A History of the Future by Kunstler James Howard

Author:Kunstler, James Howard [Kunstler, James Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dpgroup.org, Fluffer Nutter
ISBN: 9780802192479
Amazon: B00HWGLW9I
Publisher: Perseus Book Group
Published: 2014-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

Thirty-four

Jack Harron lay awake in the darkness in his room behind the kitchen in Andrew Pendergast’s house, his mind roiling with perturbations about the order of the universe and his place in it. He felt grateful and aggrieved at the same time and he could not sort out his feelings, nor understand why a mysterious fate had chosen to place him in the company of his new . . . the word “master” resonated in his head. He saw himself as something like a dog. Andrew, as Jack was instructed to call him, trained him relentlessly all day long, one task after another, things that he had seen other people do, things that he had never troubled himself to learn, things he had no prior conception of doing: how to clean a kitchen with vinegar; how to polish silver with salt and alkali made from burnt wood ashes; how to make corn bread (properly); how to dress a turkey; how to beat a rug (he’d never heard of it before); how to grind the pigments that Andrew used in his artistic endeavors; how to take apart a mechanical clock (though not yet how to put it together); how to use the scores of tools Andrew had carefully collected before the old times suddenly became the new times, and countless other things that Jack had also never considered before.

He was confused but not sure he still felt broken, in the way he had during those desperate days before Christmas—in need of being fixed. He was confused about feeling tied down to a place and to another person and about what otherwise might be his lot if he wasn’t tied down but cast back into a world that seemed utterly without kindness, fairness, or meaning. He wondered what sort of world this was where people could have masters, just like dogs used to have masters, when people owned dogs. Maybe this was what people did now, in the new times, lacking dogs. He was confused about liking the attention and care that Andrew showed him in teaching him how to do things, but he dreaded the moment he was sure lay ahead, maybe days, perhaps weeks, when Andrew would venture to touch him in a personal way that would offend his manhood, for everybody knew the sort of person Andrew Pendergast was.

He also began to suspect that his fears about the world—which before had seemed set, as though he were constantly surrounded by a circle of scary totem poles planted in the ground, designed to remind him at all times that the world was a frightful place—might be subject to revision. He was no longer so certain, for instance, that the world was unkind, unfair, and devoid of meaning. He took the example of Andrew, who so casually assumed the task of Jack’s redemption and was going about it in a way that appeared to be kind, fair, even generous. And Jack had glimpsed inklings of meaning and purpose in the tasks that Andrew had put him on to.

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