My eyes kept hazing open and shut without seeing anything; things were in them but didn’t have the power to stay or be remembered. The world was a kind of colored nodream with objects in it. Then, one of the times that my eyelids lifted without any command, I stared straight out with my brain asleep but my eyes wide. We were going out the far edge of a little town, swinging to the right through the twiggy grayish stuff that is always growing near southern highways. Up ahead, the road ran between two hills. Lined up dead center between them was a mountain, high, broad and blue, the color of concentrated woodsmoke. There were others farther back from it, falling back, receding left and right.
“Funny thing,” Lewis said.
I leaned around, hearing him. “What?”
“Funny thing about up yonder,” he said. “The whole thing’s different. I mean the whole way of taking life and the terms you take it on.”
“What should I know about that?” I said.
“The trouble is,” he said, “that you not only don’t know anything about it, you don’t want to know anything about it.”
“Why should I?”
“Because, for the Lord’s sake, there may be something important in the hills. Do you know what?”
“No; I don’t know anything. I don’t mind going down a few rapids with you, and drinking a little whiskey by a campfire. But I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about those hills.”
“But do you know,” he said, and his quietness made me listen, although with the reservation that it had better be good if be put that much emphasis on it, “there are songs in those hills that collectors have never put on tape. And I’ve seen one family with a dulcimer.”
“So, what does that prove?”
“Maybe nothing, maybe a lot.”
“I’ll leave that to Drew,” I said. “But do you know something, Lewis? If those people in the hills, the ones with the folk songs and dulcimers, came out of the hills and led us all toward a new heaven and a new earth, it would not make a particle of difference to me. I am a get-through-the-day man. I don’t think I was ever anything else. I am not a great art director. I am not a great archer. I am mainly interested in sliding. Do you know what sliding is?”
“No. You want me to guess?”
“I’ll tell you. Sliding is living anti-friction. Or, no, sliding is living by anti-friction. It is finding a modest thing you can do, and then greasing that thing. On both sides. It is grooving with comfort.”
“You don’t believe in madness, eh?”
“I don’t, at all. I know better than to fool with it.
“So what you do …”
“So what you do is go on by it. What you do is get done what you ought to be doing. And what you do rarely—and I mean rarely—is to flirt with it.”
“We’ll see,” Lewis said, glancing at me as though he had me. “We’ll see. You’ve had all that office furniture in front of you, desks and bookcases and filing cabinets and the rest. You’ve been sitting in a chair that won’t move. You’ve been steady. But when that river is under you, all that is going to change. There’s nothing you do as vice-president of Emerson-Gentry that’s going to make any difference at all, when the water starts to foam up. Then, it’s not going to be what your title says you do, but what you end up doing. You know: doing.”
Then he waited, and I woke up fully, where I had not been before.
“I know,” he said. “You think I’m some kind of narcissistic fanatic. But I’m not.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly,” I said.
“I just believe,” he said, “that the whole thing is going to be reduced to the human body, once and for all. I want to be ready.”
“What whole thing?”
“The human race thing. I think the machines are going to fail, the political systems are going to fail, and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over.”
I looked at him. He lived in the suburbs, like the rest of us. He had money, a good-looking wife and three children. I could not really believe that he came in from placating his tenants every evening and gave himself solemnly to the business of survival, insofar as it involved his body. What kind of fantasy led to this? I asked myself. Did he have long dreams of atomic holocaust in which he had to raise himself and his family out of the debris of less strong folk and head toward the same blue hills we were approaching?
“I had an air-raid shelter built,” he said. “I’ll take you down there sometime. We’ve got double doors and stocks of bouillon and bully beef for a couple of years at least. We’ve got games for the kids, and a record player and a whole set of records on how to play the recorder and get up a family recorder group. But I went down there one day and sat for a while. I decided that survival was not in the rivets and the metal, and not in the double-sealed doors and not in the marbles of Chinese checkers. It was in me. It came down to the man, and what he could do. The body is the one thing you can’t fake; it’s just got to be there.”
“Suppose there was a lot of fallout, and there was no way to breathe? Suppose the radiation didn’t have any respect for your physique?”
“In that case, buddy,” he said, “I’d be prepared to throw in the jock. But if it comes to a situation where I can operate, I don’t want to crap out. You know me pretty well, Ed. You know I’d go up in those hills, and I believe I’d make out where many another wouldn’t.”
“You’re ready, are you?”
“I think I am,” he said. “I sure am, psychologically. At times I get the feeling that I can’t wait. Life is so fucked-up now, and so complicated, that I wouldn’t mind if it came down, right quick, to the bare survival of who was ready to survive. You might say I’ve got the survival craze, the real bug. And to tell the truth I don’t think most other people have. They might cry and tear their hair and be ready for some short hysterical violence or other, but I think most of them wouldn’t be too unhappy to give down and get it over with.”
“Is this just something you think about on your own? Does your wife know all this?”
“Sure. She was very interested in the shelter. Now she’s learning open-air cooking. She’s doing damned good, too. She even talks about taking her paints along, and making a new kind of art, where things are reduced to essentials—like in cave painting—and there’s none of this frou-frou in art anymore.”
I had the clear sense that he’d both talked this up too much with his wife and maybe a few other people, and had never really talked about it at all.
“Where would you go?” he asked. “Where would you go when the radios died? When there was nobody to tell you where to go?”
“Well,” I said, “I’d probably head south, where the climate would be better. I’d try to beat my way down to the Florida coast, where there’d be some fish around, even if there wasn’t anything else to eat.”
He pointed ahead, where the hills were moving from one side of the road to the other, and growing solid. “That’s where I’d go,” he said. “Right where we’re going. You could make something up there. You could make something, and not have to build it on sand.”
“What could you make?”
“If everything wasn’t dead, you could make a kind of life that wasn’t out of touch with everything, with the other forms of life. Where the seasons would mean something, would mean everything. Where you could hunt as you needed to, and maybe do a little light farming, and get along. You’d die early, and you’d suffer, and your children would suffer, but you’d be in touch.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “If you wanted to, you could go up in the hills and live right now. You could have all those same conditions. You could hunt, you could farm. You could suffer just as much now as if they dropped the H-bomb. You could even start a colony. How do you think Carolyn would like that life?”
“It’s not the same,” Lewis said. “Don’t you see? It would just be eccentric. Survival depends—well, it depends on having to survive. The kind of life I’m talking about depends on its being the last chance. The very last of all.”