We’ve got Elvis and his people boarded with the mayor. Elvis says he’s just happy to get in out of the weather. He also says he’s got a lot of news from faraway places, which he’ll tell us about just as soon as he and his group get themselves some food and rest.
Elvis did a nice set, all right. Led it with a song I remembered about loving him tender. I liked it; we all did.
I got his news at the shindig after the performance. Elvis says there’s not much of the country left, as much as he’s seen of it. The war caught him in Nashville, where he was making one of his records. The Russians didn’t bomb Nashville, but the city was abandoned after the Fidel flu hit in ’69 and most people died. Elvis caught it but recovered, and he’s been on the road ever since.
Elvis says he walked most of the way here, taking his sweet time; he and his backup men only rarely find a ride. Sometimes they settle in a place for months; right now, they’re going to Montpelier to see how things are there. (I told him there’s been no news from that part of New England for years.)
Elvis says he no longer bothers to go near big cities. He says the cities they didn’t get with the bombers have been deserted — no food supply, no law and order, and loads of disease and misery did the job. We knew New York was bombed, and Boston and Washington and Cleveland, too, but we weren’t sure about Columbus, Chicago, Gary, Indianapolis and about twenty others Elvis mentioned. All gone.
Where the hell was the Air Force that October? For Christ’s sake!
Elvis says he thinks the population is headed back up again, but he admits that it might just be wishful thinking on his part. Elvis also says he met the President at Mount Thunder a couple of years ago, and he looked all right — but gray and lined, not nearly the young man we remember, and he’s sick to boot… something to do with his kidneys. He never did get married again, either, although Elvis understands that the President still takes his pleasures with any of the couple of hundred women who live in the mountain’s government complex, which is no less than I’d expect from a scoundrel like him.
Today was the anniversary. We all stood up at the end of Elvis’ performance and sang the Banner, him leading us along on his guitar.
Most of us cried a little. The mayor made a speech, said an Our Father and raised the anniversary flag his wife made back in ’78. The flag looks odd like that, the red and blue parts replaced by black, but it’s appropriate. After the Pledge, the mayor hauled the flag down for another year.
Elvis did a bunch of his old songs and also some that his drummer wrote. His drummer’s really quite a songwriter. One was a happy thing called “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” — the lyrics weren’t much, but the tune was good and the whole thing made us laugh, which we needed — and the other was one that made me get all teary. Elvis called it “Let It Be.” That man can sing a little, all right.
I asked the drummer afterwards where he’d gotten the songs. He shrugged and said he’d just dreamed ’em, woke up and wrote ’em down.
He says he’s been dreaming recently that he’s an executive with some big record company in New York. Big office, too, with air conditioning. I remember air conditioning.
Elvis was interested that I’ve been keeping a journal of our times here, and I’ve let him read some of it. He says that while he hasn’t been having any dreams at all, he’s interested in ours.
Elvis gave his last performance here tonight, finishing with a song called “The World Next Door.” He says he wrote it himself just this morning. It’s about the world we could have had without the war. He says he was inspired to do it by all the dream entries in this journal of mine. I’m proud of that, inspiring a song and all.
I had another one of those dreams last night. I was on a big airplane — I mean a
Winter’s here with a vengeance. It’s warmer the year ’round than it used to be, but the first snow fell today. It’ll melt off, but we should be doing more than we are to prepare for the winter.
Jess, who still feels good, finished hauling in his beet crop today, with the help of a bunch of kids from Mrs. Lancaster’s school. We’re all looking forward to the sugar.
Last night was Halloween, and the kids still do dress-up, although trick-or-treat is out of the question. Strange thing, though: One of the kids — Tommy Matthews — went around town wrapped in a charcoal-colored Navy blanket and an old Army helmet his dad’s had since Korea.
He also had a pair of swimming goggles and a broomstick handle he held like a sword. The costume made no damn sense, so I asked him who he was supposed to be. Darth Vader, he said. Who’s that?, I asked him. A bad man, Tommy said. He says he dreamed him. He breathes like this, Tommy added, noisily sucking in air and blowing it out again.
Jesus. The kids are beginning to dream, too.
More and more dreams. Everybody’s beginning to talk about them now. No one understands what’s going on.
We had a town meeting tonight, at which it was decided to forget about doing anything for the Jubilee. We’ve got our own problems.
Nobody’s sleeping very well. They wake up in the middle of the night with such a profound sense of loss, there’s no getting any rest.
Everybody’s tired and cranky.
After the Jubilee vote was taken, we suspended regular business so everyone could talk about the dreaming. I was asked to write down some of the things people remember from their dreams. Here are some of the clearest:
Men land on the moon in a black-and-white spaceship that looks like a spider. There’s another kind of spaceship that looks more like an airplane. Both have American flags painted on them.
A guy named Sylvester (or maybe Stephen) Stallion is in a movie about a guy who rescues people — prisoners of war? — from a place called Vietnam. (I remember Vietnam, and so I’m putting that one down.) Also, there’s a big, black monument in Washington to servicemen who died in Vietnam… thousands and thousands of servicemen.
Watches that show numbers to tell time.
Seat belts in cars.
Telephones with little buttons on them instead of dials. The buttons make music.
Something called Home Box Office. Something else called People magazine. Somebody named Princess Di.
A man named Jerry Falwell who’s either a preacher or a politician.
Young men with purple and orange hair wearing earrings in pierced ears.
Radios so small you can wear them on your head, so people can listen to them as they walk around.
A government program called Medicare, for old people.
There were others, but these are representative. Doc spoke up about wish-fulfillment fantasies again, and theorized that Elvis being here recently might have reminded us too much about the old world. He pointed out that while everyone seems to be having dreams, no two people are having exactly the same dreams about the same things. He says not to worry, that it will pass. The mayor said that while people aren’t having
In other business, Jess said he’d have the sugar ready in a week or two; the grinding and drying is taking him longer to do that he thought it would, but he says he doesn’t need any help. We’re all looking forward to the sugar. Since Jess is still okay, we’re assuming the crop is. Now if we could only grow coffee…
