October 30th, 2000

English Department
Maple Tree Community College

Dear Professor Feldman,

I’am extremely greatful for the extention you gave me on the utopia paper. What I’am handing in now is kind of weird, but I hope you dont mind, you said we could be creative on this topic. Which I still have some trouble understanding what its all about.
The truth is I didnt write this diary thing, actually Bellamy did. That might sound like a lie, but its totally the truth, I swear. Bellamy was in my brother Jerrys loft for a couple days, and then here in NJ, b/c Jerry took a Time Machine from where he work and it actually work it turn out, and so we got Bellamy, then Jerry put it back. Hes a old guy with a beard.
It was really hard talking to him. I tried so hard I was curious on so many things in his book. But there was a big comunication problems! I didnt find the notebook of Jerrys he wrote this stuff in until after he was gone and he still hadnt really explain “Looking Backward” to us by the time he split. I was really sorry to loose him b/c I wanted to bring him into class almost like for “show & tell.” Since your so into this guy, I figured you would like to meet him also maybe then youd belief me. But now I dont know were he is & the paper is way late. My bro’s friend Charlie was suppose to help me with the paper, but he has disappear, I was waiting but he let us down. So, then I thought I would hand in this book, after I found it by the bushes in our yard.
Like I said, Bellamy wrote this stuff not me. I have read alot of it, but not all before giving it to you. It was hard to read the old fashion handwriting. I was going to copy it on the computer, then I thought youd belief me more if you got his actual thing.
Please do not tell anyone about this, I think my brother Jerry might be mad at me if he knew about it and knew I gave it to you. He’s all paranoid over maybe getting into trouble because of Bellamy, and he says all the time that I’am “Lewinsky dumb” about blabbing things to people. But you are a nice prof, I know I can trust you with this, and since you actually find this guy interesting I thought you should have it. Its also way longer then the assignement you gave us to do, so I hope thats an e for effort rite there, turning in something like this. I did not no how to footnote it, or do a works cite page, since it was from a live person, not a book, but at least I didnt get this from a encyclopedia or copy it off the Net. So its not plagiarism, its new.
If you think I made it up anyways, last week Jerry read you’re assignment sheet for our class and he I could right about Bellamy and tell you to just think of it like a fictional story. B/C you said this was the 1 assignement where we could try fiction. I don’t no how to makeup a story but, if you think I did its ok if that is an ok paper to hand in. I bet Jerry wouldnt even want me to write a story about Bellamy now he is so freaked about the whole thing!
But actually it all really happen and eventhough some of Bellamys remarks about me and my bro hurt my feelings and pissed me off when I read it and eventhought I didnt understand alot of it, I’am handing it in just like he wrote it. It has to do with his book anyways and on the theme of utopias/dystopias like you said.
Plus, I would like to say that when I told him about your class being really hard and stuff I was kidding, actually I find your class extremely interesting and challenging.
I hope this will be okay, email me if their is a problem. Otherwise have a very Happy halloween!

Very Sincerely,
Your Student
Tiffany





October 22nd, 2000


Dear Diary,

Is it possible? Did I dream the things my memory tells me I have beheld and heard today, or am I simply mad? What a hideous variety of madness, to see the aspirations of one’s lifetime cruelly mocked by grotesque visitations from the future! A future one has long anticipated with hope and pleasure, a future full of promise and possibilities that one has attempted to delineate for others of one’s own age! The metaphors I employed in my popular romance, even the metaphor of dream, appear to encircle me now, in a cruel ring of mockery. So it is that, as dreadful a prospect as madness may be, I can only hope that it is amidst a madman’s delusions that I now dwell, and not within the environs of a true fate to which the entire brotherhood of man must one day succumb.
I write by the light of an electrical lamp, attached to the wall near the “loft” bed to which I have retired. The young lady (for I know not what else to call her) named Miss Tiffany Lucas offered me materials with which to write this afternoon. I refused the offer, then later thought better of it. The notebook I am employing has covers of soft card, and affords the writer blue, even lines with a pink margin on every page, much like a child’s copy-book for practicing his letters. It is bound with a spiraling swirl of metal.
The pen requires no pot of ink. I found a number of the pens of this queer world impossible to use, but am having some success with this “felt-tipped” one, that secretes a seemingly limitless supply of black ink. The pen itself is solid and black, serrated with many miniscule grooves about its body, of a material I cannot fathom; it is too light and in its way too soft for china, stone, glass or shell, too brittle and shiny and smooth for wood. On its gilt clip are faintly yet precisely inscribed the words “PAPER MATE” and “USA” along with several Valentine hearts.
So, at least I am reassured that my captors, or rather hosts, (for which should I call them?) spoke the truth when they declared that I am still in the United States of America. The Union has held and the war that tore the states asunder is well-nigh forgotten. But perhaps, glimpsing what has become of the world, I should neither rejoice nor feel reassured by the perseverance of our once fair nation. The Nationalism I championed, it seems, died long, long ago.
Whether my experiences of this day indeed be figments of a dream, some elaborate, tasteless practical joke perpetrated by friends or enemies, the illusions and folly of a madman, or -- most dreadful prospect! -- the natural and inevitable course of events in a tomorrow awaiting all my brethren in the nineteenth century and the unborn generations of our day, I find sleep to be out of the question, and there is nothing in this strange place fit for me to read . . . and so I must write, to achieve some measure of calm.
I was last myself, in a world I knew and was sure of, when I said farewell to my dear friends of the resurgent Bellamy Society of Boston. They had rented a hall in Springfield, in a neighborhood very nearly adjacent to my own in Chicopee Falls. They had been for some months importuning me to speak to them, but, due to my ill health, I had been obliged to put them off; when they took the hall that the journey might inconvenience me the less, it no longer seemed conscionable to do so. Thus, despite the gentle remonstrances of my dearest Emma, the poorness of the weather and the ominous and nagging death rattle of my cough, I set out this afternoon, which was the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of August, in the year 1896. Yet if I am to believe my current captors, I now lie in this strange bed, or rather “foo—tahn,” more than a century hence.
At the meeting I expressed once again my appreciation for the surviving Bellamy societies throughout the nation, and indeed, around the world. Though we could no longer boast of nearly two hundred such societies meeting regularly, yet the continuing interest of these dedicated men, and that of readers and thinkers whose letters I receive weekly, give me continued hope about the potential for our movement to re-emerge on the national stage.
I told them that I felt humbled rather than honored at the prospect of my proposed system flourishing in the twentieth century in fact, as I have nurtured and celebrated it in fiction, humbled because I, myself, am but one man at the service of this great idea, this fervent wish, like the rest of them. It has always been my view that men of such fellow feeling had better call their various chapters “Nationalist” societies, rather than Bellamy societies.
That the People’s Party and the Theosophist Movement have become somewhat estranged from my book and my ideas, I consider a potentially freeing development; let our cause flourish on its own, unencumbered by the agendas of others! Whatever the outcome of the current presidential elections, I still cherish the hope, I told them, that soon we shall see real and practical reforms enacted in Washington DC reflecting the desire of most Americans for a system more just, more efficient, and more in tune with the precepts upon which we claim our nation to be founded.
The intelligent and animated conversation of the members over wine and cigars after I spoke, and their manifest gratitude that I had ventured out of my house at last, despite my wretched health, to meet with them, touched me greatly. Some were old, familiar faces, from the days when I made my weekly trip to Boston, but some were new, and conversing with these recent converts to our cause was an even greater pleasure. I was heartened to learn of their crowded schedule of lectures, events and political initiatives for the state of Massachusetts.
Since my indisposition has forced me to curtail all lecture tours, suspend publication of my newspaper, and live an invalid existence, it has become all too easy, at times, to forget the ferment, the excitement and the idealistic, fraternal atmosphere that envelop the company when discussing economic and moral reforms with men who dream as ardently as do I of a day when poverty, brute selfishness, corporate tyranny and waste shall be banished from the earth.
The sky had cleared as we left the hall, and said our farewells in the street. Several pressed upon me the use of their carriages to return home, and several offered to walk with me. But I felt stimulated by our exchange; I felt no need of assistance, no stomach for the streetcar, and no keen desire to return with any haste to the dreary confines of my sick room.
I strode through the city, and then my own village, at a brisk pace, only occasionally incapacitated by a spasm of coughing, (during such moments I would turn my face to a wall or railing, and grit my teeth and cover my mouth with my handkerchief until the fit had passed) and when I had reached my house and pushed through the gate, still I dawdled. Emma, I believe, was making a social call, following her visit to the shops, yet I could well imagine her instructing our housekeeper to bustle me to bed as soon as I entered. I relished the thought neither of bed nor the scolding I would receive from Mary for braving the elements so long alone.
Instead of entering, I therefore wandered around the side of the house to our garden, which my window overlooks but where I had rarely set foot for many a month. The twilit sky was indeed now clear and bright, and though the grass and stones were still wet from the afternoon drizzles, yet the last rays of sunlight carried a hint of the summer that was passing, and I surveyed my wife’s carefully tended plants, in all their finery. The tuberoses nodded their waxy-white blooms above their grassy stems, and filled the air with spicy perfume. The hollyhocks, in brilliant crimson and shining white, still crowded round our doorway. The cornflowers and snapdragons continued to peep up from their beds of green, amidst the lazy drone of the bees.
I beheld all this loveliness, and yet I felt a pang. I thought of the poet Keats, and how he wrote of the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” and wondered, within my own cough-wracked frame, if such a season were now upon me. And yet I did not feel ready for the “music” of Autumn; there was too much to write, too much to do!
I gazed upon the blooms, some now softening and wilting above their leaves, and thought of the proposed trip to the city of Denver, with its high altitude and clean air, that my doctors have been urging upon me, and resolved to take better care of myself, that I might survive the coming chill of winter and yet see the buds of spring, might yet see the germ of my idea for a transcendent tomorrow blossom into fruition on the world stage in the coming century.
Yet as I gazed about me, lost in contemplation, I was suddenly overcome by a dizziness quite alien to the shivering moments of weakness which often accompany the chills and fevers that plague me. The ground seemed to shift beneath my feet, as if a hole might suddenly open up and swallow me. The sky and rooftops around me seemed pulled inward, as if being sucked into a sieve -- I know not how else to describe it. And then I myself was sucked into that sieve of terrifying forgetfulness, and the world went dark!
Consciousness, amidst a sickening haze of dizziness and nausea, returned to me as I lay upon some sort of thin mat, stretched out over a lacquered wood floor. There was a pillow beneath my head. Through slatted eyes, I perceived a glaring light above me, and I heard the murmuring of voices. The words and tones were strange to me, and it was some moments before I could convince myself that the speakers were employing a variant of English. The fragments that my memory retains include “Cool! He’s coming out of it,” spoken by a young woman, and a male voice advising her, “So, let me talk to him first. This is so bizarre, I swear.”
I lifted my head, and my eyes began to focus. Two apparitions stood before me in this vast and unknown chamber, both young, both so immodestly and peculiarly attired I might well have fancied myself upon some exotic South Sea island, or a visitor to a shore never before touched by Western man.
I shall attempt to describe them, one at a time. The male appeared to be a youth in his twenties, white of skin yet deeply tanned. He wore truncated trousers that did not cover his muscular legs below the mid-thigh, and a sinister tattoo of a snake wound up one of his legs, amidst a generous covering of blond hair, as though it were winding its way up a pole. He was shod in sandals of some dark, indeterminate rubber. His shirt was peach-colored and of a curious mesh material. There were several silver chains about his neck. His height was not great, and he gazed down upon me and regarded me with an expression of dull, bovine interest.
The female’s attire was equally immodest, so much so that I blushed for her, as my faculties returned, and averted my eyes from her person. I avoided looking directly at her during every interview and exchange in the course of this strange day. And yet the impression I retain is of a strip of black material as clinging and almost as slender as a bandage swathed about her bosom, with truncated trousers even shorter than those of the young man, and a small Valentine tattoo on the calf of one of her legs -- exposed so entirely to public view, it must be said, as those of a Greek nude statue in a public park.
Her hair was worn loose and cut to shoulder length. It had a curious black sheen and, what was most repulsive, her nose was pierced; she sported a diamond stud on the side of one nostril. Her navel which, I fear I must also report, was quite prominently placed in public view, also appeared to be punctured, and adorned with several rings or hooks. Again, I avoided letting my eyes stray in that direction whenever possible. There was a silver chain around one of her ankles, I observed, and she was barefoot.
“Can he, like, talk to us yet?” she queried of the male.
“Yeah, probably,” came the reply, as I continued to blink and gaze about me in a stupor of amazement. “If he’s Bellamy, he’s Bellamy. Are you Bellamy?” the lout now inquired of me directly.
I cleared my throat and found my voice. “I believe so,” I replied feebly. “But it is difficult for me to be certain of anything at present. If you would be so good as to tell me . . . Where am I, and how came I here?”
“You’re in my loft in Tryehbecca,” came the response, and I have since concluded that “Tryehbecca” must be name of some new quarter of latter-day New York City. “I’m Jerry Lucas, and this is my sister Tiffany. You’ve gone back to the future, dude. You’re gonna be okay. My friend already shot you up with some drugs, to cure your TB. She’s gonna come by later to give you another shot.”
“A cure?” Could it possibly be true? After so many years of fever, and wretched coughing, and invalid weakness? What was this drug, I wondered, with which they had been injecting me? My nether regions were indeed sore, I now realized, bearing out his statement.
“Yeah, so you’re gonna be fine, you’re not gonna die in two years.”
I opened my mouth, and closed it. I willed myself not to faint. I half-fancied I could feel my brain melting inside its cranium. The implications of my situation, if it were not an imposture, if it were anything akin to the voyages through time which I have imagined since adolescence, into the past and into the future . . . I could only repeat again: “How came I here?”
“See, it’s complicated.” The extraordinary young man now squatted down upon his hairy haunches like a savage. “I swiped this Time Machine from work. They haven’t tried them out yet, though they know in theory they work, and everybody’s in a lather to win a noble prize [I believe that is what he said] or whatever, with them. But they’re scared if they pull someone out of time, it’ll change history somehow, and then the whole universe will blow a frigging gasket. Something like that. I don’t really get it all, I’m just a lab tech.”
“A Time Machine?” I echoed. “Like the device in that fantasy by the Englishman, Mr. H.G. Wells?”
“Yeah, I just had to read him!” the female now groaned.
“I don’t know what his machine looked like. The one I swiped is like a big white box,” the young man said, gesturing with his hands. “The thing is, it’s stupid to worry about changing history, ‘cause we didn’t really pull you out of it. I mean, Edward Bellamy is still back there in his garden, wondering why he got dizzy, probably. What the machine does is, it duplicates the guy’s consciousness, and then rebuilds him out of other matter -- we used some frozen chicken parts and vegetables, and a bathtub full of dirt to make you, it has to be something organic. But it makes a new person and follows the original guy’s D.- N.- A. pattern [or so the flurry of words seem to fall from his lips, according to my recollection] and then sticks his memories into his head. So, we haven’t really changed history, ‘cause you’re not really Bellamy. You’re just a Bellamy clone.”
“A clown?” I felt a new variety of dizziness and distraction engulfing me. I pressed a hand to my brow.
“No, a clone. A copy. He’s back there and he’s gonna die in 1898 like he’s supposed to. But we can cure you and interview you, and it’s just like having him here. You’re on a lab list of people they want to pull out of time -- way down the list, obviously, after Shakespeare and Lincoln and all of those guys.”
“And my suit of clothes?”
“Yeah, you came with that. I don’t know how the machine duplicated that. I’m just a tech. But anyways, my sister Tiff here said she had to read a book by you, and she either had to write a paper on it, or come up with her own utopia. For college. And she couldn’t do it. And so I figured, what the h-ll? I’d pull you out of time and she can talk to you personally, ‘cause I tried to read your book, and I couldn’t understand that sh-t either, no offense.”
His words hung in the silence, and seemed to burn there. I knew not where to look. I felt the color burning my own cheeks with the shame that he ought to be feeling himself. For a man to casually indulge in such gross profanity, in language so shockingly and gratuitously coarse in the presence of a lady, his own sister . . . my mind reeled. What barbarians had I found myself among? I kept my hand before my eyes, and sank back down upon the mat.
Miss Lucas now knelt beside me. “Hey, are you okay?” she asked. “Maybe he’s sick and should just go to bed,” she said to her brother.
I gazed upon her pert, painted face, with the studs in the ears, a frosting of violet daubed on her eyelids, and the diamond chip embedded in the nose. Despite her harlot’s costume and strange manner, she was trying to convey a sort of human sympathy to me, I could tell. Yet what cruel and ironic contrast between this vulgar, distorted damsel of an ostensible future, and the sweet, fair Edith Leete, the heroine of my novel Looking Backward, who gave Mr. Julian West the wherewithal to acclimate himself to his suddenly changed circumstances.
I shut my eyes, and felt the sickening compulsion to cough overtaking me. I reached into my trouser pocket and retrieved my bloody, fouled handkerchief, and allowed my coughing fit to run its course. Miss Lucas withdrew from my presence.
“Ew,” I heard her say above me, her flat, nasal voice tinged with disgust. “Gross.”
“What year is this?” I croaked out, when the fit had subsided, and the soiled cloth had been folded away.
“It’s the year 2000,” her brother Jerry informed me.
I lay on mat, inches from the floor, and stared at its smooth, polished surface. “Just as in my novel,” I said quietly.
“Yeah, that’s right, that’s why Feldman is making us read it!” Miss Lucas appeared suddenly to be quite agitated. “His class is so hard, I swear to God! I needed another English credit, okay, and I thought Science Fiction Literature would be a gut. I mean, watch some movies, read Jurassic Park or something, right? But he is so harsh, he gives us so much homework. First we had to read a big chunk of Frankenstein, which is really old and boring . . .” [while that morbid tale by the late poet’s wife is not a favorite of mine, it was good to hear mention of a book with which I have some familiarity] “. . . and then the Golden Age stories were okay, the ones about robots, but now we’re doing all this utopia stuff. Like, Plato and this guy Sir Thomas More. All this boring stuff about eat simple food, and wear simple clothes and philosopher kings and communist stuff. It’s like, hello, did I sign up for a philosophy course or for sigh-figh, here?”
Her words were unclear, but her dissatisfaction with her college curriculum was manifest.
“And then we had to read this disgusting essay about eating babies in Ireland -- ” she continued.
“You mean the pamphlet by Swift?”
“Yeah, and write our own ‘modest proposal.’ That was supposed to teach us about dystopias.”
“Negative Utopias?” At times I fancied I could almost follow what she was saying.
“Whatever. And now it’s all the Utopias, and we had to read all of your book Looking Backward, the whole entire thing, just because you set it in the year 2000. So, we’re supposed to compare your predictions to the way things turned out.”
“And how have my predictions fared?” I ventured to ask. Despite the unlikely appearance of this young pair, and their not very promising manner of discourse, I must confess that I allowed myself to hope. The female had mentioned some sort of Golden Age, although she might have been alluding to the past. Could it be that my Republic of the Golden Rule had at last been realized? This “loft” was certainly spacious, if bare. Clearly both men and women were being educated in this future, however mentally ill-equipped they might be to profit by their education.
Was it possible that I was allowing unsavory surface details to blind me to a dazzlingly brighter tomorrow, when tuberculosis and perhaps all diseases had been cured? Where the world was so free of crime and barbarous thoughts that a young maiden might parade about in a state of partial undress with no fear of harm to her person? Where there might at last be an end to all hunger, all poverty, all demeaning human servitude, all cruel inequalities in the distribution of wealth, happiness, productivity and leisure, a time when the “Millennium” was truly and at last at hand?
“Has any of what I foretold come to pass?” I eagerly begged to know.
I kept my eyes focused on her face. Yet I saw her shift in her slouching stance as she squinted down at me, where I still lay prostrate before the two of them.
“Well, not exactly. But your book is really, like, um, quaint, and sweet and sad. It was a really nice idea. That’s what he wants us to write, I think, and I get that. But how can I get a whole paper out of it?” she fairly whined, in most petulant tones.
“Then, there is no industrial army?”
“Not like the real army, no. But people still go to work, we have pretty low unemployment right now. I think.”
“And money has not ceased to be used?”
“No way!” she laughed. “But we do have credit cards. But they’re not like the ones in your book, which are, like, ration cards, or whatever. I have three credit cards, but they are, like, totally maxed out right now.”
“You didn’t get any of the technology right, either,” her brother Jerry informed me sourly. “Those tube things you had people sending messages and products through?”
“The pneumatic transmitters?”
“Whatever. And listening to a symphony orchestra over the telephone at home. Like a telephone radio alarm clock? We are so totally beyond that!”
“Machinery interests me less than mankind,” I replied faintly. “Could you tell me what form of world government now exists?”
They exchanged uncertain glances. “There’s no world government,” Miss Lucas said. “This is still the U.S.”
“There’s the United Nations but they’re kind of a joke,” her brother added with a touch of scorn.
“And do nations act in concert with one another, or does warfare persist?”
“Um, yeah, there’s still war. And ethnic cleansing, and New Clear Weapons, and stuff.”
Her words, while not entirely intelligible, rang heavily in my ears. “Do the workers no longer strike, or protest their harsh conditions? Do the anarchists no longer threaten to overthrow the system by violent means?”
Again, they appeared uncertain. “What’s an anarchist?” Miss Lucas inquired. “That was one of those things in your book. I mean, I guess there are strikes. Like the baseball strike, that lasted a long time.”
“A baseball strike?” I was utterly bewildered.
“Yeah, and there are terrorists and they blow things up,” her brother added. “But they don’t get called anarchists.”
“So, anarchists were, like, terrorists?” his sister asked him.
“Basically, I think so, yeah.”
“Wait, let me write this down.” She strode hastily over to a sofa at the far end of this barren warehouse space that was evidently used for domestic habitation. As she went, I felt strong enough to venture to my feet. I was conscious of the indignity and vulnerability of a man lying prone on the floor. Young Jerry Lucas watched me as I unsteadily arose from the mat, his face impassive, but offered no assistance. I swayed, and wished there were something I might hold on to, but managed to maintain my balance.
Miss Lucas returned with a notebook like the one in which I am now writing these words, and one of these odd-looking writing implements.
“So, anarchists equals terrorists,” she wrote and said aloud, as if announcing a mathematical formulation.
“As destructive and deplorable as I found their methods,” I said, by way of clarification, “the anarchists in my day would have argued that their goals extended well beyond simply terrorizing the populace.”
“Yeah, well we got crazy Arabs trying to blow things up to make Allah happy, and militia men at home, who hate the Federal Government,” Jerry said with apparent disapproval.
“What do they wish to replace it with?”
“I dunno. They just don’t like Big Government on their backs. They don’t want gun restrictions, or to pay taxes, or they’re still mad about Wake-oh.”
“Which was?”
“This cult out in Texas. They got totally fried.”
Again, the language barrier was a source of confusion, but I gathered from his words that the harmony and logic of the system I have long proposed has never been realized.
Miss Lucas was still busy with her notebook. “Okay, but you weren’t one of these anarchist-terrorist guys, right? You were some kind of socialist or commie?”
“I beg your pardon. If by that you mean a communist,” I replied, “many in Europe who advocated communism proposed a system similar to mine. However, I sought to retain patriotism and religious belief in my social scheme, and to do away with the notion of class warfare. I have told the British Fabians, including that author Mr. Wells upon whom our discussion touched earlier, that I consider my Nationalist movement to be the American face of socialism.”
“So, wait. Wells was a commie too?” She appeared to be even more perplexed. “Is that why the Morelocks ate the Eloi, ‘cause they used to be rich people?”
I strove to remember the details of the fabulous tale. “Perhaps, in some metaphorical sense,” I replied. Again, a spasm of dizziness threatened to overwhelm me, and, my strength flagging, I swayed and put a hand to my forehead.
“You wanna sit down?” Miss Lucas asked, concern returning to her voice. “Jerry, why not take this guy to the couch?” Without awaiting his response, she grabbed my arm and piloted me in the direction of the sofa. While her grasp was rough and her steps quick, I was grateful for the support, and her helpful intentions. Once I was seated, and this partially-clad maiden of the future had settled herself a short distance from me, she resumed her questioning. Her brother trailed behind, and stood nearby.
“So,” Miss Lucas began again, ink flowing from her magical pen as she wrote in a slovenly, most extraordinary hand, “Professor Feldman said the key to your whole commie system was this idea of the coach, you had at the beginning. Could you, like, explain that?”
“You read my book, did you not?”
“Yeah, but I don’t get the old English. Just explain that idea for me, okay, because I don’t want to try to buy a paper on line, and you’re not that popular anyhow, nobody assigns you, so I don’t know if I could, even. I don’t know if you’re in cliff notes.”
Her words were a mystery to me. But I resolved to do my utmost to comply with her request and explain my system to her. Slowly, I began. “I said that humanity at the end of my century, the nineteenth century, might be likened to a coach, to which the vast majority of the population was harnessed, whipped and spurred ahead by hunger, which sat in the driver’s seat, and observed by a small, select group of people riding on top of the coach, in breezy, comfortable seats, contributing nothing to the effort, but occasionally pitying or commiserating with those who pulled them along, when those in the harness stumbled, or when the coach became caught in the mire, or the road ran uphill. Such a stretch of road was meant to stand for times of economic hardship. I also said that sometimes those who jealously guarded their comfortable seats atop the coach would fall below. This was a metaphor for how, sometimes, a rich man will lose all his wealth.”
“So, wait -- which was the metaphor and which was the analogy?” She was writing rapidly. “Feldman said this whole thing was an analogy, and it might be on a pop quiz.”
I was stymied by her concern with trivialities. “I would term the whole idea of the coach an analogy, which is merely an elaborate metaphor. Would not you?”
She blinked at me.
“Could you tell me now, Miss Lucas, if society is still so constituted that my illustration of the coach, however limited a conceit it may be, is still applicable?”
Again she blinked. “Well, we have cars now.”
“Streetcars, you mean?”
Her brother moved to a stretch of wall near where we sat, painted a dull tan like the rest of the warehouse space, but I now perceived it to be of a different texture, with handles attached to a beam running horizontally across.
“Lemme show you,” he said.
He gritted his teeth and heaved. And slowly, the strip of wall, which proved in fact to be a window coated with paint, groaned upwards, and noise and light from without soon flooded his spacious lodgings. I arose from the couch, and moved to stand beside him. The street scene I beheld below caused me to understand, to feel and believe at last, that I was a traveler through time, a vagabond in a distant age.
I have lived and worked in New York City in an earlier period of my life, in the early 1870s. I will not say I know Warren Street well, but I have traversed it on occasion. This Warren Street I gazed down upon bore no relation to any place I had ever visited or conceived of. The road was entirely paved, with a dark, smooth material, not cobblestones. It was lined on either side by colorful, boxy machines. Others rolled down the street; evidently they were some sort of auto-propelling vehicle. Horses there were none. Streetcars, and their tracks, were not in evidence.
Pedestrians kept to the pavement, as in my own day, which appeared to be formed of hydraulic cement. There were many of them, as outlandishly garbed as my hosts. None wore hats. There was a loud rumbling, perhaps of the horseless vehicles, and occasional harsh, blaring bursts of noise, which appeared to emanate from some of them.
“These vehicles are called cars?”
“Yeah,” was the reply.
My other senses became engaged. The unpleasant city odors of my own age were quite absent, but they appeared replaced by the scent of strange fumes, and a kind of grit which stung at my eyes. When I craned my head through the window and gazed upward, I saw watertowers and rooftops, and the hint of one building of quite staggering height. I withdrew my head, and returned to my perch upon the sofa.
“I apprehend,” I said at last, “that the modes of transport have changed. But again, I must venture to ask you if society remains constituted as it was in my day. If the masses of laborers still toil for long hours under cruel conditions for little pay, that the capitalists may rob them of the fruits of their labor, and leave them with barely a crust of bread to feed their children.”
I received no reply. Jerry Lucas only shook his head as he pulled shut the opaque window. “Yeah, you’re right, Tiff. Definitely a commie.”
“You use this as a term of disapprobation?” I asked his sister.
She blinked.
“Of disapproval?” I tried again. “You object to the philosophy of the communists?”
“Well, like, we believe in democracy now.”
“It is economic democracy of which I speak,” I replied.
“We believe in American democracy,” her brother thundered. “They tried all that commie sh-t in Russia and other places. It didn’t work. Communist dictatorships suck.”
I endeavored to ignore his vulgarity. “Russia has had a communist revolution?”
“Yeah, they had one. Now they wanna be capitalists like us. We won the Cold War.”
As numerous as were the terms I did not comprehend, I greatly feared that this twentieth century had been nothing like the one I have foretold. “Are any other nations engaged in a Nationalist experiment?”
“Waddya mean?” he demanded. “If it’s a nation, I guess it’s nationalist.”
“I am using the term ‘Nationalist’ as I employ it in my novel,” I explained. “I use it to mean a nation so constituted that all citizens have a vested interest in every class of agriculture and industry, and all receive an equal share of the wealth. A nation organized along rational, productive lines, in accordance with true economic science, with resources evenly distributed, and useful employment found for each, and waste absorbed back into the system, instead of a cruel and haphazard system of competition, starvation, gluttony and selfishness. I wrote of a nation organized so as to serve national, rather than personal, interests. What you would call a ‘commie nation.’”
“Oh,” Jerry said.
“Are any nations now engaged in such an experiment?” I persisted.
Miss Lucas essayed a response. “Cuba is the last commie dictatorship, I think. No, wait. Korea also, right?” She looked up at her brother.
“And China. That’s why they’re always stealing our secrets,” her brother informed her.
“But, then, why do we want to trade with them?” Miss Lucas appeared to go through life with a puzzled, rather frightened air.
“What of the great nations of Europe?” I broke in. “England, Germany, France?”
“I don’t think any of them are communist. Now now,” Jerry told me.
Their uncertainty was what I found most unsettling. These youths were not of the class of common laborers; they appeared educated, in some sense. One was a scientific laboratory technician, as best as I could gather, and the other was enrolled in a college. Did they know nothing of their own world?
“If he’s, like, a national socialist,” Miss Lucas appealed to her brother, “Doesn’t that make him a Not-See?”
“No. I don’t think so. Not directly, anyway. I think his stuff came way before the Not-Sees.”
I wondered if perhaps they referred to some permutation of the “Know Nothing” Party.
“‘Cause we gotta read about them in history class, right now, and that was another name they used . . .” She peered at me anxiously. “You’re not a Not-See, are you?”
“My dear young lady,” I returned, “I hardly know what I am, anymore. It certainly appears that I did ‘not see’ a great deal. So little, in fact, did I prognosticate accurately, that I am ill-equipped to answer your question.”
“I don’t think he’s a Not-See,” she stoutly defended me to her brother.
And it was at that point that their friend arrived. There was a loud, obnoxious buzzing noise, and Jerry Lucas moved to a metal panel near the door of the warehouse, and pressed a button. Presently, loud footsteps could be heard upon the stairs outside. The young man undid the mulitudinous locks festooning the door, and admitted a young Oriental woman in workman’s clothes: a gray shirt, long denim trousers and heavy workboots.
“Hey,” she said to the other two. “What’s up?” Then she turned her gaze upon my person. “Oh, he’s up. Hey, that’s great. I’m Dr. Chen, you can call me Lizzie.” She spoke without a trace of an accent. Save for her visage, which was clearly derived from the Orient, she appeared to be a young lady of the same cut and stamp as her friend. She strode forward and shook my hand vigorously, with her free hand. In the other she carried a large, white, crinkly bag, and there was another bag strapped to her back. She handed the bag in her hand to Miss Lucas.
“I dumped it all in here,” she said. “But I hit both the Tie and the Chinese place, so there should be something here for him to eat.”
“Thanks,” Miss Lucas said, extracting several rolls of dollar bills and bits of silver from the pocket of her truncated trousers, and handing them to her friend.
“I’ll get some plates,” Jerry said, and disappeared to the other end of the vast, high-ceilinged room.
“Now, I’m gonna give you a couple more shots,” this young lady doctor told me, rather loudly and slowly, as though I were hard of hearing, “and then we’re all going to eat dinner together, okay?”
I glanced from her to Miss Lucas and back.
“Does she know who I am?” I inquired. “Does she know of my extraordinary circumstances?”
“We, like, told her, but I don’t think she believes us,” came the reply.
“Which is fine,” Jerry interposed, as he returned with white plates made of paper in his hand, and curious white cutlery. “None of her business, anyhow.”
“That’s right,” Dr. Chen said emphatically. “None of my business what’s going on here. What I can say for sure is, your TB is real, and it’s an advanced case, but we’ve got the anti-biotics to clear it up, and that’s what I’m using. That’s all I know, and all I wanna know, about this whole situation.”
“Are a physician’s services free, in this epoch?” I asked, thinking wistfully of the august and gentle Dr. Leete of my romance, who took upon himself the roles of friend, guide and caretaker to my young millionaire, washed up upon the shores of the year 2000. It was odd, the ghosts of parallels that I was seeing between the adventures of my protagonist Julian West and my actual plight.
“H-ll, no.” The newcomer laughed. She was crouched on the floor, rummaging in the black bag she had removed from her back, even as Jerry Lucas was setting out the plates of paper, and white cartons his sister had removed from the rustly white bag; apparently, we were meant to dine upon the floor.
“Free services?” she pursued the point. “With what medical school costs? And malpractice insurance? I don’t think so.”
“But this is a special case,” Jerry said with a smile. “I promised to do some cat-sitting for her, next month, if she helped us out with you.”
“Cat-sitting?” I was at a loss.
“He’s gonna watch my kitties while I’m in Cancun!” the extraordinary new young lady sang out happily.
Jerry continued his explanation: “Plus, Lizzie is a friend of the family. This place of mine? It’s an illegal sublet from her sister. We went to high school together.”
“An illegal . . .?”
“She’s not supposed to rent it out to me, but we keep it hush hush.”
“Then, the system of landlords and tenants still persists?”
“Well, yeah. Obviously. Not many people I know who can afford to buy an apartment,” he said with a touch of irritation.
“And are there still . . . the ill conditions, the over-crowded tenement houses of the poor? Are there still slums infested with dirt, disease, vermin and despair?”
Now it was Miss Lucas’s turn to laugh. “Well, yeah. Duh. Welcome to New York.”
I could not pursue the topic further, because by now their friend was at me, rolling up my sleeve, tapping on my arm to find a vein, holding what was recognizable as a small syringe, though it was fashioned not of glass but of one of these new materials I cannot yet put a name to.
“Okay, hold still,” she said. There was the inevitable pain of being pricked – but much less than I had ever experienced in my own epoch. Again, I fought dizziness, and asked her the names of the drugs she was using.
“It’s ______________ and ____________,” I believe was her reply. “They should clear it up permanently.”
After a lifetime of consumption, my youthful heartbreak when I failed my physical at West Point, the maddening lack of strength that has frustrated my efforts to realize my ideals on the world stage, the shadow of mortality hanging over my domestic felicity all these years . . . her promise hardly seemed real. “Truly?”
“Guaranteed. Just relax. Have something to eat.” She and Jerry and Miss Lucas now arranged themselves on the floor, folding their legs before and beneath them in the manner of Red Indians.
I attempted to join them, awkwardly. “Have tables passed out of vogue?” I ventured.
“Naah. But we like to keep things casual around here,” Jerry said, and winked at the ladies. His sister giggled.
A heady array of aromas wafted up from the opened, steaming cartons. It appeared that the people of this age, or at least these people, had dispensed with serving meals in a proper order, in terms of courses, along with the formality of tables.
“So, like, what do you usually have for dinner?” Miss Lucas asked me, shoveling rice onto her plate of paper.
“I join my family for our evening meal,” I replied, and saying the words out loud brought the scene all too vividly to mind: Emma smiling softly, Paul and Marion’s bright, upturned faces, Paul’s cheerful answers as I ask him about the volume of Plutarch’s Lives I have lent him to read . . . shall I never again look upon these precious creatures? “But I myself do not usually partake. My doctor has me on a regimen of raw eggs, with a bit of whiskey.”
Miss Lucas dropped her laden plate onto the floor. “Ew, ew, ew, ew, that is so gross! Oh God, I’m going to gag!” she exclaimed.
Her friend the physician regarded me severely. “That’s a crazy diet for a guy with TB.”
Jerry Lucas looked equally disapproving. “No wonder you’re gonna die in two years. I mean the real Bellamy. No wonder he’s toast.”
I attempted no response. As a relic from the past, who knew less of his own history than they, there was none for me to make.
I must confess that I found myself with a greater appetite that night than I have known for some time. Could it have been the effects of Miss, or, rather, Dr. Chen’s drugs? Operating so quickly? I have long maintained that, given a chance, a woman might prove as capable in the professional sphere as a man. I decided to accord her the respect denoted by her title.
“What type of food ought I to be taking, Doctor?”
“Everything,” she replied with her mouth full of some sort of chicken strips, and exotic vegetables. She swallowed, and continued. “You are way malnourished. Let’s lay off the spicy stuff at first, though.” She turned to the other two. “Don’t give him any of the setch-wan beef, or the general soze. Or that coconut curry, the Tie place makes that killer. Stick with the low mane and the pad Tie for now.”
“What is ‘Tie’?” I asked.
“Tie. Like from Tie-land,” Jerry said, slowly and sarcastically.
“Maybe he doesn’t know about that,” said his somewhat more astute friend. “It used to be Siam,” she told me.
“Ah.”
Miss Lucas screwed up an impish face full of mischief, and quizzed her friend. “But why would you think he wouldn’t know that, Lizzie, if you don’t believe he’s from the past?”
Dr. Chen appeared annoyed. “Hey. I don’t know much, and I don’t know what this guy knows.”
“Shut the f--k up, Tiffany!” Jerry yelled. “She helped us out, and that’s all that counts, okay?”
Again, the ladies did not so much as raise an eyebrow, but so mortified was I by his manner of addressing his sister, that I could only stare down at my plate, which Dr. Chen had heaped high with what appeared to be several types of spaghetti, with bits of chicken, egg, vegetable and shrimp added to the mixture. There are – were, I should say – stories in my day about Chinamen preparing their food with mousemeat and insects in it. But I did not venture to ask if this were so, and I saw no signs of such materials. Gingerly, I took a bite. The others ate with sticks, in the Oriental manner; I made use of the odd, light, white cutlery.
My long indifferent palate seemed to come alive! I surprised myself by just how much of this strange, almost indescribable, food I found myself able to consume.
“It’s good you have an appetite,” Dr. Chen said. “By tomorrow you should be as healthy as any guy on the street. Just get some rest, and lay off the raw eggs.”
I nodded obediently.
“Oh, and do you smoke?”
“I enjoy a good cigar, of an evening,” I replied.
“No more. Forget it. Your lungs are messed up enough,” she pronounced. And I attempted to accept her heavy judgment philosophically.
For the remainder of the meal, I listened to their quiet chatter as I ate. Jerry Lucas told some story about a friend who had given him a gift of something called “software” that was not to his liking. In relating the incident, he made frequent use of the verb “to suck.” Although I am not familiar with its derivation in this instance, it appears to carry a negative connotation.
Miss Lucas complained again, at length, about the difficulty and unreasonableness of the assignments she received in what she termed her “science fiction lit” class. “But at least Feldman has tenure, he’s been there, like, forever. I can go see him if I have to. All my other classes are so bogus, they’re all taught by T.A.s.”
Abbreviating words by their initials appears to be quite the thing now. “What are ‘T.A’s?” I asked her.
“Teachers assistants. Or we get adjuncts, who don’t have to keep office hours, or even have an office. They’re like teacher-temps.”
“If I assume correctly that you mean they are hired only temporarily, why would a college pursue such a course of action?”
Jerry Lucas swallowed and belched, his sister giggled, and I attempted to take his disgraceful behavior in stride once more.
“The colleges just do it to save a buck,” he said. “A real professor retires and they hire four part-timers, and this way they don’t have to give them tenure or health insurance, or whatever. It’s like my lab. Everything is ‘mick-jobs,’ now.”
Did he mean this as a slur upon the Irish? I did not inquire.
Miss Lucas and Dr. Chen spoke of a tavern which they frequent, and to which they proposed we all pay a visit. Jerry Lucas begged off, and I also declined. Jerry offered me a beer, and I was pleased to be handed a small, cold bottle. The label bore a German name – Budweiser. But I found the drink much less thick and full than the beers I imbibed in my youth, when I sojourned in Germany with my cousin William, or indeed when I lived in Manhattan with its excellent German breweries and beer gardens.
The young ladies gossiped about the youths they sometimes encounter at their tavern of choice, and soon after the meal, they adjourned thither. I helped Jerry gather the cartons that still contained food, close them, and place them inside a superb, tall ice box, containing its own electric light, which was situated near a sink in the kitchen area of his lodgings. (There are no walls separating it from the rest of the space.) The empty cartons and the plates he crumpled and threw into the dustbin.
In Equality, the sequel to Looking Backward that I have been engaged in writing over the past few years, I speculate that in the future all clothing, shoes, household hangings, plates and even internally heated kettles shall be made of paper, to be discarded after use, rather than cleaned. About the plates, at least, I appear to have been correct.
One bottle of watery beer is evidently quite sufficient to intoxicate young Jerry Lucas. He indicated to me that he would be retiring, on the sofa, and that his sister would sleep on the mat on the floor where I first awoke, when she returned. He offered me what he said was the best bed in the place, another “foo-tahn” up in this loft space.
Then, without further ceremony, he disrobed all but completely, and stretched out upon the sofa. Within minutes, he was snoring sonorously, with the bright electrical light overhead still glaring down.
I wandered about, trembling anew at the implications of my situation, now that I had a moment to examine them alone. The sudden silence afforded my terror and anxieties full scope. I touched my own flesh, pinching my arm in the manner of one who wishes to awake from a dreadful dream. My thoughts flitted to the materials Jerry had claimed this familiar skin of mind is now composed of. It did not bear thinking about.
The morsel of hope to which I had clung, amidst all that had transpired, was his mention of a Time Machine, for I remember from the novel by Wells that, in the machine he postulated, one could travel backward in time as well as forward. I told myself that I had been dropped into this strange age, only temporarily, and that all might be corrected, soon. Now, alone with my thoughts and ignorance, all such certainty faded.
Seeking to distract myself, I stumbled over to a set of crates, arranged so as to provide a shelf space. There are almost no books in these lodgings, but a few volumes stand in one of the crates. Eagerly, I perused them, hoping they might provide a more elevated introduction to this world of the future than my uncouth hosts had been able to do.
It is difficult to describe what I found within their pages. One book contained a series of crude and unpleasant drawings, and bore the title 101 Things to Do with a Dead Cat. Another purported to be a novel of some sort, according to the fragments of newspaper reviews printed upon it. It was called Vox. As best as I could make out, it concerned a telephone conversation between a man and a woman . . . but for inexplicably lewd purposes. There was no narrative; there was only their shocking, bewildering, and generally distasteful exchanges.
The last book bore a colored photograph of a young man on its shiny, soft cover, and the title American Psycho. It had a more traditional first person narrator, or appeared to, as I began examining it. At times I almost wondered if it were meant to satirize the Wall Street world of capitalism and excess it treated of. I am still unsure. I do know that I found portions of it quite incomprehensible, and others so breathtakingly crude and foul, that my mouth hung open in astonishment.
And then I stumbled across a passage so horrifyingly cruel, so gratuitously wicked and vicious in the actions it described, involving an apparatus chillingly and mysteriously referred to as a “staple-gun,” that I hurriedly shut the volume and returned it to its place. I found myself pacing up and down the room in an agitated manner, as I desperately attempted to divest my mind of the vile images to which it had just been so rudely exposed. Is it possible that events such as those related in this book take place in this world of tomorrow? What fate has befallen mankind, if this is the literature of the age?
In time, I grew calmer, and endeavored to make my toilet for the evening. The tiny water closet was a revelation of efficiency. It contained a tall, narrow douche, and a sink as well, with cool running water. I splashed some on my face, and felt a mite revivified.
And so it was that I retired to this spot. I ascended the rickety wooden ladder, and wished that one of the other, less prized, berths had been offered to me. I tested the beams of the shelf on which I now couch, and they appeared sound enough. Still, I might wish to be in a conventional bed, with a solid floor beneath me.
There is a switch near at hand which I touched experimentally, and which extinguished the light overhead quite suddenly. Groping in the darkness, I found this other switch, which illuminated my bedside lamp.
It is idle folly to speculate about what my wife and children are doing at this moment. For at this moment they are no more than –
A heavy tread upon the stair. Perhaps Miss Lucas returns. I shall switch off the light.

October 24th, 2000

It is several days since I wrote the above words. My waking hours have been so filled with wonders, and horrors, that I scarcely know where to begin in describing the impressions that throng my teeming brain.
I awoke yesterday morning feeling considerably refreshed: much stronger, it must be said, than I have felt in years. I believed in the words that Dr. Chen had told me; I am a sick man no longer. That is the greatest wonder of all, and I am determined to be grateful for it.
I sat up, on this curious shelf – and looked down upon a startling sight! Miss Lucas had retired to the mat on the floor wearing almost no covering at all, quite as near nakedness, indeed, as her brother who still emitted his whistling snores a few feet away from her on the couch. In my embarrassment, I returned to my bed and turned my face to the wall. And so I remained until the two young Lucases had risen, washed, and clothed themselves.
Then I arose, still in my attire from 1896, and made my way unsteadily down the ladder. Jerry Lucas regarded me critically and suggested that I bathe (or in actuality make use of the douche, or “shower” as they term it.)
“We’ll get your stuff dry-cleaned,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’ll lend you some clothes and you can walk around, check out the city.”
The matter of clothing me has proved difficult. Although we are roughly similar in build, enough so that his habiliments do fit me, I gather that I made a rather incongruous picture once outfitted in one of his buttoned shirts with their loud, garish patterns, and shiny trousers. Our feet are of different sizes, and so I borrowed socks from him, but retain my original shoes. My ample set of whiskers, admired in my day when they excited any comment at all, are not, I gather, a very common feature at the moment. They may have contrasted all the more sharply with Jerry’s taste in attire.
“Don’t worry about it, there are all kinds of freaks wandering around in New York,” he told me, by way of reassurance. “I’ll see if I got a friend who can lend you a fuddy-duddy suit,” he added, as he and his sister observed me in my new garb. “Or, you can wear yours when it gets back, I guess. Just not that watch on a chain and all. We’ll get you a cheap-o wrist watch instead.”
Miss Lucas departed for New Jersey, the shores of which are apparently readily accessible through modern transport, where she said she had some late afternoon classes to attend. And then, experiencing both some measure of excitement and trepidation, I descended to the street with Jerry, to enter into this new New York.
My first impressions were of chaos, noise and crowding. What a fantastical jumble of people and vehicles of every description! There are electric signs at most corners that command the pedestrian WALK in green or DON’T WALK in red at regular intervals, and this seemed to me a sensible innovation – but hardly enough to regulate a flow of traffic so heavy as this!
There were the swift “cars” and horseless lorries, some frighteningly huge, putting me in mind of the saurians of the ancient world, thundering through the streets, and then there were modern bicycles with wheels of matched size whipping past, in both the street and on the pavement.
Then there were people charging by on pairs of boots on wheels, and occasionally a young man in a smooth, rounded helmet on a loud, rumbling, squat sort of mechanical bicycle with thick rubber wheels, and adults and children piloting themselves about on strange little silver contraptions which Jerry tells me are called scooters . . . it was more than I could quite take in.
When I looked up, I saw buildings taller than the imagination can quite grasp. From some angles they are oppressively formidable, and I feel claustrophobic and lost amid the vast forest of their trunks. At other times, I must own, the vistas they offer, towering overhead and receding in the distance, and the views down individual avenues and streets, are quite stunningly beautiful.
In the sky I several times spied pointed, winged craft, very different from the “air cars” I imagine in Equality, and distinct also from dirigibles or hot-air balloons. These also made a perceptible noise, as they sewed their way through the clouds.
Every now and then would come the low rumble of a subterranean railway. The cacophany of noises was quite deafening. Many of the noises made by the cars in the street are, Jerry tells me, the result of drivers tooting their horns at one another. As I passed another car, when we were walking abreast in a less crowded street, it gave off a series of obnoxious pips, whirrs, squawks and groans the like of which I never heard in my life. I backed away from the explosion of murderous sounds in terror, and was very nearly mowed down by an Oriental delivery man, clutching the sort of parcel Dr. Chen arrived with last night, pedaling by on a bicycle. Jerry informs me that these vile noises constitute a “car alarm” meant to deter robbers from entering a vehicle so equipped.
Several special cars of the police, several medical ambulances, and a string of shiny red fire trucks with huge metal ladders atop them poured screaming by us at one point, and the other cars slowed, or attempted to move out of the way. These emergency vehicles were rather thrilling to observe – so much swifter than their horse-drawn equivalents in my own day! And the firemen’s hats were still recognizable, and gave me an irrational childish thrill.
But such a clamor the vehicles raised! I pressed my hands to my ears, and hesitated to remove them, even after the procession had receded into the distance.
Jerry Lucas bought me the “cheap-o” watch, as promised. It is made of this curious new substance I see everywhere, the name of which, he tells me, is “plastic.” Plastic often appears to be a sort of brittle vulcanized rubber, though it comes in many forms. The watch irritates my wrist, but I am attempting to make my peace with it. It is a shocking lemon yellow, displays numbers in what Jerry calls a “digital” form, and features an odd, fantastical children’s story creature, which Jerry terms a “Pee-ka-choo” smiling joyously and dancing.
Then he purchased a new black shirt for me in a “Ten Dollars or Less” shop. I was staggered by the price: Seven dollars! But Jerry waved away my concern and declared that he was in a generous mood. All black, with buttons up the front and on the sleeves, he assures me that it is more becoming to my person and my whiskers than anything in his wardrobe. I know nothing of the fashions of the moment, and must rely upon his judgment.
Indeed, the fashions that these people wear! And the people themselves! The young man we purchased the watch from on the street had the appearance of a young Mayan or Aztec god: the same sharp, impressive profile. There appear to be many more South Americans in this Manhattan of the year 2000, as well as many Orientals, Negroes, Indians from India and people from lands I would not fain attempt to identify. It all adds to the bustle and excitement that was ever one of this city’s charms, but it makes for a rather bewildering amalgam of visages, languages and accents.
The restaurants we passed promised their patrons samplings of the cuisine of every nation of the globe: Thai (for so it is apparently rendered), Caribbean, Salvadoran, Italian, Mexican, Ethiopian, Syrian, Russian . . . The variety is astonishing.
Jerry led me into a small, unprepossessing Indian establishment called Curry In A Hurry. We each ordered a lunch “special”; I had not yet broken my fast and found myself, again, uncharacteristically hungry. Again, however, I felt a vague anxiety about the strange aromas and unidentifiable nature of the foods the shop served.
“Is this place . . . clean?” I ventured to ask.
“Clean enough,” was his cryptic response. “But listen to what Lizzie said, and just go for the mild stuff.”
It was difficult to determine what was mild and what hot, in all my ignorance. But with the help of the charming Brahmin woman behind the counter, I selected my three items, which were poured over rice. Two were mild, but one curry burned my mouth rather badly, and caused me to cough – for the first time since the previous evening, I realized. Jerry Lucas pounded my back and urged me to eat more rice, and drink water from a tiny cup of paper. (Another prediction proved!)
After the meal, we deposited my suit of clothes at the “dry cleaners,” and then repaired to his lodgings, and I exchanged the shirt on my back for the somber one we had purchased. I then broached a topic upon which I had been meditating for much of the morning.
“Jerry,” said I, “I am most grateful for your hospitality, and the opportunity to see this age, of which I have long dreamed.”
“Don’t mention it, big guy.”
“And I wish to learn more,” I pursued, “and I wish to be of assistance to you and your sister in any way possible; I would welcome a chance to repay my debt of gratitude.”
“Relax. We’re cool. Just help Tiff write that paper. And maybe we can think of some way you can help me out later.”
His inveterate churlishness was not encouraging; he appeared to shrug off my words, and intimated the conversation was over by walking away. But I followed him. “And yet I cannot help hoping,” I went on, “that there might be a way of returning me to my own time, and my own home, once I have –”
“Absolutely not. Forget about it.” He was lifting one of the crinkly plastic bags out of a harder plastic container; it was clearly the receptacle for waste. “God, this stuff starts smelling fast,” he grunted. “F-cking roaches,” he added, as several of the insects scurried away from his theater of operations.
I would not let the point go. “I apprehend that I am some sort of artificial construct, redundant to my original self. But if the consciousness of my mind, and what I have seen, could be returned to his mind and memories –”
“N. O., no. Do you understand English? There’s no way to do that, and anyhow, we don’t want to change history, now, do we?”
I held my tongue. For how could I tell this ruffian, upon whom my fate seems to depend, that it is precisely because I wish to prevent the advent of men like himself that I wish to return to my own time, and write and work with renewed vigor?
“Anyways, cheer up,” he added, clapping a hand on my shoulder that had all too recently been sullied by tying off the bag full of trash. “That real Bellamy’s gonna croak in two years, remember. You got your whole life ahead of you. And if you want your M.T.V., we got that for you, too.”
I did not catch his meaning, nor could I muster the energy to inquire.
But, apparently taken by his own remark, and thinking to divert me, Jerry then proceeded to show me the use of a large mechanical box I had glimpsed the previous evening but could not have guessed the purpose of. It is called a Tele-Vision, or “T.V.” He seemed eager to display its virtues to me, as one of the crowning achievements of his age.
In Equality, I postulate the development of a device called an electroscope which, coupled with a telephone, allows a man to view other persons or performances far away, whilst hearing them in the same instant. Thus, Doctor and Mrs. Leete, Edith and Julian make themselves easy in the music room to “attend,” in a sense, the theatrical presentation of a historical drama being performed in Honolulu. I dreamed that anyone, anywhere in the world could attend a matinee or evening of theater in any other locale, much as they could turn a screw on the telephone in their home, as I described in Looking Backward, and listen to any symphony orchestra, or any fine minister delivering a Sunday morning sermon.
Because the best would be on offer to all, in remote areas as well great metropolises, I felt certain that the dross would fall by the wayside, and only the wisest, best speakers and most talented performers would be tolerated, or find an audience.
What we watched that afternoon . . . disabused me of some of these notions. I discovered, for one thing, that many of the programmes presented on the T.V. are not unfolding as one looks on and listens, in the manner of a telescope or telephone. On the contrary, they appear to be recorded in advance, like the music on Mr. Edison’s experimental gramophone wax cylinders.
A stunning amount of time appears to be devoted to advertisements, which have the same sound and visual component. I asked Jerry why this was the case.
“Well, they’re not just going to show this stuff for free, right? They have to pay overhead, when they make a show. And they have to have sponsors. And the sponsors make money through ads. Obviously.”
“But who would watch advertisements for such lengths of time? What dramatic presentation is comprehensible or enjoyable with this many rude and sudden interruptions by companies hawking their wares?”
“You get used to it. You don’t have that stuff so much on cable.”
“Cable?” I asked.
“Cable T.V.” He has precious little patience for my gross ignorance of their customs and terminology. “The extra channels you pay for. They don’t have ads, or as many ads. But this is a network station, and we’re watching for free, so you put up with a few commercials. You get up, go to the bathroom, or switch channels or whatever. It’s no big deal.”
It appeared to me that more money and more elaborate preparation must have gone into some of these “commercials” than into the “shows” they punctuate. There is much music, much use of moving drawings which Jerry terms animation, and much ingenuity in these miniature capitalist dramatic presentations. One contained an amusing goose, angrily quacking out the name of an insurance company – though how it was possible for the “bird actor” to be coaxed into some movements and facial expressions (yes, facial expressions!) was quite beyond me.
As to the quality, as to the intrinsic value and uplifting potentiality of the spectacles with which these marketing ploys are interspersed . . . I hardly know how to comment on what I saw. I think, for the time being, I shall hold off.
Next, Jerry Lucas demonstrated the use of his “stereo” machine. It plays music, much like a gramophone, without a horn, without scratching cylinders or winding down – and at a hair-raising volume. He showed me how the “radio” component worked, and again heaped scorn upon my fictional notion of live concerts carried over the telephone. (Telephones themselves do yet persist, however. His is tiny, with neither stem, nor wire, nor the need to ask an operator to act as intermediary.)
Then he played me several of his favorite “C.D.”s. One contained the work of a colored man with the curious moniker of Snoop Doggy-Dog. Jerry spoke with great feeling of how “Snoop” was a hero, a friend of “Too-pock’s,” another artist, who had died, how they both were persecuted and had spent time in prison. Yet when I asked what purported crimes had placed them there, he became rather vague. As for the “songs” themselves . . . I know not what to say. It is in no wise music in the sense in which I have lived my life employing the word. The insistent beat was compelling, but stamped out any hint of a lilt in the melody. The lyrics were almost impossible to decipher, yet from what I could make out they were cruel, and full of swagger.
Then he played something he called “world” music – a tune from Brazil. This had an intoxicating, South American charm to it, and the arrangement was richly textured, and it reassured me that music, as we cherished it in my time and in my home, has not died out entirely.
I fear I greatly underestimated the role that homesickness would play in the life of a time-traveler when I wrote Looking Backward. I miss my home, my wife and my children so intensely that in moments their absence seems quite insupportable.
Ah, me! Oh, friendless world!
But there is no help for it, or none has so far appeared – so let that pass.
Later, Jerry Lucas demonstrated the use of yet another contraption, one situated on a desk against the far wall of his loft. This machine, he said, was a computer – but it proved capable of doing far more than simply calculating numbers. It has the keyboard of a typewriter, which rolls out from beneath the desk. It has a wide glass screen and, when switched on, the screen is illuminated by a series of illustrations which give way to the moving images of fish swimming in a tank, if the machine is too long allowed to stand idle.
My companion said that he would “surf” on it for a while, by which I suppose he meant: ride the surf of electricity and ether? He promised to show me how to operate it soon. He gave me a key, and catechised me about the location of his lodgings. I assured him I could find my way thither without difficulty.
Once I had let myself out, I felt a great sense of freedom and relief, like a captive at last given some measure of parole. I must make my way in this new epoch. I frankly do not know enough of these people who have conjured me out of time to remain entirely dependent upon their charity.
I was soon lost amidst the throng of bustling, shouting people garbed in their garish colors and myriad designs. The women for the most part wear a masculine dress, although most are more generously covered than Miss Lucas was when I first met her. (The weather has since acquired more of the seasonable chill one associates with October.) Some of the women are no doubt very handsome, and stride about quite athletically, in comparison with the retiring beauties of my day. But there is a hardness in their manner and an oddness to their apparel that leaves me ill-equipped to appreciate their charms.
The varieties of the immigrant groups, old and new, continue to stagger me.
Many of the stores are festooned with ghosts and witches and pumpkins made out of card – apparently in anticipation of the coming of All Hallow’s Eve. To what degree they currently believe in ancient notions of sorcery and witchcraft I cannot tell.
I turned into Vesey Street . . . and there beheld the old colonial church. There it stands still, as in the days when I lived and worked here. The gravestones behind it are more worn, but remain as I remember them . . . I gripped a bar of the black railing with one hand, and held back tears, as I contemplated this island vision from my own time. Faulty oracle that I am, I have written of a future in which the clergy are not in the pay of church boards, and thus can truly preach what they believe, and serve God according to their conscience. I doubt such a day as that has been realized. For some years, I have not been induced to set foot inside a church, for the hypocrisy and contradictions therein cause me too great a pain. And yet I wept as I gazed upon this church and the stones in her yard, as if glimpsing an oasis in a desert of incomprehensible strangeness.
I made my way down to the Wall Street area. Here there were many buildings that remained unchanged. Pillars and Greco-Roman facades are still favored in this district. The dominant color is still gray, and I became acquainted with the modern permutation of a businessman’s suit. Self-important young men and women hurried along, relaying commonplaces or else barking orders into the portable telephones they pressed to their ears. I stopped outside the stock exchange, a new erection built upon the old site, and asked of an elderly colored man to my right: “Pardon me, but I am a stranger here. Is it true that the men who do business here still hold the reins to the rest of the country?”
He grinned at me, and shook his head. “They own me, baby, and you better believe they own you.”
It only confirmed my intuition that this region of the city was quite unchanged.
I next wandered uptown, and to the east, into the once dreaded Five Points area, through the sixth ward and up toward the eleventh ward. The neighborhoods had changed greatly. No more were there the slum houses filled with the Irish immigrants, or the German shoemakers, tailors, beer gardens and tobacconists of Kleinedeutschland. I detected almost no Teutonic nor Hibernian presence whatsoever – only a few shabby ghosts of delicatessens that appeared to be Jewish rather than German.
Instead, round about Mulberry Street, the Italians who were entering the city in such great numbers, from what I have read in the years of my illness, were manifest. Their restaurants crowded the area – but jostled with what appeared to be a city within the city, filled with Chinamen. An area of many blocks is apparently known as Chinatown, and these people appeared far less acclimated to American life than Dr. Chen.
It was a scene both strange and familiar, for the area. The peddler carts of the Lower East Side are gone, but the fish markets are quite as pungent as ever. The signs are mostly written in Chinese, on the stores and fly posters alike. Again, several times I was nearly run down by the drivers of cars or bicycles, several times nearly toppled over backwards in my efforts to remove myself from their path.
The buildings may be safer and cleaner than the tenements of my day. I cannot tell from their exteriors. All buildings appear to be of at least three or four stories, and many are higher. They are all of brick or stone. Wooden homes have quite disappeared, along with cobblestones and horses. There was no sign of Street Arabs, or urchins employed in the shops, or shining shoes, or picking rags, or hawking the newspapers, so perhaps all children do attend school now.
On my return route, I stumbled across a building designated as a public library! Here was a real find. I entered, and found that there were computing machines such as the one Jerry owns, but that in other respects, this place was quite recognizably similar in function to a sizeable library of my own epoch. There were modest tables and chairs, and shelves and racks of books. The books were quite accessible to the public, rather than being roped off or locked away, as was too often the case in libraries of my day.
Some of the novels I turned over in my hands contained fiction of a kind I found neither repugnant nor incomprehensible. Perhaps Jerry’s books are not typical after all, or not representative of all that remains of literature.
I even, among the stacks, encountered some old friends. Though their bindings were strange and spindly and new, yet the voices in which they spoke and the tales they told were reassuringly familiar. I ached as I clutched them; like me, they were lost waifs from the distant past. It was sweet but piquant to turn over a volume of my friend Samuel Clemens, for example, writing as Mark Twain, and to hear his angry, righteous, humorous voice ringing clear across a century’s divide.
Near the readers’ tables, I encountered shelves and shelves full of encyclopedias. I yanked several volumes down and feverishly leafed through them. I hardly knew where to begin. Out of vanity, I suppose, I sought my own name . . . and found it. In several different sources, I was described as the head of a movement that briefly surfaced, then faded.
As late as 1935, I was still being described as one of the most influential writers of the past half-century, and my book Looking Backward as second only to Das Kapital by Marx in its importance. My novel was still being compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in terms of the excitement it had generated. However, the bloodless war that I hoped it might generate, as dramatic as that facilitated by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s work in its implications, has never come to pass.
And Equality, the book I have wrestled with, re-written and honed with such care these past few years of my life . . . apparently will be all but universally dismissed as “stuffy” and too concerned with ideas, instead of with the exigencies of fiction. Along with all my other books, save Looking Backward, it seems to have sunk without a trace. Only the “Parable of the Water Tank” section achieved some success, for a time, on its own.
It is a bitter thing to see one’s life and dreams summed up so succinctly and written off by posterity, in a matter of a few paragraphs.
The People’s Party, I found elsewhere, indeed, the whole Populist Movement, soon faded from the national scene. We Nationalists were foolish to allow our cause to be subsumed by theirs in ’92 and ’96, as they were foolish to allow our common cause to be subsumed by that of Bryan and the Democrats. But then, I intuited this hard truth before I left.
Bryan will lose to McKinley, amidst the wealth of propaganda that Hanna and McKinley’s wealthy patrons are manufacturing: the pamphlets and the handbills and the badges and the canes and the barbecues and the brass bands, and the threats to factory workers that if Bryan wins, they will all be out of jobs, issued to them on notes in their pay envelopes, and the eminent alienists writing in the New York Times that Bryan is a mattoid, or a megalomaniac, or suffers from graphomania or querulent logorrhoea . . .
And what Bryan is, in fact – or, I should say, was – was a spirited and well-meaning man with no real depth to his vision. They adopted some of our planks into the Democratic Party Platform: our calls for tariff reduction, a graduated income tax, and protections for striking workers against the brutal Pinkertons. But Bryan allows it all to be reduced to a call for free silver. Indeed, he himself has reduced all the issues of the campaign to a crusade against the gold standard. He has taken my notion of the crucifixion of mankind by wealth, and transmuted it into his stirring Cross of Gold address. For all the huzzahs and cheering it evoked at the convention, there is more to solving the ills of the world, and breaking the monopolies of the bankers and the corporate giants, than creating a widespread silver currency!
So, McKinley shall win – or has won, won long, long ago. Instead of giving America the promised “Full dinner pail,” however, it seems he gave more thought to giving her an Empire. It was an aspiration as inimical to Samuel Clemens as to myself.
And yet McKinley will be re-elected, and then shot by an anarchist in 1901, and succeeded by that young adventurer Theodore Roosevelt from New York, another Republican who takes just as Imperialist a view of the right of the United States to impose its will on its neighbors as does, or, rather, did, McKinley. The treachery that these men will show, or did show, to the young revolutionaries in Cuba and in the Phillipines, whose cause they once pretended to champion against Spain, is most dreadful to contemplate.
What a strange crystal ball an encyclopedia from the future is! How bemusing to read about events just around the corner, a few days ago, and about one’s contemporaries, along with oneself, as curiosities in a history lesson: dried out, and as neatly stuck into our places, as insects on pins.
As for the socialist revolution that took place in Russia early in the twentieth century . . . I read, aghast, of the bungling and the atrocities committed by the last czar, but with even greater horror of the innovations of those who cashiered him. It was the sort of revolution that Europeans are ever advocating and that I have long feared: contaminated by the class principle, with no regard for the protection of life or for an orderly transition, and no thought to the democratic safeguards that we in America hold dear.
I could not help but wonder about what might have been, even as I read what had transpired. What if this fellow Kerensky and his Menshaviks had prevailed, instead of the less popular and concomittantly less scrupulous Bolsheviks? Might a revolution that gave all men an economic stake in the system and yet also offered them the right to vote in real elections not have been possible? Would the world not have profited by such an example? This character Stalin sounds like one of the greatest catastrophes ever to befall mankind. Who, indeed, if the books I consulted are to be believed, could have predicted evil, bloodthirstiness and waste on so colossal a scale?
I spent the better part of the afternoon poring over these volumes, and became much obliged to the librarians for their helpful assistance in pursuing other reference works. When I emerged from the library, I felt, curiously enough, better posted on many aspects of the twentieth century than the Lucas youngsters appear to be after a lifetime of living in it. I read a bit about the history of China and of Korea, and hope to learn more of what befell other nations which attempted to achieve economic democracy in the course of this century.
My “Peek-a-choo” watch informed me that it was near the hour when I had promised to return, and so I made my way back to Warren Street. Jerry Lucas had purchased more Chinese food, and set out the remainders from the previous evening. I found the courage to sample several dishes I had not previously tried. Really, the advent of the return of my appetite is a most wondrous thing.
“Have fun?” he asked me, with a mouth full of food.
“It has been most illuminating,” I replied.
“I told you, guy, this is a great time to be alive. Give us a couple more days, and you’re not gonna want to go nowhere.”
I chose not to intimate that I was less enthusiastic.
After the meal, as promised, he attempted to show me how his “computer” innovation works. He taught me how to switch it on, and how to manipulate a clumsy object he calls a “mouse.” He explained how one might do a “web search.” By web, he means an electronic network of scribblings, ideas, scholarly sites, pictures and flotsam. He was most impatient with my first, fumbling efforts to master the system; I half-suspected he did not wish to see me master it at all. But with the use of the typewriter keyboard, and a book of his which explains new key functions, I began to make sense of the thing. It is an extraordinary medium, and I have the impression that it is comparatively new.
Later that evening, Miss Lucas arrived, full of complaints about her classes across the river, and we repaired to that “bar” of which she and Dr. Chen are so fond. I found the electrical lights of the city quite pretty in the evening, flecking the shadowy buildings like diamonds on a lady’s gown of dark velvet, or in a window display, although I rather missed the soft halo that once surrounded the gas lights on these same streets.
The bar smelled foul, and was crowded and dark. A Tele-Vision was nailed to one wall, and a game of football was in progress upon it. We had more “Buds” and Miss Lucas once more attempted to ply me with questions about the ideas I set forth in Looking Backward.
“Um, okay, so if nobody gets paid anything in your book, then, like, why do they go to work?”
“They consider it their patriotic duty to the nation. Every man and every woman in the society I describe, upon reaching his or her majority, would spend three years employed in various kinds of labor, and then would choose the profession for which he or she has a vocation. My putative industrial army is mustered into service as some countries have, at some times, mustered all young men into military service.”
“And what happens if people just want to kick back and hang out?”
“Shirkers would be scorned. I suggest in Looking Backward that a man who refused to work might be put on rations of bread and water. Or that those who do not wish to be part of the system might be given a plot of land to till themselves, on a reservation set aside for the purpose. But most would work, I think. If the society defined work as the measure of manhood.”
“But what if someone was just a slacker? Like, maybe they didn’t go around saying ‘I will not work,’ but they goofed off on the job, whatever?”
“It would elicit the contempt of all those around them. It would be tantamount to a soldier shirking his duty when his country needs him.”
In the smoky twilight of the bar, she blinked at me. “I know a couple of people going to college rot-see,” she said cryptically, at last. “So, like, they’re in the army, but they say no way are they going to have to serve in a battle. They just want to get out of all the g-dd-mned student loans.”
“None join the service due to motives of valor?” I inquired.
“Naah. The army is bogus. People just join if they have to.”
I considered this. “When I was young,” I told her, “I saw young men march off to battle in the war between the states, who knew they would be facing scenes of horrific bloodshed, sickness, and almost certain death. And yet they rejoiced to wear the uniform of the Union! They were glad in their hearts to sacrifice their lives for their country."
“Yeah, Feldman said that was one thing people didn’t like about you,” she informed me. “You’re, like, so militaristic.”
“That was indeed a criticism leveled against my book in my own time,” I replied, after moistening my lips with a sip of that watery beer now prevalent, “but only by readers who mistook my purpose. I wish to retain all the noblest motives for which men serve – valor, a desire to prove oneself, a wish to be subsumed by something greater than the whims of the individual – and channel these fine motives into the work force. An industrial army would kill and maim no one, but would labor only to enrich itself and those too ill, young or old to contribute.”
“But communism doesn’t work. It just makes people lazy.”
“And does capitalism do much better by starving them, exploiting them, and driving them to commit base acts?” I was emboldened by my reading of that day, and spoke with a measure of authority. “How do you know that my plan would not work, when it still has never been tried? Some nations may have exchanged corporate tyranny for State tyranny for some length of time, I grant – but that has nothing to do with the system I proposed!”
She appeared rather cowed by my vehemence. “Whatever, guy.” She returned to drinking, talking with her brother and flirting lasciviously with several other youths, and left me to my gloomy meditations.
Soon, conversation became all but impossible, as the football match ended, the Tele-Vision was switched off, and deafening, percussive music came crashing out of some recessed place, causing the very bar in front of us to vibrate.
“Oh wow!” Miss Lucas squealed, and gripped my arm excitedly. “This is, like, my favorite song! This is the best! It’s Christina Aguilera, it was her first hit, you’ll really like this.”
The song in question boasted a more discernible melody than the piece by “Snoop” her brother had played for me. The young siren singing spoke of being a “genie in a bottle.” Despite the oppressive beat, I found the ditty harmless enough, as Miss Lucas swayed provocatively and sang along, until in a flash I understood the double-entendre nature of the lyric about being “rubbed the right way.” So startled and scandalized was I, that I stepped off of the stool, and stood, staring about me rather wildly.
“You okay, fella?” the saloon-keeper asked.
I nodded my assent, and backed away. On a table near the door were piled a number of what I realized must be modern newspapers. I retrieved several samples, and squinted at them in the dim light, wishing that there were a candle or a lantern handy. One publication was called The New York Press and the other The Village Voice. Perhaps the latter is printed up in Greenwich Village. It appears to reflect the more bohemian viewpoint that was associated with that region of the city in my day. The first is more conservative in its line, if I may use that term for any paper of this crass, sensual era. There were several editorials most sarcastic in tone, deriding families on “welfare,” which I gather is a form of government relief, and “whiny” poorer nations seeking aid from this country.
The Village Voice, in contrast, boasted articles purporting to expose bigotry and discrimination toward recent immigrants, and to expose campaign funding irregularities and platform inconsistencies on both sides in the presidential elections which the nation shall be undergoing in the next few weeks. The strategies enumerated put me sadly in mind of the machinations of the Republican Party machine, and the inanity and weakness of the Democratic response, in my own election year of 1896.
What struck me most forcibly about both periodicals were the advertisements in their final pages. I could not believe my eyes, as moments earlier, listening to Miss Lucas’s favorite song, I could not believe my ears. These pages are nothing more than a collection of lurid photographs of virtually naked men and women. Image after image is baldly laid out before the viewer with the goal of titillating and seducing him into spending money, in ways not always clear to me.
Some suggest sexual services over the telephone, as in that grotesque and indecipherable novel of Jerry’s. Some promise the services of “escorts.” Most of the “escorts” pictured were young Oriental women, described as lotuses, Tokyo blossoms and so forth. They smiled sweetly out of the pictures, with the candid faces of children. Others were Caucasian, and a few were Negresses. There were also some women depicted called “she-males.” When the photographs were of men, I could not be certain if it were men or women they were hoping to entice. Yet as little of the lascivious nature of these advertisements was left to the imagination by the coy wording as by the miniscule dots and stars strategically placed on the bodies pictured there, as a laughable gesture toward modesty and decency, the inadequacy of which made the images all the more sordid.
Clutching one of the papers, I approached Jerry Lucas and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned on his stool. “Yeah?” he asked sleepily.
I shook the page in his face. “Tell me,” I demanded hoarsely. “Is ‘escort’ the current euphemism for a prostitute?” I had seen enough of young ladies like his sister to not scruple about being so blunt in their presence.
He shrugged. “Sure, I guess. You want one?”
I ignored his leering insinuation. “And am I to understand that prostitution is now legal?”
“Well, no. But if you say ‘escort.’ I mean, as long as you don’t spell it out, nobody cares.”
“But,” I exclaimed, “how can you guarantee that children have no access to these pictures? Are these publications only allowed in bars?”
“No, I think most kids have heard of escorts. It’s just not that big a deal.” He stared at me arrogantly, grinning condescendingly, as if I were a hysteric or a fool, and his sister burst into another fit of giggles.
I returned the publications to the table, trembling. I then approached Tiffany, who was still smiling and laughing and bobbing to the beat of the tinny music. “Miss Lucas. I have the impression that women as well as men are afforded a range of employment opportunities at the moment.”
“Wha?” She snorted. She too appeared to be intoxicated.
“Jobs, Miss Lucas. Is it not commonplace for women, as well as men, to find employment at a variety of jobs?”
“Well, yeah.” She seemed startled by the suggestion that it was not always thus.
“No, let’s face it,” her brother chimed in. “The b-tches are just looking for some sugar-daddy to pay their way for them so they don’t ever have to work.” Now it was he and his friends who indulged themselves in some hearty laughter.
“Shut up, Jerry!” she returned indignantly, and then told me: “Women work just as hard as men.”
“And have they achieved suffrage?”
“Have they what?”
“Can they vote in elections, Miss Lucas?”
She shrugged. “Sure. If they want to.”
“And do they receive wages comparable to those of men?”
“I guess.”
“Then what might drive a young woman of the year 2000 . . .” I could not complete the thought. The splendor and equity of the world I had long envisioned still engulfed my imagination. I could not make it tally with the world as I now found it.
“He wants to know why hose become hose,” her brother put in, mysteriously.
“Oh. Well, I guess some people want money. I know a couple of girls who people say do phone sex. Like I said, to pay off college loans. Like with rot-see. Some people have trouble getting jobs, you know? Or they’re druggies, or they can’t pay the rent with their lousy jobs, or whatever.”
“It does not trouble you? That people are still, in this day and age, rendered ‘things’ for the use of others? That they are still subjected to such demeaning servitude?”
She drunkenly pondered my words. “Well, I guess people can be whatever they want to be: things, or servants, or whatever.”
I sank heavily upon my stool. “And the taint of syphilis? Does it remain the scourge that it was?”
“Oh, like V.D.? Well, they got rid of the old ones like that. But now they have all kinds of disgusting new ones,” she told me. “Her-Peas, and Ades. It’s a sucky time to be young.”
When the Lucases had tired at last of their frivolity, we repaired to Jerry’s lodgings. I made no effort to write, and found I had drunk enough to lose myself for many hours in balmy oblivion.
The next morning, for a few precious moments, I had no clew as to my current situation. I lay, feeling strong and refreshed, with my eyes still closed, and imagined I should soon hear the cheerful voice of Emma calling to me, and how pleased she would be by my renewed health . . . and then the memories of the previous two days crowded in on my mind, bursting my fragile bubble of peace. This harsh new reality seemed all the crueler, all the more impossible to face, for those moments of sweet forgetfulness.
Again, Miss Lucas left for New Jersey. After her departure, and after my morning ablutions, I inquired of her brother where I might find a numismatist’s shop.
“Whatever that is,” he told me, “We don’t have it any more.”
“I see. Is there any bureau of information where I might ascertain what sort of businesses do exist in the city?” I realized that I would just as soon keep him out of my plans.
“I got a phone book. I got a yellow pages. You can look there.” So saying, he retrieved two heavy, soft-covered books from beneath his desk, and dumped them on the floor before me.
The one called the yellow pages has provided me with a wealth of information about the forms that capitalism takes in this age. I was struck, for example, by the fact that by far the largest section of the book is devoted to advertisements for prostitutes similar to the ones in the newspapers I saw last night. So far as I can see, all outcry and public objection to young women selling their bodies for money have been waived.
There are also more staid traditional professions, and a bewildering array of new ones. Still, just as in my own era, Mr. Jones clamors: buy from me! I am Mr. Jones, the cheapest, the fastest, the best! Buy from Jones, that he not starve!
Alphabetically under the letter C, I found a listing for several coin shops. I wrote down the address of one in Greenwich Village, and returned the books to Jerry Lucas with thanks.
“You wanna take my metro card?” he asked me. “I’m off from the lab this week, I ain’t going no place. I’m just gonna hang out on line, maybe scope some women in some chat rooms.”
“What is a metro card?”
“For the subway. I got unlimited rides for a month. For sixty bucks. You can take it all over, it’s totally free.”
I thanked him for his generous offer, and accepted the flimsy yellow card. Once outside, the contents of my original suit in the pocket of my borrowed trousers, I made my way toward the steps of a subway entrance. It took a few passes through the slot, but the card eventually permitted me to enter. There were few markings or maps for tourists or time travelers such as myself, but I endeavored to make my way down onto the uptown platform. It was thronged with people, cursing the delay of the train. Some announcement was being made over a system of public address, again and again, which was perfectly unintelligible. From the muttered objurations of my fellow passengers, I ascertained that they understood the words no better than I.
Large rats scuttled under and across the tracks below us, scouting the garbage that littered the space. Besides a few dogs on leashes on the street, they are the first animals I have seen since I arrived. At last, a glowing of the tracks in the depths of the tunnel heralded the arrival of the train, which, for all its shaking, its malodorous interior and its deafening rumbling, eventually deposited me in modern-day Greenwich Village.
Allow me to say a word or two about the advertisements in the subway cars – for I have been viewing them all day. Some advertise private services or government agencies. Some warn of the new sexual scourges Miss Lucas spoke of, or counsel passengers where to go for treatment, in English and Spanish. Some promise medical care for poor children, apparently a great cause of anxiety in this epoch, when doctors are prohibitively expensive.
Some speak of plastic surgery, which apparently involves cutting and reworking the human body for cosmetic purposes. (Whether the substance called plastic is then literally grafted into place on the flesh of the patient is more than I can divine from the signs I saw today.) And several cars were plastered with advertisements for one type of watch, or one brand of liquor or clothing.
In the case of the clothing, I found the images of the young men and women, boys and girls I should say, in various suggestive poses and states of undress, rolling on mattresses or sitting in each other’s laps, quite disturbing. Beneath their insistent images, the children of New Yorkers prattle and play, threatened or coaxed by their parents.
Young sweethearts grapple and grope each other in the cars in an unseemly manner, without a care in the world. The seats are hard, of ugly orange and yellow plastic. The floors are stained and littered with trash. Occasionally, a beggar will stagger through, singing or speaking in a dull monotone, attesting that he does not drink or steal or “do drugs,” rasping out a tuneless song and rattling a paper cup or shaking a hat. Most people studiously avoid his gaze. The overall effect of this mode of transport is one of squalor, tastelessness and human degradation.
It was a relief to emerge . . . and I did find that some streets in the western portion of Greenwich Village retain their quiet charm, with trees and stillness and the original brownstone buildings remaining. When I made my way through Washington Square, however, once a favorite haunt, I was dismayed to see it so thoroughly paved, parceled and overcrowded. Gone were the ladies with their parasols. Gone were the birdsong and the shrubbery. It is hardly more a “park” nowadays than would be a cinder alley in which a few weeds valiantly attempted to grow.
Instead, a frenzied juggler tossed into the air, and caught, a series of what looked like bowling pins set afire. Near a large, impressive marble arch, replacing the wooden one which once stood there, several more montebanks did a tumbling act, to the beat of percussive music. There are many dogs, and a few guitarists lounge on the stone walls, and vendors of ice cream stand by their carts. Though it has lost its tranquility, the stately homes along the northern border of the park have not lost their charm. And many of the original trees were there, the gingkoes and the buttonwoods, even the original “hanging tree” from before my time. I touched the bark of one of these old friends and, overcome with emotion, moved swiftly on.
At last I found my coin shop. The clerk took a long moment to appraise my quarters, my nickels, my gold dollars and my copper pennies, and examined them with a variety of devices, perhaps for purposes of magnification. At length he told me: “I’ll give you three hundred bucks each for the gold ones, and fifty bucks for each of the rest.”
I know not if barter is the preferred method of doing business in such cases, but it has never been to my taste. Though I am learning that inflation has quite changed the meaning of money in this time, it still sounded a staggering sum. “Done,” I replied.
And then I hesitated. At last, I drew out my old-fashioned time piece. “And, for this, do you have a price?” I asked. I hated to part with it, but the plastic children’s watch is quite functional, and I thought I would do well to have the extra cash, under the circumstances.
Again he examined it, and bit his lip. “Well, it’s not my usual line . . . but we get a call for this kind of thing now and again.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Where did you get all this?”
I stared calmly back. These things were mine, and I had nothing of which to be ashamed, save being forever obligated to the Lucases for my keep. “They have been in my family a considerable length of time,” I half-fibbed. “The exterior of the watch, and its chain are solid gold, I can assure you.”
Gold had no value in the incipient twentieth century that shone bright for so many years in my mind, and in my books. But in this twentieth century it still rules men’s lives. “Four hundred,” he spat out, taking my beautiful watch into his grubby hands. I had meant for it to pass into the hands of my son Paul one day. But perhaps, from the hands of that other, “real” Bellamy, it already has.
I now had a substantial sum of money inside my purse, surely by the standards of any era. Now, when beggars approached me in the street, as they did in the Greenwich area every few blocks, I was able to give them something. I hoped my attire did not give me the look of too prosperous a gentleman, for I have learned that crime is not the thing of the past in the year 2000 that I envisioned it might be. I distributed the paper money about my person in various places, to thwart potential pickpockets.
Yet I wished to see more of the city. I popped down the subway holes and reemerged many times in the course of the day. I did much vigorous walking. The morning’s momentary sliver of sweet forgetfulness, when I thought I was truly myself, in my own bed, had shaken me, and perhaps that is why I sought the diversion of physical exertion.
The best way to see the city would have been aboard an elevated train. But as far as I could tell, the El has quite died out, replaced entirely by her sister railroad running below ground.
Along the southernmost rim of Central Park, I saw some horses and carriages at last. They looked strangely out of place, with the inanimate, mechanized cars rolling past, and I gather that a ride in a hackney is an expensive novelty now reserved for tourists. Many of the lavish edifices along Fifth Avenue still stand: the homes of the Astors and the Vanderbilts and of Frick. But they have been converted into hotels or museums, many of them; they are no longer put to private use.
I will say that the northernmost sections of Central Park are quite as lovely and tranquil as ever they were in my day. The variety of birds I saw near 103rd Street was as great as ever: robins and jays and grackles and tits. There were even ducks and cranes in the lake! I was comforted by the hills, and trees, and huge outcroppings of rock. It was good to be lost in a forest of nature, instead of the manmade forest of the skyscraping buildings just outside.
However, while strolling through the North Woods, I came upon a colored man who shook his head and warned me: “Dangerous to be walking around here alone, man.” Apparently, he considered the risk to his own person to be not as great.
Strolling down Broadway soon after, I purchased my very first meal on my own, with the paper currency and silver of this new era. It was in another Chinese eatery (for I find I am growing fond of that fare): a “noodle and dumpling palace.” In Looking Backward I postulated a central dining hall in every ward, that citizens be freed of the drudgery of preparing all meals for themselves. It seems the hurrying denizens of this era, even more than New Yorkers of my own, have found their own capitalist means of doing the same.
I find the streets uptown to be somewhat less suffocatingly crowded. A few blocks south of the restaurant, I came upon a vast bookstore called Barnes and Noble. It was quite formidable in its breadth and height! According to a blond woman of middle age to whom I spoke outside, it is one of a chain of stores. “And they forced Shakespeare & Co. right out of existence,” she growled. “The bastards!” Yet after this emphatic objuration, she herself pushed through the doors and disappeared in the vast interior.
So, the principle of concentration of wealth, and the greater efficiency of the syndicates over small businesses remains until this day, I find. Yet still will man not take the logical step and consolidate all business into one great machine in the hands of the government!
In the store I found many books of interest, including several purporting to explain and summarize the century past, with maps, highlighted text, and colored photographs. Poring over these books and others about the wars and movements of the past hundred years, I filled in more of the blanks in my knowledge of what happened – why the cup of promise, I should say, was dashed from the lips of mankind.
I came to understand that, at the heart of the twentieth century swelled one conflict which shaped, or rather distorted, the course of history far more than any other. Twice in the 1900s, Germany sought to fulfill her Imperial aspirations. The second venture was fueled by the humiliation and thwarted passions of the first, and blazed into a conflagration that consumed the entire globe. When I traveled and lived in Germany, while I saw the squalor of her slums, I also apprehended the elegance of her civilization and her music, and the scope and penetrating vision of her thinkers. That such a nation could sink to such depths of barbarism strains my credulity. And yet all the books that I consulted insist that it is so.
The most horrifying weaponry and “sophisticated” means of waging war grew out of this second “World War,” stripping away the last vestiges of courage, valor and manliness from the field of honor. In fact, there is no field of honor anymore, properly speaking, no smart lines of fighting men, no sabres and bayonets. It was but a few days past, in my own home in Chicopee Falls, that I sought relaxation by deploying the little lead soldiers with which I used to entertain my boy Paul, re-enacting some of Napoleon’s skirmishes on the counterpane of my sickbed . . . but there are no Napoleons in this era, nor any need for them.
There are merely clerks in modern armies, pushing a button or turning a screw to rain down death on the heads of their foes – and on the women and children of their foes into the bargain.
So too, the deadlock between East and West, and the false choice between capitalist greed and exploitation on the one hand, and a pseudo-scientific, calcified socialist experiment gone wrong on the other, emerged from the years of this Second World War. Each side postured and fulminated, during the decades of that Cold War, and poured its lifeblood into these cowardly new apparatuses of death . . . and thus was the latter half of a century consumed.
I find that all talk of stirpiculture and eugenic dreams of improving the race have quite vanished, and this too may be attributable to the horrifying movement that arose in German in the 1930s. The creed of eugenics, as embraced by this Nazi Party (to which Miss Lucas, lost in her mental fog, was apparently accusing me of belonging, that first afternoon) proved to be so ruthless, so vicious in its applications, that all intelligent, humane people have shied away from it ever since, or so I infer. For when I requested of a bookseller that she inform me where books on the subject might be found, I saw her look at me askance, before replying that it is not an area of study about which the store stocks many books.
The danger was always there, I suppose, in the misapplication of the findings and theories of Mr. Darwin. The science of evolutionary theory can be twisted and misused in the social sphere, and this is clearly what transpired in the course of the twentieth century. They are right to fear a recurrence. And yet, how the people of this age do sorely need to have a thought or a care before they breed!
In Equality, I picture an America with a dwindling population, simply because everyone may live at the level of educated equanimity and comfort of the middle class in my own day, and thus, I have postulated, everyone will be as frugal and discriminating in the number of children they produce as were our middle and upper classes. In this way, I thought to cleverly refute Malthus and his warnings that, unless the lower classes be kept starving and sickly, their proclivity toward large families might overrun us all.
Yet here is an America pullulating and seething with its excessive hordes of populace. It abounds in greater creature comforts, and considers itself well-informed. There are, I gather, ample safe and reliable means of contraception now readily available. Medicine has improved to a point where parents may fairly count on their progeny’s survival. The elderly survive far longer, as I predicted and hoped in my books.
And while there is no socialist Utopia, there are pensions for the elderly which do not leave them utterly dependent upon the charity of their children. A great president, a relative of Teddy Roosevelt in fact, and yet a Democrat, enacted many such sane and humanitarian reforms a third of the way into this century, and if my book Looking Backward were a spur to some of these reforms (an end to child labor, a shorter work day, a minimum wage, relief for the unemployed) as one biographical account of my life implies, then I can only weep grateful tears that my efforts were not as entirely in vain as they generally are dismissed as having been.
Yet the nation is overrun with its own profusions of offspring, and those from other lands where education and contraception remain out of reach. Now more than ever, the poorest, the least informed and the least thoughtful – in other words, those least capable of caring for children – are the ones mostly like to produce them; the availability of contraception to the rest compounds this strange reversal of Darwin: this dynamic by which nature selects in favor of the careless and the foolish.
The previous day, as I mentioned, I beheld several T.V. programmes with Jerry Lucas that I still do not wish to describe, as the endeavor might make me ill. They were named for the noisome individuals who hosted them: Rikki Lake, Montel Williams, Jenny Jones and Jerry Springer. These exhibitions appeared to be specimens of what Jerry Lucas calls “live T.V.” rather than recorded dramatizations. One demonstrated the need for giving unattractive girls in high school a “make-over.” Another involved very young women attempting, through scientific testing, to determine the fathers of their offspring. Several involved family and sexual permutations too complicated to apprehend fully.
Jerry Lucas enjoyed the programmes most when they became most raucous. He rocked in his seat, and slapped his leg, yelling, “Oh yes! Do it! Pull her weave off!” when one colored young woman attacked another and divested her of her wig.
When several white young women were arguing over who had the greatest claim on a slovenly, dissipated, barely intelligible, barely conscious young man, by whom one had two children and the other three, Jerry shrieked with pleasure as their war of vile insults and filthy insinuations escalated toward – but I shall say no more about the specifics of what transpired in these programmes.
It was not clear to me whether the people presented by the adored ringmasters are representative of the American type at this stage, or freaks cruelly offered for public inspection. Yet, as we observed this noxious display of Barnumism, carried to a level far beyond the limits of what I should have called credulity . . . I did wonder what Mr. Darwin might have made of it all.
I rode the escalators to the different floors of this mammoth bookstore, and perused its departments (a wonderful industry in books for small children seems to have cropped up in this century!) its café and its gift stands. There were racks and racks of magazines and newspapers on one floor. I found that the New York Times persists to this day. Mr. Greeley’s Herald Tribune appears to have vanished, or at least I saw no sign of it, nor of the New York Evening Post to which I leant my editorial services as a youth. There is another paper I examined at an outdoor newsstand called The Post, but it was not to my taste, and appeared to be a quite distinct entity.
The Ladies Home Journal, to which I have contributed a piece on the genesis of Looking Backward, persists. Many of the magazines on offer in Barnes and Noble had glossy colored photographs of nubile maidens on the cover, and many had names such as Self, and Body, and Money. I also came across huge sections of books on self-improvement, and self-“actualization,” befitting this narcissistic age.
The hour was growing late. And yet, before I returned to the world of the Lucases, I felt a hankering to see Times Square, which a book on New York described as quite beautiful at night. The book contained a photograph of the Square as it was in the 1930s, and many features from my own day were still discernible: the huge billboards, and the intoxicating mixture of glamor and humbug. The subway train took me quickly to the heart of the Square, as it stands in 2000, and I was awed by the sight.
Such swirls of color and light, in splinters and splashes, now that the sun was setting! TeleVision images bending in curves and rippling around the sides of buildings, washing in and out of being as fluid as water. Such tall, reflective buildings of glass and steel! Such looming advertisements: bottles of drink three stories high, young men and women in their underclothing, dressed as scantily as the Lucases do for bed, overshadowing the rest of us as we scurried below like magnificent, shameless gods presiding over insects.
It was the logical, perhaps inevitable descendant of all that the Square had ever been. Here was the capitalist frenzy spun into its most remarkable manifestation! Here was greed holding its sceptered sway over all, in the very Temple of Plutus!
Several blocks east, I beheld a curious sight: colored men of various ages erecting cardboard boxes into dwellings into which they then curled for the night.
I stopped a young woman who appeared, (though I would scarcely care to guess) to be of Arabian descent. “Pardon me, Miss,” I said. “I am a visitor here. Do these men often make their homes in these paper houses?”
She sighed, and responded in pleasantly accented tones. “On this street, every night, yes.”
“And is there no flophouse for tramps to which they might retire?”
“From what I hear of the shelters, nobody wants to stay in them,” she murmured. “Bugs and drugs and knife-fights. Though the women and children don’t have much choice.”
“But – how is it that people reach such parlous straits?”
She peered at me, unsure, perhaps, what to make of me. At last she replied, sighing. “What are you asking me, mister? Why are homeless people homeless? Somebody loses their job, or their building burns down, or their partner kicks them out. Some people are on drugs. Some are mentally ill, but the hospitals are putting them in the street, to save money. Even somebody who wants to work is not gonna find a job, if he can’t write an address on the application. Welcome to New York,” she added, saying it with far more bitterness than Tiffany Lucas had on an earlier occasion.
She moved on, and I was left to wonder. It seemed incredible that a few blocks from the pyrotechnical elegance of Times Square such scenes of grubby despair and poverty were being enacted. This was what was becoming of the American dream in my own “Gilded Age.” This was the future that some of us had sought to avert.
The information I had absorbed from books and the spectacles I had beheld had not rendered me less weary and sick at heart, but at least they had diverted me somewhat from my anguished longing for home, and allowed me to spend some of my agitated energy. And so I rode back down to the world of the Lucases, and returned Jerry’s metro card to its rightful owner. Tiffany was there, arrayed in an immodest, clingy dress, and, once again, Dr. Chen joined our party, in a less risqué blouse and skirt, checking my eyes and my tongue and my pulse and asking me a round of doctorly questions about my condition, in the midst of conversational pleasantries.
We dined out, as a group, in an Italian restaurant, and I found the food to be excellent. I did not wish to reveal my new resources to my hosts, but pride won out over caution, and I insisted that I contribute to the payment for the meal.
“I don’t think they’re gonna want your old-fashioned money,” Jerry said.
“I have some of the current currency on my person,” I told him. “I pawned my watch,” I added, sorry to be less than truthful, but thinking it prudent nevertheless to minimize my wealth.
“Oh. Okay. Then how about paying me back for the shirt and the wrist-watch?” he demanded. I was glad to discharge both obligations.
As it was Friday, they proposed taking me to a “dance-club.”
“I dunno if they’ll let us in,” Tiffany worried. “The bouncers there are real jerks, they turn people away, like, for no reason at all. But maybe his weird looking beard will actually help us get in.” She looked me over speculatively.
“Yeah, they like exhibitionist freaks,” Jerry agreed. “Anybody colorful. Maybe we should get him a feather boa or something.” His own throat was ornamented with several heavy gold chains.
“Leave him alone, you guys,” Dr. Chen said, and patted my arm protectively.
We took a taxi cab to the hall for dancing, and by this I mean we rode inside one of the cars, painted a bright and garish yellow. A disembodied voice which identified itself as that of someone named Jackie Mason admonished us all to fasten our “seat belts” for the duration of the trip, but no one did so. Jerry sat in the front with the driver, a man from India, and I was squeezed into the back seat, inevitably pressed too closely between the two young ladies, while the vehicle careened through the night.
The ride was far smoother than any journey in a horse-drawn carriage over cobblestones could be, but infinitely faster, and for the first time in days, I felt nausea overtaking me. In my terror, I shut my eyes, and felt perspiration breaking out on my brow, and my teeth fairly chattered.
“Whoa, whoa, what’s going on with you?” Dr. Chen murmured, concerned.
“He’s fine, he’s just chicken,” Tiffany Lucas concluded.
Jerry Lucas, from the front, let out a cackle. “Hey, he’s hot for you, Lizzie. You know you always have that effect on guys.”
“Shut up Jerry,” she told him, and lowered the glass window pane. The night air did help to revive me.
The vehicle came to a stop with a sudden lurch. Jerry paid the driver, and demanded that Dr. Chen and mysel