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

Watches that show numbers to tell time.

Seat belts in cars.

Telephones with little buttons on them instead of dials. The buttons make music.

Something called Home Box Office. Something else called People magazine. Somebody named Princess Di.

A man named Jerry Falwell who’s either a preacher or a politician.

Young men with purple and orange hair wearing earrings in pierced ears.

Radios so small you can wear them on your head, so people can listen to them as they walk around.

A government program called Medicare, for old people.

There were others, but these are representative. Doc spoke up about wish-fulfillment fantasies again, and theorized that Elvis being here recently might have reminded us too much about the old world. He pointed out that while everyone seems to be having dreams, no two people are having exactly the same dreams about the same things. He says not to worry, that it will pass. The mayor said that while people aren’t having exactly the same dreams, they’re close enough to make him suspicious; he called it a psychic event. Doc’s answer to that was that since people have been doing nothing else but talk about their dreams, the dreams they have are being influenced by those conversations.

In other business, Jess said he’d have the sugar ready in a week or two; the grinding and drying is taking him longer to do that he thought it would, but he says he doesn’t need any help. We’re all looking forward to the sugar. Since Jess is still okay, we’re assuming the crop is. Now if we could only grow coffee…

Big snow last night. Twelve inches on the ground, and this one won’t melt off. But we’ve gotten the crops and firewood in.

The temperature’s taken a plunge, too. We’d probably have lost some field hands if they’d still been working out in the open. Doc says with the winds still coming out of the northwest, the snow’s safe enough, since the early October rain was. That’s a relief; it means we’ll have a healthy soil for next spring’s planting.

The dreams got very sharp, very real last night. I saw superhighways with thousands of cars on them. I was reading a thick paperback book by somebody named Jackie Collins. My wife and daughter were still alive and with me. There was a nice little house I lived in, right in this town.

There was a color TV set in the living room and another one in our bedroom; both were showing the news, but I don’t remember any, except that the announcer seemed excited and worried, maybe scared. And there was a wonderful, luxurious indoor bathroom with all the hot water you could want. It was so real I could touch it. I woke up suddenly in the night and I cried for my family, gone all these years ever since the first, worst days.

No dreams last night at all. Slept well for the first time in weeks.

I tried Jess’ sugar. Wonderful! I’d forgotten how good real sugar could be. I sprinkled some of my share on wild blueberries I picked a couple of days ago.

Everybody in town is saying their dreams are gone. Doc says we’ve all had a psychic trauma, but it’s over now.

Big topic in the meeting tonight was how to ration out the meat supply. The dairymen think it’s time to rebuild their milking stock; the townies say they’re hungry for real, red meat, and since the rain’s been good, the meat will be good, too. We’ll probably compromise on this again; a lot of those bossies aren’t going to make it through the winter anyway. And it snowed like hell again today.

Jess came in from his farm to say he’d found a body by the side of the road on his way in. It was a stranger, shot dead where he stood; there was dried blood under him and nowhere else. Doesn’t look like a bandit attack, though; the kid still had his wallet on him. Maybe it was a hunting accident, but the mayor’s posted extra patrols, just in case it was bandits after all. We’ll go out and get the body tonight.

Nobody can figure it out.

The body’s the damnedest thing anyone’s ever seen. Doc went through the kid’s ID and came up with all sorts of stuff that didn’t make any sense.

First off, there was a lot of ID, and no one here has any anymore. The kid’s name was John David Wright. He was just about to turn twenty.

There was a New York State driver’s license dated this year; the kid’s picture was on it. It’s a good sign things are returning to normal, if they’ve begun issuing those again. Only problem is, it doesn’t say where the seat of government was that issued it. Was it in Rensselaer or Syracuse or what?

Wright’s home town is given as this one, but he’s a complete stranger to us. The address on his driver’s license is for a big house on Bates Road that burned down right after the war. Jess says he thinks he remembers a family named Wright who lived there around the time the war started, but they all died in the fire.

The kid was wearing a wristwatch with numbers on it instead of hands; Fred Crawthers says it looks a lot like the watch he saw in one of his dreams. He had money, too — bills and change both — all with recent dates. I was pleased to see the mint is back in business… but there was a half-dollar coin that bore the President’s picture, which I think is overdoing it. There were also a couple of credit cards called Mastercard and Visa; it took me a while to recognize a credit card when I saw one.

Wright also had a receipt, dated three days ago, from a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. I remember those. They were on highways and had orange roofs. But there aren’t any around here and there never were.

Young Wright was wearing eyeglasses, but they weren’t made of glass.

They had plastic lenses that scratch easily; Doc showed me. Doc’s been through the kid and reports nothing physically unusual except for his teeth. He’s got the usual fillings, but one of his front teeth was covered by a tough white plastic. Doc says it covered a bad crack and looked convincingly good. (I wish I knew where they were doing dental work these days. Everybody in town needs some.)

The only other thing Doc said was that the kid was maybe too healthy.

He had good weight on him, no obvious signs of radiation impairment, no nothing. About like we all were, before the war.

Well, the kid may be one of ours; we don’t know. We’ll treat him right, anyway. We’ll bury him tomorrow as best we can, with all this damn snow on the ground.

Doc came by the house this morning, red-eyed and sleepless. He says he didn’t tell all he knew about the Wright boy, but he decided to tell me and give me the proof. I can write it down and hide the proof, as long as I don’t show it to the mayor or anyone else right away. Doc’s afraid people might panic or something. I think the people around here are stronger than that, but I’ll respect Doc’s wishes.

Anyway, I’m not sure I believe it myself, although I’ve got it all right here in front of me. When Doc began undressing Wright’s body for autopsy, he found that the kid had wrapped himself in newspapers. It’s an old Boy Scout trick, for insulation. The kid had used six sheets from the Albany Times-Union from the 13th of November, this year. Now there is no Albany and it sure isn’t in any shape to print newspapers… but this paper was fresh and white. The sheets covering the kid’s chest are full of buckshot holes and covered with blood, but the rest of the sheets are okay.

We have the front page, and it’s clean. The headline tells about a SOVIET ULTIMATUM. Another story says PRESIDENT URGES CIVIL DEFENSE MEASURES. A third reads POPE FLIES TO MOSCOW TO MEDIATE CRISIS. There’s also what we used to call a think-piece about the number of weapons the U.S. and the Soviet Union have and the damage they could do. The story is a horror of thousands of intercontinental missiles that carry ten or more warheads each, and there are germ bombs and chemical bombs and orbital bombs and things that carry radioactive dust.