War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

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  elist in those days. He did this novel called Fata Morgana that was practically unknown. But it was simply wonderful. I always wanted to write like him. And Swimmer in the Secret Sea, which Red-

  book published in ' 7 6 . I was working on a novel called Shadowgirl.

  It was about a woman who thinks she is a shadow. About how she discovers she is real, and this basically destroys her. Before that, her life was a fairy tale of submission. Easy, but dangerously self-defeating. I had about three hundred pages done, and my agent really liked it. God knows where it is now. I must say, I do fanta-size about going back to Manhattan and seeing what my old place is like. I bought my loft for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Forty thousand dollars down. My parents bought it. I hired a locator, a guy here in Baldwin, and he found out they'd died during the famine. I felt awful about it. For a while I had this nightmare where they are sitting in the kitchen in our house. It's a sunny morning and the birds are singing and the apple tree outside is blooming. Only the kitchen doesn't smell like bacon and eggs and coffee. And I look at them, and they are human skeletons.

  I couldn't help them, I know that. The locator got the state of New Jersey to issue me a provisional deed to their house. It's a ruin, I guess. Nobody lives in Morristown, New Jersey, anymore.

  I have gotten to the point where I say, Amy, you just get through today. Or this morning. Or this minute. Whatever. I just want to survive the next ten minutes.

  I love my job. Teaching is so very important. It's incredible to realize, but some of the very small children in the Baldwin Elementary School were born after Warday. They're going to grow up without reference to the old world. They'll never know what it was like.

  So what are we teaching your children these days, you ask? Actually, most of the parents don't ask. They're too tired. The people of Pittsburgh work very, very hard. We're highly organized. This is a free-enterprise town, but we really do a lot of cooperating with one another. Our area is the most radiation-free in the whole Midwest. West of here, they got the dust from the missile fields.

  Pittsburgh is an important place because it's healthy and strong. There is a lot of farming toward the Pennsylvania border and in eastern Ohio, just this side of the radiation areas. I heard ACROSS AMERICA 293

  there was this giant dust storm out there recently, but it didn't get as far as Canton, so we're okay. Pittsburgh sends its own agents to the farms in Ohio and Pennsylvania and West Virginia to buy up food. We have a unique system. The whole city is on a co-op food plan, the Greater Pittsburgh Sustenance Program. The program figures out what we need and where to get it, and allocates the food by person. We all have these ration cards. You can get hung in the Allegheny County Jail for a class-one ration violation. That's if you steal food and sell it. That's the worst To give you an idea of how well put together we are, the Relief has designated us a Prime Recovery Area, meaning that we get such things as computers for the school and demonstrable-need programs like Sustenance. We also get extra shipments of medical supplies.

  In junior high, we teach land management and radiation control, animal husbandry, principles of small-scale farming, FAN-TIX, reading skills, and business math. The kids endure it all, except FAN TLX, which of course they love. And the new Phillips and Apple computers are great fun. We get feeds from the British via satellite, which is a great improvement because now the kids can communicate with students in England. They can have conversations, and it means a lot to them to know that somewhere across the sea, there is an unhurt world full of people who care about us.

  I remember when we just assumed Europe had been hit. During the famine, for example. The world was ending, I thought then.

  One evening a funny-looking jet flew over the school and we thought, oh God, the Russians. We lost the war and now the Russians have come.

  All night there were planes landing at the airport, which is only a couple of miles away from us here in Baldwin. We hadn't seen a plane in six months. Boy, was this place in an uproar! I'll never forget, we were planning to surrender the town. I went out there with half the rest of the people and we saw all these planes on the runway with target insignia on the side. Most of us were on foot, a few in trucks and cars. We were coming up the road to the terminal when a man in a white uniform came out with a bullhorn and called out, "We are a Royal Air Force Relief Support Unit. We are friends."

  The RAF! I just sat down in the road and cried. They came over 294 W A R D A Y

  and checked us for radiation. When they found we were clean, they sent up a cheer.

  They were all in white uniforms. They'd come up from Atlanta.

  They gave us kippers. They had zillions of kippers that had been salted in Ireland and packed for export in plastic bags, so they were totally uncontaminated. We filled our pockets with kippers and went home.

  One of the most vivid memories I have is of those kippers. They were so good. I'd never had one before in my life.

  You know, another thing I'd like to tell the rest of the world about the people of Baldwin is this: we work hard, but we also have lots of fun. We have a rugby team and a baseball team and a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe and a little theater and reading clubs and a thriving 4-H. Pittsburgh has the only satellite uplink in the Midwest, and we have been allocated short-wave receivers so we get the BBC North American service. As a teacher, the one special allocation I get is books and computer programs.

  Which, by the way, reminds me of my Prince Andrew story, because it has to do with books. How long have I been talking? I'm getting hoarse! But this is really fun. I haven't actually sat down and talked like this before. Not ever, just talked and talked.

  Now I have to tell you I was really impressed with Prince Andrew last June. We were so excited. I remember Martha Dor-ris—she's our Relief General Officer—got the RAF to give us shoe polish so we could get ourselves fit to see the Prince. Shoe polish!

  We hadn't polished a shoe for at least two years. But we shined

  'em up for the Prince. The English were hilarious about the visit.

  Or, as they put it in their bulletins, The Visit. Polished shoes. Best clothes. He came to inspect a farm, the school, the Relief operation. He was here for two hours, which was considered a great honor. Most places he only stayed half an hour.

  I must say that before he came I was not all that overawed.

  This is America, after all. We don't have a king. But I was totally won over by what happened at the school. We had all been out to watch the royal plane arrive, of course. The most beautiful white airplane. To see that huge Airbus and the royal entourage, you would not have known that there had ever been a war. Here is the ACROSS AMERICA 296

  world turned on its ear, and the royals are going on just as always, like saying it's all going to be all right. Civilization isn't over.

  The Visit was a totally self-contained production. First a band came marching down the stairs. Then they rolled out their own red carpet. Then a bunch of officers came along and saluted while some lords and generals came down. Then came the High Commissioner of the North American Relief. He had flown in from Toronto. He was dressed in a blue uniform, and did he ever look imposing! Then the Prince. He was in white. In my imagination I had visualized him as a very big man. But he was normal size. He moved quickly. They played "God Save the King." We sang

  "America the Beautiful." Then "The Star-Spangled Banner." Then he met the local Relief officials. Martha was very poised, but she was shaking like a leaf.

  We teachers and the kids rushed back to the school. We had been selected for inspection, I think, mainly because we're so close to the airport. I thought it would be a very formal thing. But he spent half an hour sitting on a chair in the auditorium, asking questions. What is the most important thing you are learning here? Tell me about the curriculum. Is it useful? Is it interesting?

  He asked how well heated the school was. He asked after the health of the children. He went to the infirmary and read the re
cords and inspected the medicine chest. He issued a Royal Warrant for tablet ampicillin, and we have never been without it since.

  After he left, an equerry arrived with two suitcases of books.

  They were a gift from the Prince. He asked that we read one poem each day from The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and suggested that we form a Shakespeare society, which we have done.

  Of course, I know there are people who resent the British, but without them I think the United States would really have had a very hard time. When it came time for them to repay their debt for our help and support through two world wars, they didn't hesitate.

  I will never forget that.

  Interview

  Charles Kohl, Student

  I go to the Baldwin New School. My birthday is June eighth. I'm eleven. I like my school. There is always plenty of everything. We have all the sports stuff we want. I could have ten lockers if I wanted. We all stay just in the South Building. The senior high is on the top floor, we're on the second floor, and the elementary school is downstairs.

  I go to school in the winter. From April to October, me and my family work to tear down houses on our land so we can increase acreage. We have some apple trees, and we grow corn and green beans and stuff. When we lived in New Jersey we had so many scrubdowns I got allergic to the soap Mom used to make. Mom and Dad tried to move to New Mexico, but this guy from the Relief said we were crazy, it was very bad there, because there was a revolution.

  When I got TB, they gave me pills at the hospital. There are kids, like in Texas or somewhere like that, who probably die if they get sick. We pray in school that God will keep us.

  Dad was a stockbroker before the war. He will not talk about those times, except he says he worked in an office. Dad is strong. I used to think it was stock-breaking, like breaking horses, but Mom says it was a numbers job.

  The United States is my favorite country. Of course, I love the 296

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  King because of all the good things the Crown has done for us.

  When Prince Andrew came here, I saw him. England must be a great place, and my ambition is to go there. My dad says they still use his stock skills there, so he might be transferred to London someday. He put our names on the list. If we go before I am fourteen, I could get to be a British subject and have my own computer. They also have frozen food there. I would like to be a pilot. But the United States is the greatest country in the world, Dad says, although that is not right, Miss Carver says. She says we had a hard time but we will get back. One time there were aircraft carriers as big as our school.

  We have big plants here. There are problems with furnaces and controls and fuel and all kinds of stuff, so they can hardly go, although I saw smoke last week coming out of the Bethlehem Number One.

  Dad says life is to work from six to six, eat from six to seven, read from seven to nine, and sleep the rest of the time. Mom has NSD, but she thinks she will be better. I think when she puts mineral oil on her tummy it is better. Miss Carver says I should love her and pray for her.

  Our school computers are tied into the international information network. I am working on a program to defeat the holds so we can find out more about the world. Miss Carver says okay, but store my programs on disks, not in the internal memory, and officially she doesn't know what I am doing. When a hold is imposed, it is always preceded by a synalog coding. It looks like it is coming in from the master program, but actually the master is just instructing your computer not to access the information. So I am revising our data-capture program to also capture the synalogs in the dump. That way I can find out their command sequences and probably get to where our program will automatically issue defeats anytime it sees a synalog being imposed.

  Miss Carver wants to find out a lot of things she says are behind the holds. Miss Carver is from New York and she wants to know why people still can't go back. Also, she wants to know about Russia and China.

  There is this guy in our high school named Buddy Toro who tries to scuzz me half the time when I am on the computer. He will 298 W A R D A Y

  chat into my work and scoop whatever I am doing. Then he'll alter my programs and superimpose something so my stuff comes out weird, like I'm supposed to have a geomorphic drawing but the earth looks like a pear and I get a C. He only goes after me. Our dads have trouble together. They are both on the Baldwin Council, and they are on opposite sides. The Relief wants the city to keep food allocation, but Dad thinks it should go back to the state government, which we do not at the moment have. We have to get a new one, Dad says.

  I have a girlfriend. She is Stacy Boyce and I like her because not only can she play rugby football, she is really neat We are writing a saga together on our class computers. Fifth grade has a new Phillips that is really fast. It accesses ten kilobytes in the time it takes our Epson to do one. If they wanted to, they could pull up a thousand pages all at once and do instant correlations. Anyway, she is Morgan Le Fay in this saga and I am King Arthur, and we love each other even though we are brother and sister. Last night in the saga I kissed her, and she comes back, "save." That was so beautiful.

  I gave her hard copy this morning, and she turned all red and said she would keep it forever. Her dad and mine were brokers together when, as my mom says, America was still young.

  But we are young now, Stacy and me.

  A Wanderer

  East of Pittsburgh there are mountains, then there are farms, then there are fields full of wild growth, and a tumbledown look to the towns. Not many people are aboard the Empire State, the train that runs from Pittsburgh to Albany via Scranton. We are carsick and uncomfortable. This was not a passenger line before the war, and the roadbed is brutal. I doubt that we're going much more than forty.

  We reach Scranton after midnight. There is a cold, wet wind blowing out of the northwest The air is fresh, with a tang of woodsmoke. We are leaving the train here, shifting to Trailways.

  To pare some hours off our journey, we'll take the bus across 84 to Poughkeepsie, then catch a midmorning train down to the end of the line in White Plains, the headquarters of the New York Military Area.

  The terminal is empty, lit by a single light There are no streetlights in this neighborhood, and we are forced to rely on a map, reading street signs as best we can.

  The Trailways station is more active. People camp here and there in the waiting room. Somebody is playing a dulcimer quite well, but I do not recognize the tune.

  The restaurant is open, selling cheese sandwiches, cherry pie, and a local brand of yogurt

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  I eat a slice of the pie, which is far less sweet than what used to be sold in bus stations. We get coffee, which is generally made from toasted grain these days, and this is no exception. But it's hot.

  There is one other passenger on the Poughkeepsie bus, a small woman of delicate beauty. Her eyes are large and dark, her lips full, her brown hair framing her soft face, which is as pale as a shadow.

  She tells us she is on her way back to Boston. Her family lives in Scranton, but she is in school at Harvard. She is studying twentieth-century English literature. I am delighted. It was a discipline I thought might have been abandoned in the rush to prepare people for practical careers. "I've applied to read at Oxford or Cambridge, but I doubt I'll make it. There are a thousand American applications a semester, just for my field. They take six in modern literature."

  "What's it like at Harvard?" Jim asks.

  "Difficult, in the sense of physical survival. I'm a senior. I arrived there in the fall of '88, right? I was just starting my freshman year when the war happened. I stayed there because it was obviously mad to try to get back to Scranton. I couldn't even make a phone call home for months. I wrote, but the letters never got through. Harvard was in total chaos. People were leaving—stu-dents, professors, administrators. Trying to get home, wherever their homes were. Northeastern University, which is in the Fenway in Boston, officially closed.
There were all kinds of problems there. The students rioted when they couldn't get food. I heard that there were shootings in the Fenway. In any case, one can now get a former student apartment there for next to nothing.

  "Harvard was a bit better off than Northeastern. We thought of the war as an awful sort of irony, because there had actually been a joint U.S.-Soviet physics conclave in session on campus when the war was fought, the first such conclave in years. The Russians tried to leave the next day. They set out for Logan Airport on foot, finally, even though it was obviously hopeless. Nobody ever saw them again.

  "The famine caused riots in Boston, which grew so serious that AMERICA 301

  the campus had to be sealed off. I found myself in the peculiar position of studying for my finals while doing guard duty in the Yard. I was lucky to fall only a semester behind. Despite everything, Harvard was still dutifully failing people at the usual alarming rate.

  "Those times were very dramatic and dangerous. The worst problem was food. We ate odd things. The various kitchens kept coming up with jointly prepared meals. Pickles, corned beef, Wheaties. and Tang was the sort of thing we might get for dinner. Everybody was always babbling about how various unlikely things would make complete proteins when they were put together. To make a long story short, we all but starved."

  "What do you study?"

  "Well, at this point my seminar in Joyce is probably my most interesting course. I went through a period of furiously decon-structing everyone from Barbara Pym to James Gould Cozzens. I think I agree with Cozzens about some things. You know what he said about Joyce? He said, There's no point fooling around with the English language. You can't win.' It's a hilarious thing to say, but I think there's something in it Please don't think me a conser-vative, though. Actually, I suppose it's possible that's exactly what I am. I'm not really certain where I'm going, except that I feel most drawn to prose that is written with absolute clarity. Pym. An-thony Powell. Americans? Maybe Wharton, certainly Hemingway, although in his case the directness tends to bury what should have been subtle about the work."