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= ORWELL IN ORBIT 2084 =

Dystopia USA

by John Argo

Page 24.

Chapter 9. Talmadge

During the break on Friday, Kenny and the others received free coffee and donuts and watched old family home movies of the Harrisons. Cheryl really was a beautiful girl, maybe sixteen at the time, standing with her ascetically smiling father and her beautiful mother. The film must have been made some years ago, because the two boys were still teenagers, and Melody was an adorably dimpled, smiling like girl with glossy brown ringlets, sitting on a rocking horse with her big sister Cheryl protectively hovering around her. Cheryl always hovered over her little sister.

Kenny and Beasley avoided each other. Kenny glanced over once, and saw Beasley humming to himself as he measured something with an electro micrometer. Then Beasley glanced toward the office with that crazy look that scared Kenny. Kenny bent over his broom and pushed as hard as he could, so that spiral tin shavings, misfit nuts and bolts, and a thick coating of black, oily dirt moved before him.

After work, Kenny clomped up the stairs, entered his room, and took his boots off. As he sat on the cot, tugging at a boot, he noticed a multicolored paper, the size of a playing card, by his side on the dark army blanket. Had it fallen from his pocket? Had someone put it in his pocket or brought it to the room?

He picked up the card, looking at its front and back. The issuing authority read San Diego Metropolitan Transit System. He held here a one-day bus pass good to the end of 2084. Once you started using it, you could ride as far and as long and as often as you wanted, but it was only valid for 24 hours from the first usage stamp. After washing his face and neck with tap water to cool down, Kenny thought of something. He went to the locker, and took the map from his grip bag. He turned on the overhead light and spread the map out on the bed. Someone had gone into the locker and used one of his pencils to mark up the map. He was sure of it—and it had to be the same person who had left the bus ticket. Those two circles had not been there before. He had a deep, wrenching feeling in his gut. He almost felt like violently heaving. Something black and horrible was thrashing in his soul, like a crocodile disturbed in the deep water and lashing around for life and death.

On Saturday, after work, Kenny took a bus ride. He had the map in his pocket. He was still wearing his dirty overalls. He was sweaty, and didn't like to be on a bus dressed like this, but he had no choice. Several nicely dressed older ladies avoided sitting near him. In frustration, he rose and went to sit in one of the rear corners, where he almost had to bend his head forward because the curving ceiling. The air conditioning on the bus was broken, but it had forced air, and that made for some cooling. He leaned his head tiredly against the window and yawned. The bus, fueled with hydrogen in a cell on top, trundled from stop to stop, from Golden Hill to North Park, onto El Cajon Boulevard. It went down the Texas Street hill into Mission Valley, where Kenny got out at an ancient shopping mall, now mostly boarded up and with ceilings falling in. He boarded a No. 13 bus that would take him the rest of the way. It was still a long ride, and he grew more tense, more dreading, more filled with anticipation and almost fear. The bus roared along the city streets in the San Diego River valley.

There must have been a massive waterway, millions of years ago, to carve out a vast canyon like Mission Valley, Kenny thought, but now the river was a shallow waterway averaging twenty feet across. Six or seven miles from the ocean, the river was choked up with tall reeds and gloomy oaks, under which many homeless families lived. Only at its delta did it grow to about two hundred feet as it swilled slowly into the Pacific Ocean.

The bus swung through one small community after another: a business park; a strip mall with apartments; a poor neighborhood with cars up on concrete blocks and dirty kids screaming at stickball; a subdued college neighborhood; a bunch of dentist offices shaded by big willow trees; an old Catholic church with a pale Virgin Mary in a wall niche, spreading her arms in blessing over colorful flowers; a street of used car dealers; an Asiatown that smelled of frying noodles, fish, and hot peanut oil; on and on, in a whirl of constant change from one focus to the next. It became impossible to believe there could be more, but there always was. The bus stops began to seem repetitious, as if he were traveling between parallel worlds, but he knew that was silly. He opened the map against and studied it. He sat with one foot raised on the broken air grating by the wall, the other stretched under the seat before him. There were only a few older men and women scattered about the fifty-something seats. Someone had made two circles on the map. One was Kensington. The other was Colina Del Sol.

His name—Kensington C. Del Sol. How odd.

His eyes fell on the neighborhood between them. Talmadge. Huh?

He studied the map repeatedly There were a bunch of wiggly little lines all over the map, representing neighborhoods. Where the unknown person was calling his attention tothree adjoining neighborhoods: Kensington, Talmadge, and Colina Del Sol.

That name Talmadge had some meaning but he had no idea what. The meaning was fierce inside of him, like a wounded animal trying to burst out of a cellar. The animal thrashed and howled in grief and loss. In rage and helplessness. What did it all mean? Stunned, he got off and boarded a #11 bus that took him through Talmadge, from Kensington to Colina Del Sol. What mystery was trapped here as the sun hung dying in orange agony in the sweltering western sky? He sat there not knowing why, and cried like a baby. Tears flowed from his eyes and fell on the map, so that it grew soggy and disintegrated between his helplessly clawing fingers. He cried and cried all the way into Colina Del Sol, where he got off the bus. People were used to anything these days, and ignored him. He wandered west, still crying, on El Cajon Boulevard for miles, like a crazed homeless man, until he got to 70th Street and remembered his pass was good into the next day. He felt weak, wrung out, dehydrated. He washed his face at a gas station toilet, and drank from the tap. As the last orange fire faded in the western sky, and darkness set in among the sparse city lights, he used his pass to ride a bus the rest of the way home.

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