“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.
PART FOUR
New York
The Approach to New York—Ghosts
Monday, October 4, 1993: The Northeast was more beautiful empty than it had been populated. Some of the drama of the old wildness had returned, in the thick foliage that scraped the windows of the train, and in the rioting fields that once were ordered. As we moved into the commuter belt, though, ruin took the place of wildness.
Images from the window of the train: empty suburban stations whose parking lots once glittered with commuters’ BMWs and Buicks; dark doorways and vines everywhere, spreading in the most unlikely places, along streets, up telephone poles, jamming the empty hulk of a bus.
Beneath all the brick and concrete, this land was always fertile.
Green things, full of confidence and ambition, were reasserting themselves everywhere. The effect of all this was much more powerful than the kind of abandonment we are all familiar with, because this was so total, and the Northeast had been so vastly and intricately populated.
The thousands of fragile reminders of human presence intensified the emptiness.
The New York Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area contained nine million people in 1987. The official population is now seven thousand. According to General George Briggs, USA, the Commandant of the New York Military Area, there are roughly twenty thousand illegal inhabitants in the city. Officially, New York is a Red Zone, under martial law with a twenty-four-hour curfew, violators to be shot on sight. But General Briggs, a tall man with narrow gunsights of eyes, said that his men hadn’t ever shot anybody. “There’s been sufficient death here,” he said.
Amtrak goes as far south as White Plains. From there it is possible to take a bus east to Stamford, but there is no public transportation into New York at all.
We arrived at the White Plains station on the Twentieth Century, which we had left in Cleveland for our detour to Pittsburgh.
From the moment we got off the train, we were aware of two things: this was U.S. Army territory, and there was a massive salvage operation going on.