Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

by Robert Charles Wilson

  But as I approached the walk a soldier stepped out of the shadows and raised his hand. “No admittance, sir,” he said.

  That was astonishing; and I was outraged, as soon as I was sure I had understood the man correctly. “Get out of my way. That’s an order,” I added, since my Colonel’s stripes were intact and plainly visible.

  The soldier blanched but didn’t stand down. He was a young man, probably a fresh draftee, a lease-boy hauled out of some southern Estate, judging by the accent in his voice. “Sorry, Colonel, but I have my orders—very strict—no one to be admitted without authorization.”

  “My wife is in this house, or was, or ought to be—what under heaven are you doing here?”

  “Preventing exit or entry, sir.”

  “By what authority?”

  “Writ of Ecclesiastical Quarantine.”

  “That’s a mouthful! What’s it signify?”

  “Don’t precisely know, sir,” the soldier confessed. “I’m new at this.”

  “Well, where do these orders emanate from?”

  “My superior officer down at the Fifth Avenue headquarters, most directly; but I think it has something to do with the Dominion. ‘Ecclesiastical’ means ‘church,’ don’t it?”

  “I expect it does …. Who is inside, that you’re guarding so adamantly?”

  “Only a couple of women.”

  My heart beat twice, but I pretended to keep aloof. “Your dangerous prisoners are women?”

  “I deliver food parcels to them now and again … women, sir, yes, sir, a young one and an old one. I don’t know anything about their crimes. They don’t seem hateful, or especially dangerous, though they’re a little short-tempered now and then, especially the younger female—she hardly speaks but it bites.”

  “They’re in there now?”

  “Yes, sir; but as I said, no admittance.”

  I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I shouted Calyxa’s name, at the greatest volume I could muster.

  The guard cringed, and I saw his hand stray to the pistol on his hip. “I don’t think that’s allowed, sir!”

  “Do your orders say anything about preventing a uniformed officer from shouting in the street?”

  “I guess they don’t, specifically, but—”

  “Then, specifically, follow your orders as they were written—guard the door, if you have to, but don’t improvise, and don’t pay any attention to what’s going on the sidewalk; the sidewalks of New York are not your kingdom right at the moment.”

  “Sir,” the young man said, blushing; but he didn’t contradict me, and I called out Calyxa’s name several more times, until the head of my beloved wife at last appeared at an upstairs window.

  I could hardly contain my happiness at the sight of her. How often I had imagined seeing her again, during the long Goose Bay Campaign! Calyxa’s form, recalled in the interlude between waking and sleep, had become a deity to which I inclined as predictably as any Mohammedan to Mecca. Framed in the upstairs window of Mrs. Comstock’s stone house she looked at least as lovely as any of my visions of her, though a little more impatient, which was not surprising.

  I called out her name once more, just to feel the throb of it in my throat.

  “Yes, it’s me,” she called back.

  “I’m home from the war!”

  “I see that! Can’t you come in?”

  “There’s a guard on the door!”

  “Well, that’s the problem!” Calyxa turned away for a moment, then reappeared. “Mrs. Comstock is here also, though she doesn’t like to shout at the window—she sends her regards.”

  “Why are you locked up? Is it the trouble with the Dominion you wrote to me about?”

  “It’s too long a story to bellow into the street, but Deacon Hollingshead is in back of it.”

  “Julian won’t let this go on!”

  “I hope he hears about it quickly, then.”

  The soldier on guard, during this exchange, peered at me with a frank curiosity, his jaw agape. I didn’t enjoy his close attention. I wanted to ask Calyxa about our child—I wanted to proclaim my love for her—but the draftee’s blunt stare, and the public circumstances in general, made me feel awkward about it. “Calyxa!” I called out. “I have to tell you—my affectionate feelings are not diminished—”

  “Can’t hear you!”

  “Undiminished! Affection! Mine, for you!”

  “Please don’t waste time, Adam!”

  She left her place at the window.

  I turned to the guard, my cheeks burning. “Are you enjoying the show, soldier?”

  But he was immune to irony, or had been raised somewhere outside its orbit. “Yes, sir,” he said, “thank you for asking. It’s quite a distraction. This is tedious work, as a rule.”

  “I’m sure it is. You look cold. Wouldn’t you rather go someplace warm, take a meal perhaps, this close to Christmas?”

  “I surely would; but my relief isn’t due for two hours.”

  “Why don’t I relieve you? I know I can’t go inside—that would violate regulations—but I believe a ranking officer can assume an enlisted man’s duties for a short period of time, as a kindness on a cold December night.”

  “Thank you, Colonel, but that dodge won’t work. I can’t afford to eat at my own expense. I haven’t been paid since last month, with the turbulence in the government and all.”

  “There’s a place around the corner that serves beef tongue and lozenged pork, piping hot. Here,” I said, pulling a pair of Comstock dollars out of my pocket and pressing them into his palm, “go on, enjoy yourself, and Merry Christmas to you.”

  The recruit looked at the money with wide eyes, then clapped the coins into the pocket of his duffel coat. “I suppose I could leave the ladies in your custody for an hour or so—no more than that, though.”

  “I appreciate it, and I’ll make sure they’re safe when you get back.”

  Delicacy prevents me from recounting every detail of my reunion with Calyxa, but it was a warm and at times tearful meeting, and I made many demonstrations of my affection, and perceived with amazement and a melting pride the way her feminine form had softened and enlarged. Mrs. Comstock watched these displays with uncomplaining indulgence, until our intimacies began to embarrass her; then she said, “There are important subjects we need to discuss, Adam Hazzard, unless you mean to carry Calyxa off to the bridal chamber instantaneously.”

  I might have liked very much to do just that; but I submitted to the implied suggestion, and left off kissing my wife for a time.

  “I’ve bribed the guard away,” I said. “We can escape now, if you like.”

  “If it were a matter of bribery,” said Mrs. Comstock, “we would have been away long ago—but where do you imagine we would go? We’re not criminals, and I at least don’t propose to behave like one.”

  “This is confusing to me,” I confessed. “I’m less than two hours off the boat from Newfoundland, and I’ve had no answer to the letters I sent.”

  “They didn’t arrive, or were turned back. And Julian is here as well?”

  “That’s what the ringing of the city bells was all about. He was carried off to the Executive Palace to be inaugurated, or whatever they do with new Presidents.”

  Mrs. Comstock was relieved to hear the news, so much so that she had to sit down and compose herself. It was a long moment until she took notice of me again. “I’m sorry, Adam,” she said. “Take a chair and keep still while I explain the situation. Then we can discuss the important question of what to do about it.”

  Her explanation was discursive, with much back-tracking, and heated interjections from Calyxa, but the gist of it was this:

  Since Deacon Hollingshead’s arrival in town last July the Dominion had been hard at work, cleansing New York City of moral corruption.

  “Corruption” is a popular word with the enthusiasts of the Dominion, usually uttered as a prelude to the knife, the docket, or the noose. In the present case it referred to
the growing number of non-tithing churches in this city—churches, that is, which were not just unrecognized by the Dominion but disdained that recognition; for they regarded the Dominion as a worldly institution, feeding on forced donations while it suppressed genuine apostolic brotherhood and individual salvation in Christ.

  I had heard of these renegade churches. They existed in all the large cities, but were especially common in Manhattan, where several varieties of them catered to the poor and malcontent, to the lowest echelons of mechanical workers, or to the Egyptians and other newly-arrived immigrants. But I could make no connection between these institutions and the confinement of Calyxa and Mrs. Comstock.

  “We were found in,” Calyxa said bluntly, interrupting Mrs. Comstock’s more nuanced narrative.

  “What do you mean, found in? Found in what?”

  “It’s a legal term,” Mrs. Comstock said. “We were arrested with a dozen other people when one of these institutions was raided by Hollingshead and his clerical police—‘found in attendance,’ in other words.”

  “You were attending a renegade church?” That surprised me, since Mrs. Comstock’s religious devotions in the past had been wholly conventional; and Calyxa, who was educated in a Catholic institution, often told me she had garnered from that experience just as much religion as she expected to need, and then some.

  “Not for religious purposes,” Calyxa said. “The church allowed its premises to be used for political meetings. I had been telling Mrs. Comstock about the idea of the Parmentierists, and she was interested, and we went there so she could take a sample.”

  “Isn’t that an extenuating circumstance?”

  “Not in Deacon Hollingshead’s eyes,” said Mrs. Comstock. “Parmentierism hardly constitutes an alibi, under the current regime. I almost suspect the Deacon pursued us for the explicit purpose of incriminating us. It may have been part of some scheme he worked up with the Executive before Deklan was deposed.”

  “But Deklan is deposed, and you’re still confined to the house.”

  “Deacon Hollingshead is as powerful as ever, and a Writ of Ecclesiastical Quarantine isn’t so easily suborned. Once issued, it tends to stick. We’re only here, and not in jail along with all the other Found-Ins, because I am a Comstock, and Calyxa is pregnant.”*

  “Julian will fix it,” I said.

  “I expect he will,” Mrs. Comstock said, “once he learns about it. He won’t be easily reached, however, now that he’s installed in the Executive Palace.”

  “I can find a way to him.”

  “I expect it won’t be necessary. Julian has never failed to join me for Christmas, if he was in Manhattan, and I’m sure he’ll send for me this year. In any case Calyxa isn’t due until April, which means Hollingshead can’t act until then. No, Adam, I have another commission for you, if you’ll accept it.”

  I could hardly refuse, though this was all a surprise to me, and disorienting in its effects.

  “My commission,” Mrs. Comstock said, “involves Sam Godwin.”

  “Sam! I haven’t seen Sam since Labrador. He was sent home with an injury. We asked after him at the military hospital in St. John’s, but he had already passed through, bound for New York. He must have arrived long since—have you seen him? I would like to shake his hand again.” His remaining hand, I thought, but did not say.

  “I made similar inquiries,” Mrs. Comstock told me, “and I know he arrived safely in the city, and spent some days at the Soldier’s Rest, but he was released—and promptly vanished, or at least hasn’t bothered to contact me. This isn’t like him, Adam.”

  I agreed that it was not. “Perhaps I can find him, and solve the mystery.”

  “I hoped you would say so.” She beamed. “Thank you, Adam Hazzard.”

  “You don’t need to thank me. But what about the guard on the door? He’ll be back before long, and I can’t stay.”

  “Never mind the guard—he’s harmless, and as prisons go this one is comfortable enough.”

  “Once I’m out of the house it might be difficult to get back in,” I said. I didn’t like the idea that I might be barred from my marital chamber for some indefinite time. It was cruel, if not unusual.

  “Stay at the Soldier’s Rest, if you have to, and say your goodbyes to Calyxa for the time being. We’ll be together again on Christmas Day, I’m sure of it.”

  “Welcome home, Adam,” Calyxa added, and she embraced me again; and we exchanged intimacies once more, until Mrs. Comstock indicated by the clearing of her throat and the rolling of her eyes that the time had come for me to leave—too soon!

  The guard was returning as I came down the steps into the damp December air. “Thank you, Colonel,” he said. “That was a fine meal, much appreciated, and Merry Christmas to you.”

  “Keep a firm watch on the house,” I told him. “Be sure you don’t let any villains in.”

  I passed the night at the Soldier’s Rest near the docks. My rank entitled me to better accommodations than a common soldier would have received, though in practice this was just a cubicle containing a yellow mattress and a threadbare blanket. The bed and the blanket were infested with fleas, who took the opportunity to cavort at will and dine at leisure; and I slept fretfully, and hurried out as soon as the sky grew light.

  Sam Godwin was in New York, or recently had been. That much was an established fact. I went to the Regimental headquarters, and the clerk there showed me a ledger which said Sam had been discharged as a wounded veteran. It listed a New York address where mail could be forwarded.

  The address was in a disreputable neighborhood, not far from the Immigrant District. I went there directly. The houses in that location were mainly wooden frame structures crowded shoulder-to-shoulder, most of them divided up into rooms for rent, with here and there a tavern or hemp shop or gambling den in which degraded men could indulge their vices without traveling very far out of their way. Smoke poured from every chimney, for the day was cold. The thought of all those coal-grates and wood-stoves made me wary of fire, for these buildings were little more than tinder and brown paper, putting on airs of architecture.

  I knocked at a ramshackle door, and after a while an elderly woman with pox scars on her face answered. When I asked for Sam Godwin she said, “I don’t know any.” But I pressed her with a description, and proclaimed him as my friend; and she relented and showed me to an upstairs room at the end of a lightless corridor.

  The door was a little ajar. I pushed it and entered, calling out Sam’s name.

  He was asleep on a narrow bed no better than the one I had occupied during the night. He wore a ragged shirt, and he had pulled an old overcoat around himself to serve as a blanket. His face was drawn and haggard even in repose. His hair was thinner than I remembered it, his beard unkempt and almost entirely white. His left arm was curled under him and pressed against his belly as if to shelter his missing hand.

  There was a bottle on the floor beside him, and on the battered night-table a long-stemmed pipe, and a wooden box with a few crumbs of dried hemp flowers in it.

  I sat on the bed beside him. “Sam,” I said. “Sam, wake up if you can hear me. It’s me—it’s Adam Hazzard.”

  A few repetitions of this and he began to stir. He groaned, and turned on his back, and sighed, and opened one eye warily, as if he anticipated bad news. At last the light of sensibility seemed to penetrate all the way to his inward parts, and he struggled to sit up. “Adam?” he mumbled in a hoarse voice.

  “Yes, Sam, it’s me.”

  “Adam—oh! I thought for a moment we were back in Labrador—is that the sound of shelling?”

  “No, Sam. This is New York City, though not a very attractive neighborhood of it. The sound is just freight wagons out on the street.”

  He stared at me afresh as comprehension dawned. “Adam! But I left you at Striver. You and Julian. The Basilisk carried me away ….”

  “It carried us away, too, Sam, a few weeks later, and after considerable tragedy and fuss.”


  “I thought—”

  “What?”

  “The situation was hopeless. Striver was meant to be a slaughterhouse, and seemed to serve the purpose. I thought—”

  “That we had been killed?”

  “That you had been killed, yes, and that I had failed in my commission of protecting Julian.”

  “Is that why you’re living in these circumstances? But we’re alive, Sam!—I’m alive, and Julian is alive. Have you looked at a newspaper lately?”

  He shook his head. “Not for … weeks, I suppose. You mean to say Admiral Fairfield reinforced the divisions at Striver?”

  “I mean to say that Deklan Comstock is no longer President! If you had poked your head out of this ugly den you might have seen the Army of the Laurentians marching to depose him!”

  Sam, in his amazement, stood up suddenly, and then blushed, as he didn’t have his trousers on. He took a crumpled pair from the floor and buttoned himself into respectability with a shaking hand. “Damn me for my inattention! Deklan Comstock deposed! And have they installed a new President?”

  “Yes, Sam, they have … but perhaps you had better sit down again before I tell you about it.”

  I helped Sam dress himself, and comb his hair, and when he was relatively presentable I took him to a nearby tavern, where we ordered eggs and toast from the kitchen. It wasn’t gourmet fare—the butter was maggoty—but it was filling. Sam admitted that he had been alone since his return to Manhattan. It wasn’t just his grief over Julian’s presumed death that had caused him to hide himself away; it was the loss of his left hand, or the sense of wholeness and manliness that went with it. He ate efficiently with his right hand but kept his left forearm immobile in his lap, and he was careful at all times not to show the stump. He kept his chin down and avoided the eyes of other customers. I didn’t mention his condition to him, or act as if I noticed it, and I thought by that strategy to distract him.

  While he ate I shared the story of my adventures with Julian in Striver, and Julian’s unexpected ascension to the Presidency. Sam was greatly interested, and thanked me repeatedly for relieving his mind about Julian. “Not that the Presidency is any kind of safe haven, God knows. I’m glad you came to me, Adam, and I thank you for the meal, but you had better leave me alone after this. I don’t care to see people, as things stand. I’m not what I used to be. I’m of no value to Julian anymore. I’m a useless appendage.”