War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

  7:45 A . M . I see a child with persistent diarrhea. A manual examination of his abdomen indicates gas. The transverse colon is tender. A rectal feels clear. Still, there aren't any intestinal bugs going around and he has been eating his usual diet. He isn't triaged, so I call the hospital and order up a colon study, and refer it to my Project Partnership M.D., Dr. Stanford Gittleson. Sandy will see the boy at three o'clock this afternoon. The sonograms of the child's colon will be in his hands by then. I say a silent prayer, Goddess grant that all this child needs is a little sumac root and peppermint tea.

  7:55 A . M . I see an elderly woman whose symptoms suggest NSD. I prescribe a depurative tea of burdock root and red clover blossom and a cataplasm of comfrey leaf, which we currently have available. One of the coveners takes her into the instruction room to teach her the use of the medicants and give her supplies. Because she is over sixty, I do not charge her. I will wait until the disease progresses a little more before I tell her what she has.

  Over the next four hours I see thirty more patients. Then I stop for a lunch of soybean soup and a glass of milk. Afterward I drink a cup of bee balm tea and read the Plain Dealer. There were two fires in Cleveland last night. Since insurance ended, the number of fires in this country has decreased dramatically.

  2:00 P . M . I fill out my daily report for the Relief. Mainly, the English want to know about any contagious diseases. Except for a possible with the little boy I referred to Sandy, I don't have any.

  Unless NSD is contagious. If the English or the Research Group in ACROSS AMERICA 283

  Chicago know the answer to that question, they certainly aren't telling us.

  I'd like a bath, but there's no time for that. I wash my hands instead, and then it's time to meet one of my psychotherapy groups. Since Warday the number of people in therapy has dropped by more than half. I think most of us work so hard we don't have time to be crazy. And nobody in this group is actually insane, not in the classic sense. There are ten members, five of them with touch neurosis, which is one of the more common current problems. There are many people who have developed a patho-logical terror of touching things because of the threat of hidden radiation. Two of my male patients suffer from impotence. Again, fear is a strong factor here. I have two women who have recently discovered they are gene-damaged, and one who is trying to cope with being triaged at the age of twenty-six, as a result of drinking strontium 90 in some milk she got last year in Dallas. Everybody is scared of milk because of the way cows concentrate strontium 90, but it has become a vitally important food. Milk, eggs, dairy products, soybeans, corn, and oats are our staples nowadys. Some chicken, but eggs are now too important to justify the slaughter of potential layers.

  One of the things that sets people back nowadays is poor nutrition. I try to teach modern nutrition techniques, how to adjust to a reduced-protein diet. I get a lot of people coming in worrying about leukemia or anemia, who simply aren't eating right. Vitamin C and D deficiencies are most common, followed by proteins and amino acids. I can usually tell by looking at people or talking to them what their general deficiency problem is.

  Most of the people in the afternoon group suffer from lack of good nutrition as much as anything else. People in therapy also tend to be the rigid personalities. This is an era of extreme change, and these are people who are afraid of change. Deep panic reactions are common. Most of them have very vivid memories of prewar times, and they are clinging to them. In better-adjusted people, prewar memories are always kind of hazy.

  3:30 P . M . I go from the therapy group to the daily business meeting of the coven. One of our problems is record-keeping. We 284 WARDAY

  have applied to the Relief for a computer, but so far no response.

  They've been granting small computers to certain types of farms, so we decide to look into that program. For a suburban community like Shaker Heights, we have a big farm, seven acres. Two are in herbs and the rest in corn, soybeans, and vegetables. We're even trying to grow watermelons in a semi-sheltered environment we've built, though they are officially an illegal crop here because of the likelihood of failure. As an experimental effort, they are tolerated.'

  We also have a geiger counter, and run a radiation program. I have the whole property checked every day.

  4:00 P . M . I start on my housecalls, taking along Kirby Gentry, who assists me in this part of the practice and is going to take it over sometime soon. In the ideal world, I would devote myself to ritual, meditation, one-on-one counseling, and critical procedures such as deliveries and euthanasias. But this is hardly the ideal world, so we get in the vanagon and set out. First stop is the Barkers', where the little girl has chicken pox with a secondary staph infection. On the way in, I see that the Relief has quarantined the house. The little girl, Dotty, is really bad. I have prescribed applications of juice of sundew to the areas of most severe eruption, but I can see only slight improvement. This is one of the few herbs with a staph-effective antibiotic. The kid has acquired secondary pruri-tis from scratching. Her fever is 106. She is delirious and suffering agonies from itching. I think we might very well lose this child. I make sure her fingernails are trimmed back so that she won't break her skin so much. Then Kirby and I give her a bath in butter-fat soap and water. She screams from the cold. We reapply a paste of myrrh, golden seal, and cayenne to the sites of infection and make sure she is comfortable. The mother tells us that the children's clinic won't accept her daughter because of the risk of contagion, but they have promised to send antibiotics if I approve. I sign the form.

  Next stop is a house where both husband and wife have NSD.

  Their three children will soon be on what the English call the "or-phaned list." We are getting to know these kids, because they will be in the fostering program we do with the Diocese of Cleveland and the Council of Churches.

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  We do five more housecalls, and we find a situation where a diagnosis of tuberculosis is highly probable. Yesterday I gave scratch tests to Mr. and Mrs. Malone, and they are both positive.

  They also have hacking coughs and look generally debilitated. I have no choice but to isolate them and call the Relief. TB is a serious contagion, and we cannot risk letting it spread to the general population. The supply of curative drugs like Isoniazid is too limited to run that risk. The Malones will be hospitalized. Even though Hank Malone is triaged, he will get drug therapy, primarily because the disease is so contagious and long-term hospitalization is too expensive. I encourage them as best I can, explaining that if a triaged person is going to get seriously ill, TB is his best choice, because all cases are treated.

  N o w it's six. I'm tired. I go home and sit down to dine with Kirby and four other witches. We eat, as usual, in silence, too exhausted to talk, too hungry to want to.

  Rumors

  The Garden of Eden

  We had been traveling on trains almost continuously. To vary our experience, we took Trailways from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. It's a three-hour-and-ten-minute journey over the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes, both of which are in rather poor condition. There is considerable shoulder erosion, and what the bus driver called "set-tling," which makes the road look wrinkled and feel as if the bus is a boat on a choppy sea.

  We asked a number of passengers if they had heard anything about a part of the country being a Garden of Eden.

  They certainly had.

  T O M M O O N : "Hawaii, where I took a vacation in 1977, is now a Garden of Eden. The islands were annexed by Japan in 1989. All non-Asians were forced to return to the States. The official language of Hawaii is now Japanese. There is no rationing and people are getting rich off Jap tourists. The Japanese consider American food the height of luxury, and have kept McDonald's and Burger King open. Cokes and Pepsis and milkshakes are readily available.

  You can go to a twenty-course luau for a dollar. There are theaters that play only old American movies, and the local television stations rerun old network tapes, complete with all com
mercials, which the Japanese love."

  P A C K Hawaii remains a part of the United States. There is, of 288

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  course, a substantial Japanese presence, and the Royal Navy maintains its Western Pacific Fleet HQ there. The local fast-food establishments are closed—as they are everywhere—due more to a lack of cheap meat and soy protein from the mainland than to any local economic difficulty. The local Coca-Cola bottler has recently begun to get syrup again, and is expecting to restart production soon. As far as television stations are concerned, forget it. The functional parts were shipped to California years ago, which is one of the reasons L.A. and San Francisco have TV themselves. This is quite a sore point with Hawaiians, by the way. Rationing is worse than it is stateside because of the island's limited ability to grow grains and maintain its own herds. If you don't like breadfruit and pineap-ple, do not go to Hawaii.

  JOAN R . H A M N E R : "There is a Garden of Eden on the Texas coast. The British have built a new port to supply Europeans in the States with luxuries we Americans can't get. This city has a huge entertainment complex where they show first-run European movies and plays. The Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Shakespeare Company come. In this port there is a four-star French restaurant.

  Americans are not allowed, but only Europeans and Japanese. The city is all new."

  F A C T : There is no such city in Texas, and we suspect that it doesn't exist at all. Walter Tevis placed a similar city somewhere on the Pacific Coast, but almost in the same breath discounted the story as a rumor.

  C A R L D I E T R I C H : "Seattle is a Garden of Eden. The Japanese have taken over the state of Washington and are soon going to be turning out such things as high-pulse electromagnetic motors in the old Boeing facilities. They are planning to retrain former Boeing employees, to take advantage of the cheap labor. Soon the United States won't even need roads because of the off-road cars and stuff they will make. Also, the Japanese are now basing their fishing fleet there instead of in the home islands. As a matter of fact, things are so good in Washington that immigration is out and you will be turned back at the border."

  F A C T : We are not aware of any major Japanese presence in the Pacific Northwest. This area has become a thriving agricultural and shepherding community. Vegetables, apples, and mutton from 288 WARDAY

  the state of Washington are beginning to be exported to other parts of the country, particularly California.

  The Boeing facilities are not functioning at the present time, although company spokesmen maintain that they will be producing the 800 series of aircraft there in the future. They will be powered by conventional jets.

  V E R N A M C D U F F : "Litchfield County, Connecticut, is a Garden of Eden. Rich survival freaks escaped into Litchfield County right after Warday and have formed a separate country, which has been recognized by Great Britain and Japan. It is about the size of Liechtenstein. It has its own gold currency and its own form of government, which is based on family status. The Europeans allow it to exist because these old families have such long-standing ties with them. Many of them own parts of the world's great companies, such as Phillips-IBM and Lever House. Litchfield has a fully functional telephone system and satellite TV from Europe, and is full of luxury European cars such as Daimler-Benz 4 W D s and Leyland Stars. Unemployment in Litchfield is zero, and there is no such thing as malnutrition or birth defects. The living standard is even better than it was prewar."

  F A C T : We learned in White Plains that Litchfield County has a population of about a thousand, roughly twenty percent of whom are triaged because of Warday exposures. The county hospital was closed in 1991 due to a lack of doctors, leaving only alternate practitioners and religious organizations to serve the population.

  Interview

  Amy Carver, Teacher

  Well, I feel stranger than I thought I would, doing this. Although it's nice to talk about yourself. Ever since I got Joan Wilson's letter from Kansas City about you guys, thoughts have been running through my head about what I would say. I hope I can do the whole thing without talking about the World Series. But the Pirates won the first game, so we're all very, very excited.

  Let's see. I'm supposed to identify myself? Yes? Oh, you're going to be totally silent. What is this, some kind of psychological thing? You're smiling. Is it? Are you really psychologists? Are you British? Joan said you were from Dallas.

  Well, anyway, I am A m y Hill Carver. I teach junior high at the Baldwin N e w School in Baldwin, Pennsylvania. This school was reorganized in 1991, and serves as the central educational facility for all the surrounding suburbs.

  I am thirty-seven years of age. Before Warday I was a freelance writer. I had done work for all the major women's maga-zines— Cosmo, Good Housekeeping, Bazaar, The Journal, all of them.

  And then your next question is where was I on Warday. Well, I was on my way to Killington, Vermont, to ski. I was thirty-two years old, making good money, single, and there had been an early snowfall. So off I went for a long weekend. I heard nothing, saw 289

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  nothing. The car radio went off. I thought, thank you, Mr. Ford. I continued on to Killington. When I got to the Holiday Inn, it turned out that all the radios and TVs were out in the whole place. There was an uproar. Nobody knew what had happened.

  I skied anyway, all that afternoon. I remember it was powdery and not very settled, but it was still fun. I've never skied since, not after that day. So that's where I was on Warday. Skiing.

  It wasn't until the next day that people started saying stuff

  —New York had been bombed, there had been a nuclear accident, a reactor explosion, that sort of thing. We saw a couple of helicopters. The out-of-town papers didn't get delivered. The second morning of my trip, I found the dining room of the hotel closed. No breakfast, and no explanations. That scared me. So I headed for home, which was New York.

  I was in Hartford when I started seeing this immense black cloud to the south. It wasn't a mushroom cloud or anything. Just a huge black thing like a giant blob or something. By the time I was in Middletown, it was all the way across the southern sky.

  It was the most terrifying thing I've ever seen. I stopped in Middletown and asked about it at the gas station. The man said there had been a bomb. He told me not to go any farther, because New York was burning.

  I remember I just stood there staring at that old man. There was nothing to say. The radios and TVs were out. Many car ignitions were out. Even so, cars were streaming up from the south.

  And there was that cloud.

  I stayed that night in Middletown—I was very lucky to get a motel room. Refugees were all over the place. When I got to the room, I found that there were six other people in it already. Two of them had these disgusting swellings, one all over his back and one on his face. I did not know then what flash burns look like if they're left untreated. I learned, though.

  When the sun went down, we saw that the cloud was full of lightning. I decided then and there to stay inside the motel as long as I could. Other people did too. We were scared there was radiation.

  We had a very hard time. Food ran out. My car got stolen. I lived at that motel for months. Nobody knew what to do. The man-

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  ager kept a tab, but he couldn't get the bank to pay him on his credit-card chits. Then the bank closed. Food got really scarce. I used to get a slice of bread and make it into soup, seasoned with salt and pepper. No, wait a minute, that was months later. In the famine.

  What saved me was staying in that motel as long as I did. I'm over thirty, single and childless. I didn't get much of a dose. I don't think I'm in a high-risk cancer situation. I have a little cluster of B

  cells on my nose, but they slough off as rapidly as they form, which is a good sign. Even if they do become cancerous, they will treat me because skin cancers are curable.

  I was in that motel for six months. We became a family. The Brentwood Middletown
Motel People. We had deaths and a marriage, and we foraged together during the food shortage.

  One day a man came through, traveling from the West. He said Pittsburgh was good. There was food, and the people were okay.

  Outsiders were welcome there. So I thought, why not? Our motel family was down to ten or twelve people. We'd gone through the worst winter of our lives together, and we were ready to say good-bye. You don't necessarily want to stay with people you endured hell with. Every time you look at them, you see the past.

  It took me two weeks to get to Pittsburgh. I hitched, took the bus, took the train.

  You know, talking about Warday has a funny effect on me. I used to be very unemotional about it. But now I think about it in terms of humanity. And places. Not that motel. My beautiful prewar places. I had a loft in SoHo, can you believe it? A big white loft with the kitchen in the middle of the space. Light on three sides. I could see the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building. I remember the way the brick streets looked in the rain. I remember my friends. And my editors and co-workers. Cassie Stewart. I loved Cassie. She was full of laughter and fun. Sometimes I dream about those people. Cassie and Mindy and Janice and all the people at Cosmopolitan. That was really my best market. I did sort of self-help articles. "Glamorize Yourself for that Special Him"—that sort of thing.

  In those days I wanted to be a novelist. I dreamed of being a female William Kotzwinkle. Do you remember him? He was a nov-