Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future Page 12

  We got my boots on and Benny waited outside the stall in the john while I shuddered through a few explosive moments of diarrhea. When we got outside, the cold air revived me a bit, and I leaned on Benny as we walked the two blocks to the Student Health Service. Halfway there, it all came back at once. I panicked and ran. Benny caught up with me and we lurched on together, his hand under my arm.

  Then a blur: we got into the infirmary but I fell down while he was talking to the receptionist, they carried me behind a curtain and put me on a table, I tried to answer her questions but didn’t make much sense, tried to keep my hands at my sides but they kept wandering in the air, finally my whole body was bucking in convulsions and a man came in and rolled me over and pulled down my jeans, I felt the cold hypodermic nozzle against my hip and a sharp sting when it went off. Then everything stopped, like a switch being thrown. I went limp. The man tucked my blouse back in and helped me roll over. “Rest for a while.” I stared at the ceiling and reveled in the absence of symptoms, of desperation. What was it? Food poisoning? What had I eaten that Benny hadn’t—the hot dog! On the street. Benny said they made them out of anything, carcasses of animals from the pound and the zoo. Spices covered any odd flavor. I kidded him about his weak stomach and said I liked the idea of eating hippopotamus. Not anymore. I sat up. I felt fine, just light-headed. Cotton in my ears. I watched the clock. I would look away for a long time and look back and only seconds had passed. I looked at all the bottles and instruments around the room and wished I had a book.

  My hearing returned (or maybe I just started listening) and I realized there was a man in the area next to me, softly crying. Another man was talking to him very quietly. I felt sorry for their lack of privacy, only a draped sheet between us. I fidgeted, itching from the diarrhea, and wished this godforsaken planet had bathtubs. I unbuttoned my blouse and buttoned it up right Got off the table and used a square of gauze to blow my nose, feeling vaguely guilty. We make hospitals into holy places and their appurtenances, icons. I dutifully got back on the table and the doctor came in.

  “Are you feeling better?” She was a dully-looking woman in her fifties, white hair pulled severely back over a permanent expression of disapproval.

  “I feel fine. Was it food poisoning?”

  “Food poisoning.” She stuck a thermometer in my mouth and read it “No, you had an acute anxiety attack. A small nervous breakdown. We’ve had a lot of them the past week. Aren’t exams over?”

  I nodded. It was all in my mind?

  “You’re worried about grades?”

  “No… it… it’s not school.”

  “Trouble with your parents? A man?”

  “Partly. I guess that’s it.” No, actually, I’m afraid a group of wild-eyed revolutionaries is going to tie me down and force-feed me sleeping pills and booze. Then they’ll kill Benny. Then the FBI will throw both our bodies in jail. Then the United States will blast the Worlds out of the sky. So what’s new with you?

  She rattled a bottle of pills that she had been holding out to me. I took it from her. “That tranquilizer you got will last a few hours. Take one of these before each meal, for the next month.”

  “Klonexine?” I read.

  “It’s a drug that inhibits the release of norepinephrine. Do you know what that is?”

  “I was never strong in science.”

  “It’s a hormone that, among other things, causes what happened to you, after a long period of stress. The pills will keep it from happening for a month. Do you fly?”

  “No.”

  “Good. You shouldn’t operate any vehicle, or participate in any dangerous sport, while you’re taking Klonexine. Your body won’t release adrenaline in case of danger. Otherwise, there are no side effects.”

  “Afterwards, when I stop taking it, will it come back again?”

  “Usually not. If it does, I’ll give you some more, schedule you for some—”

  “But I’ll be in Europe. Yugoslavia, I think.”

  She looked at me for a second and got another bottle out of a drawer. “Well, continue if you have to. But then we’ll schedule some therapy when you get back, if you’re still sick.

  “Ultimately, you have to either adjust your personality so it will cope with the stress, or remove the sources of stress. Make up with your parents, ditch the boyfriend, whatever it is. If you take these pills for too long, a year or so, you’ll never be able to function without them.”

  “I understand.”

  “Is there someone waiting for you?”

  “Yes.” She nodded and hurried out the door.

  Benny and I went back to my room and lay together for a few hours, talking quietly. I think the episode upset him almost as much as it did me. Not as deeply, though. Would I ever be able to trust my mind and my body again?

  In the afternoon we walked aimlessly, down to the Village and back again. Benny tried to convince me not to worry—not because the troubles weren’t worrisome, but because there was nothing to be gained by it—and he succeeded in some measure. We wound up in a flamenco club, watching the dancers and drinking brandy and coffee. That was probably a pharmaceutical mistake, since I’m not used to either, and I guess I was the most wide-awake drunk in the dorm that night But it did bury the blues. Benny and I talked until early morning, mainly about the tour.

  When I woke up he was dressed and putting on his coat. He said he hadn’t wanted to wake me; he didn’t like good-byes. I hugged him close and whispered, “Route Five, Lancaster Mills, Perkins.” He squeezed my arm and left without a word.

  30

  1,156 leagues under the sea

  The transatlantic tunnel is older than the U.S. system by some twenty years: slower, bumpier, noisier. It takes four hours to get from New York to Dover, and you learn not to let your tongue get between your teeth. I took the seat next to Jeff, but we gave up trying to talk after a few minutes. I was never so glad for hangover pills.

  The train had a newspaper machine; I splurged on a complete (five-dollar) New York Times. Four hours was not enough time to read it all, even skipping sports.

  Yesterday, while I was walking around in a numb haze with Benny, stocks worth ten billion dollars changed hands on Wall Street. Twenty people died in crimes of violence. The residents of Gramercy Park defeated a local referendum that would limit the size of personal pets. The Emir of Qatar and his entourage were scheduled to arrive on a state visit, coming by sea in a yacht that comprised half of the emirate’s navy. Last-minute Christmas shoppers “thronged” the city (it was crowded enough unthronged; the population of Manhattan tripled every workday with commuters from all over the country). The “Entertainment” section listed 480 Stars in 48 different categories, ranked according to Gallup’s daily poll. There was a birthday party for Major Tobias Klass, who at 142 was the oldest living veteran of the Vietnam war. Thirteen pages of referenda to be voted on in various localities. Advertisements covered exactly half of each page, and they were interesting, sometimes for their subtlety. They sponsored the only comic strips in the paper.

  There was an interview with a broker who commuted daily between London and New York. She left her London residence at 8:45, caught the 9:00 tube at Dover, got into New York at 8:00, worked until 5:00, caught the 6:00 to Dover, which arrived at 3:00 a.m., allowing her five and a half solitary hours in London before starting over. She said she slept better on the tube than anywhere else, and it was cheaper than maintaining a separate residence in New York, appropriate to her social status. She couldn’t find a decent flat for forty thousand a month?

  The “Space” section had no mention of the upcoming referendum in New New. Maybe that had been covered in yesterday’s edition. No editorials, either, which seemed strange. The Times was the most Worlds-aware paper in the city, maybe in the country. They did note that there was a face-to-face meeting between New New’s Coordinators and the Church Council of Devon’s World, the first such meeting in over a decade.

  Every establishment on Broadwa
y had a display ad in the “Classified” section. They were marvels of euphemism and double entendre. The individual “personals” were interesting, too: will psychoanalyze your cat, trade boxing gloves & equipment for books, seek male or female for Legendre triune, must be under twenty-five and broad-minded; secrets of the universe revealed, fifty dollars, satisfaction guaranteed; make big money on your phone/ stuffing envelopes/ in your spare time/and save your fellow men from themselves.

  I had to admit that New York was a world more complex and exciting than all the Worlds rolled together. In the three months since I stepped out of Penn Station I hadn’t gone more than twenty kilometers in any direction, but I’d done more and had more done to me than in twenty-one years in New New. (Actually, it may have been more than twenty kilometers when Benny and I took the floater up above the city. It looked so peaceful, a medieval vision of the Heavenly City, with all of the graceful post-Worlds sky-scrapers seeming to float on the top of the cloud. What does it do to a person’s outlook to live or work surrounded by that scene?) It occurred to me that this whirlwind tour might actually be a relaxing change, if I kept the right attitude.

  It didn’t start out relaxing. The Dover terminus was as big and crowded as Penn Station, with the same sort of determined mindless bustle, like a hive of frenzied insects each bent on his own mysterious assignment. We stood in a stationary knot around our luggage while the tour director went off to find somebody.

  “Almost makes you homesick,” Jeff said. Depends on where home is. The population density of New New is higher than any Earth city’s, but you never see so many in one place. I’d gotten used to it in New York, and was ready for it in London, but wanted the rest of England to be slow-paced and, well, dignified.

  The director came back and led us down a long slide-walk to the Bank of England, where we made credit arrangements and were issued Temporary Alien blinker cards. At least that was a touch of home; Britain had advanced beyond currency and coins.

  Since our passports and luggage had been stamped and inspected aboard the train, we were free to be herded away. We went up three long escalators and stepped out into the night. (It was two in the afternoon, New York time; seven here.) It was very still, not too cold, and a light snow was falling. We filed down a dry raised sidewalk to where a bus, omnibus, was waiting. It was an eight-wheeled double-deck vehicle with a disconcerting number of dents, but brightly polished.

  Dover’s famous “white cliffs” were behind us, which didn’t make much difference, since it was too dark to see anything beyond the parking-lot lights. We got aboard and drove through a couple of blocks of nondescript modern buildings, and then out into the countryside, which was probably very picturesque, but unfortunately was not visible. All we could see was a pool of light on the road and vague shadows on either side.

  After a few minutes we turned into a driveway and slowly crawled up a hill. The road had a couple of centimeters of snow on it and, from the crunching sound, seemed to be only gravel underneath. A large old house sat on top of the hill, yellow light streaming out of small windows on the ground floor. It was made of stone, covered with dead ivy, and the guides said it had been used as an inn for nearly three hundred years.

  Our hostess, a florid fat woman, met us at the door and silently counted the people as they filed in. We were given a packet of information and a bed number; women to the right, men to the left.

  Our dormitory was a huge room with, I think, the highest ceilings I’d ever seen. Bunk beds along one wall, two footlockers across from each bed, linen folded neatly on each footlocker. It was cold and drafty.

  I was first one into the john, and made a delightful discovery: a bathtub! It was in a little closet separate from the toilets, with a sign-up sheet on the door. There was nobody signed up for the next half-hour (only four women in the room before we invaded), so I put down my name and went back to the footlocker for a towel.

  I locked the closet door and slid the blinker card into the paybox, two pounds for thirty minutes. About twenty dollars. I would have paid ten times that. The faucet coughed and began to splash hot water into the plastic tub. Slightly brown water, but it made a great cloud of steam. I undressed and stood in the water while the tub filled, loving the moist heat rising. When it was deep enough I sat into the delicious sting and leaned back. The water shut off and I lay there like a dormant reptile for half an hour. I’d brought the travel packet in but couldn’t get up the motivation to reach for it. The tub started to drain and somebody knocked.

  She started the tub while I was dressing—close quarters—and it turned out we were the same sort of outlanders, in a sense, as she’d come to New York from a farm in Kansas, and was also used to baths rather than showers.

  Something was nagging at me. It would catch up in a few hours.

  There were only a few people in the dormitory room. Most of them were on the back porch, smoking and talking. I would have joined them, for the talk, but didn’t want to go outside with wet hair. The woman on the bunk next to mine asked whether I played chess; we hauled a foot-locker between the beds and set up a board. She was good and I hadn’t played in years; the end game resembled Pearl Harbor.

  Her name was Violet Brooks and I liked the apologetic way she enveloped my troops and destroyed them. She was an undergraduate, a senior from Nevada. I was curious about that state but she didn’t want to talk too much about it. Said it wasn’t as bad as most people said, but she was never going back. No taste for anarchy. Not many jobs for English majors, either.

  We went into the “common” room, which was warmer and had tea and coffee, and leafed through our information packets. Violet had been to England once before, as a girl, when her mother had brought her along on a business trip. But she had only seen London, and claimed a week was scarcely enough to hit a few high points. We had eight days for the whole country.

  Jeff came in with a number of other men, all covered with snow and slightly redolent of brandy. They stood around the stove that was keeping the urns warm, talking loudly and joking. The hostess stuck her head in and gave them a dour look.

  They had been engaged in snow sculpture. Violet and I stepped outside for a few seconds to view their handiwork. It looked like a cross between a fat woman and a mountain of snow. They called it “the Venus of Dover.”

  Violet and I, it turned out, were the only students along who were not citizens of the United States. So we were free to take a side trip into the Supreme Socialist Union, which would not admit Americans. We decided to look into it—China, at least, was a fascinating prospect—though I suspected it would be too expensive. (Violet had plenty of money; her mother ran a bordello.) No need to decide until February.

  They had delayed dinner until ten, for our transatlantic stomachs, which made it only a couple of hours early. Bangers and mash, an authentic English meal, bland sausage with mashed potatoes. I didn’t mind it, but Jeff said he finally understood why the British had roamed the seas to forge an Empire: they were in search of a decent meal.

  A few warm beers afterward, and some excited talk about going into London tomorrow, and I went off to bed.

  Lying on the hard mattress, under a heavy quilt, I started sweating although I wasn’t particularly hot. Then dizziness and a sudden feeling of rootless horror—and I realized I’d forgotten to take the pill. The Klonexine from lunch had worn off.

  I got the bottle from my bag and rushed into the john and washed down a pill. Then I sat in one of the stalls, sweating, teeth chattering, waiting for it to take effect.

  I felt like crying out, or just crying, but managed to keep my jaws shut. And think, after a fashion.

  I may have made a dreadful mistake. Lulled by the drug. I wasn’t escaping anything, going east, just postponing trouble. I should have gone up instead. This world was no place for anyone with access to another. I should be down at the Cape, waiting for a seat. Going back to Daniel, to peace. Leaving this desperate planet to work out its own fate.

  The pill di
d its magic, corralling all of the norawhatzis into a safe place. I could almost talk myself back down. I had pretty well cut myself off from James and his group. Benny was resourceful. The Cape would be there when I got back. I got very sleepy. The sheet was damp and cold, but I lay very still and it warmed under me.

  I dreamed a montage: Benny held down and forced to take pills, my pills. Jacob’s Ladder coming down, hitting New York. Violet looking at me with James’s glass eyes. Jeff tying me up with padded ropes, naked, rampant.

  31

  London bridge

  When we got off the tube in London I was set to immerse myself in History and Culture—but the first sight was a weird combination of anatomy and abnormal psychology. The Lambs of the Eternal Eye.

  There were about a dozen Lambs in a line, begging, as we got off the train. They wore saffron robes and made soft music with finger-cymbals and sticks. Their skulls had been surgically removed from the eyebrows up, replaced with clear plastic, a sight presumably more pleasing to God’s eye than to mine.

  They had stationed themselves wisely, as their tin plate full of foreign coins and currency showed. A blinker-card economy is hard on beggars; they had to get to foreigners before the Bank of England did, or on their way home.

  One of them carried a sign saying THE BRITISH RAIL SYSTEM DOES NOT ENDORSE THIS ACTIVITY.

  London taxis have human drivers. Eight of us squeezed into a cavernous black vehicle; Jeff told him the name of our hotel. We emerged from underground into bright morning sunlight and blue sky—garish after months of New York’s perpetual cloud.

  The driver had an impenetrable accent (Cockney, I later learned), and chattered constantly. We drove down the Thames and sped by Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park—the Albert Memorial was almost majestic in its ugliness—and finally down into Kensington, where our hotel was. One man was trying to follow our progress on a map, and remarked that we were being taken for a ride in American idiom as well as British fact. I think the driver said this was the fastest route for this time of day.