18

DIALLO: I’ll ask you more about Arthur Leander and the comics in a moment. Perhaps I could ask you a few questions about your life first?

RAYMONDE: You know me, François. We’ve been coming through this town for years.

DIALLO: Yes, yes, of course, but some of our readers might not know you, or the Symphony. I’ve been giving copies of the paper to traders, asking them to distribute it along their routes. You’ve been acting since you were very young, isn’t that right?

RAYMONDE: Very young. I was in a commercial when I was three. Do you remember commercials?

DIALLO: I do, regrettably. What were you selling?

RAYMONDE: I don’t actually remember the thing itself, the commercial, but I remember my brother telling me it was for arrowroot biscuits.

DIALLO: I remember those too. What came after the biscuits?

RAYMONDE: I actually don’t remember, but my brother told me a little. He said I did more commercials, and when I was six or seven I had a recurring role on a televised … on a televised show.

DIALLO: Do you remember which show?

RAYMONDE: I wish I did. I can’t remember anything about it. I think I’ve mentioned before, I have some problems with memory. I can’t remember very much from before the collapse.

DIALLO: It’s not uncommon among people who were children when it happened. And the Symphony? You’ve been with them for a while, haven’t you?

RAYMONDE: Since I was fourteen.

DIALLO: Where did they find you?

RAYMONDE: Ohio. The town where we ended up after we left Toronto, my brother and I, and then after he died I was there by myself.

DIALLO: I didn’t know they went that far south.

RAYMONDE: They only went down there once. It was a failed experiment. They wanted to expand the territory, so that spring they followed the Maumee River down past the ruins of Toledo, and then the Auglaize River into Ohio, and they eventually walked into the town where I lived.

DIALLO: Why do you say it was a failed experiment?

RAYMONDE: I’ll always be grateful that they passed through my town, but the expedition was a disaster for them. By the time they reached Ohio they’d lost an actor to some illness on the road, something that looked like malaria, and they got shot at three times in various places. One of the flautists got hit and almost died of a gunshot wound. They—we—the Symphony never left their usual territory again.

DIALLO: It seems like a very dangerous life.

RAYMONDE: No, that was years ago. It’s much less dangerous than it used to be.

DIALLO: The other towns you pass through, are they very different from here?

RAYMONDE: The places we return to more than once aren’t dissimilar to here. Some places, you pass through once and never return, because you can tell something’s very wrong. Everyone’s afraid, or it seems like some people have enough to eat and other people are starving, or you see pregnant eleven-year-olds and you know the place is either lawless or in the grip of something, a cult of some kind. There are towns that are perfectly reasonable, logical systems of governance and such, and then you pass through two years later and they’ve slid into disarray. All towns have their own traditions. There are towns like this one, where you’re interested in the past, you’ve got a library—

DIALLO: The more we know about the former world, the better we’ll understand what happened when it fell.

RAYMONDE: But everyone knows what happened. The new strain of swine flu and then the flights out of Moscow, those planes full of patient zeros …

DIALLO: Nonetheless, I believe in understanding history.

RAYMONDE: Fair enough. Some towns, as I was saying, some towns are like this one, where they want to talk about what happened, about the past. Other towns, discussion of the past is discouraged. We went to a place once where the children didn’t know the world had ever been different, although you’d think all the rusted-out automobiles and telephones wires would give them a clue. Some towns are easier to visit than others. Some places have elected mayors or they’re run by elected committees. Sometimes a cult takes over, and those towns are the most dangerous.

DIALLO: In what sense?

RAYMONDE: In the sense that they’re unpredictable. You can’t argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic. You come to a town where everyone’s dressed all in white, for example. I’m thinking of a town we visited once just outside our usual territory, north of Kincardine, and then they tell you that they were saved from the Georgia Flu and survived the collapse because they’re superior people and free from sin, and what can you say to that? It isn’t logical. You can’t argue with it. You just remember your own lost family and either want to cry or harbor murderous thoughts.