August 1, 1991
Everyone went out to look for work today. They left me in the shelter, by myself except for a few other people who had just come or were too ill to go out. Two of them were a woman and a child who came last night. They were both very pale, very thin, almost like stick people, and the little girl seemed very sad.
I went into their cubicle to see if I could talk to them, maybe cheer the little girl up a bit. The two of them sat on their bed, scarcely moving. On the table was an almost untouched plate of food someone had brought them, the knife and fork laid side by side, a glass half-empty beside it. I got the little girl to play with me. At least, I sat her on my lap and told her stories. She leaned into me, as though she needed the warmth. She put her head against my chest and smiled a tiny smile. I wondered if she felt whatever the burning was. It hadn’t been quite so bad since we’d come to the twentieth, but I could feel it, so maybe she did, too.
I told her the story about the gypsy and the prince, and I ended it, “So they lived happily ever after.”
“Ever after,” said the woman. “Together.”
I had not heard her speak before. Her voice was dreadful, like a mechanical echo, with nothing vital in it at all.
“We loved each other,” she said. “We said we would be together ever after, together.”
“Who’s she talking about?” I whispered to the child.
“Daddy,” the child whispered back, putting her cheek against my chest and smiling, as though she heard something inside there.
“But the chutes were full,” her mother said in her cold, quiet voice. “We were going together, but the chutes were full. Full all the way to the top, the furnaces gone out, bodies jammed in, rotting, stinking, bones sticking out …”
“Daddy and mommy and me were going down the chutes,” the child said with wide eyes. “To happyland.”
I looked at the woman in horror. Her face was very still, her eyes were still. Her mouth moved and the words came out, but there was nothing behind them. It was as though she were dead, already, and the words were bats fleeing from her coffin.
“But we couldn’t go, couldn’t go, couldn’t go,” she chanted. “So we walked away, down the corridors where the sidewalks slept, down the aisles where the rot lay thick, down the stairs where the stink rose up like paste, gluing itself inside our lungs, down and down to the room where the machine was, humming to itself, the little machine.”
“It was very tiny,” the child said. “Only big enough for Mommy and me. Daddy knew it was there. He turned on the big engine that gave it power for more than a hundred years, and he put us in and shut the door. And when we opened the door, we were here.”
“Down, down,” the woman crooned, “down, to happyland.”
I asked the child to come away with me, and after a while she did. Her name was Elaine. She had a lovely laugh. I asked her what year she had been born, and she said 2108. She couldn’t remember what year it had been when she got in the tiny machine, but she looked about six to me, which would make it about 2114. We stayed in the corridor, playing ball, playing hide-and-seek.
The last time she hid, I could not find her. Finally, I went back to their cubicle to see if she had gone there, and she had. She was lying beside her mother on the bed. Her mother’s hand was still upon the knife, wet with Elaine’s quiet blood. Deathwords came from the woman’s mouth, a terrible singing, “Down … down … down … to happyland.”
I screamed, stood there screaming, screaming until it hurt. The people who manage the shelter came and took the woman away. They wrapped up the little girl’s body in black stuff and took it away. Someone gave me a white pill and a glass of water. They said the woman was mad. That she should have been locked up long ago.
I did not tell them that the woman had been locked up, locked up all her life; that in the time she had come from, everyone was locked up forever.
August 12, 1991
Bill brought back a set of his documentaries with him to use as examples of his work. He had to claim they are speculative fiction in order to use them in seeking a job, but evidently they’re good examples of his talent, for it didn’t take him long to get a position writing for a television station. Janice got work, too, at a library, and then we three rented a house on the corner of Wisdom Street and Seventh Avenue. It’s a house about the size of the pigpen at Westfaire.
However, it has flush toilets, which I like, and a garbage disposer. I also like hair dryers and tampons. I do not like telephone salesmen and the way everybody has dogs they let empty themselves just anywhere. In my time commoners didn’t have dogs, they couldn’t have fed dogs, they’d probably have ended up eating the dogs. I don’t like the noise people are allowed to make with radios. It does not sound like music. It sounds savage and makes your ears ring, and afterward it is hard to hear when people speak.
I have a room of my own, with my own things in it. I put my cloak and the boots and Mama’s box at the back of the closet shelf. Grumpkin sleeps on my bed. I don’t like all the concrete and no trees. I do like hamburgers and french fries and Pepsi, and the kind of chickens they have now with all the meat on them. In the fourteenth, chickens were very skinny and tough.
