by James Gunn
Johnson didn't say anything.
“Having said that,” Duke went on brightly, “I must add that you seem a bit confused. Something you need help with?"
Johnson took a deep breath as if he was about to speak and then shook his head. “I don't know."
“If it comes....” Duke said comfortably. “Meanwhile, maybe you'd like a bite to eat.” He fished around in the shopping sack and came out with a couple of apples. “Got a bruised spot or two,” he said, “but you can eat around those if you're particular."
Johnson picked up his suitcase and they walked along in the direction Johnson had been going, toward the city, munching on their apples. Johnson pointed at the flames on the river. “How long has that been going on?"
“Off and on for the past ten years. It burns out in a few hours—and then the pollution starts building up again. Nobody seems to care. Seems to be happening more often now."
“Nobody does anything about it?"
The little man shrugged. “Gets rid of the pollution better than most things. Oh, used to be the fireboats would get out here and try to smother it with chemicals and such, but that seemed to be worse than letting it burn. Bother you?"
“I look at it and see a world dying in its own wastes,” Johnson said, as if he were a million miles away.
“No worse than a lot of things,” Duke said. “But I can see that it might depress somebody who had a future. You got a future?"
“I don't know,” Johnson said.
“A whole lot of things you don't know,” Duke said, giving him a sidelong glance. “But that's your business. Come on. I'll introduce you to some of the guys."
* * * *
They sat with their backs against a clay bluff that had been blackened and hardened by old fires whose odors still lingered, but they were difficult to distinguish from the fire over which the communal evening meal had been cooked. The fire still burned fifteen feet away toward the river, and a large, sooty pot still hung from an improvised metal support above the fire. The pot had been salvaged some months ago, Johnson had been told, by Smitty, a tall, wiry man of indeterminate age who was the luckiest junk picker of the whole group. In the pot was some mulligan stew left over after everybody had eaten their fill out of old tin cans and assorted metal objects beaten into the shape of plates and cups.
Almost everyone had contributed something to the meal except Johnson: a few potatoes here, a couple of carrots and turnips there, an onion, a clove of garlic, a piece of meat into whose origin and age nobody inquired, a battered can of tomatoes opened with a hunting knife, a few shakes of salt and pepper from a hoarded store, and other assorted seasonings.
“That was good!” Johnson had said, as he wiped up the last of his meal with a piece of stale French bread.
“Meals eaten in the open air and all that,” Duke had said.
Johnson had met some of the other dropouts. Most of them were men, and all except one or two were middle-aged or older. The young ones had something wrong behind their eyes. The older ones had simply given up on any kind of future. They wanted to think no farther ahead than a few minutes. But those minutes they filled with useful activities.
Many of them searched for usable items in the trash dumped by the big trucks. These they cleaned as best they could and sold to secondhand stores for pennies; some they repaired with surprising skill and used themselves. One craggy old man spent his days turning objects he found in the trash into strange sculpture, which he left along the riverbank until mischievous boys or high water destroyed them. He did not seem to care. He contributed little or nothing to the evening meal, but he was fed anyway.
Some scavenged through the dumpsters of nearby supermarkets and restaurants for edible materials too damaged or old or stale to sell. They would return, like Santa Clauses, with their sacks of plenty. The women seemed particularly good at this. The women were all old. They had the swollen joints and painful movements of arthritis, but they seemed otherwise in good health.
None of them spent money for anything but medicine or tobacco. When food ran short, they went, reluctantly, to soup kitchens and other charities.
The rest of them had now scattered to different parts of the area adjacent to the dump. Actually, Duke had explained, it was over the dump. This part had been filled up and covered with dirt. Beneath was a midden waiting for some future archeologist to unearth its treasures.
The river had stopped burning, but Johnson still stared at it as if it held an answer he was seeking.
“Is this what you were looking for?” Duke said.
Johnson stirred. “No. But maybe it's better."
“There's worse. That's for sure.” The distant firelight cast a ruddy glow against Duke's face. He looked as if he was thinking about a place that was worse.
“What do you do in the winter?"
“Some go south like migrating birds. Some find an old building to hole up in. There's a lot of those around. Nobody fixes things anymore, and it costs money to tear them down. Some just tough it out here, with boxes and shanties. A few die, some from exposure. But there's always replacements, and everybody dies sooner or later."
“Nobody tries to help?"
“Once in a while a social worker will poke around, once in a while a do-gooder will remember the forgotten people and try to rescue us, once in a while a church will try to redeem us. More often the cops will bust our heads and try to send us somewhere else. We always come back, because this is home. Is this home for you?"
“I wish it were,” Johnson said.
“There's always room. If you aren't particular, you can make out on what society throws away."
“I can see that,” Johnson said, “and it's very attractive. But I think there's something wrong with me."
“There's something wrong with all of us here, at least the way the rest of the world looks at it. We've given up, and it feels good."
“No, there's something wrong with me the way people here look at it,” Johnson said. Then, as if changing the subject, he asked, “Can you look out there and see how things are going to be?"
“Not if I don't want to,” Duke said. “And I don't want to. That's why I'm here. I got tired of worrying about the way things were going to turn out: kids, marriage, career, the stock market, the economy, the country, the world....Once you start worrying there's no place to stop unless you just stop entirely."
“I can see that,” Johnson said. “Maybe it's just me."
“You really see things?"
Johnson put his right hand in front of his eyes. “I look out there and see a world that can no longer even breathe: people choking, gasping for air, and each breath sears their lungs. The food is poisoned and the water is ruined; the world is burning up with heat it can't get rid of."
“You really see this. You don't just imagine it."
“I really see it,” Johnson said, “and I have a desperate need to do something about it."
“You do have a problem, friend,” Duke said. “I'll tell you what: in my previous life I used to be a physician. I couldn't cure myself. But I have a few acquaintances who still are in the business, including a psychiatrist who owes me a favor or two. In the morning, if you can lend me a quarter, I will make a telephone call and see if I can get you some help."
They sat for a while as if thinking about it while the night grew darker and the river sloshed greasily against the bank. Suddenly, in the distance, brief blue fire appeared above the dump and skipped away like a fairy converting trash into treasure.
“What's that?” Johnson asked. “Has the river started burning again?"
“No, that's the dump. It's a will-of-the-wisp, what some people call St. Elmo's fire. Used to be seen around marshes with its decaying vegetation. Now we see it quite often here as garbage, newspapers, and other vegetable matter is converted into today's version of marsh gas."
“What's marsh gas?"
“Methane. Also called firedamp when formed in mines. CH4. The principal ingredient in n
atural gas. Some places are digging gas wells in old dumps to recover the usable methane."
“'Will-of-the-wisp,'” Johnson mused.
“Also means an elusive or deceptive object. The story goes that people used to pursue it across a marsh until they drowned."
“Yes,” Johnson said, as if he were agreeing how easy it would be. “Do you think your friend can help me?"
“Well, now, I don't have much faith in ‘help’ anymore. The question is, Do you have faith?"
* * * *
Duke's friend was a woman. She was a strikingly attractive woman in her middle to late thirties, perhaps, with black hair streaked with premature gray strands, black arching eyebrows, dark brown eyes that seemed to hide in caves and then leap out upon the unwary passerby, and vivid coloring in cheeks and lips. She would not have looked out of place in a gypsy caravan with a bandana tied around her head. She occupied her office completely, filling it with herself from wall to wall so that patients did not so much enter the room as come into her web.
Her name was Roggero, and she spoke in a mixture of deep, resonant phrases and pregnant pauses that her patients hastened to fill with revelations. “Dr. Vines is a remarkable man,” she said in her gypsy voice. “A remarkable man. He is not an old man. Did you know that? No older than his late fifties. He likes to let people think he is older, because the world does not expect as much of them. Society lets older men alone. But he is still a better man than anyone I know.
“He was a man of great personal power. He was not just a physician. He could cure people, yes. But he shaped people's lives. He shaped government and industry. He shaped this city. He was the force behind the building of this complex. He worked to make life better. He helped people. He is responsible for my being here. The ghetto family that took care of me after my parents were killed in an accident brought me to him for treatment and he saw the anger in me, and he got me schooling and training and he channeled that anger into helping others. He has had much tragedy in his life, and if he is where he is today, that is his decision and his story to tell. What you should know if I am to help you is that I would do anything for him. Anything.
“We were lovers. Would you think that? This little, white-haired man and this strong, young woman of wild passions. Ah, but you do not know him. No one really knows him, even me, and no one knows what a man is like with a woman. But I know him best. So, I will help you. Dr. Vines has asked me to help you—for what reason I do not know, and I do not care. There will be no talk of money.
“You will fall in love with me if these sessions go on very long. That is perfectly natural. It may be that we will become lovers, and that should not bother you. All of these things must be understood before we start. You should know me, just as I must learn to know you. Now, tell me what troubles you."
So Johnson, who had received all her remarkable confidences with the face of a listener, told her what troubled him. They sat in her office in a tall building in the center of the city, she in a padded chair behind a darkly gleaming desk that had nothing on it except a pad of ruled yellow paper and a gold-colored fountain pen, and he in an upholstered armchair beside the desk. He talked in a low but clear voice about his experience of waking up the morning before in a bus and not knowing who he was or where he was going, of staring out the window at the desolate countryside, of finding a message.
“Do you have that message with you?” she asked.
“I tore it up and threw it away."
“Why did you do that?"
“It suddenly seemed too much."
“In what way?"
“I could not believe what it seemed to tell me."
“And what was that?"
“That I came from the future. That I intervened in the problems of the present to solve them, to make the future better. That whenever I changed things I forgot who I was, and that was why I kept leaving messages. That this had happened many times before."
“If you looked around at the world, you would not see much evidence that someone exists such as you describe."
“Yes, it's crazy."
“On the other hand,” she said, “the world is in a bad condition. Someone like that would be a godsend."
“There's no reason to think he could exist."
“No,” she said. “That is the difficult part. But it is easy to understand why a person looking out at the world might feel compelled to do something about it."
“Yes."
“Might even feel in some way selected."
“You're saying that my delusion is natural."
“No delusions are natural. They are a failure to recognize and cope with reality. Sometimes, when conditions are bad and no solution seems possible, delusions may be an understandable response. People with systems of delusions are often happy and can even function normally so long as those delusions do not come into conflict with reality. You are troubled because your belief system has come into conflict with what you believe to be reality."
“What I believe to be reality?"
“There are all kinds of realities, and none of us can be sure we share the same one, if there is one. But we have not established yet that you have a delusion."
“What else could it be?"
“That is what we must determine before we can treat it. But you must have some evidence to support what that note told you, or you would simply have dismissed it."
“I have—visions,” Johnson said with a helpless spreading of his palms. “That is what the note said, and it seemed like confirmation."
“What kind of visions?"
“Like a glimpse of another view of what I've been looking at. But it's grimmer. Darker. As if it's the future, or the way the future will be unless someone does something about it. It's disorienting. Makes you dizzy at first, like a briefly glimpsed scene that's the same but different, thrown into the midst of a movie you're watching, and then you get used to it—or at least I did. You learn to ignore it for practical purposes. But it's what the vision implies that is disturbing."
“What does it imply?"
“At first I thought everybody saw visions like that, but I've asked, and nobody admits it."
“You think they're lying?"
Johnson slowly shook his head. “I hoped they were. Do you ever see such things?"
“I'm sorry. Are you seeing them now?” Johnson nodded. “What do you see?"
Johnson looked away from her and stood up. He walked to the window and gazed down toward the street far below. Yesterday's fog had lifted, but the air was hazy and tinged with yellow. Vehicles moved like brightly colored beetles along the street, adding their exhausts to the general level of pollution.
“The smog thickens,” Johnson said in a monotone. “The automobiles dwindle, like dinosaurs becoming extinct. Garbage and trash pile up in the streets. Nobody takes it away. Children and old people die in the streets. They fall over. They gasp. They stop breathing. People are robbed and raped and murdered. Plagues break out. People flee, but the countryside is only a little better. Finally everything is still."
Dr. Roggero was silent for several minutes. “And you want to stop seeing these things? You want to be relieved of the compulsion to do something about them?"
Johnson turned back to her. “Oh, very much,” he said.
* * * *
Dr. Roggero's office building was one of a group of buildings clustered around a plaza. The group included a theater, a conference center, a hotel, and a collection of shops, all of them served by an underground garage. In the center a fountain sent plumes of spray high in the air, and occasionally, when the wind was strong, sprinkled the nearest benches or passersby.
The plaza was clean. Uniformed attendants moved between the benches and the stone trash containers with broom and hose, with polishing cloth and plastic bag. The plaza was like an oasis in the midst of a desert, but even here the air itself was visible as fumes rolled through it from the street and smoke and fog blew in from the river.
Johnso
n stopped just outside the entrance to the office building as if adjusting from the air-conditioned fantasy he had left to the reality ahead. He was neat. Dr. Vines, Duke, had shown him how to use the public restrooms to make himself presentable and admired the fact that he didn't need to shave. “Vinya won't care,” he said, “but the people in uniform, the elevator attendants and the receptionists, may give you trouble. Always watch out for people in uniform. It gives them delusions of power."
As Johnson was crossing the plaza heading back toward the river, a woman's voice came ringing across the concrete and stone. “Bill!” it called. “Bill Johnson!"
Johnson turned. Behind him, hurrying across the plaza from the conference building, was a woman. She was cool and blonde and beautiful in a gray, summer-weight dress. She carried a folder under one arm and had a gray leather bag slung over the other. Her eyes were gray and appraising as she got closer.
“Bill,” she said breathlessly. “I thought it was you, but I couldn't be certain."
He looked at her courteously but without recognition. “Do we know each other?” he asked.
And at the same moment she said, “You don't recognize me, do you?"
She laughed with just a trace of embarrassment and broke off and looked at him. “You haven't changed,” she said. “Maybe a little sadder."
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I should know who you are, but I seem to have forgotten a great deal. It's a mental problem. I'm seeking treatment."
She put a hand on the sleeve of his jacket. “Oh, Bill,” she said. “You told me that you would forget me, and I didn't believe you. I couldn't believe you. We were very close once. I left you a tape recorder with a message on it, don't you remember? Of course you don't remember.
“Look, I'm rattling on, I know. I'm not like that usually. I don't act flustered and helpless, but I never thought I'd see you again. I was hurt and angry and then sad, after what we'd been through—and now you don't know me. It's all too much."