Brad Ferguson: The World Next Door (A Short Story)

Jess is still okay, his wife says. His gums look good, and bleeding’s one of the first signs. He didn’t get the shits, either, and he hasn’t been particularly tired.

Another singer showed up today, and getting two in just over a month is really unusual, because we’re so hidden away here. His name is Elvis Presley, and he came into town this afternoon with a couple of what he called “backup men” — a guy with a guitar and another guy with a small set of drums that didn’t look too easy to carry through these mountains.

The drummer’s a Negro. We haven’t seen one of those around here in maybe twenty years.

Some of the folks remember Elvis pretty well from the old days. He was a big deal back then, always being on television and making records; he even made some movies. Now he makes a living on the road, singing.

He looks good… maybe a little thin, but we all are. Some of his hair’s gone, too; whether it’s from radiation or because he’s, what, fifty?, I don’t know. He’ll do a set for us tomorrow. I think it’ll help take our minds off the anniversary of the beginning of the war.

We’ve got Elvis and his people boarded with the mayor. Elvis says he’s just happy to get in out of the weather. He also says he’s got a lot of news from faraway places, which he’ll tell us about just as soon as he and his group get themselves some food and rest.

Elvis did a nice set, all right. Led it with a song I remembered about loving him tender. I liked it; we all did.

I got his news at the shindig after the performance. Elvis says there’s not much of the country left, as much as he’s seen of it. The war caught him in Nashville, where he was making one of his records. The Russians didn’t bomb Nashville, but the city was abandoned after the Fidel flu hit in ’69 and most people died. Elvis caught it but recovered, and he’s been on the road ever since.

Elvis says he walked most of the way here, taking his sweet time; he and his backup men only rarely find a ride. Sometimes they settle in a place for months; right now, they’re going to Montpelier to see how things are there. (I told him there’s been no news from that part of New England for years.)

Elvis says he no longer bothers to go near big cities. He says the cities they didn’t get with the bombers have been deserted — no food supply, no law and order, and loads of disease and misery did the job. We knew New York was bombed, and Boston and Washington and Cleveland, too, but we weren’t sure about Columbus, Chicago, Gary, Indianapolis and about twenty others Elvis mentioned. All gone.

Where the hell was the Air Force that October? For Christ’s sake!

Elvis says he thinks the population is headed back up again, but he admits that it might just be wishful thinking on his part. Elvis also says he met the President at Mount Thunder a couple of years ago, and he looked all right — but gray and lined, not nearly the young man we remember, and he’s sick to boot… something to do with his kidneys. He never did get married again, either, although Elvis understands that the President still takes his pleasures with any of the couple of hundred women who live in the mountain’s government complex, which is no less than I’d expect from a scoundrel like him.

Today was the anniversary. We all stood up at the end of Elvis’ performance and sang the Banner, him leading us along on his guitar.

Most of us cried a little. The mayor made a speech, said an Our Father and raised the anniversary flag his wife made back in ’78. The flag looks odd like that, the red and blue parts replaced by black, but it’s appropriate. After the Pledge, the mayor hauled the flag down for another year.

Elvis did a bunch of his old songs and also some that his drummer wrote. His drummer’s really quite a songwriter. One was a happy thing called “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” — the lyrics weren’t much, but the tune was good and the whole thing made us laugh, which we needed — and the other was one that made me get all teary. Elvis called it “Let It Be.” That man can sing a little, all right.

I asked the drummer afterwards where he’d gotten the songs. He shrugged and said he’d just dreamed ’em, woke up and wrote ’em down.

He says he’s been dreaming recently that he’s an executive with some big record company in New York. Big office, too, with air conditioning. I remember air conditioning.

Elvis was interested that I’ve been keeping a journal of our times here, and I’ve let him read some of it. He says that while he hasn’t been having any dreams at all, he’s interested in ours.

Elvis gave his last performance here tonight, finishing with a song called “The World Next Door.” He says he wrote it himself just this morning. It’s about the world we could have had without the war. He says he was inspired to do it by all the dream entries in this journal of mine. I’m proud of that, inspiring a song and all.

I had another one of those dreams last night. I was on a big airplane — I mean a big one. People were seated maybe ten across. They showed movies. I was having a real liquor drink — Jack Daniel’s, and I can almost taste it now — and on the little napkin that came with the drink was printed AMERICAN AIRLINES LUXURY LINER 747. I wonder where I was supposed to be going? Maybe Elvis can work the dream into his song somehow, the next time he does it somewhere.

Winter’s here with a vengeance. It’s warmer the year ’round than it used to be, but the first snow fell today. It’ll melt off, but we should be doing more than we are to prepare for the winter.

Jess, who still feels good, finished hauling in his beet crop today, with the help of a bunch of kids from Mrs. Lancaster’s school. We’re all looking forward to the sugar.

Last night was Halloween, and the kids still do dress-up, although trick-or-treat is out of the question. Strange thing, though: One of the kids — Tommy Matthews — went around town wrapped in a charcoal-colored Navy blanket and an old Army helmet his dad’s had since Korea.

He also had a pair of swimming goggles and a broomstick handle he held like a sword. The costume made no damn sense, so I asked him who he was supposed to be. Darth Vader, he said. Who’s that?, I asked him. A bad man, Tommy said. He says he dreamed him. He breathes like this, Tommy added, noisily sucking in air and blowing it out again.

Jesus. The kids are beginning to dream, too.

More and more dreams. Everybody’s beginning to talk about them now. No one understands what’s going on.

We had a town meeting tonight, at which it was decided to forget about doing anything for the Jubilee. We’ve got our own problems.

Nobody’s sleeping very well. They wake up in the middle of the night with such a profound sense of loss, there’s no getting any rest.

Everybody’s tired and cranky.

After the Jubilee vote was taken, we suspended regular business so everyone could talk about the dreaming. I was asked to write down some of the things people remember from their dreams. Here are some of the clearest:

Men land on the moon in a black-and-white spaceship that looks like a spider. There’s another kind of spaceship that looks more like an airplane. Both have American flags painted on them.

A guy named Sylvester (or maybe Stephen) Stallion is in a movie about a guy who rescues people — prisoners of war? — from a place called Vietnam. (I remember Vietnam, and so I’m putting that one down.) Also, there’s a big, black monument in Washington to servicemen who died in Vietnam… thousands and thousands of servicemen.