A History of the Future by James Howard Kunstler Page B

I couldn’t tell you what he was like, except loud.”
    “Where have you been living?”
    “The old place on Southside. There’s no fireplace or stove in it. It was colder inside than out.”
    “There are plenty of empty houses around town.”
    “I didn’t have the means to get cordwood anyhow.”
    A clock in a distant room chimed twelve times. It had a muted velvety tone.
    “Merry Christmas, Jack.”
    “Merry Christmas to you, sir.”

E IGHTEEN
    He was a shadow of a man, a ghost, clothed in shroudlike shreds with a ragged blanket roll slung over one shoulder, stealing across a haunted landscape. He had lost count of the days as he trekked from the deep interior of the continent toward home, passing through an autumn season of glorious color and bright days to the frozen, dim sepia vistas and endless nights of the northeastern early winter. Comfort was a distant memory. For weeks, he had known nothing but pain, cold, hunger, exhaustion, and loneliness. He subsisted on things stolen: the gleanings of harvested cornfields, turnips and potatoes purloined from root cellars, chickens, not always cooked, small wild animals, whatever the roadsides and forests grudged up. Though he had once eagerly met and consorted with strangers in his two years of adventuring, he now avoided them because in his current condition he looked like trouble coming, and others looked like trouble to him. The wool balaclava he pulled down over his face in the cold gave him an outward demeanor of alien menace, but he was too sick and weak to defend himself against people who might rush to judgment about who or what he was.
    What kept Daniel Earle alive was a repository of sense memories that he played and replayed in his mind as he staggered across the landscape: fragments of places, vignettes, sights, smells, and sounds that connected to his deepest emotional center. One particular sense scene he returned to constantly was the image of a small barn, like a carriage house, with a loading door up in the hayloft. It was always spring there, with a welcoming pool of sunlight in the forecourt. That’s all. It was not any place he remembered out of his own history, and he didn’t connect it with any particular beloved person, but it spoke to him in deeply resonant tones suggesting that someday he would come home to it. Another fragmentary scene was of a shopfront window of many small panes, from the inside, a warm and well-lighted refuge, looking out on a street gathered in winter twilight. He didn’t know why it meant so much to him, but when he called it forth from the vaults of his imagination it stirred things deep within him and produced a sense of profound contentment that allowed him to keep swinging one foot in front of the other.
    Throughout his day and its gathering night, which he did not know to be that of Christmas Eve, he passed through increasingly familiar landscapes. He had skirted New York’s capital city, Albany, to the north, thinking all big cities to be dangerous traps now, and wended through the broken, desolate suburbs across the Mohawk River, an unresolved countryside of abandoned tract housing, scraps of woodland, scavenged malls and strip malls, highways without cars, and scarecrow people scuttling around the ruins of it all in the cold with arms full of sticks for their fires. In and about this terrain of failed modernity lay country roads that had never been developed, as the old term went for farmland waiting to be paved over, and the visible traces of the farms that preceded the suburbs still stood represented by barns with sagging roofs and see-through walls and silos shrouded in Virginia creeper. He had slept in such a barn for a few hours the previous night in a place called Rexford, a former dormitory town for General Electric executives from Schenectady back in the mid-twentieth century, now a liminal zone where the suburban expansion of the old times came to a dead stop with the shattered economy. The population