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EIGHTEEN
From the Journal of Ida Jaxon (“The Book of Auntie”)
Presented at the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period
Center for the Study of Human Cultures and Conflicts
University of New South Wales, Indo-Australian Republic
April 16-21, 1003 A.V.
[Excerpt begins.]
… and it was chaos. So many years gone by, but you never forget a sight like that, the thousands of people, all of them so frightened, pressing against the fences, the soldiers and dogs trying to keep folks calm, the shots fired in the air. And me, not more than eight years old, with my little suitcase, the one my mama had packed for me the night before, bawling the whole time, because she knew what she was doing, that she was sending me away forever.
The jumps had taken New York, Pittsburgh, D. C. Most the whole country, as far as I recall. I had folks in all those places. There was lots we didn’t know. Such as what happened to Europe or France or China, though I’d heard my daddy talking to some other men from our street about how the virus was different there, it just flat-out killed everyone, so I’m supposing it was possible that Philadelphia was the last city left with people in it in the whole world at that time. We were an island. When I asked my mama about the war, she explained that the jumps were people like you and me, just sick. I’d been sick myself so it scared me about out my skin when she told me this, I just started crying my eyes out, thinking I would wake up one day and kill her and my daddy and my cousins the way the jumps liked to do. She hugged me hard and told me, no no, Ida, it’s different, that’s not the same kind of a thing at all, you hush now and stop your crying, which I did. But even so for a while it didn’t make no sense to me, why there was a war on and there was soldiers everywhere if folks had just come down with a sniffle or something in they throat.
That’s what we called them, jumps. Not vampires, though you heard the word said. That’s what my cousin Terrence said they were. He showed me in a comic that he had, which was a kind of picture book as I recall, but when I asked my daddy about that and showed him the pictures he told me no, vampires were just something in a made-up story, nice-looking men in suits and capes with good ma
Only the good Lord knows why he spared Philadelphia long as he did. I barely remember it now, except the feeling of it, time to time. Little things, like stepping out with my daddy at night to get a water ice up the corner, and my friends at school, Joseph Pe
I remember my address: 2121 West Laveer. There was a college near there, and stores, and busy streets, and all sorts of people going to and fro in the day to day. And I remember a time when my daddy took me downtown, out of our neighborhood, on the bus to see the windows at Christmastime. I couldn’t have been much more than five years old at the time. The bus carried us past the hospital where my daddy worked, taking X-rays, which were photographic pictures of people’s bones, he’d had that job since he’d gotten out of the service and met my mama, and he always said it was the perfect job for a man like him, how he got to look at the insides of things. He’d wanted to be a doctor but taking the X-rays was the next best thing. Outside the store he showed me the windows, all done up fancy for Christmas, with lights and snow and a tree and moving figures inside them, elves and reindeer and such. I’d never been happy like that in all my life, just to see so beautiful a sight, standing in the cold like we were, the two of us together. We were going to pick up a present for Mama, he told me, his big hand on my head like he did, a scarf or maybe gloves. The streets were all full of people, so many people, all different ages and looks to them. I like to think about it even now, to send my mind back to that day. No one remembers Christmas anymore, but it was a bit like First Night is now. I don’t recall if we got the scarf and gloves or not. Probably we did.
That’s all gone now, all of it. And stars. Time to time I think that’s what I miss seeing most of all, back in the Time Before. From the window of my bedroom I could look over the roofs of the buildings and the houses and see them, these points of light in the sky, hanging there like God his own self had strung the sky for Christmas. It was my mama who told me the names for some and how you could watch them awhile and start to see pictures up there, simple things like spoons and people and animals. I used to think you could look at the stars and that was God, right there. Like looking straight into his face. You needed the dark to see him plain. Maybe he forgot us and maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was us who forgot, when we couldn’t see the stars no more. And to tell the truth they’re the one thing I’d like to see again before I die.
There were other trains, I do believe. We’d heard about trains leaving from all over, that other cities had sent them before the jumps got in. Maybe it was just people talking like they do when they’re scared, grasping at any bit of hope that floats on past. I don’t know how many made it all the way to where they were going. Some were sent to California, some to places with names I don’t just now recall. There was only one we ever heard from, back in the early days. Before the Walkers and the One Law, when radio was still allowed. Someplace in New Mexico, I do believe it was. But something happened to their lights and we didn’t hear from them again after that. From what Peter and Theo and the others tell me, I do believe we are the only one left now.