Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

Jonathan Lethem is the best-selling author of Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, and several other novels, his most recent being You Don’t Love Me Yet. His first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, won the William L. Crawford Award, the Locus Award, and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. Lethem has published more than 60 short stories, in a diverse range of markets, from The New Yorker and McSweeney’s to F&SF and Asimov’s; his first collection, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, won the World Fantasy Award. In 2005, he was presented with the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his contributions to literature.

“How We Got in Town and Out Again” is one of a sequence of stories by Lethem railing against virtual reality technologies. In an interview in Science Fiction Studies, Lethem said “I didn’t set out … to write a series of stories … examining my own resistance to that technology. But living in San Francisco during the years of an intense kind of utopian ideological boom in virtual reality and computer technologies, I felt an instinctive need to represent my own skepticism about claims that were being made that seemed to me naïve. … And so I found these resistance stories coming out of me.”

Combine that with Lethem’s research into 1930s dance marathons, and you’ve got this story.

When we first saw somebody near the mall Gloria and I looked around for sticks. We were going to rob them if they were few enough. The mall was about five miles out of the town we were headed for, so nobody would know. But when we got closer Gloria saw their vans and said they were scapers. I didn’t know what that was, but she told me.

It was summer. Two days before this Gloria and I had broken out of a pack of people that had food but we couldn’t stand their religious chanting anymore. We hadn’t eaten since then.

"So what do we do?" I said.

"You let me talk " said Gloria.

"You think we could get into town with them?"

"Better than that," she said. "Just keep quiet."

I dropped the piece of pipe I’d found and we walked in across the parking lot. This mall was long past being good for finding food anymore but the scapers were taking out folding chairs from a store and strapping them on top of their vans. There were four men and one woman.

"Hey" said Gloria.

Two guys were just lugs and they ignored us and kept lugging. The woman was sitting in the front of the van. She was smoking a cigarette.

The other two guys turned. This was Kromer and Fearing, but I didn’t know their names yet.

"Beat it," said Kromer. He was a tall squinty guy with a gold tooth. He was kind of worn but the tooth said he’d never lost a fight or slept in a flop. "We’re busy," he said.

He was being reasonable. If you weren’t in a town you were nowhere. Why talk to someone you met nowhere?

But the other guy smiled at Gloria. He had a thin face and a little mustache. "Who are you?" he said. He didn’t look at me.

"I know what you guys do," Gloria said. "I was in one before."

"Oh?" said the guy, still smiling.

"You’re going to need contestants," she said.

"She’s a fast one," this guy said to the other guy. I’m Fearing," he said to Gloria.

"Fearing what?" said Gloria. "Just Fearing."

"Well, I’m just Gloria."

"That’s fine," said Fearing. "This is Tommy Kromer. We run this thing. What’s your little friend’s name?"

"I can say my own name," I said. "I’m Lewis."

"Are you from the lovely town up ahead?"

"Nope," said Gloria. "We’re headed there."

"Getting in exactly how?" said Fearing.

"Anyhow," said Gloria, like it was an answer. "With you, now."

"That’s assuming something pretty quick."

"Or we could go and say how you ripped off the last town and they sent us to warn about you," said Gloria.