Warday

I never dreamed that the bank I worked for was about to become a part of history, and the computer I worked with worth considerably more than its weight in gold. My initial concern was just to get home. I kept thinking, standing at the rail of the Canberra on that warm October afternoon, feeling the reassuring hum of the ship beneath my feet, of my wife and daughter and that measured BBC voice saying, “New York is burning… For some reason I just assumed the Russians had won. I felt that as an employee of a capitalist bank, I would not have much of a future.

I don’t want to go into my whole life story over the past five years. Suffice to say that it has been sad in some ways, but in others lucky. I have been preserved from the suffering and upheaval that have blighted so many lives. Of course, I lost my wife and daughter, but since I met Quinn here in San Francisco, I have found that I can contend with the hollowness inside me, and the awful sense of having deserted them. Quinn hasn’t been successful in finding them. In looking for them I found her, I guess.

The Canberra eventually docked at New Orleans. Since the war, I have not gone north of Atlanta. I put my name in the Red Cross National Finders, but nothing ever came of it. And of course, Quinn’s scoured the earth. Even so, I still look at the lists every month, when they post them in the Student Union. But Berkeley is a world away from the war.

Hell. I’m a goddamn coward, is what I am. My little girl could be anywhere and I’m afraid to go look for her. I’m so scared of radiation. Even while it’s killing you, you don’t know it’s there. I wake up in the night when the wind blows down from the mountains, thinking maybe some microscopic bit of plutonium from the Dakotas has found its way here, and is aiming for my lungs. I get these weird, nonspecific sicknesses. So I go to the Medical Center and they tell me I’m fine. Once I heard them showing a man on triage how to manage lung cancer by breathing steam!

I went to a psychologist. I went to an osteopath. I went to a witch.

Now listen, I’m really getting off on a personal tangent. I think in a sense that I’ve developed the habit of being a patient. Half the world is starving and I’m worried about my own damn guilt trip.

This interview method is cunning. You guys find the people who want to talk, don’t you, and then just let ’em rip. Get a man’s secrets right on disk.

What are you, a couple of State Intelligence or MI-5 types?

We’ve got both around Berkeley, believe me. The British are good friends to this country. The best friends. But they are also very interested in using the current crisis to solidify their international position, shall we say.

One thing I’m sure of. There will never be another United States as free, as powerful, as magnificent as there was before.

From a statistical standpoint, we regressed too far. Now outsiders can control how much reconstruction we do of our technological base industries, and thus make sure we stay just far enough behind not to be a threat. The tendency of Japan and Europe is to look upon the U.S. and Russia as two countries that went kind of mad. By 1980 or ’81, both nations were effectively insane. The accession of Reagan the actor and Andropov the human computer were the first sure symptoms of the war madness, according to the poolside theories of my friend Dr. Hideo Hayakawa, who is a psychopolitical theorist.

We have about a hundred and seventy-five million people in this country, and the death rate still exceeds the viable birth rate by two to one. So we’ve had a net loss of fifty-five million people.

That’s twenty million births and seventy-five million actual deaths.

We have lost as many people as there are in England. Yet look at the English. They’re all over the place. Two thousand British bureaucrats are running this country through the blind of the Relief, which is really a colonial government disguised as a sort of Red Cross with teeth. The provisional U.S. government in L.A. is gaining strength every day, but so far it’s mostly paperwork and planning.

The Capital Replacement Program, where the government prints money to replace the capital of corporations that lost it in the banking catastrophe, has been effective here in California, but so far it hasn’t spread beyond the borders. Thus we’re dealing with a three-percent inflation rate out here, which is really only reflation of the deflated currency, while the rest of the country is still deflating.

I recall my own personal sense of panic when I discovered that I had no money. None. Even my MasterCard was meaningless. My bank account was simply another lost record among billions of lost records. Our economy was electronically erased, really.