A History of the Future Read online

  Andrew had no family left. He had lost his only sibling, a sister he had idolized, in a waterskiing accident when she was sixteen and he was twelve. His parents never lived to see the global collapse. Andrew was a bachelor who lived alone. In the old times, he defined himself and the precinct of his daily life as gay, meaning homosexual. Now, with the old contexts dissolved, it was no longer possible to think that way. His personal map of the world had changed as much as the geography he was immersed in.

  He had survived a decade of adventures in the New York City publishing world and its extracurricular social venues. He had felt himself an outsider even in that lively subculture. Then, seeing the disorders blossom in politics, banking, and oil, he very deliberately planned his escape from that life to a new one in the distant upper Hudson River valley, a region he had discovered on B & B weekends before everything fell apart. On one of those forays upstate, he had seen the house for sale on Cottage Street. The seller was “highly motivated” due to financial reverses, the realtor disclosed in a low whisper. This was the case for a lot of unfortunate people at the time. Andrew bought the house, moved up from the city, and worked his freelance editing jobs at a remove until the bomb in Washington, DC, tanked the nation’s economy altogether and scattered the remnants of its government. By then, though, he had made a beachhead for himself in Union Grove.

  A person of diverse skills and interests, Andrew found many roles to play in the post-collapse village of Union Grove, Washington County, New York. He took charge at the town library after Mrs. Downs, librarian since the 1990s, lost her life to the vicious encephalitis that winnowed the region’s population by a good third. Nobody else stepped forward at a time when the townspeople were consumed with grieving for their dead and finding some way to salvage their lives by practicing useful occupations that they had never planned on and were not trained for. Andrew took charge of the library building, resurrected the mothballed card catalogs stored in the basement, and opened up the place three evenings a week plus Sunday afternoons. As well as reopening the library, he had helped form the public volunteer burial committee when the Mexican flu followed the encephalitis epidemic and the bodies piled up like stacked cordwood outside Dr. Copeland’s infirmary. He established a model garden on his half-acre property and his methods were emulated by other householders for whom gardening was a lost art that necessity required them to relearn. He repaired old mechanical clocks, which were much in demand, with the electricity down for good. He painted portraits, now the only method for recording likenesses. He organized and directed the stage shows put on in the old theater on the third floor of the town hall, most recently Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel the previous fall. And he presided over the music circle of the Congregational Church, which was the heart of the one reliably enduring institution in Union Grove that the townspeople could organize their lives around.

  This glowing winter evening, Andrew stepped lightly down the porch stairs of his house, leaving the front door unlocked, one of the pleasures of living in a tightly knit village in these new times. His house was the oldest surviving in town with its original details intact, an 1841 center-gable Gothic cottage with a trefoil window in the peak under the figured bargeboards. Before the Civil War it had been a station on the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses that had sheltered escaped slaves on their journey to Canada. Robert Earle helped Andrew restore the sills, the porch, and the scrollwork ornaments. Andrew fixed the old windows himself, one by one, even rebuilding the sash-weight counterbalances. He made his own house paint from boiled linseed oil, turpentine, and an oxide yellow ocher pigment he discovered in a cliff face on one of his rambles along the Battenkill. His neighbors thought it strange that Andrew put so much effort into fixing up the old house, while they neglected theirs in melancholy discouragement. His mental state was not like theirs. The world was singing in all his cells.

  This evening, with the scent of fir mixed with wood smoke on the crisp air, Andrew wore a fine wool overcoat over his customary worsted trousers and waistcoat. He had an impressive collection of vests from his days as a young dandy in book publishing. Andrew had devoted much of his meager income in those years to assembling a wardrobe of the highest quality, which he now cared for meticulously. His feet were shod in lace-up ankle boots, made to order for him in town by Walter McWhinnie, Union Grove’s cobbler and harness maker. Andrew was thrilled when the New Faith people opened their haberdash, because they sold a pretty good bib-front cotton shirt that went well with his outfits after his old Ralph Lauren shirts grew threadbare with pilled collars. On his head this cool winter evening, Andrew wore a felted wool slouch hat, collected with other hats during his city years. Unlike most of the regular townsmen of Union Grove, he was clean-shaven.

  Andrew did not have a close companion or a romantic partner. He was careful and guarded with his emotions, the opposite of impulsive. Even back in New York he had been prudent in his sexual adventures. In Union Grove, he had avoided the appearance of seeking liaisons. He did not want to tempt the fearful reactions of frightened people struggling among the remnants of their culture. More to the point, however, since the world and everything in it had changed he had come to reexamine the question of his sexual orientation, wondering whether it even was an orientation or something less fixed in his persona than a figment from a bygone cultural ideology. He wondered how much of the story he had told himself back then was just a story scripted for him by others, a convenient explanation for a sequence of acts undertaken to stick to the script. Despite the enormous pressures to conform to it, the script did not validate his deeper feelings of uncertainty and shame. He wondered how much of it had come from sheer avoidance of the tension he felt around women, and whether there was perhaps something marvelous in meeting that tension that he had avoided just because it was easier to do so. He wondered above all why, for years after he’d grown up, he could not quite conceive of himself as a genuine adult. He recognized the paradox of wanting to escape into femininity, as represented by his idolized dead sister, while associating sexually only with other males, many of whom made a fetish of mocking the femininity they affected to imitate. His episodes with other men had been furtive encounters of priapic ritual not so different from sex with himself, except they left him in a state of enervated anxiety. Of all the feelings they generated, pride was not one of them, whatever the script insisted. That was all over for him now. He hadn’t heard the word “gay” in as long as he could remember and at one point he realized what a relief that was. The memories of his acts with other men resided in an emotional compartment that he rarely revisited. He was more than content, at age thirty-seven, to sublimate the terrors of sex in all the other activities that lately engaged his hours.

  The thoughts that preoccupied him as he left the house this winter evening revolved around pieces he was about to rehearse with the other members of the music circle: “The Boar’s Head Carol,” “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night,” “Es Ist Ein Ros Entsprungen,” “The Wexford Carol,” “In Dulci Jubilo,” “The Gloucester Wassail,” and about ten more. The regular music circle was composed of seven instrumentalists including himself on piano and harmonium, Robert Earle and Bruce Wheedon on violins (fiddles, they called them), Leslie Einhorn, cello, Dan Mullinex, flutes and clarinet, Eric Laudermilk on guitar, and Charles Pettie on bass fiddle and trombone. This group met once a week all year round and played at the many balls, fetes, and levees that composed the social life of Union Grove now that canned entertainment no longer existed. In addition to this lineup was the Congregational Church choir, which came on board with the music circle only at Christmas and Easter. Andrew’s mind was crowded with orchestrations as he proceeded down Main Street toward the center of the old business district. He was distracted from his musical ruminations when he noticed the unusual number of people on the sidewalks, in particular the crowd that had formed outside the New Faith group’s new tavern. It looked so wonderfully cheerf
ul in the December twilight, like the best bars in downtown New York on a TGIF night back in the day. He was tempted to go have a look for himself, but he wanted to be on time for rehearsal so he stayed on the opposite side of the street.

  As he rounded the corner onto Van Buren Street, he saw a figure in a battered and patched goosedown jacket pissing against a vacant storefront that had last been a Verizon wireless phone store and, before that, a farmers credit union, a liquor store, a psychedelic head shop (briefly), a jewelry and watch repair emporium, and for decades, starting when the building was erected in 1912, a greengrocer. As Andrew passed him, the ragged figure, named Jack Harron, age twenty-six, turned around and directed the stream of his piss toward Andrew so that a little bit of it actually splashed on the bottom of his wool overcoat. Andrew was so amazed that he stopped in his tracks.

  “What are you looking at?” Harron said.

  “You . . . wet my coat.”

  “So I did,” Harron said, slurring his words. He wove and listed in his laceless boots, barely keeping upright.

  Andrew searched Harron’s haggard face for something that was not present behind the scraggly brown beard. Harron returned his gaze with a chilling look in his red-rimmed eyes that denoted more an utter vacancy of purpose than actual malice.

  “I have to go now,” Andrew said, thinking himself ridiculous for saying so.

  “Too late for a pissing match anyway,” Harron said. “I’m all out of piss. What makes you think you’re better than other people?”

  “I’m not better than other people,” Andrew said.

  “Sure you are.”

  Andrew spun on his heels and resumed his journey up Van Buren Street. He could see the white steeple of the Congregational Church two blocks ahead gleaming in the last moments of twilight while his brain spun out one fantasy after another about how he might have defended his honor. As he neared the church and heard the sound of instruments tuning in the community room, his fantasies of violent combat turned to a vague searching curiosity as to what this antagonist had been doing in life before the great hardships of the new times scuttled just about everybody’s hopes, dreams, and expectations—everyone except himself, Andrew Pendergast, who was thriving. Perhaps the drunken young man was right. Andrew gave the appearance of being better than other people, certainly of doing better. Was that okay, he reflected, something to be ashamed of, or just a plain fact in the new order of things?

  Three

  Mandy Stokes, thirty-two, left her brick cottage in the Mill Hollow section of town at the prompting of a voice she called the “spirit guide” that had taken up residence within her beginning the previous summer after a brief, violent illness during which something happened in her mind. As a result, the everyday world had become for her a shadowy backdrop to a more vivid beckoning interior realm of colorful event populated by dream figures who alternately tempted and persecuted her. Mandy carried her fourteen-month-old infant boy, Julian, in an ash-splint backpack made by her husband, Rick, chief foreman on Ned Larmon’s farm. Rick was still out at the farm, baby-sitting a sick horse.

  Rick was aware that his wife had come through her illness changed and distant, but she did not tell him about her new ­familiars—they had warned her not to—and he had waited patiently all these months for her to “come back to herself,” as Dr. Copeland told him to expect she would, while Rick continued to take the doctor’s hopeful words literally, against the evidence of his senses. If anything, Mandy became more unreachable as the weeks went by. She appeared at times to talk to herself, but when Rick asked if she had said something she denied it. In the days that beat a quickening path to the December solstice, Rick sometimes came back home from his duties at the Larmon farm to find Mandy sitting in the dark, with the baby crying on the floor and the ashes from the morning’s fire cold in the woodstove. He was afraid to leave the child alone with her but ashamed to admit to anyone that she was unwell and so unable to manage.

  Rick and Mandy were the sort of people for whom the economic collapse had harshly undone all of their own early programming. Rick was an Amherst grad, fortunate to find a job as an on-air reporter at the NBC affiliate TV station in Albany when the bomb went off in Washington. Mandy had just completed her master’s thesis on gender relations in Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. The SUNY Albany campus shut down a week after the bombing when supply chains for everything from cafeteria stocks to payroll funding broke down. Rick’s TV station suspended paychecks the following week, though by then the banks were on a ­government-declared “holiday” and cash money was vanishing every­where. The two of them stayed in the sizzling apartment in a not very good neighborhood of central Albany waiting for something like normal life to resume. Up until then, Mandy had entertained furtive thoughts of leaving Rick, who she saw as hopelessly conventional in habits and aspirations, but in the first weeks of the emergency his stolidity impressed her and she clung to him as if he were a lifeboat after a shipwreck.

  Meanwhile the supermarket shelves grew bare as the jobbers quit their resupply deliveries and angry, unoccupied people milled in the streets at all hours, giving the city a vivid sense of constant menace. The state government affected to distribute food, but diesel fuel was in short supply, too, and the few trucks sent out were easily hijacked. As Mandy and Rick ate through the last of their dried lentils and the jar of years-old curry powder, their situation grew desperate.

  Rick had a college roommate, Matt Larmon, whose father ran a farm, a big successful dairy operation, in the little town of Union Grove, some thirty-five miles northeast of Albany. Rick had spent one memorable July there, after his junior year, haying, fixing machinery, running cows, and hanging out on country roads drinking beers with Matt and some local girls on hot nights. Mr. Larmon had told him more than once that he was a good worker. It had been seven years since then, and he’d fallen out of touch with Matt, but Rick proposed that he and Mandy now try to get to the Larmon farm and ride out whatever craziness was going on in the world there, if possible. The phones were down and they could not contact Matt’s father, Ned Larmon, but the city was quickly growing untenable with scavengers invading apartments, so Rick and Mandy decided to get going. They took only what they could carry in two small backpacks. Rick left his now useless Honda Civic behind. For three days they made their way north on foot in pleasant summer weather, eating early corn out of the fields and getting some hot meals here and there from kind people along the way. The people they met on the road were as baffled as they were frightened. How could something like this happen in the United States?

  Rick and Mandy succeeded in finding their way to the Larmon farm. Matt was already there, too, it turned out, having left his apartment in Brooklyn and his job managing the web advertising revenue for a sports magazine group. Within an hour of the Washington bombing, with a full tank of gas, Matt had crossed the Willis Avenue Bridge out of Manhattan and then navigated his way north on back roads, avoiding the interstates. That first evening at the farm was pervaded by a strange combination of giddy excitement and dread, like a class reunion in wartime. In the background, behind the flowing liquor and the plentiful local viands, they were all painfully aware that the economy was failing, that many things had stopped working, and it had begun to look as if there would be no going back to anything that resembled the normality of life before the bombings.

  By August of that year, as their predicament became clear, Ned and Matt Larmon worked to reorganize the farm to operate as though the modern age had permanently ended. They acquired draft horses, Belgians and Haflingers. Matt and Rick scoured the countryside buying up antique horse-drawn machinery, mowers, seed drills, and balers and learned step by step to rebuild them. They repaired several outbuildings on the property and constructed a new creamery, anticipating that all the old long-distance supply lines would unravel now that the tanker trucks no longer made their routine bulk collections of milk for the conglom
erate food companies—meaning that value-added goods, such as butter and cheese, had to be produced on site. Mandy went to work in the creamery. It was not a life she could have anticipated the previous spring as she completed the work for her master’s degree in Women’s Studies.

  It was obvious that much of the work done previously by machines and fossil fuels would now have to be realized by human labor. Rick’s role was enlisting local men from Union Grove to sign on to work on the Larmon farm under terms that would have seemed crazy in the old times—shares of the food that was produced there, no cash because there wasn’t any as the weeks went by. Few of the people in Union Grove were keen to do farm work. They were used to offices or, at least, to manual jobs aided by power equipment. Rick found twelve willing men and organized several crews rotating between the fields, the barns, and the pastures, and five women for milking and the creamery. Many other townspeople just waited fretfully for normality (and their accustomed jobs and paychecks) to return and wouldn’t consider stooping to farm labor, and in the first winter these would be among the people who froze to death in unheated houses, or went hungry in ways unimaginable to a nation of former Walmart shoppers, or ran down their immune systems with liquor and drugs just as the first wave of the Mexican flu hit. The more nimble personalities understood that the great changes wracking the U.S. economy would probably be permanent. The Larmon farm’s system of shares and bonuses was different from Stephen Bullock’s more explicitly feudal operation, located seven miles east on the Hudson River, where the workers and their families lived on the premises and sold their allegiance to Bullock in exchange for security. But as the first planting season of the new times got under way, the Larmon system seemed to work, and the model was adopted by other landholders in the neighborhood of Union Grove, including Ben Deaver, Carl ­Weibel, and Bill Schmidt.