"Do you think it's appropriate for somebody to be studying a subject as impractical as English literature right now?"
"Impractical? It's not impractical at all. In fact, it's very necessary if we intend to keep the civilization going. I cant make wid-gets, it's true enough. But not every single soul should. I'm a klutz anywav."
We ride on, three people in a bus. If there weren't medical supplies aboard, we wouldn't be traveling at all. No bus company would release a bus with so few passengers unless there's another, better reason to move it than their needs. We are quiet for some time. I have just closed my eyes when the girl begins to talk again.
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This time her voice is low and rushed and full of tension.
"I have a lot of trouble with images that won't leave my mind. I have to make room for them. For example, I have an image of a kid who was executed in Cambridge. Can you believe it, he had broken into a house and killed everybody and eaten their food. Then he did it in another house. He was caught and put in the town jail. Two weeks later he escaped and did it again. This was the only way he could think of to cope. When he was caught a second time, the town made a decision to hold a public execution. We were deeply shocked, all of us at Harvard. This was in the summer of '89. We thought to mount some kind of a protest, but there was no time.
One morning there was an execution notice on various bulletin boards around town, and that afternoon they hanged him by pushing him out a window with a rope around his neck. He was left there for days. I am not sure that the threat of execution deterred anybody else from killing for food. Most people wouldn't do it anyway, not under any circumstances.
"I have an image of the police finding the house next door to mine with everybody in it dead during the first week of the flu.
"I have an image of my dog, Nancy, the night I let her go. People killed their pets during the famine, but I let Nancy go. She never came back. I hope she learned to live by hunting. She was a smart dog.
"When the kitchens began to fail, Harvard organized foraging teams. We ate rats, ducks from the park, geese when they appeared, all kinds of things. We ate the city-issue cheese and the carrots and potatoes the Army brought in. I've heard that lots of people starved during the famine, and I'm not a bit surprised.
"I've just had the satisfaction of going home and finding, once again, that my family is well. I go every few months, even though we can now talk on the phone. I really am compulsive about it."
"Does your interest in family life mean you want to get married?" I asked.
"Am I wrong, or is there a whiff of fatuousness about that question? I'm twenty-two years old and ought, I suppose, to be eager to support a house-husband on my possible stipend of two quid ACROSS AMERICA 303
a week, assuming Oxbridge accepts me. Is that a sufficiently fatuous answer?"
"What do you remember most about being in Cambridge on Warday?"
"That's easy. I remember the cloud. It blew out to sea before it hit us, thank God. All one day and night it could be seen from Boston Harbor, hanging over the Atlantic. God, it was big. It looked like a hurricane or something. People were leaving. The cops had bullhorns, telling you to go in the basement. It was awful. There was so much craziness. Kids went nuts in the Fenway, kids from Northeastern running crazy, naked, kicking people, burning cars, looting apartments.
"My romantic streak makes me wish it was about 1985 and I was a high school girl again, in love in the way one could be before the war, but which seems so impossible now.
"I wonder what I will do with myself. In a sense, my degree is certainly an anachronism. If I don't make it into Oxbridge, I'll have to do my graduate work here, perhaps at Yale. At any rate, I've applied there and to the University of Chicago—and to Stanford, where I have no chance because you can't get a California Student Permit if you have a noncritical specialty. Oxbridge can lead to employment in England. If I have to stay here, I think I'll quit and join my father's company. They make windows. Dull, but it pays well."
Again she falls silent. The bus roars and bounces. This is not a spectacular road. In places we can hear the hiss of grass scraping the sides of the bus.
"Anything else?" Jim asks.
"Years ago I had a mad love affair. We were going to marry and live together always, all the usual things. When I got back to Scranton I found he had died of the flu. I think we would have been happy together. For a little while, life would have been perfect. I missed that chance."
She rests her head back against the seat.
"I'm so tired. These days I really need my sleep. When I go to bed I imagine a little warm cottage where I can cuddle up by the fire, sip wine, and be content."
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She says no more. Like most people who live at a very low nutrition level, sleep comes suddenly to her, this porcelain beauty. After a moment Jim touches her cheek, but she does not awaken.
The bus pulls into Poughkeepsie in thin dawn light. When the driver wakes her up, she bustles quickly down the aisle and disappears without a word.
PART FOUR
New York
When pennants trail and street-festoons hang
from the windows,
When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-
passengers and foot-standers, when the mass
is densest,
When the facades of the houses are alive with
people, when eyes gaze riveted tens of
thousands at a time . . .
—Walt Whitman,
"A Broadway Pageant"
Monday, October 4,1993: The Northeast was more beautiful empty than it had been populated. Some of the drama of the old wildness had returned, in the thick foliage that scraped the windows of the train, and in the rioting fields that once were ordered. As we moved into the commuter belt, though, ruin took the place of wildness.
Images from the window of the train: empty suburban stations whose parking lots once glittered with commuters' BMWs and Buicks; dark doorways and vines everywhere, spreading in the most unlikely places, along streets, up telephone poles, jamming the empty hulk of a bus.
Beneath all the brick and concrete, this land was always fertile.
Green things, full of confidence and ambition, were reasserting themselves everywhere. The effect of all this was much more powerful than the kind of abandonment we are all familiar with, because this was so total, and the Northeast had been so vastly and intricately populated.
The thousands of fragile reminders of human presence intensified the emptiness.
The New York Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area contained nine million people in 1987. The official population is now seven thousand. According to General George Briggs, USA, the 307
308 WARDAY
Commandant of the New York Military Area, there are roughly twenty thousand illegal inhabitants in the city. Officially, New York is a Red Zone, under martial law with a twenty-four-hour curfew, violators to be shot on sight. But General Briggs, a tall man with narrow gunsights of eyes, said that his men hadn't ever shot anybody. "There's been sufficient death here," he said.
Amtrak goes as far south as White Plains. From there it is possible to take a bus east to Stamford, but there is no public transportation into New York at all.
We arrived at the White Plains station on the Twentieth Centu-
ry, which we had left in Cleveland for our detour to Pittsburgh.
From the moment we got off the train, we were aware of two things: this was U.S. Army territory, and there was a massive salvage operation going on.
First impressions: blank-eyed kids standing around smoking, wearing uniforms that were threadbare before the war, carrying M-16s the way exhausted majorettes might carry their batons, as if all their magic had been transformed into weight.
It was cloudy, but there were signs of fair weather. During the night it had rained, and the streets of White Plains were shining in the shafts of light that were breaking through the clouds. There was a
smell something like creosote in the air. A convoy of salvage trucks roared past on the Bronx River Parkway. There were buses out in front of the station, and our thirty fellow passengers all got into them. Soon quiet descended on the station. A soldier, who had been playing Sunshine's "Glee" on a harmonica, stopped and began staring at us. He was wearing an MP armband. He hitched up his web belt, unsnapped his holster flap, and came over. He regarded us. His shoulder stripes said he was a staff sergeant. His name tag identified him as Hewitt.
"Can we be of service, Sergeant?" Jim asked, when he did not speak.
"Identification, please."
"What kind?" I asked. My identification consists of a Texas driver's license and an ancient MasterCard, unless you count the false California ID.
"Federal. British. Whatever you got."
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Jim showed him his Herald News press card* "We'd like to arrange an interview with General Briggs," he said.
The young man looked at us. "Okay," he said, "you'll find him over at the armory. You know where it is?"
"You'll have to direct us."
"We're goin' over there ourselves, now that the train's come in.
You can come with us." He turned to the knot of soldiers lounging nearby. "Okay, guys, excitement's over. Time to get back to the Tire Palace."
The Tire Palace?
We rumbled through the streets of White Plains in, of all things, a massive, roaring, turbine-driven armored personnel carrier. "What the hell is this?" I asked. "We could've used a few of these in 'Nam." It was like riding in a safe—massive steel doors, quartz window slits.
"This is the Atomic Army," Sergeant Hewitt said. "You could blow off a hydrogen bomb right on top of this thing, and you know what'd happen?"
"What?"
"We'd be vaporized."
We rode on for a few minutes. Sergeant Hewitt pulled the lever that opened the door. Before us was a Gothic building of fairly massive proportions, designed to look like a castle, with towers and parapets and narrow windows set in red brick. Soldiers came and went. The convoy we had seen on the parkway was now parked across the street. Beneath the tarps I could see that the trucks were loaded with rusted steel beams and stacks of aluminum sheathing from buildings. One truck contained nothing but intact windows, each carefully taped and insulated against breakage. A soldier was walking along with a handheld computer, taking inventory.
This scene was my first experience of the work of the famous salvors, who are methodically dismantling Manhattan. Salvage is the latest business in which Great American Fortunes are being made, and the salvors, in their dashing khaki tunics and broad-brimmed hats, were romantic figures, lean men who stood around and gibed the neat officer with the computer.
310 WARDAY
A helicopter landed on a pad in the small park in front of the armory, disgorging five men in white radiation suits, who began to examine the salvage with geiger counters amid a good bit of derisive laughter. A peacock, standing in the patch of grass in front of the building, gave throat and spread its tail.
"General's office is the second door to the right,,, Hewitt said.
"It says 'Commanding General' on the door. At least that's what it said the last time I looked at it."
Even though I knew you couldn't see New York from the streets of White Plains, I found myself looking south. The sky revealed nothing.
The moment we entered the armory, we found out why the soldiers called it the Tire Palace. The place reeked of rubber. The central foyer was stacked with tires. There were tires in the hallway.
Farther back I could see a vast, dim room, also filled with the tall, shadowy stacks.
Nobody ever explained to us what they were there for.
As we entered General Briggs's office, a bell tinkled above the door. A master sergeant, lean and moist with nervous sweat, labored at a brand-new word processor, his fingers flying. I saw Jim's eyes glaze with envy. I suppose mine did too. No writer who has ever used one can forget the joys of the word processor. I couldn't resist a look at the brand name. It was an Apple, a new model called an Eve. The Eve had a nine-inch screen no thicker than a pancake. I noticed that the sergeant typed normally, but directed the word-processing program by speaking into a micro-phone around his neck. He said, "File two-four-two," and the disk drives blinked.
How beautiful! Ever since I saw it, I haven't been able to get the Eve out of my mind. What wondrous capabilities it must have.
I used an Apple II Plus from '79 to '84, and a Lisa after that, so I have an affinity for Apple machines. Nowadays I am a pencil-and-paper man.
We had no trouble getting in to see General Briggs, and he was willing to give us a short interview. Most of our respondents have agreed to an hour, but General Briggs gave us only ten minutes, which, as it turned out, was a generous amount considering how busy he is..
NEW YORK 311
Manhattan is almost free of radioactivity. It is still a Designated Red Zone, though, because of the city's other problems. First, there is no water supply. By Warday-plus-ten, the city's reservoir system was drained dry because of thousands of uncontrolled leaks in Brooklyn and Queens. The old water mains couldn't stand the stress of losing pressure and drying out, and in subsequent months many of them collapsed. It would take years to repair the system.
It is contamination that prevents this work from being done.
Ironically, radiation is only a small part of the problem. The serious pollution is chemical. Hundreds of thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals were burned in the Brooklyn-Queens firestorm.
Dioxins were produced, PCBs from insulation were released into the air, and deadly fumes mingled with the radioactive fallout.
Over the years, untended chemical-storage facilities deteriorated, especially along the Harlem River and on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. The whole of southern New Jersey is now uninhabitable, and Manhattan and the Bronx are severe hazard zones. People cannot remain in the Bronx for more than a few hours at a time, nor live in Manhattan north of Twenty-third Street.
Despite the dangers, we felt we had to go in. We asked for and obtained General Briggs's permission to enter the city. I suspect that he knew we would go in, even if he didn't give us the necessary papers. We were lucky to have gained his confidence. Had we not been under the guidance of Army and city personnel, we would not have lived through our trip to Manhattan.
Rumors
from the Northeast
R U M O R : The complete records of the United States government were preserved in a mountain in Colorado, and officials are just waiting for the right moment to put them to use in getting the country reorganized.
P A C T : This is one of the most persistent stories we heard in this part of the country. In fact, there was and is a redoubt in the Rockies. It is the NORAD Aerospace Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain, and it is back in operation despite battle damage. It is being run by a joint U.S.-U.K.-Canadian command. But it contains only military equipment and electronics, most of it preserved by the mountain from EMP effects.
R U M O R : There is a Council of State Governors that will soon meet to appoint an interim Congress, which will in turn appoint an interim President, whose primary responsibility will be the reorganization of the federal government.
F A C T : The federal government in Los Angeles gave no hint of any such plan, nor is there any functional national governors' organization.
R U M O R : Even though it was terribly damaged, the Soviet Union remained in one piece while the U.S. did not. Thus the Russians won the war, but they need time to rebuild before they occupy America. Stories to the effect that the USSR has broken up are 312
NEW YORK 313
planted by Soviet intelligence to lull the Americans into complacency and create a false sense of security.
We think this rumor is false, and here's why: First if Russia were still intact, Europe and Japan would be arming themselves as quickly as possible. There is little evidence of this. And the Ru
ssians apparently do nothing to resist the Royal Navy's attacks on isolated Soviet submarines, of which we have an excellent account elsewhere in this book.
Second, an intact Russia would already have invaded western Europe. The Russian armies in Poland and in some of the other Eastern Bloc countries disintegrated after the war because they had no orders from Moscow and no idea what had happened at home.
Third—the smallest but most telling fact—during the clothing shortage in 88— 89. the British brought in freighters loaded with uniforms. Everybody remembers them because we were all wearing them. They were dyed black, but they were Soviet summer uniforms, apparently liberated and sold to the U.K. as surplus by the Poles when the Soviet armies stationed in Poland collapsed.
Interview
General George Briggs, New York
Military Area
What the U.S. Army is engaged in here is the mission of protecting the property of American citizens and managing the most massive salvage operation in the history of the human race.
This salvage will continue until everything of value is physically removed from this area. And I mean everything. Let me read some statistics. In the past four years we have salvaged, among other things, 816,000 typewriters, 235,561 automobile parts, 199,021 kitchen appliances, over seven thousand tons of steel, four thousand tons of aluminum or other sheathing, more than three million meters of copper wire, eighty-eight thousand windows, 199,803 business suits and 204,381 articles of women's clothing from stores and factories, 9,100 toupees, 6,170 pieces of bridge-work and artificial teeth, and one set of prosthetic rear legs suitable for a medium-sized dog, which were found at the Animal Medical Center. We have also saved 14,126,802 books, 2,181,709
phonograph records, and enough video and audio tape to stretch to the moon and back twice. Working in association with various art galleries and other types of museums, we are aiding in the salvage of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim, the Whit-ney, the Frick, and many others. Among the items we have saved 314
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