Horace Afoot

There are no streetcars in Oblivion. There aren’t any streetcars anywhere in America, as far as I know. I don’t count the trolley cars in San Francisco. Since I moved here I’ve been wishing streetcars would make a comeback. I know it’s hopeless. I hate internal combustion engines and the civilization that has been built on them. I shouldn’t take it so personally. But I read in
Selected Philosophical Essays
that hatred of civilization is not
necessarily
an irrational projection onto the world of personal psychological difficulties. So I know it’s not just me.

My house is a rickety yellow thing at the dead end of West Street. The owner moved away and doesn’t care what happens to it as long as he gets a check every month. It’s a comfortable place, and I sometimes get the feeling that it has remained standing as a favor to me. I’m sure I’ll be its last occupant. Every evening I fix myself a plate of beans and rice, pour myself a glass of wine, then go upstairs and eat in bed listening to the night sounds from the woods behind the house. Tonight it is too hot to go to sleep, so I just sit with the empty bowl in my lap trying to imagine someone in China doing exactly the same thing. Of course the time difference would make it daytime on the other side of the world, so anyone sitting up in bed with an empty plate in their lap is bound to be ill or in prison or both. Right? I make a mental calculation. The world’s population is somewhere over five billion, so the probability is there. In fact, it is likely that
there are thousands of us all around the globe doing exactly the same thing: sitting in bed with our empty bowl, staring at the wall. The process of calculation lulls me into a mild sort of hypnosis, and I find my thoughts wandering from the world of cozy musings in bed to the world of torture described in Amnesty International brochures, the ones that read: right now, today, the horrors of torture and political detention are everyday incidents in fully one-third of the world’s countries. I realize that what seems to me a comforting extrapolation, the projection of my measly being into the entire human universe, is also a bloody goddamn nightmare.

I reach for the phone and dial a number.

“Horace here.”

“Hello?”

“Right now, today, the horrors of torture are everyday incidents in one-third of the world’s countries.” I pause, wait for the click of the receiver.

“Is that a fact?” A woman’s voice.

“Yes, it is. Do you ever find yourself wondering about the unspeakable things that are happening this very moment around the globe?”

A pause. “To tell you the truth, sir, I do not.” Another pause. “But I go to church every Sunday and pray to Almighty Christ that I never have to.”

I consider how to respond, but my finger slips and I accidentally hang up on her. I can’t remember the number I’d dialed, which is a shame because I would have enjoyed talking to the old lady. There was a grain of frustrated reason in her voice, the voice of a heavy smoker.

I get out of bed and go into the kitchen, put my bowl in the sink, stand at the back door, and watch for falling stars. The outline of a large water tower teeters like a hydrocephalic child against the night sky. The name of the town is painted on it in matte black letters. You can read them during the day. OBLIVION. At night, despite the silhouette of the tower, you can see a big swath of sky. I turn off the kitchen light, sit on the stoop and scrutinize the summer night, listen to the chorusing crickets and cicadas. The sky is clear and brilliant with stars. I wish I hadn’t broken the binoculars I confiscated from the kid next door. It would be nice to use them now. I ended up paying for them anyway, and now the kid is spying on me with a higher-powered set from a safer distance.

The evening wears on and I walk to the top of the street, turn left, and follow Old Route 47 out of town. The cornfields are about chest high,
and from the slight elevation of the roadway I can see across them. All 180 degrees of the horizon are open to me. A few cars speed past. I step into the shadow of the field and hide as they blow by. At night the traffic on this side of town is light. Few use this road since the new thoroughfare was built several years ago. I like to walk out here for that reason.

Old Route 47 leads to the back of a factory that employs a good part of the town. Semantech, pronounced
semmatech
by the locals. They produce parts for cruise missiles and other weapons, and they’ve been doing it for long enough now that everybody takes it for granted. A few months ago the president came through and gave a speech.

At eleven the shifts change and the parking lot becomes a sea of clustered headlights. The new thoroughfare, a four-lane road with highway signs and cloverleaf exits, takes this traffic to the east and around to the north end of town, where the new shopping malls are being built. The town has expanded in that direction, leaving the southern end, with its older houses and poorer neighborhoods, to a quiet, slow decay.

At a bend in the road is an ancient mound. Excavated around the turn of the century by the State Historical Society and the Bureau of American Ethnology, it is the highest elevation for miles around. A rotting picnic bench shaded by two medium-sized elm trees and a rusty plaque are the last signs of the state’s interest in it. I follow the path that winds around to the top, brushing the tall grass out of the way as I make my way up. The ground is hard and dry and my footsteps fall with a hollow, dusty thud. On top of the mound the nighttime vista spreads out, open fields and the constellation-filled summer sky. Moving directly south from the North Star, I find Hercules low over the horizon. Behind me the town of Oblivion, to my right the factory with its high fence and orange anticrime lamps. These are my coordinates. The rest is a dark sea of fields.

The secret about Oblivion is that it is identical to every other place on the outskirts of the era we live in. The malls and food franchises are here, the idle libraries, the cable and satellite networks, the bad manners, all the septic, inflamed dysfunctions and disorders. An airport was
built, but it provides entertainment rather than escape. The corporate moguls who planned it have never come here themselves. If they did, it would only irritate them to see the cars parked along the roadside and the bored people watching the finely logoed airplanes land beyond the fence.

I walk out there now and then to join the fun. Several times a day the big airplanes land. They come in so low over the fence at the eastern end of the runway that people standing there hold their ears and duck. Engines roaring, the flying steel swoops down; puffs of smoke erupt underneath as the wheels hit the ground; the beast brakes, reduces speed. At the far end of the runway it swings abruptly to the left and rolls toward the three-gate terminal, where an eager ground crew waits. In half an hour it’s gone again. People finish their cans of soda, pile back into their cars and pickups, and drive away.

I overhear a conversation between a young couple.

“One of these days it’ll be me in that thing.”

“You ever flown?”

“Sure have.”

“Where’d you fly?”

“Florida.”

“Vacation?”

“Yup. One of these days I’ll be gone for good. I’ll take you with me too.”

“To Florida?”

“Sure.”

They nuzzle briefly. The young man fishes a cigarette from his shirt pocket, puts it between his lips with a proletarian swagger, and lights it, cupping the flame. They stand in silence for a few moments longer, his dry, red-rashed skin a homely contrast to the buttery blue hue that glows under hers, then climb into his pickup and drive away.

I did not arrive in Oblivion by air. I came in on a truck that I’d hitched a ride with. The driver of the rig was a black man from Chicago. His name was Alex, and he said the only reason he picked me up was that he was bored and needed somebody to talk to. He played a tape of songs he had recorded from his collection of old sheet music.