“Talk to me,” I asked him. He didn’t.
Finally he stood up ahead of me. I could see the rat cages, and I knew where the entrance was behind him. And then he was gone. I tried to follow with my flashlight, but he’d jumped or something. He was just gone.
“Victor,” Rat Six told me when I finally came out. “Goddamn Victor.”
Maybe so. If Victor was the same little boy I put a net over in the high country in Yosemite.
When I came out, they told me less than three hours had passed. I didn’t believe them. I told them about Victor. Most of them didn’t believe me. Nobody outside the tunnels believed in Victor. “We just sent home one of the rats,” a doctor told me. “He emptied his whole gun into a tunnel. Claimed there were V.C. all around him, but that he got them. He shot every one. Only, when we went down to clean it up, there were no bodies. All his bullets were found in the walls.
“Tunnel vision. Everyone sees things. It’s the dark. Your eyes no longer impose any limit on the things you can see.”
I didn’t listen. I made demands right up the chain of command for records: recruitment, AWOLS, special projects. I wanted to talk to everyone who’d ever seen Victor. I wrote Clint to see what he remembered of the drive back from Yosemite. I wrote a thousand letters to Mercy Hospital, telling them I’d uncovered their little game. I demanded to speak with the red-haired doctor with glasses whose name I never knew. I wrote the Curry Company and suggested they conduct a private investigation into the supposed suicide of Sergeant Redburn. I asked the CIA what they had done with Paul’s parents. That part was paranoid. I was so unstrung I thought they’d killed his parents and given him to the coyote to raise him up for the tunnel wars. When I calmed down, I knew the CIA would never be so farsighted. I knew they’d just gotten lucky. I didn’t know what happened to the parents; still don’t.
There were so many crazy people in Vietnam, it could take them a long time to notice a new one, but I made a lot of noise. A team of three doctors talked to me for a total of seven hours. Then they said I was suffering from delayed guilt over the death of my little dog-boy, and that it surfaced, along with every other weak link in my personality, in the stress and the darkness of the tunnels. They sent me home. I missed the moon landing, because I was having a nice little time in a hospital of my own.
When I was finally and truly released, I went looking for Caroline Crosby. The Crosbys still lived in Palo Alto, but Caroline did not. She’d started college at Berkeley, but then she’d dropped out. Her parents hadn’t seen her for several months.
Her mother took me through their beautiful house and showed me Caroline’s old room. She had a canopy bed and her own bathroom. There was a mirror with old pictures of some boy on it. A throw rug with roses. There was a lot of pink. “We drive through the Haight every weekend,” Caroline’s mother said. “Just looking.” She was pale and controlled. “If you should see her, would you tell her to call?”
I would not. I made one attempt to return one little boy to his family, and look what happened. Either Sergeant Redburn jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of his investigation or he didn’t. Either Paul Becker died in Mercy Hospital or he was picked up by the military to be their special weapon in a special war.
I’ve thought about it now for a couple of decades, and I’ve decided that, at least for Paul, once he’d escaped from the military, things didn’t work out so badly. He must have felt more at home in the tunnels under Cu Chi than he had under the bed in Mercy Hospital.
There is a darkness inside us all that is animal. Against some things— untreated or untreatable disease, for example, or old age—the darkness is all we are. Either we are strong enough animals or we are not. Such things pare everything that is not animal away from us. As animals we have a physical value, but in moral terms we are neither good nor bad. Morality begins on the way back from the darkness.
The first two plagues were largely believed to be a punishment for man’s sinfulness. “So many died,” wrote Agnolo di Tura the Fat, who buried all five of his own children himself, “that all believed that it was the end of the world.” This being the case, you’d imagine the cessation of the plague must have been accompanied by outbreaks of charity and godliness. The truth was just the opposite. In 1349, in Erfurt, Germany, of the three thousand Jewish residents there, not one survived. This is a single instance of a barbarism so marked and so pervasive, it can be understood only as a form of mass insanity.
Here is what Procopius said: And after the plague had ceased, there was so much depravity and general licentiousness, that it seemed as though the disease had left only the most wicked.
When men are turned into animals, it’s hard for them to find their way back to themselves. When children are turned into animals, there’s no self to find. There’s never been a feral child who found his way out of the dark. Maybe there’s never been a feral child who wanted to.
You don’t believe I saw Paul in the tunnels at all. You think I’m crazy or, charitably, that I was crazy then, just for a little while. Maybe you think the CIA would never have killed a policeman or tried to use a little child in a black war, even though the CIA has done everything else you’ve ever been told and refused to believe.
That’s okay. I like your version just fine. Because if I made him up, and all the tunnel rats who ever saw him made him up, then he belongs to us, he marks us. Our vision, our Procopian phantom in the tunnels. Victor to take care of us in the dark.
Caroline came home without me. I read her wedding announcement in the paper more than twenty years ago. She married a Stanford chemist. There was a picture of her in her parents’ backyard with gardenias in her hair. She was twenty-five years old. She looked happy. I never did go talk to her.
So here’s a story for you, Caroline:
A small German town was much plagued by rats who ate the crops and the chickens, the ducks, the cloth and the seeds. Finally the citizens called in an exterminator. He was the best; he trapped and poisoned the rats. Within a month he had deprived the fleas of most of their hosts.
The fleas then bit the children of the town instead. Hundreds of children were taken with a strange dancing and raving disease. Their parents tried to control them, tried to keep them safe in their beds, but the moment their mothers’ backs were turned, the children ran into the streets and danced. The town was Erfurt. The year was 1237.
Most of the children danced themselves to death. But not all. A few of them recovered and lived to be grown-ups. They married and worked and had their own children. They lived reasonable and productive lives.
The only thing is that they still twitch sometimes. Just now and then. They can’t help it.
Stop me, Caroline, if you’ve heard this story before.
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Buffalo - John Kessel
“Buffalo” first saw publication in F&SF, but the story was originally written for an anthology of short stories about hometowns. That book was edited by Anne Jordan, who had been the managing editor of F&SF and it was commissioned by yours truly, so it might as well have been written for our magazine. (In fact, one of the reviews of the book said, “It reads like a top-notch issue of F&SF” which always struck me as high praise.) The story is a dazzling, virtuoso performance, one of many such literary gems that Mr. Kessel has produced.
In May 1934 H. G. Wells made a trip to the United States, where he visited Washington, D.C., and met with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Wells, sixty-eight years old, hoped the New Deal might herald a revolutionary change in the U.S. economy, a step forward in an “Open Conspiracy” of rational thinkers that would culminate in a world socialist state. For forty years he’d subordinated every scrap of his artistic ambition to promoting this vision. But by 1934 Wells’s optimism, along with his energy for saving the world, was waning.
While in Washington he requested to see something of the new social welfare agencies, and Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, arranged f
or Wells to visit a Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Fort Hunt, Virginia.
It happens that at that time my father was a CCC member at that camp. From his boyhood he had been a reader of adventure stories; he was a big fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and of H. G. Wells. This is the story of their encounter, which never took place.
In Buffalo it’s cold, but here the trees are in bloom, the mockingbirds sing in the mornings, and the sweat the men work up clearing brush, planting dogwoods and cutting roads is wafted away by warm breeze. Two hundred of them live in the Fort Hunt barracks high on the bluff above the Virginia side of the Potomac. They wear surplus army uniforms. In the morning, after a breakfast of grits, Sgt. Sauter musters them up in the parade yard, they climb onto trucks and are driven by forest service men out to wherever they’re to work that day.
For several weeks Kessel’s squad has been working along the river road, clearing rest stops and turnarounds. The tall pines have shallow root systems, and spring rain has softened the earth to the point where wind is forever knocking trees across the road. While most of the men work on the ground, a couple are sent up to cut off the tops of the pines adjoining the road, so if they do fall, they won’t block it. Most of the men claim to be afraid of heights. Kessel isn’t. A year or two ago back in Michigan he worked in a logging camp. It’s hard work, but he is used to hard work. And at least he’s out of Buffalo.
The truck rumbles and jounces out the river road, that’s going to be the George Washington Memorial Parkway in our time, once the WPA project that will build it gets started. The humid air is cool now, but it will be hot again today, in the 80s. A couple of the guys get into a debate about whether the feds will ever catch Dillinger. Some others talk women. They’re planning to go into Washington on the weekend and check out the dance halls. Kessel likes to dance; he’s a good dancer. The fox trot, the lindy hop. When he gets drunk he likes to sing, and has a ready wit. He talks a lot more, kids the girls.
When they get to the site the foreman sets most of the men to work clearing the roadside for a scenic overlook. Kessel straps on a climbing belt, takes an axe and climbs his first tree. The first twenty feet are limbless, then climbing gets trickier. He looks down only enough to estimate when he’s gotten high enough. He sets himself, cleats biting into the shoulder of a lower limb, and chops away at the road side of the trunk. There’s a trick to cutting the top so that it falls the right way. When he’s got it ready to go he calls down to warn the men below. Then a few quick bites of the axe on the opposite side of the cut, a shove, a crack and the top starts to go. He braces his legs, ducks his head and grips the trunk.
The treetop skids off and the bole of the pine waves ponderously back and forth, with Kessel swinging at its end like an ant on a metronome. After the pine stops swinging he shinnies down and climbs the next tree.
He’s good at this work, efficient, careful. He’s not a particularly strong man—slender, not burly—but even in his youth he shows the attention to detail that, as a boy, I remember seeing when he built our house.
The squad works through the morning, then breaks for lunch from the mess truck. The men are always complaining about the food, and how there isn’t enough of it, but until recently a lot of them were living in Hoovervilles and eating nothing at all. As they’re eating, a couple of the guys rag Kessel for working too fast. “What do you expect from a Yankee?” one of the southern boys says.
“He ain’t a Yankee. He’s a polack.”
Kessel tries to ignore them.
“Whyn’t you lay off him, Turkel?” says Cole, one of Kessel’s buddies.
Turkel is a big blond guy from Chicago. Some say he joined the CCCS to duck an armed robbery rap. “He works too hard,” Turkel says. “He makes us look bad.”
“Don’t have to work much to make you look bad, Lou,” Cole says. The others laugh, and Kessel appreciates it. “Give Jack some credit. At least he had enough sense to come down out of Buffalo.” More laughter.
“There’s nothing wrong with Buffalo,” Kessel says.
“Except fifty thousand out-of-work polacks,” Turkel says.
“I guess you got no out-of-work people in Chicago,” Kessel says. “You just joined for the exercise.”
“Except he’s not getting any exercise, if he can help it!” Cole says.
The foreman comes by and tells them to get back to work. Kessel climbs another tree, stung by Turkel’s charge. What kind of man complains if someone else works hard? But it’s nothing new. He’s seen it before, back in Buffalo.
Buffalo, New York, is the symbolic home of this story. In the years preceding the First World War it grew into one of the great industrial metropolises of the United States. Located where Lake Erie flows into the Niagara River, strategically close to cheap electricity from Niagara Falls and cheap transportation by lakeboat from the Midwest, it was a center of steel, automobiles, chemicals, grain milling and brewing. Its major employers—Bethlehem Steel, Ford, Pierce Arrow, Gold Medal Flour, the National Biscuit Company, Ralston Purina, Quaker Oats, National Aniline—drew thousands of immigrants like Kessel’s family. Along Delaware Avenue stood the imperious and stylized mansions of the city’s old money, ersatz-Renaissance homes designed by Stanford White, huge Protestant churches, and a Byzantine synagogue. The city boasted the first modern skyscraper, designed by Louis Sullivan in the 1890s. From its productive factories to its polyglot work force to its class system and its boosterism, Buffalo was a monument to modern industrial capitalism. It is the place Kessel has come from—almost an expression of his personality itself—and the place he, at times, fears he can never escape. A cold, grimy city dominated by church and family, blinkered and cramped, forever playing second fiddle to Chicago, New York and Boston. It offers the immigrant the opportunity to find steady work in some factory or mill, but, though Kessel could not have put it into these words, it also puts a lid on his opportunities. It stands for all disappointed expectations, human limitations, tawdry compromises, for the inevitable choice of the expedient over the beautiful, for an American economic system that turns all things into commodities and measures men by their bank accounts. It is the home of the industrial proletariat.
It’s not unique. It could be Youngstown, Akron, Detroit. It’s the place my father, and I, grew up.
The afternoon turns hot and still; during a work break Kessel strips to the waist. About two o’clock a big black De Soto comes up the road and pulls off onto the shoulder. A couple of men in suits get out of the back, and one of them talks to the Forest Service foreman, who nods deferentially. The foreman calls over to the men.
“Boys, this here’s Mr. Pike from the Interior Department. He’s got a guest here to see how we work, a writer, Mr. H. G. Wells from England.”
Most of the men couldn’t care less, but the name strikes a spark in Kessel. He looks over at the little, pot-bellied man in the dark suit. The man is sweating; he brushes his mustache.
The foreman sends Kessel up to show them how they’re topping the trees. He points out to the visitors where the others with rakes and shovels are leveling the ground for the overlook. Several other men are building a log rail fence from the treetops. From way above, Kessel can hear their voices between the thunks of his axe. H. G. Wells. He remembers reading The War of the Worlds in Amazing Stories. He’s read The Outline of History, too. The stories, the history, are so large, it seems impossible that the man who wrote them could be standing not thirty feet below him. He tries to concentrate on the axe, the tree.
Time for this one to go. He calls down. The men below look up. Wells takes off his hat and shields his eyes with his hand. He’s balding, and looks even smaller from up here. Strange that such big ideas could come from such a small man. It’s kind of disappointing. Wells leans over to Pike and says something. The treetop falls away. The pine sways like a bucking bronco, and Kessel holds on for dear life.
He comes down with the intention of saying something to Wells, telling him how much he admires him, but whe
n he gets down the sight of the two men in suits and his awareness of his own sweaty chest make him timid. He heads down to the next tree. After another ten minutes the men get back in the car, drive away. Kessel curses himself for the opportunity lost.
That evening at the New Willard hotel, Wells dines with his old friends Clarence Darrow and Charles Russell. Darrow and Russell are in Washington to testify before a congressional committee on a report they have just submitted to the administration concerning the monopolistic effects of the National Recovery Act. The right wing is trying to eviscerate Roosevelt’s program for large scale industrial management, and the Darrow Report is playing right into their hands. Wells tries, with little success, to convince Darrow of the short-sightedness of his position.
“Roosevelt is willing to sacrifice the small man to the huge corporations,” Darrow insists, his eyes bright.
“The small man? Your small man is a romantic fantasy,” Wells says. “It’s not the New Deal that’s doing him in—it’s the process of industrial progress. It’s the twentieth century. You can’t legislate yourself back into 1870.”
“What about the individual?” Russell asks.
Wells snorts. “Walk out into the streets. The individual is out on the streetcorner selling apples. The only thing that’s going to save him is some coordinated effort, by intelligent, selfless men. Not your free market.”
Darrow puffs on his cigar, exhales, smiles. “Don’t get exasperated, H. G. We’re not working for Standard Oil. But if I have to choose between the bureaucrat and the man pumping gas at the filling station, I’ll take the pump jockey.”
Wells sees he’s got no chance against the American mythology of the common man. “Your pump jockey works for Standard Oil. And the last I checked, the free market hasn’t expended much energy looking out for his interests.”
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1 Page 33
