When John Wellfleet began this story he doubted if he would live long enough to finish it. He wondered at first whether any kind of coherence could be made out of such a jumble of material. He was also troubled about some of the dates in the past and was not always sure that his memory was accurate. He used to say to me that once a man reaches the age of fifty, time passes in a blur; that two years in the life of a man in his twenties can seem longer than twenty years in the life of a man in his seventies. But one thing he was sure of: he remembered the time of his youth much better than he remembered the years between the Destructions and the present. What troubled him most was his belief that none of us would be able to identify with the characters in his book, or have any sympathy with them. And finally there was the glossary; it took us more than a month, working together, to complete it.
For me it was wonderful to watch this strange old man appear to grow young again as he lived with these papers. It angered me also to realize how heartless the Bureaucracy was to have branded survivors like John Wellfleet as inoperatives and put them into those compounds isolated from everyone else. Long before he finished the work, I begged him to leave the compound but he said that he was used to it, that his books were there, and that he did not want to lose any time from his work by moving. However, once he had delivered the book to me, he agreed to come out.
I was living at the time in a small hamlet on the transporter line not far from Metro and I found an empty cottage for him. He often visited us and we visited him and in his last winter I even persuaded him to live with us during the cold months because I was afraid that he lacked the strength to keep himself warm. We had a large stone hearth in our principal room and burned wood from our own trees, which were red oaks. The logs were heavy and made a very hot fire, and in the evenings after work, when the children were in bed and some of our friends came in for conversation, John’s chair was always beside the hearth. By this time he limped badly from arthritis and if he had been left alone he would have suffered that winter, which was one of the coldest I can remember.
There was still another thing he did for us which may put him into the debt of future generations. He had a large collection of disks that he called records and an old instrument he called a recordplayer. It had ceased to function years before I knew him, but one of my friends, who is an electrician, studied it and decided that he might be able to repair it. He did repair it and then music came into our lives.
All of us knew old songs, even some new ones, and there were a few people who could play violins, trumpets, drums, guitars, and even pianos, but music of the kind which requires orchestras had been absolutely forbidden by the Bureaucracy. At first this music was strange to me, very difficult to understand, but it reached my feelings as nothing had ever reached them before. I had never heard the names of the composers until John told me them, and said they had been the glory of civilization even in the terrible days when he was young – Scarlatti, Corelli, Handel, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and many more. He also had some records he called “Jazz” and a few he called “Rock.” The Jazz I rather liked, but after hearing a few records of the Rock I told him that at least it helped me to understand a little better why his cousin Timothy had been the kind of man he was.
When the warm weather came, he went back to his own little cottage and spent much time sitting in the sun and listening to the birds singing. It was full summer of that year before we finally finished printing the book and I was able to give him a copy. He glanced through a few pages, laid it down, and said that it no longer belonged to him; that it seemed now as though somebody else had written it. When he asked how many copies had been printed, I told him that we had a total of fifty and that we intended to circulate them among our friends who would lend them to others. He smiled quietly and asked if the Bureaucracy would ban it if they knew it had been published. Yes, I had to tell him, if the book were given to the general public the Bureaucracy would confiscate it and burn it. I had done my best with them, but could not make them change their decision. But I also assured him that within ten years, perhaps even sooner, the younger men of my generation would have control of the Bureaucracy and thousands of people would be able to read his book. His expression was strange when he said that this kind of thing had often happened to books before.
A few weeks later, in the late afternoon of a very hot day when I had expected him to visit us, he did not come. I walked over to his cottage to see if he was all right. He was leaning back in his chair with his face toward the sky and even before I touched him I knew he had died, and I remembered an old phrase my mother had used. Literally, he seemed to have passed away from us, yet I had the sensation that though his body was dead, his mind was alive. There was a table beside his chair and a piece of paper on it, a pen lying across the paper. Apparently he had intended to write a letter, but had got no further than the single introductory word “Dear …” Was it his Mother? Was it the girl he called Joanne? I would never know, but I am sure that in this last instant of his life he was remembering someone he had loved.