Just like everybody else.
Travel passes aren’t commonly needed except, as we found out, in California. Washington State and Oregon also have stringent immigration restrictions. War Zones were off limits, of course, but my government contacts could help us there.
Whitley is in somewhat more jeopardy than I. He is triaged because of his high lifedose. His chances of getting cancer in the next five years are seventy percent. His ten-year survival probability is zero. This comes from his living through Warday and the week after in New York.
I have lost so much: wife, mother, friends, expectations. All of my references are to the here and now, and I found I wanted to expand and enrich them. The trip would do that.
Besides, I remember something my grandfather used to say whenever someone would offer him a scotch and water. “Why not, I can’t dance.”
As much as any, that was a good reason for doing this.
Dallas to Aztlan to California, then back across the continent to New York, then home through the old South. A call to Amtrak confirmed that the rail service is not only running but somewhat expanded since prewar times. Amtrak’s diesels did not suffer from the effects of EMP because they have no delicate electronic parts like airplanes.
We made phone calls and sent letters. The telephone system is quixotic. Some large areas are still completely without service.
Others were never affected at all. To find out if a place has service, it is easiest just to call. Austin is as easy to reach as ever. A call to Los Angeles was interrupted by an operator asking us to state our business—our first taste of California’s raging paranoia about outsiders.
When you call San Antonio, a recorded voice says, “We’re sorry, but the number you have called does not exist in the 512 area code. Please consult your directory and try again.”
Each regional telephone company has dealt with its destroyed areas in different ways. Call Cheyenne and you’ll get an announcement that the number has been disconnected. New York clicks on the third ring, and returns silence.
As we called here and there, we found that our reputations opened some doors and closed others. But I’m a decent enough reporter, and I felt confident that I could overcome even the resistance of the military authorities and the federal government to letting their documents out.
I’m organized. Whitley is a narrative writer, a storyteller. I have a more technical bent, and a reporter’s knowledge of whom to approach for documents. I made a list of people we should talk to in government agencies, and drew up an assessment of the ease or difficulty we could expect with each one. Then I mapped out our journey, assessed transportation problems, estimated expenses, and evaluated expected roadblocks of both the human and highway kinds, identified radzones on our path, and marked out areas of the country where there might be bandits or aggressive survivalist bands.
Both Whitley and I wished that we could have organized all our data on our lost computers. He was rich before the war; he had an Apple. I had an old Osborne. They are missed accomplices, the best tools either of us ever had.
Families and friends had mixed reactions to the trip. Whitley’s wife, Anne, and his son, Andrew, hated it, but in the end they accepted it. One of my friends called it “difficult.” I suppose he was trying for understatement. My editor at the paper was excited.
Given no city or state censorship problems, he would print our reports in serial fashion, assuming we were able to mail them back to him. And he’d pay. Not much, but it would help.
After our final planning session together, I left Whitley to a day alone with his family. I spent it packing, thinking about places and people.
Sometime after dark there was a knock at my door. Nobody was there; instead, on the doormat was a bottle of bourbon—very valuable—and a small unsigned note reading
The next morning, waiting outside Whitley’s house, I thought how hard it must be for him to leave a real, functioning family. But we’ve all left people before, and we’ve all experienced hard moments.
Our journey began in morning and sun. By some miracle, an old aunt of mine managed to catch up with us at the British Relief HQ in Dallas and give me her St. Christopher medal, which she’d carried for more than seventy years.
I did not tell her that the Church removed Christopher from the calendar of saints years ago. And I wore the medal all the way.
PART ONE
The West
The Journey Begins
It is a bright August morning, the air dense and full of the smell of the wisteria that grows around our back door. I have been up since five-thirty, watching the sky go from gold to white. Jim will soon arrive, and I am beginning to count my minutes. There has been wind from the west, dusty wind, but I don’t mind; west of Dallas lie the South Plains, and, unlike the Corn Belt, their dust is low-content.
Anne has given me a breakfast of eggs and a glass of goat’s milk. Our eggs are small and brown, from our own bantam hens.
Good town birds. The goat’s milk is from the Perrys, across the street. Their son Robert keeps three goats. On the table there are hard, tart grapes from our arbor.
Anne sits across from me, her chin in her hands. Though she is only forty-six, her hair is white and as soft as down. There is about her face a nervous look that is new. It comes, perhaps, from the difficulty she has believing that our life will remain as tolerable as it has recently become. But there is also hardness in that look, a kind of determination that has developed over the years. You can see it in her eyes, a sort of flintiness. We have been married for twenty-three years and we know that our remaining time together is quite limited, and so she sees my journey as a family tragedy. But she understands my motives. I was a writer for many years, and I did not voluntarily give that up.
Anne will not stop me from doing something of real value with my skill.
“I’m going to miss you,” I say. She smiles, tight-lipped. “I’ll write,” I add. Her hand comes up, touches my face. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Loving and being loved is the great thing, I think. My love for Anne is as much a part of me as my eyes or my voice. For the first time in perhaps ten years, I will not tonight sleep in the same bed as she. After all we have been
