Wastelands

by John Joseph Adams

  "You were telling me about the Richters."

  "Terrible thing what happened to them, the whole family."

  "It was the snow, right?"

  "Your brother, Jaime, that's when we lost him."

  "We don't have to talk about that."

  "Everything changed after that, you know. That's what got your mother started. Most folks just lost one, some not even, but you know those Richters. That big house on the hill and when it snowed they all went sledding. The world was different then."

  "I can't imagine."

  "Well, neither could we. Nobody could of guessed it. And believe me, we were guessing. Everyone tried to figure what they would do next. But snow? I mean how evil is that anyway?"

  "How many?"

  "Oh, thousands. Thousands."

  "No, I mean how many Richters?"

  "All six of them. First the children and then the parents."

  "Wasn't it unusual for adults to get infected?"

  "Well, not that many of us played in the snow the way they did."

  "So you must have sensed it, or something."

  "What? No. We were just so busy then. Very busy. I wish I could remember. But I can't. What we were so busy with." He rubs his eyes and stares out the window. "It wasn't your fault. I want you to know I understand that."

  "Pop."

  "I mean you kids, that's just the world we gave you, so full of evil you didn't even know the difference."

  "We knew, Pop."

  "You still don't know. What do you think of when you think of snow?"

  "I think of death."

  "Well, there you have it. Before that happened it meant joy. Peace and joy."

  "I can't imagine."

  "Well, that's my point."

  * * *

  "Are you feeling all right?" She dishes out the macaroni, puts the bowl in front of me, and stands, leaning against the counter, to watch me eat.

  I shrug.

  She places a cold palm on my forehead. Steps back and frowns. "You didn't eat anything from those girls, did you?"

  I shake my head. She is just about to speak when I say, "But the other kids did."

  "Who? When?" She leans so close that I can see the lines of makeup sharp against her skin.

  "Bobby. Some of the other kids. They ate candy."

  Her hand comes palm down, hard, against the table. The macaroni bowl jumps, and the silverware. Some milk spills. "Didn't I tell you?" she shouts.

  "Bobby plays with them all the time now."

  She squints at me, shakes her head, then snaps her jaw with grim resolve. "When? When did they eat this candy?"

  "I don't know. Days ago. Nothing happened. They said it was good."

  Her mouth opens and closes like a fish. She turns on her heels and grabs the phone as she leaves the kitchen. The door slams. I can see her through the window, pacing the backyard, her arms gesturing wildly.

  My mother organized the town meeting and everybody came, dressed up like it was church. The only people who weren't there were the Manmensvitzenders, for obvious reasons. Most people brought their kids, even the babies who sucked thumbs or blanket corners. I was there and so was Bobby with his grandpa who chewed the stem of a cold pipe and kept leaning over and whispering to his grandson during the proceedings, which quickly became heated, though there wasn't much argument, the heat being fueled by just the general excitement of it, my mother especially in her roses dress, her lips painted a bright red so that even I came to some understanding that she had a certain beauty though I was too young to understand what about that beauty wasn't entirely pleasing. "We have to remember that we are all soldiers in this war," she said to much applause.

  Mr. Smyths suggested a sort of house arrest but my mother pointed out that would entail someone from town bringing groceries to them. "Everybody knows these people are starving. Who's going to pay for all this bread anyway?" she said. "Why should we have to pay for it?"

  Mrs. Mathers said something about justice.

  Mr. Hallensway said, "No one is innocent anymore."

  My mother, who stood at the front of the room, leaning slightly against the village board table, said, "Then it's decided."

  Mrs. Foley, who had just moved to town from the recently destroyed Chesterville, stood up, in that way she had of sort of crouching into her shoulders, with those eyes that looked around nervously so that some of us had secretly taken to calling her Bird Woman, and with a shaky voice, so soft everyone had to lean forward to hear, said, "Are any of the children actually sick?"

  The adults looked at each other and each other's children. I could tell that my mother was disappointed that no one reported any symptoms. The discussion turned to the bright colored candies when Bobby, without standing or raising his hand, said in a loud voice, "Is that what this is about? Do you mean these?" He leaned back in his chair to wiggle his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of them.

  There was a general murmur. My mother grabbed the edge of the table. Bobby's grandfather, grinning around his dry pipe, plucked one of the candies from Bobby's palm, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth.

  Mr. Galvin Wright had to use his gavel to hush the noise. My mother stood up straight and said, "Fine thing, risking your own life like that, just to make a point."

  "Well, you're right about making a point, Maylene," he said, looking right at my mother and shaking his head as if they were having a private discussion, "but this is candy I keep around the house to get me out of the habit of smoking. I order it through the Government Issue catalog. It's perfectly safe."

  "I never said it was from them," said Bobby, who looked first at my mother and then searched the room until he found my face, but I pretended not to notice.

  When we left, my mother took me by the hand, her red fingernails digging into my wrist. "Don't talk," she said, "just don't say another word." She sent me to my room and I fell asleep with my clothes on still formulating my apology.

  The next morning when I hear the bells, I grab a loaf of bread and wait on the porch until they come back up the hill. Then I stand in their path.

  "Now what d'you want?" Bobby says.

  I offer the loaf, like a tiny baby being held up to God in church. The weeping girl cries louder, her sister clutches Bobby's arm. "What d'you think you're doing?" he shouts.

  "It's a present."

  "What kind of stupid present is that? Put it away! Jesus Christ, would you put it down?"

  My arms drop to my sides, the loaf dangles in its bag from my hand. Both girls are crying. "I just was trying to be nice," I say, my voice wavering like the Bird Woman's.

  "God, don't you know anything?" Bobby says. "They're afraid of our food, don't you even know that?"

  "Why?"

  "'Cause of the bombs, you idiot. Why don't you think once in a while?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  The goats rattle their bells and the cart shifts back and forth. "The bombs! Don't you even read your history books? In the beginning of the war we sent them food packages all wrapped up the same color as these bombs that would go off when someone touched them."

  "We did that?"

  "Well, our parents did." He shakes his head and pulls the reigns. The cart rattles past, both girls pressed against him as if I am dangerous.

  "Oh, we were so happy!" my father says, rocking into the memory. "We were like children, you know, so innocent, we didn't even know."

  "Know what, Pop?"

  "That we had enough."

  "Enough what?"

  "Oh, everything. We had enough everything. Is that a plane?" he looks at me with watery blue eyes.

  "Here, let me help you put your helmet on."

  He slaps at it, bruising his fragile hands.

  "Quit it, Dad. Stop!"

  He fumbles with arthritic fingers to unbuckle the strap but finds he cannot. He weeps into his spotted hands. It drones past.

  Now that I look back on how we were that summer, before the trag
edy, I get a glimmer of what my father's been trying to say all along. It isn't really about the cakes, and the mail order catalogs, or the air travel they used to take. Even though he uses stuff to describe it that's not what he means. Once there was a different emotion. People used to have a way of feeling and being in the world that is gone, destroyed so thoroughly we inherited only its absence.

  "Sometimes," I tell my husband, "I wonder if my happiness is really happiness."

  "Of course it's really happiness," he says, "what else would it be?"

  We were under attack is how it felt. The Manmensvitzenders with their tears and fear of bread, their strange clothes and stinky goats were children like us and we could not get the town meeting out of our heads, what the adults had considered doing. We climbed trees, chased balls, came home when called, brushed our teeth when told, finished our milk, but we had lost that feeling we'd had before. It is true we didn't understand what had been taken from us, but we knew what we had been given and who had done the giving.

  We didn't call a meeting the way they did. Ours just happened on a day so hot we sat in Trina Needles's playhouse fanning ourselves with our hands and complaining about the weather like the grownups. We mentioned house arrest but that seemed impossible to enforce. We discussed things like water balloons, T.P.ing. Someone mentioned dog shit in brown paper bags set on fire. I think that's when the discussion turned the way it did.

  You may ask, who locked the door? Who made the stick piles? Who lit the matches? We all did. And if I am to find solace, twenty-five years after I destroyed all ability to feel that my happiness, or anyone's, really exists, I find it in this. It was all of us.

  Maybe there will be no more town meetings. Maybe this plan is like the ones we've made before. But a town meeting is called. The grownups assemble to discuss how we will not be ruled by evil, and also, the possibility of widening Main Street. Nobody notices when we children sneak out. We had to leave behind the babies, sucking thumbs or blanket corners and not really part of our plan for redemption. We were children. It wasn't well thought out.

  When the police came we were not "careening in some wild imitation of barbaric dance" or having seizures as has been reported. I can still see Bobby, his hair damp against his forehead, the bright red of his cheeks as he danced beneath the white flakes that fell from a sky we never trusted; Trina spinning in circles, her arms stretched wide, and the Manmensvitzender girls with their goats and cart piled high with rocking chairs, riding away from us, the jingle bells ringing, just like in the old song. Once again the world was safe and beautiful. Except by the town hall where the large white flakes rose like ghosts and the flames ate the sky like a hungry monster who could never get enough.

  How We Got In Town and Out Again

  by Jonathan Lethem

  Jonathan Lethem is the best-selling author of The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, and several other novels, his most recent being You Don't Love Me Yet. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, won the William L. Crawford Award, the Locus Award, and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. Lethem has published more than sixty short stories, in a diverse range of markets, from The New Yorker and McSweeney's to F&SF and Asimov's; his first collection, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, won the World Fantasy Award. In 2005, he was presented with the MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant for his contributions to literature.

  "How We Got In Town and Out Again" is one of a sequence of stories by Lethem railing against virtual reality technologies. In an interview in Science Fiction Studies, Lethem said, "I didn't set out . . .to write a series of stories . . .examining my own resistance to that technology. But living in San Francisco during the years of an intense kind of utopian ideological boom in virtual reality and computer technologies, I felt an instinctive need to represent my own skepticism about claims that were being made that seemed to me naïve. . . .And so I found these resistance stories coming out of me."

  Combine that with Lethem's research into 1930s dance marathons, and you've got this story.

  When we first saw somebody near the mall Gloria and I looked around for sticks. We were going to rob them if they were few enough. The mall was about five miles out of the town we were headed for, so nobody would know. But when we got closer Gloria saw their vans and said they were scapers. I didn't know what that was, but she told me.

  It was summer. Two days before this Gloria and I had broken out of a pack of people that had food but we couldn't stand their religious chanting anymore. We hadn't eaten since then.

  "So what do we do?" I said.

  "You let me talk," said Gloria.

  "You think we could get into town with them?"

  "Better than that," she said. "Just keep quiet."

  I dropped the piece of pipe I'd found and we walked in across the parking lot. This mall was long past being good for finding food anymore but the scapers were taking out folding chairs from a store and strapping them on top of their vans. There were four men and one woman.

  "Hey," said Gloria.

  Two guys were just lugs and they ignored us and kept lugging. The woman was sitting in the front of the van. She was smoking a cigarette.

  The other two guys turned. This was Kromer and Fearing, but I didn't know their names yet.

  "Beat it," said Kromer. He was a tall squinty guy with a gold tooth. He was kind of worn but the tooth said he'd never lost a fight or slept in a flop. "We're busy," he said.

  He was being reasonable. If you weren't in a town you were nowhere. Why talk to someone you met nowhere?

  But the other guy smiled at Gloria. He had a thin face and a little mustache. "Who are you?" he said. He didn't look at me.

  "I know what you guys do," Gloria said. "I was in one before."

  "Oh?" said the guy, still smiling.

  "You're going to need contestants," she said.

  "She's a fast one," this guy said to the other guy. I'm Fearing," he said to Gloria.

  "Fearing what?" said Gloria.

  "Just Fearing."

  "Well, I'm just Gloria."

  "That's fine," said Fearing. "This is Tommy Kromer. We run this thing. What's your little friend's name?"

  "I can say my own name," I said. "I'm Lewis."

  "Are you from the lovely town up ahead?"

  "Nope," said Gloria. "We're headed there."

  "Getting in exactly how?" said Fearing.

  "Anyhow," said Gloria, like it was an answer. "With you, now."

  "That's assuming something pretty quick."

  "Or we could go and say how you ripped off the last town and they sent us to warn about you," said Gloria.

  "Fast," said Fearing again, grinning, and Kromer shook his head. They didn't look too worried.

  "You ought to want me along," said Gloria. "I'm an attraction."

  "Can't hurt," said Fearing.

  Kromer shrugged, and said, "Skinny, for an attraction."

  "Sure, I'm skinny," she said. "That's why me and Lewis ought to get something to eat."

  Fearing stared at her. Kromer was back to the van with the other guys.

  "Or if you can't feed us—" started Gloria.

  "Hold it, sweetheart. No more threats."

  "We need a meal."

  "We'll eat something when we get in." Fearing said. "You and Lewis can get a meal if you're both planning to enter."

  "Sure," she said. "We're gonna enter—right, Lewis?"

  I knew to say right.

  The town militia came out to meet the vans, of course. But they seemed to know the scapers were coming, and after Fearing talked to them for a couple of minutes they opened up the doors and had a quick look then waved us through. Gloria and I were in the back of a van with a bunch of equipment and one of the lugs, named Ed. Kromer drove. Fearing drove the van with the woman in it. The other lug drove the last one alone.

  I'd never gotten into a town in a van before, but I'd only gotten in two times before this anyway. The first time by myself, just by creeping in, the secon
d because Gloria went with a militia guy.

  Towns weren't so great anyway. Maybe this would be different.

  We drove a few blocks and a guy flagged Fearing down. He came up to the window of the van and they talked, then went back to his car, waving at Kromer on his way. Then we followed him.

  "What's that about?" said Gloria.

  "Gilmartin's the advance man." said Kromer. "I thought you knew everything,"

  Gloria didn't talk. I said, "What's an advance man?"

  "Gets us a place, and the juice we need," said Kromer. "Softens the town up. Gets people excited."

  It was getting dark. I was pretty hungry, but I didn't say anything. Gilmartin's car led us to this big building shaped like a boathouse only it wasn't near any water. Kromer said it used to be a bowling alley.

  The lugs started moving stuff and Kromer made me help. The building was dusty and empty inside, and some of the lights didn't work. Kromer said just to get things inside for now. He drove away one of the vans and came back and we unloaded a bunch of little cots that Gilmartin the advance man had rented, so I had an idea where I was going to be sleeping. Apart from that it was stuff for the contest. Computer cables and plastic spacesuits, and loads of televisions.

  Fearing took Gloria and they came back with food, fried chicken and potato salad, and we all ate. I couldn't stop going back for more but nobody said anything. Then I went to sleep on a cot. No one was talking to me. Gloria wasn't sleeping on a cot. I think she was with Fearing.

  Gilmartin the advance man had really done his work. The town was sniffing around first thing in the morning. Fearing was out talking to them when I woke up. "Registration begins at noon, not a minute sooner," he was saying. "Beat the lines and stick around. We'll be serving coffee. Be warned, only the fit need apply—our doctor will be examining you, and he's never been fooled once. It's Darwinian logic, people. The future is for the strong. The meek will have to inherit the here and now."

  Inside, Ed and the other guy were setting up the gear. They had about thirty of those wired-up plastic suits stretched out in the middle of the place, and so tangled up with cable and little wires that they were like husks of fly bodies in a spiderweb.