War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

  He became an Angel a month before he took henbane from a witch. He did not die of cancer, he died of structure, or at least suffered from it. There is no shortage of painkillers, for example. The Relief could have given him Brompton Mixture on an outpatient basis, but the rules reserve it for inpatients only, and he couldn't be an inpatient because he was triaged!

  So the structure—simply because it was there—at the very least condemned him to unnecessary agony. If his family had been in control of his fate, instead of some bureaucrat in the Relief office down at the civic center, he would have been spared the torment and indignity of the pain.

  People say thank God Europe didn't get in the war, what would we do without them, but the Angels say we are just suffering more because of the structures that are now being imposed on us from the outside. When Washington was destroyed, we had a golden, historic opportunity to free ourselves from the age-old slavery of government. Instead, we are having both economic and political structure imposed on us from the outside—colonial exploitation, as a matter of fact, very similar to what the Europeans practiced on the Chinese in the last century. The foreign presence on our shores is nothing more than a prescription for more structural enslavement, with the added problem that we don't even control the structure.

  Also, they take crops from the few viable growing areas and al-

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  locate them not only to North America but also to themselves. Remember, if we weren't feeding Europe too, we wouldn't be starving ourselves. The story is that they have gone into Argentina and taken it over to make sure the crops are not held up for high prices. Argentina is no longer even a country. If you read the English papers, they always call it "the Argentine" or some such thing. We believe that most of the population south of the border is dead of starvation, and the Europeans caused it by taking the only food our Latin sisters and brothers could get their hands on, the Argentine wheat. That is hundreds of millions of deaths.

  We call ourselves Angels because we help people in need and because we remember the dishonored dead of the world, those who died on Warday in the United States and the USSR, and the billions who have died since. We represent the living, the ordinary men and women and children who see that, in order to survive, mankind needs a whole new way of being.

  There is inherent in Destructuralism the concept that people can remake their own hearts to include a new valuation of their fellow human beings. By refocusing our energies on our families we can learn never to forget for an instant how it feels to be the other person. For example, the American President and the Russian Premier could not have done what they did to the rest of us on Warday if they had been trained from birth never to forget for an instant that all human beings are partners in life and that everybody is as important to himself or herself as they were to themselves—that the death of the average Joe was going to be as much of a catastrophe for him and his family as the death of the great leader would be to his own precious self and his relatives. Instead, they sat in their command posts and talked numbers. To Destructuralists there are no numbers, there are only names and faces and hearts.

  Only in a truly destructured, rehumanized social milieu can the kind of maturing growth that people need take place, because only if there are no distancing structures can the individual come to realize, through his identification with his own family, that every other life on earth is as precious and valuable as his own.

  You might argue that Destructuralism is old-style anarchy all over again, but it isn't. Destructuralism is based on the caring of 134 WARDAY

  mature human souls for one another and for the planetary body, too. It is government by putting yourself in the other man's shoes.

  The bible said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

  That is all the government the world needs.

  Remember this: If you love life and think that big government is big poison, and you are willing to stand hand in hand with your brothers and sisters on this earth, do not scorn the Angels, for you are one.

  Fugitives

  As soon as she finished her statement, our friendly Angel got into the nearest American-made car, reached under the dashboard, and hotwired it.

  "You want a ride?"

  We didn't. We just wanted to disappear. She backed out into the alley and was soon off down La Mirada. Not ten seconds after the car had disappeared, there came a roar from about thirty feet overhead and an ultralight aircraft darted past in the direction she had gone. There are large numbers of these planes in Los Angeles skies, used by police and fire departments to keep detailed tabs on rooftops and backyards. Soon, more of the moped cops shot past on La Mirada.

  We were scared. The penalties for being an illegal immigrant in California are severe. Capture could mean years in a work camp.

  Maybe all the years I have left.

  "Let's get out of here," Jim said. "Half the police department's in the neighborhood this morning."

  I did not reply. I was thinking of Anne and Andrew, wondering what they were doing. It was a quarter to six in Dallas. I could imagine my family out in the henhouse, Anne collecting eggs while Andrew did the cleaning. I could hear the hens clucking and smell 135

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  thick henhouse odors mixing with the aroma of morning coffee floating across from the kitchen.

  Another ultralight appeared and began circling us as we walked along La Mirada. It was all I could do not to break and run as the damned thing soared round and round overhead, its engine whining like an angry wasp. Jim stopped and looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun.

  1 "Don't do that!"

  "It's more suspicious to ignore him."

  The policeman's amplified voice crackled down: "IDs, please!"

  We held up our red plastic cards. He peered down as he made another sweep, then flew off, talking into his radio.

  "Do you think that did it, Jim?"

  "No." m

  "Neither do I." We walked on, heading for the Santa Ana Free-way. If we could catch an interregional bus there, it just might take us all the way to Burbank.

  Suddenly a black car pulled up, and behind the wheel was an unexpected but welcome sight: a priest in a Roman collar. "(Jet in,"

  he said.

  The thought crossed my mind that he might be a police agent.

  Then a siren began wailing. I could see the lights of a squad car far down La Mirada. "Get in," the priest repeated. "Hurry up about it!"

  We got into the old Buick. "Down, down, you darned fools!" As the squad car roared past, we dropped to the floor of the back seat.

  "They're on foot," a voice rattled from the front seat I was astonished to realize that the priest had a police radio. "Two-four-two to Air Six. We do not, repeat, do not have them in our sight."

  The priest started his car. "That's a relief, anyway."

  "Father—"

  "Keep down!"

  He drove us to his rectory, where we got a shave, a shower, and a much-needed change of clothing. He never referred to the Destructuralists, or why he had been in that particular neighborhood at that time, or why he had so mercifully helped us.

  He believed strongly in the value of human freedom, though, and in the old Bill of Rights. You can read that between the lines of the interview he gave us.

  Interview

  Reverend Michael Dougherty. Catholic Priest

  I was afraid we wouldn't have time to do this, but I think you're probably safe here for another half hour or so. I'm glad to get the chance to speak for publication. We've forgotten a few basic human freedoms out here in sunny California. We need to rediscover ourselves as Americans—as people, really. As children of God.

  Sometimes I think of the world—is that thing on? I don't see the red light. Ah, okay. Sometimes I think of the world as a little lost bit of dust in the middle of nowhere, and it is deathly ill, and there is nobody to help us. But then I feel the presence of Christ, as if He had taken the world in His arms a
nd was hugging us to Himself the way a father might hug a hurt child.

  I think that we Americans are feeling terribly guilty about ourselves. Especially the older generation. I see the effects. One of them is that priests like me have gotten incredibly busy, and one of the things that keeps me busiest is ministering to the sad and the guilty. We've got three priests here at St. Francis, me and two newly ordained, as well as three deacons and four nuns. I've been a priest since 1975, so I'm an old hand. That rarity, the prewar religious. The rest are all new. Since Warday, my parish has more than quadrupled in size. In the past five years, I can hardly remember a Mass that wasn't full. Even at six o'clock on Saturday morning, it's full. Many, many kids. The children of secularized parents, 137

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  rebelling against the indifference of their elders. And the elders too, now, fumbling with the St. Joseph's missals we have in the church, saying their prayers as best they can.

  But it's in the confessional that I hear the motives people have for returning to the Church. It isn't piety or love of God, not among the older folks. People are coming back to the Church because they feel that their own indifference, just letting things happen, was a big part of what caused the war. Remember, back in those days it just seemed like there was nothing you personally could do. The solutions now to our problems then seem obvious.

  But in those days we were all very different people. We were dulled by living under the Sword of Damocles for nearly half a century. We had done the worst possible thing—gotten used to an incredible and immediate danger. The nuclear mechanism was far more hazardous to each one of us individually than, say, pouring gasoline on our clothes would have been. But it didn't feel that way, not in those sunny, treacherous days.

  We understood how absolutely deadly the bomb was, but we did not understand how helpless we were in the face of the mechanism of war. The mechanism began to run quite mysteriously, and went on until it broke down. It could as easily have destroyed the world. Only faulty design prevented that. We thought that people dickering about arms control in Geneva mattered, when what we really needed all along was a massive change of heart. How absurdly outmoded the elaborate diplomacy of the prewar period now seems. There could have been a massive shift of heart, toward acceptance and understanding and away from hostile competitiveness and ideological obsession.

  The whole business of the United States and the USSR squan-dering their resources on territorialism seems incredibly silly now.

  Our prewar mistake was to believe in rubble. We visualized ourselves as crawling out of the basement and putting brick back on brick. Places don't just cease to exist.

  You know, they say that a person set down in the middle of the Washington Dead Zone would have died within hours. Just keeled over and died. Birds died flying across it. That was in the L.A.

  Times after the war. It's a forty-square-mile desert of black glass CALIFORNIA DANGERS 139

  dotted with the carcasses of sparrows and larks and the occasional duck.

  Before the war there weren't even intellectual references for such things. No comprehension. The message of Hiroshima wasn't understood. We thought that it meant devastation. But ruins have to do with the past. Modern nuclear war means life being replaced by black, empty space. It means ancient seats of government evaporating in a second. The moral question is almost beyond asking.

  What are we, that we can do this? What is evil, that it can speak with such a voice? We no longer know what we are, we of the Holocaust and Stalin and Warday. We unleashed hell on ourselves by pretending that diplomacy, of all things, could control its fires. The heart, and the heart alone, is more powerful than hell.

  Am I preaching? Excuse me. I run so fast, give so much advice, quite frankly I think I've forgotten how to talk without a degree of pontification. Sometimes I wish I had a wife to have a private life with. Someone who would say, "You're preaching, Mike," or

  "You're talking through your hat." But I don't have time for a wife. Or children. I couldn't raise kids in a life that doesn't have ten free minutes a day. So I'm no longer uptight about the celibacy rule.

  Before Warday I was well on my way to losing my vocation. I wanted to get married. I think I might have become an Episcopa-lian. But then came Warday and, afterward, the Reunion with the Anglicans and the Episcopals. Then, most of all, the tremendous upsurge of need for my services. I got the feeling that Christ was very close to us religious people, full of forgiveness and need, asking for our help. I want to be Christ's servant. Now when I'm feeling alone I take my soul to Mary, who is His mother and therefore the mother of all mankind. She's what the witches call the Mother Goddess! I just kneel before her altar and say the rosary.

  She never fails me, Mary. The rosary is far better for me than, say, meditation. It's not only meditation, with all the repetition, it's humble and it's a request for help. She was once a human being.

  She knows what we suffer. She is always there, anytime, for anybody. Mary doesn't care a fig about the details. She loves and respects you because you exist.

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  The witchcraft movement talks about taking personal, individual responsibility for the condition of planet Earth as if they invented the idea. But it's also a Christian and very specifically Catholic notion. At least I think it is. My saddest, guiltiest parishioners say that they sinned terribly by not taking some kind of personal action on behalf of peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. They say they should have demonstrated against this or in favor of that. But I tell them no, the sin was that we did not accept one another in our hearts, neither side. Our leaders hardly even knew each other. The two greatest nations on earth, with almost total responsibility for the fate of planet and species, and they hardly even spoke! They should have made it their business to be close personal friends. And there should have been as much commonality of policymaking and government as possible.

  Instead the two countries were separate islands, distant from, and mysterious to, each other. That was the sin of pride, doing that.

  What a price has been paid for the pleasure of such indulgence.

  When I think of what our generation did, I pray very, very hard that the future will somehow accept us and find in the Body of Christ the love and understanding that will enable them to say,

  "Our ancestors chose foolishness over wisdom and hostility over acceptance, but we understand and we forgive."

  Now I'm not your deep thinker. But I do try. I've read the Catholic philosophers, and the Greeks, and most of the moderns. I mean to say, I've read my Whitehead and my Hegel, my Aristotle and my Plotinus.

  You know, throughout history, philosophy centered on the concept of being rather than the ethics. That was fine until recent years, when we began to try on some pretty bizarre concepts, and to hell with the ethics of it all. Nazism and so forth, I mean. And the concept of nationhood that allowed us to think we had the right to build such things as nuclear bombs.

  The American and Russian peoples should never have allowed their leaders to play the game of overstating the threat to justify exorbitant military expenditures. We were supposed to be seeking a balance of terror, weren't we? But the United States in fact got so far ahead of the Russians technologically that we were about to send up a satellite that would have made their missiles useless CALIFORNIA DANGERS 141

  against us. And they had no similarly effective weapon. So they were forced to start the war. They were backed up against the wall.

  I'm just a priest in a medium-sized parish. Nobody on high would ever have listened to me. Before the war I had eight hundred in my parish. Now I've got close to ten thousand frightened and suffering people. In some ways I'd rather have had eight hundred and the old world than ten thousand and the new.

  Let's see now, you asked me for an idea about how my day goes. What I do. Well, I get up at five-thirty and I run like a mad-man until midnight, then I sleep like the dead until five-thirty the next morning. I've got my schedule for last Wedn
esday. I'll read it into the record:

  5:30 A.M. Arose and said breviary.

  5:45 A.M. Breakfast of corn soup and milk.

  6:00 A.M. Said Mass. Gave out communion to 230 people.

  6:30 A.M. Meeting with my staff. Discussed the reroofing project. Looked over Father Moore's report to the bishop on the feasibility of splitting St. Francis into two parishes. I hope that this is done!

  7:00 A.M. Met a parishioner who has just been diagnosed as having stage-three Hodgkin's and has been triaged. Has a wife and three teenage children. Is fifty-two. We prayed together and he cried. He paced like a trapped lion. Prayed for him and put him in the Mass list for Sunday.

  7:20 A.M. CCD leaders met in my office to plan a bake sale.

  They have thirty pounds of flour, six pounds of sugar, some apples, some molasses, and so we are very excited. Thank God they also have Sister Euphrasia, who is one good baker.

  7:45 A.M. Had coffee and listened to the Vatican U.S. Service on the shortwave.

  8:00 A.M. Went to Holy Cross Hospital for my visitations. I'm glad I took Father Moore, as my list was sixty names long! I had an hour there, and because he took half my people, I was able to spend two minutes with each patient. I blessed, I prayed, I heard eighteen confessions and gave out thirty Holy Communions. I gave the Last Rites to twelve patients on the critical list.

  9:15 A.M. Returned to the rectory. Did youth counseling until 142 WARDAY

  noon. We have seventy young people who are converting, and an active Sodality and CYO. But these were all special cases. I gave each kid half an hour. Saw six troubled kids. A girl who is preg-nant. A boy who is in love with a younger boy. A girl who says she sees visions of the Virgin, and indeed may. Another girl who has beaten her mother and father so badly that they want her out of the house. Where does a petite girl of sixteen get such titanic anger? Two boys who steal. I warned them very sternly. They must remember, these children, that we have a looting law here in California, and they are liable to be shot on sight if they're caught. It isn't like the old days. There is no due process at the end of a gunsight.