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.”