To: Natalie Vried, Lincoln, NE

From: Bert Gunderson, Philadelphia, PA

January 18, 20+2

Nat-

This will be the last time I write you, from Philly at the very least. I’m not sure where I’m going to be a month or even a week from now. Things have become simply intolerable here, and I need to find someplace different.

It’s been a while since we last talked. Lack of e-mail, phone and an even remotely reliable postal service is partly to blame, I think. Maybe I should have tried carrier pigeon, but I’ve heard they hunt those things out where you live. Or maybe it was doves. Regardless, it’s probably not a good bet.

Just remembered you the other day. Not that I would really forget, it’s just that recent events have brought thoughts of you to the fore. You were preternaturally cute at SFSU, checking out your Weldon Kees books when I worked in circulation. I had no real idea who he was then, no clue why you’d be interested in such a depressed but clever person. I’m glad you came back to check out more, so I could ask you about him. Once I finished my thesis, the chance to work near the APS library – and maybe there, eventually – was too good to pass up. We’ve been over this, and I hate to rehash it, so I will not. You had your priorities straight. Going back home to care for a loved one may be one of the few things I understand anymore. Wish I could put it into practice, but I don’t even have a goldfish. Ha.

I don’t know why you would have had this urging, but if you ever thought making a trip anywhere out here was a good idea, please reconsider that. I haven’t got good, reliable news from anywhere on the east coast, but I’ve heard enough conflicting rumors to last me two lifetimes. Boston’s gone up in flames, and then Boston’s fine and they’re still playing intrasquad Sox games. New York has had a month straight of rioting and anarchy, and two weeks later New York has had six months straight of rioting and anarchy. (OK, to be honest I don’t hear much about that place that conflicts – I’m willing to believe it’s become a veritable hellhole and far, far worse than the mere cesspool it used to be.) Hundreds, thousands of murders in DC this year alone, and the Pentagon has become a giant hotel for bigwigs and the lights are still on there and they’ve got a regular plantation farm going inside the building grounds, and there are still helicopters choppering to it and out to destinations unknown. Of course, I have no reason to believe things are horribly bad in most other cities, but the converse is also true.

It used to be that, when I worked at the Free Library, patrons would rarely ever come to me to find out about really current events or news, other than questions like, “Hey, where do you guys keep the New York Times?” I can count them on one hand. One was a little old Volga German lady who wanted to know what was happening in Berlin – this was just after the Wall fell. Well, she sat down with me and by the time we’d found out the relevant newspaper articles and gone through them – she was not a native speaker/reader, nor had the best eyesight, so it was plodding work – she was in tears. It was the oddest thing – I couldn’t tell if she was happy that the Soviet Union was falling or saddened by the violence and turmoil, and you can’t really ask that sort of thing or even offer any solace. “Professionalism” guidelines, best practices and all that rot. Of course, I can name this instance where those guidelines were an abomination, but the hundreds of times where they were the right way to go remain anonymous.

Now – well, after everything went to shit and then up until a couple weeks ago – at the Am. Phil., patrons would come in all the time saying, “I heard alien mushroom people were spotted in Yonkers. Are they just in Yonkers, or have they infiltrated the entire metropolitan area?” And I could say, “I have heard no reliable reports of alien mushroom people sightings in Yonkers or anywhere else, you fucking loon. Get out.” But a lot of other folks would come in and ask, “My family lives in Yonkers, and I heard there’s been almost a full year of rioting and anarchy in New York and I wonder if it’s spread somehow to spread out there. Do you have a paper or any word from there?” And then all I could do is look at them and tear up because I just couldn’t say, didn’t know, and that we weren’t really the kind of library that could help with questions like that. But I guess at least I could tell them that much and show them some empathy.

The entire seaboard – hell, the entire world – outside this meagerly gray city has become completely unknowable to me and pretty much everyone else in every city, and I can’t speak for others, but that fact makes me feel smaller than I can even fully relate. May as well be a hydrogen atom in the sun for all I can see going around me.

And now even Philly has fully masked itself, putting on its own death shroud. Or maybe the blinders have been ripped off my eyes. In any case, the clincher came two weeks and one day ago. I left the apartment a little early to get to work on time, as there’s been a bit of snow lately. We haven’t had much at all this year, but it has been bitter cold, one of the worst I can remember since moving here. Well, I was halfway over the Benjamin Franklin bridge when I started hearing a commotion. It’s phenomenal how the sound carries without the noise of cars and other machinery, even inside the library. So I kept on and when I took a left on 5th street I could see that something really rotten was happening. By the time I got within a block of the library, the first few of the looters were walking off with their bounty. Cartloads, baskets full of books, papers, old loose leaf stuff. There was no point in even trying to stop them.

I just fail to comprehend what got into all of them, and why they targeted our library of all places. Was it just easier to break into? Does older paper burn better or something?... actually, I don’t even want to think about that. Now, that stuff wasn’t Proust, or Bulwer-Lytton (HA!) – nah. Just Franklin’s, Darwin’s, Boas’s personal papers, among thousands of other absolutely unique things that some of the best minds ever found special and wanted to keep safe. And now it’s a couple cold nights’ worth of hibachi fodder for a bunch of Philly chuckleheads. After watching the objects of my work – oh, they didn’t take all of it, but you can bet they’ll be back as soon as the Charles Peirce is in ashes – get trucked out the doors, I meandered around a bit. No reason to go inside that place, no real reason to go home. Took a walk through Independence park, right across the street. Sat on a bench and watched a drunk pissing on another, who was passed out in the overturned Liberty Bell. Yeah. I haven’t been sleeping much since then.

So now that there’s nowhere that I know, understand or have a real feel for, I find it’s time to leave and maybe search out some place where that’s possible. I’ve got a light tent, a warm sleeping bag, a sharp knife, a decent enough bike, a better bike lock and a will to leave this deathly place.

It might be nice to ride out to San Francisco. See the country on the way, pretend for a while that I can still grasp it. But be at peace; I won’t trouble you on the way out west.

Yes, San Francisco sounds like a good bet to me. Ride up that hill overlooking the Golden Gate bridge from the north, leave the keys in the bike lock, take in the view, taste that clean rock salt air and leave this unknowable world behind.

-Bert G.