Hayward
I brooded and dozed to uneasy dreams until I heard a bullhorn in the street the next morning, commanding one and all to attend a general meeting, where instructions and food cards would be given out. I fell in with my neighbors all heading to a nearby park and never saw my home again. At the park we were divided into rows by age and sex and questioned one by one as to our former professions. The business was quickly transacted. At the first table each was asked a few questions, then handed a card from a set of shapes and directed to another post for more instructions.
When my turn came, I answered the rude tone of the officer with one word, ‘philologist’. He didn’t seem to understand it or relish my tone and gave me a card that I later found out meant the lowest classification possible. I found myself in a line with older women and me and some who looked very sick and lame, a motley crew. We were told we were part of a ‘nutrition corps’ at a downtown center. We were taken to a refitted office building and lodged in the small cubicles in groups of four.
Then began the drab, daily routine of rising for services early each morning, spending the day in the basement of a huge cafeteria, cleaning vegetables for soups, dish washing through the afternoons and evenings and finally retiring to my bunk, dead tired, with the three other almost speechless, old gentlemen who shared my sad room and my sadder life.
This dismal cycle went on and on for the next two years. What I gathered of the world was heard through the bars of our basement window which was set right above my workstation, looking out at the sidewalk of a main avenue. Besides what I sometimes overheard from the street, there were the official announcements at the services. Idle talking in our kitchen was forbidden.
Most of those I worked with lived in a sort of shell-shocked state, waiting for the end. Many found it, being older than myself, and more prey to the plague. They were taken away at the first signs by the daily inspectors who visited us. Replacements were brought in the next day, and I sometimes gleaned a little news from them in low whispers.
One thing I couldn’t help notice was the rapid regimentation of our world. It wasn’t four months before we were issued long, white uniforms with hoods and I saw that everyone on the street wore a slight variation of this new clothing weeks before us. All but our aluminum pots and utensils had been removed and we were scolded whenever they were not brightly scoured.
I had my first sight of ‘lickers’ one morning when a band of thirty of them went through our kitchen on their hands and knees, examining every odd corner and underside of the shelves and tables, licking and spitting their white paint with concentrated focus. One came crawling right between my legs as I washed vegetables and lifted up my feet to see if the bottoms of my sandals had been properly bleached.
Our sleeping quarters were also standardized. Wooden cots were brought in to replace metal ones. I wondered at this, since both types had been painted white, until I noticed that the wood wasn't just painted, it was white through and through, so that you could chip it and not change the color.
Besides our cots, our room contained a small table with a washbasin and a large can of white skin ointment. We had our sheets and towels and spare clothes and a shelf to hold them, but nothing else, except later in the year we returned from work one night to find a strange white box hanging on the wall. It had a little door to it and inside was a sheet of white paper, framed in white wood. We decided that it must be a shrine of some sort and paid no attention to it thereafter.
We had to eat standing at our posts, and only attended the morning services, not the evening, because it was too much trouble to interrupt our work at that hour. But on certain, rare days our cafeteria was closed and we were led along with everyone else to the coliseum, now totally whitened, to listen to inspirational speeches, usually by visiting dignitaries. Afterwards there were parades to watch, no longer colorful, but with them bands playing marching music, delightful to our starving ears.
There were also contests with young athletes, races and jumps and pole-vaulting, though they were hard to follow visually, with so much white on white. I’d heard that other sporting events had been attempted, attended by those of higher rank than us. But one by one they were quietly discontinued. They all proved impractical. They were replaced with the shows we now saw.
I heard that there had been baseball games, but the whiteness of the field ruined the players performance. They tried to vary it because, in the first months, the Church was eager to please its new converts. To give the players a better chance at hitting and catching they added a loud buzzing mechanism in the ball and renamed the game 'buzzball'. This seemed to work at first, though scores were tenfold what they had been. But soon a debilitating ringing developed in the ears of most players, leaving them more inept and off balance than ever. Our monochrome world was simply not geared towards feats of hand-eye coordination.
But even in these dire times people could not live entirely without entertainment. Songs and chants became popular at the gatherings, along with speeches and parades by the various new guilds and work groups. Workers who had performed exceptionally well were led up to a stage and presented with silver emblems they could pin to their chests and show off as a mark of merit. For the most part the Church simply tried to keep everyone constantly busy so that they wouldn’t have time to think about what they missed.
As the plague still took a large, weekly toll our city kept pulling in its boundaries. Many times whole acres of glasshouse facilities had to be piece-by-piece relocated. The areas given up were burned and then razed to the ground so that no illegal use was made of them. There were no fences put up, not even any rules forbidding us to wander off. But it was understood that this was our world and that to leave it meant entering a dangerous and lawless wilderness; a land, we were told, from which there was no return, a land of human beasts and wolves and certain death.
So I kept to my post while two years rolled by and it might have been forever, had not that fateful meeting occurred at one of our ceremonies. When my university colleague recognized me and clasped my arm, he didn’t let go. He was beside himself with joy at finding, as he termed it, ‘a dear, old friend’.
That very day he procured my transfer and walked me through his ‘Department of Records’ proud to show it off. That evening he took me to his spacious house and every evening following, to reminisce about old times and old friends. We’d talk on the subject for hours and in a joyful glow, as if we were replaying a favorite movie and enjoying our remarks on all the players and scenes as it rolled. He had none of that clogging regret that swelled up in my own throat as I walked away.
He’d recently lost his beloved wife and wanted company the few spare hours he was home. But he was extremely happy and excited about his work. He was a true convert, with the task of building up a whole records department out of nothing. In our private meetings he often showed me the techniques and mediums and even some of the special symbols they were developing to perfect their office. I think that he looked upon my own dejection as merely the result of my unfortunate work assignment over the last two years and hoped that it would soon vanish with the easy tasks he had in mind for me, along with his own contagious good cheer.
Our get-togethers became less frequent after the first month, after we had fairly talked ourselves out on our memories of youth. He was also getting over the loss of his spouse, though he never mentioned that. But he still kept up a sincere, big-hearted liking for me and clapped me on the back whenever we met in the hallways of his bureau.
He also continued to give me good advice in dealing with my immediate superiors. He’d take me up to his private office on the top floor of our four-story building and tell all that he’d heard about me informally, with pep-talks and hints on how I might improve my standing. Even his singling me out in the halls gave me an unspoken stature. I was treated better than the other messengers and excused for my habitual morosity, because my bosses looked for their own promotions to the very same favor I enjoyed.
My new job involved riding a bicycle back and forth across the city delivering messages, sometimes verbal and sometimes written and I had ample opportunity to see just what sort of developments were going on. The whole town was in a frenzy of reconstruction. Except for the nightly burning of the dead, a ceremony which took place after the twilight service, and a very somber spectacle, the city was in a happy mood. People everywhere were singing as they worked and working as long as light permitted, almost every day of the year. In fact days and years had already been abolished, blurred into one unending march towards purity, towards the clean, white light of the universe.
I was surprised at all this zeal in what I considered a slave state. The people's efforts and the buildings going up all around were honestly impressive, and my eyes actually ached at the end of each day from all the white facades I stared at. But I was not drawn into this folly. I shuddered each night thinking about it and our lost world.
Most impressive of all was the temple complex. It was easy to get lost in its endless corridors. It covered at least ten city blocks, and the plaza before it another ten, of what had recently been downtown Oakland. It was a fort-like structure four stories high, with its own central square. It housed all the hundreds of priests and nuns and their offices and meeting chambers. A wide, front gate was set beneath a tower built of large blocks that stood perhaps nine stories high. At the top of it was a smaller bell tower with a roof of silver leaf that was continually being polished. It was by far the tallest structure around and looked across the bay to its one sister tower of the temple in White Sans, two lonely pillars of two cities that had lately been forests of skyscrapers.
Almost equally tall was the bridge still joining these two administrative units. But this was all that was left of what had been a sprawling Bay Area. I would estimate that the population of our city at this time was about fifty thousand, and that of White Sans a little larger. One corner of the island of Alameda was still populated, though shrinking, and our old harbor front was now a vital hub of commerce. The hills behind us, where my own university once stood, were dotted with glasshouses.
To the north and south, where Albany and Hayward had been, there was a flat, man made wasteland. Every structure had been burned and then tumbled. I drew up to the fringe of this abandoned zone on my bicycle one day. It was a horrible sea of crushed and charred objects, tangled metal and concrete, like a dump that had been bulldozed. A wild dog was standing on a low heap not far away and staring at me. Perhaps he was still waiting for the return of his master or wondering, like I was, what had become of him.
