Totalitopia

by John Crowley

  She pressed again, and the two skydivers again fell toward earth.

  What’s wrong with us? Pat Poynton thought.

  She stood, black instrument in her hand, a wave of nausea seizing her again. What’s wrong with us? She felt as though she were drowning in a tide of cold mud, unstoppable; she wanted not to be here any longer, here amid this. She knew she did not, hadn’t ever, truly belonged here at all. Her being here was some kind of dreadful sickening mistake.

  “Good Will Ticket?”

  She turned to face the great thing, gray now in the TV’s light. It held out the little plate or tablet to her. All all right with love afterward. There was no reason at all in the world not to.

  “All right,” she said. “All right.”

  It brought the ticket closer, held it up. It seemed to be not something it carried but a part of its flesh. She pressed her thumb against the square beside the YES. The little tablet yielded slightly to her pressure, like one of those nifty buttons on new appliances that feel, themselves, like flesh to press. Her vote registered, maybe.

  The elmer didn’t alter, or express satisfaction or gratitude, or express anything except the meaningless delight it had been expressing, if that’s the word, from the start. Pat sat again on the couch, and turned off the television. She pulled the afghan (his mother had made it) from the back of the couch and wrapped herself in it. She felt the calm euphoria of having done something irrevocable, though what exactly she had done she didn’t know. She slept there a while, the pills having grown importunate in her bloodstream at last; lay in the constant streetlight that tiger-striped the room, watched over by the unstilled elmer till gray dawn broke.

  In her choice, in the suddenness of it, what could almost be described as the insouciance of it if it had not been experienced as so urgent, Pat Poynton was not unique or even unusual; worldwide, polls showed, voting was running high against life on earth as we know it, and in favor of whatever it was that your YES was said to, about which opinions differed. The alecks of TV smart and otherwise detailed the rising numbers, and an agreement seemed to have been reached among them all, an agreement shared in by government officials and the writers of newspaper editorials, to describe this craven unwillingness to resist as a sign of decay, social sickness, repellently non-human behavior: the newspeople reported the trend toward mute surrender and knuckling under with the same faces they used for the relaying of stories about women who drowned their children or men who shot their wives to please their lovers, or of snipers in faraway places who brought down old women out gathering firewood: and yet what was actually funny to see (funny to Pat and those like her who had already felt the motion of the soul, the bone-weariness too, that made the choice so obvious) was that in their smooth tanned faces was another look never before seen there, seen before only on the faces of the rest of us, in our own faces: a look for which Pat Poynton anyway had no name but knew very well, a kind of stricken longing: like, she thought, the bewildered look you see in kids’ faces when they come to you for help.

  It was true that a certain disruption of the world’s work was becoming evident, a noticeable trend toward giving up, leaving the wheel, dropping the ball. People spent less time getting to the job, more time looking upward. But just as many now felt themselves more able to buckle down, by that principle according to which you get to work and clean your house before the cleaning lady comes. The elmers had been sent, surely, to show us that peace and cooperation were better than fighting and selfishness and letting the chores pile up for others to do.

  For soon they were gone again. Pat Poynton’s began to grow a little listless almost as soon as she had signed or marked or accepted her Good Will Ticket, and by evening next day, though it had by then completed a list of jobs Pat had long since compiled but in her heart had never believed she would get around to, it had slowed distinctly. It went on smiling and nodding, like an old person in the grip of dementia, even as it began dropping tools and bumping into walls, and finally Pat, unwilling to witness its dissolution and not believing she was obliged to, explained (in the somewhat overdistinct way we speak to not real bright teenage babysitters or newly hired help who have just arrived from elsewhere and don’t speak good English) that she had to go out and pick up a few things and would be back soon; and then she drove aimlessly out of town and up toward Michigan for a couple of hours.

  Found herself standing at length on the dunes overlooking the lake, the dunes where on a summer night she and Lloyd had first. Though he had not been the only one, only the last of a series that seemed for a moment both long and sad. Chumps. Herself too, fooled bad, and not just once or twice either.

  Far off, where the shore of the silver water curved, she could see a band of dark firs, the northern mountains rising. Where he had gone or threatened to go. Lloyd had been part of a successful class-action suit against the company where he’d worked and where everybody had come down with Sick Building Syndrome, Lloyd being pissed off enough (though not ever really deeply affected as far as Pat could ever tell) to hold out with a rump group for a higher settlement, which they got, too; that was what got him the classic Camaro and the twenty acres of high woods. And lots of time to think.

  Bring them back, you bastard, she thought; at the same time thinking that it was her, that she should not have done what she did, or should have done what she did not do; that she loved her kids too much, or not enough.

  They would bring her kids back; she had become very sure of that, fighting down every rational impulse to question it. She had voted for an inconceivable future, but she had voted for it for only one reason: it would contain—had to contain—everything she had lost. Everything she wanted. That’s what the elmers stood for.

  She came back at nightfall, and found the weird deflated spill of it strung out through the hallway and (why?) halfway down the stairs to the rec room, like the aftermath of a foam fire-extinguisher accident, smelling (Pat thought, others described it differently) like buttered toast; and she called the 800 number we all had memorized.

  And then nothing. There were no more of them, if you had been missed you now waited in vain for the experience that had happened to nearly everyone else, uncertain why you had been excluded but able to claim that you, at least, would not have succumbed to their blandishments; and soon after it became apparent that there would be no more, no matter how well they had been received, because the Mother Ship or whatever exactly it was that was surely their origin also went away: not away in any trackable or pursuable direction, just away, becoming less distinct on the various tracking and spying devices, producing less data, fibrillating, becoming see-through finally and then unable to be seen. Gone. Gone gone gone.

  And what then had we all acceded to, what had we betrayed ourselves and our leadership for, abandoning all our daily allegiances and our commitments so carelessly? Around the world we were asking that, the kind of question that results in those forlorn religions of the abandoned and forgotten, of those who have been expecting big divine things any moment and then find out they are going to get nothing but a long, maybe a more than life-long, wait and a blank sky overhead. If their goal had been to make us just dissatisfied, restless, unable to do anything at all but wait to see what would now become of us, then perhaps they had succeeded; but Pat Poynton was certain they had made a promise, and would keep it: the universe was not so strange, so unlikely, that such a visitation could occur, and come to nothing. Like many others she lay awake looking up into the night sky (so to speak, up into the ceiling of her bedroom in her house on Ponader Drive, above or beyond which the night sky lay) and said over to herself the little text she had assented or agreed to: Good will. You sign below. All all right with love afterwards. Why not say yes?

  At length she got up, and belted her robe around her; she went down the stairs (the house so quiet, it had been quiet with the kids and Lloyd asleep in their beds when she had used to get up at five and make instant coffee and wash and dress to get to work but this was
quieter) and put her parka on over her robe; she went out barefoot into the back yard.

  Not night any longer but a clear October dawn, so clear the sky looked faintly green, and the air perfectly still: the leaves falling nonetheless around her, letting go one by one, two by two, after hanging on till now.

  God how beautiful, more beautiful somehow than it had been before she decided she didn’t belong here; maybe she had been too busy trying to belong here to notice.

  All all right with love afterwards. When though did afterwards start? When?

  There came to her as she stood there a strange noise, far off and high up, a noise that she thought sounded like the barking of some dog-pack, or maybe the crying of children let out from school, except that it wasn’t either of those things; for a moment she let herself believe (this was the kind of mood a lot of people were understandably in) that this was it, the inrush or onrush of whatever it was that had been promised. Then out of the north a sort of smudge or spreading dark ripple came over the sky, and Pat saw that overhead a big flock of geese were passing, and the cries were theirs, though seeming too loud and coming from somewhere else or from everywhere.

  Going south. A great ragged V spread out over half the sky.

  “Long way,” she said aloud, envying them their flight, their escape; and thinking then No they were not escaping, not from earth, they were of earth, born and raised, would die here, were just doing their duty, calling out maybe to keep their spirits up. Of earth as she was.

  She got it then, as they passed overhead, a gift somehow of their passage, though how she could never trace afterwards, only that whenever she thought of it she would think also of those geese, those cries, of encouragement or joy or whatever they were. She got it: in pressing her Good Will Ticket (she could see it in her mind, in the poor dead elmer’s hand) she had not acceded or given in to something, not capitulated or surrendered, none of us had though we thought so and even hoped so: no she had made a promise.

  “Well yes,” she said, a sort of plain light going on in her backbrain, in many another too just then in many places, so many that it might have looked—to someone or something able to perceive it, someone looking down on us and our earth from far above and yet able to perceive each of us one by one—like lights coming on across a darkened land, or like the bright pinpricks that mark the growing numbers of Our Outlets on a TV map, but that were actually our brains, getting it one by one, brightening momentarily, as the edge of dawn swept westward.

  They had not made a promise, she had: good will. She had said yes. And if she kept that promise it would all be all right, with love, afterwards: as right as it could be.

  “Yes,” she said again, and she raised her eyes to the sky, so vacant, more vacant now than before. Not a betrayal but a promise; not a letting-go but a taking-hold. Good only for as long as we, all alone here, kept it. All all right with love afterwards.

  Why had they come, why had they gone to such effort, to tell us that, when we knew it all along? Who cared that much, to come to tell us? Would they come back, ever, to see how we’d done?

  She went back inside, the dew icy on her feet. For a long time she stood in the kitchen (the door unshut behind her) and then went to the phone.

  He answered on the second ring. He said hello. All the unshed tears of the last weeks, of her whole life probably, rose up in one awful bolus in her throat; she wouldn’t weep though, no not yet.

  “Lloyd,” she said. “Lloyd, listen. We have to talk.”

  In the Tom Mix Museum

  1958, AND WE ARE going to the Museum of Tom Mix. It is in a place called Dewey. “Dewy” is what my father calls my sister. A dewy girl. She lowers her eyes to not see him looking at her. I have my guns on, I buckle them on every morning when I put on my jeans. They have ivory handles with rearing horses carved on them that look like Tony, Tom Mix’s horse. My father’s name is Tony too. There is a horse on the hood of the car, and my father said we follow the horse wherever it goes. I used to watch for the horse to turn right or left, to see if the car went that way, and every time it did. But I am older now and I get it. Tony was a trick pony. My mother says that my father is a one-trick pony. Tony can think and talk almost like a person (Tony the horse).

  The Museum of Tom Mix is Tom Mix, but Tom Mix is much larger than you would think, taller than the statue of Paul Bunyan in that other town. We go around to the back of his left boot, which has a heel as high as I am, with a door in it. We go in one by one. There is a stairway up to the top of Tom Mix, and it is dark at the top. Tony is there, halfway up; then above Tony is the other Tony, after Tony died, and above him another. Far, far up are Tom Mix’s narrowed eyes, letting in the light. We are standing together, I love them all, and we wait to see who will start to climb.

  And Go Like This

  There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.

  —Buckminster Fuller

  DAY AND NIGHT THE jetliners come in to Idlewild fully packed, and fly out again empty. Then the arrivals have to get into the city from the airports—special trains and buses have been laid on, of course, day and night crossing into the city limits and returning, empty bean cans whose beans have been poured out, but the waits are long. The army of organizers and dispatchers, who have been recruited from around the world for this job—selfless, patient as saints, minds like adding machines, yet still liable to fainting fits or outbursts of rage, God bless them, only human after all—meet and meet and sort and sort the incomers into neighborhoods, into streets in those neighborhoods, addresses, floors, rooms. They have huge atlases and records supplied by the city government, exploded plans of every building. They pencil each room and then mark it in red when fully occupied.

  Still there are far too many arriving to be funneled into town by that process, and thousands, maybe tens of thousands finally, set out walking from the airport. It’s easy enough to see which way to go. Especially people are walking who walk anyway in their home places, bare or sandaled feet on dusty roads, with children in colorful slings at their breasts or bundles on their heads—those are the pictures you see in the special editions of Life and Look, tall Watusis and small people from Indochina and Peru. Just walking, and the sunset towers they go toward. How beautiful they are, patient, unsmiling, in their native dress, the Family of Man.

  We have set out walking too, but from the west. We’ve calculated how long it will take from our home and we’ve decided that it can’t take longer than the endless waits for trains and planes and buses, to say nothing of the trip by car. No matter how often we’ve all been warned not to do it, forbidden to do it (but who can turn them back once they’ve set out?) people have been piling into their station wagons and sedans, loading the trunk with coolers full of sandwiches and pop, a couple of extra jerry-cans of gas—about a dollar a gallon most places!—and setting out as though on some happy expedition to the National Parks. Now those millions are coming to a halt, from New Jersey north as far as Albany and south to Philadelphia, a solid mass of them, like the white particles of precipitate forming in the beaker in chemistry class, drifting downward to solidify. Then you have to get out and walk anyway, the sandwiches long gone and the trucks with food and water far between.

  No, we’ve left the Valiant in the carport and we’re walking, just our knapsacks and identification, living off the land and the kindness of strangers.

  There was a story in my childhood, a paradox or a joke, which went like this: Suppose all the Chinamen have been ordered to commit suicide by jumping off a particular cliff into the sea. They are to line up single file and each take his or her turn, every man woman and child jumping off, one after the other. And the joke was that the line would never end. For the jumping-off of so many would take so long, even at a minute a person, that at the back of the line lives would have to led by those waiting their turn, and children would be born, and mor
e children, and children of those children even, so that the line would go on and people would keep jumping forever.

  This, no, this wouldn’t take forever. There was an end and a terminus and a conclusion, there was a finite number to accommodate in a finite space—that was the point—though of course there would be additions to the number of us along the way, that was understood and accounted for, the hospital spaces of the city have been specially set aside for mothers-to-be nearing term, and anyway how much additional space can a tiny newborn use up? In those hospitals too are the old and the sick and yes the dying, it’s appalling how many will die in this city in this time, the entire mortality of earth, a number not larger than in any comparable period of course, maybe less for that matter, because this city has some of the best medical care on earth and doctors and nurses from around the world have also been assigned to spaces in clinics, hospitals, asylums, overwhelmed as they might be looking over the sea of incapacity, as though every patient who ever suffered there has been resurrected and brought back, hollow-eyed, gasping, unable to ambulate.

  But they are there! That’s what we’re not to forget, they are all there with us, taking up their allotted spaces—or maybe a little more, because of having to lie down, but never mind, they’ll all be back home soon enough, they need to hang on just a little longer. And every one who passes away before the termination, the all-clear, whatever it’s to be called, will be replaced, very likely, by a newborn in the ward next door.