Quinn wrote historical novels back when such things were popular. I haven't seen her name on anything in the Doubleday bookstore in Dallas in years, so I had no idea what had happened to her.
There seemed to me a risk in using long distance in California, so I had delayed trying to call her until we were actually here. I dialed the last number I had for her.
After five rings an older woman answered. "Yarbro Locators,"
she said.
"May I speak to Quinn, please?"
"This is she. May I help you?"
"Quinn? This is Whitley."
"Oh God, where are you calling from?"
"Oakland. I just came up from L.A. I have a friend with me.
We're doing a book on America together. We're here to see San Francisco."
"Whitley, this is—I mean, I'm in the locating business, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised—but—"
"I lived, Quinn."
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"Oh God, Whitley, I assumed—with you in New York and all."
"We've been living in Dallas. Anne and Andrew too."
She told us to take the BART to Market and Powell in San Francisco. "I—well, I'll wear something recognizable. If I must, a blue fedora."
"Quinn, we're dressed like priests."
"Ah. Okay. Shall I expect to pray?"
"Just look for two middle-aged priests with backpacks."
"I'm sure I won't have any trouble. And you can forget the darned fedora. I'll find you."
We traveled on BART for fifteen cents. The highest fare is a quarter, the lowest a penny. The trains are jammed and not particularly frequent, but they work. Like so many things in California, much EMP-related damage sustained by BART has been repaired.
There are ticket clerks, however, instead of computerized machines, and my impression was that the trains were directly controlled by their motormen rather than by a central computer. I noticed signal lights along the tracks much like those in the old New York subway system.
Even past nine at night, the Powell Street station resounded with the footsteps of a swarming crowd. Like Los Angeles, the San Francisco area has sustained a massive population influx in the past few years—despite the efforts of the immigration police.
"Hello, Father Whitley."
She was older, very much older. "Quinn." There were tears at the corners of her eyes. Finding old friends alive hurts. It is a pain one at once seeks and fears. I embraced Quinn. I touched her hair, which was still red but struck with gray. Her eyes, looking at me, were wide. Jim stood nearby, silent, not intruding, waiting.
"Quinn, this is Jim Kunetka."
"Father Jim?"
"Simply Jim. This is a disguise."
"I'm glad. You both look too thin to be priests. I'd peg you as robbers."
"Is there much crime in California?" Jim asked, ever the newsman.
"More than before the war. People are so desperate. We have rich and poor and not much in between."
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"It looks so good."
"It's still got the best weather in the world, anyway."
"Quinn, we're fugitives."
She laughed. "I gathered that. You want to get off the street?"
"Exactly."
She offered to put us up at her apartment on Russian Hill. We rode the Powell-Hyde cable car for two cents each. There was an "I Stop at the St. Francis" sign on the front of the car, and the familiar yellow destination sign: Powell & Market, Hyde & Beach. We had to hang on all the way. The gripman was a master with his bell, and he needed to be—the streets were jammed with pedestri-ans. On the way, Quinn asked if we'd eaten dinner. We had not.
Lunch on the train had seemed sufficient for a month. I can remember very long periods of my life without so much food. And the freshness of it was unforgettable, as was the menu: lima beans cooked in real butter, a thick lamb chop with the juice running in the plate, mashed potatoes with pan gravy, an endive salad, two different wines, and, for dessert, frozen pecan balls.
It is no wonder that people are willing to risk prison to come to California.
Despite the danger of the streets, we could not resist seeing if we could tuck in a dinner in Chinatown. I thought at once of a certain restaurant. "Dare I ask if Kan's is still there?"
"Kan's is still there."
We hopped off the cable car and went looking. Kan's had not changed at all. The restaurant had opened in 1936, and it retains the comfortable spaciousness of former times. If I was impressed by lunch on the train, I was delighted by dinner here, even though I couldn't eat much. A stomach used to a simpler diet cannot adjust quickly to the richness of California food.
In a way, being at Kan's made me sad. Anne and I had taken five days in San Francisco in the summer of '87. Andrew was at camp and we flew out for the chance to be alone together, to see a few good friends, to enjoy the city. It was our last vacation, and we had our last meal in San Francisco at Kan's.
Over dinner, the three of us traded lives. As soon as Quinn understood what we were doing, she had an idea. "I know a man you'll want to interview. If you're trying to understand things, he's 178 WARDAY
somebody who probably knows. He's an economist, and he teaches at Berkeley. He's also somebody I love. He'll be over to the apartment in the morning. You can meet him then."
Neither of us had heard of Dr. Walter Tevis. I doubt, however, that we will ever forget him.
I asked her what she was doing. "I'm a gumshoe," she said.
"A what?"
"A detective."
Jim went pale. I was stunned. It wasn't possible that we were in the hands of the police.
"I'm not a cop," she said, "so you can redirect some blood into your faces. I find lost people. I'll try to locate anybody you're missing. If I succeed, I get a fee."
"You must be incredibly busy," I said.
"Very."
Jim leaned forward. "My wife—I lost her in Austin right after Warday." His face was suddenly sharp, his eyes boring into Quinn's.
"Give me her name and description and last known address. I'll see what I can do. It might take some time, you understand."
Jim gave her the information.
After dinner she took us to her apartment, on a hidden Russian Hill byway called Keys Alley. "I warn you, I still have cats," she said as she let us into the single cluttered room. A huge red furball came up and began protesting.
The room was jammed with the tools of her trade. There were stacks of old telephone books from dozens of cities, city directories, maps, old newspapers, census tracts, Zip Code directories, copies of birth certificates in lettered stacks, card files and Rolo-dexes identified by colored tags, and hundreds and hundreds of photographs in thick black albums.
I could see how she carried out her trade, working from the telephone and through the mails. It must have been a frustrating and difficult job.
"Sorry about the mess." She sat down. She looked, then, very small and tired and somewhat lost herself. "A lot of people are missing," she said.
Jim and I slept on the floor. Just as I was dropping off, the cat CALIFORNIA DANGERS 179
woke me by flopping down on my face. I moved it aside and sat up.
The little room was quiet. Quinn was a shadow on her couch. On the table beside her was a Princess telephone attached to an answering machine whose power lamp glowed red. I wondered how she managed. She must be besieged with clients. Names and names and names.
A trapped feeling came upon me and made me get up and put on my collar and my black suit and go out to get some night air.
Keys Alley was silent, lit through the leaves of trees lining the street. Music drifted in the dark, a radio playing an old, old song I could not name, but which drew me back to childhood summer nights, watching my bedroom curtains make shadows on the walls and listening to my parents and their friends talking in low voices under the trees outside, talking of the cares of forty years ago, Truman and the cost of the M
arshall Plan and Stalin's health.
I stepped softly as I left the silent alley. I went up Pacific Street to the crest, then turned and looked down across the roofs of Chinatown to the Bay. The view is not one of San Francisco's most spectacular, but it satisfied me. Far out in the Bay I heard foghorns beginning to sound above the subdued rumble of the city.
The hour was late; midnight had come and gone.
Slowly, nearer horns started sounding. A fog was coming through the Golden Gate. Soon I could see it slipping up the streets and across the roofs, dulling lights, drawing the dark close around me.
When it swirled up Pacific, cold and damp, transforming crisp night sounds to whispers and making me shudder with the cold of it, I returned to the stuffy little flat and the sounds of Quinn and Jim sleeping, and the cat purring.
Sometime in the night the phone gave half a ring and the answering machine clicked. I heard a voice talking quickly into the recorder, quickly and endlessly, droning, filling my sleep with a tale of loss I no longer remember.
Interview
Walter Tevis, Economist
What happened to the economy on Warday was quite simple. Six out of every ten dollars disappeared. The Great Depression of the thirties was caused by the stock market crash of 1929, when three out of ten dollars ceased to exist. Simultaneously, we lost the ability to communicate. We lost all our current records. Chaos was inevitable. We're fortunate that the continuing deflationary process hasn't been worse.
All the money that was somehow in process in the computer systems of the government and private banks simply ceased to ex-fat because of electromagnetic disruption or, in the case of Washington, permanent and total destruction. That was about one dollar in ten, but it was all hypercritical money, because it was in motion.
It was the liquid cash, what people were using to pay other people.
The other thing that happened was that records were thrown into chaos. Records that had survived, but only on magnetic media, might as well have been destroyed because they couldn't be read.
The destruction of the computers was exactly like the failure of a nervous system in a body. All of a sudden there were no messages getting through. The body lost contact with itself. Storage companies such as the Iron Mountain Group preserved a great deal of data in underground facilities. Without the machines stored underground, as a matter of fact, there wouldn't have been a single 180
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functional computer left in the United States after Warday. The wisdom of those storage and preservation programs is now obvious. Without them, for example, there couldn't have been the gold distribution of '90. Even so, most people had only about fourteen percent of the dollar value of their prewar cash holdings restored.
Between the cash lost in transit and the inaccessible records, we were out about three dollars in ten. The collapse of Social Security, Medicaid, and the whole federal entitlement system meant another two dollars gone when those checks stopped arriving from Washington. The loss of the rest of the federal budget was another dollar gone. In a few hours the cash economy of this country was more than cut in half.
And there was more to come, of course. This sudden loss of cash meant that thousands of banks and businesses were bankrupt. But they were also without the means to communicate, or the records to communicate about. So people didn't get paid, or if they did, the banks couldn't cash their checks, and the next thing we knew, most nonessential businesses were shutting down.
Add to that the complete anarchy that reigned in the stock market, with people frantic to escape New York City and the electronic records in mayhem and the sell orders roaring in—it meant the end of Wall Street, essentially.
The next thing was the calling in of loans by foreign banks. In the mad scramble to leave the dollar, the whole delicate Eurocur-rency market trembled and then collapsed.
By this point the state of the world monetary system made the Great Depression look positively healthy.
It will take years to recover. It's a funny thing that before the war the great economic bugaboo was inflation. God knows, deflation can be worse. Money's so damned hard to get because there's so little of it around. I'd rather work an hour for twenty inflated dollars than a day for fifty deflated cents! And in terms of buying power per hour worked, we Americans are operating at about a sixth of the prewar efficiency level, meaning it takes six times as long as it did before the war to earn the same amount of buying power.
You'd better believe that goes for economists, too!
I was vacationing on St. Bart's on Warday. I'd been there for 182 WARDAY
three days and planned to stay another eleven. A few days after the war, the police rounded up all the tourists and put us aboard a passing cruise ship, the Canberra. There was a great deal of trouble. The Canberra wasn't prepared to take on over a thousand extra passengers. The first thing that happened that made this feel like a war was that a man refused to leave the police launch he was in. He said he had rights; he had prepaid his vacation. The police threw him into the water and sailed off.
That, more than anything, brought home to me the fact that the world had changed. We were not affected by EMP, so we still had radios. We were glued to them, listening mostly to the B B C There was this curious, terrifying silence across most of the dial. The United States was silent. Cuba was silent. The BBC reported massive fires in New York and Washington, and said that flights from England had been forced to return without landing because of unsettled conditions in other American cities.
My daughter was in school at Colgate. My wife was at our home in New York. At that time I was working for the Chase Econometric Institute, forecasting flow of money, which is my specialty. I had taken some time off to be alone and to think about the consequences of the massive IMF refunding that had been proposed the week before by the Saudis. This was critical to Chase because it affected the viability of our Nigerian loans, and thus our whole African exposure. Not only that, our failure to support the proposal could call into question our relationship with the Saudis.
But with free-market oil soft at twenty-two dollars, and the Mexican and Brazilian debt moratoriums creating cash-flow problems for the bank, we were concerned that we would not be able to sustain the additional loan demand the refunding would create.
So I was alone on an island with my computer and all the data I needed, quietly developing flow analyses and projections based on various cash/loan levels.
I never dreamed that the bank I worked for was about to become a part of history, and the computer I worked with worth considerably more than its weight in gold. My initial concern was just to get home. I kept thinking, standing at the rail of the Canberra
on that warm October afternoon, feeling the reassuring hum of CALIFORNIA DANGERS 183
the ship beneath my feet, of my wife and daughter and that measured BBC voice saying, "New York is burning.,, For some reason I just assumed the Russians had won. I felt that as an employee of a capitalist bank, I would not have much of a future.
I don't want to go into my whole life story over the past five years. Suffice to say that it has been sad in some ways, but in others lucky. I have been preserved from the suffering and upheaval that have blighted so many lives. Of course, I lost my wife and daughter, but since I met Quinn here in San Francisco, I have found that I can contend with the hollowness inside me, and the awful sense of having deserted them. Quinn hasn't been successful in finding them. In looking for them I found her, I guess.
The Canberra eventually docked at New Orleans. Since the war, I have not gone north of Atlanta. I put my name in the Red Cross National Finders, but nothing ever came of it. And of course, Quinn's scoured the earth. Even so, I still look at the lists every month, when they post them in the Student Union. But Berkeley is a world away from the war.
Hell. I'm a goddamn coward, is what I am. My little girl could be anywhere and I'm afraid to go look for her. I'm so scared of radiation. Even while it's killing you, you d
on't know it's there. I wake up in the night when the wind blows down from the mountains, thinking maybe some microscopic bit of plutonium from the Dakotas has found its way here, and is aiming for my lungs. I get these weird, nonspecific sicknesses. So I go to the Medical Center and they tell me I'm fine. Once I heard them showing a man on triage how to manage lung cancer by breathing steam!
I went to a psychologist. I went to an osteopath. I went to a witch.
Now listen, I'm really getting off on a personal tangent. I think in a sense that I've developed the habit of being a patient. Half the world is starving and I'm worried about my own damn guilt trip.
This interview method is cunning. You guys find the people who want to talk, don't you, and then just let 'em rip. Get a man's secrets right on disk.
What are you, a couple of State Intelligence or MI-5 types?
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We've got both around Berkeley, believe me. The British are good friends to this country. The best friends. But they are also very interested in using the current crisis to solidify their international position, shall we say.
One thing I'm sure of. There will never be another United States as free, as powerful, as magnificent as there was before.
From a statistical standpoint, we regressed too far. Now outsiders can control how much reconstruction we do of our technological base industries, and thus make sure we stay just far enough behind not to be a threat. The tendency of Japan and Europe is to look upon the U.S. and Russia as two countries that went kind of mad. By 1980 or '81, both nations were effectively insane. The accession of Reagan the actor and Andropov the human computer were the first sure symptoms of the war madness, according to the poolside theories of my friend Dr. Hideo Hayakawa, who is a psy-chopolitical theorist.
We have about a hundred and seventy-five million people in this country, and the death rate still exceeds the viable birth rate by two to one. So we've had a net loss of fifty-five million people.
That's twenty million births and seventy-five million actual deaths.
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