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= ORWELL IN ORBIT 2084 =

Dystopia USA

by John Argo

Page 21.

Kenny showed him the plastic-coated card the police had issued him, entitling him to live in San Diego, rent here, work here, check out officially approved books, carry a gun if he wanted, and sit at restaurant counters. With this much control, it was a safe world except for the crazy people in haunted ruins, and the ever-present danger of murderous infiltrators from the outside world. It was a vast difference between that and the peace in this library. Kenny had once seen a girl walking down a sandy street on a hot day in Upstate New York. He was on his way home from work, that time. A crazy woman with a cleaver had come running out of a ruined warehouse, wearing only a ragged black dress. Didn't say a word, but ran full tilt up to the girl and swung at her. She slashed her time and again, and the girl collapsed in a lake of blood. Kenny ran to help her. The madwoman turned and slashed at him. She caught him across the forehead, and he went down in the dust. Through fading eyes, he watched the woman laugh and skitter off. Like an insect, she scuttled on her hands and knees back into the darkness of her lair until the next trigger would fire up her methed-out ganglia.

Kenny, standing in the library, jerked back with a sobbing breath. He almost dropped his book at the memory that had sneaked up on him. He would always remember the dead girl lying in her own blood. He remembered the woman's huge, crazed eyes, her meaty fingers on the handle of the cleaver, the mess of wet pink meat in her mouth as she came out with her epiglottis wriggling from all the ragged groaning, as in a low scream. He remembered her panting, too—out of breath, almost sexual in a craving to slice that sharp blade through human flesh, make blood spray everywhere, end a life there on the dirty street. Preachers said the meth-mad people were infested with demons, and they showed you Bible verses at Sunday sermon to prove it. They could prove everything they said from their Bibles. They could read. It was a powerful thing.

"That one's being withdrawn," the old librarian said, snatching the book away and hiding it under the counter. Just as quickly, he slid another one out for Kenny to see. "Take this one. It's a good one, I swear."

"But I wanted that one," Kenny said in annoyance, thinking he might just reach over and grab his book back.

"Whizzago," said the old man. He snapped his fingers.

"Yessir," Kenny said, accepting the book. It had a plain brown case-bound cover, with the title pressed in gold leaf: Leaves of Grass. It was a book of poems. "Looks like a good one."

"You got a week with it," said the old man, shoving the book at him. His face looked stern but kind, and the combination made for a veiled meaningfulness that Kenny noticed but could not decipher. "You won't need more than that. Enjoy."

"Thank you, Sir." He forgot the old man as soon as he stepped into the hall and walked along the shaded, creaky wooden floor to leave the building. Children sat at tablets in the front rooms, engrossed in learning and games. The tablets didn't teach them to read anymore. Instead, it was all cartoon lessons, little squeaky pig voices that the kids laughed at while they watched Columbus sail the ocean blue in a cartoon ship, and animated Pilgrim Fathers praying as they shared a meal with pious-looking Squanto and his merry band of red-skins.

Kenny went two more blocks and stopped at the corner drugstore to buy a chilled beer in a bottle. He trudged up the dark wooden stairs that creaked under his tired boots. He rattled the key in the lock and entered his room. It was small, and you had to share a toilet down the hall, but it had a cot, a metal locker, and a little corner sink. With this heat, it was a good thing he had a north exposure, with a poor view, and no direct sunlight beating down. The window was open to a hot breeze that wheezed in and out. The window had a plastic curtain with big yellow fishes on it, that had been cut from an old shower curtain. If you lifted it, you could look out over a treetop at the windows of another former mansion, now also chopped up into a warren of dwellings. There were young women over there, and Kenny would have liked to enjoy watching them sunbathe on the grass in the backyard, but he worked twelve hours a day, five days a week, and eight hours on Saturday; and there was four hours of mandatory church on Sundays, which left little time for leisure. He dropped the curtain for privacy.

Kenny kicked his boots off and dropped his overalls on the floor. Welcoming the slight breeze ruffling the curtain, he lay on the bed in his underpants and a T-shirt. He held the cold bottle to his forehead a while and winked out into an exhausted doze. He dreamt he was running among ruins with dark doors. He woke up with a start as the beer bottle clunked to the floor. It didn't break, but the beer turned fizzy inside—a million frantic bubbles like tiny teeth, seething behind the glass. Kenny sat on the edge of the bed and watched the beer calm down. He went to the little sink and washed his face with a grimy washcloth that smelled of mildew. He laid the washcloth on the wooden window sill, where hot sunlight would purge it of demons. He washed his face with plain water from the single tap. The water was lukewarm, so baked was the ground it had run through in old cast-iron pipes to arrive here. He sat on the bed and carefully cranked the cap off the bottle. The beer had calmed down. He drank several big swigs and let the cool fizz invade his head. Some bubbles ran up his sinuses, and he choked up. He sneezed out some beer and coughed his bronchia clear. He almost laughed at the fun of it. It was like diving head-first into a municipal swimming pool, if you could find one, and getting cold chlorinated water up your nose. The beer drowned his smell-gland and made his head feel like it was in an alcoholic wheat field.

He went to his locker, and looked inside for a clean towel. There wasn't much—two clean, neatly folded white towels. And the grip bag with which he had hitch-hiked and ridden buses across country to get here. In the grip bag were odds and ends—his comb; his high school ring; a Gideon Bible he'd lifted in a hotel room and meant to read, trying to be a good citizen, but never had; a deck of playing cards; a Kraft envelope; and a few pencils and pens that looked very used. A mirror on the inside of the locker door showed him to be a somewhat bedraggled, light brown-bearded, and tousle-haired man with greenish-gray eyes. There was a faint, fine scar on his left cheek. He touched the scar and wondered about it. He took the ring out and looked at it. It was a very typical, ornate, heavy gold ring with a blue glass stone, and scrollwork that read St. Martin's on one side and H.S. on the other. He put the ring back and took out the envelope.

The envelope was addressed to Mr. Kensington C. Del Sol. No other writing, no sender. Kenny tore the gummed flap open and looked inside. There was one thing—a map. He pulled it out. It was a map of San Diego. He turned on the overhead bulb and stood under it to see better. He unfolded the map with a lot of rustling and crinkling and awkwardness. Why did he have a map of San Diego? He didn't remember buying one. He studied it for a good ten minutes. It was a fairly old map, and showed the city as it had been in the Good Old Days. There was Interstate 8 running east and west through Mission Valley, and Interstate 5 running north and south close to the beach. Each highway had a red, white, and blue shield with U.S. in it, and the number. But what was U.S.? What did that mean? Interstate must mean bigger than any one state, and that could only mean the Great Shepherd's government in Washington. Everyone referred to the nation as America. A lot of strange stuff on this map, especially buried in the fine print and the Legend. He noticed that the neighborhoods had names. Growing tired, he folded the map away and turned off the overhead bulb.

He lay down and started reading. Oddly, the inside of the book was not Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. There were a few poems to make it look right to a casual reader, but starting around page 30 was another book where the rest of the poems should have been. The title page there said: Hiking and Camping in Montana. The author was some obscure college professor from that region. The publisher was a small press in Helena, Montana. Puzzled, Kenny flipped through the pages. He'd seen books like this—plain black and white pages, square maps with icons: squiggly lines for elevations, round shadings for high mountains, straight lines for main roads, lettering for towns. This must be a very old book, because nowadays you got a tablet book, where you still had some lettering, but the illiterate could touch the letters with a fingertip and hear a voice say the words. This was just a plain, old-fashioned book. He knew he must read it, so he started on page 30 and read. The descriptions were from long ago, and spoke of things he did not quite understand. What was a rest stop? Who was Smoky the Bear? What was a park ranger? What were Yellow Pages? He read bravely on until he fell asleep.

A knock on the door startled him, and he sat up abruptly. "Huh?"

There was another knock. Heart pounding, he rose in the gloom and staggered to the door. His bare foot knocked over the beer bottle, and he heard a few last mouthfuls spill on the wood floor. "Damn!"

He opened the door, standing modestly to one side, and looked out. There stood Beasley in the hallway, with a bare, low-watt bulb wrapping him in a beery glow. Beasley regarded him with those telegraphing eyes and that cold smile full of dark intentions, all of it unreadable. Beasley had changed into jeans, a white T-shirt that revealed a tautly muscled upper body, and a brown baseball cap with the blue and white logo HB. Under that it said Helena Brewers.” Were you sleeping?"

Kenny yawned and nodded. He ran a hand over his rumpled hair and tugged at his beard.

"Whizzago," said Beasley, and snapped his fingers. "When the Postman comes, call me." He handed over a medallion as large as a $5 dollar coin, with the same round shape, but some government slogan printed on it, with an image of George Washington on the other side. "Just squeeze it three times, and I'll get the signal. Put that in your pocket and keep it with you. Trust me—your life depends on it. Now go back to bed."

Kenny closed the door. He lifted his dirty overalls from the floor and put the coin in their pocket. He tumbled back into bed, where he slid into a deep and dreamless sleep.

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