A History of the Future (31 page)
She went on. California was a basket case. A million people died in and around Los Angeles as a result of the bombing, and millions more were displaced. Agitators north of San Francisco started an aggressive movement to dissociate politically from the southern half of the state. Refugees overwhelmed the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. It was not like the Dust Bowl days of a hundred years before when refugees from one part of the country could get work picking fruit. Many survived only as robbers and bandits and their careers were generally short as word got out and they met armed resistance. The Chinese-engineered bird flu got over to the West Coast in one of the few cargo ships still delivering goods. The epidemic ripped through the population, and the refugees who stayed on the move carried it up the coast to Oregon and Washington. Along the way, people started calling it the Mexican flu but it was Chinese. Mexico had plenty of problems of its own, largely growing out of its attempts to control Texas and what remained of Southern California, plus Arizona, which was also a gigantic mess because there was no gasoline to run Phoenix, a place where you could get around only by car. Mexico’s land grab was at odds with the fact that it was crumbling internally, just like the United States. Did you know that Mexico’s full name is the United States of Mexico? Many of its states were breaking away from the center too.
While all this was going on out west, Asian freebooters fanned out over the Pacific, especially Indonesians in their own naval vessels—they still had some oil as well as a fleet of secondhand, 1970s-vintage Russian destroyers—and began raiding operations along the long coast of North and South America. Among other escapades, they docked in San Francisco, marched up to the Federal Reserve Bank building on Market Street in broad daylight, and carted off fourteen tons of gold in pushcarts that they’d brought with them for the job. They knew exactly where to go. Sacramento was negotiating with Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska to form a Pacific Northwest political union, but the last Ms. Estridge heard they hadn’t accomplished it. Colorado, and the plains states north of Missouri, stayed with the federals, but Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana did not fill their congressional seats. They were economically stranded and too distant from the seat of government. The Northeast suffered terribly, too, from epidemic disease and the wholesale dysfunction of the massive smear of human settlement that ran from Portland, Maine, clear through Virginia. What people called the Mexican flu in the east was neither the Chinese strain nor anything from Mexico but a natural bird flu that had evolved in the Canada goose population. In the big eastern cities, the social services collapsed and the people lost the ability to maintain their infrastructure. New York was especially afflicted because it had so many office skyscrapers and high-rise apartment towers that just didn’t work without reliable electricity. A breakdown in sanitation led to cholera. Diseases of the subtropics had become well established in the Northeast, including West Nile virus, several kinds of encephalitis, and meningitis. Yellow fever made a comeback in Philadelphia. In New York and Boston a lot of people just starved. The food trucks stopped coming. Others realized this was not a temporary situation and fled the cities. But most didn’t get very far. They got wet and got sick and, in the places they came to, the locals met them with firearms.
“This country has changed so much that my own parents wouldn’t recognize it,” Ms. Estridge says. “That is what happened. That is the way of the world. Sometimes things change drastically. We endeavor to carry on in what everybody seems to call these new times. Harvey Albright is a good man. I report to him directly. Our government is nothing like the leviathan that existed in Washington, but we remain Americans, with our history, our language, and our commitment to the common good. Is there anything you would like to ask me?”
“Yes,” I say. “Where is this ship going?”
“Channel Island.”
“What’s at Channel Island?”
“Your nation’s future.”
That was the end of one part of my life, right there. Ms. Estridge left the table in a little cloud of her flowery perfume.
F
ORTY-ONE
In the middle of the day, which had turned colder with full-bellied dark clouds crowding the blue out of the sky, Andrew Pendergast and his servant Jack Harron hiked east on the old county Route 29 to the Deaver farm a mile and a half out of town. Jack carried a wooden box fitted with shoulder straps on his back containing Andrew’s painting equipment. He also toted the 24 by 36–inch plywood panel Andrew had prepared with a gesso of rabbit-skin glue and marble dust. The panel was fitted with an old suitcase handle screwed to the side so Jack could carry it like a piece of luggage. Andrew carried a portable cherrywood easel under his arm. They were going to Ben Deaver’s house, where Andrew would begin the project of painting the distinguished man’s portrait.
A few stray snowflakes drifted in the still air as they marched along. Jack enjoyed walking in the boots that Andrew had given him. They were greased with beeswax and tallow to keep the wet out and very comfortable with an extra pair of socks, since Andrew’s shoe size was one greater than Jack’s. He was bundled in a warm blanket coat that draped to his shins and a conical rabbit-fur helmet that looked like something a spear carrier in the army of Genghis Khan might have worn. As they hiked, Andrew offered a running commentary on the lives and techniques of the portrait painters he admired: Velázquez, Rembrandt, Édouard Manet, and John Singer Sargent. Sargent, the American who hardly lived in America during his lifetime, was the very best, Andrew said, but then he lived in the very best moment in the history of the late, lamented recent old modern times: the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the Beaux Arts era. Jack tried to process the word “bozart.” He could only imagine it referred to a time when clowns reigned. Though self-conscious and ashamed of his ignorance, he ventured to tell Andrew that he didn’t know what a bozart was. Andrew proceeded to explain it to him. He even paused to spell out the words “Beaux Art” in the snow at the side of the road and explain the pronunciation. Jack had taken the compulsory two semesters of foreign language in high school, but it was Spanish, and he just squeaked through with C’s. At the time, it seemed that knowing a little Spanish would be handier, the way things were going in America. Now he regretted not having opted for French.
They continued up the road and Andrew resumed his disquisition on Sargent. His painting materials were first rate. The finest colors from the new chemical industries of Europe. Beautiful linen canvases, the best handmade brushes. Now, in the new times, there were no places to purchase art supplies. There was progress for you. Andrew was running out of the vivid colors he had managed to stockpile in the collapse, and before long his palette would be limited to simple earth colors plus black and white, he said. He’d have to plumb the science stacks of the library and read up on chemistry, he said, to make his own colors. Jack was not sure what it all meant, but he was surprised to find himself listening with keen interest, struck by the notion that he was actually learning something, and that it would lead him in the direction of a life worth living.
They turned off old Route 29 onto the Huddle Road, passing the delaminating house of Donald Acker along the way. Andrew remarked that there was no smoke coming out of the chimney. That was one way, he said, of telling whether buildings were inhabited, for who could live in such a place this time of year without fire? They continued up Huddle Road, a steep grade, around the back of Pumpkin Hill, until they came to the drive that led up to Ben Deaver’s house. It was a new house, built in a style and using methods that had been long forgotten in the United States of America. Deaver built it after giving up on the so-called
contemporary custom
house he had originally bought when he retired from United Airlines, a few years before the collapse. That first house was a grandiose thing of soaring angles and gigantic triangular plate glass windows designed to erase the boundary between being inside and being outside. It proved impossible to heat without propane gas and electricity, and as the economy dissolved the house’s conceits annoyed him to an extreme, so Deaver decided to build a new house in the traditional style and manner. At the center of it was a substantial stack of masonry chimneys that acted as a heat reservoir for the house’s multiple fireplaces. The system incorporated several ovens and a cook surface made of sheet steel in the big kitchen. The house was sited over a water well drilled with great effort without power machinery. The plumbing was copper and steel pipe salvaged from the old house, run in a stack proximate to the masonry heating stack at the center of the house to a tank in the attic. Water had to be hand-pumped up there by a servant assigned to the routine daily maintenance of the household systems. In the new times, human servants replaced many of the functions formerly performed by machines and automatic switches. These arrangements allowed for fewer bathrooms than was the case in the old days of so-called McMansions, with their profligate amenities. But Deaver had a very grand bathroom on the second floor that was practically a spa. A wood-fired boiler provided hot water for bathing and for the kitchen on the floor below. It was fired up twice a day so hot water was available when needed, morning and evening.
On the outside, Deaver’s house looked like it was built in the times of James Madison, with a pedimented portico, a wood fan ornament in each gable end, and shutters that actually closed. Along the hundred-foot-long entrance drive he had planted a formal allée of shagbark hickories. They were still young and he knew that he would not live long enough to see them in their glory, but was it not the case, Ben Deaver thought, that everyone in history who planted a big tree did it for succeeding generations? As an investment in the future? To express confidence in the continuity of the human project?
Andrew and Jack approached the house between the ranks of the young hickory trees in silent reverence induced by the beauty of the large building and its setting. Smoke curled out of the chimney top with its castellated cowl. The pair were greeted at the door by a servant who took their coats and hats. The servant was named Harry, a cheerful former loan officer at the Glens Falls National Bank in the old times, and his new job title was “houseman” because it had been so long since servants were an ordinary fixture in American life that people did not know what to call them, and Deaver disliked the term “butler.” Harry showed Andrew and Jack into the sitting room, as he called it, where Ben Deaver sat by the fire with his nose in a novel from the previous century about international hugger-mugger involving a Russian submarine. The room was delightfully warm and painted a genial yellow, a color that was especially pleasant at a time of year when the world outside presented only various tones of gray and sepia.
“Gosh, you’re punctual,” Deaver said. The clock on the mantelpiece, a rather fancy 1881 Ingraham, had been refurbished by none other than Andrew Pendergast. Andrew checked it now against his own pocketwatch.
“It’s seven minutes slow,” he said.
“How do you know yours is accurate?” Deaver said.
“I check it against the old almanac tables for sunrise and sunset.”
“Hmm. Imagine that.”
Andrew said they were ready to set up and proceed with the task at hand. Deaver asked Harry to bring tea and something to eat. Andrew took a drop cloth that was lashed to the paint box Jack carried on his back and laid it on the rug. He examined the room and asked Deaver to try standing in various places around it. He decided to make the portrait with Deaver posing by a window that faced east. It offered a nice view off of Pumpkin Hill down Deaver’s own fields to the valley where the Battenkill River ran and to the gentle hills behind it. The hills in their snowy mantle had a voluptuous quality. Mount Equinox, just across the Vermont border, was visible on the far horizon. Deaver had dressed for his portrtait in a fine herringbone tweed jacket with a scarlet sweater vest, a green plaid necktie, and gray moleskin trousers, all factory-made back in the old times. With his shock of silver hair he looked every inch the former airline executive that he had been and the wealthy farmer he was now.
“Do I look all right?” he asked Andrew.
“You look like a gentleman,” Andrew said. He directed Jack to move the drop cloth closer to the window and to set up the easel. He had trained Jack how to do the setup and prepare his palette. Some of the colors he made himself did not come in metal tubes, of course, which were no longer available, but in small glass jars manufactured in the old times, still plentiful and reusable. By the time everything was ready Harry had arrived with a pot of peppermint tea and a plate of cookies made of cornmeal, walnuts, honey, and plenty of butter. Deaver’s wife, Nancy, fluttered into the room briefly to say hello, before going down to the workshop beside one of the barns where the wool from her Merino sheep was being cleaned, degreased, and prepared for dyeing to fulfill a contract for the New Faith blanket-making operation.
Ben Deaver took up his pose beside the window and Andrew began the portrait by establishing reference points and lines of the composition in thin brown paint on the gessoed panel, humming a slip jig called “The Snowy Path” as he worked. He had just begun to establish the masses of Deaver’s figure when a commotion erupted in the hall outside the sitting room, accompanied by the raised voices of Harry and another man. Then there was a sharp cry, the door to the hallway crashed open, and the baleful figure of Donald Acker flew into the room with an eight-inch hollow-ground cook’s knife aloft in his hand. They smelled him the same moment they saw him. Behind Acker, Harry staggered two steps and collapsed with blood running down his arm. Both Ben Deaver at the window and Andrew Pendergast, brush in hand, stood frozen like jacked deer, but Jack Harron sprang from his place near Andrew, left his feet, and flung his shoulder into Acker’s knees, as he had learned to do years ago on the football field. The two of them crashed down on a coffee table in a heap of flailing limbs, one of which was Acker’s right arm with the knife plunging twice into the conjoined mass of clothing that was the two of them. Then, in a movement that was simply a continuation of all that kinetic motion, Jack rolled onto his feet toward the fireplace and, while Acker struggled with the great bulk of himself to rise from the floor, seized a fireplace poker that rested casually against the marble hearth and swung it with such force against the side of Acker’s head that his skull split open like a muskmelon, with large bits of bone and gobbets of brain flying against the furnishings and draperies of the beautiful room as his body crumpled back onto the splintered coffee table like a puppet with its strings cut.