Restoration

by J. F. Krause

  I looked at the group with my eyebrows lifted to see if they were satisfied. They seemed shaken, but I could see they wanted this moment over. I indicated to George that he could sit down. If I hadn’t been so angry at that moment I would have probably said something snarky. Fortunately, for me, the angrier or more frightened I am, the more under control I appear. Something I learned growing up I suppose. When other people see me like this, they think I’m turning the other cheek or being professional. In reality, it’s just me being cautious and very practical.

  The meeting continued, and in the end, the call went out for volunteers and Australia got the help they needed. They deserved it, of course. The Coalition needed them to keep Darwin and Hobart going as naval bases, and they made a lot of sacrifices to make sure that happened, and in style. They also solved the Beirut refugee crisis. None of this was easy with less than seven thousand survivors. I hope I get to visit Australia again one of these days, but for something nice, of course.

  Unfortunately, George wasn’t deflated long. Kevin, the kids, and I were out for Chinese food on our way to the Zoroastrian fire service a few days later. George came in with a woman as we were leaving. She wasn’t a local woman, and I wondered if George had managed to find a woman in the Panhandle who liked her men dumpy and with a chip on their shoulder. “Well, if it isn’t the fairy family with all the little victims. You faggots just make me sick!”

  Before I could respond, Kevin smiled pleasantly and said “It’s probably just something you ate.” I was stifling a laugh when I heard Jerry actually giggle just before he said “Good one, Dad!” So I did laugh after all.

  It appears that George didn’t get Kevin’s jibe until Jerry pointed it out, and when he did, I think his head almost exploded. He stupidly made a lunge for Kevin who deftly stepped just a little to the side to protect Chanelle who was holding his left hand. Without letting go of her hand, he reached toward George and the next thing I knew, George was sort of sailing past us where he landed on his back. Before he could move, Kevin was bending over him, and by all appearances, he was offering his hand to help George up. George wasn’t having any of that, though. He looked at Kevin like he was looking at the Grim Reaper. He couldn’t make this look any worse for himself. After all, he was stretched out like a beached beluga looking up into the pleasant, calming face of the reason for his helplessness. Kevin wasn’t touching him, though, just offering to help him gain control of himself.

  The kids were snickering, and I looked at the woman who had accompanied George to the restaurant. She looked mortified, but I got the feeling she was mortified that George had lost the altercation, not that George had acted like a bullying adolescent. I decided she must be from Panhandle.

  My next thought was to get us all out of there as quickly as possible. Of course, the kids were all really jazzed by ‘Dad’. (I’m ‘Pop’, by the way.) As we weren’t going anywhere for a couple of minutes, I stood there taking us all in. That’s when I noticed that Kevin still had Dinah sitting in her baby harness hanging from his chest. George had charged Kevin while Dinah was harnessed to his chest. And Kevin didn’t have a proverbial hair out of place. For that matter, neither did Dinah who was her usual happy self, thinking that all the attention directed toward Kevin was actually directed at her.

  Add to it all was my realization that not only Jerry but Chanelle, too, had clearly understood what Kevin had said to George. Thankfully, Charlie and Chad weren’t privy to the joke, but how had a couple of 11 year olds gotten it. Looking at Jerry, I saw he was aware of what I was thinking. He sort of ducked his head a little and looked away trying to look nonchalant. Chanelle just looked at me with wide eyes and raised eyebrows. What was I going to do? They couldn’t help it that they understood something I didn’t think they were old enough to understand. I shrugged and started rounding us up and moving down the sidewalk.

  Fortunately, there were several witnesses to this little spectacle. We’d been there with Tomas Martinez and his girl friend Jennifer. Tomas is a friend of Kevin’s from the hospital and was still on the SLO leadership team with Lydia. The proprietor of the restaurant was a friend of mine from my day with the salvage crew, Jason Kryschtoff. He and his noticeably pregnant fiancée, Mia, had just shaken our hands as we were stepping out the door. Jason and I had become close friends and we ate at his restaurant frequently. I don’t think the recipes came from Jason, though. Mia looked like she was the boss when it came to the kitchen.

  Did I mention that Jennifer was pregnant, too. We found that out over dinner. Kevin will be the best man at Tomas and Jennifer’s wedding which probably should be sooner rather than later. Anymore, if you’re in your twenties or thirties, and you’re female, you’re probably pregnant, or about to be.

  Word around town is that George tripped as he saw us coming out of the restaurant. People who need to know, know otherwise.

  September 25

  I had my first live TV interview yesterday. Until now we just sort of rebroadcast live meetings that are picked up by the radio stations and broadcast either almost live or rebroadcast at a convenient time. Now, we have a small group of former news people who have put together a World News Program. Unfortunately, they plan to make me a fairly regular feature. It makes sense since I get all the local reports from the Coalition Communities.

  The Los Angeles community is at the forefront of communications in our post-sickness world. Within days of The Sickness, Kathy Kreske, a surviving radio technician from Spearfish, South Dakota, walked a group of college age young people from the LA Metro area, along with several other similar groups from around the country, through the steps of setting up their own local radio stations. She is majorly responsible for many survivors being able to locate groups they could join. Kathy didn’t want to leave Spearfish, a now thriving community of over 200 that is largely devoted to communications networking. From her base in Spearfish, she has managed to help navigate the establishment of radio and television stations across North America. Homebase in Spearfish or not, Kathy spends a lot of time traveling.

  Much of the programming is done in LA, New York City, Atlanta, and Orange County at a university near where I lived before The Sickness. Many college campuses, particularly in the LA area, had radio stations and sound stages for making new programs. For that matter, the Los Angeles community, as small and scattered as it is, is almost totally devoted to a budding entertainment industry. Lots of local people were part of what we usually just called Hollywood before The Sickness, and even with such a strikingly low overall survival rate, there were quite a number of writers, directors, camera people, stunt people, and so on to resurrect the industry whole-cloth. We still don’t have enough programming to even have a single full 24 hour TV channel or radio station without extensive reruns, but we’re getting there. And of course, there’s programming from several other countries. Altogether, people can watch a couple of hours of original post sickness programming several nights a week. We’re not Emmy winning class, but it’s getting better, and the productions are being made with state of the art equipment.

  Most of our actors are former extras, but we do have a handful of well-known survivors along with several not so famous commercial actors. And of course, they can always import actors from the New York stage scene. Also while there is still no market for most television shows and movies from before, there is a good market for cartoons, animal shows, and certain types of documentaries.

  Among the new programs is a weekly TV drama called “Salvage Crew”. The acting isn’t bad, and the writing is a bit fanciful, but it makes our salvage crews look like heroes and that’s nothing but good. Its main stars are quite familiar from their work in commercials before the sickness.

  Another show that is a little more reality based is simply called “Gap Year”. Todd watches it every week, usually with his friends. It started airing back in August and tracked the military contingent when they arrived at the start of July. Poor Enrique was made for TV, and I know he hates it. B
ut with his back-story, and everyone has a back-story now, he was a natural. He’s tall, Latino, and likes to throw Spanish words into his English narrative with a baritone voice that demands a guitar playing in the background whenever he talks. And of course, he actually plays the guitar. Who knew? On second thought, maybe he doesn’t hate it so much. While it might not be saying much, ”Gap Year” is an international hit. One huge benefit of having “Gap Year” be so popular is that our International Sign Language (ISL) TV show is popular and evening classes in ISL are packed.

  My little interview was not so little, after all. It was actually pretty long, almost an hour, in fact. I did it yesterday evening, and it was aired live. I can’t say I wasn’t nervous, but as usual, I looked perfectly calm. We recorded it at Calloway House while Kevin and the gang watched from the basement rec room. They assured me it was fine. Actually, they said great, but they love me.

  The news anchor is an experienced anchor from one of the smaller stations in Atlanta, but she was pretty impressive. At least I thought so when I still lived in Atlanta. I still think so. We started out with the usual chitchat, and before long I almost forgot there was a camera pointed at me. Then she asked her big question. I hadn’t been warned ahead of time, but I think I was ready.

  “What if we fail?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by fail. As a species, it looks like humanity won’t go extinct. Our estimates are that about 2 million people worldwide survived, and that’s more than enough to keep our species going. At this point, it’s up to us whether we go into some sort of dark ages because of The Sickness. There are lots of challenges ahead, but we can deal with them unless we, ourselves, give up.

  We don’t need to worry about starvation. There’s more than enough land for everyone to grow their own food. And we haven’t forgotten how to farm and ranch. That knowledge and experience is still there, and it’s being shared even further.

  We have doctors, engineers, and teachers. We have highly skilled people everywhere preserving equipment, art, architecture, food, knowledge. We don’t lack for anything, so we won’t fail because we’re hungry or ignorant. If we fall back into the dark ages it’ll be because we let it happen.

  But fortunately, we’re not letting that happen. We’ve been able to pool our resources and restart schools at all levels. We have a very competent defense force. We’re planning for the future with salvage operations that are getting more efficient and skilled everyday. We’re restarting trade and agriculture. Communications are going strong. I’m confident that if we continue doing what needs to be done, one day at a time, we’ll be fine. And it’s amazing what we inherited. We have technical devices that we never even dreamed of. We don’t need them, but we have them. We have state of the art medicine and equipment in even our smallest hospitals. Really, all we have to worry about is us.”

  “Do you lie awake at night worrying?”

  “Sure I do. I worry that I’ll oversleep and the kids will get to school late. I worry that my daughter, Chanelle, will take up skydiving. Of course I worry. But I worry about the things people have worried about for generations. I don’t worry about the sun going nova. I don’t worry about things that can’t be fixed. Listen, our government knew something like The Sickness could happen. How do we know that? Because they left us instructions for how to get control of things, like the satellite system. They gave us the keys to the CDC. They had a protocol for this very thing. They knew that someday, somewhere, some crazy people would create something like The Sickness. But knowing it might happen didn’t make it possible to stop it from happening. So they did what they could. Bad things happen. All we can do is be as prepared as possible. And we’re doing that.”

  The rest of the conversation lightened up after that and we chatted about what the first day was like after The Sickness. She asked if I had been back to Georgia, yet. How had I changed since the shooting incident? Did we know who shot me? Nothing too difficult.

  My interviewer, Chevonne Babcock, said goodbye, and she and her crew packed up and left, presumably for Atlanta. My nearest and dearest were deep in conversation when I came down to join them.

  “So how’d I do?”

  “You mean, when you weren’t shaking like a leaf? Sometimes you were trembling so much your face was all blurry on the TV!”

  “Todd! Be nice!” Thank goodness Cynthia put a stop to that! I might have started to believe him. He was so serious sounding.

  “You did great, Pop!” And thank goodness for Charlie.

  The kids all were really excited. They’d seen their pop on television.

  “What’s sky diving?” Chanelle had just discovered something new she was going to have to do.

  “Nothing important, Chanelle. I was just being cute. You’ll never want to do anything crazy like that. We’re not crazy people in our family.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Chanelle, I’ll tell you about it later, okay?” Cynthia was on her game this evening.

  “Thanks, everyone. Did you save me some pizza? All that talking made me really hungry.”

  October 27

  We’ve had an amazing few weeks of almost nothing happening. No one anywhere has done much worth talking about. I’ve sort of been using my time to learn things. But, of course, George happens. The first thing on the agenda at the Thursday Representative meeting was a request presented by the Australian representative that Broome, Western Australia, Australia be granted Coalition membership. These things are usually presented by the regional representatives for the requesting community and the decision to admit or reject is pretty cut and dried. Of course, that was before George became an interim representative.

  “I object. These people are Muslim and they’re going to change the entire complexion of Australia. If we start taking in every brown skinned refugee, we’ll be waking up with a bomb under our bed.”

  “Mr. Francis, you’re out of order. Stop speaking immediately!”

  “Caldwell, you have no right to stop me from expressing my opinion. We have the right to free speech, at least we do until you manage to take it away.”

  In a challenge, the chair or facilitator gets to say why they ruled the way they did. In this case, as I had just ruled him out of order, I got to tell him why.

  “Mr. Francis I ruled you out of order because your objections to membership in the Coalition for Broome were based on a violation of the Rights and Responsibilities of the Coalition Members. Your statements were out of order.”

  Next, the challenger gets to speak. “God has given people the opportunity to correct generations of misguided racial miscegenation. If we learn nothing else at all from The Sickness, we must learn that God was sending us a message. The Australians may not care that their culture is being destroyed, but some of us do, and it’s the responsibility of this representative body to protect the rest of us from the mistaken ideas of the few, and I don’t care what the Rights and Responsibilities are, we can’t……” Since when did George start talking about what God wanted?

  “Mr. Francis, you’re out of order again. Speak to your challenge of my ‘out of order’ ruling or relinquish the floor. And if you challenge this ‘out of order’ ruling, and you lose, I’ll ask Private Barnes to remove you from the room.”

  George just stood there for a moment and then shook his head which I took to mean he wasn’t going to challenge me a second time.

  “Alright, back to the first challenge. Mr. Francis, do you have anything germane to say about the correctness of my ‘out of order’ ruling against you?”

  He didn’t so it was my turn to respond to his arguments before I held the group vote. “We were asked to make a decision that goes against the Coalition Rights and Responsibilities. Race, religion, and ethnicity cannot be factors in granting Coalition membership to requesting communities. All those in support of Mr. Francis’ challenge of the chair, please stand. One person is standing. All those in support of Mr. Caldwell’s ruling of ‘out of order’ please stand.
I count, 25 representatives standing. The chair’s ruling stands. Mr. Francis is ‘out of order’.”

  After that, as we continued the Broome membership discussion, no one had anything to say that was negative so I called for a vote on Broome’s membership in the Coalition. It passed unanimously. George sat quietly. Membership and military issues are just about the only votes we actually take in the Representatives’ meetings.

  But it wasn’t over. The Australian representative who had now been the target of George’s spleen venting was ready and waiting.

  “Mr. Caldwell, may I address the Representatives?”

  “I will allow that, Ms. Enderle.”

  “I would like to move that we censure Mr. Francis for his suggestion that this body violate the Rights and Responsibilities of the Coalition of Communities.”

  Before I could respond, I was facing a roomful of ‘seconds’.

  “Ms. Enderle, I’m not sure what you mean by the word ‘censure’. Would you explain that a little further?”

  “I want him ejected from this body? Fired!”

  “Oh. Then in that case, I’ll have to call your motion out of order. Our agreement with Panhandle is that they may appoint an interim member to this body until the next election for regional representatives. We can remove a member from a meeting, but there is no language in place for removing a representative from office. You can move to amend the Rights and Responsibilities if you like, but that process will not take care of this situation. Or, you can amend the Standing Rules. That would be easier, but it still would not take care of this situation. On the other hand, if, by ‘censure’, you meant that the body disapproved of Mr. Francis’ behavior and wanted to make that disapproval known to the member communities, that would not be out of order.”