The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  Thus American imagination is directed—as if in the whole of life no other aims or satisfactions could be found than those of being a consumer, avid, constant and catholic.

  Logic has not, of course, anywhere far advanced, as witness the fact that twentieth-century man has several thousand different descriptions of the nature of Nature, which he calls religions, and that he is nevertheless able to regard the preposterous circumstance as rational. His own “faith” is, of course, the one he regards as “logical” and he submits neither it nor, as a rule, any other to either imagination or reason.

  Wherever distortion is cultural the deformed are either blind to their enormities or proud of them and the latter is the dismal rule. The old Chinese were vain about the miniature feet their binding produced in women; Flathead Indians admired the slope given the brow by a board lashed to the infant skull; and the Ubangis set great store in their teased-out plate lips. Persons not in those groups are generally revolted (and not surprisingly) by all such customs.

  But the practice of constraining and deforming the personality—of binding the imagination, of strapping a set of fixed rules arbitrarily to logic, and of teasing out only one sort of know-how—is the common, daily vice of every culture.

  The American mind, its imagination channelized, its logic limited, its know-how hugely and uncritically specialized, is footbound, flat-headed and plate-lipped psychologically. It presents a personality with so little room for normal function and so much atrophy that the nation itself has no clear idea of what a person might, could or ought to be. As savages gloat over their induced deformities, so Americans dote upon the warped intellect of the public. A Babbitt is the envied norm here; a Nazi, or a Communist, elsewhere; a normal man would be anathema. So civilization has advanced but one step where two need to be made. It has ceased the arrogant, savage tricks of misshaping itself biologically but it has as yet not even much investigated its equally savage rituals of psychological deformation. Indeed, the general populace is not in any way aware that what it thinks, feels, dreams and employs for motive is often monstrous.

  In women, cultural inclination had all but ruled out the possibility of imagination and logic. Females are regarded as “naturally” deficient in both. That attitude, which rose in the paleolithic, is part of man’s inordinate self-assertion and he was able to establish it then simply because he was stronger. The abuse was never corrected and women of the twentieth century usually accepted it; fifty millenniums of indoctrination are bound to have an effect.

  Hence women, presented with the instantaneous vanishment of males, were in an extremely poor psychological condition to deal with the aftermath. Whatever pattern innately existed in them, what faculties they owned as individuals, what promptings, urges, intelligent ideas, logical extrapolations and valid hunches they were capable of were hidden; they found themselves without a tradition, without experience, without confidence, and without know-how.

  Here and there, of course, a few exceptional women rose as best they could to the desperate occasion. Paula Gaunt was one of them. If her own life had been circumscribed by such “womanly” chores and attitudes as were general, she had nevertheless enjoyed the advantage of association with a man who, however conventional his behavior, had a mind of some originality and did not allow orthodoxy to inhibit expression. In speculation, if not experience, William Gaunt was less misshapen than most of his fellows. Paula had vicariously learned the sensation of that. She was, besides, a woman of native abilities. Also, she had the best education obtainable—although education distorts more even than it informs. It could not be said she was in any way “prepared” for the aftermath of the Disappearance, however. She was merely less unprepared—so she did what she could where she was and as the need appeared.

  Greater Miami, a community of a half million souls before its males vanished, fared better than most megapolises. It was spread over a larger area: its residences were less intimately mingled with its business buildings: waterways dismembered it: the local construction codes required its edifices to he able to withstand hurricanes; and its slums were segregated, owing to the fact that their tenants were Negroes and this was the Deep South. Still—

  Still—

  Within minutes of the Disappearance, a host of major catastrophes occurred.

  Anyone of them would have made frontpage news across the nation if newspapers had been printed on the day following and if greater and more numerous calamities had not taken place elsewhere.

  Fires broke out, of course. They broke out where gasoline, pouring untended, encountered sources of heat. They broke out in batteries and in power plants and where machines continued to operate, threw sparks, hotted up, short-circuited, smoked and burst into flames. In cleaning establishments, upholstery shops, laundries, and stores—the fires began. Here and there in the infestious sprawl of South Florida’s “colored towns,” a flame moved from its supervised source to an unpainted wall, a scrap of curtain, or some heap of old rags and papers that had been the family pallet. In Miami proper, forty thousand persons dwelt in one square mile of stinking shanties. These took fire. No engines, of course, raced to the rescue.

  Approaching and departing planes of many airlines, small ships on local flights and huge, four-engine liners coming in or gathering speed for the long, clean hop to New York, Chicago or the West Indies, were suddenly pilotless. Most of them crashed, at sea, in the Everglades, in the midst of business blocks and residential, areas. Swaths were ripped through the pale, tropic stucco of neat houses; valleys of fire were left behind. A few planes escaped, brought in by cool-nerved stewardesses who, unaware of the world’s situation, knew only that their own pilots, copilots and male passengers were gone; the stewardesses were able to crash-land the ships successfully in fields and on shallow lakes.

  The civilized earth became a shambles of wrecked motor vehicles.

  Trains ran on, in many cases, their locomotives unsupplied with “dead man’s”

  brakes.

  Thus the Golden Comet, luxury express, having made its appointed stop at Palm Beach, rushed toward Miami an hour behind schedule. Of a sudden, there were no men aboard it and no little boys playing tiredly in its handsome aisles. There was, even, another sort of palpable loss on the train, as everywhere.

  Genevieve McCracken, in the observation car, hurrying home to bear her third child, suddenly found the mound of her abdomen relaxed, caved in, all evidence of pregnancy vanished. She hastily rose, clutching her slipping skirt. In her compartment she disrobed and stared with horror at the slack folds of skin that only minutes before had harbored a viable child, a son, she had hoped. She pressed and kneaded herself with a quivering hand. But the fact could not be denied: her child was gone, and she had not borne it.

  She whimpered. She bit her nails and worried. She took medicine. She tried to sleep. At last she put up the curtain an inch, bent forward and peered to see how soon she would be in her husband’s arms. Suburbs now hurtled past the windows—an ugly huge Navy warehouse, a lumberyard, a smoldering city dump, a junk heap, and a trailer park set in the midst of tall bamboos and pink oleanders. One after another, grade crossings flashed before her eyes and twice, down long street vistas, she saw women running.

  Presently the train passed a boulevard she recognized, buildings she knew, and soon, to her horror, it sped through the station, roared into a switch, heeled, came level again, and thundered on. Genevieve had a glimpse of the people waiting to meet the train-all women, it seemed, milling about, their eyes lifted only at the last instant to look with a unanimity of horror at the flashing express.

  Beyond Miami, the tracks led to Homestead, following the Dixie Highway and passing the Gaunt residence at a distance of about half a mile.

  As Paula sipped her Scotch, she could hear in the distance the rumble of the afternoon freight, coming up from the growers’ area, loaded with oranges and winter vegetables, its dreary whistle spread rings of sound over the flat landscape and Paula thought of the long ca
rs filled with crates of good things to eat, things people would eat, would have eaten, in snowbound cities to the north. But now she heard another sound: the fast clatter of an unscheduled train approaching from Miami.

  In that way, crewless, on a single track, the two engines met head on. The cars behind the freight locomotive leaped crisscross into the air and crashed upon each other, bursting thousands of crates of oranges, bowling grapefruit along the tracks and drenching the right-of-way with the dribbled juice of tomatoes. Human beings, women and girls, were dealt with in the same fashion by the opposed cars: their bodies, arms, legs, rolling heads and blood commingled in the steel and the dust.

  “Great God!” Edwinna whispered. “What’s that?”

  Paula was already running for her car. She passed Hester and Alicia. The old colored woman had turned saffron and her eyes held a wild look. Paula stopped long enough to hug her. “We’ll soon be back, Hester! Remember—you’ve got Alicia to care for. You, alone!”

  The wild look receded.

  They sped over a bridge that crossed a canal along the banks of which were terraces cut in the coral. Flowers bloomed on the terraces; boats rode at anchor nearby.

  They rushed by scenes, already familiar to Paula, of crashed cars. Edwinna gaped. They followed a curving thoroughfare past large houses in the yards of which spathodeas and bombax trees were bent with big scarlet blossoms. Soon they crossed the highway and stopped near the screaming avalanche of wrecked passenger cars.

  Other women were there already, some trying to help, some merely staring. One or two whom Paula first thought were casualties had only fainted, and lay like dolls on the weedy grass. “You drive,” Paula said to the cowering Edwinna, “to the new hospital.

  There might be a few women doctors available. And the nurses! Tell them that—

  whatever they’ve got on hand—this is worse!”

  Paula strode to the closest group of girls and women. “Which of you live around here?”

  Most merely glanced at her and gazed back at the shrieking, moving objects amidst the shattered metal. But there was an authority in her tone which caused two or three to reply. “I live down yonder.” “Our place is two blocks away.”

  “Well, then,” Paula said in a clear, positive voice, “go home! Get some of these other women to go with you! Bring boiling water here—all the iodine you’ve got—

  bandages—clean sheets—everything for first aid! Get beds ready! We’ve got to take care of this— ourselves!”

  The women looked, talked to each other, and began to move. Some, now, were venturing into the steel and the glass and the gore where they could see other women and children.

  Paula stared up and down the long stretch of track, parkway and wide road. Cars moved on the latter but of these most went by frenziedly with no more than a quick braking for a look. A few slowed and stopped and their occupants got out. In the distance she saw the low sun glittering on the many slanted windows of the university dormitories.

  It gave her an idea.

  At the same instant a hand touched her shoulder. She turned and saw Emma Bradley, the secretary of the South Miami Women’s Club, with tears in steady, gray eyes.

  “Paula—what is it?”

  “God knows! The men are all gone. We’ve got a horrible wreck here. Emma!

  Take charge—will you?” Paula outlined the directions she’d given and the further plans she had made.

  Emma hiked up her sleeves while she listened, retied the purple kerchief over her gray hair, and went toward the nearest women without a question, There was pandemonium on the campus when Paula drove up to the Student Club. Clusters of hysterical girls, and girls running without purpose, made eerie drama against the modernistic architecture and the sunset-tinted calm waters of the lagoon beyond. Paula parked, ran up the steps and out onto the terrazzo of the open-air dance floor where she could be seen.

  “Listen!” she shouted. “Everybody! Quiet! Listen! Silence!”

  By and by, save for sobs and peripheral running, she had the attention of about a hundred girls.

  “I’m Paula Gaunt,” she said loudly. “Some of you may know me. All of you know who my husband is—William Percival Gaunt. He’s taught courses here in past years and you’ve put on his play at your Ring Theater and you read his books. Look, girls. I don’t know why what has happened has happened. But I do know the men are gone. Everything is up to us—and how we come out is going to depend on how we behave now. You girls are the most able and intelligent of the whole bunch in all this area. Start using your heads! Get everybody together! Form a committee to register what everybody can do. We’ve got fires to fight. There’s a terrible train wreck down the Dixie Highway. People are hurt everywhere. We’ve got to figure out how to organize. How to locate qualified women and doctors and get them where they are needed. We’ve got to find all girls studying engineering—all people who can run power plants, repair power lines, everything of that sort. Nobody is going to take charge of anything tonight unless you do! We’ll need girls who can shoot-to guard things. Girls who can run fire engines—

  or who would volunteer to try!” She talked on. . . .

  As darkness fell, the sky lit up around the horizon, with the widest and most intense glow in the middle of Miami where the shanties of forty thousand Negroes were mingling flames to make a single, mile-square pyre. . . .

  Paula did not keep her promise to return to Bella Elliot’s for supper. She went without the meal. And she did not see Edwinna again that night.

  The girls and the women professors at the university had needed only the focusing of their scattered minds to set them in action.

  What she did, Paula said afterward, they would soon have done by themselves, without her. In ten minutes she was ensconced at a table in the outdoor restaurant beside the dance Boor and the lagoon. Girls were lining up chairs as if Paula were going to lecture them. Pens, paper, cards, bulletin boards, the materials for making lists were being assembled.

  Next, in rapid succession, girls—nominated from waving hands—rose to suggest who should head up firefighters, engineers, rescue workers, nurses’ aides. Those suggested, if not present, were sought immediately by runners. When they appeared, they quickly formed their own committees, set out to commandeer such equipment as they could after registering for whatever action they had undertaken. Within two hours, working now by the headlights of sedans driven into the open court of the building (for the power was off at the university), Paula had dispatched some fifty “crews” on various missions, most of which had been suggested by the students.

  In a good many other towns and cities, other Paulas had leaped into similar situations, women with good nerves and minds, women with the organization know-how of club officers, but women who, like Paula, were faced with uncountable dilemmas they were not equipped to handle. They did their best.

  Toward eleven o’clock that night, a girl with black bangs, her face smudged and the smell of smoke on her jeans, raced up the steps of the Student Club and reported to

  “headquarters” in a staccato southern voice: “Niggertown’s burning to ashes! We headed the women and the children to Bayfront Park and the other parks, like you said. We got guards around. People are abreaking in everywhere, though. Gettin’ food and gettin’

  jewelry—ahead of the fire! It’s driving down the main streets, now.”

  Paula said quietly to Professor Aveley, one of the women who had become a chief lieutenant in the passing hours, “We can’t stop it. I asked about dynamite. Nobody knows how to use it—or even where . . . men keep it. It would be silly anyhow to try to blow up rows of skyscrapers, when we haven’t got a soul who can blast a stump!”

  “We’ll just have to continue trying to evacuate.” Professor Aveley was large, mousy and homely. She taught math; no one would have thought, unless they had thought very carefully, that she had the mind of a field general. “I understand there are a dozen different groups working in Miami now—with our girls. And m
ore in the areas around here. They’ll have to spread the word to pull people back—ahead of the fires, getting everybody out of the houses. By morning—” She shrugged.

  “I know,” Paula said. “There’ll be less than half the population—and probably far less than half the housing.”

  Professor Aveley nodded. “Then we can thank the Lord for a climate you can sleep in! Imagine Minneapolis! I’ve been! I was brought up there. Ice cold! Snowing, maybe!”

  “I think—” Paula said, and stopped. She looked at the girls working at tables, the girls coming and going from the street, the graceful buildings in the alternate glare and darkness of headlamps and shadow; she looked at the orange circle of fire on the horizon.

  While she looked, lights went on everywhere on the campus.

  The woman beside her murmured, “Thank God for Alberta and her gang!”

  Paula nodded. “I think one of us ought to go down there “

  “Right. You. I’ll hold the fort.”

  Paula demurred. “Perhaps I should, after all—”

  “Go on,” the professor said. “Fire scares me.”

  Paula was forced to stop at the foot of Brickell Avenue. She parked on somebody’s front lawn, took out the keys of her car, locked it and ascended the drawbridge.

  Miami’s skyscrapers were silhouetted against seas of flame that rose to the north and the west. There was no electricity. In the nearer streets, women were running—many with children, nearly all carrying suitcases or bundles. Women were trying to drag trunks from the two nearest hotels.

  While Paula watched, a motorboat started near the bridge and made its way downstream in the glaring light. It had outriggers. These hit the bridge, splintered, and crashed into the river. Paula leaned over the rail and saw the women in the boat begin to hack at the debris. The cruiser pushed on under the bridge and headed toward the Bay. As it passed, Paula saw that two of the women in the stern wore evening dresses—and all of them, with the possible excep tion of the pilot, appeared to be drunk. They waved glasses and bottles at her.