Air Force One, Part Three (3) “Does ‘happiness’ sound too silly?” Anne asks him, smiling. “It probably is. I’m sorry; I’m just being shy. I should have used a much bigger word. Do you know what I should have said?” “No, ma’am,” the bear-sized man says sheepishly, like a schoolboy asked to solve a grammar problem. (He is twenty-five years old but looks forty. He has been on the road for eleven years. Eighteen months ago he killed three men who attacked him in a roadside camp. When Anne smiles at him and he realizes that he does not need to actually answer the question, he swallows with relief in a throat gone dry with nervousness.) “I should have used its right name,” she says, “and that is ‘joy’.” “Joy is what screwed up the world?” another man asks incredulously, then frowns self-consciously when he realizes that he has ‘cussed’. “No,” she says. “The lack of joy is what ruined our world. It wasn’t because of this or that nuclear skirmish, or bioweapon release. It didn’t happen when the people at the moon base boiled the Pacific, or when General Walker burned the nuclear plants in China. “This world’s path was set on the day that people turned away from joy. Everything since then has just been — the details.” “Well, hold on,” the second man retorts. It’s an obvious effort for him to speak without using profanity. It slows him down significantly. “I mean, what I’m saying is — you know, before the Wars and all. I would say people was getting plenty of pleasure, you know? I mean,” he laughs carefully, looking at the other men, “it’s like that’s all they were doing, you know?” He looks at the others, laughing knowingly. “You know?” “Mr. Kelley,” Anne says. He looks at her, his laughter disappearing instantly, surprised that she knows his name. “Have you ever been with a prostitute?” He looks at her silently for several seconds before he realizes that his mouth is open. “The truth, please, Mr. Kelley?” “Well, uh, yes ma’am,” he says quietly. Another man laughs but is immediately silenced by his neighbor who whispers “Shut the fuck up.” Everyone understands that this is not profane speech, since it was whispered, and the intention behind the words was helpful. “Just once,” Kelley says. Then, seeing Annie’s this eyebrows rise fractionally, he clarifies “Well, just, uh — a few times ma’am. In Memphis.” “It’s OK,” she tells him. “I only want to know one detail. Did you get the impression that she was a prostitute because she really enjoyed sex?” The mouth-open thing happens again, but he quickly closes it and looks at his ashtray. “No ma’am,” he says back, carefully stubbing out his smoke. “It, uh — it did not strike me that way.” “There was sex everywhere before the Wars,” Anne says. “There were picturegroups on the net where they were doing it with little girls and animals. That wasn’t about joy, Mr. Kelley. “And people were also doing at leas a few other things before the Wars, weren’t they? Do you remember people doing two-hour commutes in the summer? People turning their cars into offices because they spent so much time in them? That wasn’t because they loved to drive. “Do you remember Dilbert?” She looks around at the older men among them. “The most popular comic strip ten years before it all started was about an engineer who was trapped in a sea of cubicles, enslaved to a moronic boss, and so impotent that his idea of getting even is to steal office supplies. What does it mean when people laugh at something like that? Laugh until they cry.” She looks at them. These grizzled men are living out their lives in a time between the end of one world, and the beginning of the one that she’s knows is coming. And she wants them for that world, more desperately than any sixteen year-old girl ever wanted a boy in her bed. “What I mean when I say that we lost joy in our world, is not that there was no longer any laughter. There was plenty of laughter, half of it bitter. And there was certainly plenty of sex, but too much of it angry, or desperate, or cynical. “What I mean is that joy no longer moved our lives. Joy was not the force that made people jump out of bed in the morning, and shave, and blow-dry their hair, and eat freeze-dried garbage for breakfast, and take crack cocaine and black tar heroin until their organs quit working. Joy was not the force that made people spend their lives in meaningless jobs that bored them, finally, to death. “And, do you know what did move us, if not joy?” she asks them. “It was fear. Fear turned the wheels of our world. And it had been that way for a very, very long time.” “World War One,” the bear-man says simply, wide-eyed. “My daddy said that,” he explains, embarrassed that he has spoken up. “I don’t remember him much, but I remember he said once it all started in World War One. He meant the real old one, right? A hundred years ago?” He hopes his question will get the guys to look back at Anne again, and is quietly relieved by his gambit’s success. “Something very important did happen then,” Anne nods. “But the disaster I’m talking about took place much earlier. In fact, as far as we could tell, it happened somewhere between eight and ten thousand years ago.” The Bear, having just lit his new cigarette and raised it halfway to his lips, now slowly lowers it again. “I know,” she smiles. “That’s a long time ago. But we used to know things about what happened that long ago. People dug up the old stone cities, or looked at cores of ice from a mile down in a glacier, or used microscopes to look at fossilized pollen from plants. “Something terrible happened back then — probably at the earlier end of the range I mentioned: about ten thousand years. We don’t know exactly what it was—” “I know what it was,” one trucker says. It is Bob Hewitt who has spoken. Looking at him, Anne thinks that he is not completely well. He seemed especially hard hit by the apparition of the airplane last night, and again by the appearance of the soldiers this morning. The few times she has seen him he has been withdrawn, smoking alone and stealing glances at the uncaring soldiers guarding the room. He’s not half as bad as Mick — but she pushes that thought aside. “’And behold,’” Bob says, “’I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the Earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under Heaven — and every thing that is in the Earth shall die.’” “You’re talking about the Flood,” he continues. “I heard a preacher say that in San Diego the day before the Chinese missiles came in. If I’d taken off an hour later, I woulda still been there. “He said that last time it was the Water, and next time it was gonna be the Fire. I guess he was right. Sometimes I think — that fire ain’t out yet. Sooner or later it’s gonna get us all.” “We don’t know,” Anne says slowly. “We don’t know exactly what happened ten thousand years ago. Maybe it was meteors striking all over. Most of them would have fallen in the oceans and made huge waves, plus kicking up huge amounts of dust and water vapor into the atmosphere. The waves would have killed practically everyone who saw them. “As late as just before the Wars, two thirds of all people on Earth lived within fifty miles of the oceans. The few people in the interior or up in the mountains who weren’t killed on the coasts — and who didn’t starve to death when the crops failed for the next year or two — they would have only remembered the months and months of rains. Rains and floods. “Whatever the cause of it really was — that’s when our species died,” she says simply, looking at the men. “And I’m not referring to the hundreds of millions — maybe even billions who literally died beneath the waves. “What I mean is — before that time, we were hunter-gatherers. Maybe there was even a sort of hunter-gatherer civilization, with poets and philosophers and particle physicists for all I know. There’s no reason they couldn’t do all those things. “I like to believe this. I like to think that in that time, before the Floods, there was a culture on this planet that was just as big and powerful and amazing as anything that has ever been here — and that it was moved only by joy. Because I know for sure that what came afterwards, and what we’ve been ever since, has been moved only by fear. “The ones who survived wouldn’t trust the Earth anymore. They couldn’t believe anymore that it would always give them what they needed. The first agriculture began then: people tearing the earth to force what they wanted from it. Making it give them more than they needed, and building silos to hold the extra — just in case. “And then something else came,” she says, more quietly. “People who are afraid to leave the farms and the silos they’ve made — people like that can be controlled. Other people can come along riding on horses and carrying swords instead of pulling plows and say ‘If you want to keep this farm, you have to give us some of that extra food.’ “The first taxes,” she smiles. “And governments. And pretty soon kings and queens and great nations. And everybody working all the time. Do you know that, before the Wars, the few hunter-gatherers still alive in remote parts of the world worked less than a third as many hours a week as people in our wonderful modern civilization? And they were perfectly happy doing it? “And then of course you need a lot of children when you work a farm. If your local Lord is crushing you with taxes, well, it helps to be able to make more farm hands. And then the population is growing fast — because it’s afraid not to. “When science and understanding of things finally comes back, it’s put in the service of that same fear. We feel that we need more and bigger sources of energy, because all we know is need now. Take as much as you can get, and get while the getting’s good! And of course our own world is a strange place to us now, so it’s OK to rip it up, rape it, burn it — trying to fill a need that can’t be filled. “So then we get smokestacks, the world covered by asphalt. Greenhouse gasses, traffic jams, and, eventually nuclear weapons and the War Flu.” “That’s why I say that it wasn’t when the first missiles were launched that we started to die, but ten thousand years ago. And not only us, but our planet with us. Because it needs us — we need each other. And the day before the Floods came was the last day that we still loved it, and the last day that only the joy of living here moved us. She looks at the men with their beards and rough clothes and cigarettes. “Do you remember,” she almost laughs, “that one story that Mick always uses when he’s kind of — moody?” “The Green Hills of Earth,” one man in the back says immediately. “No,” she replies, “that one with the little boy—” “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” the bear-sized man says. “Yes! That’s the one. Where everything is joyful and beautiful; everybody is happy — but the price for that perfect world is one little boy kept forever in a dungeon in absolute misery, chained in the dark, covered with his own shit.” “Yeah,” one man smiles, thinking of how Mick would tell that one until they were all sick of it. “Doesn’t anybody see the joke?” she asks. “That story is exactly our world, inside out. A tiny number of people living perfectly happy, beautiful lives, and the rest of us in our own dungeon, in chains, covered with our own shit. The terrible secret is that we can leave any time we want to. In fact it’s not even really a secret, because we all know it. But we never can quite leave. We’re the Ones who are Too Scared to Walk Away from Omelas.” There are a dozen men sitting around her table now: more than half of the room’s total. And still the guards, far away across the large area, don’t care. One of the men at the table leans forward to stub out his smoke and then sits back again. “Well, ma’am,” he says, “I will say this — you certainly know how to cheer up a fella.” “I’m sorry!” she laughs. “Are my husband’s moods are rubbing off on me? I do mean to cheer you up, actually. There was a cheerful message in there somewhere. Didn’t you hear it?” She looks at them all, uncertain of how to say what she wants. “I’m leaving,” she says. “For me, the time has finally come to walk away from Omelas. “I’m going north to Traverse City, because I think that the world that we lost ten thousand years ago is starting again, up there. I believe that it is. Anyway, I know that something new is happening up there. Something that needs to happen. I know that they’re making a new kind of life: not just trying to recreate the world that made us all miserable anyway. Certainly not the world that the Gangs are trying to force on us. “What I know more than anything,” she says carefully, “is that I want to be a part of that. And I want all of you to come with me.” “But Mick—”, the bear-sized man blurts, then shuts up and looks mortified. “Ah, Mick indeed,” Anne says, tight-lipped. “He knows all about it. But — we all have to go our own ways, don’t we? I know that this is the way I have to go. I would like to believe that he — is going the right way for him.” “So —”, the man who leaned forward speaks, “you just want us to forget our routes and go north, huh? Just like that? Forget our customers, write off the loads we got in our rigs. Go be farmers up there and bang on drums and dance around bonfires or whatever it is those people do?” “Yes,” she laughs. “Something like that. You know it’s over, don’t you? The rigs and the loads and the towns? In five years all of that will be gone. You probably know that better than I do. Can’t you feel it, when you’re on the road? When you trade with the people you can still find who have something to trade and aren’t too scared to do it? In five or six years the people in those towns will all be working for the Gangs. And you will too — or you’ll be dead. It will come to that, won’t it? Sooner or later? “Why not try something really new right now? You can always leave again, if you want to. But you won’t want to. If you spend as much as a couple of months there, you’ll see it like I do. The people up there have the last ticket to the only future that will work,” she tells them. “All they need is enough good people to get on the train with them and stoke the engine. They will be very glad to see you come. And so will I.” The bear-man has tried to restrain himself since his last outburst, but he gives up at last and speaks again. “But, you want us to come with you — more than Mick?” he asks, looking afraid of the answer. “No,” she says quickly. “Not at all. I think he will come, someday. He does understand. We’ve talked about it so much. And we’ve — I only thought that, if he won’t — ” she stops and looks down, but the men can see pain on her face. She has to breathe slowly several times, before she can look up at them again. “I thought that if he won’t follow me there,” she says evenly, “then maybe he’ll follow you.” Night It is his place. As much as any place can ever belong to a man, this place belongs to him. It was he who saw the possibility of life here, and he who worked every day for two years to build a half ruined and forgotten rest-stop shack into the Wolverine Truck Stop and Motor Lodge. He led his wife and teenage daughter here, away from a failed farm, and away from a place where his past might find him. And here he stopped, and made a life for them at last. In many hot afternoons he stood in front of this place resting for a few minutes, leaning on his axe, gripping its handle with bandaged hands, imagining what it would be like. Imagining how it would let his family live. In every hour of those two years, while he worked in the daytime to build an Inn and hunting at night to feed his family, the voice of despair whispered in the back of his thoughts during every waking minute. Despair became quite a close acquaintance, back then. It almost became a friend, as anyone eventually will whom you see every day — even if they’re only there to invite you into the Abyss. So, leaning on his axe, he held to his belief like a man adrift in the sea might cling to a log. That was quite a bit more difficult than the part about the bleeding hands. And it worked, didn’t it? Didn’t his family did live here, protected, while a nation and a whole world died? Didn’t his daughter grow up to be a woman, able to go off and live on her own? Now, twelve years after it served its first customer, this Inn has seen more than fifty thousand men. If you pull off to park your rig overnight in a trucker’s camp anywhere from Bangor, Maine to the shantytowns outside of San Diego’s ruins — if there are so many as ten guys in that camp, odds are that three of them will have spent a night at the Wolverine. And the other seven will be wishing that they could. But — they would be wishing for something that has already passed. He understands that now. All the reasons for the Wolverine’s existence have faded out, one by one. Two years ago his daughter left. That’s as it should be, isn’t it? But still, she’s gone. He feels her absence and tries to ignore it, telling himself that children always leave to find their own lives. For two years he’s been able to live with her departure by knowing that she’s safe, and by continuing to believe in the Inn. But there too — the customers are fewer every month. What is an Inn without its customers? And if the gradual tapering off weren’t already bad enough, what hope of business will there ever be again after this invasion? It would take long months for men to trust the place again, and by the time those months have passed — how many of them will still be on the roads? And finally, even his wife — No. They’re all gone. And in their place, at the end of the hall that should be housing his truckers is exactly the man he has most feared to meet since before he ever came back to Ann Arbor. Mick stands near the end of that hall, not quite facing its entrance, and trying not to look directly down its length. Of course he didn’t know this particular officer, but he always imagined that the one who would finally come would be just like this one: an older man, high-ranking, serious. What he himself might have become, had he stayed.
Copyright © 2000 Michael Goulish |