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Blogfest 2005 - Aug 13, 2011 - Printable Version
- Morning in America (A short story)
by Robin Buckallew
I was just minding my own business, drawing mustaches on the girls in the fashion magazine, when the boss came over and told me to get over to the university and interview the new football coach. Find out what strategy he plans to use to turn a losing team into a winning team, he told me. Don’t let him squirm out of any questions. I groaned. This was not a job for a veteran reporter. This meant getting up out of my chair, leaving the building, and going across town. I wasn’t accustomed to such trivial assignments, and I opened my mouth to tell him so. Then I saw the look on his face, and I knew I’d better let it pass. I’d get him back somehow or other. This wasn’t the time to push my seniority in his face. I’d just slip a fake fly in his coffee cup later in the week; he’d know it was me, and why. I got up and headed out the door.
I found the new coach in his office drawing up plans for Saturday’s big game. It would be the opening game of the season, and a very important one for him. He welcomed me warmly, and offered to treat me to a cup of coffee. I accepted, and we headed out the door toward the snack bar.
It was a warm autumn day, and the leaves were just beginning to fall as we scuffed across the empty yard. I looked around me in surprise; this was the first time I’d ever been on campus, and I was surprised it was so big. Huge brick buildings stretched to the sky, three and four stories high, with large windows every few feet. Most of the buildings were empty, falling into disrepair, as if no one had been there in many years.
“I never dreamed the campus was so big!”
The coach smiled, and gestured toward one of the buildings.
“These? Oh, they’re just remnants of old activities that used to take place here. I’m not totally sure what they were all used for, but I’ve wandered through a few of them. They seem a bit useless to me. I think they were used back in the dark days before the light dawned. Would you like to see inside?”
“Is that acceptable? I mean…won’t someone get mad?”
“Oh, no”, he assured me. “No one cares. The buildings aren’t locked, because there’s nothing important in there. There’s no reason to lock useless buildings. Who you gonna keep out, the rats?”
We laughed together, though I wasn’t totally sure what I was laughing at. After all, I’d never seen the interior of the buildings, so I couldn’t judge whether there was anything to steal. We trudged up the sidewalk toward one of the larger buildings, now covered with ivy that had overgrown it on all sides. Over the door, someone had carved some characters, meaningless, nonsense characters, looking like they might spell out a word in some sort of foreign tongue. I traced the carving with my eyes. It looked like this: SCIENCE. What could that possibly mean?
Coach Peterson pushed open the large front door, and we entered the dark, empty hallway. Our footprints clattered along the floor as we picked our way cautiously through the broken glass and tile that littered the path. Doors hung off their hinges, eerie ghostly shapes in the afternoon light coming in through the window. I looked through one of the doors; the room didn’t make any sense to me. There were a number of chairs and tables lined up neatly in rows, and a large desk in the front of the room. Behind the desk there was a large piece of dull green panel, now broken from years of neglect. The windows on the outer wall were broken; some of them had been patched up years ago with boards, but most of them were just open to the weather. There were leaves and twigs lying all over the floor. I shook my head and we moved on.
“There are some particularly odd rooms down the hall”, my host said. “If you’d like to see something really weird…and I do mean weird!”
He gestured, and I followed his pointing finger. In the room he indicated, there were all sorts of strange pieces of equipment, none of them familiar. There were clunky shelves which had a strange tube attached, a tube which sort of reminded me of the kaleidoscope toy I had when I was a kid. I bent over and looked into one of the tubes, but there were no bright colors. In fact, I couldn’t see anything at all.
“One of the other fellows told me they’re called microscopes. I have no idea what that means.”
Peterson dusted off one of the chairs, and we sat down in front of the microscopes. He showed me how you’re supposed to look through them, and can see really small things that you can’t see without them. We looked into the darkness, and laughed at the foolishness of some people. You couldn’t see anything in these! Man, some people must really have a good imagination…or maybe they were just plain crazy.
We left the building, and continued on toward the coffee shop in the student center. This was apparently the most popular place on campus; in fact, it was the first place where we encountered anyone at all. The coffee shop was bright and cheery, but the rest of the student center seemed oddly quiet. Shuttered rooms seemed mysterious and spooky, as though haunted by ghosts of some strange and remote past.
The football team was clustered around a large pool table in the middle of the coffee shop, watching eagerly as the quarterback lined up a particularly difficult shot. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath. As he caromed the cue ball off the side of the table, giving it just enough of a spin to knock the five ball into the corner pocket, everyone seemed to exhale at once. Two of the tight ends gave each other a high five, as the kicker glumly pulled a five dollar bill off a wad in his pocket and handed it over to them. The coach waved, and we took our coffee to a quiet corner where we could talk.
“What’s with the big campus?”, I asked. “This looks like an awful lot of wasted space. After all, how much room does a football team need? You have the stadium, the gym, and the coffee shop. All these other buildings…what are they here for?”
My host sat silently for a minute, as if trying to collect his thoughts. Then, slowly, he started to explain. All the buildings, it seemed, had once been used as a school…back when a school was used for learning how to read, and write, and do math. They used to have thousands of students, literally thousands, who would spend four or five years here, getting an education. That sounded strange – what was all that about? He shook his head; he couldn’t explain it either. It was back in the great darkness, before people got civilized and stopped wasting their time on foolishness.
“Did they play football here then?”
“Oh, yes, but….well, for some strange reason, they had these people they called ‘professors’ who kept insisting that the football team was only an extra activity, not the main purpose of the school at all.”
“How’d they finally get it straight?”
My host sipped his coffee gingerly, and tapped his finger gently on the table. A pretty young girl appeared out of nowhere, and set two donuts on the table. He pushed one over toward me, and I accepted it politely. I don’t usually eat donuts, but this was work, and I had to maintain a professional attitude. I picked at the sugar-coated pastry without much interest as he continued.
“It turned out to be easier than they thought. The legislature just cut the budget, and they began cutting programs. They quit training teachers, and then they cut their art and music programs. After that, it just sort of moved along rapidly. More and more cuts, first the humanities, then the sciences, then economics and business. Finally, when there was nothing but the administration and the football team, it became obvious that the administration wasn’t needed any longer, because there wasn’t anything left to administer except the football team…and the coaches could take care of that just fine. So, that was it. Finally, the school was rid of all the extraneous nonsense, and we could go about our business unhampered by frills.”
“That must have been a real relief.”
“Well, of course, I wasn’t here then. I wasn’t even born yet. This was back in the early part of the century.”
I nodded. It was before my time. I’d heard tales from my father about how, when he was my age, he had to go to school, and what a horrible time that was. I had always been glad I was born later, after they’d given up torture and learned to bring children up sensibly. I’d just sort of drifted through childhood, as all children did, and when I got old enough to need a job, my dad got me the post at the TV station, where I had worked as a reporter since I was 24. It was a pretty good job; not too hard, didn’t require much of me, and it paid pretty well. I was content.
“Hey, I notice you have pictures of Reagan everywhere. Just like my office. Do you all consider yourselves children of Reagan, too?”
Coach Peterson nodded. We held our hands up in the air, and waved them around, just like we were in one of the crowds that had actually gotten to walk with him and stand in his presence. The familiar gesture brought us a feeling of companionship, and he leaned closer to me, whispering confidentially.
“You know, none of this would have been possible, without Reagan.”
“Whaddya mean? I know Reagan brought us a lot…but he changed the schools, too?”
“Oh, yes. You see, Reagan was the first one who identified the problem. He recognized a crisis in our nation’s schools, and he set out to fix it. Oh, it didn’t happen all at once, and he didn’t live long enough to see the glorious future he brought about, but it went relatively quickly. All his ideas led quite naturally to what you see today.”
I looked around me at the shuttered rooms and the dark hall, with the bright cheery coffee shop standing in stark contrast, and I smiled. All those years, all those centuries, we’d wasted so much time and energy on useless knowledge. Now, we just lived. Football…Reagan was the creator of football, wasn’t he? He was the Gipper…the man who invented the nation’s favorite game, and inspired generations of players on to greatness.
“Reagan was the greatest. He could see it all so clearly…the need to get rid of those strange, alien things that were choking the life out of our country. The wasted energy and effort that went to welfare and waste.”
For a minute, I wondered, as I’d always wondered, exactly what welfare was. It was just one of those strange, unexplainable concepts, like Communism, that the old timers seemed to understand at some level, but which we in the younger generations had no knowledge of. I was glad I didn’t know what they were. From what I could tell, they were totally corrupt and evil, without any possible justification for their existence. Reagan started knocking down the wall that kept the light out, the wall built brick by brick from welfare and communism, and we owed him everything.
I stared affectionately at the picture on the wall. I’d never seen Reagan. He’d been long dead before I was born, but I knew every line of his face. He was such a kind looking man, gentle and good, standing with his arm wrapped around the monkey, Bonzo, his vice president. Wasn’t he a bold man, to run with a monkey for vice president? He showed the entire nation what a waste a vice president was, how totally unnecessary for the good of the country, until finally we were able to get rid of the office altogether, which saved us a bunch of money. Then, thanks to his end run around Congress, when he sold footballs and helmets to the Falkland Islands against the wishes of Congress, he was able to demonstrate that they were also a useless and irrelevant body. They only lasted about four or five more presidencies, but they were never worth anything again. When they disbanded, no one missed them.
Now, it was just the President, who made decisions himself, and we all did what he told us. It was so much better, so much easier, because we didn’t have to spend a lot of time worrying or making decisions. Our entire day was planned out, and all we had to do was be where we were supposed to be. Oh, I’d heard that some people weren’t happy, that they wanted the right to make their own decisions, but that was kind of silly, wasn’t it? What was so great about having to make your own decisions? I think people like that should be locked up, for their own good and for the good of America.
I had also heard that there were some people who had a very difficult life, working in the harshest of conditions, without making enough money to support themselves and their family, but I suspected it was just a rumor. After all, look how easy my life was. My father had made a lot of money in the stock market, and I’d had everything I needed. Now I had an easy job at a good salary, and life was very good. I shuddered at the idea of having to pay taxes; it wouldn’t be fair. If anyone was living such a harsh life, which I doubted, since I’d never met anyone who wasn’t totally happy, it must be that they were unwilling to work.
The sun was beginning to set as we walked back across campus toward the coach’s office. He’d promised to show me the playbook, and outline his overall strategy for turning the team into a winning team once again, proud and competitive like they’d been before his predecessor ran the school into the ground. He was going to be out recruiting next week, offering scholarships to the best and the brightest rising stars, hoping he could get at least a couple to consider coming to school here. He didn’t expect much this year, with the poor showing they’d made for the past three seasons, but next year…just wait until next year, he promised me. They were receiving more scholarship money than ever; the state had faith that he could bring the team around.
My boss frowned as I wandered back into my office. I’d been gone much longer than he’d anticipated, and it bothered him when I wasn’t sitting at my desk. Why would I spend so long on any story? After all, most of the news had already been produced, we didn’t need to spend too much time on new information. We would be bringing out old news reports by Roseanne Rosannadanna tonight. Her news reports were always right on, and we could run them as many times a week as we liked without the audience getting tired of them. Besides, it was good to be informed, and she was one of the most informative news anchors we’d ever seen. Someone tried to sell us a load of old news tapes a couple of months ago by some idiot named Edward R. Murrow; man, was that guy a moron! We told him no thanks, we’d never put such pap on our station, we were noted for quality. We suggested he burn the whole lot.
I showed my notes to my boss; he was impressed. They took up nearly a quarter of a page in my notebook; this was really in-depth reporting. We’d be able to get a lot of air time out of that! I told him about the strange, empty buildings on the campus, and he said he’d been over there once. His dad had told him that people used to pay lots of money to go and take classes at the college, sitting in chairs listening to teachers who were supposed to be smart, but didn’t even know a tight end from a fullback. We had a good laugh at the foolishness of the primitive people, and then I went back to my desk, put my feet up, and went back to my project of drawing mustaches on the fashion models. It had been a good day. Yes, indeed, it was morning in America.
One woman, one boat…all life depends on her. Is she up to the job? Now, in her own words, we can hear the story we all thought we knew. The Diary of Mrs. Noah, by Robin Buckallew, available at www.mrs-noah.com
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