The Millennium Blues

by James Gunn

  “But what you get them to change won't save them."

  “Will you save them, Dr. Gentry?” she had asked gently. “No, Dr. Gentry, you feel used because, if you are right, the tables have been turned. Instead of using other people, instead of doing well out of preaching misery and despair, you have played a part in a process in which you have been useful in spite of yourself. Like the old fire-and-brimstone preachers, you terrify the congregation and we save them for eternity.

  “If you're still angry, however,” she had said, extending a manicured hand, “perhaps you'd like to return the check."

  “I don't think that would make me feel any better,” he had said. “But I can assure you that I'll be more careful in the future."

  MacGregor had stood up. She was even more impressive standing. “That isn't why I asked you to see me, however. I'm afraid I have bad news. We had a telephone call for you when you were unavailable. Your wife has been taken to the emergency room of the hospital. Her condition is critical."

  He had stopped, moved from confrontation to concern in a way he had not expected. “Thank you,” he had said. He had turned to leave. “How soon can I get a flight out of here?"

  “I have instructed that my personal jet be placed at your disposal,” she had said. “It will be ready as soon as you are. I'm sorry to be the one to give you the news, but I thought it might be better from me."

  “I didn't expect this,” Gentry had said, “at least, not so soon.” He had thought his wife might live out the year.

  “Dr. Gentry,” MacGregor had said, “I know you have difficulty accepting comforting thoughts, but perhaps you might pass along to your wife my sympathy and the message that death is only a temporary state. We all have lived many times before, and we will live many times more, elsewhere if not here.

  “What might help your wife—"

  “Angel,” Gentry had said.

  “—Angel, is to cleanse the third eye of negative thought patterns."

  “The third eye?"

  “The one behind the forehead."

  “The pineal gland?"

  “The third eye,” she had said. “And it wouldn't hurt you, either, Dr. Gentry.” She had lifted over her head the crystal on its golden chain that had been around her neck, walked to him with the grace of a dancer, and put it in his hand. “Give her this."

  “She will appreciate it,” he had said and turned and left behind that psychic production, that monument to humanity's power to transform everything, including itself.

  Angel's hand rested in Gentry's calloused palm. It felt like a bundle of bones held together by parchment. Sharon had turned, perhaps when she felt his body stiffen, and pretended to be brushing lint from his shoulders before she straightened her patient's covers, adjusted the drip of intravenous fluid, and left, not looking back. Angel's eyes looked at Gentry and she tried to speak.

  “I'm here,” he said. “You don't have to say anything. I bring you the personal best wishes of Julie MacGregor.” She liked even second-hand contact with celebrities. “She sent you this.” He pulled the crystal from his pocket and put it over her head so that the crystal rested against her bony chest. For a fleeting moment he entertained the notion that the crystal might magically transform her cancer-ridden body into something like that of Julie MacGregor, but it only lay there, scarcely moving with her shallow breathing.

  She tried to speak again. He leaned his ear close to her mouth. This time she spoke clearly. “It's—all—right,” she said.

  He nodded. “Yes, it's going to be all right."

  She rolled her head slowly from side to side. “I—know,” she said. “It's—all—right."

  “You know?"

  “I've—always—known."

  Gentry sat back. For a moment he could not look at her face and then he forced his gaze to return. Her face seemed incapable of movement but her eyes were asking for his understanding.

  “You've known,” he said. “I've tried to keep that part of my life separate. It had nothing to do with you."

  Her head moved forward just a bit. “I—know,” she said, and then she shut her eyes and her breathing faltered and resumed and faltered and stopped.

  Gentry held her hand for several moments before he reached over and pressed the button twice that summoned help that came, as he knew it would, too late. Nurses and a doctor bustled in, too busily, too full of life, and looked at the blue wristband that said “No Heroic Measures.” Sharon closed Angel's eyes and folded her hands across her chest, looked at the crystal and then at Gentry, and left.

  Behind him Gentry heard the CNN anchor woman saying, “Scientists now have determined that the supernova reported earlier was not Sirius, and CNN regrets any alarm that its announcement may have caused. But we live in a dangerous universe in which knowledge of what lies out there may be our only defense. Our perceptions of danger may reach beyond our ability to cope with it, but CNN believes that too much information is better than too little. It will continue to keep the public abreast of all events as they occur. Better to feel completely informed, even of troubling or ambiguous happenings, than to feel that bad news is being concealed...."

  The news, and the world itself, faded into dusk and Gentry sat with his wife's body, feeling regret for her and for himself, until the day shift ended, and Sharon returned and took him back to her apartment and comforted him far into the night.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  November 6, 2000

  Elois Hays

  The broadcasting building stood like a white monolith in the Garden of Eden. Palm trees guarded the wide green lawn, and its sweep was interrupted by red and yellow flower beds and bisected by a curving white driveway. Tucked discreetly behind the building and screened by blossoming bushes was the parking lot. No matter how much fertilizer kept the lawn green and the flowers brilliant or how much weed killer protected the domesticated flora from the attacks of its uncultivated competitors, the picture was ecologically correct.

  Tall windows in front of the building opened on an entrance lobby that reached the structure's full three-story height. Most of the space behind the lobby was devoted to television studios, administrative offices, and equipment. From the top floor, executives could glimpse the blue Pacific stretching to the endless horizon, and on good days the spouts of whales.

  The radio station, on the other hand, was tucked away in a back corner of the first floor. It consisted of a small studio big enough for the host and the equipment for playing commercial tapes, a table for his coffee cup and scattered papers, a couple of microphones hanging on flexible arms from the ceiling, and a guest or two. Facing the host, and separated from the studio by a glass window, was a room full of equipment and a technician who also answered the telephone for call-in shows.

  It had boiled down to this, Elois Hays thought: In little more than 100 years, Marconi and his Nobel prize and the mass production of radios, networks and their news operations, entertainers, and programs, and the transformation of the leisure habits of a world, the vast technological and economic enterprise had been reduced to these two little rooms and their cheap voices. She wondered whether it was the marketplace or simply human nature that transformed dreams into trinkets. What would come next? What new development would turn television into a dime-story ornament?

  Or maybe it would endure. The theater had survived, and perhaps it would last another few hundred years if only the world could get past this millennial barrier.

  Why was it a barrier, the host was asking her? And what did The North Wind contribute to people's concerns about the end of the world?

  That was easy enough, and her actress's contralto made her answers seem better than they were. Even over the radio she could project her intensity. By comparison the talk-show host's customarily dominant baritone seemed like querulous nagging. She didn't want to put him off, so she pulled back, reduced the timber of her voice, threw in a few pauses. His name was Jerry Minton; she called him “Jerry” every time she answered a quest
ion.

  She had done this many times before, answering the same questions so often that they seemed as familiar as a script. Yes, The North Wind was about catastrophe and people's fears of the approaching millennium, but one way to deal with fears was to act them out, or watch others act them out for you. That was the psychological basis for drama therapy. The North Wind and the other programs and articles and books and movies about the year 2000 were a way of developing healthy attitudes toward an uncertain future. No, she didn't think drama's principal function was to minister to neuroses; it answered people's need for art, to give the muddled world of experience an aesthetic order, and theater was a way for an audience, if not to create art, to participate in its creation.

  Yes, she had been in therapy herself. Actors and actresses lived unnatural lives. They worked nights and slept days and found themselves the focuses of too much undeserved admiration and envy. What they did and how well they did it affected the lives and careers of too many others. The theater attracted people who needed to lose themselves in being someone else, and their private lives, for that reason, were often complicated and frequently messy. When they weren't being someone else they tried to escape being themselves; they drank too much, doped too much, slept around too much, married too much, and looked for answers too much outside themselves.

  During the commercial break, Minton relaxed into a more personal mode. “You're a real pro at this. You really make me look good, you know? Sometimes guests would rather have a leg sawed off than answer a simple question, and getting them to say something meaningful about themselves is like extracting state secrets."

  “I've had a lot of experience,” Hays said.

  “And you're such a great lady of the theater,” Minton went on. “Nobody'd know it, just to meet you. I don't mind telling you, this is the high point of my radio career."

  He was a plump, ginger-haired man in his late thirties or early forties, probably with aspirations to be a television news anchor that never would be fulfilled because his voice was better than his appearance, and he had as much charm as a drilling rig. On this tour Hays had met many like him.

  “You're making me feel old,” she said.

  Minton shook his head knowingly. “You're a very attractive woman, and you realize it—a sexy lady no matter what the calendar says. Here we go live again,” he said, his voice and posture assuming their on-the-air demeanor.

  “Welcome back to the Jerry Minton show,” he said. “We're talking to that famous actress of stage and screen, Elois Hays—though not much screen of late, eh?—movies are such a downer. She is appearing this week at the Griffith Theater in a play as contemporary as the millennium itself, The North Wind.

  “Now if I may, Ms. Hays—or should I call you Mrs. Witherspoon?"

  “Call me Elois. I don't need any man's name,” Hays said.

  “Especially a man such as George Witherspoon, is that right? I mean, are the grocery-store tabloids correct in their stories about your husband's philandering?"

  Hays gave Minton the Lady Bracknell stare from The Importance of Being Earnest.

  “Not only with young women, of course,” Minton went on undeterred, “but if the stories are accurate with young men as well—some say with the author of the play in which you are performing?

  “Well, Elois, what does a woman of the world, the first lady of the theater, do about a husband who cares no more about her reputation than his own?"

  God damn him, he was going to make her answer or shove his microphone down his throat and stamp out of the studio. She felt her carefully crafted surface shatter and anger boil up between the cracks like molten iron from the center of the Earth.

  On the way to the Deep Sea Drilling Project, Dennis Gregory had told her that George had scheduled her for two more promotional interviews. Over the roar of the helicopter's rotors, Hays had thought the publicist had said “four.” How many? she had objected, knowing that she was the touring company's greatest asset, knowing that she did the promotion bit well and could face the ordeal one at a time, but quailing at the prospect of an endless series. More than two was endless. Handling unpleasant chores one at a time was her way of coping, just as the trip to the local scientific operation, whatever it happened to be, was her way of keeping sane in a world determined to drive her crazy. Her natural curiosity about the universe around her might be the equivalent of someone else's romance novel, but science was a great spectator sport, maybe the best around. And if she were lucky she might come across something that she could discuss instead of the usual pointless personal questions that talk-show hosts preferred to ask celebrities.

  “No-no,” Gregory had said. “Two, not four. And both in Hawaii."

  “I still don't understand,” she had shouted, “why we are performing in Guam and then doubling back to Hawaii."

  He had shrugged, as if to say that they all knew the vagaries of bookings and theater availability. Or of George, she had thought. Who knew what assignations guided his scheduling of this world tour? Or what anxieties in his aging loins sent him in search of more exotic flesh?

  After that shattering encounter in Hampdon's hotel corridor, Hays had walked through her days as if they indeed had been numbered. She had felt alive only when she was on stage being someone else and had only begun to revive when, whatever his motives, George had announced that the show was going on tour. Broadway's flirtation with millennialism had been brief, but the rest of the world was less jaded. And, whatever George's motives, the tour had done well, playing to full houses throughout the Midwest, the South, the West, and now the Pacific, with George scheduling her days for promotion and his nights for God knew what. Somewhere along their path had been Tokyo, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and at the end of the tour, in the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve, were a half-dozen final performances on Broadway. Although she didn't like using the word “final."

  “At least,” Gregory had been saying, “you get to see another part of the world—and this hole in the ocean floor that you're so keen on."

  Guam had been strange. They had performed The North Wind four times already to brown-faced people who had never seen snow in their lives, much less a glacier, once to a mostly white audience of Navy officers and men from the base up on the mountain. But it had been the Guamanians who had shivered and applauded, and the Guamanians whose tensions had peopled the island with ghosts and ghostly terrors.

  But then the Guamanians were more religious and more conservative, and fundamentalism, with its millennial apprehensions, had imbued these last few months with the anticipation and the dread of Judgment Day. If the world were to be destroyed, why not by mountains of ice? Fire the Chamorros knew all about. But ice?

  Hays had emerged from the theater late one night to find a group of Guamanians around a giant bonfire in a nearby park, as if its roaring flames could drive away the ice giants from the north. Some of them had been dancing with natural abandon, the Polynesian part of their heritage emerging, in this time of crisis, from its Spanish and Filipino components, in quest of an unmediated relationship with the supernatural.

  Other stories in the newspaper or the bi-lingual radio station had hinted at rites closer to the primitive in the more secluded portions of the island, at animal and even human sacrifice, but Hays hadn't believed them. The Guamanians were too civilized. She had guessed that the accounts were reflections of what might be happening in the truly isolated parts of the world, areas of Africa, perhaps, or Mongolia, or New Guinea—places she had never been but about which she was willing to assume the most outrageous ceremonies.

  The world definitely was coming apart. No one who paid attention to the news could doubt that. In a dozen parts of the world, neighbors were fighting because they had different religions or even different interpretations of the same religion, or their ancestors had once occupied the same lands. Organized crime had become better organized and more ruthless. Murders were up, robberies were soaring, rape was epidemic. After a modest decline d
uring the early ‘90s, drug use of all kinds had exploded. Episodes of mob violence proliferated in the major cities of the world, and mass slayings by armed lunatics occurred almost daily. Civilization was turning out to be a fragile skin over a vat of molten metal.

  Then the Army helicopter had settled on the landing pad at the stern of the JOIDES Resolution.

  * * * *

  The ship had the outline of an ocean-going vessel, but in the middle was an oil-well derrick. From it extended a couple of Erector-set booms. Nearby on the deck were racks of aluminum-alloy pipe.

  The scientist in charge, an implausibly youthful looking woman with the implausible name of April Sowers and short hair bleached blonde by the tropical sun, had explained that the ship was picking up the project abandoned by the Glomar Challenger. They were drilling a hole through the Mohorovicic discontinuity to the mantle beneath, a near part of the Earth that the creatures who inhabited its surface had never seen, never touched by drill, whose only evidence came through reflected waves of sound. She didn't call it the mantle at first, but the “lithosphere.” She shifted to “mantle” as a concession to Hays's lay vocabulary.

  For the past few years the Resolution had been drilling cores from various places on the ocean floor, dating them, tracking the movement of the floor, coming to an understanding of the geologic processes that created new floor. Molten fractions of the mantle's basalt, the scientists theorized, upwelled at the oceanic ridges and pushed the floor toward the continents where it dived under their edges, lifting them into mountain chains or stripping away vast stretches of coast, producing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.