Warday Read online

  Up close, the camp was a hodgepodge. There were L.L. Bean tents arranged with old cars to make shelters, the buses we had seen from the highway, trailers, and even a few portable buildings.

  Why, in a nation of empty housing developments and abandoned apartment buildings, anybody would be living like this was beyond me.

  “You don’t have homes?”

  “No, we don’t have homes.”

  “Go to Dallas. You can take over a couple of neighborhoods.”

  She snorted, tossed her head. “We’re on the wanted list in Texas. Don’t you ever go to the post office?”

  “A lot of wanted posters at the post office. I never saw one with your face on it.”

  “It’s there.”

  I was afraid to ask why. Jim sat in the dust, very quiet, his eyes sharp. He did not speak.

  “We’re robbers,” the girl said. “Espinoza let us stay here when we got chased out of Texas by the highway patrol.”

  “Robbers?”

  “We live by our wits,” an older woman said. “You’ve heard of the Destructuralist Movement?”

  I had indeed. They believed that there should be no social structure beyond the extended family. Even tribes were too much for them. “Destructuralists tried to burn the Dallas Civic Center.”

  “That was us,” the girl said simply.

  No wonder they had left Texas. “People were outraged.”

  “People are addicted to social structure. Warday has given us a historic opportunity to break the boundaries of social control. To be free.”

  “We can’t rebuild the economy without social structure,” Jim said.

  The faces around him went hard. I wondered if we might not be arguing for our lives here. I hoped that he realized it. “We don’t need the damn economy,” a man said, his voice full of bitter sarcasm. “The economy’s worse than an addiction, it’s a curse!”

  “People are dying because the economy’s in such a mess,” I said. “At the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand a month, to be exact. That’s about eight thousand a day. Nearly a hundred just since we started this conversation.”

  “You’re real smart,” the girl said.

  “I’m a human being. I love other human beings.”

  “People are dying because nature is rebalancing the earth’s ecology.”

  “They’re dying because of Warday.”

  Another voice intervened: “Rice’s ready!” This was a lean young man with bright gray eyes and a dusting of beard. People lined up before a big stainless-steel pot. They carried their own utensils. Each was given a smallish serving of rice topped with cooked soybeans. I thought of my lunch with Hector Espinoza. In fact, I longed for it. I still do. I would give a lot for another taco as crunchy and perfectly seasoned as that one, full of juice and chicken, just the other side of hot. The rice and soybeans were a pitiful meal. It reminded me of the famine, and made me feel frightened.

  The sun was making long shadows when we were finished. I sensed that Jim was as eager as I to get away from this place.

  When I die, I want to be given the grace to go for a good reason. I didn’t want to die to serve the frustrations of some very unhappy and confused people.

  “We have a vision,” the girl said, “of a true Jeffersonian society in America. This could be a nation of farmers, where everybody is self-sufficient and God-fearing, and the family is the center of things.” Her voice rose. “I had a family, you guys! I had a little girl. She was taken from me by heathens. She was taken for no good reason, and she was killed out in the backyard by people who had decided that my family no longer belonged in Roswell, New Mexico.”

  A man put his hand on her shoulder. She turned and kissed him in what seemed to me a private way. “We all lost people,” he said.

  “That’s why we come together. This is a family.”

  Another voice was raised. “If you’re writers, write that another world like the world we had before Warday is going to mean another war. We have to change. We have to turn aside from the hypnosis of politics and the addiction of vast economic systems that eat this beautiful planet and spit out garbage. We need to turn to one another instead. What counts is the person in bed beside you, and your children, and the people next door. The rest is all addiction and hypnosis and more Wardays.”

  My impulse was to try to comfort them, to make all the horror and the suffering of the past few years go away. But I couldn’t do that. All I could do was eat their poor meal and look across their fire at them.

  The girl with the gun sighed. “Okay,” she said, “here’s what’s gonna happen.” She nodded at Jim. “You’re gonna go wherever you’re goin’. But you aren’t sending anybody after us, like from Texas.” She put her free hand on my shoulder. “You’re stayin’ here for a while, just to make sure he doesn’t send anybody.”

  I felt the blood drain out of my face. I really did not care to end up trapped in the worst place we had thus far encountered. What would they do with me? Lock me up in one of those stifling, filthy, derelict buses?

  “Three months,” Jim said.

  “Six.”

  “Let him go in three months. If you don’t, I’ll assume he’s dead and tell the Texas police where to find you.”

  “Four months.”

  “Four.”

  With that, Jim got up. I was appalled. Apparently he proposed to just leave it like this. I was going to spend four months with this bunch. “I’m triaged,” I shouted. “I gave up precious time with my own family for the book we’re writing. You can’t take even more of my time, not if you love the family the way you say you do.”

  “We didn’t invite you here.”

  Jim turned without a word and walked to the road. He soon disappeared toward La Mesa. At that moment I hated him.

  I screamed after him. I flung my empty plate at his departing shadow.

  “You’re lucky it didn’t break,” the girl said. “You’d have to figure out how to mend it. And we don’t have a lot of glue.”

  A great woe overcame me. I was facing four pointlessly wasted months. “I swear to you, I’ll keep your secret.”

  “The Texans would kill us.”

  “I’m not even going in that direction! I’m on my way west.”

  “California’s just as dangerous. Radical Destructuralists have been executed there.”

  How odd that the terrorists of our time would hate authority but believe in what used to be its core symbol, the family. The old anarchists would have been very confused by these people. But, in a way, they made sense to me. I could understand their dream of a peaceful, agricultural America, where the horizon ended with the next farm.

  I could see something more than violence and rage in these people. They weren’t just inept terrorists or starving road people or fanatics. They had their wounds too, like all of us. And because of that, I could make a case for tolerance and understanding.

  As soon as night fell, the camp went to sleep. As we have all found out, it takes a high level of nutrition and lots of artificial light to keep human beings awake after sunset. They were still like the rest of us were during the famine—dead to the world as soon as the sun went down.

  I heard the wet rhythm of sex in the shadows, and sensed stirring here and there in the silence. Birds made their evening calls as last light disappeared behind the Portrillos. Heat lightning flickered. A young woman’s voice, calm and pure, softened the murmuring of the children with a lullaby:

  “Come and sit by my side if you love me

  Do not hasten to bid me adieu

  But remember the Red River Valley

  And the cowboy who loves you so true.”

  When Jim woke me in the middle of the night, I was at first astonished. But not enough, fortunately, to cry out. He can move more quietly than a shadow; he learned his moves in Asia. We had gone together in the jungles of hate; escaping this camp of exhausted, sleeping people was not difficult.

  “They might have killed us if they’d seen
us,” he said, once we were out on the Las Cruces highway.

  “I know it,” I said.

  Desert nights are always cold, and that one was no exception.

  We walked north for hours. No cars passed. Toward morning we came into the little town of Mesquite. A neon sign and three pickup trucks identified an open diner. We had American-style eggs and bacon, and big mugs of coffee.

  “Is this New Mexico or Aztlan?” I asked the waitress.

  She laughed. “You guys hitching up from ’Cruces?”

  “El Paso.”

  “Well, you’re out of Aztlan. It peters out between La Mesa and here. Just past where the Japs are doin’ their uranium mining.”

  We had seconds of coffee and bought some salt beef and Cokes for the road.

  Los Alamos

  It was nearly dark when Whitley and I reached the outskirts of Santa Fe, in northern New Mexico. In the distance, beyond the thin line of awakening city lights, lay the Jemez Mountains. Hidden there, on the mesa, was the city of Los Alamos.

  We felt that a visit there was essential.

  It took a long time, however, to find a ride to the mesa. There was no bus service, and the Santa Fe taxis wouldn’t take us out at any price. Finally we got a ride with a Los Alamos resident, in his gleaming new Toyota.

  Los Alamos was always a company town, and the company was Uncle Sam. Warday would seem to have ended the need for all that. We really expected to come upon a scene of abandonment.

  Since the war, scientists have not been well treated in the United States, and this is especially true for nuclear scientists. And there isn’t any funding for their work. We couldn’t imagine the state of New Mexico, for example, spending money to keep Los Alamos in operation.

  Our driver, whose name is best left unsaid, explained some fundamental truths of current life. The people of the mesa had been sealed off from the outside world on Warday. Units of the New Mexico National Guard had blocked all entrances and exits, followed by regular Army troops.

  Then there was a black year, when the economy of Los Alamos failed due to the absence of government checks. The Army guardianship was abandoned and the unpaid soldiers drifted away.

  Most of the scientists and their families left, too, choosing to make their way in some less hostile environment. The others created a miniature farming community, using their technological skills to develop viable desert agriculture. We saw the results of this work—trickle-irrigated crops, strange-looking greenhouses made of plastic, and an elaborate hydroponic system.

  We crossed the Rio Grande and made our way up onto a plateau called Parajito, which resembles a large hand divided into finger-like mesas. There had been rain earlier, and the air was heavily scented with fir and spruce. A peace lay on the land, almost as if it were uninhabited. But after a few miles we came upon the administrative complex. I felt an odd fear, seeing the absence of bustle among these familiar buildings. The library building and its classified papers archive were empty, doors swinging open, windows dark.

  Our driver told us that there had been a serious attack by local residents right after the soldiers left, and some of the damage to the library had been done then. Local people had also talked of trials for the Los Alamos scientists, but there had been no arrests.

  Nevertheless, the scientists had been glad to leave when they could.

  Which, it seems, is the central reality of Los Alamos. It is a place of leavings and departures, empty houses and abandoned lives. Nuclear science is a disliked religion in this area. Los Alamos people never spend the night in Santa Fe, and prefer to go in with Japanese guards when they can.

  As we moved across the mesa, we saw that more buildings were gutted. I recognized these structures. On my last visit to Los Alamos, highly classified work on particle-beam weapons had been going on here. The labs have been moved in their entirety to Japan.

  And their scientists have gone with them. There is a new “Atomic City,” it seems, being built near Osaka. Los Alamos is a place of caretakers.

  The plutonium fabrication plant was still standing, though hardly intact. It was as warm with technicians who were dismantling it and crating its exotic innards as reverently as doctors might pack living hearts for transplant.

  I wanted to go up to one of those Japanese workmen in his white coveralls and shake him and tell him that he was infecting himself and his people. I thought, Japan, Japan, surely you have learned. Let this place be a museum, and let these people be its caretakers.

  We crossed the bridge that connected one mesa with the other and drove into what had been the main residential and commercial district of prewar Los Alamos. Most buildings were boarded up.

  But there was a lively open-air market and an astonishing atmosphere of prosperity. The families of the “Japanese friends,” as they call themselves, live in many of the houses vacated by American scientists who have already gone to Atomic City.

  I asked whether they had any choice. Our guide smiled. “We’re going, that’s all I know. The scientist is part of the laboratory.”

  Were they paid?

  “Listen. We’re treated like gods. Paid? That isn’t the word for it. You get cars, housing, schooling for your kids, all food and medical care free, and enough yen to buy the whole damn state of New Mexico. I don’t know what would happen if anybody refused to go. Nobody does!”

  I found in myself a kind of desperate urgency. Skill and intelligence are such valuable resources, and America needs them so badly now. I wanted to say to him, please don’t go. Then I saw a gleam down in the canyon—a car that had been pushed off in the night by angry locals.

  Can you blame them, though? This is the central station of the nuclear age.

  Our guide sensed our discomfiture at what was happening here, and explained that scientific study had come to a standstill in America. Science was to some extent blamed for the war. But even where this wasn’t true, there was no money, as he put it, for contemplation.

  “That’s what you need,” he added. “Without contemplation there is no science.” I felt the vast silence around me and heard the wind whispering in the pines and realized the depth of that truth.

  I thought about the friendships I had made in Los Alamos before the war, and the combination of awe and apprehension that I had felt when I first interviewed the scientists and first heard them tell of their work on weapons. I wondered then if it was possible to be divorced from the consequences of one’s work. It seemed to me that no matter how subtle the problem a given weapon presented or how artful its contemplation might be, the ashes and the bones in the end would be the same.

  It wasn’t until we were returning across the Rio Grande, on the same bridge that brought Oppenheimer and his men here in 1940, that my mood began to lift. Despite all the thoughts that have hung electric in this air, the cottonwoods are still full and green. Across the way, the pueblos of San Ildefonso and Santa Clara gleamed in the sun. There were Indians working the land there, as they had for centuries. Los Alamos, for all its modern history, is returning to ancient ways.

  PART TWO

  California Dangers

  You road I enter upon and look around,

  I believe you are not all that is here,

  I believe that much unseen is also here.

  —Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”

  California P.O.E

  The old Superliner clicks along the tracks. Jim and I are sitting in the observation car, staring out the wide picture windows at the desert. I haven’t been to Los Angeles since 1983. In those days I used to do a certain amount of business with the film companies, and I made occasional trips west. I never cared much for Los Angeles; people who are consciously trying to be relaxed make me nervous. Jim has been to L.A. more recently, but not since the war.

  So we have no real way of knowing what to expect of the 1990 immigration controls. We’ve heard hard rumors of meticulous police searches and detention pens and people-smuggling out of Kingman, Arizona. Passing through
there, as a matter of fact, we saw the largest hobo camp we’ve encountered so far. It made the little encampment outside of La Mesa seem positively orderly. It was a vast jumble of tents, abandoned vehicles of all types, and human beings. Its residents, the people on the train were saying, were all California rejectees. If so, the border controls must be brutal.

  I know a few things about L.A. First, with nearly nine million residents, it is by far the most populous city in the United States.

  Despite the general population decline, it has grown by nearly a million since 1987. It is more than four times the size of the second largest city, San Francisco, and larger than New York was before the war.

  The conductor comes through, calling, “Needles, next stop Needles.” There is stirring in the car. Needles is one of the infamous California ports of entry. To get into the state, you’ve got to show twenty gold dollars or an equivalent amount in goods or paper currency, and a valid entry permit. The only way to get such a permit is to have business in the state or a job waiting for you there.

  We do not have any permits. And between us we have eight hundred paper dollars, the equivalent of only eight gold.

  None of our fellow passengers have talked about entry, but we sense that we are not alone. There are all kinds of stories about getting into California; few of them involve the possession of papers and astronomical sums of money.

  “Needles,” the conductor shouts. “Everybody stay in the train, stay in the train!”

  We slow to a crawl and draw up to the platform. I’m shocked.

  There are soldiers armed with submachine guns every fifteen feet.

  Behind them are huge signs:

  ILLEGAL ALIENS LIABLE TO BE SHOT.

  STAY IN THE TRAIN.

  An amplified voice can be heard: “Do not leave the train. Have your entry permits ready. Do not leave the train.”

  We decide to obey. Around us a few people are pulling the precious green forms out of purses and wallets. But most are sitting passively, waiting. This is only the first step in their journey. They have timed their arrival carefully. There isn’t an outgoing train for another six hours. For that much time they will be in the holding pen. They have staked their lives and their money on the possibility that they will be able to escape and somehow cross mountains and desert to the Los Angeles basin, there to disappear into the golden horde.