and Tang was the sort of thing we might get for dinner. Everybody was always babbling about how various unlikely things would make complete proteins when they were put together. To make a long story short, we all but starved.”

“What do you study?”

“Well, at this point my seminar in Joyce is probably my most interesting course. I went through a period of furiously deconstructing everyone from Barbara Pym to James Gould Cozzens. I think I agree with Cozzens about some things. You know what he said about Joyce? He said, ‘There’s no point fooling around with the English language. You can’t win.’ It’s a hilarious thing to say, but I think there’s something in it Please don’t think me a conservative, though. Actually, I suppose it’s possible that’s exactly what I am. I’m not really certain where I’m going, except that I feel most drawn to prose that is written with absolute clarity. Pym. Anthony Powell. Americans? Maybe Wharton, certainly Hemingway, although in his case the directness tends to bury what should have been subtle about the work.”

“Do you think it’s appropriate for somebody to be studying a subject as impractical as English literature right now?”

“Impractical? It’s not impractical at all. In fact, it’s very necessary if we intend to keep the civilization going. I can’t make widgets, it’s true enough. But not every single soul should. I’m a klutz anyway.”

We ride on, three people in a bus. If there weren’t medical supplies aboard, we wouldn’t be traveling at all. No bus company would release a bus with so few passengers unless there’s another, better reason to move it than their needs. We are quiet for some time. I have just closed my eyes when the girl begins to talk again.

This time her voice is low and rushed and full of tension.

“I have a lot of trouble with images that won’t leave my mind. I have to make room for them. For example, I have an image of a kid who was executed in Cambridge. Can you believe it, he had broken into a house and killed everybody and eaten their food. Then he did it in another house. He was caught and put in the town jail. Two weeks later he escaped and did it again. This was the only way he could think of to cope. When he was caught a second time, the town made a decision to hold a public execution. We were deeply shocked, all of us at Harvard. This was in the summer of ’89. We thought to mount some kind of a protest, but there was no time.

One morning there was an execution notice on various bulletin boards around town, and that afternoon they hanged him by pushing him out a window with a rope around his neck. He was left there for days. I am not sure that the threat of execution deterred anybody else from killing for food. Most people wouldn’t do it anyway, not under any circumstances.

“I have an image of the police finding the house next door to mine with everybody in it dead during the first week of the flu.

“I have an image of my dog, Nancy, the night I let her go. People killed their pets during the famine, but I let Nancy go. She never came back. I hope she learned to live by hunting. She was a smart dog.

“When the kitchens began to fail, Harvard organized foraging teams. We ate rats, ducks from the park, geese when they appeared, all kinds of things. We ate the city-issue cheese and the carrots and potatoes the Army brought in. I’ve heard that lots of people starved during the famine, and I’m not a bit surprised.

“I’ve just had the satisfaction of going home and finding, once again, that my family is well. I go every few months, even though we can now talk on the phone. I really am compulsive about it.”

“Does your interest in family life mean you want to get married?” I asked.

“Am I wrong, or is there a whiff of fatuousness about that question? I’m twenty-two years old and ought, I suppose, to be eager to support a house-husband on my possible stipend of two quid a week, assuming Oxbridge accepts me. Is that a sufficiently fatuous answer?”

“What do you remember most about being in Cambridge on Warday?”

“That’s easy. I remember the cloud. It blew out to sea before it hit us, thank God. All one day and night it could be seen from Boston Harbor, hanging over the Atlantic. God, it was big. It looked like a hurricane or something. People were leaving. The cops had bullhorns, telling you to go in the basement. It was awful. There was so much craziness. Kids went nuts in the Fenway, kids from Northeastern running crazy, naked, kicking people, burning cars, looting apartments.

“My romantic streak makes me wish it was about 1985 and I was a high school girl again, in love in the way one could be before the war, but which seems so impossible now.

“I wonder what I will do with myself. In a sense, my degree is certainly an anachronism. If I don’t make it into Oxbridge, I’ll have to do my graduate work here, perhaps at Yale. At any rate, I’ve applied there and to the University of Chicago—and to Stanford, where I have no chance because you can’t get a California Student Permit if you have a noncritical specialty. Oxbridge can lead to employment in England. If I have to stay here, I think I’ll quit and join my father’s company. They make windows. Dull, but it pays well.”

Again she falls silent. The bus roars and bounces. This is not a spectacular road. In places we can hear the hiss of grass scraping the sides of the bus.

“Anything else?” Jim asks.

“Years ago I had a mad love affair. We were going to marry and live together always, all the usual things. When I got back to Scranton I found he had died of the flu. I think we would have been happy together. For a little while, life would have been perfect. I missed that chance.”

She rests her head back against the seat.

“I’m so tired. These days I really need my sleep. When I go to bed I imagine a little warm cottage where I can cuddle up by the fire, sip wine, and be content.”

She says no more. Like most people who live at a very low nutrition level, sleep comes suddenly to her, this porcelain beauty. After a moment Jim touches her cheek, but she does not awaken.

The bus pulls into Poughkeepsie in thin dawn light. When the driver wakes her up, she bustles quickly down the aisle and disappears without a word.