Warday

Over dinner, the three of us traded lives. As soon as Quinn understood what we were doing, she had an idea. “I know a man you’ll want to interview. If you’re trying to understand things, he’s somebody who probably knows. He’s an economist, and he teaches at Berkeley. He’s also somebody I love. He’ll be over to the apartment in the morning. You can meet him then.”

Neither of us had heard of Dr. Walter Tevis. I doubt, however, that we will ever forget him.

I asked her what she was doing. “I’m a gumshoe,” she said.

“A what?”

“A detective.”

Jim went pale. I was stunned. It wasn’t possible that we were in the hands of the police.

“I’m not a cop,” she said, “so you can redirect some blood into your faces. I find lost people. I’ll try to locate anybody you’re missing. If I succeed, I get a fee.”

“You must be incredibly busy,” I said.

“Very.”

Jim leaned forward. “My wife—I lost her in Austin right after Warday.” His face was suddenly sharp, his eyes boring into Quinn’s.

“Give me her name and description and last known address. I’ll see what I can do. It might take some time, you understand.”

Jim gave her the information.

After dinner she took us to her apartment, on a hidden Russian Hill byway called Keys Alley. “I warn you, I still have cats,” she said as she let us into the single cluttered room. A huge red furball came up and began protesting.

The room was jammed with the tools of her trade. There were stacks of old telephone books from dozens of cities, city directories, maps, old newspapers, census tracts, Zip Code directories, copies of birth certificates in lettered stacks, card files and Rolodexes identified by colored tags, and hundreds and hundreds of photographs in thick black albums.

I could see how she carried out her trade, working from the telephone and through the mails. It must have been a frustrating and difficult job.

“Sorry about the mess.” She sat down. She looked, then, very small and tired and somewhat lost herself. “A lot of people are missing,” she said.

Jim and I slept on the floor. Just as I was dropping off, the cat woke me by flopping down on my face. I moved it aside and sat up.

The little room was quiet. Quinn was a shadow on her couch. On the table beside her was a Princess telephone attached to an answering machine whose power lamp glowed red. I wondered how she managed. She must be besieged with clients. Names and names and names.

A trapped feeling came upon me and made me get up and put on my collar and my black suit and go out to get some night air.

Keys Alley was silent, lit through the leaves of trees lining the street. Music drifted in the dark, a radio playing an old, old song I could not name, but which drew me back to childhood summer nights, watching my bedroom curtains make shadows on the walls and listening to my parents and their friends talking in low voices under the trees outside, talking of the cares of forty years ago, Truman and the cost of the Marshall Plan and Stalin’s health.

I stepped softly as I left the silent alley. I went up Pacific Street to the crest, then turned and looked down across the roofs of Chinatown to the Bay. The view is not one of San Francisco’s most spectacular, but it satisfied me. Far out in the Bay I heard foghorns beginning to sound above the subdued rumble of the city.

The hour was late; midnight had come and gone.

Slowly, nearer horns started sounding. A fog was coming through the Golden Gate. Soon I could see it slipping up the streets and across the roofs, dulling lights, drawing the dark close around me.

When it swirled up Pacific, cold and damp, transforming crisp night sounds to whispers and making me shudder with the cold of it, I returned to the stuffy little flat and the sounds of Quinn and Jim sleeping, and the cat purring.

Sometime in the night the phone gave half a ring and the answering machine clicked. I heard a voice talking quickly into the recorder, quickly and endlessly, droning, filling my sleep with a tale of loss I no longer remember.

Interview Walter Tevis, Economist

What happened to the economy on Warday was quite simple. Six out of every ten dollars disappeared. The Great Depression of the thirties was caused by the stock market crash of 1929, when three out of ten dollars ceased to exist. Simultaneously, we lost the ability to communicate. We lost all our current records. Chaos was inevitable. We’re fortunate that the continuing deflationary process hasn’t been worse.

All the money that was somehow in process in the computer systems of the government and private banks simply ceased to exist because of electromagnetic disruption or, in the case of Washington, permanent and total destruction. That was about one dollar in ten, but it was all hypercritical money, because it was in motion.

It was the liquid cash, what people were using to pay other people.