Warday

WHITLEY A Survivor’s Tale

The survivor’s tale is the essential document of our time. All of us have them; even babies have them. To be born now is no guarantee that you will not be touched by Warday. Indeed, birth makes it certain.

So we are all survivors, and those of us who actually lived through that day carry our histories with us, our stories of how we did it, of what particular luck or strength or cleverness saw us through.

We are not the people we were on that sharp October day in 1988. I see the change in my wife and son, certainly in my collaborator, Jim Kunetka. And in all whom I know. Sitting here with my pad and paper, I find that writing about it evokes obscure and powerful feelings. Am I bitter, or angry, or simply sad? So much of what I saw as basic to life is gone; what I counted valuable, worthless.

I have my own particular artifacts of that time, mostly small things and mostly relating to the security of my former life. I have been marked by the economic disaster as much as, or more than, by the radiation. In the final analysis, for so many of us, the closed bank and the worthless money are truer expressions of Warday than is some distant mushroom cloud. My last stock statement from Shearson/American Express, for example, is probably my most treasured talisman of the past. It reminds me of the fragility of complex things. Somehow, age has given it beauty. I can imagine that such a thing, covered with symbols and symbolic numbers, associated with a mythical time of plenty, could one day become an object of worship.

I open the document, smooth it out. My feelings about it are so strong that they are almost silly. I have sat staring for hours at the anachronistic names: Raytheon, General Foods, American Motors, Dow Chemical. I got eighteen gold dollars in the distribution of ’90. How ironic that nine hundred paper dollars will now buy a house. In 1987 you could spend more on a suit.

More even than to this paper, though, I cling to the memories of my family. These five years later I still find myself waiting for the phone to ring, expecting my younger brother, Richard, to be on the other end of the line. Richard, the determined, tiny rival, the childhood enemy who became as an adult my best friend, who understood me and whom I understood. Whom I loved. We talked every afternoon, no matter where we were in the world. So now, each day at four, I remember. That is my monument to him.

New York was my home in the eighties, and I was there on Warday. We remained there through the dangerous twilight that followed. In fact, the only reason I am alive now is that we stayed as long as we did.

I saw New York in her gaudy evening, and I saw her dead, and so—a little bit—I comprehend. My difficulty is with my childhood home, San Antonio. How a whole place, all of its people, all the details of its life, could just disappear is beyond my understanding.

Nobody would have put San Antonio on a list of prime targets—nobody except the Russians.

They thought not of the quiet streets or of the fun we had, but of the repair and refitting facilities at Kelly Air Force Base and of the burn center at Brooke General Hospital, and of the massive concentration of spare parts and equipment in the area. But they did not think of kids running through sprinklers, or of the River Walk or the genteel silence of the McNay Art Institute, or of the enormous, vital, striving Chicano population.

My family had a history in San Antonio. I was deeply connected to the place; in so many ways, my identity flowed from it. Though I lived in New York, I kept a membership in the San Antonio Writers’ Guild. When I was there I used to walk by the river for hours, and then eat Mexican food at Casa Rio. At age ten, I would sit in my father’s office in the Alamo National Bank Building and look out over the flat, smiling land and dream boy’s dreams, of having wings, or of riding shotgun on the stagecoach to Dallas.

How can it be that the place where I was formed is gone? The Alamo National Bank Building was a tremendous skyscraper, or so I remember it. Did it fall over at the end, crashing into Commerce Street, or did it simply disintegrate?

My brother had just opened his own law office there, on the eighteenth floor. Did he feel anything? Say anything? I visualize him on the phone, hearing a noise, glancing up, then gone. Or was it horrible and slow? Death by fire in an elevator? Or by suffocation in some sub-basement parking garage?

And my mother. Looking back to the placid life we knew, it seems so impossible that her fate was to be killed in a war. She was seventy-one years old, and for her the end was almost certainly instantaneous. She lived in an apartment house two stories high, of rather light construction. She was either there or at a neighbor’s house at the moment of death. Whichever was the case, there wouldn’t have been the least protection.

So many bombs exploding simultaneously over such a relatively small area caused the temperature to exceed that of the surface of the sun. People have told me that they heard the explosion in Oklahoma City and Monterrey, Mexico.

We are the first generation to see places instantly vaporized.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, but not so completely as this. In a vaporized place, not even rubble remains.

I understand so very well the thing that impels refugees to cluster at the borders of the San Antonio Red Zone. I myself have thought of going back. And yet the blackened land must be terrible to see, and the smell of it, the stench of millions of tons of rotting ash, almost beyond enduring.

I have thought of memorials. Many times I have copied out the forty-seven names of the members of my family who died in San Antonio. And I have wondered—are they all really dead? Ours was a prosperous clan. Maybe some of them were traveling. One aunt and uncle, for example, often went to Europe in the fall. Are they there now, perhaps engaged in a new life? They had investments in Germany; they could have got a refugee visa if they had applied for it early enough. But the rest—I have a feeling about them that is common to those who lost people close to them on Warday. They disappeared so suddenly and so completely that they don’t seem dead so much as lost. My relationships with them continue as if they will sometime soon come back and take up the thread.

We’ve all read and heard about the details of blast effect. But there is one detail that is usually overlooked: the heart does not understand this sort of death, neither the suddenness nor the scale.

Blast effect has trapped me in a maze of expectancy from which I cannot seem to escape.

I know a little bit more about blast effect. I was riding a Number 5 bus down Fifth Avenue when the New York Pattern detonated. Of course, I have thought many times about the consequences of the miss. I have wondered what subtle imbalance of technology caused it. And I have thought: a nuclear miss doesn’t mean much.

The city died of it anyway.

The bomb that would have exploded about eight thousand feet directly over my head detonated instead on the eastern edge of Queens.

As I sit here, my yellow pad in front of me, I find that my mind shifts focus from the broad to the tiny: the shin splints I had that day from too much jogging; the breakfast cereal I had eaten.

October 28, 1988.

I was trying to remember to call my sister in Houston, to congratulate her on becoming forty-four years of age.

But Pandora’s Box was sprung, and nobody was going to be making any phone calls for a while.

October 28, 1988: a clear blue afternoon, just pushing toward five o’clock. While I read the New York Post and sucked a Velamint, the world cracked asunder. I was sitting in the bus, just behind the rear exit door. I remember that it was one of the GM buses, with the darkly tinted windows. All of a sudden it was lit up inside with a chalky brilliance, a strange and unpleasantly hot light that penetrated everything.

Sudden darkness followed—due to our eyes, of course, being stunned by the intensity of the flash. The driver shouted, “Jesus Christ!” and stopped the bus. I just sat there. We all did. We couldn’t see a thing. I heard a horn honking.

Then the blast hit. There was no warning, just a sudden cataract of sound and wind. The bus rocked violently. There were deep thuds and shattering noises as pieces of roofing and glass came down. The noise rose and rose until I thought it would never stop.

People were trying to get out of the bus. I crouched down on the floor. My heart was pounding; I was gasping. I had my eyes shut tight. At that moment I was thinking in terms of a terrorist attack or maybe of the Con Ed plant in the East Thirties blowing up. The thought of a nuclear bomb didn’t occur to me until the noise subsided and my eyesight got back to normal. Then I looked out.

The chaos was so great that my mind simply went blank. I was vision only. The images swept all thought away. Windows were broken, cars were up on the sidewalk, and people were running, staggering, lying in the street. A dark yellow haze of dust cast everything in eerie light.

My first clear thought was of my family. My son was in the third grade at Grace Church School and taking an after-school gymnastics class. As far as I knew, my wife was at home. I thought I’d better call her and tell her that there had been some kind of an explosion but I was all right and not to worry. By this time the driver had gotten the doors open. He was trying to restart the bus and not getting anywhere at all. Of course, we didn’t know a single thing about electromagnetic pulse back then. He had no idea that the bus’s electronic ignition had been destroyed.

Because the bus was broken down, the driver gave us all transfers, and we filed off. A few people went to the Twentieth Street bus stop to wait for another bus. The wind was gone, its roar replaced by the sound of glass still raining down from above, the screams of the injured and the terrified, and a complex mix of car horns, sirens, the hissing of a broken fireplug, and the blue-streak cursing of a hot dog vendor whose cart had exploded.

Suddenly all I could think about was my boy. I started off down Fifth Avenue at a trot. It wasn’t long before I was turning east on Fourteenth. I knew by then that things were terribly wrong. People were lying everywhere, in every condition. Lots of them were bloody from flying glass, many more livid with flash burns. I did not know it, but I was bleeding too, the blood running down my neck and soaking my shirt like sweat. I’d had a slice taken out of my scalp that I wouldn’t feel until much later.

I saw gangs of kids coming out of the Fourteenth Street stores with everything you could name in their hands: radios, records, clothes, candy bars. They were laughing and shrieking. I saw one of them get blown almost in half by a storekeeper with a shotgun.

My mind was still far from clear. I just couldn’t seem to grasp what had happened. There was no reason to think that there had been a nuclear attack, though I kept considering and then rejecting that thought. U.S.-Soviet tensions weren’t high. There’d been no sign of impending conflict, none at all. In fact, the news was full of the reestablishment of detente.

It was the sky over Queens and Brooklyn that enforced the notion of a nuclear bomb. Through the dusty air I could see ash-black clouds shot through with long red flames. These clouds were immense. They stretched up and up until they were lost in their own expanding billows. There was no impression of a mushroom cloud, but I knew that was what it was, a mushroom cloud seen so close that it didn’t look like a mushroom. The coldest, most awful dread I have ever known came upon me then.

I knew it for certain: a nuclear device had been exploded at the eastern edge of the city. I thought, My God, the lives. Later it was estimated that a million people had died in the instant of the explosion. Hundreds of thousands more were dying right now.

I was walking on a grate above the Fourteenth Street subway station when a blast of dank, dirty air from below practically blew me off my feet. It was accompanied by the most horrible screaming I have ever heard, then the nasty bellow of water. Though nobody knew it then, the tidal wave caused by the bombs that had detonated at sea had arrived and was filling the subway system.

Those screams still come to me in the night.

A man came up out of the station, wet from head to foot, his right arm dangling. “Agua,” he kept saying, “agua!” Then he made a bleating noise and staggered off into the swaying crowds.

My mind said: Grace Church School, Grace Church School, Grace Church School. I ran.

My greatest fear was fire.

I found the school closed and locked. There were lots of broken windows, but the lower floors were barred. I shouted and the Latin teacher opened the front door for me. Inside, the kids were sitting quietly in the great hall with their teachers.

“What’s going on?” Mr. Lewis asked me.

“I think we’ve been hit by an atomic bomb,” I replied.

He nodded. “We all think that.”

I went to my boy. He jumped up and flew into my arms, and then started screaming because he saw all the blood on my back.

The school nurse came over to tend the wound. She said I needed at least five stitches. But what could we do? I ended up with a brushing of Betadine and a bandage.

The phones weren’t working, so I couldn’t call Anne. It was then that I made the decision that saved my life.

I didn’t know it at the time, but like all people caught outside during the initial stages of the disaster, I had received a radiation dose. If I had gone out even another fifteen minutes at the height of the fallout period, I would have quickly dosed red and then lethaled. What kept me from doing so was my belief that my wife’s instinct would also be to come to the school and I was more likely to find her by waiting than by searching.

Not ten minutes later she appeared. She was wearing my felt hat and carrying an umbrella. I will never forget how it felt to kiss her at that moment, to feel her in my arms. And then Andrew said, “Let’s have a family hug.” We held each other, and I told them both what I thought had happened.

Anne is a practical person. She had no idea what had happened—in fact, her theory was that a volcano had erupted—but she suspected that in any case we might get hungry, so she’d brought a box of freeze-dried food we had put aside years ago for a camping trip and never used. She’d also brought a little news of home: the power was out, the radio and TV were dead, the phones weren’t working, and there was hardly any water pressure. Every window in the apartment was broken. The dishwasher was stopped on rinse and the clothes washer on spin. She reminded me that I had the video recorder set to tape a movie on HBO at five o’clock, and the power failure was going to mean that I would miss it.

Other parents were now arriving at the school. The Head moved the children into the gym, which had no windows, and we decided to make that a shelter for all the families who wanted to stay. Anne and I went to the locker room and took long showers.

Some of the parents who did not take this precaution died in days.

Others were unaffected. For the most part it depended on how long they had been outside, and whether or not they had been shielded from the initial burst of gamma rays from the blast. We had the church right there, of course, attached to the school. Grace is probably New York City’s most beautiful church, and it served us well in the next few days. It could be reached from the school without going outside. While the city died, we prayed there. At that time I wondered if humanity would prevail. Despite what was happening, I found myself trusting the goodness in us more than hating the violence. I still feel that way.

Of that night there remains with me the memory of a particular noise: footsteps on pavement. It was persistent thunder, and mixed with the cries of the hurt and desolate, it defined those hours.

By 6:00 P.M. the sky was black, the air very still, the sun a lifeless maroon shadow on the western horizon. Many parents were at the school, but not many families were complete. Some of the kids were still waiting. Some had left. They didn’t come back. Every so often another mother or father would appear out of the gloom, and we would count a victory.

By now it had occurred to us that there must be dangerous radiation, so we were trying to keep trips outside to a minimum, and had hung blankets over the windows.

Throughout the night, the rattle of walking continued as people crossed Manhattan, heading for the tunnels and bridges, trying to get out of the city on foot. Once we saw a fire truck—obviously too old to have an electronic ignition and so not immobilized by the electromagnetic pulse—making its way down Fourth Avenue, trying to negotiate a path among the reefs of stalled cars. It was soon lost in the gloom. The eastern sky glowed like the inside of a furnace, a deep, fearsome orange. Toward midnight it began to rain pieces of burning tar. They looked like meteors coming down into the streets and onto roofs. I thought then that this was the beginning of the end—the firestorm was crossing the river.

By this time the little group at Grace had become a community of sorts. We organized ourselves as best we could, trying to find our way to survival. There was no information, only the crowds and the confusion and the burning streaks of tar. Two of our group went to the roof to put out any fires that might start there. They held plastic dropcloths from the art room over their heads as protection from cinders and radiation. The fallout worried us even more than the fire. We knew little about it. Was there still too much radiation in the air, or should we join the exodus west instead of trying to fight the fire? We just couldn’t recall. On balance, most of us decided to remain at the school a little longer. At least we were reasonably safe there for the time being. We also had light from church candles, food from the school’s larder, and water from the tower, which we hoped wasn’t contaminated by radiation.

Our first case of radiation sickness started at about eleven that night. Meg Parks began sneezing. She had walked down First Avenue all the way from Eighty-ninth Street, where she had her office.

She was a psychiatrist, and her two girls were in the school. By 2:00 A.M., Meg had fever and was breaking out in a rash. She was vomiting and suffering from severe diarrhea. We tried to get water into her, and the school nurse gave her Kaopectate. But it was all quite useless. Her husband, Peter, still had not appeared, and by morning we decided to take her over to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

Bob Tucker and Fred Wallace volunteered to be stretcher bearers.

We suspected that the streets might be dangerous, so three more of us went along: Jerry Fielder, Tom Roote, and myself. As Tom had a .38, we considered ourselves relatively safe.

We were less concerned about radiation now. A brisk west wind had come up about midnight, blowing not only the firestorm away from Manhattan, but the fallout as well. As we went down the street, though, I wondered; our feet crunched on a thick dusting of ash. We kept on—it was unthinkable that we should just let Meg die because we were afraid to go out.

We carried her in a hammock made from a blanket. She lay quite still. She was coherent and she joked that swinging her in a hammock had to be the hardest labor any of us had done in years.

She was having frequent convulsions, and she looked very weak.

To the east the sky was now filled by a massive gray-white cloud. Closer, there were tall columns of smoke.

On our way across Thirteenth Street we counted many dead.

Forty, I think, all shot or beaten or, in one particularly horrible case, burnt. There were fires smoldering here and there, but nothing devastating. We didn’t know it, but at this time hundreds of thousands of people were dying on Long Island as the firestorm swept eastward.

We were a block away from St. Vincent’s when we understood our mistake. The crowds were so thick we couldn’t move a step forward. There was the disgusting tang of vomit on the air, and many people were lying in the street, sick to death and helpless. There were burned people everywhere, many of them also suffering from radiation sickness. We could hardly stand to see it. We fell silent, we turned away.

It was like the aftermath of a great battle. The hospital itself must have been a scene of unspeakable horror.

We took Meg back to the church, where she expired at four o’clock that afternoon, after a very hard five hours. The father of her daughters never showed up. I do not know what happened to the two Parks girls.

As soon as we were back at Grace, we all took long showers.

Anne and Andrew and I decided that we would remain inside this building, away from the windows, for as long as we could. We did not know then that the hot cloud from Washington was on its way up the seaboard, spreading extinction. If we had tried to leave then, we would have been caught in it with the millions whose footsteps still had not stopped.

The teachers organized activities. The children threw themselves into work on a folk song festival. Along with myself and Tucker and a couple of others, the rector of the church and the Head formed a survival committee. We inventoried the food and discovered that we could do about a thousand calories a day per person for two more weeks. We wouldn’t starve, but as far as quality was concerned, we were going to have protein problems.

There were cans of beans and soup, but the only meat was the six freeze-dried hamburgers Anne had brought. There was no longer any gas pressure, but we worked out a method of using the stove anyway. We found that we could heat food by building a fire from paper and pieces of chairs on top of the burners and hanging the pots up in the exhaust flue.

Our first meal consisted of spaghetti with marinara sauce from cans, and pork and beans. It was washed down with fruit juice. Not much, but I suspect that it was better than many got in New York on that day. We ate in the gym, off paper dishes saved from last year’s May Fair and intended for use at the Christmas party.

All during that day, neighborhood people had been congregating in the church. Our food situation improved rapidly. Everybody brought canned goods, so the increasing numbers were no drain on those resources. We began to worry instead about water, and drew up strict regulations about those long showers we had been taking.

No baths unless you made an “approved excursion.”

We were determined to live through this, somehow, even though most of us felt that the rest of the world had been destroyed.

Falling water pressure rapidly became a more and more serious problem. Already high-rise apartment buildings were uninhabitable above the sixth floor because of a lack of electrically pumped water. Low-rises were suffering too, as was Grace Church School.

Broken mains in the bombed boroughs were draining the system dry. Soon our rooftop tank would be all we had left.

More even than the lack of water and power, though, people were scared because of the lack of news. Those who had ventured as far east as the river confirmed that there was a holocaust going on in Brooklyn and Queens. They had been able to feel the heat on their faces even on this side of the river, and the wind being pulled into the fire was stiff enough to make it hard to stand up. People reported that the conflagration made a great, hissing roar. They described it variously as sounding like a railroad train, a hurricane, or the voice of an angry crowd.

The electromagnetic pulse generated by the huge bombs the Soviets had detonated in near space was the answer to the mystery of why even portable radios wouldn’t work, and why people with recent-model cars couldn’t get them started. The vast majority of electronic devices—computers, televisions, radios, microwave stations, radar, avionic devices on airplanes, electronic car ignitions—had been shorted out by Soviet bombs detonated in outer space.

The explosions had been invisible and had had no effect except to blanket the country with a brief, massive burst of electromagnetic energy. Certain military equipment had been shielded, and even some computers owned by big banks and corporations.

They shielded such devices, during the mid-eighties, to resist a 50,000-volt pulse. So the Soviets simply generated a larger one. Recent estimates are that it exceeded 150,000 volte. Thus they overcame billions of dollars’ worth of shielding with bombs worth at most a few million. An efficient means of destruction.

Because of the electromagnetic pulse, we had no access to broadcast news.

I will never forget the moment when somebody outside started yelling about the Times. The next thing I knew, there was a man coming in with a paper. It was the famous sixteen-page extra, which was the last news we were to see for a long time. I still don’t know how the Times managed to get that paper out. Someone told me it was produced in New Jersey before local electric power was lost.

I remember the headline: NUCLEAR ATTACK BY AT LEAST THREE MISSILES DEVASTATES CITY. And the lead: “Nuclear weapons detonated over Queens and Brooklyn on October 28 at approximately 4:45 P.M., causing catastrophic devastation and leaving both boroughs in flaming ruins. An estimated two million people lost their lives.”

It was there also that we read of Washington. We were stunned, confused. Washington no longer existed. There was no President, no Vice-President, no Congress, nobody. We had no government.

“Washington, D.C., the seat of government of the United States of America since 1800, has been destroyed by a surprise nuclear air tack. Reports from the area indicate catastrophic destruction on a scale previously unknown in human affairs. The city was swept away in a sea of Are. Not a building remains standing, not a monument intact. Observers are unable even to approach within ten miles of the city. Baltimore, Maryland, is also burning, as are the majority of smaller communities surrounding the District of Columbia.” It went on, but I find that my memory does not serve me to quote the rest.

The paper recommended that people stay indoors, reported the flooding of the subway system, and announced that the police department had opened Madison Square Garden, the Armory, and the Convention Center as protected public shelters.

I would say that the appearance of that newspaper was one of the few good things that happened in those terrible days. It served first notice that humanity still existed, that we had been hurt but we were not going to give in just yet. I know that people lost their lives doing the reporting that went into it, not to mention transporting and delivering it. Not only Times people were involved in the edition, but also news crews from the television networks and the staff of the Daily News, which was without power to run its own presses.

Still, reading in black and white that Washington was gone made me frantic.

Until that moment I hadn’t thought beyond the immediate situation: how to live through the next few hours, and would I come down with radiation sickness? Every passing moment of queasiness or faint chill was terrifying. We had set up a hospital in the parents’ lounge, which was also an interior room, and there we attended the sick and dying as best we could. The school’s science teacher, Mrs. Dannay, had managed to rig up a thing called a Kearney Fallout Meter, and was engaged in dividing the school into safe and unsafe areas.

The KFM was made in a Folger’s coffee can and consisted of two leaves of aluminum foil hung side by side on strings inside the can. It was covered by the clear plastic top from a Tupperware container in which the fourth grade had been hatching frog eggs. The bottom of the can held crushed gypsum, used as a drying agent because humidity can affect the ability of the foil strips to respond to the presence of radiation. Mrs. Dannay had dug the gypsum out of the wall in the lab. It was just ordinary wallboard.

She could tell by the way the leaves of foil spread apart or came together how much gamma radiation was present in a given area.

It wasn’t accurate enough to measure hot spots on people, but it did help us to confirm that our water was not highly contaminated and that our top two floors and the area of the church closest to the main doors were, as well as all areas on the main floor of the school near doors and windows, and the whole central foyer.

That Kearney Fallout Meter probably saved the lives of most of the people in our School. It also enabled Mrs. Dannay to develop a rough estimate of ambient radiation outside. She told us that trips out were safe only for fifteen or twenty minutes, and that no individual should make more than one trip.

It was on the third day that I began to have symptoms. My head had become infected despite copious applications of Betadine and plenty of soap and water. Of course, I had been exposed to radiation and that had lowered my resistance to disease. (Lowered resistance caused by the combination of radiation and starvation is undoubtedly the reason that the Cincinnati Flu took so many lives the year before last.) In any case, I began to get symptoms of radiation poisoning and infection. My head hurt terribly.

When I started vomiting, Anne and Andrew took me off to a corner of the hall and tended me there. They did not want to put me in the parents’ lounge, which had become a virtual dying room.

Just about everybody who went in there died within a few hours.

Of course, people had no notion of how to protect themselves from radiation, and many of them had gotten very severe doses. I hoped that my dose wasn’t too terrible, but I also suspected that, combined with the head wound and the rough conditions, it might weaken me enough to threaten my life.

We prayed a good deal. Over the past few years we had gone from being agnostics to becoming Christians again. We had been parishioners at Grace for about six months. I am a Roman Catholic by birth, and have had a stormy relationship with my Church. During the early eighties I went through a period of what could be described as confused neutrality. By Warday, I was temporarily uninterested in religion, though I felt comfortable with my son in an Episcopal school. Since the Reunion of ’90, I have been a Catholic worshiping in the Episcopal rite.

It was the prospect of death that brought me back once and for all to the Church. I am not a strong man, spiritually. I returned because I was facing pain and destruction and I was scared. Since Warday my faith has become so essential to me that I can hardly imagine being without it. When I thought I was dying, I began to pray to the Blessed Virgin, to whom I used to turn in times of childhood crisis. I was not afraid to die, but I felt awful that I must leave Anne and Andrew at such a time.

The sickness grew in me until it was an invincible horror, a devastating, agonizing thing that wracked me with convulsion after convulsion and left me so weak I could not even move my hands, let alone talk. Our rector came and gave me the last rites. With my wife and son at my side, I waited for death.

By this time Dr. Leo Stein had arrived. Leo’s son Jeremy and my boy were best friends, and Leo and I had gotten to know each other pretty well. He had been working since Warday. The moment he heard the explosion, he had simply packed up what he had on hand in his office and hiked to the nearest hospital, which was Bellevue. The hospital had reeled under the strain, but Bellevue was a powerful institution and had managed to organize itself well enough to provide at least routine care to every serious case that presented itself. This was before triage, and doctors were still treating people on a most-serious-first basis. Best-prospect-first classification was still six months away. When Leo had been relieved after seventy hours of work, he had put on a whole-body radiation suit from the hospital’s stores, acquired a gun from its armory, and come down here on foot, bringing what medicines he could.

He treated me with ampicillin for my infection, then dressed the head wound. To replace electrolytes lost in vomiting and diarrhea, he prescribed the now-familiar salt, baking soda, and potassium solution that is routinely used in such cases. We managed only the salt and baking soda. I recovered without the potassium. Nine days after Warday I was on my feet again. I weighed a hundred and thirty-one pounds. In nine days I had lost forty-six pounds.

Since then, my lifedose level has been diagnosed as terminal, so I am on the triage, waiting for the inevitable outbreak of cancer. It could start tomorrow, or next year, or in five years. It might never start, but the odds in favor of that are very small.

By the time I recovered, the radiation level in the streets was not detectable on our Kearney Fallout Meter. Our food supplies were dwindling, and water was strictly rationed. About a third of the families had left the school.

On November 6, 1988, Anne and Andrew and I started out on our own journey home. It was to be a long and bitter trip, ending in sorrow.

Home is where one’s family lives. For Anne and Andrew and me, this was San Antonio. Not until ten hard days of traveling later, when we were on a bus in Arkansas, did we learn that it had suffered the same fate as Washington and was no more.

JIM What’s It Like Out There?

I was forty-four years old on Warday. By prewar standards I had lived somewhat more than half of my life.

I was forty-nine when I left with Whitley on an adventure through postwar America. I was very conscious that the five years that had just passed had been the equivalent of at least twenty prewar years. I kept wondering how many more I would use up on the journey.

And I wonder now how many are left.

War is about death and change, but it is also about numbers, about counting. Because there was a war, our numbers have changed. If it did nothing else, the war and its aftereffects have aged us. But how do we measure an epidemic of shortened lives?

Whitley and I have been friends a long time. We went to grade school together. Our prewar literary careers certainly didn’t parallel, but they happened in tandem. I was writing Oppenheimer while he was doing The Wolfen, for example. I doubt that those books are even known now.

(It makes me feel terribly uneasy to think of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has appeared from time to time in my dreams. He stands there, silent. When I realize who it is, I wake up with a shout.)

But beyond friendship or an interest in writing, there was a shared vision. Two men in their forties, white-haired, thick of voice, slowed, but wanting to find out what is happening in ordinary, everyday America. Poor communications have made a secret of experience we all need and deserve to share.

When Whitley and I first considered the notion behind this book, my impulse was protective: I wanted to stay right here at home and cling to what life I have left. But then I began to wonder: What is the country actually like now? Everything certainly seems different. If there has been fundamental change, is it productive? Or is cultural psychosis threatening us?

At first, I must admit, even my curiosity was not enough to move me. Even in tranquil times, one tends to hold on to anything definite and stable, and my job with the Dallas Herald News was a good one. Whitley and I talked about the book needing to be written, but I’m not sure I buy that. I don’t think there is such a thing as a book that needs to be written.

But the question of the state of the country—the way it feels for ordinary people to live in its various regions—wouldn’t go away. Since the wire services were reconstructed in ’90, we have all been getting a certain amount of outside news. But facts can’t reveal the things that are really important: how it feels and tastes and smells in America, what work is like and what hopes are general. The only way to find such things out is to walk the streets and talk to the people.

Travel is not easy, and in many places it’s far from safe.

I live in a nice house and, with two others, I own a fairly good car. I cherish my safety passionately. On Warday both my wife and my mother disappeared, my mother in the maelstrom of San Antonio, my wife in Austin. Mother I know is dead. But my wife—there is always the chance she remains alive, caught in the great shuffling departures that have marked the famine and the flu. I wrote only my mother’s name in the Governor’s Book of the Dead.

I ate dandelion leaves during the famine. I know what it is to have the flu and get told to leave the hospital or face arrest. I know what it is to lose relatives, home, possessions, friends.

And I know how I feel when I watch the sunset over the roofs of the neighborhood and hear the snick of the scythe as my neighbor cuts his lawn. But the things I did not know seemed to me more important.

What, for example, was life like in the least affected parts of the country, such as California? How was the federal government functioning now, with its new capital in Los Angeles and a whole new breed of bureaucrats? Have they documented the history of the war, and what are they saying about it now?

More importantly, what do ordinary people know about the war, and what have they learned from it? Will we ever rebuild the old “United States,” or is that as much a part of history as the USSR?

So curiosity became interest and I found myself drawn into working on the book. We both knew it couldn’t be done from Dallas, that we would have to do our research by traveling, talking with people, getting in touch with the landscape, gathering the vitally important personal stories and sensations even more than the official facts.

There would be risks, of course. We could get hurt or even killed. We could run out of money. Whitley would be away from his family for an indefinite time. Travel is not easy. We would have to do a lot of walking. We might, in fact, end up for a while in one of the civilian detention centers the Army uses to control migration.

We would have to use every contact we had and all the salesmanship we could muster to go where we wanted and meet the right people.

I also wanted to gather government reports, documentary evidence. Not to place blame, but to see and perhaps understand.

Transportation was the most immediate obstacle. Air travel is quick, but there isn’t much chance of doing it on a regular basis without government approval or foreign papers, unless you are willing to wait months for a reservation. Also, you don’t meet ordinary people on planes. We would go TBF—train, bus, and foot.

Just like everybody else.

Travel passes aren’t commonly needed except, as we found out, in California. Washington State and Oregon also have stringent immigration restrictions. War Zones were off limits, of course, but my government contacts could help us there.

Whitley is in somewhat more jeopardy than I. He is triaged because of his high lifedose. His chances of getting cancer in the next five years are seventy percent. His ten-year survival probability is zero. This comes from his living through Warday and the week after in New York.

I have lost so much: wife, mother, friends, expectations. All of my references are to the here and now, and I found I wanted to expand and enrich them. The trip would do that.

Besides, I remember something my grandfather used to say whenever someone would offer him a scotch and water. “Why not, I can’t dance.”

As much as any, that was a good reason for doing this.

Dallas to Aztlan to California, then back across the continent to New York, then home through the old South. A call to Amtrak confirmed that the rail service is not only running but somewhat expanded since prewar times. Amtrak’s diesels did not suffer from the effects of EMP because they have no delicate electronic parts like airplanes.

We made phone calls and sent letters. The telephone system is quixotic. Some large areas are still completely without service.

Others were never affected at all. To find out if a place has service, it is easiest just to call. Austin is as easy to reach as ever. A call to Los Angeles was interrupted by an operator asking us to state our business—our first taste of California’s raging paranoia about outsiders.

When you call San Antonio, a recorded voice says, “We’re sorry, but the number you have called does not exist in the 512 area code. Please consult your directory and try again.”

Each regional telephone company has dealt with its destroyed areas in different ways. Call Cheyenne and you’ll get an announcement that the number has been disconnected. New York clicks on the third ring, and returns silence.

As we called here and there, we found that our reputations opened some doors and closed others. But I’m a decent enough reporter, and I felt confident that I could overcome even the resistance of the military authorities and the federal government to letting their documents out.

I’m organized. Whitley is a narrative writer, a storyteller. I have a more technical bent, and a reporter’s knowledge of whom to approach for documents. I made a list of people we should talk to in government agencies, and drew up an assessment of the ease or difficulty we could expect with each one. Then I mapped out our journey, assessed transportation problems, estimated expenses, and evaluated expected roadblocks of both the human and highway kinds, identified radzones on our path, and marked out areas of the country where there might be bandits or aggressive survivalist bands.

Both Whitley and I wished that we could have organized all our data on our lost computers. He was rich before the war; he had an Apple. I had an old Osborne. They are missed accomplices, the best tools either of us ever had.

Families and friends had mixed reactions to the trip. Whitley’s wife, Anne, and his son, Andrew, hated it, but in the end they accepted it. One of my friends called it “difficult.” I suppose he was trying for understatement. My editor at the paper was excited.

Given no city or state censorship problems, he would print our reports in serial fashion, assuming we were able to mail them back to him. And he’d pay. Not much, but it would help.

After our final planning session together, I left Whitley to a day alone with his family. I spent it packing, thinking about places and people.

Sometime after dark there was a knock at my door. Nobody was there; instead, on the doormat was a bottle of bourbon—very valuable—and a small unsigned note reading Good luck. We are more furtive now, we Americans. I never found out who cared so much about me that they would give me something as precious as that.

The next morning, waiting outside Whitley’s house, I thought how hard it must be for him to leave a real, functioning family. But we’ve all left people before, and we’ve all experienced hard moments.

Our journey began in morning and sun. By some miracle, an old aunt of mine managed to catch up with us at the British Relief HQ in Dallas and give me her St. Christopher medal, which she’d carried for more than seventy years.

I did not tell her that the Church removed Christopher from the calendar of saints years ago. And I wore the medal all the way.