“I never said it was from them,” said Bobby, who looked first at my mother and then searched the room until he found my face, but I pretended not to notice.
When we left, my mother took me by the hand, her red fingernails digging into my wrist. “Don’t talk,” she said, “just don’t say another word.” She sent me to my room and I fell asleep with my clothes on still formulating my apology.
The next morning when I hear the bells, I grab a loaf of bread and wait on the porch until they come back up the hill. Then I stand in their path.
“Now what d’you want?” Bobby says.
I offer the loaf, like a tiny baby being held up to God in church. The weeping girl cries louder, her sister clutches Bobby’s arm. “What d’you think you’re doing?” he shouts.
“It’s a present.”
“What kind of stupid present is that? Put it away! Jesus Christ, would you put it down?”
My arms drop to my sides, the loaf dangles in its bag from my hand. Both girls are crying. “I just was trying to be nice,” I say, my voice wavering like the Bird Woman’s.
“God, don’t you know anything?” Bobby says. “They’re afraid of our food, don’t you even know that?”
“Why?”
“’Cause of the bombs, you idiot. Why don’t you think once in a while?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The goats rattle their bells and the cart shifts back and forth. “The bombs! Don’t you even read your history books? In the beginning of the war we sent them food packages all wrapped up the same color as these bombs that would go off when someone touched them.”
“We did that?”
“Well, our parents did.” He shakes his head and pulls the reigns. The cart rattles past, both girls pressed against him as if I am dangerous.
“Oh, we were so happy!” my father says, rocking into the memory. “We were like children, you know, so innocent, we didn’t even know.”
“Know what, Pop?”
“That we had enough.”
“Enough what?”
“Oh, everything. We had enough everything. Is that a plane?” he looks at me with watery blue eyes.
“Here, let me help you put your helmet on.”
He slaps at it, bruising his fragile hands.
“Quit it, Dad. Stop!”
He fumbles with arthritic fingers to unbuckle the strap but finds he cannot. He weeps into his spotted hands. It drones past.
Now that I look back on how we were that summer, before the tragedy, I get a glimmer of what my father’s been trying to say all along. It isn’t really about the cakes, and the mail order catalogs, or the air travel they used to take. Even though he uses stuff to describe it that’s not what he means. Once there was a different emotion. People used to have a way of feeling and being in the world that is gone, destroyed so thoroughly we inherited only its absence.
“Sometimes,” I tell my husband, “I wonder if my happiness is really happiness.”
“Of course it’s really happiness,” he says, “what else would it be?”
We were under attack is how it felt. The Manmensvitzenders with their tears and fear of bread, their strange clothes and stinky goats were children like us and we could not get the town meeting out of our heads, what the adults had considered doing. We climbed trees, chased balls, came home when called, brushed our teeth when told, finished our milk, but we had lost that feeling we’d had before. It is true we didn’t understand what had been taken from us, but we knew what we had been given and who had done the giving.
We didn’t call a meeting the way they did. Ours just happened on a day so hot we sat in Trina Needles’s playhouse fanning ourselves with our hands and complaining about the weather like the grownups. We mentioned house arrest but that seemed impossible to enforce. We discussed things like water balloons, T.P.ing. Someone mentioned dog shit in brown paper bags set on fire. I think that’s when the discussion turned the way it did.
You may ask, who locked the door? Who made the stick piles? Who lit the matches? We all did. And if I am to find solace, twenty-five years after I destroyed all ability to feel that my happiness, or anyone’s, really exists, I find it in this. It was all of us.
Maybe there will be no more town meetings. Maybe this plan is like the ones we’ve made before. But a town meeting is called. The grownups assemble to discuss how we will not be ruled by evil and also, the possibility of widening Main Street. Nobody notices when we children sneak out. We had to leave behind the babies, sucking thumbs or blanket corners and not really part of our plan for redemption. We were children. It wasn’t well thought out.
When the police came we were not “careening in some wild imitation of barbaric dance” or having seizures as has been reported. I can still see Bobby, his hair damp against his forehead, the bright red of his cheeks as he danced beneath the white flakes that fell from a sky we never trusted; Trina spinning in circles, her arms stretched wide, and the Manmensvitzender girls with their goats and cart piled high with rocking chairs, riding away from us, the jingle bells ringing, just like in the old song. Once again the world was safe and beautiful. Except by the town hall where the large white flakes rose like ghosts and the flames ate the sky like a hungry monster who could never get enough.
HOW WE GOT IN TOWN AND OUT AGAIN
by Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem is the best-selling author of Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, and several other novels, his most recent being You Don’t Love Me Yet. His first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, won the William L. Crawford Award, the Locus Award, and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. Lethem has published more than 60 short stories, in a diverse range of markets, from The New Yorker and McSweeney’s to F&SF and Asimov’s; his first collection, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, won the World Fantasy Award. In 2005, he was presented with the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his contributions to literature.
“How We Got in Town and Out Again” is one of a sequence of stories by Lethem railing against virtual reality technologies. In an interview in Science Fiction Studies, Lethem said “I didn’t set out… to write a series of stories… examining my own resistance to that technology. But living in San Francisco during the years of an intense kind of utopian ideological boom in virtual reality and computer technologies, I felt an instinctive need to represent my own skepticism about claims that were being made that seemed to me naïve. …And so I found these resistance stories coming out of me.”
Combine that with Lethem’s research into 1930s dance marathons, and you’ve got this story.
When we first saw somebody near the mall Gloria and I looked around for sticks. We were going to rob them if they were few enough. The mall was about five miles out of the town we were headed for, so nobody would know. But when we got closer Gloria saw their vans and said they were scapers. I didn’t know what that was, but she told me.
It was summer. Two days before this Gloria and I had broken out of a pack of people that had food but we couldn’t stand their religious chanting anymore. We hadn’t eaten since then.
“So what do we do?” I said.
“You let me talk.” said Gloria.
“You think we could get into town with them?”
“Better than that,” she said. “Just keep quiet.”
I dropped the piece of pipe I’d found and we walked in across the parking lot. This mall was long past being good for finding food anymore but the scapers were taking out folding chairs from a store and strapping them on top of their vans. There were four men and one woman.