Amerika

by Brauna E. Pouns

  Suddenly he was facing them, the six hundred or so men and women who ruled America, or pretended to.

  He had thought and thought about the speech. He realized that he could not express all the fear and uncertainty and suspicion that he truly felt—those must remain hidden, if he was to be a public man. But neither was he willing to deliver the pep talk for Heartland that Andrei wanted; the government’s propaganda machine was already boosting Heartland and he didn’t intend to be another cog in the machine.

  Peter had only one rule of speechmaking—keep it short. He had scribbled a few notes on the back of an envelope as they drove to the Capitol and added to them as he was being introduced. Now, for better or for worse, he began to speak, partly from the notes, more from his heart.

  “Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Mr. Vice-President, members of Congress, ladies and gentlemen ...”

  It was a mouthful, and after he got it out he paused and said, “I never expected to be here.”

  He spoke with such innocence and candor, no one could doubt his sincerity. His audience chuckled with amusement and sympathy.

  “Like most Americans,” Peter said, “the course of my life has not been what I expected. I think of the history of our country and wonder at its growth and change. I wonder if Washington or Jefferson could have imagined the shape and condition of the country just two centuries after their lifetimes. I wonder at the amazement and possibly the despair of Abraham Lincoln if he were to have seen the changes since the nineteenth century. Yet somehow, despite all the changes, our country has survived.

  “I come from a part of the country where life, in many ways, is simple and predictable.

  “Every spring when the ground thaws we plant a seed. In the summer it grows to maturity and is harvested. In the winter the earth rests, waiting for new planting. And when we plant again, it is not the same stalk of com or grain that we saw standing beautiful in the field the summer before, but the seed is the same and given time, effort, and good fortune, another crop will emerge to feed hungry people.

  “The seed is in the ground. It is the history and experience of two hundred years. I promise you I will give it my time and my effort, and with the help of the people of my area—the Heartland—we will see a bountiful harvest.

  “Thank you and God bless.”

  There was a hush as his speech abruptly ended; four-hour-long orations were not unknown in that chamber. People were looking around, not sure what they had heard, or how they should respond.

  General Petya Samanov, the most powerful man in the chamber, maintained a poker face, even as Andrei Denisov began to applaud enthusiastically. It had not been what Andrei had asked for, yet his sense was that it had been good, perhaps better than he had expected. The parable of the seed, Andrei thought, all the better for being of uncertain meaning. Had it seemed to hint at American independence, an American rebirth? If so, so much the better.

  Andrei leaned close to Samanov. “It is good,” he said. “Good.”

  Samanov slowly nodded and began to applaud. Marion watched him carefully, then she too began to clap vigorously. Soon the listeners rose to their feet and the chamber echoed with applause and cheers.

  Peter, still at the podium, was genuinely surprised. His face beamed, masking a thought that had suddenly occurred to him: if these people approve of me, something must be wrong.

  * * *

  The bus rolled east through the darkness, across southern Illinois, passing Springfield, Abe Lincoln’s home, through the heart of America. Devin and Clayton had seats in the back, where they could talk if they kept their voices down.

  “How’d you get into the underground railroad business?” Devin asked.

  Clay laughed quietly. “Just lucky, I guess. No, I was an Episcopal priest, serving up tea and salvation to nice old ladies. A pleasant life. Useful, in its way. A few good works thrown in—a center for the homeless, that sort of thing. But then the Transition came and I had to choose. It was like slavery, like the Vietnam War, one of those great moral issues that defy fence straddling. So I talked to God and God and I agreed I ought to try to help people who were being oppressed by this regime. Ergo, the underground railroad. Except that, instead of slaves, we’re mostly helping political dissidents—hiding people who’d be imprisoned if they were caught, trying to reunite families, that sort of thing.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “It’s hard to say. A lot. Religion in America had never been tested like this before. You could always play at social reform, with no greater penalty than pissing off your congregation, or maybe losing your job, but now we’ve got people in jail, hundreds of them. You pay the price if you stand up to the New America.”

  “I was away five years,” said Devin. “Before that, it didn’t seem that they were going after religion.”

  “They never did,” Clay said. “They were smart. Let’s face it, by the 1980s religion was not a major force in American life, so why stomp on it? Scare it, buy it off, co-opt it, the way they did business and politicians and journalism and everyone else. For most churches today, it’s business as usual. Ask them about the Russians, and you’ll get some mumbo-jumbo about having faith and the Lord working in mysterious ways.” “But some of you resisted?” Devin pressed.

  “Oh sure. The Catholic church hasn’t been so split since the Reformation. We Episcopalians have a pretty good record, relatively speaking—a lot of our guys act like they’re docile, but they’re secretly helping us. You know who’s really made out like bandits in the Transition?”

  “Who?”

  “The evangelicals. The TV preachers. They ate it up. Had an answer for everything. God’s punishing us because we’d been a nation of adulterers and druggies and homos and abortionists and all that; in other words, the Ruskies got us because we didn’t pay attention to Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart. So what’s their answer? Keep the faith, brothers, and keep them cards and letters coming!”

  Devin laughed. “And the checks with ’em.”

  “You got it. The Russians like that message. Down south, they treat the evangelicals real good. They won’t let them have their own TV networks again, not yet, but they let them on Natnet once in a while. And those guys would kill to get on the tube.”

  Clay grinned in the first light of morning. “It’s a funny world.”

  “Yeah,” Devin said. “My sense of humor keeps getting challenged.”

  Jackie was in her room, gazing out at the new morning. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Her mother came in quietly and put her arms around her. For a time no words were spoken; icicles caught the sunlight and glinted in the window.

  Finally Jackie, still looking out at the empty fields, said, “I have this daydream. That he comes back. He’s on his cycle and he says he couldn’t live without me. He—”

  She broke off, embarrassed. Amanda stroked her hair and Jackie continued. “He says, no matter what, he’ll take care of me. We’ll be all right.” She looked up at Amanda, eyes bright with tears. “I didn’t go with him. He asked me to go and I didn’t.”

  Amanda said, “I don’t think either of you was ready.”

  Jackie stiffened a bit. “You don’t know. You always had Daddy.”

  Amanda smiled wistfully. “Once ... I had a choice, a little like yours. But he was”—she shrugged—“too

  scary.”

  Jackie gazed at Amanda with surprise, maybe new respect. She had never imagined there might have been drama or conflict in her mother’s early life.

  “I thought Daddy was, you know, your childhood sweetheart.”

  Amanda smiled. “I had a long childhood, dear. There was room for two or three sweethearts.” She hugged herself. “Anyway, all that was years ago.”

  “Mom, do you ever, like, wonder what would have happened?”

  “Maybe sometimes. Not often. I’m very glad I married your father. Look at the bonus I got—you and of course your brother the hulk. See what I would have missed.”
<
br />   “You could have skipped that.” Jackie smiled a little.

  Amanda walked to the door, then turned back. “If he loves you enough, maybe he’ll come back, if he can,” she said. “And if he does come back, maybe you’ll still have enough love for it to make a difference.”

  Jackie weighed her mother’s words, then shook her head in bemusement. “God, Mother, you’re supposed to be trying to cheer me up.”

  Amanda smiled a bittersweet smile. “Sorry. Best I can do.”

  The bouncing of the bus awoke him. He looked up and saw an armed national guardsman moving down the aisle. He pulled himself together, trying to show no emotion.

  “Relax, it’s okay,” Clayton said. “A border check. We’re about to enter the late great state of Indiana.”

  The guardsman was lanky and casual. He glanced at their IDs and moved on.

  “See, I told you those papers were cool,” Clayton said. “You ever been to the Industrial Area?”

  “Not lately,” Devin said drily.

  “It’s not a pretty sight. What the Russians wanted mostly from us was agricultural—our farm capacity. If we would produce more and eat less, they could eat more, which is how it’s working out. Plus, they wanted to make use of our high-tech capacity, and some of our scientific and medical knowledge. Then there’s Hollywood. The Russians love our movies and they knew they could never duplicate Hollywood on the banks of the Volga. Essentially, Hollywood now is doing what it always secretly wanted to do—making trash, pure and simple. No phony-baloney art. Just sex and violence, except the message has changed a little. I mean, Rocky doesn’t beat up on commies anymore—he’s after neo-fascists now.”

  Devin was looking down the road at the checkpoint they were approaching. The border guards on the Indiana side wore different uniforms than the Heartland guards. Past the guards, beyond the high, electrified fence, was an open area patrolled by jeeps with mounted machine guns.

  “Anyway,” Clayton said, “the point is that the Russians didn’t have much use for industrial America, the so-called Rust Belt. It was dying anyway, so they speeded the process. Maybe you know some of this, heard it where you were. They stripped most of the new mills—the robotic assembly lines—anything that was better than what they had in the Soviet Union. Then they just let the rest atrophy. No new equipment, no replacement parts. They figured anything we could make here, the Japanese and the Koreans could make better and cheaper. Which maybe made sense on paper, but what they did was leave an entire region— Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania—with something like' fifty percent unemployment.”

  “My God,” Devin said.

  “And they won’t let them out,” Clayton continued. “It’s like a disease that they’ve quarantined.”

  They cleared the checkpoint and moved into the outskirts of Hammond, Indiana. They passed block after block of shabby motels, fast-food joints, and tent cities that had sprung up in vacant lots. Thousands of men milled about, gazing up anxiously as the bus moved past.

  “What’re they doing?” Devin asked.

  “Trying to get across. Out of this wasteland to someplace where there’s work.”

  “Will they?”

  “Not many. They’ll hang around here, in these camps, then drift back to wherever they came from.”

  “American refugees,” Devin said. The words, the very idea, chilled him.

  “A few will join the so-called Volunteers for America,” Clay said.

  “The what?”

  “I guess they started that while you were away. American workers volunteer to go work in Russian factories for five years. They get subsistence wages. Their families, back here, get a monthly payment.”

  “What’s it like? Does anybody know?”

  “Not really. They show movies of the happy American workers and their happy Russian comrades, but nobody really knows. It sounds pretty good—a way for a factory worker to use his skills. Nobody’s come back yet. Maybe they shoot them at the end. Time will tell.”

  Devin stared out at the empty faces of idle men.

  “We’ll be out of here in a minute,” Clayton said. “And they’ll still be here.”

  The dying man had been a professor of philosophy and a Republican political activist; now he was an exile, and the death rattle was already gurgling in his throat.

  “Unplug him,” Alan Drummond said.

  The nurse hesitated. It was an order she had never received before.

  “He’s gone,” Alan said wearily. “We need the machine for others.”

  The nurse did as she was told, cut off the life-support system, and Alan Drummond took one long last look at the professor. They had been friends. Many nights at the exile camp had been brightened by this man’s intellect. But his intellect had not saved him from an SSU tank.

  Alan stood in the Milford County Hospital’s

  intensive-care unit, which was pitifully unprepared to handle the flood of patients who now crowded its wards and corridors. He looked up in surprise as Herb Lister, followed by two SSU soldiers, entered the room. “May I see you, please?” Lister said.

  Alan loathed Lister, but understood his power. He followed him into the corridor, crowded now with wounded Exiles on makeshift cots.

  “What do you want?” he demanded.

  “This is terrible,” Lister said. “This is a small county hospital, never intended to serve so many people.” “What the hell do you expect us to do?” Alan raged. “Put them out in the parking lot?”

  “No, doctor, I have a realistic solution. You and your patients are being transferred to the People’s Acceptance Hospital in Omaha.”

  “You’re crazy!” Alan shouted. “They’ll die on the way.”

  “They’re dying here, doctor. Surely you agree this is a humane move, to help these innocent people.” “Innocent—you bastard. You stood by and let Gurt-man and his troops slaughter them and then you talk to me about humanity.”

  “You medical types don’t often understand politics, doctor,” Herb Lister said coldly. “You have two hours to move them. Our volunteers will help.”

  Alan looked out the door and saw the buses, the troops, the teenagers from the Lincoln Brigade. One of the teenagers marched up to them. “Just point the way, doctor,” he said brightly. “We’re here to serve.”

  Alethea awoke at dawn, looked at Helmut asleep next to her, and carefully got out of bed. She slipped on a robe and stood at the foot of the bed, studying her lover’s face. In sleep, his long, handsome face was relaxed, the cruelty gone. There was an elegance, even a beauty to him.

  For a moment his face seduced her. Without its accustomed hate and barbarism there seemed at least the hope that he could be different, could be gentle, loving.

  And yet she knew better.

  She backed away and her eyes fixed on Ms revolver, hanging in its holster, on the wall above his head. She looked from the one to the other, from his face to his gun, from the dream to the reality.

  She stepped forward quickly, reached out, and touched the butt of the gun. She hesitated, barely breathing, then wrapped her strong fingers around the weapon and slipped it from its pouch. For an instant she froze, fearful of waking him, fearful of his wrath, then clutched it firmly in her hand.

  Alethea stepped to the window, breathing deeply, and looked out at the rows of tanks and helicopters crouching under the glare of the mercury-vapor floodlights.

  She turned back to her lover. His white shoulder, outside the sheet, looked vulnerable, almost frail. She raised the gun. It wobbled badly. She took a step forward, holding the gun with both hands, trying to steady it, aiming at his head, so dark and quiet against the black pillow.

  The gun was still now, aimed; Alethea took a deep breath and held it; her finger started to tighten on the trigger.

  His eyes opened. He smiled. It was an open, trusting, wonderful smile, the finest smile he had ever given her.

  “Was I such a bad lover?” he asked.

  The quip disarmed her; she
loosened her grip on the trigger, but kept the weapon pointed at his head.

  “Don’t move,” she said.

  “I’m just going to sit up,” he said cautiously. He propped himself up against the headboard. “So you’re finally going to have your revenge. No doubt I deserve it. But have you ever killed a man? Particularly a naked

  man?”

  He tossed the sheet aside, exposing himself.

  “There’s something about killing a man with his clothes on that neutralizes the process. Somehow the naked body, unprotected—ceasing to function, turning an odd color—is so much more real. Can you do that? Here I am, helpless. This man who has subjugated you, the monster who has made love to you and made you feel happier, more fulfilled, than ever before in your life.”

  He reached slowly for a cigarette. He kept his eyes on her as he lit it. Her hands were starting to shake; the gun seemed to weigh a ton.

  “Even last night, Alethea, were you thinking about killing me? Was that why it was so exciting? Did you have your revenge planned? Think of it—one squeeze of that trigger and a small piece of metal will cut off that lovemaking forever. Can you actually kill what has given you such pleasure—and pain?”

  He smiled as she let the gun drop to her side; it was the old, arrogant smile now.

  “I’m not a murderer,” she said softly.

  Helmut relaxed a little. “No, you’re just weak. Pathetic.” He sprang out of bed and ripped the gun from her hand. She did not resist, did not even move.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t do it,” she said.

  He pointed the weapon at her. “I lack your scruples.”

  She saw him slowly tightening his grip on the trigger, savoring the process. She did not move; she accepted her fate and thought it somehow just.

  She stiffened as she heard the click of the firing pin on the empty chamber. Then her body went limp.

  “I was wondering when the gun would tempt you,” he said.

  He pulled the trigger again. This time the roar of the gun filled the room. The bullet smashed a mirror behind her. Alethea began to tremble as Helmut laughed heartily.