CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella

by George Saunders

  “I’ve heard,” says Judith. “We’ll need to talk, Mitch.”

  “I think that’s an excellent idea,” Jerome says. “Somebody really needs to talk to Mitch.”

  “I’ve got something to say,” Mitch says. “You people are always yapping about oppression this and oppression that, but you certainly don’t seem to mind oppressing me.”

  “Nobody’s oppressing you, Mitch,” Jerome says. “Get off it. If anything, I’d say you’re attempting to oppress us, by accusing us of oppressing you. Wouldn’t you say so, Judith?”

  “Did you hear that, Judith?” Mitch says. “Did you hear how he turned that around? It’s always my fault, and if that’s not oppression I don’t know what is. Just because I’m one of the few rebels with an internal Flaw, you people think you can treat me like dirt. If you think a perforated duodenum is somehow less significant than an extra arm or some open facial lesions, you’re just plain wrong.”

  “This has nothing to do with your duodenum, Mitch,” says Judith. “This is strictly a performance issue.”

  “You want to talk performance?” shouts Mitch. “Ask this little fart where he learned to fire a machine gun! There he was, spraying friend and foe alike, this smug look on his face, and now he has the gall to accuse me of a performance issue?”

  “Leave it to you to bring my size into it,” says Jerome.

  “For your information, my size is related to my pituitary, which in turn is related to a suite of mutagenic effects, so what you’ve just done, whether you’re man enough to admit it or not, is make fun of my Flaw, which last time I checked was exactly what we were fighting against, Mr. Shits-in-a-Bag.”

  “That’s enough, you two,” Judith says. “Mitch, go walk the perimeter.”

  “Who died and made her queen,” mutters Mitch.

  “Phil did,” Judith says sharply. “And his last words to me as he died gutshot were: Continue my work.”

  “Oops,” says Mitch. “Guess I sort of hit a nerve there.”

  “What else is new?” says Jerome. “Open mouth, insert foot.”

  “What was the first thing I did after Phil put me in charge, Mitch?” Judith demands, holding up her left arm, at the end of which is a reddened stump. “What did I do to make myself a more valuable commander?”

  “Cut off your hand with a hacksaw to get your Flawed bracelet off,” Mitch says, hangdog.

  “That’s right,” says Judith. “And why did I do that, Jerome?”

  “To be able to more convincingly impersonate a Normal, ” says Jerome, equally hangdog.

  “Correct,” says Judith. “And what was my first solo mission, post Phil?”

  “You went to Denver and ingratiated yourself with a federal judge and made off with ten grand of his loot,” says Mitch.

  “And what did I do with the money?” says Judith. “Did I buy myself jewels? Did I flee the country?”

  “No,” Jerome says. “You bought weapons and food.”

  “That’s right,” Judith says. “Weapons and food. Now. If you boys have finished presenting an absolutely shameful first impression of the movement to our guests, I’ll tend to my wounded.”

  She leaves. Mitch and Jerome flip each other off and stomp away in opposite directions.

  “Nice people,” says one of the nuns.

  “Charming,” says another.

  Then an old man brings us each a cup of cocoa and a questionnaire, which we fill out by candlelight to the sound of coyotes.

  In the morning the old man shakes me awake and leads me to Judith’s tent. Judith’s sitting outside, wearing fatigues and hair rollers and sipping coffee.

  “Good morning,” she says. “Welcome to freedom. I’d like to take a few minutes to tell you a little about our operation, if I may. Please have a seat.”

  I sit at her feet and she gives me a cup of coffee and a sugar packet and some creamer.

  “Stole these on a recent raid,” she says. “A little indulgence. In general, however, our resources are rather scarce. So, after a liberation, the rescued Flaweds are basically on their own. Your cavemates of last night, for example, have been sent stumbling out across the canyon in their high heels with five dollars each, regrettably still wearing their habits, because we have no budget for clothing. It kills me, but it’s all we can do to replenish our ammo and buy eggs from sympathetic farmers, much less subsidize jeans for liberated whores. Which brings me to you. I understand that you saved Mitch’s life by stun-gunning a Normal. That was impressive. That took guts. That implies to me that you may be a fantastic potential guerrilla. What do you say? Have you ever considered joining the movement?”

  In truth I didn’t even know there was a movement. At Bounty Land we had Maurice Rabb, a malcontent who advocated armed Flawed rebellion. Then one day he tried to burn off his Flawed bracelet and ended up with a scorched wrist and a demotion to Porcine Reproductive Services. I’d often see him in the Birthing Barn, elbow-deep in pig afterbirth, still arguing the merits of a separate Flawed state. I tell her my story. I tell her I’m not joining anything until I find out what happened to Connie.

  She removes her stump and hands me a Danish with a perfectly good hand.

  “Surprise, surprise,” she says. “Step inside a sec.”

  Inside the tent are pictures of Lincoln and Che Guevara and an extra-large Baggie stuffed with spare fake stumps.

  “Here’s the thing,” she says. “I’m Normal. Never even had a bracelet. A few years ago I looked at the movement, or what passed for a movement, and said to myself, this is no movement, this is a bunch of uninspired yahoos waiting to be led to the slaughter, except that their moribund leadership couldn’t locate the slaughter if the slaughter sent up flares. So I invented a myth and invested in some fake stumps. I stopped being Lynette, a shy debutante with no marital prospects, and became Judith, the one-handed scourge of north Texas. Now every month or so I disappear and go to the bank in Lubbock and hit my trust fund and come back with a couple grand and a wild story about robbing a convenience store or seducing a senator. Is that wrong? Is a lie told in the service of good still reprehensible? These are the types of questions I ask myself every night as I apply antifungal to my hand, which is prone to infection due to these cheap stumps. But your people respect me. They work hard for me. Some have died for me. For themselves, actually, and for you, and for Connie. Ask yourself this: if you’d go through all you have to save your sister, what would you do to save a million sisters? Imagine a Connie in every town you’ve passed through, Connies of all ages, babies in cribs, bitter crones, pigtailed girls, children yet unborn. You could help give them dignity, a chance at careers, children, homes, husbands, peaceful dotages. Isn’t that something to work towards? Wouldn’t that be a way of honoring Connie’s memory?”

  Her memory? I think. She’s not dead. At least I don’t think she’s dead. She may be a high-volume whore in some frontier brothel but she’s not dead.

  “I can see in your eyes that you’re still mired down on the petty personal level,” she says.

  “I guess so,” I say.

  “Regrettable,” she says, then hands me a pocket atlas and a bag of apples and tells me mum’s the word on her stump and waves me out of the tent.

  I start walking. I sneak through sleeping Amarillo and swing north through ranch country. I hear freights clanking and barbed wire humming in the wind. I see cows asleep on their feet and families of lunatics living in overturned semis. By Clayton the apples are gone and I hurry through Mt. Dora and Grenville and Capulin with a growling stomach. I eat from Dumpsters, I gnaw flowers, I find a dead deer and stuff my pockets with what I can tear off. There are orange lights in ranch windows and bikes propped against willows. There are well-tended gardens and little dresses on clotheslines and once I hear a man on a ladder say Love me? and a woman in a tire swing answer Always. I wish I was Normal. I wish I lived here and could whistle my kids in from the yard as the rain made sweet homish clangings in my gutters. Instead I shiver behind a forme
r diner and heave rocks at wild dogs and start bits of trash on fire so I can read my atlas. I limp through Raton and Cimarron and Ute Park and my mind starts to slip with hunger and the mountains speak to me in cowboy accents of the ore within them and one morning I straighten up from a gut cramp to find I’m standing in front of a sign, and the sign says: TAOS.

  I eat what’s left of the deer, for strength, and start down.

  I get directions from some Flaweds baling hay in a meadow. I start up a dirt path. There’s an orchard where they promised an orchard and a stream where they promised a stream. I crawl under some of Corbett’s barbed wire, then walk through his cows and ducks and goats, practicing a little speech as I go: I know you sold her, I’ll say, but I want you to know who it was that you sold. She was funny. She was thoughtful. She loved jigsaw puzzles and could do a one-arm pull-up and once saved a rabbit from a flooded culvert. She could have given you so much if you would’ve been man enough to accept her, but instead you deceived her and used her and turned her out for a lifetime of misery. And you’ll pay. You’re paying already. Because she could be here now, conferring grace on this place and on you, who could have been her savior but instead chose to be her executioner.

  After that I don’t know what I’ll do.

  The house is huge. I take a deep breath, then hop a redwood fence and land in a bed of tulips. All around my face are colored bobbing pods. There’s a wet bar near a satellite dish and a trampoline near a pool.

  Sitting in a rattan chair is Connie, big as a house.

  Pregnant.

  I look at her. She looks at me. She leaps to her feet and we do a happy little dance around the yard and Corbett steps out from behind a shrub with a croquet mallet and says that what five grand in detective fees couldn’t deliver, destiny has.

  Then we have lunch.

  Over soup he asks if I want a job in Grounds. I say sure. Next morning he gives me a Walkman and some pruning shears. Soon I’m an old hand. I dust roses and trim shrubs and mow lawns. On my lunch breaks I read. The Bounty-Land library had a few Hardy Boys and a Bible with fallacious pro-slavery sayings of Christ pasted into the Sermon on the Mount, but Corbett’s got everything. I read Epictetus and Frederick Douglass and Bobbo Schmidt, a Flawed Louisiana poet thrown off the Pontchartrain bridge for impregnating his Normal lover. At night Connie and I have long talks, remembering Dad’s aftershave and Mom’s lasagna, the swell of the hill in our yard, the names of neighbors and the voices of friends.

  One night I ask her what she sees in Corbett.

  “He’s good to me,” she says, eyes down. “I’m safe. It’s not so bad.”

  Who am I to judge? She’s here in front of me, not off suffering somewhere, not starving, not in agony, and for that I’m glad.

  A week later she goes into labor in the rec room and what seems like years into the night something comes from her, something red and yowling and malleable, temporarily cross-eyed but ours, our girl, and Connie names her Anita, for our mother.

  She has Corbett’s eyes and Connie’s vestigial tail.

  That night I dream I’m standing barefoot before a crowd of hostile Normals with baseball bats. I tell them I’ve never loved anyone so much in my life. I describe the way the baby flinches when she passes gas, her tiny brown eyes, the smell of her head. I beg them to repeal the Slave Edict and grant her full citizenship. I ask them to consider their own children and honor that part of the eternal that resides within them. Then I stand there smiling feebly, hoping for the best, and the crowd surges forward and knocks the hell out of me with their bats until I’m dead.

  I wake with a start and think: What am I doing here?

  There’s a rebel cell recruiting down in Talpa. According to Corbett they’re a bunch of skinny passionate guys in a leaning barn, practicing hand-to-hand with broomsticks and eating vanilla wafers provided in bulk by a sympathetic grocer from Chimayó. After dinner I kiss Connie goodbye and the baby goodbye and shake Corbett’s hand and off I go.

  The night’s cold. I see a bushel of snowfrosted apples and two black horses snorting at a frozen shirt on a fence-post and I’m lonely already.

  There’s a half-moon above the rebel barn. I give a little knock.

  “I’m here to help,” I whisper, and the door swings open.

  Author’s Note

  1.

  This book was written in the Rochester, New York, offices of Radian Corporation between 1989 and 1996, at a computer strategically located to maximize the number of steps a curious person (a boss, for example) would have to take to see that what was on the screen was not a technical report about groundwater contamination but a short story.

  I had graduated from the Syracuse MFA program in 1988 and had been writing stories that owed everything to Ernest Hemingway and suffered for that. They were stern and minimal and tragic and had nothing to do whatsoever with the life I was living or, for that matter, any life I had ever lived.

  We billed our hours, and I would respond to any disrespect toward my person by declaring (in my mind, always only in my mind): “Thanks, a-hole, your project has just funded a Saunders grant for the arts.” And, for an edit that could have been done in an hour, I would bill that program manager’s project an hour and a half, then use the liberated half hour to work on my book.

  This book.

  “Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body,” wrote Terry Eagleton, and that was certainly true of my body at that time. It was being plundered of its sensuality every day. I had an engineering degree but was working as a tech writer. I had earned a reputation as the go-to guy where document covers were concerned. I was good at taping figures into place on frame sheets. I spent a lot of time at the photocopier, producing copies of the reports I had just edited, so we could send them to Kodak or the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, who, we suspected, often filed them without having read them. I was gaining weight, losing energy, had grown a consolation ponytail, would go home sore in my ankles and knees from walking what felt like miles on the thin carpeting that ran over our concrete floors.

  There was a lot going on at home during those years, too. My wife, Paula, and I had gotten engaged after dating for three weeks. She became pregnant on the honeymoon, then went into labor at four months. She was put on total bed-rest and required to take a drug (since outlawed by the FDA) to suppress her contractions. This happened again during her second pregnancy. So, while I was writing this book, we had two baby daughters at home, each made doubly precious by how close we’d come to losing her. We didn’t have any money and were into our thirties and were (maybe, just a little) wondering how it was that we’d missed the boat in terms of this thing called upward mobility.

  At one point our second car broke and we couldn’t afford to replace it, so I started riding my bike the seven miles to and from work, along the Erie Canal. As winter approached, Paula put together an ad hoc winterproofing ensemble for me: a set of lab goggles, a rain poncho, some high rubber boots that, as I remember, had little spacemen on them. Biking along the canal I’d be composing in my head, and might arrive at work with a sentence or two all worked out. Then I’d dash through the atrium, into the men’s room, and try to get myself cleaned up, while not forgetting those sentences. Ah, those were the days.

  But seriously: those were the days.

  Biking back into town after dark, past the cozy Colonial houses orange with firelight, I’d think: I have a home. I have people waiting for me, who love me. This is it. This is my life. These are the best years of my life.

  2.

  We managed to buy a house. It was small but sweet, and the four of us lived there, happily. What a thing it was, to suddenly have a real life happening to us, to be in over our heads but glad about it. The gratitude I was feeling nudged me to the edge of a thought precipice: Had others, loving this much, had it go wrong? Did that ever happen?

  And I knew the answer was yes, of course, all the time, every day.

  Which raised a second question, on
e that I now see as being at the heart of this book: Why is the world so harsh to those who are losing? Sensing how close we were to the edge financially (we lived check to check, were running up huge credit card debt), feeling ourselves bringing up the back of the pack in terms of what kind of life we were making for our daughters relative to the lives of their peers, I realized for the first time, in my gut, how harsh life could be and how little it cared if someone failed.

  Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t the Gulag. But I was puzzled by how difficult it was proving for me (a nice guy, an educated guy, a guy who loved his wife and kids) to put together a middle-class, or even lower-middle-class, livelihood for our family, and what it was costing me in terms of personal grace.

  The realization that failure was possible, even for me, had the effect of increasing my empathy. If life could be this harsh/grueling/boring for someone who’d had all the advantages, what must it be like for someone who hadn’t? A thread of connection went out between me and everyone else. They, too, wanted to be happy. They, too, wanted to succeed. Maybe they had people they loved at home. They, too, were doing some weird uninteresting job in order to ensure the security and happiness of those beloved people of theirs, and yet…

  And yet there were people sleeping on benches and muttering to themselves and getting fired, and there were nasty divorces and men slamming their fists into the sides of their cars when they thought no one was around.

  It was as if I’d been driving along a highway littered with broken-down cars, blithely unconcerned, then heard a clunk from under my own hood.

  What? I’d begun to think. Me, too, possibly?

  All of this made its way slantwise into this book, although I’m not sure how aware of it I was at the time.

  3.

  It was a weird world I found myself living in then, a world I’d been trying to avoid all my life: a world of paper shuffling and cubicles and a cheap little tie I would wear whenever “the client” was coming in, a world through which a burned-coffee smell would emanate late in the afternoons; a world of long white hallways and generic/minimal furniture (no art on the walls, no flowers in vases), a world of five-hundred-page reports with titles like “Long-Term Study of Possible Effects of Alleged Benzene Spill on Indoor Air Quality on Riley Street,” which I would write and/or edit in the small one-computer room I shared with my officemate, Dawn Wendt (and God bless you, Dawn, for all the times you sensed an edgy marital phone conversation coming on and left the office, and God bless me, for all the times I did the same for you).