curative drugs like Isoniazid is too limited to run that risk. The Malones will be hospitalized. Even though Hank Malone is triaged, he will get drug therapy, primarily because the disease is so contagious and long-term hospitalization is too expensive. I encourage them as best I can, explaining that if a triaged person is going to get seriously ill, TB is his best choice, because all cases are treated.
Now it’s six. I’m tired. I go home and sit down to dine with Kirby and four other witches. We eat, as usual, in silence, too exhausted to talk, too hungry to want to.
The Garden of Eden
We had been traveling on trains almost continuously. To vary our experience, we took Trailways from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. It’s a three-hour-and-ten-minute journey over the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes, both of which are in rather poor condition. There is considerable shoulder erosion, and what the bus driver called “settling,” which makes the road look wrinkled and feel as if the bus is a boat on a choppy sea.
We asked a number of passengers if they had heard anything about a part of the country being a Garden of Eden.
They certainly had.
TOM MOON: “Hawaii, where I took a vacation in 1977, is now a Garden of Eden. The islands were annexed by Japan in 1989. All non-Asians were forced to return to the States. The official language of Hawaii is now Japanese. There is no rationing and people are getting rich off Jap tourists. The Japanese consider American food the height of luxury, and have kept McDonald’s and Burger King open. Cokes and Pepsis and milkshakes are readily available.
You can go to a twenty-course luau for a dollar. There are theaters that play only old American movies, and the local television stations rerun old network tapes, complete with all commercials, which the Japanese love.”
FACT: Hawaii remains a part of the United States. There is, of course, a substantial Japanese presence, and the Royal Navy maintains its Western Pacific Fleet HQ there. The local fast-food establishments are closed—as they are everywhere—due more to a lack of cheap meat and soy protein from the mainland than to any local economic difficulty. The local Coca-Cola bottler has recently begun to get syrup again, and is expecting to restart production soon. As far as television stations are concerned, forget it. The functional parts were shipped to California years ago, which is one of the reasons L.A. and San Francisco have TV themselves. This is quite a sore point with Hawaiians, by the way. Rationing is worse than it is stateside because of the island’s limited ability to grow grains and maintain its own herds. If you don’t like breadfruit and pineapple, do not go to Hawaii.
JOAN R. HAMNER: “There is a Garden of Eden on the Texas coast. The British have built a new port to supply Europeans in the States with luxuries we Americans can’t get. This city has a huge entertainment complex where they show first-run European movies and plays. The Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Shakespeare Company come. In this port there is a four-star French restaurant. Americans are not allowed, but only Europeans and Japanese. The city is all new.”
FACT: There is no such city in Texas, and we suspect that it doesn’t exist at all. Walter Tevis placed a similar city somewhere on the Pacific Coast, but almost in the same breath discounted the story as a rumor.
CARL DIETRICH: “Seattle is a Garden of Eden. The Japanese have taken over the state of Washington and are soon going to be turning out such things as high-pulse electromagnetic motors in the old Boeing facilities. They are planning to retrain former Boeing employees, to take advantage of the cheap labor. Soon the United States won’t even need roads because of the off-road cars and stuff they will make. Also, the Japanese are now basing their fishing fleet there instead of in the home islands. As a matter of fact, things are so good in Washington that immigration is out and you will be turned back at the border.”
FACT: We are not aware of any major Japanese presence in the Pacific Northwest. This area has become a thriving agricultural and shepherding community. Vegetables, apples, and mutton from the state of Washington are beginning to be exported to other parts of the country, particularly California.
The Boeing facilities are not functioning at the present time, although company spokesmen maintain that they will be producing the 800 series of aircraft there in the future. They will be powered by conventional jets.
VERNA MCDUFF: “Litchfield County, Connecticut, is a Garden of Eden. Rich survival freaks escaped into Litchfield County right after Warday and have formed a separate country, which has been recognized by Great Britain and Japan. It is about the size of Liechtenstein. It has its own gold currency and its own form of government, which is based on family status. The Europeans allow it to exist because these old families have such long-standing ties with them. Many of them own parts of the world’s great companies, such as Phillips-IBM and Lever House. Litchfield has a fully functional telephone system and satellite TV from Europe, and is full of luxury European cars such as Daimler-Benz 4WDs and Leyland Stars. Unemployment in Litchfield is zero, and there is no such thing as malnutrition or birth defects. The living standard is even better than it was prewar.”
FACT: We learned in White Plains that Litchfield County has a population of about a thousand, roughly twenty percent of whom are triaged because of Warday exposures. The county hospital was closed in 1991 due to a lack of doctors, leaving only alternate practitioners and religious organizations to serve the population.
Amy Carver, Teacher
Well, I feel stranger than I thought I would, doing this. Although it’s nice to talk about yourself. Ever since I got Joan Wilson’s letter from Kansas City about you guys, thoughts have been running through my head about what I would say. I hope I can do the whole thing without talking about the World Series. But the Pirates won the first game, so we’re all very, very excited.
Let’s see. I’m supposed to identify myself? Yes? Oh, you’re going to be totally silent. What is this, some kind of psychological thing? You’re smiling. Is it? Are you really psychologists? Are you British? Joan said you were from Dallas.
Well, anyway, I am Amy Hill Carver. I teach junior high at the Baldwin New School in Baldwin, Pennsylvania. This school was reorganized in 1991, and serves as the central educational facility for all the surrounding suburbs.
I am thirty-seven years of age. Before Warday I was a freelance writer. I had done work for all the major women’s magazines—
And then your next question is where was I on Warday. Well, I was on my way to Killington, Vermont, to ski. I was thirty-two years old, making good money, single, and there had been an early snowfall. So off I went for a long weekend. I heard nothing, saw nothing. The car radio went off. I thought, thank you, Mr. Ford. I continued on to Killington. When I got to the Holiday Inn, it turned out that all the radios and TVs were out in the whole place. There was an uproar. Nobody knew what had happened.
I skied anyway, all that afternoon. I remember it was powdery and not very settled, but it was still fun. I’ve never skied since, not after that day. So that’s where I was on Warday. Skiing.
It wasn’t until the next day that people started saying stuff—New York had been bombed, there had been a nuclear accident, a reactor explosion, that sort of thing. We saw a couple of helicopters. The out-of-town papers didn’t get delivered. The second morning of my trip, I found the dining room of the hotel closed. No breakfast, and no explanations. That scared me. So I headed for home, which was New York.
I was in Hartford when I started seeing this immense black cloud to the south. It wasn’t a mushroom cloud or anything. Just a huge black thing like a giant blob or something. By the time I was in Middletown, it was all the way across the southern sky.
It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. I stopped in Middletown and asked about it at the gas station. The man said there had been a bomb. He told me not to go any farther, because New York was burning.
I remember I just stood there staring at that old man. There was nothing to say. The radios and TVs were
