Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

“Call me Pete,” he says, as he has said before. I catch his hungry look at Jennie. She doesn’t, but some sixth sense —even here, even Inside—makes her step slightly backwards. I know she will go on calling him ‘Peter.’

Mamie says to Jennie, “Have some more champagne. Stay for dinner.”

With her eyes Jennie measures the amount of champagne in the bottle, the size of the chicken bleeding slightly on the table. She measures unobtrusively, and then of course she lies. “I’m sorry, I can’t—we ate our meal at noon today. I just wanted to ask if I could bring someone over to see you later, Gram. A visitor.” Her voice drops to a hush, and the glow is back. “From Outside.”

I look at her sparkling blue eyes, at Rachel’s face, and I don’t have the heart to refuse. Even though I can guess, as the two girls can not, how the visit will be. I am not Jennie’s grandmother, but she has called me that since she was three. “All right.”

“Oh, thank you!” Jennie cries, and she and Rachel look at each other with delight. “I’m so glad you said yes, or else we might never get to talk to a visitor up close at all!”

“You’re welcome,” I say. They are so young. Mamie looks petulant; her announcement has been upstaged. Peter watches Jennie as she impulsively hugs Rachel. Suddenly I know that he too is wondering where Jennie’s body is diseased, and how much. He catches my eye and looked at the floor, his dark eyes lidded, half ashamed. But only half. A log cackles in the wooden stove, and for a brief moment the fire flares.

#

The next afternoon Jennie brings the visitor. He surprises me immediately: he isn’t wearing a sani-suit, and he isn’t a sociologist.

In the years following the internments, the disease colonies had a lot of visitors. Doctors still hopeful of a cure for the thick gray ridges of skin that spread slowly over a human body—or didn’t, nobody knew why. Disfiguring. Ugly. Maybe eventually fatal. And communicable. That was the biggie: communicable. So doctors in sani-suits came looking for causes or cures. Journalists in sani-suits came looking for stories with four-color photo spreads. Legislative fact-finding committees in sani-suits came looking for facts, at least until Congress took away the power of colonies to vote, pressured by taxpayers who, increasingly pressured themselves, resented our dollar-dependent status. And the sociologists came in droves, minicams in hand, ready to record the collapse of the ill-organized and ill colonies into street-gang, dog-eat-dog anarchy.

Later, when this did not happen, different sociologists came in later-model sani-suits to record the reasons why the colonies were not collapsing on schedule. All these groups went away dissatisfied. There was no cure, no cause, no story, no collapse, no reasons.

The sociologists hung on longer than anybody else. Journalists have to be timely and interesting, but sociologists merely have to publish. Besides, everything in their cultural tradition told them that Inside must sooner or later degenerate into war zones: Deprive people of electricity (power became expensive), of municipal police (who refused to go Inside), of freedom to leave, of political clout, of jobs, of freeways and movie theatres and federal judges and state administered elementary school accreditation-and you get unrestrained violence to just survive. Everything in the culture said so. Bombed-out inner cities. Lord of the Flies. The Chicago projects. Western movies. Prison memoirs. The Bronx. East L.A. Thomas Hobbes. The sociologists knew.

Only it didn’t happen.

The sociologists waited. And Inside we learned to grow vegetables and raise chickens who, we learned, will eat anything. Those of us with computer knowledge worked real jobs over modems for a few years-maybes it was as long as a decade-before the equipment became too obsolete and unreplaced. Those who had been teachers organized classes among the children, although the curriculum, I think, must have gotten simpler every year: Rachel and Jennie don’t seem to have much knowledge of history or science. Doctors practiced with medicines donated by corporations for the tax write-offs, and after a decade or so they began to train apprentices. For a while-it might have been a long while-we listened to radios and watched TV. Maybe some people still do, if we have any working ones donated from Outside.

Eventually the sociologists remembered older models of deprivation and discrimination and isolation from the larger culture: Jewish shtetls. French Huguenots. Amish farmers. Self-sufficient models, stagnant but uncollapsed. And while they were remembering, we held goods lotteries, and took on apprentices, and rationed depository food according to who needed it, and replaced our broken-down furniture with other broken-down furniture, and got married and bore children. We paid no taxes, fought no wars, wielded no votes, provided no drama. After a while-a long while—the visitors stopped coming. Even the sociologists.