A History of the Future by James Howard Kunstler Page A

you hungry?”
    Jack shrugged his shoulders.
    “Anyway, help yourself. I brought this back for you.”
    Jack nodded. Andrew sat down across from him.
    “Do you have any idea why I did that?” he said.
    Jack appeared puzzled. “No,” he said.
    “It’s called an act of kindness, the important part of being human. Has no one been kind to you?”
    Jack began to weep quietly with his head hanging, eyes on the table.
    “When I came here last night, I think I wanted to do you harm,” he said.
    “I thought so too,” Andrew said.
    “But I don’t know why. I’m so confused . . . about everything.”
    “Do you still want to harm me?”
    “No.”
    “All right. Eat something.”
    Jack hesitated as if struggling to work through a conundrum, before he picked up the slab of ham and began nibbling on it.
    “I don’t understand what’s happened,” he said.
    “Tell me who you are.”
    “I don’t know where to start.”
    “Start at whatever part makes sense.”
    “Sometime this fall,” he said, “I stopped showing up for work at Mr. Schmidt’s farm. I was just a common laborer. If there was a hard or a filthy job to do, Mr. Schmidt put me to it. I don’t know why.”
    “He’s not a bad man.”
    “I was a bad worker. I know it. I showed up late. I didn’t care how I did anything. I had no gloves. My hands froze. I couldn’t stand another day of it. I walked away. I never expected it would go this way.”
    “What would go what way?”
    “My life. Working in mud, in frozen pig shit. I can’t believe what’s happened in the world. Now I can’t even take care of myself.”
    Andrew reflected that, given the tribulations of the society he was born into, he had been fortunate never to have felt so lost.
    “When the world wants to destroy you, what do you do?” Jack said.
    “I don’t believe the world wants to destroy you. At the worst it’s indifferent to us.”
    “That’s an evil thing. It brings us here. I didn’t ask to be born. Nobody does. You’d think the world would have some pity on its creations.”
    “It’s up to people to care for other people,” Andrew said.
    Their eyes met. Jack’s were moist with emotion.
    “Why would you let me stay here?”
    “I’m by myself and there’s a lot to do just to run this household. I could use help.”
    “Why are you by yourself?”
    “It’s how I am,” Andrew said.
    “Then why let me stay here?”
    “You asked to be fixed. In the meantime, I’ll ask you to do things. And you’ll get fixed.”
    “I’ll do things,” Jack said. “I won’t do any . . . personal things.”
    “I won’t ask you to do any personal things.”
    “All right then.”
    Jack ate the rest of the ham more earnestly and popped the deviled egg in his mouth.
    “Do you mind if I ask,” Andrew said, “what you were before?”
    “Before everything went to shit?”
    “Yes.”
    “A student at Adirondack. The community college up to Glens Falls.”
    “Studying what?”
    Jack laughed ruefully. “Communications,” he said. “After a certain point, I couldn’t drive up there anymore because of the gas shortage. Anyway, the school shut down, like everything else after a while. My mom lived here, over on Southside behind the Cumberland Farms store. She died. My older sister, she died too. You should have seen her in high school. Sizzling hot. She had a kid. The baby daddy was a useless piece of shit. Blew himself up in a trailer over to Battenville cooking drugs. In the last years of the old times, my sister got hugely fat. Like a cartoon. Then the world turned upside down. Her baby died the same year as Mom from the same disease. There was no food coming into the supermarket anymore. Not the stuff she ate, which was only stuff you could put into a microwave. Then she got to be skinny as a scarecrow. Her teeth fell out. Killed herself. Drank some old cleaner from under the sink. That’s my family.”
    “What about your father?”
    “Out of the picture since I was three.