The following weeks proved to be a happy and recuperative period in Jonathan’s life, by virtue of the pleasant occupation that filled them, reading through nearly all the miscellaneous literature he’d discovered. He forgot about any serious purpose in being there. Like an idle boy on a summer day, he puttered and lolled about, reading this or that as fancy dictated. He made a bench for himself out of the scraps of wood lying around. He took little excursions to explore the environs, idyllically leading his burro along in search of grass, book in hand and careless of the hour.
When he’d run through the small library to his satisfaction he began to interest himself in the rest of his acquisitions. He fitted himself out in the best of the old clothes there, after washing and patching them, Robinson Crusoe-like, as he’d also found a needle and thread. He wore the old boots, though a size too large, and tramped around recalling the years he passed in the mountains as an outcast.
With a hatchet and a rusty saw he began to dismantle and salvage what he could of the cottage. He began to build himself a smaller cabin right over that part of the flooring where the hatch lay. The structure was only large enough to contain a bed on one side and a small counter on the other. The built-in bed stretched from one wall to the other, just able to accommodate his six-foot height. The other end was a wider, for the room finally assumed a sort of trapezoidal shape. The ceiling was low, only a foot higher than himself at best and sloping lower towards the bed. But the roof kept out the rain thanks to the tarp he stretched over it.
There was a solid door in the front wall and even a window at each side, covered with old plastic, not quite transparent but able to let light in. He also found some pieces of a mirror which he patched together. With this he resumed the habit of shaving each day, something neglected for several decades, but which he decided was the civilized thing to do in this improved and cultured state of existence.
One last gesture, to celebrate the completion of his cabin, was to cut the picture of the cows from its book and post it on the wall near the foot of his bed, so that he could lay there and gaze at it and feel a little bit closer to the world he missed so much.
Almost a month went by in the making of this home before Jonathan ran out of purpose. He’d brought up the chair from the cellar along with everything else, except the cupboard of canned foods. The desk had to be cut in pieces to be fitted out and he used them to make the counter in what he called his den. He had no use for the thing down below. It was too dark to work there, now doubly dark since he’d built his room right over it’s only aperture.
For many days the blank notebook and pen lay in plain view, undisturbed and waiting for him on his new table. He was reluctant to open it, for he knew that when he did, he would have a heavy task before him. He would have to make sense of a world gone mad and turn his own experience into lessons that might be of use to another human being, on the odd chance that some stray reader chanced to find it.
"I’ve done many futile things in my life, and of all the schemes I’ve thought of, perhaps this is the worst," he began writing, "making a record that no one can read, or dare to read even if they could.
"But I have something to say and fate has now put into my hands the means to say it. Never despise chance. It’s all we have.
"When I look back upon my life, I see such a succession of strange coincidences guiding it and preserving me even against my own wishes that I don't doubt some higher purpose is at work, though I can't say what it is.
"I won’t proceed to defend myself. I admit extreme degrees of fault in managing my own wretched career. Look at me now, a priest, breaking cardinal laws. No one can mistake it. I’m so uncleansed and unamended by the revolution that I even resume an outlawed profession, that of historian. And I do this with a heavy heart, as I have a sad story to relate."
At this point Jonathan paused and set down his pen. He didn't know how to proceed. It would be painful, he thought, to dredge up all the sad details of his own life. It would be trivial too, unless there was some meaning of value to others. He realized that a better plan would be to try to describe the huge changes that shook the world, weaving it into his own life story. But this idea made the task seem even more complicated. He thought on it a long while.
"I'm torturing myself with details!" he concluded. "I'll get nowhere at this rate. Now that I can write, I muddy-up my head with abstractions. A plague upon me."
So he picked up his pen, turned to a fresh page and wrote: "The first cause of our revolution and all our woes was the plague."
"There, enough for one day," he thought with satisfaction. "iacta alea est”, “the die is cast”. I'll start in earnest tomorrow."
That evening, after a delicious meal of one of the cans of beans from his new larder and a pot of tea, his thoughts drifted off to a time some twenty five years earlier when he and his mountain companion shared similar meals beside similar campfires, taking in the sounds of the forest under the blanket of night.
"That was one happy period in my life," he thought, "when I learned to live comfortably in the wilderness." He mused upon it a little more and the thought struck him that this would be a good way to start his history, by simply picking out a year not too horrible and write down his recollections. He could put them in better order and fill them out later. So he got up and collected his notebook and pen, threw a few more pieces of wood on the fire and lying stretched out at full length on the bare ground in front of his cabin, began to write.
“In the fourth year after the abolition of timekeeping, and nearly everything else, I decided to escape the city and life under the 'new order’. I did this because the chance presented itself, even though I had just gained a promotion that made my life in that society bearable, perhaps even comfortable. But it was the travelling about and the sense of freedom it brought that put the idea into my head.
In the first days of the restructure I was assigned to the lowest post imaginable. I spent three bleak years in the basement of a huge cafeteria, washing dishes and preparing food along with a hundred other lost and nameless souls. We worked all the time, except for morning services. The labor was hard. Each night we were shuffled off to a dormitory for what seemed like a few hours of sleep. Then we were rudely roused and forced to another day's work. I thought I would die in these dungeons. I’d given up hope.
But a chance encounter at one of the rare public festivals saved me. An old colleague from university days noticed me as he was passing through the seats in the temple stadium. He immediately drew me off by the arm, expressed his wonder that I was still alive and offered me a job as a mail-messenger in the Department of Records, which he headed. This entitled me to a bicycle, better housing and a better food card.
After months of inner-city deliveries, I was promoted by his nod to the regional bureau. Now I had to personally deliver communications of the highest priority, stamped and sealed in their waxen tablets, between the administrative units of White Oaks and White Sans. I was even sent on occasion to White Sac, and when no convoys were available, I travelled there by bicycle. It was a healthy and pleasant employment. I was often given days of rest between posts, while waiting for return messages.
It was on one of these trips to White Sac that I made my escape. I’d found out from overheard conversations and from deciphering the notes I carried that there were concerns in the administration over colonies of outlaws to the north, and the threats they might pose to the new order. Rumor was that they’d preserved all sorts of contraband and books that could be poisonous to the state. Of course such whispers played a great deal on my mind. A seductive hope sprang up that whole colonies on the old plan still existed, needing only more recruits like myself, before they could rise up and recapture the cities of the new order, one by one, and destroy the despotism.
And so, one crisp morning, with a small supply of food hidden in my mailbag, I rode out a few miles past the western edge of White Sac along the highway and then turned north on an abandoned road into the outlawed zone.
After two days of pedalling on this deserted road, I ran into a group of three men walking toward me. After a brief interrogation, in which I expressed my sympathies, they took my bicycle and me up a dirt trail that wound deep into the hills, till we came to a camp in the night, of the rebel tribe.
Right away I could see that it wasn’t at all what I’d envisioned. Even in the dark the place had a shabby appearance, a few rows of huts surrounded by a palisade of crooked stakes, not eight feet tall. I was led to a low shelter built of sticks and canvass, much like a tepee, and told to lie down alongside the huddled mass of people at my feet. The setting was sordid, but I breathed an imaginary air of freedom and rested that night as comfortably as ever, upon cushions of hope.
There were still a few such clans as this living in the countryside back then. Their numbers, to be sure, had severely declined over the last four years. There was no law out here and in-fighting and raiding one another over dwindling food supplies had taken a heavy toll. The plague caused even more loss. As in the cities, it still claimed about one in ten each year. The population was now less than one hundredth of what it had been five years earlier, and in some places, I was to find, the ratio was far worse. But the few carried on, or tried to, and this camp was an example of the struggle.
In the next few days I was introduced to my new "tribe.” They called themselves the Puma, from the Indians that once lived in these regions and whose lifestyle they were trying to imitate. If only there had been a few real Pumas among them! Their greatest problem was ignorance. They simply didn’t know how to live comfortably off the land. Of course it was harder to grow crops in recent years because of the radiation, and whenever they were about to reap some meager harvest there were the "rovers," ready to pilfer or openly attack, depending on how starved they were.
These were smaller bands of men, desperate beings, whose only way of life was plunder. In the early days there had been many such bands, living by the gun until their ammunition ran out. Now only the most savage were left, using knives and spears and ambush in place of guns. Some had even descended to the level of brutes. There were rumors of cannibalism. The times were getting worse.
Our tribe consisted of a little over a hundred souls. Only a few years before they had numbered two hundred. But they’d been attacked repeatedly by small groups of robbers from the north, where there were no cities for hundreds of miles. So they moved their settlement further east, deep into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, east of a deserted town once known as Chico.
They were a kind-hearted and humane group. There were women and older children here, about twenty of each, a very humanizing influence. They had preserved a few books, not many because they had to move so often and could only save what they could carry. But more rare still they had among them two laptop computers with hand crank batteries and hundreds of books on disk. It was their custom in the evenings to read aloud from some these and it wasn’t long before I was a happy participant in these sessions.
These people had come from all walks of life, those who were never rounded up or who had escaped the Church in the first months, sickened by the turn of events, by the transformation of each city into a tyrannical state, brutally marshalling its citizens into work squads, without private possessions or rights, indoctrinating them day and night to a radical faith, and publicly burning anyone for the slightest infraction of Draconian laws.
The first concern of the Puma tribe at this time, which was late winter, was to decide in which direction to move and to do it before the planting season slipped by. Many nights they held meetings to discuss the matter. I was invited to join in these talks. They had no tiers of authority here. Every member was equal and held one vote.
They feared that their whereabouts would soon be discovered by a group of some twenty rovers who had come into the region recently. Their scouts had spotted these men the day before they found me. This was a very serious matter. They were known to have at least several firearms, from shots that had been heard. It was the only way such a group could possibly remain together. There must have been some skilful hunters among them, able to support the little army. It would be suicide to confront them. A similar such confrontation last year ended with over thirty lives lost. Once a band of such men formed and worked as a unit, there was no adopting them or splitting them. They plundered like pirates. There was no bargaining with them. There was only death.
We talked ourselves down to two options. Our present location was untenable. It had been a poor choice to start with. The soil was too acidic for some crops and the place was not distant enough from the central valley to protect us from those who prowled its fringes. There were rumors of a large tribe on the coast, and some of us wanted to try to make contact and negotiate a union. It meant moving our tribe back across the valley to some isolated spot in the coastal range and send out scouting parties from there to locate this possible ally.
But it was clearly dangerous, liable to attract the attention of brigands who could trail us and attack. And the whole endeavor rested on a rumor. The tribe might not exist, or be hostile, or in worse shape than ours, more of a burden than a blessing.
The other plan seemed less dangerous even though it was filled with many unknowns. It was to travel east across the mountains into very remote regions and find some spot, some home, where we could build a permanent settlement where no one was likely to find us, perhaps in the wilds of Utah or Colorado or New Mexico.
The recent, bloody encounters with rovers finally made my companions adopt this course, away with all haste from the likelihood of running into other people. We packed our belongings and set out, as we discovered, prematurely. The high passes were still blocked by snow. We had to wait two weeks in a makeshift camp at a cold elevation, while our strength and supplies melted away.
Finally the thaw arrived and we moved on in late May, with dangerously lightened loads of food to carry. We made a safe passage into empty regions and breathed a little easier, imagining that we had escaped at least one form of death, the violent kind by the hand a fellow human.
By early summer we settled in the recess of a river valley on the eastern slope. There were fine meadows and steep wooded hills all around. There were fish in the river and in a small lake nearby. The hardships of the journey and the reduced diets we had cost us some twenty members, mostly those who were sick or had suffered some effects of the plague.
We planted our seed and, at my suggestion, built a single longhouse to shelter the whole tribe. We used heavier timber than before, not only for the longhouse but in the palisade that surrounded it, even though we hadn’t encountered a single sign of other people on our trek there.
We planted for a late crop of vegetables, especially potatoes and corn, and after a long summer harvested a fair reward. But the winter that came after it was hard and miserable.
Although our shelter was solid and warm, and the food sufficient, the plague again visited, infecting eight of our number. I had become devoted to this family by now, especially the younger ones, as they were to me, and it was hard to see them go.
For some odd reason, though I lived on reduced rations and worked hard, I remained healthy and fit. I attribute this to the years of good nutrition I enjoyed before leaving the city. Though I toiled in the dim basements of food centers, I ate the best, and as a messenger I enjoyed both fresh air, exercise and an equally good diet.
At the end of winter we voted to pack up and go further east. I had urged that we stay in that region, since there was no one there. But my companions were driven by the vague hope of meeting up with other civilized beings, and it seemed impossible that we would make it on our own, if we kept dwindling at this rate.”
At this point, Jonathan left off his narrative and went to bed. It was late in the night. In the morning, he decided to continue and see where it would take him. He knew that he was skipping over a great deal. But it was not easy, after more than two decades of silence, to write at all. He realized that he should tread lightly, letting the wounded parts of his memory come slowly back to life before he set it to task, before he undertook to describe the real extent of the horror that had engulfed mankind.
