In the Country of Last Things Page 4
Assuming that you are a duly registered garbage collector and that all your papers are in order, you earn your money by gathering up as much as you can and taking it to the nearest power plant. There you are paid so much money per pound—a trivial amount—and the garbage is then dumped into one of the processing tanks. The preferred instrument for transporting garbage is the shopping cart—similar to the ones we have back home. These metal baskets on wheels have proved to be sturdy objects, and there is no question that they work more efficiently than anything else. A larger vehicle would become too exhausting to push when filled to capacity, and a smaller one would require too many trips to the depot. (A pamphlet was even published on this subject a few years back, which proved the accuracy of these assumptions.) As a consequence, these carts are in great demand, and the first goal of every new garbage collector is to be able to afford one. This can take months, sometimes even years—but until you have a cart, it is impossible to make a go of it. There is a deadly equation buried in all this. Since the work brings in so little, you rarely have a chance to put anything aside—and if you do, that usually means you are depriving yourself of something essential: food, for example, without which you will not have the strength to do the work necessary to earn the money to buy the cart. You see the problem. The harder you work, the weaker you become; the weaker you are, the more draining the work. But that is only the beginning. For even if you manage to obtain a cart, you must be vigilant about keeping it in good repair. The streets are murderous on equipment, and the wheels in particular must be attended to with constant watchfulness. But even if you manage to stay on top of these matters, there is the additional obligation of never letting the cart out of your sight. Since the carts have become so valuable, they are especially coveted by thieves—and no calamity could be more tragic than losing your cart. Most scavengers therefore invest in some kind of tether device known as an “umbilical cord”—meaning a rope, or a dog leash, or a chain, which you literally tie around your waist and then attach to the cart. This makes walking a cumbersome business, but it is worth the trouble. Because of the noise these chains make as the cart goes bumping along the street, scavengers are often referred to as “musicians.”
An object hunter must go through the same registration procedures as a garbage collector and is subject to the same random inspections, but his work is of a different kind. The garbage collector looks for waste; the object hunter looks for salvage. He is in search of specific goods and materials that can be used again, and though he is free to do whatever he likes with the objects he finds, he generally sells them to one of the Resurrection Agents around the city—private entrepreneurs who convert these odds and ends into new goods that are eventually sold on the open market. The Agents perform a multiple function—part junk dealer, part manufacturer, part shopkeeper—and with other modes of production in the city now nearly extinct, they are among the richest and most powerful people around, rivaled only by the garbage brokers themselves. A good object hunter, therefore, can stand to make an acceptable living from his work. But you must be quick, you must be clever, and you must know where to look. Young people tend to do best at it, and it is rare to see an object hunter who is over twenty or twenty-five. Those who cannot make the grade must soon look for other work, for there is no guarantee that you will get anything for your efforts. Garbage collectors are an older and more conservative lot, content to toil away at their jobs because they know it will provide them with a living—at least if they work as hard as they can. But nothing is really sure, for the competition has become terrible at all levels of scavenging. The scarcer things become in the city, the more reluctant people are to throw anything out. Whereas previously you would not think twice about tossing an orange rind onto the street, now even the rinds are ground up into mush and eaten by many people. A frayed T-shirt, a pair of torn underpants, the brim of a hat—all these things are now saved, to be patched together into a new set of clothes. You see people dressed in the most motley and bizarre costumes, and each time some patchwork person walks by, you know that he has probably put another object hunter out of work.
Nevertheless, that is what I went in for—object hunting. I was lucky enough to begin before my money ran out. Even after I bought the license (seventeen glots), the cart (sixty-six glots), a leash and a new pair of shoes (five glots and seventy-one glots), I still had more than two hundred glots left over. This was fortunate, for it gave me a certain margin of error, and at that point I needed all the help I could get. Sooner or later, it would be sink or swim—but for the moment I had something to hold on to: a piece of floating wood, a chunk of flotsam to bear my weight.
In the beginning, it did not go well. The city was new for me back then, and I always seemed to be lost. I squandered time on forays that yielded nothing, bad hunches on barren streets, being in the wrong spot at the wrong time. If I happened to find something, it was always because I had stumbled onto it by accident. Chance was my only approach, the purely gratuitous act of seeing a thing with my own two eyes and then bending down to pick it up. I had no method as the others seemed to have, no way of knowing in advance where to go, no sense of what would be where and when. It takes years of living in the city to get to that point, and I was only a novice, an ignorant newcomer who could barely find her way from one census zone to the next.
Still, I was not a total failure. I had my legs, after all, and a certain youthful enthusiasm to keep me going, even when the prospects were less than encouraging. I scampered around in breathless surges, dodging the dangerous byways and toll mounds, careening fitfully from one street to another, never failing to hope for some extraordinary find around the next corner. It is an odd thing, I believe, to be constantly looking down at the ground, always searching for broken and discarded things. After a while, it must surely affect the brain. For nothing is really itself anymore. There are pieces of this and pieces of that, but none of it fits together. And yet, very strangely, at the limit of all this chaos, everything begins to fuse again. A pulverized apple and a pulverized orange are finally the same thing, aren’t they? You can’t tell the difference between a good dress and a bad dress if they’re both torn to shreds, can you? At a certain point, things disintegrate into muck, or dust, or scraps, and what you have is something new, some particle or agglomeration of matter that cannot be identified. It is a clump, a mote, a fragment of the world that has no place: a cipher of it-ness. As an object hunter, you must rescue things before they reach this state of absolute decay. You can never expect to find something whole—for that is an accident, a mistake on the part of the person who lost it—but neither can you spend your time looking for what is totally used up. You hover somewhere in between, on the lookout for things that still retain a semblance of their original shape—even if their usefulness is gone. What another has seen fit to throw away, you must examine, dissect, and bring back to life. A piece of string, a bottle-cap, an undamaged board from a bashed-in crate—none of these things should be neglected. Everything falls apart, but not every part of every thing, at least not at the same time. The job is to zero in on these little islands of intactness, to imagine them joined to other such islands, and those islands to still others, and thus to create new archipelagoes of matter. You must salvage the salvageable and learn to ignore the rest. The trick is to do it as fast as you can.
Little by little, my hauls became almost adequate. Odds and ends, of course, but a few totally unexpected things as well: a collapsible telescope with one cracked lens; a rubber Frankenstein mask; a bicycle wheel; a Cyrillic typewriter missing only five keys and the space bar; the passport of a man named Quinn. These treasures made up for some of the bad days, and as time went on I began doing well enough at the Resurrection Agents’ to leave my nest egg untouched. I might have done better, I think, but there were certain lines I drew within myself, limits I refused to step beyond. Touching the dead, for example. Stripping corpses is one of the most profitable aspects of scavenging, and there are few object hu
nters who do not pounce at the chance. I kept telling myself that I was a fool, a squeamish little rich girl who didn’t want to live, but nothing really helped. I tried. Once or twice I even got close—but when it came right down to it, I didn’t have the courage. I remember an old man and an adolescent girl: crouching down beside them, letting my hands get near their bodies, trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter. And then, on Lampshade Road one day, early in the morning, a small boy of about six. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s not that I felt proud of myself for having made some deep moral decision—I just didn’t have it in me to go that far.
Another thing that hurt me was that I stuck to myself. I didn’t mix with other scavengers, made no effort to become friends with anyone. You need allies, however, especially to protect yourself against the Vultures—scavengers who make their living by stealing from other scavengers. The inspectors turn their backs on this nastiness, concentrating their attention on those who scavenge without a license. For bona fide scavengers, therefore, the job is a free-for-all, with constant attacks and counterattacks, a sense that anything can happen to you at any time. My hauls were filched on the average of about once a week, and it got so that I began to calculate these losses in advance, as though they were a normal part of the work. With friends, I might have been able to avoid some of these raids. But in the long run it did not seem worth it to me. The scavengers were a repulsive bunch—Vultures and non-Vultures alike—and it turned my stomach to listen to their schemes, their boasting, and their lies. The important thing was that I never lost my cart. Those were my early days in the city, and I was still strong enough to hold on to it, still quick enough to dart away from danger whenever I had to.
Bear with me. I know that I sometimes stray from the point, but unless I write down things as they occur to me, I feel I will lose them for good. My mind is not quite what it used to be. It is slower now, sluggish and less nimble, and to follow even the simplest thought very far exhausts me. This is how it begins, then, in spite of my efforts. The words come only when I think I won’t be able to find them anymore, at the moment I despair of ever bringing them out again. Each day brings the same struggle, the same blankness, the same desire to forget and then not to forget. When it begins, it is never anywhere but here, never anywhere but at this limit that the pencil begins to write. The story starts and stops, goes forward and then loses itself, and between each word, what silences, what words escape and vanish, never to be seen again.
For a long time I tried not to remember anything. By confining my thoughts to the present, I was better able to manage, better able to avoid the sulks. Memory is the great trap, you see, and I did my best to hold myself back, to make sure my thoughts did not sneak off to the old days. But lately I have been slipping, a little more each day it seems, and now there are times when I will not let go: of my parents, of William, of you. I was such a wild young thing, wasn’t I? I grew up too fast for my own good, and no one could tell me anything I didn’t already know. Now I can think only of how I hurt my parents, and how my mother cried when I told her I was leaving. It wasn’t enough that they had already lost William, now they were going to lose me as well. Please—if you see my parents, tell them I’m sorry. I need to know that someone will do that for me, and there’s no one to count on but you.
Yes, there are many things I’m ashamed of. At times my life seems nothing but a series of regrets, of wrong turnings, of irreversible mistakes. That is the problem when you begin to look back. You see yourself as you were, and you are appalled. But it’s too late for apologies now, I realize that. It’s too late for anything but getting on with it. These are the words, then. Sooner or later, I will try to say everything, and it makes no difference what comes when, whether the first thing is the second thing or the second thing the last. It all swirls around in my head at once, and merely to hold on to a thing long enough to say it is a victory. If this confuses you, I’m sorry. But I don’t have much choice. I have to take it strictly as I can get it.
I never found William, she continued. Perhaps that goes without saying. I never found him, and I never met anyone who could tell me where he was. Reason tells me he is dead, but I can’t be certain of it. There is no evidence to support even the wildest guess, and until I have some proof, I prefer to keep an open mind. Without knowledge, one can neither hope nor despair. The best one can do is doubt, and under the circumstances doubt is a great blessing.
Even if William is not in the city, he could be somewhere else. This country is enormous, you understand, and there’s no telling where he might have gone. Beyond the agricultural zone to the west, there are supposedly several hundred miles of desert. Beyond that, however, one hears talk of more cities, of mountain ranges, of mines and factories, of vast territories stretching all the way to a second ocean. Perhaps there is some truth to this talk. If so, William might well have tried his luck in one of those places. I am not forgetting how difficult it is to leave the city, but we both know what William was like. If there was the slightest possibility of getting out, he would have found a way.
I never told you this, but some time during my last week at home, I met with the editor of William’s newspaper. It must have been three or four days before I said good-bye to you, and I avoided mentioning it because I did not want us to have another argument. Things were bad enough as they were, and it only would have spoiled those last moments we had together. Don’t be angry with me now, I beg you. I don’t think I could stand it.
The editor’s name was Bogat—a bald, big-bellied man with old-fashioned suspenders and a watch in his fob pocket. He made me think of my grandfather: overworked, licking the tips of his pencils before he wrote, exuding an air of abstracted benevolence that seemed tinged with cunning, a pleasantness that masked some secret edge of cruelty. I waited nearly an hour in the reception room. When he was finally ready to see me, he led me by the elbow into his office, sat me down in his chair, and listened to my story. I must have talked for five or ten minutes before he interrupted me. William had not sent a dispatch for over nine months, he said. Yes, he understood that the machines were broken in the city, but that was beside the point. A good reporter always manages to file his story—and William had been his best man. A silence of nine months could only mean one thing: William had run into trouble, and he would not be coming back. Very blunt, no beating around the bush. I shrugged my shoulders and told him that he was only guessing.
“Don’t do it, little girl,” he said. “You’d be crazy to go there.”
“I’m not a little girl,” I said. “I’m nineteen years old, and I can take care of myself better than you think.”
“I don’t care if you’re a hundred. No one gets out of there. It’s the end of the goddamned world.”
I knew he was right. But I had made up my mind, and nothing was going to force me to change it. Seeing my stubbornness, Bogat began to modify his tactics.
“Look,” he said, “I sent another man over there about a month ago. I should be getting word from him soon. Why not wait until then? You could get all your answers without having to leave.”
“What does that have to do with my brother?”
“William is a part of the story, too. If this reporter does his job, he’ll find out what happened to him.”
But it wasn’t going to wash, and Bogat knew it. I held my ground, determined to fend off his smug paternalism, and little by little he seemed to give up. Without my asking for it, he gave me the name of the new reporter, and then, as a last gesture, opened the drawer of a filing cabinet behind his desk and pulled out a photograph of a young man.
“Maybe you should take this along with you,” he said, tossing it onto the desk. “Just in case.”
It was a picture of the reporter. I gave it a brief glance and then slipped it into my bag to oblige him. That was the end of our talk. The meeting had been a standoff, with neither one of us giving in to the other. I think Bogat was both angry and a little impressed.
&n
bsp; “Just remember that I told you so,” he said.
“I won’t forget,” I said. “After I bring William back, I’ll come in here and remind you of this conversation.”
Bogat was about to say something more, but then he seemed to think better of it. He let out a sigh, slapped his palms softly against the desk, and stood up from his chair. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’m not against you. It’s just that I think you’re making a mistake. There’s a difference, you know.”
“Maybe there is. But it’s still wrong to do nothing. People need time, and you shouldn’t jump to conclusions before you know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s the problem,” Bogat said. “I know exactly what I’m talking about.”
At that point I think we shook hands, or perhaps we just stared at each other across the desk. Then he walked me through the press room and out to the elevators in the hall. We waited there in silence, not even looking at each other. Bogat rocked back and forth on his heels, humming tunelessly under his breath. It was obvious that he was already thinking about something else. As the doors opened and I stepped into the elevator, he said to me wearily, “Have a nice life, little girl.” Before I had a chance to answer him, the doors closed, and I was on my way down.
In the end, that photograph made all the difference. I wasn’t even planning to take it with me, but then I packed it in with my things at the last minute, almost as an afterthought. At that point I didn’t know that William had disappeared, of course. I had been expecting to find his replacement at the newspaper office and begin my search there. But nothing went as planned. When I reached the third census zone and saw what had happened to it, I understood that this picture was suddenly the only thing I had left. It was my last link to William.