Time to Go (8 page)

Mrs. Longmore has been known to use any excuse or lie to get into one of her apartments to see if the tenant's installed a new heavy appliance without notifying her for the surcharge on the rent, so I tell her to calm herself, the only war currently raging is between our son and his folks, and to quiet my own nerves I turn on the radio to a classical music station which at this hour only plays Baroque.

The announcer's speaking only a little less hysterically than Mrs. Longmore about a civil war taking place. I figure it's this very station's radio play about a war that's disturbing her. I switch stations to prove my point, but they're all giving the same kind of news.

The insurrection, as the newscaster I settle on puts it, began last night in a northeast college community when a band of students beat up three policemen who the students said had for no reason clubbed a friend of theirs, though the police claim the student they clubbed had first beaten up an elderly park employee who had courteously informed the student of the park's curfew law. Though opinions differ on how the disturbance started, the police then called for reinforcements, who came with the suburb's one armored car. The police tried breaking up the students' demonstration in the park with nightsticks, the students beat them back with rocks and chemical sprays, the police fired tear gas canisters, and when these were hurled back with makeshift fire bombs, rifles, and two students were killed. Hundreds of enraged students on campus banded into an armed mob and overwhelmed the police guarding the park, with several fatalities on both sides, and used the cannon in the armored car to blow up the police barracks. They then seized the local radio station and broad casted appeals to students and workers to join them in the streets to rid the area of its homicidal police and those public servants who use these police for private self-serving ends. The radio station was destroyed by armored cars summoned from nearby suburbs, though by this time thousands of students and some workers were battling guardsmen and police in the area and eventually throughout the Northeast Region. Students in many university communities in the North and Southwest Regions learned of the fighting and also rebelled. Over commandeered radio stations they declared a national revolt in the name of sanity and peace against all institutions, groups and persons who opposed the revolt, and that they soon hoped to meet their Eastern and Central revolutionary comrades to form a united provisional government that would coordinate the postwar effort if they won, or else all underground activities if the open rebellion failed.

Georgia, Jimmy and Mrs. Longmore huddle around me when the newscaster says the president's about to make an address of unprecedented importance from his emergency headquarters. We turn on the television and stare at the president's seal for a while. Then the president appears, looking no more harried than he was in all his previous heralded addresses of proven unimportance, and says his historical residence, Defense and Justice Buildings and National Art Museum have been shelled and nearly taken this morning, but the Capitol and entire Central Region surrounding it are now back under complete government control. “By late today, or early tomorrow, this so-called rebellion by university thugs, high school toughs, innocent dupes seduced by the slogans of strife, and those alien agitators working for the countries most likely to gain by the collapse of our political and economic system, will have ended. And then that part of the world still in chains though ever hopeful of future freedom, and those allied nations not in chains only because of the military might behind our country's freedom, will once more breathe easier knowing our nation is at peace again.”

He's suddenly cut off. There's nothing on the screen now but the jittery specks we usually only get with bad reception. Then the word “liberated” appears, followed by a voiceover saying “In the name of the common people of this country and those, via television satellite, of the world.”

A young man in work clothes and with a rifle strapped to his back faces the camera from behind a lectern. He says he's the regional spokesman for the national revolution and gives a report of the war up to now. Guerrilla units are fighting counterrevolutionary forces in all Northern and Southern regions, and despite what the president just said, in the Central Region and Capitol as well. Many large sections of small major cities and many small sections of large major cities are in the hands of the revolutionaries. The battle for the country's principal war-works city was lost at a cost of hundreds of lives to both armies, though military production there has been set back for years. “By tomorrow evening, or the evening after, half the population will be under rebel control. And once all five regions and the Capitol have been completely liberated, and it can only be with a second successful revolution here that the first real world revolution can begin, we will help all the common people of this globe free themselves from the international political-economic arrangement that is keeping them hungry and enslaved and the world perpetually on the verge of war and total annihilation. For a new day of eternal peace and freedom is fast approaching us,” he says, when he collapses from a bullet fired off-camera. Two soldiers in recognizable military dress drag him out by his hair. His cameraman's ordered to stand before the camera with his arms raised. A third revolutionary—the director of the newscast—is rifle-butted to the ground for reaching for a concealed weapon, though she gave ample warning to studio guards and home audience that she was going to search through her pockets for a handkerchief because she was about to sneeze.

An army officer kicks over the lectern and sits behind a desk.

He says the country's first widespread internal armed conflict in a hundred years has all but concluded and that every annexed radio and television station will be returned to its rightful ownership by tonight. He reviews the counterrevolution in progress. All sections of cities the revolutionary spokesman said were in rebel hands have been recaptured and pacified. Guerrilla units are rapidly being smoked out and eliminated and no longer pose a national or regional threat. The president is returning to a thoroughly becalmed Capitol and will spend the evening in his historical residence. The country's leading defense industry city will resume normal production at the start of the regular work day tomorrow. “All citizens in this area are urged to return to their homes till further notice, as an indefinite curfew begins in two hours. Stay tuned to this or any of your other legitimately run stations for a continuation of the president's address and important news bulletins, advisements, and information regarding the country's planned victory celebration.” Then there's an unusually long series of commercials followed by the soap opera Mrs. Longmore says she always puts on at this hour. She returns to her apartment to watch it.

“I guess this means Jimmy's dental appointment is canceled,” Georgia says, “and it took two months to get. And what about your recital, Phil? You'll have rented a hall nobody's allowed to come to. And Dad!” meaning her father who lives with us and spends every day in the park's chess house downtown. We run to the window, but he isn't on the street. At the windows of brownstones across the street and on either side of us are people anxiously eyeing the pedestrians hurrying to get home or to buy goods before the curfew begins.

“Check the refrigerator,” I say.

“Forget the refrigerator. We've got to find Dad.”

I yell out the window if anyone's heard if our city and particularly the park has been physically touched by the war. But it seems the people in the buildings don't want to be distracted from catching sight of their close ones and the people in the street are in too much of a hurry to answer me.

I switch to every radio and television station to see if there's any news about the city's involvement in the war. All the radio keeps saying is for everyone to stay tuned to his television, and the only television programs are the ones normally on, with messages moving at the bottom of the screen urging all viewers to remain home or return home but stay tuned because important news bulletins will follow.

I dial the chess house, parks department, police, newspaper and the two cronies my father-in-law always meets at the chess house and then the telephone operator as to why I can't reach any of these numbers, but right after each dialing a recorded voice tells me the number I'm calling is temporarily out of service and that I should stay tuned to my television set because important news bulletins are going to be made.

I ring the doorbells of all my neighbors. The only person who'll tear himself away from his television long enough to speak to me briefly through the door says he hasn't heard anything about the city's part in the war. “Though there was an announcement just before that tomorrow and the next day will be wage-paid holidays for all workers and government-subsidized ones for all businesses because the rebellion was crushed. And that all TV programs will be preempted in a few minutes for a four-hour special on the revolt, with live coverage of the most damaged areas in the country, videotape highlights of the last bloody battles, and the president conducting a walking tour of the partially ravaged Capitol.”

Georgia pleads with me to try to find her father in the hour we have left before the curfew. “That way I'll always know we did everything possible to find him.”

I leave the building. The weather's clear and the neighborhood as peaceful as on an average summer Sunday: stores grated and locked, most of the apartment windows shaded and closed, an occasional car or motorcycle driving past, a solitary couple at a bus stop. They know less than I about what's happened in this city, as their television broke down an hour ago and they're going to a friend's house to watch the special.

I start to jog to the park's chess house. Little by little I see signs that perhaps a minor disturbance took place. A broken car window…an abandoned bike…a row of garbage cans turned over…a speeding police car and army truck with their emergency lights on. Then that a riot if not a fierce battle took place, with stores without windows…buildings without walls…streets without buildings, and smoke, flames, bodies, limbs, teeth, hair…I head home. This time across the park, which was bombed and strafed. Past the gutted chess house. Through several residential neighborhoods: now smoldering mounds of debris. My own street's been torn up while I was gone, my building blown apart. Only the old-fashioned marble staircase remains, ending in the sky. “Georgia,” I scream. “Jimmy!” I shout their names repeatedly as I dig and pick away at the rubble.

The super comes out of a hole in the ground where the entrance to his basement apartment was. “No use wasting your energy and voice doing that, Mr. Devine. Whole building's occupants either been wiped out or buried under or went scrambling out of here between the time the explosions started and the place caved in. Really can't say who was responsible for it all. Either the revolutionaries who rushed into the building and for one strategic reason or another set it off, or else the government tanks that came up the street chasing them. Didn't see any of your family leave, but that doesn't mean they didn't. I just know nobody else is around but my wife and me. We were the lucky ones, living so deep in the ground with no floor to fall from. All our friends used to say ‘Why do you want to live in a dungeon like that? Steam pipes all over your ceilings and no view but the next building's blank wall.' Now they know. Because I always felt this would happen one day, which is why I took this place and job. What do you think you're going to do now?”

I haven't been back in this city for nine years. First thing on arriving I go to our former street. Twenty-to thirty-story apartment buildings have gone up where our five-story buildings used to be. There are trees and shrubbery on the sidewalks now, and all the stores have become so sophisticated with their wares and window displays and exorbitantly priced: ours was a neighborhood of apparently poorer workingmen.

I check the tenant directory in the apartment house where our building and several others once stood. Only name I recognize from the old days is the super's and I ring his bell.

“Who is it?” he says over the intercom. He can't quite place the name so I say “You know: Georgia, Phil and Little and Big limbo from number thirty before it was blown up.” Now he remembers and he tells me to take the apartments A to L elevator to basement two.

“So how goes?” he says in the basement corridor. “And did you ever find any of your pretty family and your wife's dad?”

“Nope. They just never turned up or were found. How's your wife, father-in-law and son?”

“First wife cracked up, got a new one now, and I never had any in-laws or son. You must be mistaking me for another super.”

“How do you like your new building?”

“The walls are like cardboard, most of the plumbing and wiring's already shot, and it's either way overheated or drafty and cold. But it's a more cheerful looking and social place. And there are no rounded hallways and big staircases and high ceilings and such like the old one, which makes it easier for my staff and me to clean. Well, it's been good talking to you, Mr. Devine. And every bit of luck in your future living, okay?”

I press the elevator button for the lobby, but it takes me to the floor we lived on. Our hallway floor was made of a lively terrazzo and at the end of it was a casement window we threw open on the warmer days. On the walls were forged iron fixtures with light bulbs. This door would be where our thick oak one was if this was still our third floor. Georgia would be home now preparing dinner, and instead of using my keys today I think I'd ring the bell. She'd say “who's there, please?” and when I'd tell her, though first posing as a special delivery postman with a message about her missing husband or maybe just a grocery boy, she'd open the door and say how unusual it is for me to forget my keys. I'd kiss her lips, ask where's our son. She'd yell out the window “Jimmy, your father's home,” or “Dinner's ready,” or “Come quick—the surprise of your life is here.” The front door would still be open. I'd hear him run upstairs. He could take the elevator of this new building, but like me he likes racing up rounded stairways. But I'm getting confused. Our building was destroyed, this one went up in its place. The same super's downstairs—that's true: ten years older and with a different wife, though he said he never had an in-law or son. If Georgia's on this floor it's because she moved in some time after the building was constructed, and because of a number of errors, neither of us was told the other was alive, and the super might not have told me she's here because over the years he's developed mental blocks about certain people, events and times. I'd knock on the door. I'd knock because I don't live in this building and never had the keys. She'd open the door. Jimmy would be there and they'd be overjoyed at seeing me, we'd all kiss and hug. I'd tell them how neither my hands and then the most advanced digging equipment could turn up any of their remains. How I stayed in the city for a year, each day canvassing all the police stations for some word of them, till I was told to give up or at least stop pestering the police, so I got a job with a Central Region orchestra, remarried, had two children, Laurel and Rose. Then a revolution started in Central. I was on tour, my wife and children were at home, they too were never found. We had the basement apartment—I'd taken that safeguard of my former super's just in case there would be another revolution—but this time the building fell on top of it rather than around. The revolution ended as quickly as the last one. One of the sides won. The other side is now in power. It seems there's going to be another revolution there, which is why I came to this city. I'd heard that because of the extensive death and devastation of the last revolution here, this region had become the most peaceful of the five. She'd tell me her story. While I was searching for her father, she and Jimmy were watching the television special when suddenly all the electricity went and seconds later the building fell apart. Both were quickly hospitalized in different cities and were incoherent for a year till a relief agency brought them together again. “No, that's not how it happened,” Jimmy would say. “I was in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, when the tap stopped running and then the windows and walls went. Just as I was looking at Mom through the space where the living room wall used to be, the floor under me went also. Then I don't remember anything but a lot of tumbling, and next thing I know it's a year later and Mom's holding me.”