However, he kept on going, not turning back; his hands felt numb, as if they were lifeless. He was exhausted. I know there’re going to be other bombs or explosions, he said to himself. They landed one on the Bay Area and they’ll keep shooting them off at us. In the sky overhead he saw now flashes of light in quick succession and then after a time a distant rumble seized his bus and made it buck and quake. Bombs .going off up there, he decided. Maybe our defenses. But there will be more getting through.
Then, too, there was the radiation.
Drifting overhead, now, the clouds of what he knew to be deadly radiation passed on north, and did not seem to be low enough yet to affect life on the surface, his life and that of the bushes and trees along the road. Maybe we’ll wither and die in another few days, he thought. Maybe it’s only a question of time. Is it worth hiding? Should I head north, try to escape? But the clouds were moving north. I better stay here, he said to himself, and try to find some local shelter. I think I read somewhere once that this is a protected spot; the winds blow on past West Marin and go inland, toward Sacramento.
And still he saw no one. Only the girl—the only person he had seen since the first great bomb and the realization of what it meant. No cars. No people on foot. They’ll be showing up from down below pretty soon, he reasoned. By the thousands. And dying as they go. Refugees. Maybe I should get ready to help. But all he had in his VW truck were pipes and cans of tobacco and bottles of California wine from small vintners; he had no medical supplies and no know-how. And anyhow he was over fifty years old and he had a chronic heart problem called paroxysmal tachycardia. It was a wonder, in fact, that he had not had an attack of it back there when he was making love with the girl.
My wife and the two kids, he thought. Maybe they’re dead. I just have to get back to Petaluma. A phone call? Absurd. The phones are certainly out. And still he drove on, pointlessly, not knowing where to go or what to do. Not knowing how much danger he was in, if the attack by the enemy was over or if this was just the start. I could be wiped out any second, he realized.
But he felt safe in the familiar VW bus, which he had owned for six years now. It had not been changed by what had happened; it was sturdy and reliable, whereas—he felt—the world, the rest of things, all had undergone a permanent, dreadful metamorphosis.
He did not wish to look.
What if Barbara and the boys are dead? he asked himself. Oddly, the idea carried with it the breath of release. A new life, as witness me meeting that girl. The old is all over; won’t tobacco and wines be very valuable now? Don’t I in actual fact have a fortune here in this bus? I don’t have to go back to Petaluma ever; I can disappear, and Barbara will never be able to find me. He felt buoyed up, cheerful, now.
But that would mean—God forbid—he would have to abandon his shop, and that was a horrible notion, overlain with the sense of peril and isolation. I can’t give that up, he decided. That represents twenty years of gradually building up a good customer-relationship, of genuinely finding out people’s wants and serving them.
However, he thought, those people are possibly dead now, along with my family. I have to face it: everything has changed, not merely the things I don’t care for.
Driving slowly along, he tried to cogitate over each possibility, but the more he cogitated the more confused and uneasy he became. I don’t think any of us will survive, he decided. We probably all have radiation exposure; my relationship with that girl is the last notable event in my life, and the same for her—she is no doubt doomed too.
Christ, he thought bitterly. Some numbskull in the Pentagon is responsible for, this; we should have had two or three hours warning, and instead we got—five minutes. At the most!
He felt no animosity toward the enemy, now; he felt only a sense of shame, a sense of betrayal. Those military saps in Washington are probably safe and sound down in their concrete bunkers, like Adolf Hitler at the end, he decided. And we’re left up here to die. It embarrassed him; it was awful.
Suddenly he noticed that on the seat beside him lay two empty shoes, two worn slippers. The girl’s. He sighed, feeling weary. Some momento, he thought with gloom.
And then he thought in excitement, It’s not a momento; it’s a sign—for me to stay here in West Marin, to begin all over again here. If I stay here I’ll run into her again; I know I will. It’s just a question of being patient. That’s why she left her shoes; she already knew it, that I’m just beginning my life here, that after what’s happened I won’t—can’t—leave. The hell with my shop, with my wife and children, in Petaluma.
As he drove along he began to whistle with relief and glee.
There was no doubt in the mind of Bruno Bluthgeld now; he saw the unceasing stream of cars all going one way, going north toward the highway that emptied into the countryside. Berkeley had become a sieve, out of which at every hole leaked the people pressing upward from beneath, the people from Oakland and San Leandro and San Jose; they were all passing through along the streets that had become one-way streets, now. It’s not me, Doctor Bluthgeld said to himself as he stood on the sidewalk, unable to cross the street to get to his own car. And yet, he realized, even though it is real, even though it is the end of everything, the destruction of the cities and the people on every side, I am responsible.
He thought, In some way I made it happen.
I must make amends, he told himself. He clasped his hands together, tense with concern. It must unhappen, he realized. I must shut it back off.
What has happened is this, he decided. They were developing their arrangements to injure me but they hadn’t counted on my ability, which in me seems to lie partly in the subconscious. I have only a dubious control over it; it emanates from suprapersonal levels, what Jung would call the collective unconscious. They didn’t take into account the almost limitless potency of my reactive psychic energy, and now it’s flowed back out at them in response to their arrangements. I didn’t will it to; it simply followed a psychic law of stimulus and response, but I must take moral responsibility for it anyhow; because it is I, the greater I, the Self which transcends the conscious ego. I must wrestle with it, now that it’s done its work contra the others. Surely it has done enough; isn’t, in fact, the damage too great?
But no, it was not too great, in the pure physical sense, the pure realm of action and reaction. A law of conservation of energy, a parity, was involved; his collective unconscious had responded commensurate to the harm intended by the others. Now, however, it was time to atone for it; that was, logically, the next step. It had expended itself… or had it? He felt doubt and a deep confusion; had the reactive process, his meta-biological defense system, completed its cycle of response, or was there more?
He sniffed the atmosphere, trying to anticipate. The sky, an admixture of particles: debris light enough to be carried. What lay behind it, concealed as in a womb? The womb, he thought, of pure essence within me, as I stand here debating. I wonder if these people driving by in these cars, these men and women with . their blank faces—I wonder if they know who I am. Are they aware that I am the omphalos, the center, of all this cataclysmic disruption? He watched the passing people, and presently he knew the answer; they were quite aware of him, that he was the source of this all, but they were afraid to attempt any injury in his direction. They had learned their lesson.