Of Another Yellow Summer
It was the evening news.
"In the war today, our forces advanced three hundred more miles into the enemy jungles, sought and destroyed eighteen of their bases, eliminated several villages which had been known to contain sympathizers, and sustained only light casualties. The enemy's losses amounted to several thousand killed, and nearly a million wounded. More action on the front is expected tomorrow, and we will have full-color reports.
"The draft lottery was stepped-up today by Congress. It is estimated that next month's quota will total more than 300,000 under the age of eighteen. This step was necessary, the Defense Department said, to replace the million-plus men lost in action so far this year.
"On the home front, the Post Office has just enacted new legislation which will make it a felony offense to use in private correspondence any of the 235 words already on its official list of 'objectionable language.' The penalty will be the same as that for mailing 'obscene' printed matter or booklets. The Postmaster General called the new law a 'milestone in public morals.'
"In Georgia and Alabama, repeated skirmishes are continuing between Black Panther guerrillas and the Ku Klux Klan. The Panther-held city of Macon suffered its thirteenth consecutive day of massive raids by fleets of Klan bombers, and Mobile was the scene of yet more Panther atrocities as an additional two hundred Klan hostages were executed, to force the surrender of the Klan concentration camps at Birmingham. We will have a special one-hour report on the conflict following tonight's regular late-evening news.
"In geriatrics today, the National Medical Service reports that it is now possible for our older citizens to live to the ripe old age of 250, under complete care in the new Government dormitories. With all of the daily advances in controlling the aging process, the director of the research facility stated that he didn't see why people shouldn't soon expect to see three hundred. Also, according to the report, what with the new artificial-reality headsets, reaching such extreme age will not mean missing out on the latest entertainment. It looks like a long, long future for all of us.
"And there's good news in the pollution picture. A new method has been found for dealing with the ever-increasing problem of refuse and garbage. The proposal is to fill in the Arctic Ocean, layer by layer. An incidental bonus of this plan will be the gradual restoration of our sea levels to their original height, where they were before we began to use seawater in our fusion reactors.
"The crime rate has been determined for the second half of this year. According to the Bureau of Crime Measurement, the average citizen stands a 60-percent chance of getting mugged before next January, a 40-percent chance of being burglarized or vandalized, 30-percent of being molested or attacked, 20-percent of being seriously wounded, 10-percent of being murdered. Another 450,000 persons are expected to die in vehicle accidents.
"Now for the weather. Winterlike conditions will continue for the forseeable future. The sun may come out for a full two hours tomorrow, provided the temperature inversion doesn't lower, and it has been predicted by the weather office that schoolchildren will have a one-hour play period without their smogmasks, between one and two P. M. There should be no pollution alert between nine tonight and four in the morning. Temperatures will remain unseasonably low, the highs expected to rise to only--"
But the newscaster didn't finish his line, because Donald Norton had gotten up from his chair and had just now shut off the 48-inch telescreen. The musty room became very dark.
Norton, in his early nineties, made his creaking way back to the chair, and lowered himself painfully into its depths.
"Couldn't stand another minute of that," he said.
In an adjoining chair, his wife Lydia sat, her eyes swinging from the dead screen to focus on him.
"Why not?"
"Because that isn't our world. It isn't mine, anyway. Look around us! Did we grow up in this kind of civilization? Look at this apartment of ours. This is our world, what's left of it. Not that nightmare out there..." He pointed his palsied finger at the screen.
"Well, my goodness--!" said Lydia, amazed.
"I'm sorry." He spoke now in a lower voice. "But I'm not going to take back what I just said. The world isn't the same anymore. It's turned into something people our age weren't meant to comprehend. Wars! Bombings! Atrocities! Obscenity laws! Pollution! Science gone mad! Let the youngsters have it. I don't even want to hear about it!"
Lydia, still amazed, didn't offer an argument. Donald sat back in his chair, and quietly took stock of his surroundings. Now that the video wasn't on, the room appeared genuinely comfortable. The apartment he shared with his wife was a set of smallish cubicles, in a stolid old building, with thick old-style walls and real wooden floors. Many generations' worth of trinkets and heirlooms lined the place like a nest. Delicate vases stood on inlaid-wood end tables. Lamps of a dozen designs filled odd corners and flanked both the radiant-flame heater and the screen. Books littered tables and lined ceiling-high cabinets. Rugs overlapped on the floor, which squeaked gently when you walked on it. Smaller rugs lay atop worn places in the older rugs underneath. Without a doubt, this room and the kitchen, bedroom, and closet-like bath beyond comprised home.
"You don't have to watch just the news, you know," said Lydia at last, breaking the silence.
"The other shows aren't any better. No matter how loud the laugh tracks are, the comedies always leave me crying, or furious. No matter how thrilled everybody seems to be on the game shows and the quiz shows, how much they jump up and down like children, and clap their little hands, I never learn who wins because I'm always asleep by halftime. The adventure shows make me want to root for the natives, or the crocodiles, and I always have the detective shows puzzled-out before the first commercial. Donald sneered. "No, Lydia, I would much rather read a good book."
"Whatever you say, dear." She shrugged, and reached for one of the many battered volumes stacked next to her chair. Once she'd gotten into that chair, she didn't like leaving it until bedtime, barring major emergencies. It was simply too inconvenient to struggle to one's feet, and then struggle back into the chair again.
While she absently turned pages, Donald leaned back.
"I've been thinking," he said to nobody in particular, "about the past. The good old days. About how things used to be." He took a tired breath and let it out. "How different they were!"
He glanced sideways, but Lydia was pretending to read.
So he returned his gaze to the ceiling, and to his dreams.
"It was a bit of poetry I read the other day," he said absently, "that brought it all back. Something about a yellow summer. All of a sudden I could see everything, just the way it was when I was younger. Do you remember the way the trees used to look, all green and thick with leaves that rustled in the breeze? And what about the sky in those days, so clear and faraway, so that from an upstairs window you could look out and see all the way to the horizon? Remember the lawns? And the big old houses people lived in, with open verandas that looked out onto the rest of the world, not closed-in, but greeting their surroundings like open arms? And the children! Playing games in the yards. Then running off to school, and finally growing older and getting married. What a wonderful time it was! A time for taking deep breaths of the clear morning air, for going on long walks after dark, listening to piano music coming from a house here and there along the way. For riding a bicycle!"
His expression grew even dreamier.
"I could remember our family, my brothers and sisters, Mother and Dad, the aunts, the uncles, the grandparents ... It wasn't like it is now, with everyone shut up in separate cubicles, afraid of each other, like strangers. Back then, people lived together, talked together, shared their joys and their problems. And the things we did! The picnics we went to, the socials, the carnivals and the county fairs! What about the circus, and the matinees on Saturdays, and the vaudeville shows? When was the last time you or I tasted a hot dog on a bun, or cotton candy?"
Donald's voice, a reedy rasp, trailed off into stillness. "How I wish I could live in those times," he finished at long last, "just as I am now. But transplanted, as it were, from here to the far-preferable past..."
Lydia continued reading. But eventually she closed the book and looked across at Donald.
she said, speaking as gently as she could. "I know you're a dreamer. That's why I married you. It's why I've always loved you. But when it comes to facing the way things are..."
"I can dream if I want to," he said stubbornly. "If I want to create a time machine that'll take me back to better years and a more beautiful world, I will. Even if it's only in my imagination, and I never leave this room."
"Well, dear, there are no time machines." She chuckled. "But if I know you, and there were such a contraption, you'd be the very first one aboard, and reaching out to yank me on with you!"
Donald remained quiet, holding onto his thoughts.
Lydia put down her book again, later. "By the way," she said, "thank you for switching off the news. You're the only man I know who would think of doing something like that. It's been a lovely evening without it."
Not long after the evening when Donald Norton turned off the screen, he and Lydia were visited by an agent from the Bureau of Retirement.
"Good evening," the man said when Donald let him in. He was a mere lad barely in his thirties, and wore the crisp plastic uniform of a medical inspection officer.
"Are you Mr. and Mrs. Norton?" he asked, consulting an electronic notepad he held in his hand.
Donald replied that they were.
"Very good. May we sit down?"
They sat, and Donald offered the government man some tea, which he refused.
"Our records show that you are both well past the normal retirement age," he said, reading the statistics off his small screen, "that you, Mr. Norton, are a retired factory worker, that your children, numbering two, are both fully grown and living elsewhere, and that you are fully-registered citizens and your taxes are paid-up. Correct?"
Of course it was correct. Both Jessie and Wilomene were long-gone, one living in the midwest and the other on the coast. Donald answered each of the youngster's questions as it was asked, wondering where they were all leading.
The agent wasn't long in reaching the point.
It was time, at last, for Donald and Lydia to move into a dormitory.
"We have beds already set aside for both of you. You'll love them, and I'm sure you'll appreciate the chance to take it easy. The service is absolutely complete, nothing has been left out, and you won't have a worry in the world. There are planned activities if you want them, crafts and hobbies for as long as you have the strength to concentrate on them. And, after that, you'll have full use of artificial-reality entertainment." He put the notepad away in his pocket. "We've decided to send a crew to pick you up the day after tomorrow."
Donald and Lydia were quiet for several seconds. The man from the Bureau of Retirement folded his hands in his lap, sitting on the front edge of his chair, trying to absorb the awkward silence.
"What if we don't want to go?" Donald asked.
The youngster regarded him curiously. "I don't understand."
"If we'd rather stay here, in our own apartment, among the things we've acquired over the years, which still have meaning and value to us, instead of allowing ourselves to be taken away and put in a bed in a stripped-bare, hygienic hospital room, can't we do that? I mean, if Liddie and I preferred just to grow old and die, rather than being kept alive by a cold-blooded machine, a super-iron-lung..."
"But," said the officer, "that's unheard-of. Everybody wants to stay alive! Nobody would rather die than have the chance to live to be 300 years old. It's out of the question. You definitely couldn't be left here, to die."
"But," Lydia put in, "that's what we want. And if it's all right with us, why shouldn't we be allowed--"
"Because," the agent interrupted, "It's simply not done. Now, the arrangement is for me to inform you of our intention to come by for you the day after tomorrow. Actually, although we try to make it sound like a privilege and a favor, it's all been planned long in advance. We need this apartment for another family to use, people who aren't ready to go into the dormitories. There is a shortage of apartments these days. Do you understand now?"
"Do you mean..." said Donald in disbelief, "that we have no choice in the matter?"
The agent nodded, with a sad expression.
"Exactly. I'm sorry."
Donald and Lydia stayed up unusually late that evening, after the young government man had gone, pondering their future.
And when they had finally managed to help each other up from their chairs, moving into the tiny dark bedroom, and into bed, they both lay on their backs, unable to sleep because of thinking.
"What are we going to do?" asked Lydia, speaking to the ceiling.
"We can't let ourselves be taken away and put in a dormitory," he answered.
"We couldn't take any of our things along," she reminded him. "What would happen to them?"
He shrugged. "Be destroyed? Taken to a dump and mashed into the rest of the fertilizer."
She was shocked. "The pictures? The lamps? The rugs? The books? Wouldn't anybody want them after we weren't allowed to keep them?"
"They wouldn't be wanted by anybody else," he said. "Nobody but us knows how valuable they are."
He reached across and patted her lovingly in the dark.
It was the next afternoon, the day before the crew from the Bureau of Retirement was due to show up again, that Donald Norton found himself taking a walk downstairs, outdoors, in the open, in order to clear the hallucinations and disillusionments from his head. Despite the pollution, the traffic and the crowds, he needed to get out.
And so, on the pretext of going to buy some tobacco for his pipe, which he hadn't smoked since he could remember, he said goodbye to Lydia in her chair, and stepped down the three flights of creaking stairs, to the rattling front door.
He was no longer even sure that there was a tobacconist's shop along this particular street. The last time he'd gone looking for one had been years ago. Outside, the noise was much worse than he'd remembered, and the ozone and sulfur fumes were palpably stronger. It seemed even colder and grayer than it had been the last time he'd ventured outdoors, as if winter had closed in even more over the city, the sky a dark lid over the roofs of the buildings.
He walked for the sake of walking, forcing his ancient bones to propel him onward. He assumed an attitude of perpetual falling, tipping his weight from foot to foot, making his way along the gritty, sooty sidewalk.
And, as he passed one particular shop, one of many that he couldn't recall ever having seen before, he heard a strange sound. It was an impossibly reedy singsong, chanting, "Summertime, summertime, summertime...!"
He halted himself clumsily, stood balanced on top of his feet, and turned to face the shop from which the voice seemed to be coming. It looked ordinary enough. APOTHECARY, said a sign above the door.
He went inside. What he saw was a small shop lined with shelves. On the shelves were cans, jars, bottles, and boxes. All had colorful, bright-printed labels, but none seemed to show what they might contain.
"Summertime, summertime..." the voice continued.
He saw no one for several seconds. And then a wizened bronze head peeped up over the counter and regarded him with gold-button eyes like saucers. "Yes sir, what can I do for you? Do you need summertime, perhaps?"
"Was that you," asked Donald, "calling out from in here a moment ago?"
With a twitch and a lunge, the proprietor heaved himself up onto the countertop, and stood facing the old man. He was a dwarf, not more than three feet tall. "Yes," he said. "And I can tell by looking at you, sir, that you want summertime. That, in fact, you need summertime." Reaching onto a shelf behind him, he brought forth an aerosol can. "Summertime, on special, today only. Half-price."
He held out the can with a thrust.
Donald, at first vaguely frightened, became intrigued. "Is this it?" he said, taking the can. "Summertime?" He eyed the label. "What is this stuff, a room deodorizer?"
"Oh, most certainly not! It's summertime!"
"But ... what?"
The dwarf looked deep into Donald's eyes. "What is summertime to you? Childhood? Nostalgia? Escape? An end to worry? Well! Whatever summertime holds for you, you will find it in this convenient little can. Spray it in the privacy of your own room or office, and summertime will be yours!" He grinned, and went on. "Special price, today only. Twenty-five cents."
Donald didn't know why, but the next thing he did was pay the little man a quarter. He left the shop, holding onto the can.
He made his lonely, plodding way back through the afternoon crowds to his door, up the three flights of steps, and into his apartment. He closed the door slowly.
Lydia looked up at him. He moved over and sat in his chair, holding the can of summertime out in front of himself once again and looking at it.
"What is that?" she asked. "What did you buy now?"
"I'm not really sure," he replied. "Maybe it's an aerosol spray, or maybe it's really something else."
She asked him how much he'd spent on it, where he got it, and why, and he told her about the apothecary and the dwarf. "He told me it was simply summertime in a can."
"How odd," she said, peering at him. Then she grinned. "And silly."
He returned her look.
"It's cruel of people," she continued, "to prey on the sad wishes of an old man condemned to be moved into a dormitory, who goes out on walks looking for escape, grabbing at straws. So this little pirate sold you a dream in a can."
She snorted, returning her attention to the book she'd been reading. "Summertime ... bah!"
Feeling rebuked and uncertain, Donald went on inspecting the can. The label, printed in looping, swirling, Baroque curleycues, bore only one word: Summertime.
He held a hand cupped over his nose, and sprayed out a little mist from the can. He breathed it.
And it was as if the entire world changed color, like a chameleon. The dim umber walls, the video screen, the bookcases and the heavy drapes covering the room's few, small windows all became suddenly green and yellow and clear crystalline blue.
They became a street in a small-town neighborhood, just as Donald had always remembered it, with green lawns, an overhead canopy of summer trees, cool shade, and tall whitewashed houses with high, narrow windows, domes and cupolas. The tangible actuality of it startled and delighted him. His feet actually sank into cool, moist grass, his nostrils tasted, like wine, the summer air, and he felt certain that if he took a step forward, he would be walking into that other world, free.
When Lydia called him back from the vision, he almost wept. He had the feeling in the back of his mind that he had nearly made it into the past, into the world he'd been so obsessed with, lately. One more second in that world, and he felt sure he wouldn't have been able to come back.
"What were you doing, just now?" she asked.
"I don't know..."
He put aside the can. He found it difficult to recover control over his speech, after what must've been an extremely vivid dream.
"I must've blanked out for a moment."
She stared at him, then shook her head. She had been ready to say something, but now she changed her mind.
The next day, they were both ready for the government crew, both sitting in their chairs, Donald with his can of summertime on the side table, and Lydia with her book.
"We've got to learn to take these things in stride," she said, holding the book open in front of herself although she wasn't able to go on reading it. "It's no use trying to slip off into a fantasy world, to put reality behind you. When you do that, you're only fooling yourself."
He nodded, without wanting to.
All night and all morning, he had been working to gather up enough courage to tell her what had happened to him yesterday, when he'd breathed the summertime-spray into his hand. But, from many years of being married to her, he knew how hard it was to convert her, to change her mind if she didn't want it changed. Lydia was a levelheaded woman, and had been the stabilizing influence in his life since the beginning. And now was no different. Without bitterness, she had already convinced herself that life in a dormitory would be acceptable, if it couldn't be avoided. She would adjust. She didn't intend to flee from it, especially into the mind-altering mist from a cheap spray can.
She was ready.
"It won't be long now," he said, "before the Bureau men arrive to haul us both away."
"No, dear. Not long at all."
"Are you ready, Liddie? Really ready?"
She sniffed. "I'm going to miss my things. That's my only real regret. It took us so many years of living together to end up with these pictures, vases, lamps, rugs, books. It's going to be sad for me to say goodbye to them, never to be able to see them again..."
"You know," he said, touching the can, "it doesn't have to end this way."
"Yes it does," she responded, nodding. "There's nothing we can do."
Donald held out the can of summertime. This was their last chance. He wondered whether the spray would reach clear across to where Lydia sat in her chair. How he wanted her to go back into that warm, sunny neighborhood with him! How she would love the grass, the trees, and the stately old houses!
"Have faith, darling," he said, and pressed the sprayer.
That afternoon in Prairie City, Iowa, the weather was clear and warm. The grass on the lawns was deep and spicy-moist. The leaves of the overhanging oaks and elms rustled in the cool breeze. Somewhere a piano was playing, a tinkly ragtime tune. Children romped near the sidewalk, while older folks sat and rocked in their chairs on the veranda, talking.
Somebody saw Donald, bringing Lydia with him by the hand, coming across the lawn.
"Well, Grandpa and Grandma," they said. "Back so soon from your stroll."
When the plastic-clad workers from the Bureau of Retirement arrived at the Norton apartment to take the two old people away, they found it empty.
)
"Santana Morning" was originally published in 1970, but a quirk of fate has given it a forgotten history. The author, Mike Dolan, once lauded by the likes of Ray Bradbury slipped back into obscurity, resurfacing over thirty-five years later to put a new spin on these tales.
