October 4, 1991
Today I think I figured out Fidipur. In social studies class the teacher commented that the recent famines in Africa are only the beginning of what may turn out to be worldwide famines of varying degrees of severity. Then he showed us a film of black people in Africa dying in large numbers and another one about the hole in the Van Allen belts. (Father Raymond would be fascinated!) The teacher explained that very soon the world would warm up and get dryer, that food would be harder to produce, and “We won’ be able to fidipur, ’cause there’ll be millyuns and millyuns of ’em.”
Fidipur! Feed the poor. The way he said it was exactly the way the beggars in the twenty-first had said it. I asked Bill to explain it to me, and he told me about population growth and the Catholic church and acid rain and cutting down the rain forests to grow more food. Everyone argues about it, he said. Economists and businessmen say nothing is going wrong. Ecologists and population experts say the end is coming. While they argue, things keep changing until we get to the point of no return, sometime during the next hundred years. After that, there’ll be no more out-of-doors because every square inch of land will be needed to produce food, and that’s why, in the twenty-first, all the people had to be shut up in great tall, half-buried towers where they couldn’t move around and interfere with Fidipur’s farms.
I said, sensibly I thought, that God gave man the duty to take care of the world, not a contract to wreck the place, and Bill laughed the way he does, ha, ha, ha.
The comebacks say everything starts breaking down sometime late in the twenty-first, with Fidipur’s farms playing out and people getting pushed down the chutes a hundred thousand at a time and all the machines breaking down. Elaine may have been the last person who came back, and she came in about 2114.
Bill says the handwriting is already on the wall, we’re already doomed. Janice says he shouldn’t say “doomed” when so many people will be alive and being fed, so he asked her why she left the twenty-first if it was so great, and she got mad at him. There are tear spots all over this page, and I can’t stop.
October 7, 1991
I’ve stopped thinking about Fidipur. You can’t think about things like that all the time. Your body won’t let you. Everytime I started to cry about it, my chest would burn like a bonfire. It got so I was afraid to think about it at all. So, I’m trying to think about other things, about trying out for cheerleader—which seems kind of dumb, but all the good-looking girls do it—and going to football games and things like that. I am trying to do as Father Raymond used to suggest and seek the good. Things wouldn’t be too bad if Janice would just stop talking about religion and let me alone. I wish I could be nicer to her about it, but her religion is so ugly! So mean!
[We go on transmitting these urgencies, but they have not the volume of the constant music where she is; they cannot be heard above the traffic noises. There are so many distractions in the twentieth, she doesn’t hear us. If she would only decide to be a nun! I think possibly we could get through to a nun.]
November 15, 1991
Yesterday we had a special kind of event at school. The event was called “Career Days,” and they had people from all kinds of jobs and professions come speak to us about their jobs. One of the men was our teacher’s brother, an author, Barrymore Gryme, only he told us all to call him Barry. I’ve seen his books in the school library, but I’ve never read one. After the session, when the students were leaving the room, he asked me what my name was. I told him, Dorothy, because that’s the name Bill and Janice and I had decided on, after my old friend Doll. We knew enough to realize I couldn’t call myself Beauty, not in the twentieth.
“You don’t belong in Kansas, do you?” he asked me with a funny smile.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just smiled back.
“No, you’re the Emerald City all over,” he said. Then I knew he was talking about that movie with the singing girl and the straw man. The Yellow Brick Road one. I’d seen that in the twenty-first, about fifteen times.
“Not that Dorothy,” I explained. “I was named after an old friend.”
“Where do you live, old friend Dorothy?” he asked me. I didn’t want to be rude, so I told him. When I got home that night, there were flowers for me in the living room, from him. Bill was puzzled, but Janice was furious.
“What have you been doing when you’re supposed to be at school,” she shouted at me. “What have you been up to?”
I guess my mouth dropped open, because Bill told her not to yell. When I saw his name on the tag with the flowers, I was just as puzzled as Bill was.
“I only said about six words to him,” I said. “And there were lots of other people around.”
“Where, around?” Janice demanded.
I told her, at Career Day, at school, that he was our teacher’s brother, and after a while she believed it. When I told her his full name, then she was as puzzled as Bill.
Bill nodded, his mouth pursed up. Then he sat me down at the desk and made me write the man a nice note, saying thank you for the flowers but I’d sent them to a hospital, because I wasn’t allowed to accept gifts from older men. Bill thought it was
