"i sing the body electric" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC! - Ray Bradbury

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC!

Ray Bradbury

This book, a bit late in the day, but with admiration, affection, and friendship, is for NORMAN CORWIN.

I sing the Body Electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them,
And charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

—WALT WHITMAN

THE KILIMANJARO DEVICE
THE TERRIBLE CONFLAGRATION UP AT THE PLACE
TOMORROW'S CHILD
THE WOMEN
THE INSPIRED CHICKEN MOTEL
DOWNWIND FROM GETTYSBURG
YES, WE'LL GATHER AT THE RIVER
THE COLD WIND AND THE WARM
NIGHT CALL, COLLECT
THE HAUNTING OF THE NEW
I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC!
THE TOMBLING DAY
ANY FRIEND OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY'S IS A FRIEND OF MINE
HEAVY-SET
THE MAN IN THE RORSCHACH SHIRT
HENRY THE NINTH
THE LOST CITY OF MARS
CHRISTUS APOLLO
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE KILIMANJARO DEVICE

I arrived in the truck very early in the morning. I had been driving all night, for I hadn't been able to sleep at the motel so I thought I might as well drive and I arrived among the mountains and hills near Ketchum and Sun Valley just as the sun carne up and I was glad I had kept busy with driving.
I drove into the town itself without looking up at that one hill. I was afraid if I looked at it, I would make a mistake. It was very important not to look at the grave. At least that is how I felt. And I had to go on my hunch.
I parked the truck in front of an old saloon and walked around the town and talked to a few people and breathed the air and it was sweet and clear. I found a young hunter, but he was wrong; I knew that after talking to him for a few minutes. I found a very old man, but he was no better. Then I found me a hunter about fifty, and he was just right. He knew, or sensed, everything I was looking for.
I bought him a beer and we talked about a lot of things, and then I bought him another beer and led the conversation around to what I was doing here and why I wanted to talk to him. We were silent for a while and I waited, not showing my impatience, for the hunter, on his own, to bring up the past, to speak of other days three years ago, and of driving toward Sun Valley at this time or that and what he saw and knew about a man who had once sat in this bar and drunk beer and talked about hunting or gone hunting out beyond.
And at last, looking off at the wall as if it were the highway and the mountains, the hunter gathered up his quiet voice and was ready to speak.
"That old man," he said. "Oh, that old man on the road. Oh, that poor old man."
I waited.
"I just can't get over that old man on the road," he said, looking down now into his drink.
I drank some more of my beer, not feeling well, feeling very old myself and tired.
When the silence prolonged itself, I got out a local map and laid it on the wooden table. The bar was quiet. It was midmorning and we were completely alone there.
"This is where you saw him most often?" I asked.
The hunter touched the map three times. "I used to see him walking here. And along there. Then he'd cut across the land here. That poor old man. I wanted to tell him to keep off the road. I didn't want to hurt or insult him. You don't tell a man like that about roads or that maybe he'll be hit. If he's going to be hit, well that's it. You figure it's his business, and you go on. Oh, but he was old there at the last."
"He was," I said, and folded the map and put it in my pocket.
"You another of those reporters?" said the hunter.
"Not quite those," I said.
"Didn't mean to lump you in with them," he said.
"No apology needed," I said. ''Let's just say I was one of his readers."
"Oh, he had readers all right, all kinds of readers. Even me. I don't touch books from one autumn to the next. But I touched his. I think I liked the Michigan stories best. About the fishing. 1 think the stories about the fishing are good. I don't think anybody ever wrote about fishing that way and maybe won't ever again. Of course, the bullfight stuff is good, too. But that's a little far off. Some of the cowpokes like them; they been around the animals all their life. A bull here or a bull there, I guess it's the same. I know one cowpoke has read just the bull stuff in the Spanish stories of the old man's forty times. He could go over there and fight, I swear."
"I think all of us felt," I said, "at least once in our lives, when we were young, we could go over there, after reading the bull stuff in the Spanish stories, that we could go over there and fight. Or at least jog ahead of the running of the bulls, in the early morning, with a good drink waiting at the other end of the run, and your best girl with you there for the long weekend."
I stopped. I laughed quietly. For my voice had, without knowing, fallen into the rhythm of his way of saying, either out of his mouth, or from his hand. I shook my head and was silent.
"You been up to the grave yet?" asked the hunter, as if he knew I would answer yes.
"No," I said.
That really surprised him. He tried not to show it.
"They all go up to the grave," he said.
"Not this one."
He explored around in his mind for a polite way of asking. "I mean … " he said. "Why not?"
"Because it's the wrong grave," I said.
"All graves are wrong graves when you come down to it," he said.
"No," I said. "There are right graves and wrong ones, just as there are good times to die and bad times."
He nodded at this. I had come back to something he knew, or at least: smelled was right.
"Sure, I knew men," he said, "died just perfect. You always felt, yes, that was good. One man I knew, sitting at the table waiting for supper, his wife in the kitchen, when she came in with a big bowl of soup there he was sitting dead and neat at the table. Bad for her, but, I mean, wasn't that a good way for him? No sickness. No nothing but sitting there waiting for supper to come arid never knowing if it came or not. Like another friend. Had an old dog. Fourteen years old. Dog was going blind and tired. Decided at last to take the dog to the pound and have him put to sleep. Loaded the old blind tired dog on the front seat of his car. The dog licked his hand, once. The man felt awful. He drove toward the pound. On the way there, with not one sound, the dog passed away, died on the front seat, as if he knew and, knowing, picked the better way, just handed over his ghost, and there you are. That's what you're talking about, right?"
I nodded.
"So you think that grave up on the hill is a wrong grave for a right man, do you?"
"That's about it," I said.
"You think there are all kinds of graves along the road for all of us?"
"Could be," I said.
"And if we could see all our life one way or another, we'd choose better? At the end, looking back," said the hunter, "we'd say, hell, that was the year and the place, not the other year and the other place, but that one year, that one place. Would we say that?"
"Since we have to choose or be pushed finally," I said, "yes."
"That's a nice idea," said the hunter. "But how many of us have that much sense? Most of us don't have brains enough to leave a party when the gin runs out. We hang around."
"We hang around," I said, "and what a shame."
We ordered some more beer.
The hunter drank half the glass and wiped his mouth.
"So what can you do about wrong graves?" he said.
"Treat them as if they didn't exist," I said. "And maybe they'll go away, like a bad dream."
The hunter laughed once, a land of forlorn cry. "God, you're crazy. But I like listening to crazy people. Blow some more."
"That's all," I said.
"Are you the Resurrection and the Life?" said the hunter.
"No."
"You going to say Lazarus come forth?"
"No."
"What then?"
"I just want, very late in the day," I said, "to choose right places, right times, right graves."
"Drink that drink," said the hunter. "You need it. Who in hell sent you?"
"Me," I said. "I did. And some friends. We all chipped in and picked one out of ten. We bought that truck out on the street and I drove it across country. On the way I did a lot of hunting and fishing to put myself in the right frame. I was in Cuba last year. Spain the summer before. Africa the summer before that. I got a lot to think about. That's why they picked me."
"To do what, to do what, goddammit?" said the hunter urgently, half wildly, shaking his head. "You can't do anything. It's all over."
"Most of it," I said. "Come on."
I walked to the door. The hunter sat there. At last, examining the fires lit in my face by my talking, he grunted, got up, walked over, and came outside with me.
I pointed at the curb. We looked together at the truck parked there.
"I've seen those before," he said. "A truck like that, in a movie. Don't they hunt rhino from a truck like that? And lions and things like that? Or at least travel in them around Africa?"
"You remember right."
"No lions around here," he said. "No rhino, no water buffalo, nothing."
"No? "I asked.
He didn't answer that.
I walked over and touched the open truck.
"You know what this is?"
"I'm playing dumb from here on," said the hunter. "What is it?"
I stroked the fender for a long moment.
"A Time Machine," I said.
His eyes widened and then narrowed and he sipped the beer he was carrying in one large hand. He nodded me on.
"A Time Machine," I repeated.
"I heard you," he said.
He walked out around the safari truck and stood in the street looking at it. He wouldn't look at me. He circled the truck one entire round and stood back on the curb and looked at the cap on the gas tank.
"What kind of mileage you get?" he said.
"I don't know yet."
"You don't know anything," he said.
"This is the first trip," I said. "I won't know until it's over."
"What do you fuel a thing like that with?" he said.
I was silent.
"What kind of stuff you put in?" he asked.
I could have said: Reading late at night, reading many nights over the years until almost morning, reading up in the mountains in the snow or reading at noon in Pamplona, or reading by the streams or out in a boat somewhere along the Florida coast. Or I could have said: All of us put our hands on this Machine, all of us thought about it and bought it and touched it and put our love in it and our remembering what his words did to us twenty years or twenty-five or thirty years ago. There's a lot of life and remembering and love put by here, and that's the gas and the fuel and the stuff or whatever you want to call it; the rain in Paris, the sun in Madrid, the snow in the high Alps, the smoke off the guns in the Tyrol, the shine of light off the Gulf Stream, the explosion of bombs or explosions of leapt fish, that's the gas and the fuel and the stuff here; I should have said that, I thought it, but I let it stay unsaid.
The hunter must have smelled my thought, for his eyes squinted up and, telepath that he was from long years in the forest, chewed over my thinking.
Then he walked over and did an unexpected thing. He reached out and … touched … my Machine.
He laid his hand on it and left it there, as if feeling for the life, and approving what he sensed beneath his hand. He stood that way for a long time.
Then he turned without a word, not looking at me, and went back into the bar and sat drinking alone, his back turned toward the door.
I didn't want to break the silence. It seemed a good time to go, to try.
I got in the truck and started the motor.
What kind of mileage? What kind of fuel? I thought. And drove away.
I kept on the road and didn't look right or left and I drove for what must have been an hour, first this direction and then that, part of the time my eyes shut for full seconds, taking a chance I might go off and get hurt or killed.
And then, just before noon, with the clouds over the sun, suddenly I knew it was all right.
I looked up at the hill and I almost: yelled.
The grave was gone.
I drove down into a little hollow just then and on the road ahead, wandering along by himself, was an old man in a heavy sweater.
I idled the safari truck along until I was pacing him as he walked. I saw he was wearing steel-rimmed glasses and for a long moment we moved together, each ignoring the other until I called his name.
He hesitated, and then walked on.
I caught up with him in the truck and said again, "Papa."
He stopped and waited.
I braked the car and sat there in the front seat.
"Papa," I said.
He came over and stood near the door.
"Do I know you?"
"No. But I know you."
He looked me in the eyes and studied my face and mouth. "Yes. I think you do."
"I saw you on the road. I think I'm going your way. Want a lift?"
"It's good walking this time of day," he said. "Thanks."
"Let me tell you where I'm going," I said.
He had started off but now stopped and, without looking at me, said, "Where?"
"A long way," I said.
"It sounds long, the way you tell it. Can't you make it shorter?"
"No. A long way," I said. "About two thousand six hundred days, give or take some days, and half an afternoon."
He came back and looked into the car.
"Is that how far you're going?"
"That's how far."
"In which direction? Ahead?"
"Don't you want to go ahead?"
He looked at the sky. "I don't know. I'm not sure."
"It's not ahead," I said. "It's back."
His eyes took on a different color. It was a subtle shift, a flex, like a man stepping out from the shade of a tree into sunlight on a cloudy day.
"Back."
"Somewhere between two thousand and three thousand days, split half a day, give or take an hour, borrow or loan a minute, haggle over a second," I said.
"You really talk," he said.
"Compulsive," I said.
"You'd make a lousy writer," he said. "I never knew a writer yet was a good talker."
"That's my albatross," I said.
"Back?" He weighed the word.
"I'm turning the car around," I said. "And I'm going back down the road."
"Not miles but days?"
"Not miles but days."
"Is it that kind of car?"
"That's how it's built."
"You're an inventor then?"
"A reader who happens to invent,"
"If the car works, that's some car you got there."
"At your service," I said.
"And when you get where you're going," said the old man, putting his hand on the door and leaning and then, seeing what he had done, taking his hand away and standing taller to speak to me, "where will you be?"
"January 10, 1954."
"That's quite a date," he said.
"It is, it was. It can be more of a date."
Without moving, his eyes took another step out into fuller light.
"And where will you be on that clay?"
"Africa," I said.
He was silent. His mouth did not work. His eyes did not shift.
"Not far from Nairobi," I said.
He nodded, once, slowly.
"Africa, not far from Nairobi."
I waited.
"And when we get there, if we go?" he said.
"I leave you there."
"And then?"
"You stay there."
"And then?"
"That's all."
"That's all?"
"Forever," I said.
The old man breathed out and in, and ran his hand over the edge of the doorsill.
"This car," he said, "somewhere along the way does it turn into a plane?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Somewhere along the way do you turn into my pilot?"
"It could be. I've never done this before."
"But you're willing to try?"
I nodded.
"Why?" he said, and leaned in and stared me directly in the face with a terrible, quietly wild intensity. "Why?"
Old man, I thought, I can't tell you why. Don't ask me.
He withdrew, sensing he had gone too far.
"I didn't say that," he said.
"You didn't say it," I said.
"And when you bring the plane in for a forced landing," he said, "will you land a little differently this time?"
"Different, yes."
"A little harder?"
"I'll see what can be done."
"And will I be thrown out but the rest of you okay?"
"The odds are in favor."
He looked up at the hill where there was no grave. I looked at the same hill. And maybe he guessed the digging of it there.
He gazed back down the road at the mountains and the sea that could not be seen beyond the mountains and a continent beyond the sea. "That's a good day you're talking about."
"The best."
"And a good hour and a good second."
"Really, nothing better."
"Worth thinking about."
His hand lay on the doorsill, not leaning, but testing, feeling, touching, tremulous, undecided. But his eyes came full into the light of African noon.
"Yes."
"Yes?" I said.
"I think," he said, "I'll grab a lift with you."
I waited one heartbeat, then reached over and opened the door.
Silently he got in the front seat and sat there and quietly shut the door without slamming it. He sat there, very old and very tired. I waited. "Start her up," he said.
I started the engine and gentled it.
"Turn her around," he said.
I turned the car so it was going back on the road.
"Is this really," he said, "that kind of car?"
"Really, that kind of car."
He looked out at the land and the mountains and the distant house.
I waited, idling the motor.
"When we get there," he said, "will you remember something … ?"
"I'll try."
"There's a mountain," he said, and stopped and sat there, his mouth quiet, and he didn't go on.
But I went on for him. There is a mountain in Africa named Kilimanjaro, I thought. And on the western slope of that mountain was once found the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has ever explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
We will put you up on that same slope, I thought, on Kilimanjaro, near the leopard, and write your name and under it say nobody knew what he was doing here so high, but here he is, And write the date born and died, and go away down toward the hot summer grass and let mainly dark warriors and white hunters and swift okapis know the grave.
The old man shaded his eyes, looking at the road winding away over the hills. He nodded.
"Let's go," he said.
"Yes, Papa," I said.
And we motored away, myself at the wheel, going slow, and the old man beside me, and as we went down the first hill and topped the next, the sun came out full and the wind smelled of fire. We ran like a lion in the long grass. Rivers and streams flashed by. I wished we might stop for one hour and wade and fish and lie by the stream frying the fish and talking or not talking. But if we stopped we might never go on again. I gunned the engine. It made a great fierce wondrous animal's roar. The old man grinned.
"It's going to be a great day!" he shouted.
"A great day."
Back on the road, I thought, How must it be now, and now, us disappearing? And now, us gone? And now, the road empty. Sun Valley quiet in the sun. What must it be, having us gone?
I had the car up to ninety.
We both yelled like boys.
After that I didn't know anything.
"By God," said the old man, toward the end. "You know? I think we're … flying?"

THE TERRIBLE CONFLAGRATION UP AT THE PLACE

THE CLOCK SHOP

Fantoccini Our Specialty.

Perhaps we had smelled something on Father's conversation the previous night, or caught some special furtive glance at the sky or the freeway Rapped briefly and then lost in his gaze. Or perhaps it was merely the way the wind blew the ghost curtains out over our beds, making pale messages all night.
For suddenly there we were in the middle of the grass, Timothy and I, with Agatha, pretending no curiosity, up on the porch, hidden behind the potted geraniums.
We gave her no notice. We knew that if we acknowledged her presence, she would flee, so we sat and watched the sky where nothing moved but birds and highflown jets, and watched the freeway where a thousand cars might suddenly deliver forth our Special Gift … but … nothing.
At noon we chewed grass and lay low …
At one o'clock, Timothy blinked his eyes.
And then, with incredible precision, it happened.
It was as if the Fantoccini people knew our surface tension.
All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves.
Well, as if knowing our long wait must absolutely end within one minute! this second! no more, God, forget it!
At that instant, I repeat, the clouds above our house opened wide and let forth a helicopter like Apollo driving his chariot across mythological skies.
And the Apollo machine swam down on its own summer breeze, wafting hot winds to cool, reweaving our hair, smartening our eyebrows, applauding our pant legs against our shins, making a flag of Agatha's hair on the porch and thus settled like a vast frenzied hibiscus on our lawn, the helicopter slid wide a bottom drawer and deposited upon the grass a parcel of largish size, no sooner having laid same then the vehicle, with not so much as a god bless or farewell, sank straight up, disturbed the calm air with a mad ten thousand flourishes and then, like a skyborne dervish, tilted and fell off to be mad some other place.
Timothy and I stood riven for a long moment looking at the packing case, and then we saw the crowbar taped to the top of the raw pine lid and seized it and began to pry and creak and squeal the boards off, one by one, and as we did this I saw Agatha sneak up to watch and I thought, thank you, God, thank you that Agatha never saw a coffin, when Mother went away, no box, no cemetery, no earth, just words in a big church, no box, no box like this … !
The last pine plank fell away.
Timothy and I gasped. Agatha, between us now, gasped, too.
For inside the immense raw pine package was the most beautiful idea anyone ever dreamt and built.
Inside was the perfect gift for any child from seven to seventy-seven.
We stopped up our breaths. We let them out in cries of delight and adoration.
Inside the opened box was …
A mummy.
Or, first anyway, a mummy case, a sarcophagus!
"Oh, no!" Happy tears filled Timothy's eyes.
"It can't be!" said Agatha.
"It is, it is!"
"Our very own?"
"Ours!"
"It must be a mistake!"
"Sure, they'll want it back!"
"They can't have it!"
"Lord, Lord, is that real gold!? Real hieroglyphs! Run your fingers over them!"
"Let me!"
"Just like in the museums! Museums!"
We all gabbled at once. I think some tears fell from my own eyes to rain upon the case.
"Oh, they'll make the colors run!"
Agatha wiped the rain away.
And the golden mask face of the woman carved on the sarcophagus lid looked back at us with just the merest smile which hinted at our own joy, which accepted the overwhelming upsurge of a love we thought had drowned forever but now surfaced into the sun.
Not only did she have a sun-metal face stamped and beaten out of purest gold, with delicate nostrils and a mouth that was both firm and gentle, but her eyes, fixed into their sockets, were cerulean or amethystine or lapus lazuli, or all three, minted and fused together, and her body was covered over with lions and eyes and ravens, and her hands were crossed upon her carved bosom and in one gold mitten she clenched a thonged whip for obedience, and in the other a fantastic ranuncula, which makes for obedience out of love, so the whip lies unused …
And as our eyes ran down her hieroglyphs it came to all three of us at the same instant:
"Why, those signs!" "Yes, the hen tracks!" "The birds, the snakes!"
They didn't speak tales of the Past.
They were hieroglyphs of the Future.
This was the first queen mummy delivered forth in all time whose papyrus inkings etched out the next month, the next season, the next year, the next lifetime!
She did not mourn for time spent.
No. She celebrated the bright coinage yet to come, banked, waiting, ready to be drawn upon and used.
We sank to our knees to worship that possible time.
First one hand, then another, probed out to niggle, twitch, touch, itch over the signs.
"There's me, yes, look! Me, in sixth grade!" said Agatha, now in the fifth. "See the girl with my-colored hair and wearing my gingerbread suit?"
"There's me in the twelfth year of high school!" said Timothy, so very young now but building taller stilts every week and stalking around the yard.
"There's me," I said, quietly, warm, "in college. The guy wearing glasses who runs a little to fat. Sure. Heck." I snorted. "That's me."
The sarcophagus spelled winters ahead, springs to squander, autumns to spend with all the golden and rusty and copper leaves like coins, and over all, her bright sun symbol, daughter-of-Ra eternal face, forever above our horizon, forever an illumination to tilt our shadows to better ends.
"Hey!" we all said at once, having read and reread our Fortune-Told scribblings, seeing our lifelines and lovelines, inadmissible, serpentined over, around, and down. "Hey!"
And in one seance table-lifting feat, not telling each other what to do, just doing it, we pried up the bright sarcophagus lid, which had no hinges but lifted out like cup from cup, and put the lid aside.
And within the sarcophagus, of course, was the true mummy!
And she was like the image carved on the lid, but more so, more beautiful, more touching because human shaped, and shrouded all in new fresh bandages of linen, round and round, instead of old and dusty cerements.
And upon her hidden face was an identical golden mask, younger than the first, but somehow, strangely wiser than the first.
And the linens that tethered her limbs had symbols on them of three sorts, one a girl of ten, one a boy of nine, one a boy of thirteen.
A series of bandages for each of us!
We gave each other a startled glance and a sudden bark of laughter.
Nobody said the bad joke, but all thought:
She's all wrapped up in us!
And we didn't care. We loved the joke. We loved whoever had thought to make us part of the ceremony we now went through as each of us seized arid began to unwind each of his or her particular serpentines of delicious stuffs!
The lawn was soon a mountain of linen.
The woman beneath the covering lay there, waiting.
"Oh, no," cried Agatha. "She's dead, too!"
She ran. I stopped her. "Idiot. She's not dead or alive. Where's your key?"
"Key?"
"Dummy," said Tim, "the key the man gave you to wind her up!"
Her hand had already spidered along her blouse to where the symbol of some possible new religion hung. She had strung it there, against her own skeptic's muttering, and now she held it in her sweaty palm.
"Go on," said Timothy. "Put it in!"
"But where?"
"Oh for God's sake! As the man said, in her right armpit or left ear. Gimme!"
And he grabbed the key and impulsively moaning with impatience and not able to find the proper insertion slot, prowled over the prone figure's head and bosom and at last, on pure instinct, perhaps for a lark, perhaps just giving up the whole damned mess, thrust the key through a final shroud of bandage at the navel.
On the instant: spunnng!
The Electrical Grandmother's eyes flicked wide!
Something began to hum and whir. It was as if Tim had stirred up a hive of hornets with an ornery stick.
"Oh," gasped Agatha, seeing he had taken the game away, "let me!"
She wrenched the key.
Grandma's nostrils flared! She might snort up steam, snuff out fire!
"Me!" I cried, and grabbed the key and gave it a huge … twist!
The beautiful woman's mouth popped wide.
"Me!"
"Me!"
"Me!"
Grandma suddenly sat up.
We leapt back.
We knew we had, in a way, slapped her alive.
She was born, she was born!
Her head swiveled all about. She gaped. She mouthed. And the first thing she said was:
Laughter.
Where one moment we had backed off, now the mad sound drew us near to peer as in a pit where crazy folk are kept with snakes to make them well.
It was a good laugh, full and rich and hearty, and it did not mock, it accepted. It said the world was a wild place, strange, unbelievable, absurd if you wished, but all in all, quite a place. She would not dream to find another. She would not ask to go back to sleep.
She was awake now. We had awakened her. With a glad shout, she would go with it all.
And go she did, out of her sarcophagus, out of her winding sheet, stepping forth, brushing off, looking around as for a mirror. She found it.
The reflections in our eyes.
She was more pleased than disconcerted with what she found there. Her laughter faded to an amused smile.
For Agatha, at the instant of birth, had leapt to hide on the porch.
The Electrical Person pretended not to notice.
She turned slowly on the green lawn near the shady street, gazing all about with new eyes, her nostrils moving as if she breathed the actual air and this the first morn of the lovely Garden and she with no intention of spoiling the game by biting the apple
Her gaze fixed upon my brother.
"You must be—?"
"Timothy. Tim," he offered.
"And you must be—?"
"Tom," I said.
How clever again of the Fantoccini Company. They knew. She knew. But they had taught her to pretend not to know. That way we could feel great, we were the teachers, telling her what she already knew! How sly, how wise.
"And isn't there another boy?" said the woman.
"Girl!" a disgusted voice cried from somewhere on the porch.
"Whose name is Alicia—?"
"Agatha!" The far voice, started in humiliation, ended in proper anger.
"Algernon, of course."
"Agatha!" Our sister popped up, popped back to hide a flushed face.
"Agatha." The woman touched the word with proper affection. "Well, Agatha, Timothy, Thomas, let me look at you."
"No," said I, said Tim, "Let us look at you. Hey … "
Our voices slid back in our throats.
We drew near her.
We walked in great slow circles round about, skirting the edges of her territory. And her territory extended as far as we could hear the hum of the warm summer hive. For that is exactly what she sounded like. That was her characteristic tune. She made a sound like a season all to herself, a morning early in June when the world wakes to find everything absolutely perfect, fine, delicately attuned, all in balance, nothing disproportioned. Even before you opened your eyes you knew it would be one of those days. Tell the sky what color it must be, and it was indeed. Tell the sun how to crochet its way, pick and choose among leaves to lay out carpetings of bright and dark on the fresh lawn, and pick and lay it did. The bees have been up earliest of all, they have already come and gone, and come and gone again to the meadow fields and returned all golden fuzz on the air, all pollen-decorated, epaulettes at the full, nectar-dripping. Don't you hear them pass? hover? dance their language? telling where all the sweet gums are, the syrups that make bears frolic and lumber in bulked ecstasies, that make boys squirm with unpronounced juices, that make girls leap out of beds to catch from the corners of their eyes their dolphin selves naked aflash on the warm air poised forever in one eternal glass wave.
So it seemed with our electrical friend here on the new lawn in the middle of a special day.
And she a stuff to which we were drawn, lured, Spelled, doing our dance, remembering what could not be remembered, needful, aware of her attentions.
Timothy and I, Tom, that is.
Agatha remained on the porch.
But her head flowered above the rail, her eyes followed all that was done and said.
And what was said and done was Tim at last exhaling:
"Hey … your eyes … "
Her eyes. Her splendid eyes.
Even more splendid than the lapis lazuli on the sarcophagus lid and on the mask that had covered her bandaged face. These most beautiful eyes in the world looked out upon us calmly, shining.
"Your eyes," gasped Tim, "are the exact same color, are like—"
"Like what?"
"My favorite aggies … "
"What could be better than that?" she said.
And the answer was, nothing.
Her eyes slid along on the bright air to brush my ears, my nose, my chin. "And you, Master Tom?"
"Me?"
"How shall we be friends? We must, you know, if we're going to knock elbows about the house the next year … "
"I … " I said, and stopped.
"You," said Grandma, "are a dog mad to bark but with taffy in his teeth. Have you ever given a dog taffy? It's so sad and funny, both. You laugh but hate yourself for laughing. You cry and run to help, and laugh again when his first new bark comes out."
I barked a small laugh remembering a dog, a day, and some taffy.
Grandma turned, and there was my old kite strewn on the lawn. She recognized its problem.
"The string's broken. No. The ball of string's lost. You can't fly a kite that way. Here."
She bent. We didn't: know what might happen. How could a robot grandma fly a kite for us? She raised up, the kite in her hands.
"Fly," she said, as to a bird.
And the kite flew.
That is to say, with a grand flourish, she let it rip on the wind.
And she and the kite were one.
For from the tip of her index finger there sprang a thin bright strand of spider web, all half-invisible gossamer fishline which, fixed to the kite, let it soar a hundred, no, three hundred, no, a thousand feet high on the summer swoons.
Timothy shouted. Agatha, torn between coming and going, let out a cry from the porch. And I, in all my maturity of thirteen years, though I tried not to look impressed, grew taller, taller, and felt a similar cry burst out my lungs, and burst it did. I gabbled and yelled lots of things about how I wished I had a finger from which, on a bobbin, I might thread the sky, the clouds, a wild kite all in one.
"If you think that is high," said the Electric Creature, "watch this!"
With a hiss, a whistle, a hum, the fishline sung out. The kite sank up another thousand feet. And again another thousand, until at last it was a speck of red confetti dancing on the very winds that took jets around the world or changed the weather in the next existence …
"It can't be! "I cried.
"It is." She calmly watched her finger unravel its massive stuffs. "I make it as I need it. Liquid inside, like a spider. Hardens when it hits the air, instant thread … "
And when the kite was no more than a specule, a vanishing mote on the peripheral vision of the gods, to quote from older wisemen, why then Grandma, without turning, without looking, without letting her gaze offend by touching, said:
"And, Abigail—?"
"Agatha!" was the sharp response.
O wise woman, to overcome with swift small angers.
"Agatha," said Grandma, not too tenderly, not too lightly, somewhere poised between, "and how shall we make do?"
She broke the thread and wrapped it about my fist three times so I was tethered to heaven by the longest, I repeat, longest kite string in the entire history of the world! Wait till I show my friends! I thought. Green! Sour apple green is the color they'll turn!
"Agatha?"
"No way!" said Agatha.
"No way," said an echo.
"There must: be some—"
"We'll never be friends!" said Agatha.
"Never be friends," said the echo.
Timothy and I jerked. Where was the echo coming from? Even Agatha, surprised, showed her eyebrows above the porch rail.
Then we looked and saw.
Grandma was cupping her hands like a seashell and from within that shell the echo sounded.
"Never … friends … "
And again faintly dying "Friends … "
We all bent to hear.
That is we two boys bent to hear.
"No! "cried Agatha.
And ran in the house and slammed the doors.
"Friends," said the echo from the seashell hands. "No."
And far away, on the shore of some inner sea, we heard a small door shut.
And that was the first day.
And there was a second day, of course, and a third and a fourth, with Grandma wheeling in a great circle, and we her planets turning about the central light, with Agatha slowly, slowly coming in to join, to walk if not run with us, to listen if not hear, to watch if not see, to itch if not touch.
But at least by the end of the first ten days, Agatha no longer fled, but stood in nearby doors, or sat in distant chairs under trees, or if we went out for hikes, followed ten paces behind.
And Grandma? She merely waited. She never tried to urge or force. She went about her cooking and baking apricot pies and left foods carelessly here aid there about the house on mousetrap plates for wiggle-nosed girls to sniff and snitch. An hour later, the plates were empty, the buns or cakes gone and without thank you's, there was Agatha sliding down the banister, a mustache of crumbs on her lip.
As for Tim and me, we were always being called up hills by our Electric Grandma, and reaching the top were called down the other side.
And the most peculiar and beautiful and strange and lovely thing was the way she seemed to give complete attention to all of us.
She listened, she really listened to all we said, she knew and remembered every syllable, word, sentence, punctuation, thought, and rambunctious idea. We knew that all our days were stored in her, and that any time we felt we might want to know what we said at X hour at X second on X afternoon, we just named that X and with amiable promptitude, in the form of an aria if we wished, sung with humor, she would deliver forth X incident.
Sometimes we were prompted to test her. In the midst of babbling one day with high fevers about nothing, I stopped. I fixed Grandma with my eye and demanded:
"What did I just say?"
"Oh, er—"
"Come on, spit it out!"
"I think—" she rummaged her purse. "I have it here." From the deeps of her purse she drew forth and handed me:
"Boy! A Chinese fortune cookie!"
"Fresh baked, still warm, open it."
It was almost too hot to touch. I broke the cookie shell and pressed the warm curl of paper out to read:
"—bicycle Champ of the whole West! What did I just say? Come on, spit it out!"
My jaw dropped.
"How did you do that?"
"We have our little secrets. The only Chinese fortune cookie that predicts the Immediate Past. Have another?"
I cracked the second shell and read:
" 'How did you do that?' "
I popped the messages and the piping hot shells into my mouth and chewed as we walked.
"Well?"
"You're a great cook," I said.
And, laughing, we began to run.
And that was another great thing.
She could keep up.
Never beat, never win a race, but pump right along in good style, which a boy doesn't mind. A girl ahead of him or beside him is too much to bear. But a girl one or two paces back is a respectful thing, and allowed.
So Grandma and I had some great runs, me in the lead, and both talking a mile a minute.
But now I must tell you the best part of Grandma.
I might not: have known at all if Timothy hadn't taken some pictures, and if I hadn't taken some also, and then compared.
When I saw the photographs developed out of our instant Brownies, I sent Agatha, against her wishes, to photograph Grandma a third time, unawares.
Then I took the three sets of pictures off alone, to keep counsel with myself. I never told Timothy and Agatha what I found. I didn't want to spoil it.
But, as I laid the pictures out in my room, here is what I thought and said:
"Grandma, in each picture, looks different!"
"Different?" I asked myself.
"Sure. Wait. Just a sec—"
I rearranged the photos.
"Here's one of Grandma near Agatha. And, in it, Grandma looks like … Agatha!
"And in this one, posed with Timothy, she looks like Timothy!
"And this last one, Holy Goll! Jogging along with me, she looks like ugly me!"
I sat down, stunned. The pictures fell to the floor.
I hunched over, scrabbling them, rearranging, turning upside down and sidewise. Yes. Holy Goll again, yes!
O that clever Grandmother.
O those Fantoccini people-making people.
Clever beyond clever, human beyond human, warm beyond warm, love beyond love …
And wordless, I rose and went downstairs and found Agatha and Grandma in the same room, doing algebra lessons in an almost peaceful communion. At least there was not outright war. Grandma was still waiting for Agatha to come round. And no one knew what day of what year that would be, or how to make it come faster. Meanwhile—
My entering the room made Grandma turn. I watched her face slowly as it recognized me. And wasn't there the merest ink-wash change of color in those eyes? Didn't the thin film of blood beneath the translucent skin, or whatever liquid they put to pulse and beat in the humanoid forms, didn't it flourish itself suddenly bright in her cheeks and mouth? I am somewhat ruddy. Didn't Grandma suffuse herself more to my color upon my arrival? And her eyes? watching Agatha-Abigail-Algernon at work, hadn't they been her color of blue rather than mine, which are deeper?
More important than that, in the moments as she talked with me, saying, "Good evening," and "How's your homework, my lad?" and such stuff, didn't the bones of her face shift subtly beneath the flesh to assume some fresh racial attitude?
For let's face it, our family is of three sorts. Agatha has the long horse bones of a small English girl who will grow to hunt foxes; Father's equine stare, snort, stomp, and assemblage of skeleton. The skull and teeth are pure English, or as pure as the motley isle's history allows.
Timothy is something else, a touch of Italian from mother's side a generation back. Her family name was Mariano, so Tim has that dark thing firing him, and a small bone structure, and eyes that will one day burn ladies to the ground.
As for me, I am the Slav, and we can only figure this from my paternal grandfather's mother who came from Vienna and brought a set of cheekbones that flared, and temples from which you might dip wine, and a kind of steppeland thrust of nose which sniffed more of Tartar than of Tartan, hiding behind the family name.
So you see it became fascinating for me to watch and try to catch Grandma as she performed her changes, speaking to Agatha and melting her cheekbones to the horse, speaking to Timothy and growing as delicate as a Florentine raven pecking glibly at the air, speaking to me and fusing the hidden plastic stuffs, so I felt Catherine the Great stood there before me.
Now, how the Fantoccini people achieved this rare and subtle transformation I shall never know, nor ask, nor wish to find out. Enough that in each quiet motion, turning here, bending there, affixing her gaze, her secret segments, sections, the abutment of her nose, the sculptured chinbone, the wax-tallow plastic metal forever warmed and was forever susceptible of loving change. Hers was a mask that was all mask but only one face for one person at a time. So in crossing a room, having touched one child, on the way, beneath the skin, the wondrous shift went on, and by the time she reached the next child, why, true mother of that child she was! looking upon him or her out of the battlements of their own fine bones.
And when all three of us were present and chattering at the same time? Well, then, the changes were miraculously soft, small, and mysterious. Nothing so tremendous as to be caught and noted, save by this older boy, myself, who, watching, became elated arid admiring and entranced.
I have never wished to be behind the magician's scenes. Enough that the illusion works. Enough that love is the chemical result. Enough that cheeks are rubbed to happy color, eyes sparked to illumination, arms opened to accept and softly bind and hold …
All of us, that is, except Agatha who refused to the bitter last.
"Agamemnon … "
It had become a jovial game now. Even Agatha didn't mind, but pretended to mind. It gave her a pleasant sense of superiority over a supposedly superior machine.
"Agamemnon!" she snorted, "you are a d … "
"Dumb?" said Grandma.
"I wouldn't say that."
"Think it, then, my dear Agonistes Agatha … I am quite flawed, and on names my flaws are revealed. Tom there, is Tim half the time. Timothy is Tobias or Timulty as likely as not … "
Agatha laughed. Which made Grandma make one of her rare mistakes. She put out her hand to give my sister the merest pat. Agatha-Abigail-Alice leapt to her feet.
Agatha-Agamemnon-Alcibiades-Allegra-Alexandra-Allison withdrew swiftly to her room.
"I suspect," said Timothy, later, "because she is beginning to like Grandma."
"Tosh," said I.
"Where do you pick up words like Tosh?"
"Grandma read me some Dickens last night. 'Tosh.' 'Humbug.' 'Balderdash.' 'Blast.' 'Devil take you.' You're pretty smart for your age, Tim."
"Smart, heck. It's obvious, the more Agatha likes Grandma, the more she hates herself for liking her, the more afraid she gets of the whole mess, the more she hates Grandma in the end."
"Can one love someone so much you hate them?"
"Dumb. Of course."
"It is sticking your neck out, sure. I guess you hate people when they make you feel naked, I mean sort of on the spot or out in the open. That's the way to play the game, of course. I mean, you don't just love people you must love them with exclamation points."
"You're pretty smart, yourself, for someone so stupid," said Tim.
"Many thanks."
And I went to watch Grandma move slowly back into her battle of wits and stratagems with what's-her-name …
What dinners there were at our house!
Dinners, heck; what lunches, what breakfasts!
Always something new, yet, wisely, it looked or seemed old and familiar. We were never asked, for if you ask children what they want, they do not know, and if you tell what's to be delivered, they reject delivery. All parents know this. It is a quiet war that must be won each day. And Grandma knew how to win without looking triumphant.
"Here's Mystery Breakfast Number Nine," she would say, placing it down. "Perfectly dreadful, not worth bothering with, it made me want to throw up while I was cooking it!"
Even while wondering how a robot could be sick, we could hardly wait to shovel it down.
"Here's Abominable Lunch Number Seventy-seven," she announced. "Made from plastic food bags, parsley, and gum from under theatre seats. Brush your teeth after or you'll taste the poison all afternoon."
We fought each other for more.
Even Abigail-Agamemnon-Agatha drew near and circled round the table at such times, while Father put on the ten pounds he needed and pinkened out his cheeks.
When A. A. Agatha did not come to meals, they were left by her door with a skull and crossbones on a small flag stuck in a baked apple. One minute the tray was abandoned, the next minute gone.
Other times Abigail A. Agatha would bird through during dinner, snatch crumbs from her plate and bird off.
"Agatha!" Father would cry.
"No, wait," Grandma said, quietly. "She'll come, she'll sit. It's a matter of time."
"What's wrong with her?" I asked.
"Yeah, for cri-yi, she's nuts," said Timothy.
"No, she's afraid," said Grandma.
"Of you?" I said, blinking.
"Not of me so much as what I might do," she said.
"You wouldn't do anything to hurt her."
"No, but she thinks I might. We must wait for her to find that her fears have no foundation. If I fail, well, I will send myself to the showers and rust quietly."
There was a titter of laughter. Agatha was hiding in the hall.
Grandma finished serving everyone and then sat at the other side of the table facing Father and pretended to eat. I never found out, I never asked, I never wanted to know, what she did with the food. She was a sorcerer. It simply vanished.
And in the vanishing, Father made comment:
"This food. I've had it before. In a small French restaurant over near Les Deux Magots in Paris, twenty, oh, twenty-five years ago!" His eyes brimmed with tears, suddenly.
"How do you do it?" he asked, at last, putting down the cutlery, and looking across the table at this remarkable creature, this device, this what? woman?
Grandma took his regard, and ours, and held them simply in her now empty hands, as gifts, and just as gently replied:
"I am given things which I then give to you. I don't know that I give, but the giving goes on. You ask what I am? Why, a machine. But even in that answer we know, don't we, more than a machine. I am all the people who thought of me and planned me and built me and set me running. So I am people. I am all the things they wanted to be and perhaps could not be, so they built a great child, a wondrous toy to represent those things."
"Strange," said Father. "When I was growing up, there was a huge outcry at machines. Machines were bad, evil, they might dehumanize—"
"Some machines do. It's all in the way they are built. It's all in the way they are used. A bear trap is a simple machine that catches and holds and tears. A rifle is a machine that wounds and kills. Well, I am no bear trap. I am no rifle. I am a grandmother machine, which means more than a machine."
"How can you be more than what you seem?"
"No man is as big as his own idea. It follows, then, that any machine that embodies an idea is larger than the man that made it. And what's so wrong with that?"
"I got lost back there about a mile," said Timothy. "Come again?"
"Oh, dear," said Grandma. "How I do hate philosophical discussions and excursions into esthetics. Let me put it this way. Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer. Only at noon can a man fit his own shoes, his own best suit, for a few brief minutes. But now we're in a new age where we can think up a Big Idea and run it around in a machine. That makes the machine-more than a machine, doesn't it?"
"So far so good," said Tim. "I guess."
"Well, isn't a motion-picture camera and projector more than a machine? It's a thing that dreams, isn't it? Sometimes fine happy dreams, sometimes nightmares. But to call it a machine and dismiss it is ridiculous."
"I see that!" said Tim, and laughed at seeing.
"You must have been invented then," said Father, "by someone who loved machines and hated people who said all machines were bad or evil."
"Exactly," said Grandma. "Guido Fantoccini, that was his real name, grew up among machines. And he couldn't stand the clichés any more."
"Clichés?"
"Those lies, yes, that people tell and pretend they are truths absolute. Man will never fly. That was a cliché truth for a thousand thousand years which turned out to be a lie only a few years ago. The earth is flat, you'll fall off the rim, dragons will dine on you; the great lie told as fact, and Columbus plowed it under. Well, now, how many times have you heard how inhuman machines are, in your life? How many bright fine people have you heard spouting the same tired truths which are in reality lies; all machines destroy, all machines are cold, thoughtless, awful.
"There's a seed of truth there. But only a seed. Guido Fantoccini knew that. And knowing it, like most men of his kind, made him mad. And he could have stayed mad and gone mad forever, but instead did what he had to do; he began to invent machines to give the lie to the ancient lying truth.
"He knew that most machines are amoral, neither bad nor good. But by the way you built and shaped them you in turn shaped men, women, and children to be bad or good. A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that's how it turned out."
Grandma circled the table, refilling our glasses with clear cold mineral spring water from the tappet in her left forefinger. "Meanwhile, you must use other compensating machines. Machines that throw shadows on the earth that beckon you to run out and fit that wondrous casting-forth. Machines that trim your soul in silhouette like a vast pair of beautiful shears, snipping away the rude brambles, the dire horns and hooves to leave a finer profile. And for that you need examples."
"Examples?" I asked.
"Other people who behave well, and you imitate them. And if you act well enough long enough all the hair drops off and you're no longer a wicked ape."
Grandma sat again.
"So, for thousands of years, you humans have needed kings, priests, philosophers, fine examples to look up to and say, 'They are good, I wish I could be like them. They set the grand good style.' But, being human, the finest priests, the tenderest philosophers make mistakes, fall from grace, and mankind is disillusioned and adopts indifferent skepticism or, worse, motionless cynicism and the good world grinds to a halt while evil moves on with huge strides."
"And you, why, you never make mistakes, you're perfect, you're better than anyone ever!"
It was a voice from the hall between kitchen and dining room where Agatha, we all knew, stood against the wall listening and now burst forth.
Grandma didn't even turn in the direction of the voice, but went on calmly addressing her remarks to the family at the table.
"Not perfect, no, for what is perfection? But this I do know: being mechanical, I cannot sin, cannot be bribed, cannot be greedy or jealous or mean or small. I do not relish power for power's sake. Speed does not pull me to madness. Sex does not run me rampant through the world. I have time and more than time to collect the information I need around and about an ideal to keep it clean and whole and intact. Name the value you wish, tell me the Ideal you want and I can see and collect and remember the good that: will benefit you all. Tell me how you would like to be: kind, loving, considerate, well-balanced, humane … and let me run ahead on the path to explore those ways to be just that. In the darkness ahead, turn me as a lamp in all directions. I can guide your feet."
"So," said Father, putting the napkin to his mouth, "on the days when all of us are busy making lies—"
"I'll tell the truth."
"On the days when we hate—"
"I'll go on giving love, which means attention, which means knowing all about you, all, all, all about you, and you knowing that I know but that most of it I will never tell to anyone, it will stay a warm secret between us, so you will never fear my complete knowledge."
And here Grandma was busy clearing the table, circling, taking the plates, studying each face as she passed, touching Timothy's cheek, my shoulder with her free hand flowing along, her voice a quiet river of certainty bedded in our needful house and lives.
"But," said Father, stopping her, looking her right in the face. He gathered his breath. His face shadowed. At last he let it out. "All this talk of love and attention and stuff. Good God, woman, you, you're not in there!"
He gestured to her head, her face, her eyes, the hidden sensory cells behind the eyes, the miniaturized storage vaults and minimal keeps.
"You're not in there!"
Grandmother waited one, two, three silent beats.
Then she replied: "No. But you are. You and Thomas and Timothy and Agatha.
"Everything you ever say, everything you ever do, I'll keep, put away, treasure. I shall be all the things a family forgets it is, but senses, half-remembers. Better than the old family albums you used to leaf through, saying here's this winter, there's that spring, I shall recall what you forget. And though the debate may run another hundred thousand years: What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream …
"I am family memory and, one day perhaps, racial memory, too, but in the round, and at your call. I do not know myself. I can neither touch nor taste nor feel on any level. Yet I exist. And my existence means the heightening of your chance to touch and taste and feel. Isn't love in there somewhere in such an exchange? Well … "
She went on around the table, clearing away, sorting and stacking, neither grossly humble nor arthritic with pride.
"What do I know?
"This, above all: the trouble with most families with many children is someone gets lost. There isn't time, it seems, for everyone. Well, I will give equally to all of you. I will share out my knowledge and attention with everyone. I wish to be a great warm pie fresh from the oven, with equal shares to be taken by all. No one will starve. Look! someone cries, and I'll look. Listen! someone cries, and I hear. Run with me on the river path! someone says, and I run. And at dusk I am not tired, nor irritable, so I do not scold out of some tired irritability. My eye stays clear, my voice strong, my hand firm, my attention constant."
"But," said Father, his voice fading, half convinced, but pi:tting up a last faint argument, "you're not there. As for love—"
"If paying attention is love, I am love.
"If knowing is love, I am love.
"If helping you not to fall into error and to be good is love, I am love.
"And again, to repeat, there are four of you. Each, in a way never possible before in history, will get my complete attention. No matter if you all speak at once, I can channel and hear this one and that arid the other, clearly. No one will go hungry. I will, if you please, and accept the strange word, 'love' you all."
"I don't accept!" said Agatha.
And even Grandma turned now to see her standing in the door.
"I won't give you permission, you can't, you mustn't!" said Agatha. "I won't let you! It's lies! You lie. No one loves me. She said she did, but she lied. She said but lied!"
"Agatha!" cried Father, standing up.
"She?" said Grandma. "Who?"
"Mother!" came the shriek. "Said: Love you! Lies! Love you! Lies! And you're like her! You lie. But you're empty, anyway, and so that's a double lie! I hate her. Now, I hate you!"
Agatha spun about and leapt down the hall.
The front door slammed wide.
Father was in motion, but Grandma touched his arm.
"Let me."
And she walked and then moved swiftly, gliding down the hall and then suddenly, easily, running, yes, running very fast, out the door.
It was a champion sprint by the time we all reached the lawn, the sidewalk, yelling.
Blind, Agatha made the curb, wheeling about, seeing us close, all of us yelling, Grandma way ahead, shouting, too, and Agatha off the curb and out in the street, halfway to the middle, then the middle and suddenly a car, which no one saw, erupting its brakes, its horn shrieking and Agatha flailing about to see and Grandma there with her and hurling her aside and down as the car with fantastic energy and verve selected her from our midst, struck our wonderful electric Guido Fantoccini-produced dream even while she paced upon the air and, hands up to ward off, almost in mild protest, still trying to decide what to say to this bestial machine, over and over she spun and down and away even as the car jolted to a halt and I saw Agatha safe beyond and Grandma, it seemed, still coming down or down and sliding fifty yards away to strike and ricochet and lie strewn and all of us frozen in a line suddenly in the midst of the street with one scream pulled out of all our throats at the same raw instant.
Then silence and just Agatha lying on the asphalt, intact, getting ready to sob.
And still we did not move, frozen on the sill of death, afraid to venture in any direction, afraid to go see what lay beyond the car and Agatha and so we began to wail and, I guess, pray to ourselves as Father stood amongst us: Oh, no, no, we mourned, oh no, God, no, no …
Agatha lifted her already grief-stricken face and it was the face of someone who has predicted dooms and lived to see and now did not want to see or live any more. As we watched, she turned her gaze to the tossed woman's body and tears fell from her eyes. She shut them and covered them and lay back down forever to weep …
I took a step and then another step and then five quick steps and by the time I reached my sister her head was buried deep and her sobs came up out of a place so far down in her I was afraid I could never find her again, she would never come out, no matter how I pried or pleaded or promised or threatened or just plain said. And what little we could hear from Agatha buried there in her own misery, she said over and over again, lamenting, wounded, certain of the old threat known and named and now here forever. " … like I said … told you … lies … lies … liars … all lies … like the other … other … just like … just … just like the other … other … other … !"
I was down on my knees holding onto her with both hands, trying to put her back together even though she wasn't broken any way you could see but just feel, because I knew it was no use going on to Grandma, no use at all, so I just touched Agatha and gentled her and wept while Father came up and stood over and knelt down with me and it was like a prayer meeting in the middle of the street and lucky no more cars coming, and I said, choking, "Other what, Ag, other what?"
Agatha exploded two words.
"Other dead!"
"You mean Mom?"
"O Mom," she wailed, shivering, lying down, cuddling up like a baby. "O Mom, dead, O Mom and now Grandma dead, she promised always, always, to love, to love, promised to be different, promised, promised and now look, look … I hate her, I hate Mom, I hate her, I hate them!!"
"Of course," said a voice. "It's only natural. How foolish of me not to have known, not to have seen."
And the voice was so familiar we were all stricken.
We all jerked.
Agatha squinched her eyes, flicked them wide, blinked, and jerked half up, staring.
"How silly of me," said Grandma, standing there at the edge of our circle, our prayer, our wake.
"Grandma!" we all said.
And she stood there, taller by far than any of us in this moment of kneeling and holding and crying out. We could only stare up at her in disbelief.
"You're dead!" cried Agatha. "The car—"
"Hit me," said Grandma, quietly. "Yes. And threw me in the air and tumbled me over and for a few moments there was a severe concussion of circuitries. I might have feared a disconnection, if fear is the word. But then I sat up and gave myself a shake and the few molecules of paint, jarred loose on one printed path or another, magnetized back in position and resilient creature that I am, unbreakable thing that I am, here I am."
"I thought you were—" said Agatha.
"And only natural," said Grandma. "I mean, anyone else, hit like that, tossed like that. But, O my dear Agatha, not me. And now I see why you were afraid and never trusted me. You didn't know. And I had not as yet proved my singular ability to survive. How dumb of me not to have thought to show you. Just a second." Somewhere in her head, her body, her being, she fitted together some invisible tapes, some old information made new by interblending. She nodded. "Yes. There. A book of child-raising, laughed at by some few people years back when the woman who wrote the book said, as final advice to parents: 'Whatever you do, don't die. Your children will never forgive you.' "
"Forgive," some one of us whispered.
"For how can children understand when you just up and go away and never come back again with no excuse, no apologies, no sorry note, nothing."
"They can't," I said.
"So," said Grandma, kneeling down with us beside Agatha who sat up now, new tears brimming her eyes, but a different kind of tears, not tears that drowned, but tears that washed clean. "So your mother ran away to death. And after that, how could you trust anyone? If everyone left, vanished finally, who was there to trust? So when I came, half wise, half ignorant, I should have known, I did not know, why you would not accept me. For, very simply and honestly, you feared I might not stay, that I lied, that I was vulnerable, too. And two leavetakings, two deaths, were one too many in a single year. But now, do you see, Abigail?"
"Agatha," said Agatha, without knowing she corrected.
"Do you understand, I shall always, always be here?"
"Oh, yes," cried Agatha, and broke down into a solid weeping in which we all joined, huddled together and cars drew up and stopped to see just how many people were hurt and how many people were getting well right there.
End of story.
Well, not quite the end.
We lived happily ever after.
Or rather we lived together, Grandma, Agatha-Agamemnon-Abigail, Timothy, and I, Tom, and Father, and Grandma calling us to frolic in great fountains of Latin and Spanish and French, in great seaborne gouts of poetry like Moby Dick sprinkling the deeps with his Versailles jet somehow lost in calms and found in storms; Grandma a constant, a clock, a pendulum, a face to tell all time by at noon, or in the middle of sick nights when, raved with fever, we saw her forever by our beds, never gone, never away, always waiting, always speaking kind words, her cool hand icing our hot brows, the tappet of her uplifted forefinger unsprung to let a twine of cold mountain water touch our flannel tongues. Ten thousand dawns she cut our wildflower lawn, ten thousand nights she wandered, remembering the dust molecules that fell in the still hours before dawn, or sat whispering some lesson she felt needed teaching to our ears while we slept snug.
Until at last, one by one, it was time for us to go away to school, and when at last the youngest, Agatha, was all packed, why Grandma packed, too.
On the last day of summer that last year, we found Grandma down in the front room with various packets and suitcases, knitting, waiting, and though she had often spoken of it, now that the time came we were shocked and surprised.
"Grandma!" we all said. "What are you doing?"
"Why going off to college, in a way, just like you," she said. "Back to Guido Fantoccini's, to the Family."
"The Family?"
"Of Pinocchios, that's what he called us for a joke, at first. The Pinocchios and himself Gepetto. And then later gave us his own name: the Fantoccini. Anyway, you have been my family here. Now I go back to my even larger family there, my brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, all robots who—"
"Who do what?" asked Agatha.
"It all depends," said Grandma. "Some stay, some linger. Others go to be drawn and quartered, you might say, their parts distributed to other machines who have need of repairs. They'll weigh and find me wanting or not wanting. It may be I'll be just the one they need tomorrow and off I'll go to raise another batch of children and beat another batch of fudge."
"Oh, they mustn't draw and quarter you!" cried Agatha.
"No!" I cried, with Timothy.
"My allowance," said Agatha, "I'll pay anything … ?"
Grandma stopped rocking and looked at the needles and the pattern of bright yarn. "Well, I wouldn't have said, but now you ask and I'll tell. For a very small fee, there's a room, the room of the Family, a large dim parlor, all quiet and nicely decorated, where as many as thirty or forty of the Electric Women sit and rock and talk, each in her turn. I have not been there. I am, after all, freshly born, comparatively new. For a small fee, very small, each month and year, that's where I'll be, with all the others like me, listening to what they've learned of the world and, in my turn, telling how it was with Tom and Tim and Agatha and how fine and happy we were. And I'll tell all I learned from you."
"But … you taught us!"
"Do you really think that?" she said. "No, it was turnabout, roundabout, learning both ways. And it's all in here, everything you flew into tears about or laughed over, why, I have it all. And I'll tell it to the others just as they tell their boys and girls and life to me. We'll sit there, growing wiser and calmer and better every year and every year, ten, twenty, thirty years. The Family knowledge will double, quadruple, the wisdom will not be lost. And we'll be waiting there in that sitting room, should you ever need us for your own children in time of illness, or, God prevent, deprivation or death. There we'll be, growing old but not old, getting closer to the time, perhaps, someday, when we live up to our first strange joking name."
"The Pinocchios?" asked Tim.
Grandma nodded.
I knew what she meant. The day when, as in the old tale, Pinocchio had grown so worthy arid so fine that the gift of life had been given him. So I saw them, in future years, the entire family of Fantoccini, the Pinocchios, trading and re-trading, murmuring and whispering their knowledge in the great parlors of philosophy, waiting for the day. The day that could never come.
Grandma must have read that thought in our eyes.
"We'll see," she said. "Let's just wait and see."
"Oh, Grandma," cried Agatha and she was weeping as she had wept many years before. "You don't have to wait. You're alive. You've always been alive to us!"
And she caught hold of the old woman and we all caught hold for a long moment and then ran off up in the sky to faraway schools and years and her last words to us before we let the helicopter swarm us away into autumn were these:
"When you are very old and gone childish-small again, with childish ways and childish yens and, in need of feeding, make a wish for the old teacher nurse, the dumb yet wise companion, send for me. I will come back. We shall inhabit the nursery again, never fear."
"Oh, we shall never be old!" we cried. "That will never happen!"
"Never! Never!"
And we were gone.
And the years are flown.
And we are old now, Tim and Agatha and I.
Our children are grown and gone, our wives and husbands vanished from the earth and now, by Dickensian coincidence, accept it as you will or not accept, back in the old house, we three.
I lie here in the bedroom which was my childish place seventy, O seventy, believe it, seventy years ago. Beneath this wallpaper is another layer and yet another-times-three to the old wallpaper covered over when I was nine. The wallpaper is peeling. I see peeking from beneath, old elephants, familiar tigers, fine and amiable zebras, irascible crocodiles. I have sent for the paperers to carefully remove all but that last layer. The old animals will live again on the walls, revealed.
And we have sent for someone else.
The three of us have called:
Grandma! You said you'd come back when we had need.
We are surprised by age, by time. We are old. We need.
And in three rooms of a summer house very late in time, three old children rise up, crying out in their heads: We loved you! We love you!
There! There! in the sky, we think, waking at morn. Is that the delivery machine? Does it settle to die lawn?
There! There on the grass by the front porch. Does the mummy case arrive?
Are our names inked on ribbons wrapped about the lovely form beneath the golden mask?!
And the kept gold key, forever hung on Agatha's breast, warmed and waiting? Oh God, will it, after all these years, will it wind, will it set in motion, will it, dearly, fit?!

TOMBLING DAY

It was the Tombling day, and all the people had walked up the summer road, including Grandma Loblilly, and they stood now in the green day and the high sky country of Missouri, and there was a smell of the seasons changing and the grass breaking out in flowers.
"Here we are," said Grandma Loblilly, over her cane, and she gave them all a flashing look of her yellow-brown eyes and spat into the dust.
The graveyard lay on the side of a quiet hill. It was a place of sunken mounds and wooden markers; bees hummed all about in quietudes of sound and butterflies withered and blossomed on the clear blue air. The tall sunburnt men and ginghamed women stood a long silent time looking in at their deep and buried relatives.
"Well, let's get to work!" said Grandma, and she hobbled across the moist grass, sticking it rapidly, here and there, with her cane.
The others brought the spades and special crates, with daisies and lilacs tied brightly to them. The government was cutting a road through here in August and since this graveyard had gone unused in fifty years the relatives had agreed to untuck all the old bones and pat them snug somewhere else.
Grandma Loblilly got right down on her knees and trembled a spade in her hand. The others were busy at their own places.
"Grandma," said Joseph Pikes, making a big shadow on her working. "Grandma, you shouldn't be workin' on this place. This's William Simmons's grave, Grandma."
At the sound of his voice, everyone stopped working, and listened, and there was just the sound of butterflies on the cool afternoon air.
Grandma looked up at Pikes. "You think I don't know it's his place? I ain't seen William Simmons in sixty years, but I intend to visit him today." She patted out trowel after trowel of rich soil and she grew quiet and introspective and said things to the day and those who might listen. "Sixty years ago, and him a fine man, only twenty-three. And me, I was twenty and all golden about the head and all milk in my arms and neck and persimmon in my cheeks. Sixty years and a planned marriage and then a sickness and him dying away. And me alone, and I remember how the earth mound over him sank in the rains—"
Everybody stared at Grandma. "But still, Grandma—" said Joseph Pikes. The grave was shallow. She soon reached the long iron box.
"Gimme a hand!" she cried.
Nine men helped lift the iron box out of the earth,
Grandma poking at them with her cane. "Careful!" she shouted. "Easy!" she cried. "Now." They set it on the ground. "Now," she said, "if you be so kindly, you gentlemen might fetch Mr. Simmons on up to my house for a spell."
"We're takin' him on to the new cemetery," said Joseph Pikes.
Grandma fixed him with her needle eye. "You just trot that box right up to my house. Much obliged."
The men watched her dwindle down the road. They looked at the box, looked at each other, and then spat on their hands.
Five minutes later the men squeezed the iron coffin through the front door of Grandma's little white house and set the box down by the potbelly stove.
She gave them a drink all around. "Now, let's lift the lid," she said. "It ain't every day you see old friends."
The men did not move.
"Well, if you won't, I will." She thrust at the lid with her cane, again and again, breaking away the earth crust. Spiders went touching over the floor. There was a rich smell, like plowed spring earth. Now the men fingered the lid. Grandma stood back. "Up!" she said. She gestured her cane, like an ancient goddess. And up in the air went the lid. The men set it on the floor and turned.
There was a sound like wind sighing in October, from all their mouths.
There lay William Simmons as the dust filtered bright and golden through the air. There he slept, a little smile on his lips, hands folded, all dressed up and no place in all the world to go.
Grandma Loblilly gave a low moaning cry.
"He's all there!"
There he was, indeed. Intact as a beetle in his shell, his skin all fine and white, his small eyelids over his pretty eyes like flower petals put there, his lips still with color to them, his hair combed neat, his tie tied, his fingernails pared clean. All in all, he was as complete as the day they shoveled the earth upon his silent case.
Grandma stood tightening her eyes, her hands up to catch the breath that moved from her mouth. She couldn't see. "Where's my specs?" she cried. People searched. "Can't you find 'em?" she shouted. She squinted at the body. "Never mind," she said, getting close. The room settled. She sighed and quavered and cooed over the open box.
"He's kept," said one of the women. "He ain't crumbled."
"Things like that," said Joseph Pikes, "don't happen."
"It happened." said the woman.
"Sixty years underground. Stands to reason no man lasts that long."
The sunlight was late by each window, the last butterflies were settling amongst flowers to look like nothing more than other flowers.
Grandma Loblilly put out her wrinkly hand, trembling. "The earth kept him. The way the air is. That was good dry soil for keeping."
"He's young," wailed one of the women, quietly. "So young."
"Yes," said Grandma Loblilly, looking at him. "Him, lying there, twenty-three years old. And me, standing here, pushing eighty!" She shut her eyes.
"Now, Grandma," Joseph Pikes touched her shoulder.
"Yes, him lyin' there, all twenty-three and fine and party, and me—" She squeezed her eyes tight. "Me bending over him, never young agin, myself, only old and spindly, never to have a chance at being young agin. Oh, Lord! Death keeps people young. Look how kind death's been to him." she ran her hands over her body and face slowly, turning to the others. "Death's nicer than life. Why didn' I die then too? Then we'd both be young now, together. Me in my box, in my white wedding gown all lace, and my eyes closed down, all shy with death. And my hands making a prayer on my bosom."
"Grandma, don't carry on."
"I got a right to carry on! Why didn't 1 die, too? Then, when he came back, like he came today, to see me, I wouldn't: be like this!"
Her hands went wildly to feel her lined face, to twist the loose skin, to fumble the empty mouth, to yank the gray hair and look at it with appalled eyes.
"What a fine coming-back he's had!" She showed her skinny arms. "Think that a man of twenty-three years will want the likes of a seventy-nine-year-old woman with sump-rot in her veins? I been cheated! Death kept him young forever. Look at me; did Life do so much?"
"They're compensations," said Joseph Pikes. "He ain't young, Grandma. He's long over eighty years."
"You're a fool, Joseph Pikes. He's fine as a stone, not touched by a thousand rains. And he's come back to see me and he'll be picking one of the younger girls now. What would he want with an old woman?"
"He's in no way to fetch nuthin' offa nobody," said Joseph Pikes.
Grandma pushed him back. "Get out now, all of you! Ain't your box, ain't your lid, and it ain't your almost-husband! You leave the box here, leastwise tonight, and tomorrow you dig a new burying place."
"Awright, Grandma; he was your beau. I'll come early tomorra. Don't you cry, now."
"I'll do what my eyes most need to do."
She stood stiff in the middle of the room until the last of them were out the door. After awhile she got a candle and lit it and she noticed someone standing on the hill outside. It was Joseph Pikes. He'd be there the rest of the night, she reckoned, and she did not shout for him to go away. She did not look out the window again, but she knew he was there, and so was much better rested in the following hours.
She went to the coffin and looked down at William Simmons.
She gazed fully upon him. Seeing his hands was like seeing actions. She saw how they had been with reins of a horse in them, moving up and down. She remembered how the lips of him had clucked as the carriage had glided along with an even pacing of the horse through the meadowlands, the moonlight shadows all around. She knew how it was when those hands held to you.
She touched his suit. "That's not the same suit he was buried in!" she cried suddenly. And yet she knew it was the same. Sixty years had changed not the suit but the linings of her mind.
Seized with a quick fear, she hunted a long time until she found her spectacles and put them on.
"Why, that's not William Simmons!" she shouted.
But she knew this also was untrue. It was William Simmons. "His chin didn't go back that far!" she cried softly, logically. "Or did it?" And his hair, "It was a wonderful sorrel color, I remember! This hair here's just plain brown. And his nose, I don't recall it being that tippy!"
She stood over this strange man and, gradually, as she watched, she knew that this indeed was William Simmons. She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory—you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.
There was a certain sense of loss and bewilderment in her. She wished she had never opened the box. Or, leastwise, had the sense to leave her glasses off. She had not seen him clearly at first; just enough so she filled in the rough spots with her mind. Now, with her glasses on …
She glanced again and again at his face. It became slowly familiar. That memory of him that she had torn apart and put together for sixty years faded to be replaced by the man she had really known. And he was fine to look upon. The sense of having lost something vanished. He was the same man, no more, no less. This was always the way when you didn't see people for years and they came back to say howdy-do. For a spell you felt so very uneasy with them. But then, at last you relaxed.
"Yes, that's you," she laughed. "I see you peeking out from behind all the strangeness. I see you all glinty and sly here and there and about."
She began to cry again. If only she could lie to herself, if only she could say, "Look at him, he don't look the same, he's not the same man I took a fetching on!" then she could feel better. But all the little inside-people sitting around in her head would rock back in their tiny rockers and cackle and say, "You ain't foolin' us none, Grandma."
Yes, how easy to deny it was him. And feel better. But she didn't deny it. She felt the great depressing sadness because here he was, young as creek water, and here she was, old as the sea.
"William Simmons!" she cried. "Don't look at me! I know you still love me, so I'll primp myself up!"
She stirred the stove-fire, quickly put irons on to heat, used irons on her hair till it was all gray curls. Baking powder whitened her cheeks! She bit a cherry to color her lips, pinched her cheeks to bring a flush. From a trunk she yanked old materials until she found a faded blue velvet dress which she put on.
She stared wildly in the mirror at herself.
"No, no." She groaned and shut her eyes. "There's nothing I can do to make me younger'n you, William Simmons! Even if I died now it wouldn't cure me of this old thing come on me, this disease—"
She had a violent wish to run forever in the woods, fall in a leaf pile and moulder down into smoking ruin with them. She ran across the room, intending never to come back. But as she yanked the door wide a cold wind exploded over her from outside and she heard a sound that made her hesitate.
The wind rushed about: the room, yanked at the coffin and pushed inside it.
William Simmons seemed to stir in his box.
Grandma slammed the door.
She moved slowly back to squint at him.
He was ten years older.
There were wrinkles and lines on his hands and face.
"William Simmons!"
During the next hour, William Simmons's face tolled away the years. His cheeks went in on themselves, like clenching a fist, like withering an apple in a bin. His flesh was made of carved pure white snow, and the cabin heat melted it. It got a charred look. The air made the eyes and mouth pucker. Then, as if struck a hammer blow, the face shattered into a million wrinkles. The body squirmed in an agony of time. It was forty, then fifty, then sixty years old! It was seventy, eighty, one hundred years! Burning, burning away! There were small whispers and leaf-crackles from its face and its age-burning hands, one hundred ten, one hundred twenty years, lined upon etched, greaved, line!
Grandma Loblilly stood there all the cold night, aching her bird bones, watching, cold, over the changing man. She was a witness to all improbabilities. She felt something finally let loose of her heart. She did not feel sad any more. The weight lifted away from her.
She went peacefully to sleep, standing against a chair.
Sunlight came yellow through the woodland, birds and ants and creek waters were moving, each as quiet as the other, going somewhere.
It was morning.
Grandma woke and looked down upon William Simmons.
"Ah," said Grandma, looking and seeing.
Her very breath stirred and stirred his bones until they flaked, like a chrysalis, like a kind of candy all whittling away, burning with an invisible fire. The bones flaked and flew, light as pieces of dust on the sunlight. Each time she shouted the bones split asunder, there was a dry flaking rustle from the box.
If there was a wind and she opened the door, he'd be blown away on it like so many crackly leaves!
She bent for a long time, looking at the box. Then she gave a knowing cry, a sound of discovery arid moved back, putting her hands first to her face and then to her spindly breasts and then traveling all up and down her arms and legs and fumbling at her empty mouth,
Her shout brought Joseph Pikes running.
He pulled up at the door only in time to see Grandma Loblilly dancing and jumping around on her yellow, high-peg shoes in a wild gyration.
She clapped her hands, laughed, flung her skirts, ran in a circle, and did a little waltz with herself, tears on her face. And to the sunlight and the flashing image of herself in the wall mirror she cried:
"I'm young! I'm eighty, but I'm younger'n him!"
She skipped, she hopped, and she curtsied.
"There are compensations, Joseph Pikes; you was right!" she chortled. "I'm younger'n all the dead ones in the whole world!"
And she waltzed so violently the whirl of her dress pulled at the box and whispers of chrysalis leapt on the air to hang golden and powdery amidst her shouts.
"Whee-deee!" she cried. "Whee-heee!"

ANY FRIEND OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY'S IS A FRIEND OF MINE

Imagine a summer that would never end.
Nineteen twenty-nine.
Imagine a boy who would never grow up.
Me.
Imagine a barber who was never young.
Mr. Wyneski.
Imagine a dog that would live forever.
Mine.
Imagine a small town, the kind that isn't lived in any more.
Ready? Begin …
Green Town, Illinois … Late June.
Dog barking outside a one-chair barbershop.
Inside, Mr. Wyneski, circling his victim, a customer snoozing in the steambath drowse of noon.
Inside, me, Ralph Spaulding, a boy of some twelve years, standing still as an iron Civil War statue, listening to the hot wind, feeling all that hot summer dust out there, a bakery world where nobody could be bad or good, boys just lay gummed to dogs, dogs used boys for pillows under trees that lazed with leaves which whispered in despair: Nothing Will Ever Happen Again.
The only motion anywhere was the cool water dripping from the huge coffin-sized ice block in the hardware store window.
The only cool person in miles was Miss Frostbite, the traveling magician's assistant, tucked into that lady-shaped long cavity hollowed in the ice block displayed for three days now without, they said, her breathing, eating, or talking. That last, I thought, must have been terrible hard on a woman.
Nothing moved in the street but the barbershop striped pole which turned slowly to show its red, white, and then red again, slid up out of nowhere to vanish nowhere, a motion between two mysteries.
" … hey … "
I pricked my ears.
" … something's coming … "
"Only the noon train, Ralph." Mr. Wyneski snicked his jackdaw scissors, peering in his customer's ear. "Only the train that comes at noon."
"No … " I gasped, eyes shut, leaning. "Something's really coming … "
I heard the far whistle wail, lonesome, sad, enough to pull your soul out of your body.
"You feel it, don't you, Dog?"
Dog barked.
Mr. Wyneski sniffed. "What can a dog feel?"
"Big things. Important things. Circumstantial coincidences. Collisions you can't escape. Dog says. I say. We say."
"That makes four of you. Some team." Mr. Wyneski turned from the summer-dead man in the white porcelain chair. "Now, Ralph, my problem is hair. Sweep."
I swept a ton of hair. "Gosh, you'd think this stuff just grew up out of the floor."
Mr. Wyneski watched my broom. "Right! I didn't cut all that. Darn stuff just grows, I swear, lying there. Leave it a week, come back, and you need hip boots to trod a path." He pointed with his scissors. "Look. You ever see so many shades, hues, and tints of forelocks and chin fuzz? There's Mr. Tompkins's receding hairline. There's Charlie Smith's topknot. And here, here's all that's left of Mr. Harry Joe Flynn."
I stared at Mr. Wyneski as if he had just read from Revelations. "Gosh, Mr. Wyneski, I guess you know everything in the world!"
"Just about."
"I—I'm going to grow up and be—a barber!"
Mr. Wyneski, to hide his pleasure, got busy.
"Then watch this hedgehog, Ralph, peel an eye. Elbows thus, wrists so! Make the scissors talk! Customers appreciate. Sound twice as busy as you are. Snickety-snick, boy, snickety-snick. Learned this from the French! Oh, yes, the French! They do prowl about the chair light on their toes, and the sharp scissors whispering and nibbling, Ralph, nibbling and whispering, you hear!"
"Boy!" I said, at his elbow, right in with the whispers and nibbles, then stopped: for the wind blew a wail way off in summer country, so sad, so strange.
"There it is again. The train. And something on the train … "
"Noon train don't stop here."
"But I got this feeling—"
"The hair's going to grab me, Ralph … "
I swept hair.
After a long while I said, "I'm thinking of changing my name."
Mr. Wyneski sighed. The summer-dead customer stayed dead.
"What's wrong with you today, boy?"
"It's not me. It's the name is out of hand. Just listen. Ralph." I grred it. "Rrrralph."
"Ain't exactly harp music … "
"Sounds like a mad dog." I caught myself.
"No offense, Dog."
Mr. Wyneski glanced down. "He seems pretty calm about the whole subject."
"Ralph's dumb. Gonna change my name by tonight."
Mr. Wyneski mused. "Julius for Caesar? Alexander for the Great?"
"Don't care what. Help me, huh, Mr. Wyneski? Find me a name … "
Dog sat up. I dropped the broom.
For way down in the hot cinder railroad yards a train furnaced itself in, all pomp, all fire-blast shout and tidal churn, summer in its iron belly bigger than the summer outside.
"Here it comes!"
"There it goes," said Mr. Wyneski.
"No, there it doesn't go!"
It was Mr. Wynesld's turn to almost drop his scissors.
"Goshen. Darn noon train's putting on the brakes!"
We heard the train stop.
"How many people getting off the train, Dog?"
Dog barked once.
Mr. Wyneski shifted uneasily. "U.S. Mail bags—"
"No … a man! Walking light. Not much luggage. Heading for our house. A new boarder at Grandma's, I bet. And he'll take the empty room right next to you, Mr. Wyneski! Right, Dog?"
Dog barked.
"That dog talks too much," said Mr. Wyneski.
"I just gotta go see, Mr. Wyneski. Please?"
The far footsteps faded in the hot and silent streets.
Mr. Wyneski shivered.
"A goose just stepped on my grave."
Then he added, almost sadly:
"Get along, Ralph."
"Name ain't Ralph."
"Whatchamacallit … run see … come tell the worst."
"Oh, thanks, Mr. Wyneski, thanks!"
I ran. Dog ran. Up a street, along an alley, around back, we ducked in the ferns by my grandma's house. "Down, boy," I whispered. "Here the Big Event comes—whatever it is!"
And down the street and up the walk and up the steps at a brisk jaunt came this man who swung a cane and carried a carpetbag and had long brown-gray hair and silken mustaches and a goatee, politeness all about him like a flock of birds.
On the porch near the old rusty chain swing, among the potted geraniums, he surveyed Green Town.
Far away, maybe, he heard the insect hum from the barbershop, where Mr. Wyneski, who would soon be his enemy, told fortunes by the lumpy heads under his hands as he buzzed the electric clippers. Far away, maybe, he could hear the empty library where the golden dust slid down the raw sunlight and way in back someone scratched and tapped and scratched forever with pen and ink, a quiet woman like a great lonely mouse burrowed away. And she was to be part of this new man's life, too, but right now …
The stranger removed his tall moss-green hat, mopped his brow, and not looking at anything but the hot blind sky said:
"Hello, boy. Hello, dog."
Dog and I rose up among the ferns.
"Heck. How'd you know where we were hiding?"
The stranger peered into his hat for the answer. "In another incarnation, I was a boy. Time before that, if memory serves, I was a more than a usually happy dog. But … !" His cane rapped the cardboard sign board and room thumbtacked on the porch rail. "Does the sign say true, hoy?"
"Best rooms on the block."
"Beds?"
"Mattresses so deep you sink down and drown the third time, happy."
"Boarders at table?"
"Talk just enough, not too much."
"Food?"
"Hot biscuits every morning, peach pie noon, shortcake every supper!"
The stranger inhaled, exhaled those savors.
"I'll sign my soul away!"
"I beg your pardon?!" Grandma was suddenly at the screen door, scowling out.
"A manner of speaking, ma'am." The stranger turned. "Not meant to sound un-Christian."
And he was inside, him talking, Grandma talking, him writing and flourishing the pen on the registry book, and me and Dog inside, breathless, watching, spelling:
"C.H."
"Read upside down, do you, boy?" said the stranger, merrily, giving pause with the inky pen.
"Yes, sir!"
On he wrote. On I spelled:
"A.R.L.E.S. Charles!"
"Right."
Grandma peered at the calligraphy. "Oh, what a fine hand."
"Thank you, ma'am." On the pen scurried. And on I chanted. "D.I.C.K.E.N.S."
I faltered and stopped. The pen stopped. The stranger tilted his head and closed one eye, watchful of me.
"Yes?" He dared me, "What—what?"
"Dickens! "I cried.
"Good!"
"Charles Dickens, Grandma!"
"I can read, Ralph. A nice name … "
"Nice?" I said, agape. "It's great! But … I thought you were—"
"Dead?" The stranger laughed. "No. Alive, in fine fettle, and glad to meet a recognizer, fan, and fellow reader here!"
And we were up the stairs, Grandma bringing fresh towels and pillowcases and me carrying the carpetbag, gasping, and us meeting Grandpa, a great ship of a man, sailing down the other way.
"Grandpa," I said, watching his face for shock. "I want you to meet … Mr. Charles Dickens!"
Grandpa stopped for a long breath, looked at the new boarder from top to bottom, then reached out, took hold of the man's hand, shook it firmly, and said:
"Any friend of Nicholas Nickleby's is a friend of mine!"
Mr. Dickens fell back from the effusion, recovered, bowed, said, "Thank you, sir," and went on up the stairs, while Grandpa winked, pinched my cheek, and left me standing there, stunned.
In the tower cupola room, with windows bright, open, and running with cool creeks of wind in all directions, Mr. Dickens drew off his horse-carriage coat and nodded at the carpetbag.
"Anywhere will do, Pip. Oh, you don't mind I call you Pip, eh?"
"Pip?!" My cheeks burned, my face glowed with astonishing happiness. "Oh, boy. Oh, no, sir. Pip's finer—"
Grandma cut between us. "Here are your clean linens, Mr ___?"
"Dickens, ma'am." Our boarder patted his pockets, each in turn. "Dear me, Pip, I seem to be fresh out of pads and pencils. Might it be possible—"
He saw one of my hands steal up to find something behind my ear. "I'll be darned," I said, "a yellow Ticonderoga Number 2!" My other hand slipped to my back pants pocket. "And hey, an Iron-Face Indian Ring-Back Notepad Number 12!"
"Extraordinary!"
"Extraordinary!"
Mr. Dickens wheeled about, surveying the world from each and every window, speaking now north, now north by east, now east, now south:
"I've traveled two long weeks with an idea. Bastille Day. Do you know it?"
"The French Fourth of July?"
"Remarkable boy! By Bastille Day this book must be in full flood. Will you help me breach the tide gates of the Revolution, Pip?"
"With these?" I looked at the pad and pencil in my hands.
"Lick the pencil tip, boy!"
I licked.
"Top of the page: the title. Title." Mr, Dickens mused, head down, rubbing his chin whiskers. "Pip, what's a rare fine title for a novel that happens half in London, half in Paris?"
"A—" I ventured.
"Yes?"
"A Tale," I went on.
"Yes?!"
"A Tale of … Two Cities?"
"Madame!" Grandma looked up as he spoke. "This boy is a genius!"
"I read about this day in the Bible," said Grandma. "Everything Ends by noon."
"Put it down, Pip." Mr. Dickens tapped my pad. "Quick. A Tale of Two Cities. Then, mid-page. Book the First. 'Recalled to Life.' Chapter 1. 'The Period.' "
I scribbled. Grandma worked. Mr. Dickens squinted at the sky arid at last intoned:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it: was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter—"
"My," said Grandma, "you speak fine."
"Madame." The author nodded, then, eyes shut, snapped his fingers to remember, on the air. "Where was I, Pip?"
"It was the winter," I said, "of despair."
Very late in the afternoon I heard Grandma calling someone named Ralph, Ralph, down below. I didn't know who that was. I was writing hard.
A minute later, Grandpa called, "Pip!"
I jumped. "Yes, sir!"
"Dinnertime, Pip," said Grandpa, up the stairwell.
I sat down at the table, hair wet, hands damp. I looked over at Grandpa. "How did you know … Pip?"
"Heard the name fall out the window an hour ago."
"Pip?" said Mr. Wyneski, just come in, sitting down.
"Boy," I said. "I been everywhere this afternoon. The Dover Coach on the Dover Road. Paris! Traveled so much I got writer's cramp! I—"
"Pip?" said Mr. Wyneski, again.
Grandpa came warm and easy to my rescue.
"When I was twelve, changed my name—on several occasions." He counted the tines on his fork. "Dick. That was Dead-Eye Dick. And … John. That was for Long John Silver. Then: Hyde. That was for the other half of Jekyll—"
"I never had any other name except Bernard Samuel Wyneski," said Mr. Wyneski, his eyes still fixed to me.
"None?" cried Grandpa, startled.
"None."
"Have you proof of childhood, then, sir?" asked Grandpa. "Or are you a natural phenomenon, like a ship becalmed at sea?"
"Eh? "said Mr. Wyneski.
Grandpa gave up and handed him his full plate.
"Fall to, Bernard Samuel, fall to."
Mr. Wyneski let his plate lie. "Dover Coach … ?"
"With Mr. Dickens, of course," supplied Grandpa. "Bernard Samuel, we have a new boarder, a novelist, who is starting a new book and has chosen Pip there, Ralph, to work as his secretary—"
"Worked all afternoon," I said. "Made a quarter!"
I slapped my hand to my mouth. A swift dark cloud had come over Mr. Wyneski's face.
"A novelist? Named Dickens? Surely you don't believe—"
"I believe what a man tells me until he tells me otherwise, then I believe that. Pass the butter," said Grandpa.
The butter was passed in silence.
" … hell's fires … " Mr. Wyneski muttered.
I slunk low in my chair.
Grandpa, slicing the chicken, heaping the plates, said, "A man with a good demeanor has entered our house. He says his name is Dickens. For all I know that is his name. He implies he is writing a book. I pass his door, look in, and, yes, he is indeed writing. Should I run tell him not to? It is obvious he needs to set the book down—"
"A Tale of Two Cities!" I said.
"A Tale!" cried Mr. Wyneski, outraged, "of Two-"
"Flush," said Grandma.
For down the stairs and now at the door of the dining room there was the man with the long hair and the fine goatee and mustaches, nodding', smiling, peering in at us doubtful and saying, "Friends … ?"
"Mr. Dickens," I said, trying to save the day. "I want you to meet Mr. Wyneski, the greatest barber in the world—"
The two men looked at each other for a long moment.
"Mr. Dickens," said Grandpa. "Will you lend us your talent, sir, for grace?"
"An honor, sir."
We bowed our heads. Mr. Wyneski did not.
Mr. Dickens looked at him gently.
Muttering, the barber glanced at the floor.
Mr. Dickens prayed:
"O Lord of the bounteous table, O Lord who furnishes forth an infinite harvest for your most respectful servants gathered here in loving humiliation, O Lord who garnishes our feast with the bright radish and the resplendent chicken, who sets before us the wine of the summer season, lemonade, and maketh us humble before simple potato pleasures, the lowborn onion and, in the finale, so my nostrils tell me, the bread of vast experiments and fine success, the highborn strawberry shortcake, most beautifully smothered and amiably drowned in fruit from your own warm garden patch, for these, and this good company, much thanks. Amen."
"Amen," said everyone but Mr. Wyneski.
We waited.
"Amen, I guess," he said.
O what a summer that was!
None like it before in Green Town history.
I never got up so early so happy ever in my life! Out of bed at five minutes to, in Paris by one minute after … six in the morning the English Channel boat from Calais, the White Cliffs, sky a blizzard of seagulls, Dover, then the London Coach and London Bridge by noon! Lunch and lemonade out under the trees with Mr. Dickens, Dog licking our cheeks to cool us, then back to Paris and tea at four and …
"Bring up the cannon, Pip!"
"Yes, sir!"
"Mob the Bastille!"
"Yes, sirr!!"
And the guns were fired and the mobs ran and there I was, Mr. C. Dickens A-l First Class Green Town, Illinois, secretary, my eyes bugging, my ears popping, my chest busting with joy, for I dreamt of being a writer some day, too, and here I was unraveling a tale with the very finest best.
"Madame Defarge, oh how she sat and knitted, knitted, sat—"
I looked up to find Grandma knitting in the window.
"Sidney Carton, what and who was he? A man of sensibility, a reading man of gentle thought and capable action … "
Grandpa strolled by mowing the grass.
Drums sounded beyond the hills with guns; a summer storm cracked and dropped unseen walls …
Mr. Wyneski?
Somehow I neglected his shop, somehow I forgot the mysterious barber pole that came up from nothing and spiraled away to nothing, and the fabulous hair that grew on his white tile floor …
So Mr. Wyneski then had to come home every night to find that writer with all the long hair in need of cutting, standing there at the same table thanking the Lord for this, that, and t'other, and Mr. Wyneski not thankful. For there I sat staring at Mr. Dickens like he was God until one night:
"Shall we say grace?" said Grandma.
"Mr. Wyneski is out brooding in the yard," said Grandpa.
"Brooding?" I glanced guiltily from the window.
Grandpa tilted his chair back so he could see.
"Breeding's the word. Saw him kick the rose bush, kick the green ferns by the porch, decide against kicking the apple tree. God made it too firm. There, he just jumped on a dandelion. Oh, oh. Here he comes, Moses crossing a Black Sea of bile."
The door slammed. Mr. Wyneski stood at the head of the table.
"I'll say grace tonight!"
He glared at Mr. Dickens.
"Why, I mean," said Grandma. "Yes. Please."
Mr. Wyneski shut his eyes tight and began prayer of destruction:
"O Lord, who delivered me a fine June and a less fine July, help me to get through August somehow.
"O Lord, deliver me from mobs and riots in streets of London and Paris which drum through my room night and morn, chief members of said riot being one boy who walks in his sleep, a man with a strange name and a Dog who barks after the ragtag and bobtail.
"Give me strength to resist the cries of Fraud, Thief, Fool, and Bunk Artists which rise in my mouth.
"Help me not to run shouting all the way to the Police Chief to yell that in all probability the man who shares our simple bread has a true name of Red Joe Pylce from Wilkesboro, wanted for counterfeiting life, or Bull Hammer from Hornbill, Arkansas, much desired for mean spitefulness and pennypilfering in Oskaloosa.
"Lord, deliver the innocent boys of this world from the fell clutch of those who would tomfool their credibility.
"And Lord, help me to say, quietly, and with all deference to the lady present, that if one Charles Dickens is not on the noon train tomorrow bound for Potters Grave, Lands End, or Kankakee, I shall like Delilah, with malice, shear the black lamb and fry his mutton-chop whiskers for twilight dinners and late midnight snacks.
"I ask, Lord, not mercy for the mean, but simple justice for the malignant.
"All those agreed, say 'Amen.' "
He sat down and stabbed a potato.
There was a long moment with everyone frozen.
And then Mr. Dickens, eyes shut said, moaning:
"Ohhhhhhhhhh … !"
It was a moan, a cry, a despair so long and deep it sounded like the train way off in the country the day this man had arrived.
"Mr. Dickens," I said.
But I was too late.
He was on his feet, blind, wheeling, touching the furniture, holding to the wall, clutching at the doorframe, blundering into the hall, groping up the stairs.
"Ohhhhh … "
It was the long cry of a man gone over a cliff into Eternity.
It seemed we sat waiting to hear him hit bottom.
Far off in the hills in the upper part of the house, his door banged shut.
My soul turned over and died. "Charlie," I said. "Oh, Charlie."
Late that night, Dog howled.
And the reason he howled was that sound, that similar, muffled cry from up in the tower cupola room.
"Holy Cow," I said. "Call the plumber. Everything's down the drain."
Mr. Wyneski strode by on the sidewalk, walking nowhere, off and gone.
"That's his fourth time around the block." Grandpa struck a match and lit his pipe.
"Mr. Wyneski!" I called.
No answer. The footsteps went away.
"Boy oh boy, I feel like I lost a war," I said.
"No, Ralph, beg pardon, Pip," said Grandpa, sitting down on the step with me. "You just changed generals in midstream is all. And now one of the generals is so unhappy he's turned mean."
"Mr. Wyneski? I—I almost hate him!"
Grandpa puffed gently on his pipe. "I don't think he even knows why he is so unhappy and mean. He has had a tooth pulled during the night by a mysterious dentist and now his tongue is aching around the empty place where the tooth was."
"We're not in church, Grandpa."
"Cut the Parables, huh? In simple words, Ralph, you used to sweep the hair off that man's shop floor. And he's a man with no wife, no family, just a job. A man with no family needs someone somewhere in the world, whether he knows it or not."
"I," I said. "I'll wash the barbershop windows tomorrow. I—I'll oil the red-and-white striped pole so it spins like crazy."
"I know you will, son."
A train went by in the night.
Dog howled.
Mr. Dickens answered in a strange cry from his room.
I went to bed and heard the town clock strike one and then two and at last three.
Then it was I heard the soft crying. I went out in the hall to listen by our boarder's door.
"Mr. Dickens?"
The soft sound stopped.
The door was unlocked. I dared open it.
"Mr. Dickens?"
And there he lay in the moonlight, tears streaming from his eyes, eyes wide open staring at the ceiling, motionless.
"Mr. Dickens?"
"Nobody by that name here," said he. His head moved side to side. "Nobody by that name in this loom in this bed in this world."
"You," I said. "You're Charlie Dickens."
"You ought to know better," was the mourned reply. "Long after midnight, moving on toward morning."
"All I know is," I said, "I seen you writing every day. I heard you talking every night."
"Right, right."
"And you finish one book and start another, and write a fine calligraphy sort of hand."
"I do that." A nod. "Oh yes, by the demon possessions, I do."
"So!" I circled the bed. "What call you got to feel sorry for yourself, a world-famous author?"
"You know and I know, I'm Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, on my way to Eternity with a dead flashlight and no candles."
"Hells bells," I said. I started for the door. I was mad because he wasn't holding up his end. He was ruining a grand summer. "Good night!" I rattled the doorknob.
"Wait!"
It was such a terrible soft cry of need and almost pain, I dropped my hand, but I didn't turn.
"Pip," said the old man in the bed.
"Yeah?" I said, grouching.
"Let's both be quiet. Sit down."
I slowly sat on the spindly wooden chair by the night table.
"Talk to me, Pip."
"Holy Cow, at three—"
"—in the morning, yes. Oh, it's a fierce awful time of night. A long way back to sunset, and ten thousand miles on to dawn. We have need of friends then. Friend, Pip? Ask me things."
"Like what?"
"I think you know."
I brooded a moment and sighed. "Okay, okay. Who are you?"
He was very quiet for a moment lying there in his bed and then traced the words on the ceiling with a long invisible tip of his nose and said, "I'm a man who could never fit his dream."
"What?"
"I mean, Pip, I never became what I wanted to be."
I was quiet now, too, "What'd you want to be?"
"A writer."
"Did you try?"
"Try!" he cried, and almost gagged on a strange wild laugh. "Try," he said, controlling himself. "Why Lord of Mercy, son, you never saw so much spit, ink, and sweat fly. I wrote my way through an ink factory, broke and busted a paper company, ruined and dilapidated six dozen typewriters, devoured and scribbled to the bone ten thousand Ticonderoga Soft Lead pencils."
"Wow!"
"You may well say Wow."
"What did you write?"
"What didn't I write. The poem. The essay. The play tragique. The farce. The short story. The novel. A thousand words a day, boy, every day for thirty years, no day passed I did not scriven and assault the page. Millions of words passed from my fingers onto paper and it was all bad."
"It couldn't have been!"
"It was. Not mediocre, not passing fair. Just plain outright mudbath bad. Friends knew it, editors knew it, teachers knew it, publishers knew it, and one strange fine day about four in the afternoon, when I was fifty, I knew it."
"But you can't write thirty years—without—"
"Stumbling upon excellence? Striking a chord? Gaze long, gaze hard, Pip, look upon a man of peculiar talent, outstanding ability, the only man in history who put down five million words without slapping to life one small base of a story that might rear up on its frail legs and cry Eureka! we've done it!"
"You never sold one story?!"
"Not a two-line joke. Not a throwaway newspaper sonnet. Not a want ad or obit. Not a home-bottled autumn pickle recipe. Isn't that rare? To be so outstandingly dull, so ridiculously inept, that nothing ever brought a chuckle, caused a tear, raised a temper, or discharged a blow. And do you know what I did on the day I discovered I would never be a writer? I killed myself."
"Killed?!"
"Did away with, destroyed. How? I packed me up and took me away on a long train ride and sat on the back smoking-car platform a long time in the night and then one by one let the confetti of my manuscripts fly like panicked birds away down the tracks. I scattered a novel across Nebraska, my Homeric legends over North, my love sonnets through South Dakota. I abandoned my familiar essays in the men's room at the Harvey House in Clear Springs, Idaho. The late summer wheatfields knew my prose. Grand fertilizer, it probably jumped up bumper crops of corn long after I passed. I rode two trunks of my soul on that long summer's journey, celebrating my badly served self. And one by one, slow at first, and then faster, faster, over I chucked them, story after story, out, out of my arms out of my head, out of my life, and down they went, sunk drowning night rivers of prairie dust, in lost continents of sand and lonely rock. And the train wallowed around a curve in a great wail of darkness and release, and I opened my fingers and let the last stillborn darlings fall..
"When I reached the far terminus of the line, the trunks were empty. I had drunk much, eaten little, wept on occasion in my private room, but had heaved away my anchors, dead-weights, and dreams, and came to the sliding soft-chuffing end of my journey, praise God, in a kind of noble peace and certainty. I felt reborn. I said to myself, why, what's this, what's this? I'm—I'm a new man."
He saw it all on the ceiling, and I saw it, too, like a movie run up the wall in the moonlit night.
"I—I'm a new man I said, and when I got off the train at the end of that long summer of disposal and sudden rebirth, I looked in a fly-specked, rain-freckled gum-machine mirror at a lost depot in Peachgum, Missouri, and my beard grown long in two months of travel and my hair gone wild with wind that combed it this way sane, that way mad, and I peered and stood back and exclaimed softly, 'Why, Charlie Dickens, is that you?!' "
The man in the bed laughed softly.
" 'Why, Charlie,' said I, 'Mr. Dickens, there you are!' And the reflection in the mirror cried out, 'Dammit, sir, who else would it be!? Stand back. I'm off to a great lecture!'"
"Did you really say that, Mr. Dickens?"
"God's pillars and temples of truth, Pip. And I got out of his way! And I strode through a strange town and I knew who I was at last and grew fevers thinking on what I might do in my lifetime now reborn and all that grand fine work ahead! For, Pip, this thing must have been growing. All those years of writing and snuffing up defeat, my old subconscious must have been whispering, 'Just you wait. Things will be black midnight bad but then in the nick of time, I'll save you!'
"And maybe the thing that saved me was the thing ruined me in the first place: respect for my elders; the grand moguls and tall muckymucks in the lush literary highlands and me in the dry river bottom with my canoe.
"For, oh God, Pip, how I devoured Tolstoy, drank Dostoevsky, feasted on De Maupassant, had wine and chicken picnics with Flaubert and Moliere. I gazed at gods too high. I read too much! So, when my work vanished, theirs stayed. Suddenly I found I could not forget their books, Pip!"
"Couldn't?"
"I mean I could not forget any letter of any word of any sentence or any paragraph of any book ever passed under these hungry omnivorous eyes!"
"Photographic memory!"
"Bull's-eye! All of Dickens, Hardy, Austen, Poe, Hawthorne, trapped in this old box Brownie waiting to be printed off my tongue, all those years, never knew, Pip, never guessed, I had hid it all away. Ask me to speak in tongues. Kipling is one. Thackeray another. Weigh flesh, I'm Shylock. Snuff out the light, I'm Othello. All, all, Pip, all!"
"And then? And so?"
"Why then and so, Pip, I looked another time in that fly-specked mirror and said, 'Mr. Dickens, all this being true, when do you write your first book?' 'Now!' I cried. And bought fresh paper and ink and have been delirious and joyful, lunatic and happy frantic ever since, writing all the books of my own clear self, me, I, Charles Dickens, one by one.
"I have traveled the continental vastness of the United States of North America and settled me in to write and act, act and write, lecturing here, pondering there, half in and then half out of my mania, known and unknown, lingering here to finish Copperfield, loitering there for Dornbey and Son, turning up for tea with Marley's Ghost on some pale Christmas noon. Sometimes I lie whole snowbound winters in little whistle stops and no one there guessing that Charlie Dickens bides hibernation there, then pop forth like the ottermole of spring and so move on. Sometimes I stay whole summers in one town before I'm driven off. Oh, yes, driven. For such as your Mr. Wyneski cannot forgive the fantastic, Pip, no matter how particularly practical that fantastic be.
"For he has no humor, boy.
"He does not see that we all do what we must to survive, survive.
"Some laugh, some cry, some bang the world with fists, some run, but it all sums up the same: they make do.
"The world swarms with people, each one drowning, but each swimming a different stroke to the far shore.
"And Mr. Wyneski? He makes do with scissors and understands not my inky pen and littered papers on which I would flypaper-catch my borrowed English soul."
Mr. Dickens put his feet out of bed and reached for his carpetbag.
"So I must pick up and go."
I grabbed the bag first.
"No! You can't leave! You haven't finished the book!"
"Pip, dear boy, you haven't been listening—"
"The world's waiting! You can't just quit in the middle of Two Cities!"
He took the bag quietly from me.
"Pip, Pip … "
"You can't, Charlie!"
He looked into my face and it must have been so white hot he flinched away.
"I'm waiting," I cried. "They're waiting!"
"They … ?"
"The mob at the Bastille. Paris! London. The Dover sea. The guillotine!"
I ran to throw all the windows even wider as if the night wind and the moonlight might bring in sounds and shadows to crawl on the rug and sneak in his eyes, and the curtains blew out in phantom gestures and I swore I heard, Charlie heard, the crowds, the coach wheels, the great slicing downfall of the cutting blades and the cabbage heads falling and battle songs and all that on the wind—
"Oh, Pip, Pip … "
Tears welled from his eyes.
I had my pencil out and my pad.
"Well?" I said.
"Where were we, this afternoon, Pip?"
"Madame Defarge, knitting."
He let the carpetbag fall. He sat on the edge of the bed and his hands began to tumble, weave, knit, motion, tie and untie, and he looked and saw his hands and spoke and I wrote and he spoke again, stronger, and stronger, all through the rest of the night …
"Madame Defarge … yes … well. Take this, Pip. She—"
"Morning, Mr. Dickens!"
I flung myself into the dining-room chair. Mr. Dickens was already half through his stack of pancakes.
I took one bite and then saw the even greater stack of pages lying on the table between us.
"Mr. Dickens?" I said. "The Tale of Two Cities. It's … finished?"
"Done." Mr. Dickens ate, eyes down. "Got up at six. Been working steady. Done. Finished. Through."
"Wow!" I said.
A train whistle blew. Charlie sat up, then rose suddenly, to leave the rest of his breakfast and hurry out in the hall. I heard the front door slam and tore out on the porch to see Mr. Dickens half down the walk, carrying his carpetbag.
He was walking so fast I had to run to circle round and round him as he headed for the rail depot.
"Mr. Dickens, the book's finished, yeah, but not published yet!"
"You be my executor, Pip."
He fled. I pursued, gasping.
"What about David Copperfield?! Little Dorrit?!"
"Friends of yours, Pip?"
"Yours, Mr. Dickens, Charlie, oh, gosh, if you don't write them, they'll never live."
"They'll get on somehow." He vanished around a corner. I jumped after.
"Charlie, wait. I'll give you—a new title! Pickwick Papers, sure, Pickwick Papers!"
The train was pulling into the station.
Charlie ran fast.
"And after that, Bleak House, Charlie, and Hard Times and Great—Mr. Dickens, listen—Expectations! Oh, my gosh!"
For he was far ahead now and I could only yell after him:
"Oh, blast, go on! get off! get away! You know what I'm going to do!? You don't deserve reading! You don't! So right now, and from here on, see if I even bother to finish reading Tale of Two Cities! Not me! Not this one! No!"
The bell was tolling in the station. The steam was rising. But, Mr. Dickens had slowed. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk. I came up to stare at his back.
"Pip," he said softly. "You mean what you just said."
"You!" I cried. "You're nothing but—" I searched in my mind and seized a thought: "—a blot of mustard, some undigested bit of raw potato—!"
"'Bah, Humbug, Pip?'"
"Humbug! I don't give a blast what happens to Sidney Carton!"
"Why, it's a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done, Pip. You must read it."
"Why!?"
He turned to look at me with great sad eyes.
"Because I wrote it for you."
It took all my strength to half-yell back: "So—?"
"So," said Mr. Dickens, "I have just missed my train. Forty minutes till the next one—"
"Then you got time," I said.
"Time for what?"
"To meet someone. Meet them, Charlie, and I promise I'll finish reading your book. In there. In there, Charlie."
He pulled back.
"That place? The library?!"
"Ten minutes, Mr. Dickens, give me ten minutes, just ten, Charlie. Please."
"Ten?"
And at last, like a blind man, he let me lead him up the library steps and half-fearful, sidle in.
The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years.
Way off in that direction: silence.
Way off in that direction: hush.
It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were.
We waited, Mr. Dickens and I, on the edge of the silence.
Mr. Dickens trembled. And I suddenly remembered I had never seen him here all summer. He was afraid I might take him near the fiction shelves and see all his books, written, done, finished, printed, stamped, bound, borrowed, read, repaired, and shelved.
But I wouldn't be that dumb. Even so, he took my elbow and whispered:
"Pip, what are we doing here? Let's go. There's—"
"Listen!" I hissed.
And a long way off in the stacks somewhere, there was a sound like a moth turning over in its sleep.
"Bless me," Mr. Dickens's eyes widened. "I know that sound."
"Sure!"
"It's the sound," he said, holding his breath, then nodding, "of someone writing."
"Yes, sir."
"Writing with a pen. And … and writing … "
"What?"
"Poetry," gasped Mr. Dickens. "That's it. Someone off there in a room, how many fathoms deep, Pip, I swear, writing a poem. There! Eh? Flourish, flourish, scratch, flourish on, on, on, that's not figures, Pip, not numerals, not dusty-dry facts, you feel it sweep, feel it scurry? A poem, by God, yes, sir, no doubt, a poem!"
"Ma'am," I called.
The moth-sound ceased.
"Don't stop her!" hissed Mr. Dickens. "Middle of inspiration. Let her go!"
The moth-scratch started again.
Flourish, flourish, scratch, on, on, stop. Flourish, flourish. I bobbed my head. I moved my lips, as did Mr. Dickens, both of us suspended, held, leant forward on the cool marble air listening to the vaults and stacks and echoes in the subterrane.
Flourish, flourish, scratch, on, on.
Silence.
"There." Mr. Dickens nudged me.
"Ma'am!" I called ever so urgently soft.
And something rustled in the corridors.
And there stood the librarian, a lady between years, not young, not old; between colors, not dark, not pale; between heights, not short, not tall, but rather frail, a woman you often heard talking to herself off in the dark dust-stacks with a whisper like turned pages, a woman who glided as if on hidden wheels.
She came carrying her soft lamp of face, lighting her way with her glance.
Her lips were moving, she was busy with words in the vast room behind her clouded gaze.
Charlie read her lips eagerly. He nodded. He waited for her to halt and bring us to focus, which she did, suddenly. She gasped and laughed at herself.
"Oh, Ralph, it's you and—" A look of recognition warmed her face. "Why, you're Ralph's friend. Mr. Dickens, isn't it?"
Charlie stared at her with a quiet and almost alarming devotion.
"Mr. Dickens," I said. "I want you to meet—"
" 'Because I could not stop for Death—' " Charlie, eyes shut, quoted from memory.
The librarian blinked swiftly and her brow like a lamp turned high, took white color.
"Miss Emily," he said.
"Her name is—" I said.
"Miss Emily." He put out his hand to touch hers.
"Pleased," she said. "But how did you—?"
"Know your name? Why, bless me, ma'am, I heard you scratching way off in there, runalong rush, only poets do that!"
"It's nothing."
"Head high, chin up," he said, gently. "It's something. 'Because I could not stop for death' is a fine A-l first-class poem."
"My own poems are so poor," she said, nervously. "I copy hers out to learn."
"Copy who?" I blurted.
"Excellent way to learn."
"Is it, really?" She looked close at Charlie. "You're not … ?"
"Joking? No, not with Emily Dickinson, ma'am!"
"Emily Dickinson?" I said.
"That means much coming from you, Mr. Dickens," she flushed. "I have read all your books."
"All?" He backed off.
"All," she added hastily, "that you have published so far, sir."
"Just finished a new one." I put in, "Sockdolager! A Tale of Two Cities."
"And you, ma'am?" he asked, kindly.
She opened her small hands as if to let a bird go.
"Me? Why, I haven't even sent a poem to our town newspaper."
"You must!" he cried, with true passion and meaning. "Tomorrow. No, today!"
"But," her voice faded. "I have no one to read them to, first."
"Why," said Charlie quietly. "You have Pip here, and, accept my card, C. Dickens, Esquire. Who will, if allowed, stop by on occasion, to see if all's well in this Arcadian silo of books."
She took his card. "I couldn't—"
"Tut! You must. For I shall offer only warm sliced white bread. Your words must be the marmalade and summer honey jam. I shall read long and plain. You: short and rapturous of life and tempted by that odd delicious Death you often lean upon. Enough." He pointed. "There. At the far end of the corridor, her lamp lit ready to guide your hand … the Muse awaits. Keep and feed her well. Good-bye."
"Good-bye?" she asked. "Doesn't that mean 'God be with you'?"
"So I have heard, dear lady, so I have heard."
And suddenly we were back out in the sunlight, Mr. Dickens almost stumbling over his carpetbag waiting there.
In the middle of the lawn, Mr. Dickens stood very still and said, "The sky is blue, boy."
"Yes, sir."
"The grass is green."
"Sure." Then I stopped and really looked around. "I mean, heck, yeah!"
"And the wind … smell that sweet wind?"
We both smelled it. He said:
"And in this world are remarkable boys with vast imaginations who know the secrets of salvation … "
He patted my shoulder. Head down, I didn't know what to do. And then I was saved by a whistle:
"Hey, the next train! Here it comes!"
We waited.
After a long while, Mr. Dickens said:
"There it goes … and let's go home, boy."
"Home!" I cried, joyfully, and then stopped. "But what about … Mr. Wyneski?"
"O, after all this, I have such confidence in you, Pip. Every afternoon while I'm having tea and resting my wits, you must trot down to the barbershop and—"
"Sweep hair!"
"Brave lad. It's little enough. A loan of friendship from the Bank of England to the First National Bank of Green Town, Illinois. And now, Pip … pencil!"
I tried behind one ear, found gum; tried the other ear and found: "Pencil!"
"Paper?"
"Paper!"
We strode along under the soft green summer trees.
"Title, Pip—"
He reached up with his cane to write a mystery on the sky. I squinted at the invisible penmanship.
"The—"
He blocked out a second word on the air.
"Old," I translated.
A third.
"C.U." I spelled. "R.I … Curiosity!"
"How's that for a title, Pip?"
I hesitated. "It … doesn't seem, well, quite finished, sir."
"What a Christian you are. There!"
He flourished a final word on the sun.
"S.H.O … Shop! The Old Curiosity Shop."
"Take a novel, Pip!"
"Yes, sir," I cried. "Chapter One!"
A blizzard of snow blew through the trees.
"What's that?" I asked, and answered:
Why, summer gone. The calendar pages, all the hours and days, like in the movies, the way they just blow off over the hills. Charlie and I working together, finished, through. Many days at the library, over! Many nights reading aloud with Miss Emily done! Trains come and gone. Moons waxed and waned. New trains arriving and new lives teetering on the brink, and Miss Emily suddenly standing right there, and Charlie here with all their suitcases and handing me a paper sack.
"What's this?"
"Rice, Pip, plain ordinary white rice, for the fertility ritual. Throw it at us, boy. Drive us happily away. Hear those bells, Pip? Here goes Mr. and Mis. Charlie Dickens! Throw, boy, throw! Throw!"
I threw and ran, ran and threw, and them on the back train platform waving out of sight and me yelling good-bye, Happy marriage, Charlie! Happy times! Come back! Happy … Happy …
And by then I guess I was crying, and Dog chewing my shoes, jealous, glad to have me alone again, and Mr. Wyneski waiting at the barbershop to hand me my broom and make me his son once more.
And autumn came and lingered and at last a letter arrived from the married and traveling couple.
I kept the letter sealed all day and at dusk, while Grandpa was raking leaves by the front porch I went out to sit and watch and hold the letter and wait for him to look up and at last he did and I opened the letter and read it out loud in the October twilight:
"Dear Pip," I read, and had to stop for a moment seeing my old special name again, my eyes were so full.
"Dear Pip. We are in Aurora tonight and Felicity tomorrow and Elgin the night after that. Charlie has six months of lectures lined up and looking forward. Charlie and I are both working steadily and are most happy … very happy … need I say?
"He calls me Emily.
"Pip, I don't think you know who she was, but there was a lady poet once, and I hope you'll get her books out of the library someday.
"Well, Charlie looks at me and says: 'This is my Emily' and I almost believe. No, I do believe."
I stopped and swallowed hard and read on:
"We are crazy, Pip.
"People have said it. We know it. Yet we go on. But being crazy together is fine.
"It was being crazy alone I couldn't stand any longer.
"Charlie sends his regards and wants you to know he has indeed started a fine new book, perhaps his best yet,one you suggested the title for, Bleak House.
"So we write and move, move and write, Pip. And some year soon we may come back on the train which stops for water at your town. And if you're there and call our names as we know ourselves now, we shall step off the train. But perhaps meanwhile you will get too old. And if when the train stops, Pip, you're not there, we shall understand, and let the train move us on to another and another town.
"Signed, Emily Dickinson.
"P.S. Charlie says your grandfather is a dead ringer for Plato, but not to tell him.
"P.P.S. Charlie is my darling."
"Charlie is my darling," repeated Grandpa, sitting down and taking the letter to read it again. "Well, well … " he sighed. "Well, well … "
We sat there a long while, looking at the burning soft October sky and the new stars. A mile off, a dog barked. Miles off, on the horizon line, a train moved along, whistled, and tolled its bell, once, twice, three times, gone.
"You know," I said. "I don't think they're crazy."
"Neither do I, Pip," said Grandpa, lighting his pipe and blowing out the match. "Neither do I."

HEAVY-SET

The woman stepped to the kitchen window arid looked out.
There in the twilight yard a man stood surrounded by barbells and dumbbells and dark iron weights of all kinds and slung jump ropes and elastic and coiled-spring exercisers. He wore a sweat suit and tennis shoes and said nothing to no one as he simply stood in the darkening world and did not know she watched.
This was her son, and everyone called him Heavy-Set.
Heavy-Set squeezed the little bunched, coiled springs in his big fists. They were lost in his fingers, like magic tricks; then they reappeared. He crushed them. They vanished. He let them go. They came back.
He did this for ten minutes, otherwise motionless.
Then he bent down and hoisted up the one-hundred-pound barbells, noiselessly, not breathing. He motioned it a number of times over his head, then abandoned it and went into the open garage among the various surfboards he had cut out and glued together and sanded and painted and waxed, and there he punched a punching bag easily, swiftly, steadily, until his curly golden hair got moist. Then he stopped and rilled his lungs until his chest measured fifty inches and stood eyes closed, seeing himself in an invisible mirror poised and tremendous, two hundred and twenty muscled pounds, tanned by the sun, salted by the sea wind and his own sweat.
He exhaled. He opened his eyes.
He walked into the house, into the kitchen and did not look at his mother, this woman, and opened the refrigerator and let the arctic cold steam him while he drank a quart of milk straight out of the carton, never putting it down, just gulping and swallowing. Then he sat down at the kitchen table to fondle and examine the Hallowe'en pumpkins.
He had gone out earlier in the day and bought the pumpkins and carved most of them and did a fine job: they were beauties and he was proud of them. Now, looking childlike in the kitchen, he started carving the last of them. You would never suspect he was thirty years old, he still moved so swiftly, so quietly, for a large action like hitting a wave with an uptilted and outthrust board, or here with the small action of a knife, giving sight to a Hallowe'en eye. The electric light bulb filled the summer wildness of his hair, but revealed no emotion, except this one intent purpose of carving, on his face. There was all muscle in him, and no fat, and that muscle waited behind every move of the knife.
His mother came and went on personal errands around the house and then came to stand and look at him and the pumpkins and smile. She was used to him. She heard him every night drubbing the punching bag outside, or squeezing the little metal springs in his hands or grunting as he lifted his world of weights and held it in balance on his strangely quiet shoulders. She was used to all these sounds even as she knew the ocean coming in on the shore beyond the cottage and laying itself out flat and shining on the sand. Even as she was used, by now, to hearing Heavy-Set each night on the phone saying he was tired to girls and said no, no he had to wax the car tonight or do his exercises to the eighteen-year-old boys who called.
She cleared her throat. "Was the dinner good tonight?"
"Sure," he said.
"I had to get special steak. I bought the asparagus fresh."
"It was good," he said.
"I'm glad you liked it, I always like to have you like it."
"Sure," he said, working.
"What time is the party?"
"Seven thirty." He finished the last of the smile on the pumpkin and sat back. "If they all show up, they might not show up, I bought two jugs of cider."
He got up and moved into his bedroom, quietly massive, his shoulders filling the door and beyond. In the room, in the half-dark, he made the strange pantomime of a man seriously and silently wrestling an invisible opponent as he got into his costume. He came to the door of the living room a minute later licking a gigantic peppermint-striped lollipop. He wore a pair of short black pants, a little boy's shirt with ruff collar, and a Buster Brown hat. He licked the lollipop and said, "I'm the mean little kid!" and the woman who had been watching him laughed. He walked with an exaggerated little child's walk, licking the huge lollipop, all around the room while she laughed at him and he said things and pretended to be leading a big dog on a rope. "You'll be the life of the party!" the woman cried, pink-faced and exhausted. He was laughing now, also.
The phone rang.
He toddled out to answer it in the bedroom. He talked for a long time and his mother heard him say Oh for gosh sakes several times and finally he came slowly and massively into the living room looking stubborn. "What's wrong?" she wanted to know. "Aw," he said, "half the guys aren't showing up at the party. They got other dates. That was Tommy calling. He's got a date with a girl from somewhere. Good grief." "There'll be enough," said his mother. "I don't know," he said. "There'll be enough for a party," she said. "You go on." "I ought to throw the pumpkins in the garbage," he said, scowling. "Well you just go on and have a good time," she said. "You haven't been out in weeks."
Silence.
He stood there twisting the huge lollipop as big as his head, turning it in his large muscular ringers. He looked as if at any moment now he would do what he did other nights. Some nights he pressed himself up and down on the ground with his arms and some nights he played a game of basketball with himself and scored himself, team against team, black against white, in the backyard. Some nights he stood around like this and then suddenly vanished and you saw him way out in the ocean swimming long and strong and quiet as a seal under the full moon or you could not see him those nights the moon was gone and only the stars lay over the water but you heard him there, on occasion, a faint splash as he went under and stayed under a long time and came up, or he went out some times with his surfboard as smooth as a girl's cheeks, sandpapered to a softness, and came riding in, huge and alone on a white and ghastly wave that creamed along the shore and touched the sands with the surfboard as he stepped off like a visitor from another world and stood for a long while holding the soft smooth surfboard in the moonlight, a quiet man and a vast tombstone-shaped thing held there with no writing on it. In all the nights like that in the past years, he had taken a girl out three times one week and she ate a lot and every time he saw her she said Let's eat and so one night he drove her up to a restaurant and opened the car door and helped her out and got back in and said There's the restaurant. So long. And drove off. And went back to swimming way out, alone. Much later, another time, a girl was half an hour late getting ready and he never spoke to her again.
Thinking all this, remembering all this, his mother looked at him now.
"Don't stand there," she said. "You make me nervous."
"Well," he said, resentfully.
"Go on!" she cried. But she didn't cry it strong enough. Even to herself her voice sounded faint. And she did not know if her voice was just naturally faint or if she made it that way. She might as well have been talking about winter coming; everything she said had a lonely sound. And she heard the words again from her own mouth, with no force: "Go on!"
He went into the kitchen. "I guess there'll be enough guys there," he said. "Sure, there will," she said, smiling again. She always smiled again. Sometimes when she talked to him, night after night, she looked as if she were lifting weights, too. When he walked through the rooms she looked like she was doing the walking for him. And when he sat brooding, as he often did, she looked around for something to do which might be burn the toast or overfire the steak. She made a short barking faint and stifled laugh now, "Get out, have a good time." But the echoes of it moved around in the house as if it were already empty and cold and he should come back in the door. Her lips moved: "Fly away."
He snatched up the cider and the pumpkins and hurried them out to his car. It was a new car and had been new and unused for almost a year. He polished it and jiggered with the motor or lay underneath it for hours messing with all the junk underneath or just sat in the front seat glancing over the strength and health magazines, but rarely drove it. He put the cider and the cut pumpkins proudly in on the front seat, and by this time he was thinking of the possible good time tonight so he did a little child's stagger as if he might drop everything, and his mother laughed. He licked his lollipop again, jumped into the car, backed it out of the gravel drive, swerved it around down by the ocean, not looking out at this woman, arid drove off along the shore road. She stood in the yard watching the car go away. Leonard, my son, she thought.
It was seven fifteen and very dark now; already the children were fluttering along the sidewalks in white ghost sheets and zinc-oxide masks, ringing bells, screaming, lumpy paper sacks banging their knees as they ran.
Leonard, she thought.
They didn't call him Leonard, they called him Heavy-Set and Sammy, which was short for Samson. They called him Butch and they called him Atlas and Hercules. At the beach you always saw the high-school boys around him feeling his biceps as if he was a new sports car, testing him, admiring him. He walked golden among them. Each year it was that way. And then the eighteen-year-old ones got to be nineteen and didn't come around so often, and then twenty and very rarely, and then twenty-one and never again, just gone, and suddenly there were new eighteen year olds to replace them, yes, always the new ones to stand where the others had stood in the sun, while the older ones went on somewhere to something and somebody.
Leonard, my good boy, she thought. We go to shows on Saturday nights. He works on the high power lines all day, up in the sky, alone, and sleeps alone in his room at night, and never reads a book or a paper or listens to a radio or plays a record, and this year he'll be thirty-one. And just where, in all the years, did the thing happen that put him up on that pole alone and working out alone every night? Certainly there had been enough women, here and there, now and then, through his life. Little scrubby ones, of course, fools, yes, by the look of them, but women, or girls, rather, and none worth glancing at a second time. Still, when a boy gets past thirty … ? She sighed. Why even as recent as last night the phone had rung. Heavy-Set had answered it, and she could fill in the unheard half of the conversation because she had heard thousands like it in a dozen years:
"Sammy, this is Christine." A woman's voice. "What you doing?"
His little golden eyelashes flickered and his brow furrowed, alert and wary. "Why?"
"Tom, Lu, and I are going to a show, want to come along?"
"It better be good!" he cried, indignantly.
She named it.
"That!" He snorted.
"It's a good film," she said.
"Not that one," he said. "Besides, I haven't shaved yet today."
"You can shave in five minutes."
"I need a bath, and it'd take a long time."
A long time, thought his mother, he was in the bathroom two hours today. He combs his hair two dozen times, musses it, combs it again, talking to himself.
"Okay for you." The woman's voice on the phone. "You going to the beach this week?"
"Saturday," he said, before he thought.
"See you there, then," she said.
"I meant Sunday," he said, quickly.
"I could change it to Sunday," she replied.
"If I can make it," he said, even more quickly. "Things go wrong with my car."
"Sure," she said. "Samson. So long."
And he had stood there for a long time, turning the silent phone in his hand.
Well, his mother thought, he's having a good time now. A good Hallowe'en party, with all the apples he took along, tied on strings, and the apples, untied, to bob for in a tub of water, and the boxes of candy, the sweet corn kernels that really taste like autumn. He's running around looking like the bad little boy, she thought, licking his lollipop, everyone shouting, blowing horns, laughing, dancing.
At eight, and again at eight thirty and nine she went to the screen door and looked out and could almost hear the party a long way off at the dark beach, the sounds of it blowing on the wind crisp and furious and wild, and wished she could be there at the little shack out over the waves on the pier, everyone whirling about in costumes, and all the pumpkins cut each a different way and a contest for the best homemade mask or makeup job, and too much popcorn to eat and—
She held to the screen door knob, her face pink and excited and suddenly realized the children had stopped coming to beg at the door. Hallowe'en, for the neighborhood kids anyway, was over.
She went to look out into the backyard.
The house and yard were too quiet. It was strange not hearing the basketball volley on the gravel or the steady bumble of the punching bag taking a beating. Or the little twcezing sound of the hand-squeezers.
What if, she thought, he found someone tonight, found someone down there, and just never came back, never came home. No telephone call. No letter, that was the way it could be. No word. Just go off away and never come back again. What if? What if?
No! she thought, there's no one, no one there, no one anywhere. There's just this place. This is the only place.
But her heart was beating fast and she had to sit down.
The wind blew softly from the shore.
She turned on the radio but could not hear it.
Now, she thought, they're not doing anything except playing blind man's buff, yes, that's it, blind tag, and after that they'll just be—
She gasped and jumped.
The windows had exploded with raw light.
The gravel spurted in a machine-gun spray as the car jolted in, braked, and stopped, motor gunning. The lights went off in the yard. But the motor still gunned up, idled, gunned up, idled.
She could see the dark figure in the front seat of the car, not moving, staring straight ahead.
"You—" she started to say, and opened the back screen door. She found a smile on her mouth. She stopped it. Her heart was slowing now. She made herself frown.
He shut off the motor. She waited. He climbed out of the car and threw the pumpkins in the garbage can and slammed the lid.
"What happened?" she asked. "Why are you home so early—?"
"Nothing." He brushed by her with the two gallons of cider intact. He set them on the kitchen sink.
"But it's not ten yet—"
"That's right." He went into the bedroom and sat down in the dark.
She waited five minutes. She always waited five minutes. He wanted her to come ask, he'd be mad if she didn't, so finally she went and looked into the dark bedroom.
"Tell me," she said.
"Oh, they all stood around," he said. "They just stood around like a bunch of fools and didn't do anything."
"What a shame."
"They just stood around like dumb fools."
"Oh, that's a shame."
"I tried to get them to do something, but they just stood around. Only eight of them showed up, eight out of twenty, eight, and me the only one in costume. I tell you. The only one. What a bunch of fools."
"After all your trouble, too."
"They had their girls and they just stood around with them and wouldn't do anything, no games, nothing. Some of them went off with the girls," he said, in the dark, seated, not looking at her. "They went off up the beach and didn't come back. Honest to gosh." He stood now, huge, and leaned against the wall, looking all disproportioned in the short trousers. He had forgotten the child's hat was on his head. He suddenly remembered it and took it off and threw it on the floor. "I tried to kid them. I played with a toy clog and did some other stuff but nobody did anything. I felt like a fool the only one there dressed like this, and them all different, and only eight out of twenty there, and most of them gone in half an hour. Vi was there. She tried to get me to walk up the beach, too. I was mad by then. I was really mad. I said no thanks. And here I am. You can have the lollipop. Where did I put it? Pour the cider down the sink, drink it, I don't care."
She had not moved so much as an inch in all the time he talked. She opened her mouth.
The telephone rang.
"If that's them, I'm not home."
"You'd better answer it," she said.
He grabbed the phone and whipped off the receiver.
"Sammy?" said a loud high clear voice. He was holding the receiver out on the air, glaring at it in the dark. "That you?" He grunted. "This is Bob." The eighteen-year-old voice rushed on. "Glad you're home. In a big rush, but—what about that game tomorrow?"
"What game?"
"What game? For cri-yi, you're kidding. Notre Dame and S.C.!"
"Oh, football."
"Don't say oh football like that, you talked it, you played it up, you said—"
"That's no game," he said, not looking at the telephone, the receiver, the woman, the wall, nothing.
"You mean you're not going? Heavy-Set, it won't be a game without you!"
"I got to water the lawn, polish the car—"
"You can do that Sunday!"
"Besides, I think my uncle's coming over to see me. So long."
He hung up and walked out past his mother into the yard. She heard the sounds of him out there as she got ready for bed.
He must have drubbed the punching bag until three in the morning. Three, she thought, wide awake, listening to the concussions. He's always stopped at twelve, before.
At three thirty he came into the house.
She heard him just standing outside her door.
He did nothing else except stand there in the dark, breathing.
She had a feeling he still had the little boy suit on. But she didn't want to know if this were true.
After a long while the door swung slowly open.
He came into her dark room and lay down on the bed, next to her, not touching her. She pretended to be asleep.
He lay face up and rigid.
She could not see him. But she felt the bed shake as if he were laughing. She could hear no sound coming from him, so she could not be sure.
And then she heard the squeaking sounds of the little steel springs being crushed and uncrushed, crushed and uncrushed in his fists.
She wanted to sit up and scream for him to throw those awful noisy things away. She wanted to slap them out of his fingers.
But then, she thought, what would he do with his hands? What could he put in them? What would he, yes, what would he do with his hands?
So she did the only thing she could do, she held her breath, shut her eyes, listened, and prayed, O God, let it go on, let him keep squeezing those things, let him keep squeezing those things, let him, let him, oh let, let him, let him keep squeezing … let .. let …
It was like lying in bed with a great dark cricket.
And a long time before dawn.

THE MAN IN THE RORSCHACH SHIRT

Brokaw.
What a name!
Listen to it bark, growl, yip, hear the bold proclamation of:
Immanuel Brokaw!
A fine name for the greatest psychiatrist who ever tread the waters of existence without capsizing.
Toss a pepper-ground Freud casebook in the air and all students sneezed:
Brokaw!
What ever happened to him?
One day, like a high-class vaudeville act, he vanished.
With the spotlight out, his miracles seemed in danger of reversal. Psychotic rabbits threatened to leap back into hats. Smokes were sucked back into loud-powder gun muzzles. We all waited.
Silence for ten years. And more silence.
Brokaw was lost, as if he had thrown himself with shouts of laughter into mid-Atlantic. For what? To plumb for Moby Dick? To psychoanalyze that colorless fiend and see what he really had against Mad Ahab?
Who knows?
I last saw him running for a twilight plane, his wife and six Pomeranian dogs yapping far behind him on the dusky field.
"Good-bye forever!"
His happy cry seemed a joke. But I found men flaking his gold-leaf name from his office door next day, as his great fat-women couches were hustled out into the raw weather toward some Third Avenue auction.
So the giant who had been Gandhi-Moses-Christ-Buddha-Freud all layered in one incredible Armenian dessert had dropped through a hole in the clouds. To die? To live in secret?
Ten years later I rode on a California bus along the lovely shores of Newport.
The bus stopped. A man in his seventies bounced on, jingling silver into the coin box like manna. I glanced up from the rear of the bus and gasped.
"Brokaw! By the saints!"
And with or without sanctification, there he stood. Reared up like God manifest, bearded, benevolent, pontifical, erudite, merry, accepting, forgiving, messianic, tutorial, forever and eternal …
Immanuel Brokaw.
But not in a dark suit, no.
Instead, as if they were vestments of some proud new church, he wore:
Bermuda shorts. Black leather Mexican sandals. A
Los Angeles Dodgers' baseball cap. French sunglasses. And …
The shirt! Ah God! The shirt!
A wild thing, all lush creeper and live flytrap undergrowth, all Pop-Op dilation and contraction, full flowered and crammed at every interstice and cross-hatch with mythological beasts and symbols!
Open at the neck, this vast shirt hung wind-whipped like a thousand flags from a parade of united but neurotic nations.
But now, Dr. Brokaw tilted his baseball cap, lifted his French sunglasses to survey the empty bus seats. Striding slowly down the aisle, he wheeled, he paused, he lingered, now here, now there. He whispered, he murmured, now to this man, this woman, that child.
I was about to cry out when I heard him say:
"Well, what do you make of it?"
A small, boy, stunned by the circus-poster effect of the old man's attire, blinked, in need of nudging. The old man nudged:
"My shirt, boy! What do you see!?"
"Horses!" the child blurted, at last. "Dancing horses!"
"Bravo!" The doctor beamed, patted him, and strode on. "And you, sir?"
A young man, quite taken with the forthrightness of this invader from some summer world, said:
"Why … clouds, of course."
"Cumulus or nimbus?"
"Er … not storm clouds, no, no. Fleecy, sheep clouds."
"Well done!"
The psychiatrist plunged on.
"Mademoiselle?"
"Surfers!" A teen-age girl stared. "They're the waves, big ones. Surfboards. Super!"
And so it went, on down the length of the bus and as the great man progressed a few scraps and titters of laughter sprang up, then, grown infectious, turned to roars of hilarity. By now, a dozen passengers had heard the first responses and so fell in with the game.
This woman saw skyscrapers! The doctor scowled at her suspiciously. The doctor winked. That man saw crossword puzzles. The doctor shook his hand. This child found zebras all optical illusion on an African wild. The doctor slapped the animals and made them jump! This old woman saw vague Adams and misty Eves being driven from half-seen Gardens. The doctor scooched in on the seat with her awhile; they talked in fierce whispered elations, then up he jumped and forged on. Had the old woman seen an eviction? This young one saw the couple invited back in!
Dogs, lightnings, cats, cars, mushroom clouds, man-eating tiger lilies!
Each person, each response, brought greater out-crys. We found ourselves all laughing together. This fine old man was a happening of nature, a caprice, God's rambunctious Will, sewing all our separateness up in one.
Elephants! Elevators! Alarums! Dooms!
When first he had bounded aboard we had wanted naught of each other. But now like an immense snowfall which we must gossip on or an electrical failure that blacked out two million homes and so thrown us all together in communal chat, laugh, guffaw, we felt the tears clean up our souls even as they cleaned down our cheeks.
Each answer seemed funnier than the previous, and no one shouted louder his great torments of laughter than this grand tall and marvelous physician who asked for, got, and cured us of our hairballs on the spot. Whales. Kelp. Grass meadows. Lost cities. Beauteous women. He paused. He wheeled. He sat. He rose. He flapped his wildly colored shirt, until at last he towered before me and said:
"Sir, what do you find?"
"Why, Dr. Brokaw, of course!"
The old man's laughter stopped as if he were shot. He seized his dark glasses off, then clapped them on and grabbed my shoulders as if to wrench me into focus.
"Simon Wincelaus, is that you?!"
"Me, me!" I laughed. "Good grief, doctor, I thought you were dead and buried years ago. What's this you're up to?"
"Up to?" He squeezed and shook my hands and pummeled my arms and cheeks gently. Then he snorted a great self-forgiving laugh as he gazed down along the acreage of ridiculous shirting. "Up to? Retired. Swiftly gone. Overnight traveled three thousand miles from where last you saw me … " His peppermint breath warmed my face. "And now best known hereabouts as … listen! … the Man in the Rorschach Shirt."
"In the what? "I cried.
"Rorschach Shirt."
Light as a carnival gas balloon he touched into the seat beside me.
I sat stunned and silent.
We rode along by the blue sea under a bright summer sky.
The doctor gazed ahead as if reading my thoughts in vast skywriting among the clouds.
"Why, you ask, why? I see your face, startled, at the airport years ago. My Going Away Forever day. My plane should have been named the Happy Titanic. On it I sank forever into the traceless sky. Yet here I am in the absolute flesh, yes? Not drunk, nor mad, nor riven by age and retirement's boredom. Where, what, why, how come?"
"Yes," I said, "why did you retire, with everything pitched for you? Skill, reputation, money. Not a breath of—"
"Scandal? None! Why, then? Because, this old camel had not one but two humps broken by two straws. Two amazing straws. Hump Number One—"
He paused. He cast me a sidelong glance from under his dark glasses.
"This is a confessional," I said. "Mum's the word."
"Confessional. Yes. Thanks."
The bus hummed softly on the road.
His voice rose and fell with the hum.
"You know my photographic memory? Blessed, cursed, with total recall. Anything said, seen, done, touched, heard, can be snapped back to focus by me, forty, fifty, sixty years later. All, all of it, trapped in here."
He stroked his temples lightly with the fingers of both hands.
"Hundreds of psychiatric cases, delivered through my door, day after day, year on year. And never once did I check my notes on any of those sessions. I found, early on, I need only play back what I had heard inside my head. Sound tapes, of course, were kept as a double-check, but never listened to. There you have the stage set for the whole shocking business.
"One day in my sixtieth year a woman patient spoke a single word. I asked her to repeat it. Why? Suddenly I had felt my semicircular canals shift as if some valves had opened upon cool fresh air at a subterranean level.
" 'Best,' she said.
" 'I thought you said 'beast,' I said.
" 'Oh, no, doctor, 'best.' "
"One word. One pebble dropped off the edge. And then—the avalanche. For, distinctly, I had heard her claim: 'He loved the beast in me,' which is one kettle of sexual fish, eh? When in reality she had said, 'He loved the best in me,' which is quite another pan of cold cod, you must agree.
"That night I could not sleep. I smoked, I stared from windows. My head, my ears, felt strangely clear, as if I had just gotten over a thirty years' cold. I suspected myself, my past, my senses, so at three in the deadfall morning I motored to my office and found the worst:
"The recalled conversations of hundreds of cases in my mind were not the same as those recorded on my tapes or typed out in my secretary's notes!"
"You mean … ?"
"I mean when I heard beast it was truly best. Dumb was really numb. Ox were cocks and vice-versa. I heard bed and someone had said head. Sleep was creep. Lay was day. Paws were really pause. Rump was merely jump. Fiend was only leaned. Sex was hex or mix, or God knows, perplex! Yes-mess. No-slow. Binge-hinge. Wrong-long. Side-hide. Name a name, I'd heard it wrong. Ten million dozen misheard nouns! I panicked through my files! Good Grief! Great Jumping Josie!
"All those years, those people! Holy Moses, Brokaw, I cried, all these years down from the Mount, the word of God like a flea in your ear. And now, late in the day, old wise one, you think to consult your lightning-scribbled stones. And find your Laws, your Tables, different!
"Moses fled his offices that night. I ran in dark, unraveling my despair. I trained to Far Rockaway, perhaps because of its lamenting name.
"I walked by a tumult of waves only equaled by the tumult in my breast. How? I cried, how can you have been half-deaf for a lifetime and not known it! And known it only now when through some fluke, the sense, the gift, returned, how, how?!
"My only answer was a great stroke of thunder wave upon the sands.
"So much for straw number one that broke hump number one of this odd-shaped human camel."
There was a moment of silence.
We rode swaying on the bus. The bus moved along the golden shore road, through a gentle breeze.
"Straw number two?" I asked, quietly, at last.
Dr. Brokaw held his French sunglasses up so sunlight struck fish-glitters all about the cavern of the bus. We watched the swimming rainbow patterns, he with detachment and at last half-amused concern.
"Sight. Vision. Texture. Detail. Aren't they miraculous. Aweful in the sense of meaning true awe? What is sight, vision, insight? Do we really want to see the world?"
"Oh, yes," I cried, promptly.
"A young man's unthinking answer. No, my dear boy, we do not. At twenty, yes, we think we wish to see, know, be all. So thought I once. But I have had weak eyes most of my life, spent half my days being fitted out with new specs by oculists, hee? Well, comes the dawn of the corneal lens! At last, I decided, I will fit myself with those bright little teardrop miracles, those invisible discs! Coincidence? Psychosomatic cause and effect? For, that same week I got my contact lenses was the week my hearing cleared up! There must be some physio-mental connection, but don't hazard me into an informed guess.
"All I know is I had my little crystal corneal lenses ground and installed upon my weak baby blue eyes and—Voila!
"There was the world!
"THERE were people!
"And there, God save us, was the dirt, and the multitudinous pores upon the people.
"Simon," he added, grieving gently, eyes shut for a moment behind his dark glasses, "have you ever thought, did you know, that people are for the most part pores?"
He let that sink in. I thought about it.
"Pores?" I said, at last.
"Pores! But who thinks of it? Who bothers to go look? But with my restored vision I saw! A thousand, a million, ten billion … pores. Large, small, pale, crimson … pores. Everyone and on everyone. People passing. People crowding buses, theaters, telephone booths, all pore and little substance. Small pores on tiny women. Big pores on monster men. Or vice versa. Pores as numerous as that foul dust which slides pell-mell down church-nave sunbeams late afternoons. Pores. They became my utter and riven fascination. I stared at fine ladies' complexions, not their eyes, mouths, or earlobes. Shouldn't a man watch a woman's skeleton hinge and unhinge itself within that sweet pincushion flesh? Yes! But no, I saw only cheese-grater, kitchen-sieve skins. All Beauty turned sour Grotesque. Swiveling my gaze was like swiveling the 200-inch Palomar telescope in my damned skull. Everywhere I looked I saw the meteor-bombarded moon, in dread super closeup!
"Myself? God, shaving mornings was exquisite torture. I could not pluck my eyes from my lost battle-pitted face. Damnation, Immanuel Brokaw, I soughed, you are the Grand Canyon at high noon, an orange with a billion navels, a pomegranate with the skin stripped off.
"In sum, my contact lenses had made me fifteen years old again. That is: festering, self-crucified bundle of doubt, horror, and absolute imperfection. The worst age in all one's life had returned to haunt me with its pimpled, bumpy ghost.
"I lay, a sleepless wreck. Ah, second Adolescence, take pity, I cried. How could I have been so blind, so many years? Blind, yes, and knew it, and always said it was of no importance. So I groped about the world as lustful myope, nearsightedly missing the holes, rips, tears, and bumps on others as well as myself. Now, Reality had run me down in the street, And the Reality was: Pores.
"I shut my eyes and went to bed for several days. Then I sat up in bed and proclaimed, wide-eyed: Reality is not all! I refuse this knowledge. I legislate against Pores! I accept instead those truths we intuit, or make up to live by.
"I traded in my eyeballs.
"That is I handed my corneal-contact lenses to a sadist nephew who thrives on garbages and lumpy people and hairy things.
"I clapped back on my old undercorrected specs. I strolled through a world of returned and gentle mists. I saw enough but not too much. I found half-discerned ghost peoples I could love again. I saw the 'me' in the morning glass I could once more bed with, admire and take as chum. I began to laugh each day with new happiness. Softly. Then, very loud.
"What a joke, Simon, life is.
"From vanity we buy lenses that see all and so lose everything!
"And by giving up some small bit-piece of so-called wisdom, reality, truth, we gain back an entirety of life! Who does not know this? Writers do! Intuited novels are far more 'true' than all your scribbled data-fact reportage in the history of the world!
"But then at last I had to face the great twin fractures lying athwart my conscience. My eyes. My ears. Holy Cow, I said, softly. The thousand folk who tread my offices and creaked my couches and looked for echoes in my Delphic Cave, why, why, preposterous! I had seen none of them, nor heard any clear!
"Who was that Miss Harbottle?
"What of old Dinsmuir?
"What was the real color, look, size of Miss Grimes?
"Did Mrs. Scrapwight really resemble and speak like an Egyptian papyrus mummy fallen out of a nig at my desk?
"I could not even guess. Two thousand days of fogs surrounded my lost children, mere voices calling, fading, gone.
"My God, I had wandered the marketplace with an invisible sign blind and deaf and people had rushed to fill my beggar's cup with coins and rush off cured. Cured! Isn't that miraculous, strange? Cured by an old ricket with one arm gone, as 'twere, and one leg missing. What? What did I say right to them out of hearing wrong? Who indeed were those people? I will never know.
"And then I thought: there are a hundred psychiatrists about town who see and hear more clearly than I. But whose patients walk naked into high seas or leap off playground slides at midnight or truss women up and smoke cigars over them.
"So I had to face the irreducible fact of a successful career.
"The lame do not lead the lame, my reason cried, the blind and halt do not cure the halt and the blind! But a voice from the far balcony of my soul replied with immense irony: Bee's-wax and Bull-Durham! You, Immanuel Brokaw, are a porcelain genius, which means cracked but brilliant! Your occluded eyes see, your corked ears hear. Your fractured sensibilities cure at some level below consciousness! Bravo!
"But no, I could not live with my perfect imperfections. I could not understand nor tolerate this smug secret thing which, through screens and obfuscations, played meadow doctor to the world and cured field beasts.
"I had several choices then. Put my corneal lenses back in? Buy ear radios to help my rapidly improving sense of sound? And then? Find I had lost touch with my best and hidden mind which had grown comfortably accustomed to thirty years of bad vision arid lousy hearing? Chaos both for curer and cured.
"Stay blind and deaf and work? It seemed a dreadful fraud, though my record was laundry-fresh, pressed white and clean.
"So I retired.
"Packed my bags and ran off into golden oblivion to let the incredible wax collect in my most terrible strange ears … "
We rode in the bus along the shore in the warm afternoon. A few clouds moved over the sun. Shadows misted on the sands and the people strewn on the sands under the colored umbrellas.
I cleared my throat.
"Will you ever return to practice again, doctor?"
"I practice now."
"But you just said—"
"Oh, not officially, and not with an office or fees, no, never that again." The doctor laughed quietly. "I am sore beset by the mystery anyway. That is, of how I cured all those people with a laying on of hands even though my arms were chopped off at the elbows. Still, now, I do keep my 'hand' in."
"Flow?"
"This shirt of mine. You saw. You heard."
"Coming down the aisle?"
"Exactly. The colors. The patterns. One thing to that man, another to the girl, a third to the boy. Zebras, goats, lightnings, Egyptian amulets. What, what, what? I ask. And: answer, answer, answer. The Man in the Rorschach Shirt.
"I have a dozen such shirts at home.
"All colors, all different pattern mixes. One was designed for me by Jackson Pollack before he died. I wear each shirt for a day, or a week, if the going, the answers, are thick, fast, full of excitement and reward. Then off with the old and on with the new. Ten billion glances, ten billion startled responds!
"Might I not market these Rorschach shirts to your psychoanalyst: on vacation? Test your friends? Shock your neighbors? Titillate your wife? No, no. This is my own special private most dear fun. No one must share it. Me and my shirts, the sun, the bus, and a thousand afternoons ahead. The beach waits. And on it, my people!
"So I walk the shores of this summer world. There is no winter here, amazing, yes, no winter of discontent it would almost seem, and death a rumor beyond the dunes. I walk along in my own time and way and come on people and let the wind flap my great sailcloth shirt now veering north, south or south-by-west and watch their eyes pop, glide, leer, squint, wonder. And when a certain person says a certain word about my ink-slashed cotton colors I give pause. I chat. I walk with them awhile. We peer into the great glass of the sea. I sidewise peer into their soul. Sometimes we stroll for hours, a longish session with the weather. Usually it takes but that one day and, not knowing with whom they walked, scot-free, they are discharged all unwitting patients. They walk on down the dusky shore toward a fairer brighter eve. Behind their backs, the deaf-blind man waves them bon voyage and trots home there to devour happy suppers, brisk with fine work done.
"Or sometimes I meet some half-slumberer on the sand whose troubles cannot all be fetched out to die in the raw light of one day. Then, as by accident, we collide a week later and walk by the tidal churn doing what has always been done; we have our traveling confessional. For long before pent-up priests and whispers and repentances, friends walked, talked, listened, and in the listening-talk cured each other's sour despairs. Good friends trade hairballs all the time, give gifts of mutual dismays and so are rid of them.
"Trash collects on lawns and in minds. With bright shirt and nail-tipped trash stick I set out each dawn to … clean up the beaches. So many, oh, so many bodies lying out there in the light. So many minds lost in the dark. I try to walk among them all, without … stumbling … "
The wind blew in the bus window cool and fresh, making a sea of ripples through the thoughtful old man's patterned shirt.
The bus stopped.
Dr. Brokaw suddenly saw where he was and leapt up. "Wait!"
Everyone on the bus turned as if to watch the exit of a star performer. Everyone smiled.
Dr. Brokaw pumped my hand and ran. At the far front end of the bus he turned, amazed at his own forgetfulness, lifted his dark glasses and squinted at me with his weak baby-blue eyes.
"You—" he said.
Already, to him, I was a mist, a pointillist dream somewhere out beyond the rim of vision.
"You … " he called into that fabulous cloud of existence which surrounded and pressed him warm and close, "you never told me. What What?!"
He stood tall to display that incredible Rorschach shirt which fluttered and swarmed with everchanging line and color.
I looked. I blinked. I answered.
"A sunrise!" I cried.
The doctor reeled with this gentle friendly blow.
"Are you sure it isn't a sunset?" he called, cupping one hand to his ear.
I looked again and smiled. I hoped he saw my smile a thousand miles away within the bus.
"No," I said. "A sunrise. A beautiful sunrise."
He shut his eyes to digest the words. His great hands wandered along the shore of his wind-gentled shirt. He nodded. Then he opened his pale eyes, waved once, and stepped out into the world.
The bus drove on. I looked back once.
And there went Dr. Brokaw advancing straight out and across a beach where lay a random sampling of the world, a thousand bathers in the warm light.
He seemed to tread lightly upon a water of people.
The last I saw of him, he was still gloriously afloat.

HENRY THE NINTH

"There he is!"
The two men leaned. The helicopter tilted with their lean. The coastline whipped by below.
"No. Just a bit of rock and some moss—"
The pilot lifted his head, which signaled the lift of the helicopter to swivel and rush away. The white cliffs of Dover vanished. They broke over green meadows and so wove back and forth, a giant dragonfly excursioning the stuffs of winter that sleeted their blades.
"Wait! There! Drop!"
The machine fell down; the grass came up. The second man, grunting, pushed the bubble-eye aside and, as if he needed oiling, carefully let himself to the earth. He ran. Losing his breath instantly he slowed to cry bleakly against the wind:
"Harry!"
His yell caused a ragged shape on the rise ahead to stumble up and run.
"I've done nothing!"
"It's not the law, Harry! It's me! Sam Welles!"
The old man who fled before him slowed, then stopped, rigid, on the edge of the cliff above the sea, holding to his long beard with two gloved hands.
Samuel Welles, gasping, trudged up behind, but did not touch, for fear of putting him to flight.
"Harry, you damn fool. It's been weeks. I was afraid I might not find you."
"And I was afraid you would"
Harry, whose eyes had been tight shut, now opened them to look tremblingly down at his beard, his gloves, and over at his friend Samuel. Here they were, two old men, very gray, very cold, on a rise of raw stone on a December day. They had known each other so long, so many years, they had passed each other's expressions back and forth between their faces. Their mouths and eyes, therefore, were similar. They might have been ancient brothers. The only difference showed in the man who had unhinged himself from the helicopter. Under his dark clothes you could spy an incongruous Hawaiian-colored sport shirt. Harry tried not to stare at it.
Right now, anyway, both their eyes were wet.
"Harry, I came to warn you."
"No need. Why do you think I've been hiding. This is the final day?"
"The final, yes."
They stood and thought on it.
Christmas tomorrow. And now this Christmas Eve afternoon the last boats leaving. And England, a stone in a sea of mist and water, would be a marble monument to herself left written on by rain and buried in fog. After today, only the gulls would own the island. And a billion monarch butterflies in June rising up like celebrations tossed on parades to the sea.
Harry, his eyes fixed to the tidal shore, spoke:
"By sunset, will every damn stupid idiot fool clear off the Isle?"
"That's about the shape of it."
"And a dread shape it is. And you, Samuel, have you come to kidnap me?"
"Persuade is more like it."
"Persuade? Great God, Sam, don't you know me after fifty years? Couldn't you guess I would want to be the last man in all Britain, no, that hasn't the proper sound, Great Britain?"
Last man in Great Britain, thought Harry, Lord, listen. It tolls. It is the great bell of London heard through all the mizzles down through time to this strange day and hour when the last, the very last save one, leave this racial mound, this burial touch of green set in a sea of cold light. The last. The last.
"Samuel, listen. My grave is dug. I'd hate to leave it behind."
"Who'll put you in it?"
"Me, when the time's right."
"And who's to cover over?"
"Why, there's dust to cover dust, Sam. The wind will see to it. Ah, God!" Not wishing it, the words exploded from his mouth. He was amazed to see tears flung out on the air from his blinking eyes. "What are we doing here? Why all the good-byes? Why are the last boats in the Channel and the last jets gone? Where did people go, Sam? What happened, what happened!"
"Why," said Samuel Welles quietly, "it's simple, Harry. The weather here is bad. Always has been. No one dared speak of it, for nothing could be done. But now, England is finished. The future belongs—"
Their eyes moved jointly South.
"To the damn Canary Islands?"
"Samoa."
"To the Brazilian shores?"
"Don't forget California, Harry."
258 7 Sing the Body Electric!
Both laughed, gently.
"California. All the jokes. That funny place. And yet, aren't there a million English from Sacramento to Los Angeles this noon?"
"And another million in Florida."
"Two million Down Under, the past four years alone."
They nodded at the sums.
"Well, Samuel, man says one thing. The sun says another. So man goes by what his skin tells his blood. And the blood at last says: South. It has been saying it for two thousand years. But we pretended not to hear. A man with his first sunburn is a man in the midst of a new love affair, know it or not. Finally, he lies out under some great foreign sky and says to the blinding light: Teach me, oh God, gently, teach."
Samuel Welles shook his head with awe. "Keep talking like that and I won't have to kidnap you!"
"No, the sun may have taught you, Samuel, but cannot quite teach me. I wish it could. The truth is, 'twill be no fun here alone. Can't I argue you, Sam, to stay on, the old team, you and me, like when we were boys, eh?" He buffed the other's elbow roughly, dearly.
"God, you make me feel I'm deserting King and Country."
"Don't. You desert nothing, for no one's here. Who would have dreamt, when we were kids in 1980, the day would come when a promise of always summer would leak John Bull to the four corners of beyond?"
"I've been cold all my life, Harry. Too many years putting on too many sweaters and not enough coal in the scuttle. Too many years when the sky did not show so much as a crack of blue on the first day of June nor a smell of hay in July nor a dry day and winter begun August 1st, year on year. I can't take it any more, Harry, I can't."
"Nor need you. Our race has suffered itself well. You have earned, all of you, you deserve, this long retirement in Jamaica, Port-au-Prince, and Pasadena. Give me that hand. Shake hard again! It's a great moment in history. You and me, we're living it!"
"So we are, by God."
"Now look here, Sam, when you've gone and settled in Sicily, Sidney, or Navel Orange, California, tell this 'moment' to the news. They might write you in a column. And history books? Well, shouldn't there be half a page for you and me, the last gone and the last stayed behind? Sam, Sam, you're breaking the bones, but shake away, hold tight, this is our last tussle."
They stood off, panting, wet-eyed.
"Harry, now, will you walk me as far as the copter?"
"No. I fear the damn contraption. The thought of the sun on this dark day might leap me in and fly me off with you."
"And what harm in that?"
"Harm! Why, Samuel, I must guard our coast from invasion. The Normans, the Vikings, the Saxons. In the coming years I'll walk the entire isle, stand guard from Dover north on round the reefs and back through Folkestone, here again."
"Will Hitler invade, chum?"
"He and his iron ghosts just might."
"And how will you fight him, Harry?"
"Do you think I walk alone? No. Along the way, I may find Caesar on the shore. Fie loved it so he left a road or two. Those roads I'll take, and borrow just those ghosts of choice invaders to repel less choice. It's up to me, yes, to commit or uncommit ghosts, choose or not choose out of the whole damn history of the land?"
"It is. It is."
The last man wheeled to the north and then to the west and then to the south.
"And when I've seen all's well from castle here to lighthouse there, and listened to battles of gunfires in the plunge off Firth, and bagpiped round Scotland with a sour mean pipe, in each New Year's week, Sam, I'll scull back down-Thames and there each December 31st to the end of my life, the night watchman of London, meaning me, yes, me, will make his clock rounds and say out the bells of the old rhymed churches. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clemens. Bow bells. St. Marguerite's. Paul's. I shall dance rope-ends for you, Sam, and hope the cold wind blown south to the warm wind wherever you are stirs some small gray hairs in your sunburnt ears."
"I'll be listening, Harry."
"Listen more! I'll sit in the houses of Lords and Commons and debate, losing one hour but to win the next. And say that never before in history did so many owe so much to so few and hear the sirens again from old remembered records and things broadcast before we both were born.
"And a few seconds before January 1st I shall climb and lodge with mice in Big Ben as it strikes the changing of the year.
"And somewhere along the line, no doubt, I shall sit on the Stone of Scone."
"You wouldn't!"
"Wouldn't I? Or the place where it was, anyway, before they mailed it south to Summer's Bay. And hand me some sort of sceptre, a frozen snake perhaps stunned by snow from some December garden. And fit a kind of paste-up crown upon my head. And name me friend to Richard, Henry, outcast kin of Elizabeths I and II. Alone in Westminster's desert with Kipling mum and history underfoot, very old, perhaps mad, mightn't I, ruler and ruled, elect myself king of the misty isles?"
"You might, and who would blame you?"
Samuel Welles bearhugged him again, then broke and half ran for his waiting machine. Halfway he turned to call back:
"Good God. I just thought. Your name is Harry. What a fine name for a king!"
"Not bad."
"Forgive me for leaving?!"
"The sun forgives all, Samuel. Go where it wants you."
"But will England forgive?"
"England is where her people are. I stay with old bones. You go with her sweet flesh, Sam, her fair sunburnt skin and blooded body, get!"
"Good-bye."
"God be with you, too, oh you and that bright yellow sport shirt!"
And the wind snatched between and though both yelled more neither heard, waved, and Samuel hauled himself into that machine which swarmed the air and floated off like a vast white summer flower.
And the last man left behind in great gasps and sobs cried out to himself:
Harry! Do you hate change? Against progress? You do see, don't you, the reasons for all this? That ships and jets and planes and a promise of weather piped all the folk away? I see, he said, I see. How could they resist when at long last forever August lay just across the sill?
Yes, yes! He wept and ground his teeth and leaned up from the cliff rim to shake his fists at the vanishing craft in the sky.
"Traitors! Come back!"
You can't leave old England, can't leave Pip and Humbug, Iron Duke and Trafalgar, the Horse Guard in the rain, London burning, buzz bombs and sirens, the new babe held high on the palace balcony, Churchill's funeral cortege still in the street, man, still in the street! and Caesar not gone to his Senate, and strange happenings this night at Stonehenge! Leave all this, this, this!?
Upon his knees, at the cliff's edge, the last and final king of England, Harry Smith wept alone.
The helicopter was gone now, called toward august isles where summer sang its sweetness in the birds.
The old man turned to see the countryside and thought, why this is how it was one hundred thousand years ago. A great silence and a great wilderness and now, quite late, the empty shell towns and King Henry, Old Harry, the Ninth.
He rummaged half blindly about in the grass and found his lost: book bag and chocolate bits in a sack and hoisted his Bible, and Shakespeare and much-thumbed Johnson and much-tongued Dickens and Dryden and Pope, and stood out on the road that led all round England.
Tomorrow: Christmas. He wished the world well. Its people had gifted themselves already with sun, all over the globe. Sweden lay empty. Norway had flown. None lived any longer in God's cold climes. All basked upon the continental hearths of His best lands in fair winds under mild skies. No more rights just to survive. Men, reborn like Christ on such as tomorrow, in southern places, were truly returned to an eternal and fresh-grown manger.
Tonight, in some church, he would ask forgiveness for calling them traitors.
"One last thing, Harry. Blue."
"Blue?" he asked himself.
"Somewhere down the road find some blue chalk. Didn't English men once color themselves with such?"
"Blue men, yes, from head to foot!"
"Our ends are in our beginnings, eh?"
He pulled his cap tight. The wind was cold. He tasted the first snowflakes that fell to brush his lips.
"O remarkable boy!" he said, leaning from an imaginary window on a golden Christmas morn, an old man reborn and gasping for joy, "Delightful boy, there, is the great bird, the turkey, still hung in the poulterer's window down the way?"
"It's hanging there now," said the boy.
"Go buy it! Come back with the man and I'll give you a shilling. Come back in less than five minutes and I'll give you a crown!"
And the boy went to fetch.
And buttoning his coat, carrying his books, Old Harry Ebenezer Scrooge Julius Caesar Pickwick Pip and half a thousand others marched off along the road in winter weather. The road was long and beautiful. The waves were gunfire on the coast, The wind was bagpipes in the north.
Ten minutes later, when he had gone singing beyond a hill, by the look of it, all the lands of England seemed ready for a people who someday soon in history might arrive …

THE LOST CITY OF MARS

The great eye floated in space. And behind the great eye somewhere hidden away within metal and machinery was a small eye that belonged to a man who looked and could not stop looking at all the multitudes of stars and the diminishings and growings of light a billion billion miles away.
The small eye closed with tiredness. Captain John Wilder stood holding to the telescopic devices which probed the universe and at last murmured, "Which one?"
The astronomer with him said, "Take your pick."
"I wish it were that easy." Wilder opened his eyes. "What's the data on this star?"
"Alpha-Cygne II. Same size and reading as our sun. Planetary system, possible."
"Possible. Not certain. If we pick the wrong star, God help the people we send on a two-hundred-year journey to find a planet that may not be there. No, God help me, for the final selection is mine, and I may well send myself on that journey. So, how can we be sure?"
"We can't. We just make the best guess, send our starship out, and pray."
"You are not very encouraging. That's it. I'm tired."
Wilder touched a switch that shut up tight the greater eye, this rocket-powered space lens that stared cold upon the abyss, saw far too much and knew little, and now knew nothing. The rocket laboratory drifted sightless on an endless night.
"Home," said the captain. "Let's go home."
And the blind beggar-after-stars wheeled on a spread of fire and ran away.
The frontier cities on Mars looked very fine from above. Coming down for a landing, Wilder saw the neons among the blue hills and thought, We'll light those worlds a billion miles off, and the children of the people living under those lights this instant, we'll make them immortal. Very simply, if we succeed, they will live forever.
Live forever. The rocket landed. Live forever.
The wind that blew from the frontier town smelled of grease. An aluminum-toothed jukebox banged somewhere. A junkyard rusted beside the rocket port. Old newspapers danced alone on the windy tarmac.
Wilder, motionless at the top of the gantry elevator, suddenly wished not to move down. The lights suddenly had become people and not words that, huge in the mind, could be handled with elaborate ease.
He sighed. The freight of people was too heavy. The stars were too far away.
"Captain?" said someone behind him.
He stepped forward. The elevator gave way. They sank with a silent screaming toward a very real land with real people in it, who were waiting for him to choose.
At midnight the telegram-bin hissed and exploded out a message projectile. Wilder, at his desk, surrounded by tapes and computation cards, did not touch it for a long while. When at last he pulled the message out, he scanned it, rolled it in a tight ball, then uncrumpled the message and read again:
FINAL CANAL BEING FILLED TOMORROW WEEK. YOU ARE INVITED CANAL YACHT PARTY. DISTINGUISHED GUESTS. FOUR-DAY JOURNEY TO SEARCH FOR LOST CITY. KINDLY ACKNOWLEDGE.

—I. V. AARONSON

Wilder blinked, and laughed quietly. He crumpled the paper again, but stopped, lifted the telephone and said:
"Telegram to I. V. Aaronson, Mars City I. Answer affirmative. No sane reason why, but still—affirmative."
And hung up the phone. To sit for a long while watching this night which shadowed all the whispering, ticking, and motioning machines.
The dry canal waited.
It had been waiting twenty thousand years for nothing but dust to filter through in ghost tides.
Now, quite suddenly, it whispered.
And the whisper became a rush and wall-caroming glide of waters.
As if a vast machined fist had struck the rocks somewhere, clapped the air and cried "Miracle!," a wall of water came proud and high along the channels, and lay down in all the dry places of the canal and moved on toward ancient deserts of dry-bone, surprising old wharves and lifting up the skeletons of boats abandoned thirty centuries before when the water burnt away to nothing.
The tide turned a corner and lifted up—a boat as fresh as the morning itself, with new-minted silver screws and brass pipings, and bright new Earth-sewn flags. The boat, suspended from the side of the canal, bore the name Aaronson I.
Inside the boat, a man with the same name smiled. Mr. Aaronson sat listening to the waters live under the boat.
And the sound of the water was cut across by the sound of a hovercraft, arriving, and a motorbike, arriving, and in the air, as if summoned with magical timing, drawn by the glimmer of tides in the old canal, a number of gadfly people flew over the hills on jet-pack machines, and hung suspended as if doubting this collision of lives caused by one rich man.
Scowling up with a smile, the rich man called to his children, cried them in from the heat with offers of food and drink.
"Captain Wilder! Mr. Parkhill! Mr. Beaumont!"
Wilder set his hovercraft down.
Sam Parkhill discarded his motorbike, for he had seen the yacht and it was a new love.
"My God," cried Beaumont, the actor, part of the frieze of people in the sky dancing like bright bees on the wind. "I've timed my entrance wrong. I'm early. There's no audience!"
"I'll applaud you down!" shouted the old man, and did so, then added, "Mr. Aikens!"
"Aikens?" said Parkhill. "The big-game hunter?"
"None other!"
And Aikens dived down as if to seize them in his harrying claws. He fancied his resemblance to the hawk. He was finished and stropped like a razor by the swift life he had lived. Not an edge of him but cut the air as he fell, a strange plummeting vengeance upon people who had done nothing to him. In the moment before destruction, he pulled up) on his jets and, gently screaming, simmered himself to touch the marble jetty. About his lean middle hung a rifle belt. His pockets bulged like those of a boy from the candy store. One guessed he was stashed with sweet bullets and rare bombs. In his hands, like an evil child, he held a weapon that looked like a bolt of lightning fallen straight from the clutch of Zeus, stamped nevertheless: Made in U.S.A. His face was sunblasted dark. His eyes were cool surprises in the sunwrinkled flesh, all mint-blue-green crystal. He wore a white porcelain smile set in African sinews. The earth did not quite tremble as he landed.
"The lion prowls the land of Judah!" cried a voice from the heavens. "Now do behold the lambs driven forth to slaughter!"
"Oh for God's sake, Harry, shut up!" said a woman's voice.
And two more kites fluttered their souls, their dread humanity on the wind.
The rich man jubilated.
"Harry Harpwell!"
"Behold the angel of the Lord who comes with Annunciations!" the man in the sky said, hovering. "And the Annunciation is—"
"He's drunk again," his wife supplied, flying ahead of him, not looking back.
"Megan Harpwell," said the rich man, like an entrepreneur introducing his troupe.
"The poet," said Wilder.
"And the poet's barracuda wife," muttered Park-hill.
"I am not drunk," the poet shouted down the wind. "I am simply high."
And here he let loose such a deluge of laughter that those below almost raised their hands to ward off the avalanche.
Lowering himself, like a fat dragon kite, the poet, whose wife's mouth was now clamped shut, bumbled over the yacht. He made the motions of blessing same, and winked at Wilder and Parkhill.
"Harpwell," he called. "Isn't that a name to go with being a great modern poet who suffers in the present, lives in the past, steals bones from old dramatists' tombs, and flies on this new egg-beater wind-suck device, to call down sonnets on your head? I pity the old euphoric saints and angels who had no invisible wings like this so as to dart in oriole convolutions and ecstatic convulsions on the air as they sang their lines or damned souls to Hell. Poor earth-bound sparrows, wings clipped. Only their genius flew. Only their Muse knew air-sickness—"
"Harry," said his wife, her feet on the ground, eyes shut.
"Hunter!" called the poet. "Aikens! Here's the greatest game in all the world, a poet on the wing. I bare my breast. Let fly your honeyed bee sting! Bring me, Icarus, down, if your gun be sunbeams kindled in one tube and let free in a single forest fire that escalates the sky and turns tallow, mush, candlewick and lyre to mere tarbaby. Ready, aim, fire!"
The hunter, in good humor, raised his gun.
The poet, at this, laughed a mightier laugh and, literally, exposed his chest by tearing aside his shirt.
At which moment a quietness came along the canal rim.
A woman appeared walking. Her maid walked behind her. There was no vehicle in sight, and it seemed almost as if they had wandered a long way out of the Martian hills and now stopped.
The very quietness of her entrance gave dignity and attention to Cara Corelli.
The poet shut up his lyric in the sky and landed.
The company all looked together at this actress who gazed back without seeing them. She was dressed in a black jumpsuit which was the same color as her dark hair. She walked like a woman who has spoken little in her life and now stood facing them with the same quietness, as if waiting for someone to move without being ordered. The wind blew her hair out and down over her shoulders. The paleness of her face was shocking. Her paleness, rather than her eyes, stared at them.
Then, without a word, she stepped down into the: yacht and sat in the front of the craft, like a figurehead that knows its place and goes there.
The moment of silence was over.
Aaronson ran his finger down his printed guest list,
"An actor, a beautiful woman who happens to be an actress, a hunter, a poet, a poet's wife, a rocket captain, a former technician. All aboard!"
On the afterdeck of the huge craft, Aaronson spread forth his maps.
"Ladies, gentlemen," he said. "This is more than a four-day drinking bout, party, excursion. This is a Search!"
He waited for their faces to light, properly, and for them to glance from his eyes to the charts, and then said:
"We are seeking the fabled lost City of Mars, once called Dia-Sao. The City of Doom, it was called. Something terrible about it. The inhabitants fled as from a plague. The City left empty. Still empty now, centuries later."
"We," said Captain Wilder, "have charted, mapped, and cross-indexed every acre of land on Mars in the last fifteen years. You can't mislay a city the size of the one you speak of."
"True," said Aaronson, "you've mapped it from the sky, from the land. But you have not charted it via water! For the canals have been empty until now! So now we shall take the new waters that fill this last canal and go where the boats once went in the olden days, and see the very last new things that need to be seen on Mars." The rich man continued: "And somewhere on our traveling, as sure as the breath in our mouths, we shall find the most beautiful, the most fantastic, the most awful city in the history of this old world. And walk in that city—who knows?—find the reason why the Martians ran screaming away from it, as the legend says, ten thousand years ago."
Silence. Then:
"Bravo! Well done." The poet shook the old man's hand.
"And in that city," said Aikens, the hunter, "mightn't there be weapons the like of which we've never seen?"
"Most likely, sir."
"Well" The hunter cradled his bolt of lightning. "I was bored of Earth, shot every animal, ran fresh out of beasts, and came here looking for newer, better, more dangerous maneaters of any size or shape. Plus, now, new weapons! What more can one ask? Fine!"
And he dropped his blue-silver lightning bolt over the side. It sank in the clear water, bubbling.
"Let's get the hell out of here."
"Let us, indeed," said Aaronson, "get the good hell out."
And he pressed the button that launched the yacht.
And the water flowed the yacht away.
And the yacht went in the direction toward which Cara Corelli's quiet paleness was pointed: beyond.
As the poet opened the first champagne bottle. The cork banged. Only the hunter did not jump.
The yacht sailed steadily through the day into night. They found an ancient ruin and had dinner there and a good wine imported, one hundred million miles from Earth. It was noted that it had traveled well.
With the wine came the poet, and after quite a bit of the poet, came sleep on board the yacht which moved away in search of a City that would not as yet be found.
At three in the morning, restless, unaccustomed to the gravity of a planet pulling at all of his body and not freeing him to dream, Wilder came out on the afterdeck of the yacht and found the actress there.
She was watching the waters slip by in dark revelations and discardments of stars.
He sat beside her and thought a question.
Just as silently, Cara Corelli asked herself the same question, and answered it.
"I am here on Mars because not long ago for the first time in my life, a man told me the truth."
Perhaps she expected surprise. Wilder said nothing. The boat moved as on a stream of soundless oil.
"I am a beautiful woman. I have been beautiful all of my life. Which means that from the start people lied because they simply wished to be with me. I grew up surrounded by the untruths of men, women, and children who could not risk my displeasure. When beauty pouts, the world trembles.
"Have you ever seen a beautiful woman surrounded by men, seen them nodding, nodding? Heard their laughter? Men will laugh at anything a beautiful woman says. Hate themselves, yes, but they will laugh, say no for yes and yes for no.
"Well, that's how it was every day of every year for me. A crowd of liars stood between me and anything unpleasant. Their words dressed me in silks.
"But quite suddenly, oh, no more than six weeks ago, this man told me a truth. It was a small thing. I don't remember now what it was he said. But he didn't laugh. He didn't even smile.
"And no sooner was it out and over, the words spoken, that I knew a terrible thing had happened.
"I was growing old."
The yacht rocked gently on the tide.
"Oh, there would be more men who would, lying, smile again at what I said. But I saw the years ahead, when Beauty could no longer stomp its small foot, and shake down earthquakes, make cowardice a custom among otherwise good men.
"The man? He took back his truth immediately, when he saw that he had shocked me. But it was too late. I bought a one-way fare to Mars. Aaronson's invitation, when I arrived, put me on this new journey that will end … who knows where."
Wilder found that during this last he had reached out and taken her hand.
"No," she said, withdrawing. "No word. No touch. No pity. No self-pity." She smiled for the first time. "Isn't it strange? I always thought, wouldn't it be nice, someday, to hear the truth, to give up the masquerade? How wrong I was. It's no fun at all."
She sat and watched the black waters pour by the boat. When she thought to look again, some hours later, the seat beside her was empty. Wilder was gone.
On the second day, letting the new waters take them where they wished to go, they sailed toward a high range of mountains and lunched, on the way, in an old shrine, and had dinner that night in a further ruin. The Lost City was not much talked about. They were sure it would never be found.
But on the third day, without anyone's saying, they felt the approach of a great Presence.
It was the poet who finally put it in words.
"Is God humming under His breath somewhere?"
"What a fierce scum you are," said his wife. "Can't you speak plain English even when you gossip?"
"Dammit, listen!" cried the poet.
So they listened.
"Don't you feel as if you stood on the threshold of a giant blast-furnace kitchen and inside somewhere, all comfortably warm, vast hands, flour-gloved, smelling of wondrous tripes and miraculous viscera, bloodied and proud of the blood, somewhere God cooks out the dinnertime of Life? In that cauldron sun, a brew to make the flowering forth of life on Venus, in that vat a stew broth of bones and nervous heart to run in animals on planets ten billion light-years gone. And isn't God content at His fabulous workings in the great kitchen Universe, where He has meriu'd out a history of feasts, famines, deaths and reburgeonings for a billion billion years? And if God be content, would He not hum under His breath? Feel your bones. Aren't the marrows teeming with that hum? For that matter, God not only hums, He sings in the elements. He dances in molecules. Eternal celebration swarms us. Something is Near. Sh."
He pressed his fat finger to his pouting lips.
And now all were silent, and Cara Corelli's paleness searchlighted the darkening waters ahead.
They all felt it. Wilder did. Parkhill did. They smoked to cover it. They put the smokes out. They waited in the dusk.
And the humming grew nearer. And the hunter, smelling it, went to join the silent actress at the bow of the yacht. And the poet sat to write out the words he had spoken.
"Yes," he said, as the stars came out. "It's almost upon us. It has." He took a breath. "Arrived."
The yacht passed into a tunnel.
The tunnel went under a mountain.
And the City was there.
It was a city within a hollow mountain with its own meadows surrounding it and its own strangely colored and illumined stone sky above it. And it had been lost and remained lost for the simple reason that people had tried flying to discover it or had unraveled roads to find it, when all the while the canals which led to it stood waiting for simple walkers to tread where once waters had tread.
And now the yacht filled with strange people from another planet touched an ancient wharf.
And the City stirred.
In the old days, cities were alive or dead if there were or were not people in them. It was that simple. But in the later days of life on Earth or Mars, cities did not die. They slept. And in their dreamful coggeries and enwheeled slumbers they remembered how once it was or how it might be again.
So as, one by one, the party filed out on the dock, they felt a great personage, the hidden, oiled, the metaled and shining soul of the metropolis slide in a landfall of muted and hidden fireworks toward becoming fully awake.
The weight of the new people on the dock caused a machined exhalation. They felt themselves on a delicate scale. The dock sank a millionth of an inch.
And the City, the cumbrous Sleeping Beauty of a nightmare device, sensed this touch, this kiss, and slept no more.
Thunder.
In a wall a hundred feet high stood a gate seventy feet wide. This gate, in two parts, now rumbled back, to hide within the wall.
Aaronson stepped forward,
Wilder moved to intercept him. Aaronson sighed.
"Captain, no advice, please. No warnings. No patrols going on ahead to flush out villains. The City wants us in. It welcomes us. Surely you don't imagine anything's alive in there? It's a robot place. And don't look as if you think it's a time bomb. It hasn't seen fun and games in—what?—twenty centuries? Do you read Martian hieroglyphs? That cornerstone. The City was built at least nineteen hundred years ago."
"And abandoned," said Wilder.
"You make it sound like a plague drove them—"
"Not a plague." Wilder stirred uneasily, feeling himself weighed on the great scale sunk beneath his feet. "Something. Something … "
"Let's find out! In, all of you!"
Singly, and in pairs, the people from Earth stepped over the threshold.
Wilder, last of all, stepped across.
And the City came more alive.
The metal roofs of the City sprang wide like the petals of a flower.
Windows flicked wide like the lids of vast eyes to stare down upon them.
A river of sidewalks gently purled and washed at their feet, machined creekways which gleamed off through the City.
Aaronson gazed at the metal tides with pleasure. "Well, by God, the burden's off me! I was going to picnic you all. But that's the City's business now. Meet you back here in two hours to compare notes! Here goes."
And saying this he leapt out on the scurrying silver carpet that treaded him swiftly away.
Wilder, alarmed, moved to follow. But Aaronson cried jovially back:
"Come on in, the water's fine!"
And the metal river whisked him, waving, off.
And one by one they stepped forward and the moving sidewalk drifted them away. Parkhill, the hunter, the poet and his wife, the actor, and then the beautiful woman and her maid, They floated like statues mysteriously borne on volcanic fluids that swept them anywhere, or nowhere, they could only guess.
Wilder jumped. The river seized his boots gently. Following, he went away into the avenues and around the bends of parks and through fiords of buildings.
And behind them, the dock and the gate stood empty. There was no trace to show they had arrived. It was almost as if they had never been.
Beaumont, the actor, was the first to leave the traveling pathway. A certain building caught his eye. And the next thing he knew, he had leapt off and edged near, sniffing.
He smiled.
For now he knew what kind of building he stood before because of the odor that drifted from it.
"Brass polish. And, by God, that means only one thing!"
Theater.
Brass doors, brass rails, brass rings on velvet curtains.
He opened the door of the building and stepped in. He sniffed and laughed aloud. Yes. Without a sign or a light, the smell alone, the special chemistry of metals and dust torn free of a million tickets.
And above all … he listened. The silence.
"The silence that waits. No other silence in the world waits. Only in a theater will you find that. The very particles of air chafe themselves in readiness. The shadows sit back and hold their breath. Well … ready or not … here I come … "
The lobby was green velvet undersea.
The theater itself: red velvet undersea, only dimly perceived as he opened the double doors. Somewhere beyond was a stage.
Something shuddered like a great beast. His breath had dreamt it alive. The air from his half-opened mouth caused the curtains one hundred feet away to softly furl and unfurl in darkness like all-covering wings.
Hesitantly, he took a step.
A light began to appear everywhere in a high ceiling where a school of miraculous prism fish swam upon themselves.
The oceanarium light played everywhere. He gasped.
The theater was full of people.
A thousand people sat motionless in the false dusk. True, they were small, fragile, rather dark, they wore silver masks, yet—people!
He knew, without asking, they had sat here for ten thousand years.
Yet they were not dead.
They were—he reached out a hand. He tapped the wrist of a man seated on the aisle.
The hand tinkled quietly.
He touched the shoulder of a woman. She chimed. Like a bell.
Yes, they had waited a few thousand years. But then, machines have a property of waiting.
He took a further step and froze.
For a sigh had passed over the crowd.
It was like the sound, the first small sound a newborn babe must make in the moment before it really sucks, bleats and shocks out its wailing surprise at being alive.
A thousand such sighs faded in the velvet portieres.
Beneath the masks, hadn't a thousand mouths drifted ajar?
Two moved. He stopped.
Two thousand eyes blinked wide in the velvet dusk.
He moved again.
A thousand silent heads wheeled on their ancient but well-oiled cogs.
They looked at him.
An unquenchable cold ran wild in him.
He turned to run.
But their eyes would not let him go.
And from the orchestra pit: music.
He looked and saw, slowly rising, an insect agglomeration of instruments, all strange, all grotesquely acrobatic in their configurations. These were being softly thrummed, piped, touched, and massaged in tune.
The audience, with a motion, turned their gaze to the stage.
A light flashed on. The orchestra struck a grand fanfare chord.
The red curtains parted. A spotlight fixed itself to front center, blazing upon an empty dais where sat an empty chair.
Beaumont waited.
No actor appeared.
A stir. Several hands were lifted to left and right. The hands came together. They beat softly in applause.
Now the spotlight wandered off the stage, and up the aisle.
The heads of the audience turned to follow the empty ghost of light. The masks glinted softly. The eyes behind the masks beckoned with warm color.
Beaumont stepped back.
But the light came steadily. It painted the floor with a blunt cone of pure whiteness.
And stopped, nibbling, at his feet.
The audience, turned, applauded even louder now. The theater banged, roared, ricocheted with their ceaseless tide of approbation.
Everything dissolved within him, from cold to warm. He felt as if he had been thrust raw into a downpour of summer rain. The storm rinsed him with gratitude. His heart jumped in great compulsive beats. His fists let go of themselves. His skeleton relaxed. He waited a moment longer, with the rain drenching over his upthrust and thankful cheeks and hammering his hungry eyelids so they fluttered to lock against themselves, and then he felt himself, like a ghost on battlements, led by a ghost light, lean, step, drift, move, down and along the incline, sliding to beautiful ruin, now no longer walking but striding, not striding but in full-tilted run, and the masks glittering, the eyes hot with delight and fantastic welcoming, the flights of hands on the disturbed air in upflung dove-winged rifle-shot flight. He felt the steps collide with his shoes. The applause slammed to a shutdown.
He swallowed. Then slowly he ascended the steps and stood in the full light with a thousand masks fixed to him and two thousand eyes watchful, and lie sat in the empty chair, and the theater grew darker, and the immense hearth-bellow breathing softer out of the lyre-metal throats, and there was only the sound of a mechanical beehive thrived with machinery-musk in the dark.
He held to his knees. He let go. And at last he spoke:
"To be or not to be—"
The silence was complete.
Not a cough. Not a stir. Not a rustle. Not a blink. All waited. Perfection. The perfect audience. Perfect, forever and forever. Perfect. Perfect.
He tossed his words slowly into that perfect pond and felt the soundless ripples disperse and gentle away.
"—that is the question."
He talked. They listened. He knew that they would never let him go now. They would beat him insensible with applause. He would sleep) a child's sleep arid rise to speak again. All of Shakespeare, all of Shaw, all of Moliere, every bit, crumb, lump, joint, and piece. Himself in repertory!
He arose to finish.
Finished, he thought: Bury me! Cover me! Smother me deep!
Obediently, the avalanche came down the mountain.
Cara Corelli found a palace of mirrors.
The maid remained outside.
And Cara Corelli went in.
As she walked through a maze, the mirrors took away a day, and then a week, and then a month and then a year and then two years of time from her face.
It was a palace of splendid and soothing lies. It was like being young once more. It was being surrounded by all those tall bright glass mirror men who would never again in your life tell you the truth.
Cara walked to the center of the palace. By the time she stopped she saw herself twenty-five-years old, in every tall bright mirror face.
She sat down in the middle of the bright maze. She beamed around in happiness.
The maid waited outside for perhaps an hour. And then she went away.
This was a dark place with shapes and sizes as yet unseen. It smelled of lubricating oil, the blood of tyrant lizards with cogs and wheels for teeth, which lay strewn and silent in the dark waiting.
A titan's door slowly gave a slithering roar like a swept-back armored tail, and Parkhill stood in the rich oily wind blowing out around him. He felt as if someone has pasted a white flower on his face. But it was only a sudden surprise of a smile.
His empty hands hung at his sides and they made impulsive and completely unconscious gestures forward. They beggared the air. So, paddling silently, he let himself be moved into the Garage, Machine Shop, Repair Shed, whatever it was.
And rilled with holy delight and a child's holy and unholy glee at what he beheld, he walked and slowly turned.
For as far as his eye could see stood vehicles.
Vehicles that ran on the earth. Vehicles that flew in the air. Vehicles that stood ready with wheels to go in any direction. Vehicles with two wheels. Vehicles with three or four or six or eight. Vehicles that looked like butterflies. Vehicles that resembled ancient motorbikes. Three thousand stood ranked here, four thousand glinted ready there. Another thousand were tilted over, wheels off, viscera exposed, waiting to be repaired. Still another thousand were lifted high on spidery repair hoists, their lovely undersides revealed to view, their discs and tubes and coggeries all intricate and fine and needful of touching, unbolting, revalving, rewiring, oiling, delicately lubricating
Parkhill's palms itched.
He walked forward through the primeval smell of swamp oils among the dead and waiting to be revived ancient but new armored mechanical reptiles, and the more he looked the more he ached his grin.
The City was a city all right, and, to a point, self-sustaining. But, eventually, the rarest butterflies of metal gossamer, gaseous oil, and fiery dream sank to earth, the machines that repaired the machines that repaired the machines grew old, ill, and damaging of themselves. Here then was the Bestial Garage, the slumbrous Elephant's Boneyard where the aluminum dragons crawled rusting out their souls, hopeful of one live person left among so much active but dead metal, that person to put things right. One God of the machines to say, you Lazarus-elevator, rise up! You hovercraft, be reborn! And anoint them with leviathan oils, tap them with magical wrench and send them forth to almost eternal lives in and on the air and above the quicksilver paths.
Parkhill moved among nine hundred robot men and women slaughtered by simple corrosion. He would cure their rust.
Now. If he started now, thought Parkhill, rolling up his sleeves, and staring off down a corridor of machines that ran waiting for a solid mile of garage, shed, hoist, lift, storage bin, oil tank, and strewn shrapnel of tools glittering and ready for his grip; if he started now, he might work his way to the end of the giant's ever-constant garage, accident, collision, and repair works shed in thirty years!
A billion bolts to be tightened. A billion motors to be tinkered! A billion iron tripes to lie under, a grand oil-dripped-upon orphan, alone, alone, alone with the always beautiful and never talking back humming-bird-commotion devices, accoutrements and miraculous contraptions.
His hands weighed him toward the tools. He clutched a wrench. He found a forty-wheeled low running sled. He lay down on it. He sculled the garage in a long whistling ride. The sled scuttled.
Parkhill vanished beneath a great car of some ancient design.
Out of sight, you could hear him working on the gut of the machine. On his back, he talked up at it. And when he slapped it to life, at last, the machine talked back.
Always the silver pathways ran somewhere.
Thousands of years now they had run empty, carrying only dust to destinations away and away among the high and dreaming buildings.
Now, on one traveling path, Aaronson came borne like an aging statue.
And the more the road propelled him, the faster the City exposed itself to his view, the more buildings that passed, the more parks that sprang into sight, the more his smile faded. His color changed.
"Toy," he heard himself whisper. The whisper was ancient. "Just another," and here his voice grew so small it faded away, " … another Toy."
A super-Toy, yes. But his life was full of such and had always been so. If it was not some slot machine it was the next-size dispenser or a jumbo-size razzmatazz hi-fi stereo speaker. From a lifetime of handling metallic sandpaper, he felt his arms rubbed away to a nub. Mere pips, his fingers. No, handless, and lacking wrists. Aaronson, the Seal Boy!!! His mindless flippers clapped applause to a city that was, in reality, no more and no less than an economy-size jukebox ravening under its idiot breath. And—he knew the tune! God help him. He knew the tune.
He blinked just once.
An inner eyelid came down like cold steel.
He turned and tread the silver waters of the path.
He found a moving river of steel to take him back toward the Great Gate itself.
On the way, he met the Corelli maid, wandering lost on her own silver stream.
As for the poet and his wife, their running battle tore echoes everywhere. They cried down thirty avenues, cracked panes in two hundred shops, battered leaves from seventy varieties of park bush and tree, and only ceased when drowned by a thundering fountain display they passed like a rise of clear fireworks upon the metropolitan air.
"The whole thing is," said his wife, punctuating one of his dirtier responses, "you only came along so you could lay hands on the nearest woman and spray her ears with bad breath and worse poetry."
The poet muttered a foul word.
"You're worse than the actor," said his wife. "Always at it. Don't you ever shut tip?"
"Don't you?" he cried. "Ah God, I've curdled inside. Shut up, woman, or I'll throw myself in the founts!"
"No. You haven't bathed in years. You're the pig of the century! Your picture will grace the Swine Herder's Annual next month!"
"That did it!"
Doors slammed on a building.
By the time she got off and ran back and fisted the doors, they were locked.
"Coward!" she shrieked. "Open up!"
A foul word came echoing out, dimly.
"Ah, listen to that sweet silence," he whispered, to himself, in the great shelled dark.
Harpwell found himself in a soothing hugeness, a vast womb-like building, over which hung a canopy of pure serenity, a starless void.
In the middle of this room which was roughly a two-hundred-foot circle stood a device, a machine. In this machine were dials and rheostats and switches, a seat, and a steering wheel
"What kind of vehicle is this?" whispered the poet, but edged near, and bent to touch. "Christ-off-the-cross-and-bearing-mercy, it smells of what? Blood and mere guts? No, for it's clean as a virgin's frock. Still it does fill the nose. Violence. Simple destruction. I can feel the damn carcass tremble like a nervous highbred hound. It's full of stuffs. Let's try a swig."
He sat in the machine.
"What do I swig first? This?"
He snapped a switch.
The Baskerville-hound machine whimpered in its dog slumberings.
"Good beast." He flicked another switch. "How do you go, brute? When the damn device is in full tilt, where to? You lack wheels. Well, surprise me. I dare."
The machine shivered.
The machine bolted.
It ran. It dashed.
He held tight to the steering wheel.
"Holy God!"
For he was on a highway, racing fast.
Air sluiced by. The sky flashed over in running colors.
The speedometer read seventy, eighty.
And the highway ribboned away ahead, flashing toward him. Invisible wheels slapped and banged on an increasingly rough road.
Far away, ahead, a car appeared.
It was running fast. And—
"It's on the wrong side of the road! Do you see that, wife? The wrong side."
Then he realized his wife was not here.
He was alone in a car racing—ninety miles an hour now—toward another car racing at a similar speed.
He veered the wheel.
His vehicle moved to the left.
Almost instantly the other car did a compensating move, and ran back over to the right.
"The damn fool, what does he think—where's the blasted brake?"
He stomped the floor. There was no brake. Here was a strange machine indeed. One that ran as fast as you wished, but never stopped until what? it ran itself down? There was no brake. Nothing but-further accelerators. A whole series of round-buttons on the floor, which, as he tromped them, surged power into the motor.
Ninety, one hundred, one hundred twenty miles an hour.
"God in heaven!" he screamed. "We're going to hit! How do you like that, girl?"
And in the last instant before collision, he imagined she rather liked it fine.
The cars hit. They erupted in gaseous flame. They burst apart in flinders. They tumbled. He felt himself jerked now this way and that. He was a torch hurtled skyward. His arms and legs danced a crazy rigadonn in midair as he felt his peppermint stick bones snap in brittle and agonizing ecstasies. Then, clutching death as a dark mate, gesticulating, he fell away in a black surprise, drifting toward further nothings.
He lay dead.
He lay dead a long while.
Then he opened one eye.
He felt the slow burner under his soul. He felt the bubbled water rising to the top of his mind like tea brewing.
"I'm dead," he said, "but alive. Did you see all that, wife? Dead but alive."
He found himself sitting in the vehicle, upright.
He sat there for ten minutes thinking about all that had happened.
"Well now," he mused. "Was that not interesting? Not to say fascinating? Not to say, almost exhilarating? I mean, sure, it knocked the stuff out of me, scared the soul out one ear and back in the other, hit my wind and tore my gut, broke the bones and shook the wits, but, but, but, wife, but, but, but, clear sweet Meg, Meggy, Megan, I wish you were here, it might tamp the tobacco tars out of your half-ass lungs and bray the mossy graveyard backbreaking meanness from your marrow. Let me see here now, wife, let's have a look, Harpwell-my-husband-the-poet."
He tinkered with the dials.
He thrummed the great hound motor.
"Shall we chance another diversion? Try another embattled picnic excursion? Let's."
And he set the car on its way.
Almost immediately, the vehicle was traveling one hundred and then one hundred fifty miles per hour.
Almost immediately, the opposing car appeared ahead.
"Death," said the poet. "Are you always here, then? Do you hang about? Is this your questing place? Let's test your mettle!"
The car raced. The other car hurtled.
He wheeled over into the other lane.
The other car followed, homing toward Destroy.
"Yes, I see, well, then, this," said the poet.
And switched a switch and jumped another throttle.
In the instant before impact, the two cars transformed themselves. Shuttering through illusory veils, they became jet craft at take-off. Shrieking, the two jets banged flame, tore air, yammered back sound-barrier explosions before the mightiest one of all—as the two bullets impacted, fused, interwove, interlaced blood, mind, and eternal blackness, and fell away into a net of strange and peaceful midnight
I'm dead, he thought again.
And it feels fine, thanks.
He awoke to feel a smile on his face.
He was seated in the vehicle.
Twice dead, he thought, and feeling better each time. Why? isn't that odd? Curiouser and curiouser. Queer beyond queerness.
He thrummed the motor again.
What this time?
Does it locomote? he wondered. How about a big black choo-choo train out of half-primordial times?
And he was on his way, an engineer. The sky flicked over, and the motion-picture screens or whatever they were pressed in with swift illusions of pouring smoke and steaming whistle and huge wheel within wheel on grinding track, and the track ahead wound through hills, and far on up around a mountain came another train, black as a buffalo herd, pouring belches of smoke, on the same two rails, the same track, heading toward wondrous accident.
"I see," said the poet. "I do begin to see. I begin to know what this and what used for, for such as me, the poor wandering idiots of a world, confused, and sore put upon by mothers as soon as dropped from wombs, insulted with Christian guilt, and gone mad from the need of destruction, and collecting a pittance of hurt here and scar tissue there, and a larger portable wife grievance beyond, but one thing sure, we do want to die, we do want to be killed, and here's the very thing for it, in convenient quick pay! So pay it out, machine, dole it out, sweet raving device! Rape away, death! I'm your very man."
And the two locomotives met and climbed each other. Up a black ladder of explosion they wheeled and locked their drive shafts and plastered their slick Negro bellies together and rubbed boilers and beautifully banged the night in a single outflung whirl and flurry of shrapnel and flame. Then the locomotives, in a cumbrous rapine dance, seized and melted together with their violence and passion, gave a monstrous curtsy and fell off the mountain and took a thousand years to go all the way down to the rocky pits.
The poet awoke and immediately grabbed the controls. He was humming under his breath, stunned. He was singing wild tunes. His eyes flashed. His heart beat swiftly.
"More, more, I see it now, I know what to do, more, more, please, Oh God, more, for the truth shall set me free, more!"
He hoofed three, four, five pedals.
He snapped six switches.
The vehicle was auto-jet-locomotive-glider-missile-rocket.
He ran, he steamed, he roared, he soared, he flew.
Cars veered toward him. Locomotives loomed. Jets rammed. Rockets screamed.
And in one wild three-hour spree he hit two hundred cars, rammed twenty trains, blew up ten gliders, exploded forty missiles, and, far out in space, gave up his glorious soul in a final Fourth of July Death celebration as an interplanetary rocket going two hundred thousand miles an hour struck an iron meteor and went beautifully to hell.
In all, in a few short hours he figured he must have been torn apart and put back together a few times less than five hundred.
When it was all over, he sat not touching the wheel, his feet free of the pedals.
After a half hour of sitting there, he began to laugh. He threw his head back and let out great war-whoops. Then he got up, shaking his head, drunker than ever in his life, really drunk now, and he knew he would stay that way forever, and never need drink again.
I'm punished, he thought, really punished at last. Really hurt at last, and hurt enough, over and over, so I will never need hurt again, never need to be destroyed again, never have to collect another insult, or take another wound, or ask for a simple grievance. God bless the genius of man and the inventors of such machines, that enable the guilty to pay and at last be rid of the dark albatross and the awful burden. Thank you, City, thank you, old blueprinter of needful souls. Thank you. And which way out?
A door slid open.
His wife stood waiting for him.
"Well, there you are," she said. "And still drunk."
"No," he said. "Dead."
"Drunk."
"Dead," he said, "beautifully dead at last. Which means, free. I won't need you any more, dead Meg, Meggy-Megan. You're set free, also, like an awful conscience. Go haunt someone else, girl. Go destroy. I forgive you your sins on me, for I have at last forgiven myself. I am off the Christian hook. I am the dear wandering dead who, dead, can at last: live. Go and do likewise, lady. Inside with you. Be punished and set free. So long, Meg. Farewell. Toodle-oo."
He wandered away.
"Where do you think you're going?" she cried.
"Why, out into life and the blood of life and happy at last."
"Come back here!" she screamed.
"You can't stop the dead, for they wander the universe, happy as children in the dark field."
"Harpwell!" she brayed. "Harpwell!"
But he stepped on a river of silver metal.
And let the dear river bear him laughing until the tears glittered on his cheeks, away and away from the shriek and the bray and the scream of that woman, what was her name? no matter, back there, and gone.
And when he reached the Gate he walked out and along the canal in the fine day, heading toward the far towns.
By that time, he was singing every old tune he had known as a child of six.
It was a church.
No, not a church.
Wilder let the door swing shut.
He stood in cathedral darkness, waiting.
The roof, if roof there was, breathed up in a great susoense, flowed up beyond reach or sight.
The floor, if floor there was, was a mere firmness beneath. It, too, was black.
And then, the stars came out. It was like that first night of childhood when his father had taken him out beyond the city to a hill where the lights could not diminish the Universe. And there were a thousand, no ten thousand, no ten million billion stars filling the darkness. The stars were manifold arid bright, and they did not care. Even then he had known: they do not care. If I breathe or do not breathe, live or die, the eyes that look from all around don't care. And he had seized his father's hand and gripped tight, as if he might fall up into that abyss.
Now, in this building, he was full of the old terror and the old sense of beauty and the old silent crying out after mankind. The stars filled him with pity for small men lost in so much size.
Then yet another thing happened.
Beneath his feet, space opened wide and let through yet another billion sparks of light.
He was suspended as a fly is held upon a vast telescopic lens. He walked on a water of space. He stood upon a transparent flex of great eye, and all about him, as on a night in winter, beneath foot and above head, in all directions, were nothing but stars.
So, in the end, it was a church, it was a cathedral, a multitude of farflung universal shrines, here a worshipping of Horsehead Nebula, there Orion's galaxy, and there Andromeda, like the head of God, fiercely gazed and thrust through the raw dark stuffs of night to stab his soul and pin it writhing against the backside of his flesh.
God, everywhere, fixed him with shutterless and unblinking eyes.
And he, a bacterial shard of that same Flesh, stared back and winced but the slightest.
He waited. And a planet drifted upon the void. It spun by once with a great mellow autumn face. It circled and came under him.
And he stood upon a far world of green grass and great lush trees, where the air was fresh, and a river ran by like the rivers of childhood, flashing the sun and leaping with fish.
He knew that he had traveled very far to reach this world. Behind him lay the rocket. Behind lay a century of travel, of sleeping, of waiting, and now, here was the reward.
"Mine?" he asked the simple air, the simple grass, the long simplicity of water that spelled by in the shallow sands.
And the world answered wordless: yours.
Yours without the long travel and the boredom, yours without ninety-nine years of flight from Earth, of sleeping in kept tubes, of intravenous feedings, of nightmares dreamt of Earth lost and gone, yours without torture, without pain, yours without trial and error, failure and destruction. Yours without sweat and terror. Yours without a falling down of tears. Yours. Yours.
But Wilder did not put out his hands to accept.
And the sun dimmed in the alien sky.
And the world drifted from under his feet.
And yet another world swam up and passed in a huge parade of even brighter glories.
And this world, too, spun up to take his weight. And here, if anything, the fields were richer green, the mountains capped with melting snows, far fields ripening with strange harvests, and scythes waiting on the edge of fields for him to lift and sweep arid cut the grain and live out his life any way that he might.
Yours. The merest touch of weather upon the hairs within his ear said this. Yours.
And Wilder, without shaking his head, moved back. He did not say no. He thought his rejection.
And the grass died in the fields.
The mountains crumbled.
The river shallows ran to dust.
And the world sprang away.
And Wilder stood again in space where God had stood before creating a world out of Chaos.
And at last he spoke and said to himself:
"It would be easy. O Lord, yes, I'd like that. No work, nothing, just accept. But … You can't give rnc what I want."
He looked at the stars.
"Nothing can be given, ever."
The stars were growing dim.
"It's really very simple. I must borrow, I must earn. I must take."
The stars quivered and died.
"Much obliged and thank you, no."
The stars were all gone.
He turned and, without looking back, walked upon darkness: He hit the door with his palm. He strode out into the City.
He refused to hear if the machine universe behind him cried out in a great chorus, all cries and wounds, like a woman scorned. The crockery in a vast robot kitchen fell. By the time it hit the floor, he was gone.
It was a Museum of Weapons.
The hunter walked among the cases.
He opened a case and hefted a weapon, constructed like a spider's antennae.
It hummed, and a flight of metal bees sizzled out the rifle bore, flew away, and stung a target-mannequin some fifty yards away, then fell lifeless, clattering to the floor.
The hunter nodded with admiration, and put the rifle back in the case.
He prowled on, curious as a child, testing yet other weapons here and there which dissolved glass or caused metal to run in bright yellow pools of molten lava.
"Excellent!" "Fine!" "Absolutely great!"
His cry rang out again and again as he slammed cases open and shut, and finally chose the gun.
It was a gun that, without fuss or fury, did away with matter. You pressed the button, there was a brief discharge of blue light, and the target simply vanished. No blood. No bright lava. No trace.
"All right," he announced, leaving the Place of Guns, "we have the weapon. How about the Game, the Grandest Beast ever in the Long Hunt?"
He leapt onto the moving sidewalk.
An hour later he had passed a thousand buildings and scanned a thousand open parks without itching his finger.
He moved uneasily from treadway to treadway, shifting speeds now in this direction, now in that.
Until at last he saw a river of metal that sped underground.
Instinctively, he jumped toward that.
The metal stream carried him down into the secret gut of the City.
Here all was warm blood darkness. Here strange pumps moved the pulse of the City. Here were distilled the sweats that lubricated the roadways and lifted the elevators and swarmed the offices and stores with motion.
The hunter half crouched on the roadway. His eyes squinted. Perspiration gathered in his palms. His trigger finger greased the metal gun, sliding.
"Yes," he whispered. "By God, now. This is it. The City itself … the Great Beast. Why didn't I think of that? The Animal City, the terrible prey. It has men for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It kills them with machines. It munches their bones like breadsticks. It spits them out like toothpicks. It lives long after they die. The City, by God, the City. Well now … "
He glided through dark grottoes of television eyes which showed him remote parkways and high towers.
Deeper within the belly of the underground world he sank as the river lowered itself. He passed a school of computers that chattered in maniac chorus. He shuddered as a cloud of paper confetti from one titan machine, holes punched out to perhaps record his passing, fell upon him in a whispered snow.
He raised his gun. He fired.
The machine disappeared.
He fired again. A skeleton strutwork under yet another machine vanished.
The City screamed.
At first very low and then very high, then, rising, falling, like a siren. Lights flashed. Bells began to ricochet alarums. The metal river shuddered under his feet, slowed. He fired at television screens which glared all white upon him. They blinked out and did not exist.
The City screamed higher until he raved against it, himself, and the marrow of his bones shook out an insanity of black dust.
He did not see, until it was too late, that the road on which he sped fell into the gnashing maw of a machine that was used for some purpose long forgotten centuries before.
He thought that by pressing the trigger he would make the terrible mouth disappear. It did indeed vanish. But as the roadway sped on and he whirled and fell as it picked up speed, he realized at last that his weapon did not truly destroy, it merely made invisible what was there and what still remained though unseen.
He gave a terrible cry to match the cry of the City. He flung out the gun in a last blow. The gun went into cogs and wheels and teeth and was twisted down.
The last thing he saw was a deep elevator shaft that fell away for perhaps a mile into the earth.
He knew that it might take him two minutes to hit the bottom. He shrieked.
The worst thing was, he would be conscious … all the way down …
The rivers shook. The silver rivers trembled. The pathways, shocked, convulsed the metal shores through which they sped.
Wilder, traveling, was almost knocked flat by the concussion.
What had caused the concussion, he could not see. Perhaps, far off, there was a cry, a murmur of dreadful sound, which swiftly faded.
Wilder moved on. The silver track threaded on. But the City seemed poised, agape. The City seemed tensed. Its huge and various muscles were cramped, alert.
Feeling this, Wilder began to walk as well as be moved by the swift path.
"Thank God. There's the Gate. The sooner I'm out of this place the happier I'll—"
The Gate was indeed there, not a hundred yards away. But, on the instant, as if hearing his declaration, the river stopped. It shivered. Then it started to move back, taking him where he did not wish to go.
Incredulous, Wilder spun about, and, in spinning, fell. He clutched at the stuffs of the rushing sidewalk.
His face, pressed to the vibrant grillework of the river-rushing pavement, heard the machineries mesh and mill beneath, humming and agroan, forever sluicing, forever feverish for journeys and mindless excursions. Beneath the calm metal, embattlements of hornets stung and buzzed, lost bees bumbled and subsided. Collapsed, he saw the Gate lost away behind. Burdened, he remembered at last the extra weight upon his back, the jet-power equipment which might give him wings.
He jammed his hand to the switch on his belt. And in the instant before the sidewalk might have pulsed him off among sheds and museum walls, he was airborne.
Flying, he hovered, then swam the air back to hang above a casual Parkhill gazing up, all covered with grease and smiling from a dirty face. Beyond Parkhill, at the Gate, stood the frightened maid. Beyond even further, near the yacht at the landing, stood Aaronson, back turned to the City, nervous to be moving on.
"Where are the others?" cried Wilder.
"Oh, they won't be back," said Parkhill, easily. "It figures, doesn't it? I mean, it's quite a place."
"Place!" said Wilder, hovered now up, now down, turning slowly, apprehensive. "We've got to get them out! It's not safe."
"It's safe if you like it. I like it," said Parkhill.
And all the while there was a gathering of earthquake in the ground and in the air, which Parkhill chose to ignore.
"You're leaving, of course," he said, as if nothing were wrong. "I knew you would. Why?"
"Why?" Wilder wheeled like a dragonfly before a trembling of storm wind. Buffeted up, buffeted down, he flung his words at Parkhill, who didn't bother to duck but smiled up and accepted. "Good God, Sam, the place is Hell. The Martians had enough sense to get out. They saw they had overbuilt themselves. The damn City does everything, which is too much! Sam!"
But at that instant, they both looked round and up. For the sky was shelling over. Great lids were vising in the ceiling. Like an immense flower, the tops of buildings were petalling out to cover themselves. Windows were shutting down. Doors were slamming. A sound of fired cannons echoed through the streets.
The Gate was thundering shut.
The twin jaws of the Gate, shuddering, were in motion.
Wilder cried out, spun round, and dived.
He heard the maid below him. He saw her reach up. Then, swooping, he gathered her in. He kicked the air. The jet lifted them both.
Like a bullet to a target he rammed for the Gate. But an instant before, burdened, he reached it, the Gates banged together. He was barely able to veer course and soar upward along the raw metal as the entire City shook with the roar of the steel.
Parkhill shouted below. And Wilder was flying up, up along the wall, looking this way and that.
Everywhere, the sky was closing in. The petals were coming down, coming down. There was only a last small patch of stone sky to his right. He blasted for that. And kicking, made it through, flying, as the final flange of steel clipped into place, and the City was closed to itself.
He hung for a moment, suspended, and then flew down along the outer wall to the dock where Aaron-son stood by the yacht staring at the huge shut Gates.
"Parkhill," whispered Wilder, looking at the City, the walls, the Gates. "You fool. You damned fool."
"Fools, all of them," said Aaronson, and turned away. "Fools. Fools."
They waited a moment longer and listened to the City, humming, alive, kept to itself, its great mouth filled with a few bits of warmth, a few lost people somewhere hid away in there. The Gates would stay shut now, forever. The City had what it needed to go on a long while.
Wilder looked back at the place, as the yacht took them back out of the mountain and away up die canal.
They passed the poet a mile further on, walking along the rim of the canal. He waved them on. "No. No, thanks. I feel like walking. It's a fine day. Goodbye. Go on."
The towns lay ahead. Small towns. Small enough to be run by men instead of running them. He heard the brass music. He saw the neon lights at dusk. He made out the junkyards in the fresh night under tire stars.
Beyond the towns stood the silver rockets, tall, waiting to be fired off and away toward the wilderness of stars.
"Real," whispered the rockets, "real stuff. Real travel. Real time. Real space. No gifts. Nothing free. Just a lot of good hard work."
The yacht touched into its home dock.
"Rockets, by God," he murmured. "Wait till I get my hands on you."
He ran away in the night, to do just that.

CHRISTUS APOLLO—
CANTATA CELEBRATING THE EIGHTH DAY OF CREATION AND THE PROMISE OF THE NINTH

A Voice spoke in the dark,
And there was Light.
And summoned up by Light upon the Earth
The creatures swam
And moved unto the land
And lived in garden wilderness;
All this, we know.
The Seven Days are written in our blood
With hand of Fire.
And now we children of the seven eternal days
Inheritors of this, the Eighth Day of God,
The long Eighth Day of Man,
Stand upright in a weather of Time
In downfell snow
And hear the birds of morning
And much want wings
And look upon the beckonings of stars,
And need their fire.
In this time of Christmas,
We celebrate the Eighth Day of Man,
The Eighth Day of God,
Two billion years unending
From the first sunrise on Earth
To the last sunrise at our Going Away.
And the Ninth Day of the History of God
And the flesh of God which names itself Man
Will be spent on wings of fire
Claimed from sun and far burnings of sun starlight.
And the Ninth Day's sunrise
Will show us forth in light and wild surmise
Upon an even further shore.
We seek new Gardens there to know ourselves.
We seek new Wilderness,
And send us forth in wandering search.
Apollo's missions move, and Christus seek,
And wonder as we look among the stars
Did He know these?
In some far universal Deep
Did He tread Space
And visit worlds beyond our blood-warm dreaming?
Did He come down on lonely shore by sea
Not unlike Galilee
And are there Mangers on far worlds that knew His light?
And Virgins?
Sweet Pronouncements?
Annunciations?
Visitations from angelic hosts?
And, shivering vast light among ten billion lights,
Was there some Star much like the star at Bethlehem
That struck the sight with awe and revelation
Upon a cold and most strange morn?
On worlds gone wandering and lost from this
Did Wise Men gather in the dawn
In cloudy steams of Beast
Within a place of straw now quickened to a Shrine
To look upon a stranger Child than ours?
How many stars of Bethlehem burnt bright
Beyond Orion or Centauri's blinding arc?
How many miracles of birth all innocent
Have blessed those worlds?
Does Herod tremble there
In dread facsimile of our dark and murderous King?
Does that mad keeper of an unimaginable realm
Send stranger soldiers forth
To slaughter down the Innocents
Of lands beyond the Horsehead Nebula?
It must be so.
For in this time of Christmas
In the long Day totalling up to Eight,
We see the light, we know the dark;
And creatures lifted, born, thrust free of so much night
No matter what the world or time or circumstance
Must love the light,
So, children of all lost unnumbered suns
Must fear the dark
Which mingles in a shadowing-forth on air.
And swarms the blood.
No matter what the color, shape, or size
Of beings who keep souls like breathing coals
In long midnights,
They must need saving of themselves.
So on far worlds in snowfalls deep and clear
Imagine how the rounding out of some dark year
Might celebrate with birthing one miraculous child!
A child?
Born in Andromeda's out-swept mysteries?
Then count its hands, its fingers,
Eyes, and most incredible holy limbs!
The sum of each?
No matter. Cease.
Let Child be fire as blue as water under Moon.
Let Child sport free in tides with human-seeming fish.
Let ink of octopi inhabit blood
Let skin take acid rains of chemistry
All falling down in nightmare storms of cleansing burn.
Christ wanders in the Universe
A flesh of stars,
He takes on creature shapes
To suit the mildest elements,
He dresses him in flesh beyond our ken.
There He walks, glides, flies, shambling of strangeness.
Here He walks Men.
Among the ten trillion beams
A billion Bible scrolls are scored
In hieroglyphs among God's amplitudes of worlds;
In alphabet multitudinous
Tongues which are not quite tongues
Sigh, sibilate, wonder, cry:
As Christ comes manifest from a thunder-crimsoned sky.
He walks upon the molecules of seas
All boiling stews of beast
All maddened broth and brew and rising up of yeast.
There Christ by many names is known.
We call him thus.
They call him otherwise.
His name on any mouth would be a sweet surprise.
He comes with gifts for all,
Here: wine and bread.
There: nameless foods
At breakfasts where the morsels fall from stars
And Last Suppers are doled forth with stuff of dreams.
So sit they there in times before the Man is crucified.
Here He has long been dead.
There He has not yet died.
Yet, still unsure, and all being doubt,
Much frightened man on Earth does cast about
And clothe himself in steel
And borrow fire
And himself in the great glass of the careless Void admire.
Man builds him rockets
And on thunder strides
In humble goings-forth
And most understandable prides.
Fearing that all else slumbers,
That ten billion worlds lie still,
We, grateful for the Prize and benefit of life,
Go to offer bread and harvest wine;
The blood and flesh of Him we Will
To other stars and worlds about those stars.
We cargo holy flesh
On stranger visitations,
Send forth angelic hosts,
To farflung worlds
To tell our walking on the waters of deep Space,
Arrivals, swift departures
Of most miraculous man
Who, God fuse-locked in every cell
Beats holy blood
And treads the tidal flood
And ocean shore of Universe,
A miracle of fish
We father, gather, build and strew
In metals to the winds
That circle Earth and wander Night beyond till Nights.
We soar, all arch-angelic, fire-sustained
In vast cathedral, aery apse, in domeless vault
Of constellations all blind dazzlement.
Christ is not dead
Nor does God sleep
While waking Man
Goes striding on the Deep
To birth ourselves anew
And love rebirth
From fear of straying long
On outworn Earth.
One harvest in, we broadcast seed for further reaping.
Thus ending Death And Night,
And Time's demise,
And senseless weeping.
We seek for mangers in the Pleides
Where man the god-fleshed wandering babe
May lay him down with such as these
Who once drew round and worshipped innocence.
New Mangers lie waiting!
New Wise men Descry
Our hosts of machineries
Which write immortal life
And sign it God!
Down, down Alien skies.
And flown and gone, arrived and bedded safe to sleep
Upon some winters morning deep
Ten billion years of light
From where we stand us now and sing,
There will be time to cry eternal gratitudes
Time to know and see and love the Gift of Life itself,
Always diminished,
Always restored,
Out of one hand and into the other
Of the Lord.
Then wake we in that far lost
Nightmare keep of Beast
And see our star recelebrated in an East
Beyond all Easts.
Beyond a snowdrift sifting down of stars.
In this time of Christmas
Think on that: Morn ahead!
For this let all your fears, your cries,
Your tears, your blood and prayers be shed!
All numb and wild one day
You shall be reborn
And hear the Trump break forth from rocket-trembled air
All humbled, all shorn O
f pride, but free of despair.
Now listen! Now hear!
It is the Ninth Day's morn!
Christ is risen!
God survives!
Gather, Universe!
Look, ye stars!
In the exultant; countries of Space
In a sudden simple pasture
Far beyond Andromeda!
O Glory, Glory, a New Christmas
Torn
From the very pitch and rim of Death,
Snatched from his universal grip,
His teeth, his most cold breath!
Under a most strange sun
O Christ, O God,
O man breathed out of most incredible stuffs,
You are the Savior's Savior,
God's pulse and heart-companion,
You! The Host He lifts
On high to consecrate;
His dear need to know and touch and cry wonders
At Himself.
In this time of Christmas
Prepare
In this holy time
Know yourself most rare!
Beyond the vast Abyss
See those men grown Wise
Who gather with their gifts
Which are but Life!
And Life that knows no end.
Behold the rockets, more than chaff, on air,
All seed that save a holy seed
And cast it everywhere in mindless Dark.
In this time of Christmas
This holy time of Christmas,
Like Him, you are God's son!
One Son? Many?
All are gathered now to One
And will wake cradled in Beast-summer breath
That warms the sleeping child to life eternal.
You must go there.
In the long winter of Space
And lie you down in grateful innocence
At last to sleep.
O New Christmas,
O God, far-motioning.
O Christ-of-many-fleshed made one,
Leave Earth!
God Himself cries out.
He Goes to Prepare the Way
For your rebirth
In a new time of Christmas,
A holy time of Christmas,
This New Time of Christmas,
From all this stay?
No, Man. You must not linger, wonder.
No, Christ. You must not pause.
Now.
Now.
It is the Time of Going Away.
Arise, and go.
Be born. Be born.
Welcome the morning of the Ninth Day.
It is the Time of Going away.
Praise God for this Annunciation!
Give praise,
Rejoice!
For the time of Christmas
And the Ninth Day,
Which is Forever's Celebration!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. He has published over 300 stories during the past twenty-five years, and fourteen books including stories and novels. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston's Moby Dick, and his own novel, Fahrenheit 451, has been made into a motion picture by Francois Truffaut. His more recent books include S Is for Space, The Vintage Bradbury and Twice 22. Mr. Bradbury lives in Los Angeles, California.

Version History

[14 apr 2003—scanned by BookWorm]

[16 jun 2003—proofread by Wiz3]

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC! - Ray Bradbury

eVersion 1.0—click for scan notes

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC!

Ray Bradbury

This book, a bit late in the day, but with admiration, affection, and friendship, is for NORMAN CORWIN.

—WALT WHITMAN

THE KILIMANJARO DEVICE

THE TERRIBLE CONFLAGRATION UP AT THE PLACE

TOMORROW'S CHILD

THE WOMEN

CHICKEN MOTEL

DOWNWIND FROM GETTYSBURG

YES, WE'LL GATHER AT THE RIVER

THE COLD WIND AND THE WARM

NIGHT CALL, COLLECT

THE HAUNTING OF THE NEW

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC!

THE CLOCK SHOP

Fantoccini Our Specialty.

Rabbits on walls, no problem.
"Rabbits on walls?"
I held up my fingers in profile as if I held them before a candle flame, and wiggled the "ears."
"Here's a rabbit, here's a wolf, here's a crocodile."
"Of course," said Agatha.
And we were at the desk. Quiet music drifted about us. Somewhere behind the walls, there was a waterfall of machinery flowing softly. As we arrived at the desk, the lighting changed to make us look warmer, happier, though we were still cold.
All about us in niches and cases, and hung from ceilings on wires and strings were puppets and marionettes, and Balinese kite-bamboo-translucent dolls which, held to the moonlight, might acrobat your most secret nightmares or dreams. In passing, the breeze set up by our bodies stirred the various hung souls on their gibbets. It was like an immense lynching on a holiday at some English crossroads four hundred years before.
You see? I know my history.
Agatha blinked about with disbelief and then some touch of awe and finally disgust.
"Well, if that's what they are, let's go."
"Tush," said Father.
"Well," she protested, "you gave me one of those dumb things with strings two years ago and the strings were in a zillion knots by dinnertime. I threw the whole thing out the window."
"Patience," said Father.
"We shall see what we can do to eliminate the strings."
The man behind the desk had spoken.
We all turned to give him our regard.
Rather like a funeral-parlor man, he had the cleverness not to smile. Children are put off by older people who smile too much. They smell a catch, right off.
Unsmiling, but not gloomy or pontifical, the man said, "Guido Fantoccini, at your service. Here's how we do it, Miss Agatha Simmons, aged eleven."
Now there was a really fine touch.
He knew that Agatha was only ten. Add a year to that, and you're halfway home. Agatha grew an inch. The man went on:
"There."
And he placed a golden key in Agatha's hand.
"To wind them up instead of strings?"
"To wind them up." The man nodded.
"Pshaw!" said Agatha.
Which was her polite form of "rabbit pellets."
"God's truth. Here is the key to your Do-it-Yourself, Select Only the Best, Electrical Grandmother. Every morning you wind her up. Every night you let her run down. You're in charge. You are guardian of the Key."
He pressed the object in her palm where she looked at it suspiciously.
I watched him. He gave me a side wink which said, well, no … but aren't keys fun?
I winked back before she lifted her head.
"Where does this fit?"
"You'll see when the time comes. In the middle of her stomach, perhaps, or up her left nostril or in her right ear."
That was good for a smile as the man arose.
"This way, please. Step light. Onto the moving stream. Walk on the water, please. Yes. There."
He helped to float us. We stepped from rug that was forever frozen onto rug that whispered by.
It was a most agreeable river which floated us along on a green spread of carpeting that rolled forever through halls and into wonderfully secret dim caverns where voices echoed back our own breathing or sang like Oracles to our questions.
"Listen," said the salesman, "the voices of all kinds of women. Weigh and find just the right one … !"
And listen we did, to all the high, low, soft, loud, in-between, half-scolding, half-affectionate voices saved over from times before we were born.
And behind us, Agatha tread backward, always fighting the river, never catching up, never with us, holding off.
"Speak," said the salesman. "Yell."
And speak and yell we did.
"Hello. You there! This is Timothy, hi!"
"What shall I say!" I shouted. "Help!"
Agatha walked backward, mouth tight.
Father took her hand. She cried out.
"Let go! No, no! I won't have my voice used! I won't!"
"Excellent." The salesman touched three dials on a small machine he held in his hand.
On the side of the small machine we saw three oscillograph patterns mix, blend, and repeat our cries.
The salesman touched another dial and we heard our voices fly off amidst the Delphic caves to hang upside down, to cluster, to beat words all about, to shriek, and the salesman itched another knob to add, perhaps, a touch of this or a pinch of that, a breath of mother's voice, all unbeknownst, or a splice of father's outrage at the morning's paper or his peaceable one-drink voice at dusk. Whatever it was the salesman did, whispers danced all about us like frantic vinegar gnats, fizzed by lightning, settling round until at last a final switch was pushed and a voice spoke free of a far electronic deep:
"Nefertiti," it said.
Timothy froze. I froze. Agatha stopped treading water.
"Nefertiti?" asked Tim.
"What does that mean?" demanded Agatha.
"I know."
The salesman nodded me to tell.
"Nefertiti," I whispered, "is Egyptian for The Beautiful One Is Here."
"The Beautiful One Is Here," repeated Timothy.
"Nefer," said Agatha, "titi."
And we all turned to stare into that soft twilight, that deep far place from which the good warm soft voice came.
And she was indeed there.
And, by her voice, she was beautiful …
That was it.
That was, at least, the most of it.
The voice seemed more important than all the rest.
Not that we didn't argue about weights and measures:
She should not be bony to cut us to the quick, nor so fat we might sink out of sight when she squeezed us.
Her hand pressed to ours, or brushing our brow in the middle of sick-fever nights, must not be marble-cold, dreadful, or oven-hot, oppressive, but somewhere between. The nice temperature of a baby-chick held in the hand after a long night's sleep and just plucked from beneath a contemplative hen; that, that was it.
Oh, we were great ones for detail. We fought and argued and cried, and Timothy won on the color of her eyes, for reasons to be known later.
Grandmother's hair? Agatha, with girl's ideas, though reluctantly given, she was in charge of that.
We let her choose from a thousand harp strands hung in filamentary tapestries like varieties of rain we ran amongst. Agatha did not run happily, but seeing we boys would mess things in tangles, she told us to move aside.
And so the bargain shopping through the dime-store inventories and the Tiffany extensions of the Ben Franklin Electric Storm Machine and Fantoccini Pantomime Company was done.
And the always flowing river ran its tide to an end and deposited us all on a far shore in the late day …
It was very clever of the Fantoccini people, after that.
How?
They made us wait.
They knew we were not won over. Not completely, no, nor half completely.
Especially Agatha, who turned her face to her wall and saw sorrow there and put her hand out again and again to touch it. We found her fingernail marks on the wallpaper each morning, in strange little silhouettes, half beauty, half nightmare. Some could be erased with a breath, like ice flowers on a winter pane. Some could not be rubbed out with a washcloth, no matter how hard you tried.
And meanwhile, they made us wait.
So we fretted out June.
So we sat around July.
So we groused through August and then on August 29, "I have this feeling," said Timothy, and we all went out after breakfast to sit on the lawn.
Perhaps we had smelled something on Father's conversation the previous night, or caught some special furtive glance at the sky or the freeway Rapped briefly and then lost in his gaze. Or perhaps it was merely the way the wind blew the ghost curtains out over our beds, making pale messages all night.
For suddenly there we were in the middle of the grass, Timothy and I, with Agatha, pretending no curiosity, up on the porch, hidden behind the potted geraniums.
We gave her no notice. We knew that if we acknowledged her presence, she would flee, so we sat and watched the sky where nothing moved but birds and highflown jets, and watched the freeway where a thousand cars might suddenly deliver forth our Special Gift … but … nothing.
At noon we chewed grass and lay low …
At one o'clock, Timothy blinked his eyes.
And then, with incredible precision, it happened.
It was as if the Fantoccini people knew our surface tension.
All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves.
Well, as if knowing our long wait must absolutely end within one minute! this second! no more, God, forget it!
At that instant, I repeat, the clouds above our house opened wide and let forth a helicopter like Apollo driving his chariot across mythological skies.
And the Apollo machine swam down on its own summer breeze, wafting hot winds to cool, reweaving our hair, smartening our eyebrows, applauding our pant legs against our shins, making a flag of Agatha's hair on the porch and thus settled like a vast frenzied hibiscus on our lawn, the helicopter slid wide a bottom drawer and deposited upon the grass a parcel of largish size, no sooner having laid same then the vehicle, with not so much as a god bless or farewell, sank straight up, disturbed the calm air with a mad ten thousand flourishes and then, like a skyborne dervish, tilted and fell off to be mad some other place.
Timothy and I stood riven for a long moment looking at the packing case, and then we saw the crowbar taped to the top of the raw pine lid and seized it and began to pry and creak and squeal the boards off, one by one, and as we did this I saw Agatha sneak up to watch and I thought, thank you, God, thank you that Agatha never saw a coffin, when Mother went away, no box, no cemetery, no earth, just words in a big church, no box, no box like this … !
The last pine plank fell away.
Timothy and I gasped. Agatha, between us now, gasped, too.
For inside the immense raw pine package was the most beautiful idea anyone ever dreamt and built.
Inside was the perfect gift for any child from seven to seventy-seven.
We stopped up our breaths. We let them out in cries of delight and adoration.
Inside the opened box was …
A mummy.
Or, first anyway, a mummy case, a sarcophagus!
"Oh, no!" Happy tears filled Timothy's eyes.
"It can't be!" said Agatha.
"It is, it is!"
"Our very own?"
"Ours!"
"It must be a mistake!"
"Sure, they'll want it back!"
"They can't have it!"
"Lord, Lord, is that real gold!? Real hieroglyphs! Run your fingers over them!"
"Let me!"
"Just like in the museums! Museums!"
We all gabbled at once. I think some tears fell from my own eyes to rain upon the case.
"Oh, they'll make the colors run!"
Agatha wiped the rain away.
And the golden mask face of the woman carved on the sarcophagus lid looked back at us with just the merest smile which hinted at our own joy, which accepted the overwhelming upsurge of a love we thought had drowned forever but now surfaced into the sun.
Not only did she have a sun-metal face stamped and beaten out of purest gold, with delicate nostrils and a mouth that was both firm and gentle, but her eyes, fixed into their sockets, were cerulean or amethystine or lapus lazuli, or all three, minted and fused together, and her body was covered over with lions and eyes and ravens, and her hands were crossed upon her carved bosom and in one gold mitten she clenched a thonged whip for obedience, and in the other a fantastic ranuncula, which makes for obedience out of love, so the whip lies unused …
And as our eyes ran down her hieroglyphs it came to all three of us at the same instant:
"Why, those signs!" "Yes, the hen tracks!" "The birds, the snakes!"
They didn't speak tales of the Past.
They were hieroglyphs of the Future.
This was the first queen mummy delivered forth in all time whose papyrus inkings etched out the next month, the next season, the next year, the next lifetime!
She did not mourn for time spent.
No. She celebrated the bright coinage yet to come, banked, waiting, ready to be drawn upon and used.
We sank to our knees to worship that possible time.
First one hand, then another, probed out to niggle, twitch, touch, itch over the signs.
"There's me, yes, look! Me, in sixth grade!" said Agatha, now in the fifth. "See the girl with my-colored hair and wearing my gingerbread suit?"
"There's me in the twelfth year of high school!" said Timothy, so very young now but building taller stilts every week and stalking around the yard.
"There's me," I said, quietly, warm, "in college. The guy wearing glasses who runs a little to fat. Sure. Heck." I snorted. "That's me."
The sarcophagus spelled winters ahead, springs to squander, autumns to spend with all the golden and rusty and copper leaves like coins, and over all, her bright sun symbol, daughter-of-Ra eternal face, forever above our horizon, forever an illumination to tilt our shadows to better ends.
"Hey!" we all said at once, having read and reread our Fortune-Told scribblings, seeing our lifelines and lovelines, inadmissible, serpentined over, around, and down. "Hey!"
And in one seance table-lifting feat, not telling each other what to do, just doing it, we pried up the bright sarcophagus lid, which had no hinges but lifted out like cup from cup, and put the lid aside.
And within the sarcophagus, of course, was the true mummy!
And she was like the image carved on the lid, but more so, more beautiful, more touching because human shaped, and shrouded all in new fresh bandages of linen, round and round, instead of old and dusty cerements.
And upon her hidden face was an identical golden mask, younger than the first, but somehow, strangely wiser than the first.
And the linens that tethered her limbs had symbols on them of three sorts, one a girl of ten, one a boy of nine, one a boy of thirteen.
A series of bandages for each of us!
We gave each other a startled glance and a sudden bark of laughter.
Nobody said the bad joke, but all thought:
She's all wrapped up in us!
And we didn't care. We loved the joke. We loved whoever had thought to make us part of the ceremony we now went through as each of us seized arid began to unwind each of his or her particular serpentines of delicious stuffs!
The lawn was soon a mountain of linen.
The woman beneath the covering lay there, waiting.
"Oh, no," cried Agatha. "She's dead, too!"
She ran. I stopped her. "Idiot. She's not dead or alive. Where's your key?"
"Key?"
"Dummy," said Tim, "the key the man gave you to wind her up!"
Her hand had already spidered along her blouse to where the symbol of some possible new religion hung. She had strung it there, against her own skeptic's muttering, and now she held it in her sweaty palm.
"Go on," said Timothy. "Put it in!"
"But where?"
"Oh for God's sake! As the man said, in her right armpit or left ear. Gimme!"
And he grabbed the key and impulsively moaning with impatience and not able to find the proper insertion slot, prowled over the prone figure's head and bosom and at last, on pure instinct, perhaps for a lark, perhaps just giving up the whole damned mess, thrust the key through a final shroud of bandage at the navel.
On the instant: spunnng!
The Electrical Grandmother's eyes flicked wide!
Something began to hum and whir. It was as if Tim had stirred up a hive of hornets with an ornery stick.
"Oh," gasped Agatha, seeing he had taken the game away, "let me!"
She wrenched the key.
Grandma's nostrils flared! She might snort up steam, snuff out fire!
"Me!" I cried, and grabbed the key and gave it a huge … twist!
The beautiful woman's mouth popped wide.
"Me!"
"Me!"
"Me!"
Grandma suddenly sat up.
We leapt back.
We knew we had, in a way, slapped her alive.
She was born, she was born!
Her head swiveled all about. She gaped. She mouthed. And the first thing she said was:
Laughter.
Where one moment we had backed off, now the mad sound drew us near to peer as in a pit where crazy folk are kept with snakes to make them well.
It was a good laugh, full and rich and hearty, and it did not mock, it accepted. It said the world was a wild place, strange, unbelievable, absurd if you wished, but all in all, quite a place. She would not dream to find another. She would not ask to go back to sleep.
She was awake now. We had awakened her. With a glad shout, she would go with it all.
And go she did, out of her sarcophagus, out of her winding sheet, stepping forth, brushing off, looking around as for a mirror. She found it.
The reflections in our eyes.
She was more pleased than disconcerted with what she found there. Her laughter faded to an amused smile.
For Agatha, at the instant of birth, had leapt to hide on the porch.
The Electrical Person pretended not to notice.
She turned slowly on the green lawn near the shady street, gazing all about with new eyes, her nostrils moving as if she breathed the actual air and this the first morn of the lovely Garden and she with no intention of spoiling the game by biting the apple
Her gaze fixed upon my brother.
"You must be—?"
"Timothy. Tim," he offered.
"And you must be—?"
"Tom," I said.
How clever again of the Fantoccini Company. They knew. She knew. But they had taught her to pretend not to know. That way we could feel great, we were the teachers, telling her what she already knew! How sly, how wise.
"And isn't there another boy?" said the woman.
"Girl!" a disgusted voice cried from somewhere on the porch.
"Whose name is Alicia—?"
"Agatha!" The far voice, started in humiliation, ended in proper anger.
"Algernon, of course."
"Agatha!" Our sister popped up, popped back to hide a flushed face.
"Agatha." The woman touched the word with proper affection. "Well, Agatha, Timothy, Thomas, let me look at you."
"No," said I, said Tim, "Let us look at you. Hey … "
Our voices slid back in our throats.
We drew near her.
We walked in great slow circles round about, skirting the edges of her territory. And her territory extended as far as we could hear the hum of the warm summer hive. For that is exactly what she sounded like. That was her characteristic tune. She made a sound like a season all to herself, a morning early in June when the world wakes to find everything absolutely perfect, fine, delicately attuned, all in balance, nothing disproportioned. Even before you opened your eyes you knew it would be one of those days. Tell the sky what color it must be, and it was indeed. Tell the sun how to crochet its way, pick and choose among leaves to lay out carpetings of bright and dark on the fresh lawn, and pick and lay it did. The bees have been up earliest of all, they have already come and gone, and come and gone again to the meadow fields and returned all golden fuzz on the air, all pollen-decorated, epaulettes at the full, nectar-dripping. Don't you hear them pass? hover? dance their language? telling where all the sweet gums are, the syrups that make bears frolic and lumber in bulked ecstasies, that make boys squirm with unpronounced juices, that make girls leap out of beds to catch from the corners of their eyes their dolphin selves naked aflash on the warm air poised forever in one eternal glass wave.
So it seemed with our electrical friend here on the new lawn in the middle of a special day.
And she a stuff to which we were drawn, lured, Spelled, doing our dance, remembering what could not be remembered, needful, aware of her attentions.
Timothy and I, Tom, that is.
Agatha remained on the porch.
But her head flowered above the rail, her eyes followed all that was done and said.
And what was said and done was Tim at last exhaling:
"Hey … your eyes … "
Her eyes. Her splendid eyes.
Even more splendid than the lapis lazuli on the sarcophagus lid and on the mask that had covered her bandaged face. These most beautiful eyes in the world looked out upon us calmly, shining.
"Your eyes," gasped Tim, "are the exact same color, are like—"
"Like what?"
"My favorite aggies … "
"What could be better than that?" she said.
And the answer was, nothing.
Her eyes slid along on the bright air to brush my ears, my nose, my chin. "And you, Master Tom?"
"Me?"
"How shall we be friends? We must, you know, if we're going to knock elbows about the house the next year … "
"I … " I said, and stopped.
"You," said Grandma, "are a dog mad to bark but with taffy in his teeth. Have you ever given a dog taffy? It's so sad and funny, both. You laugh but hate yourself for laughing. You cry and run to help, and laugh again when his first new bark comes out."
I barked a small laugh remembering a dog, a day, and some taffy.
Grandma turned, and there was my old kite strewn on the lawn. She recognized its problem.
"The string's broken. No. The ball of string's lost. You can't fly a kite that way. Here."
She bent. We didn't: know what might happen. How could a robot grandma fly a kite for us? She raised up, the kite in her hands.
"Fly," she said, as to a bird.
And the kite flew.
That is to say, with a grand flourish, she let it rip on the wind.
And she and the kite were one.
For from the tip of her index finger there sprang a thin bright strand of spider web, all half-invisible gossamer fishline which, fixed to the kite, let it soar a hundred, no, three hundred, no, a thousand feet high on the summer swoons.
Timothy shouted. Agatha, torn between coming and going, let out a cry from the porch. And I, in all my maturity of thirteen years, though I tried not to look impressed, grew taller, taller, and felt a similar cry burst out my lungs, and burst it did. I gabbled and yelled lots of things about how I wished I had a finger from which, on a bobbin, I might thread the sky, the clouds, a wild kite all in one.
"If you think that is high," said the Electric Creature, "watch this!"
With a hiss, a whistle, a hum, the fishline sung out. The kite sank up another thousand feet. And again another thousand, until at last it was a speck of red confetti dancing on the very winds that took jets around the world or changed the weather in the next existence …
"It can't be! "I cried.
"It is." She calmly watched her finger unravel its massive stuffs. "I make it as I need it. Liquid inside, like a spider. Hardens when it hits the air, instant thread … "
And when the kite was no more than a specule, a vanishing mote on the peripheral vision of the gods, to quote from older wisemen, why then Grandma, without turning, without looking, without letting her gaze offend by touching, said:
"And, Abigail—?"
"Agatha!" was the sharp response.
O wise woman, to overcome with swift small angers.
"Agatha," said Grandma, not too tenderly, not too lightly, somewhere poised between, "and how shall we make do?"
She broke the thread and wrapped it about my fist three times so I was tethered to heaven by the longest, I repeat, longest kite string in the entire history of the world! Wait till I show my friends! I thought. Green! Sour apple green is the color they'll turn!
"Agatha?"
"No way!" said Agatha.
"No way," said an echo.
"There must: be some—"
"We'll never be friends!" said Agatha.
"Never be friends," said the echo.
Timothy and I jerked. Where was the echo coming from? Even Agatha, surprised, showed her eyebrows above the porch rail.
Then we looked and saw.
Grandma was cupping her hands like a seashell and from within that shell the echo sounded.
"Never … friends … "
And again faintly dying "Friends … "
We all bent to hear.
That is we two boys bent to hear.
"No! "cried Agatha.
And ran in the house and slammed the doors.
"Friends," said the echo from the seashell hands. "No."
And far away, on the shore of some inner sea, we heard a small door shut.
And that was the first day.
And there was a second day, of course, and a third and a fourth, with Grandma wheeling in a great circle, and we her planets turning about the central light, with Agatha slowly, slowly coming in to join, to walk if not run with us, to listen if not hear, to watch if not see, to itch if not touch.
But at least by the end of the first ten days, Agatha no longer fled, but stood in nearby doors, or sat in distant chairs under trees, or if we went out for hikes, followed ten paces behind.
And Grandma? She merely waited. She never tried to urge or force. She went about her cooking and baking apricot pies and left foods carelessly here aid there about the house on mousetrap plates for wiggle-nosed girls to sniff and snitch. An hour later, the plates were empty, the buns or cakes gone and without thank you's, there was Agatha sliding down the banister, a mustache of crumbs on her lip.
As for Tim and me, we were always being called up hills by our Electric Grandma, and reaching the top were called down the other side.
And the most peculiar and beautiful and strange and lovely thing was the way she seemed to give complete attention to all of us.
She listened, she really listened to all we said, she knew and remembered every syllable, word, sentence, punctuation, thought, and rambunctious idea. We knew that all our days were stored in her, and that any time we felt we might want to know what we said at X hour at X second on X afternoon, we just named that X and with amiable promptitude, in the form of an aria if we wished, sung with humor, she would deliver forth X incident.
Sometimes we were prompted to test her. In the midst of babbling one day with high fevers about nothing, I stopped. I fixed Grandma with my eye and demanded:
"What did I just say?"
"Oh, er—"
"Come on, spit it out!"
"I think—" she rummaged her purse. "I have it here." From the deeps of her purse she drew forth and handed me:
"Boy! A Chinese fortune cookie!"
"Fresh baked, still warm, open it."
It was almost too hot to touch. I broke the cookie shell and pressed the warm curl of paper out to read:
"—bicycle Champ of the whole West! What did I just say? Come on, spit it out!"
My jaw dropped.
"How did you do that?"
"We have our little secrets. The only Chinese fortune cookie that predicts the Immediate Past. Have another?"
I cracked the second shell and read:
" 'How did you do that?' "
I popped the messages and the piping hot shells into my mouth and chewed as we walked.
"Well?"
"You're a great cook," I said.
And, laughing, we began to run.
And that was another great thing.
She could keep up.
Never beat, never win a race, but pump right along in good style, which a boy doesn't mind. A girl ahead of him or beside him is too much to bear. But a girl one or two paces back is a respectful thing, and allowed.
So Grandma and I had some great runs, me in the lead, and both talking a mile a minute.
But now I must tell you the best part of Grandma.
I might not: have known at all if Timothy hadn't taken some pictures, and if I hadn't taken some also, and then compared.
When I saw the photographs developed out of our instant Brownies, I sent Agatha, against her wishes, to photograph Grandma a third time, unawares.
Then I took the three sets of pictures off alone, to keep counsel with myself. I never told Timothy and Agatha what I found. I didn't want to spoil it.
But, as I laid the pictures out in my room, here is what I thought and said:
"Grandma, in each picture, looks different!"
"Different?" I asked myself.
"Sure. Wait. Just a sec—"
I rearranged the photos.
"Here's one of Grandma near Agatha. And, in it, Grandma looks like … Agatha!
"And in this one, posed with Timothy, she looks like Timothy!
"And this last one, Holy Goll! Jogging along with me, she looks like ugly me!"
I sat down, stunned. The pictures fell to the floor.
I hunched over, scrabbling them, rearranging, turning upside down and sidewise. Yes. Holy Goll again, yes!
O that clever Grandmother.
O those Fantoccini people-making people.
Clever beyond clever, human beyond human, warm beyond warm, love beyond love …
And wordless, I rose and went downstairs and found Agatha and Grandma in the same room, doing algebra lessons in an almost peaceful communion. At least there was not outright war. Grandma was still waiting for Agatha to come round. And no one knew what day of what year that would be, or how to make it come faster. Meanwhile—
My entering the room made Grandma turn. I watched her face slowly as it recognized me. And wasn't there the merest ink-wash change of color in those eyes? Didn't the thin film of blood beneath the translucent skin, or whatever liquid they put to pulse and beat in the humanoid forms, didn't it flourish itself suddenly bright in her cheeks and mouth? I am somewhat ruddy. Didn't Grandma suffuse herself more to my color upon my arrival? And her eyes? watching Agatha-Abigail-Algernon at work, hadn't they been her color of blue rather than mine, which are deeper?
More important than that, in the moments as she talked with me, saying, "Good evening," and "How's your homework, my lad?" and such stuff, didn't the bones of her face shift subtly beneath the flesh to assume some fresh racial attitude?
For let's face it, our family is of three sorts. Agatha has the long horse bones of a small English girl who will grow to hunt foxes; Father's equine stare, snort, stomp, and assemblage of skeleton. The skull and teeth are pure English, or as pure as the motley isle's history allows.
Timothy is something else, a touch of Italian from mother's side a generation back. Her family name was Mariano, so Tim has that dark thing firing him, and a small bone structure, and eyes that will one day burn ladies to the ground.
As for me, I am the Slav, and we can only figure this from my paternal grandfather's mother who came from Vienna and brought a set of cheekbones that flared, and temples from which you might dip wine, and a kind of steppeland thrust of nose which sniffed more of Tartar than of Tartan, hiding behind the family name.
So you see it became fascinating for me to watch and try to catch Grandma as she performed her changes, speaking to Agatha and melting her cheekbones to the horse, speaking to Timothy and growing as delicate as a Florentine raven pecking glibly at the air, speaking to me and fusing the hidden plastic stuffs, so I felt Catherine the Great stood there before me.
Now, how the Fantoccini people achieved this rare and subtle transformation I shall never know, nor ask, nor wish to find out. Enough that in each quiet motion, turning here, bending there, affixing her gaze, her secret segments, sections, the abutment of her nose, the sculptured chinbone, the wax-tallow plastic metal forever warmed and was forever susceptible of loving change. Hers was a mask that was all mask but only one face for one person at a time. So in crossing a room, having touched one child, on the way, beneath the skin, the wondrous shift went on, and by the time she reached the next child, why, true mother of that child she was! looking upon him or her out of the battlements of their own fine bones.
And when all three of us were present and chattering at the same time? Well, then, the changes were miraculously soft, small, and mysterious. Nothing so tremendous as to be caught and noted, save by this older boy, myself, who, watching, became elated arid admiring and entranced.
I have never wished to be behind the magician's scenes. Enough that the illusion works. Enough that love is the chemical result. Enough that cheeks are rubbed to happy color, eyes sparked to illumination, arms opened to accept and softly bind and hold …
All of us, that is, except Agatha who refused to the bitter last.
"Agamemnon … "
It had become a jovial game now. Even Agatha didn't mind, but pretended to mind. It gave her a pleasant sense of superiority over a supposedly superior machine.
"Agamemnon!" she snorted, "you are a d … "
"Dumb?" said Grandma.
"I wouldn't say that."
"Think it, then, my dear Agonistes Agatha … I am quite flawed, and on names my flaws are revealed. Tom there, is Tim half the time. Timothy is Tobias or Timulty as likely as not … "
Agatha laughed. Which made Grandma make one of her rare mistakes. She put out her hand to give my sister the merest pat. Agatha-Abigail-Alice leapt to her feet.
Agatha-Agamemnon-Alcibiades-Allegra-Alexandra-Allison withdrew swiftly to her room.
"I suspect," said Timothy, later, "because she is beginning to like Grandma."
"Tosh," said I.
"Where do you pick up words like Tosh?"
"Grandma read me some Dickens last night. 'Tosh.' 'Humbug.' 'Balderdash.' 'Blast.' 'Devil take you.' You're pretty smart for your age, Tim."
"Smart, heck. It's obvious, the more Agatha likes Grandma, the more she hates herself for liking her, the more afraid she gets of the whole mess, the more she hates Grandma in the end."
"Can one love someone so much you hate them?"
"Dumb. Of course."
"It is sticking your neck out, sure. I guess you hate people when they make you feel naked, I mean sort of on the spot or out in the open. That's the way to play the game, of course. I mean, you don't just love people you must love them with exclamation points."
"You're pretty smart, yourself, for someone so stupid," said Tim.
"Many thanks."
And I went to watch Grandma move slowly back into her battle of wits and stratagems with what's-her-name …
What dinners there were at our house!
Dinners, heck; what lunches, what breakfasts!
Always something new, yet, wisely, it looked or seemed old and familiar. We were never asked, for if you ask children what they want, they do not know, and if you tell what's to be delivered, they reject delivery. All parents know this. It is a quiet war that must be won each day. And Grandma knew how to win without looking triumphant.
"Here's Mystery Breakfast Number Nine," she would say, placing it down. "Perfectly dreadful, not worth bothering with, it made me want to throw up while I was cooking it!"
Even while wondering how a robot could be sick, we could hardly wait to shovel it down.
"Here's Abominable Lunch Number Seventy-seven," she announced. "Made from plastic food bags, parsley, and gum from under theatre seats. Brush your teeth after or you'll taste the poison all afternoon."
We fought each other for more.
Even Abigail-Agamemnon-Agatha drew near and circled round the table at such times, while Father put on the ten pounds he needed and pinkened out his cheeks.
When A. A. Agatha did not come to meals, they were left by her door with a skull and crossbones on a small flag stuck in a baked apple. One minute the tray was abandoned, the next minute gone.
Other times Abigail A. Agatha would bird through during dinner, snatch crumbs from her plate and bird off.
"Agatha!" Father would cry.
"No, wait," Grandma said, quietly. "She'll come, she'll sit. It's a matter of time."
"What's wrong with her?" I asked.
"Yeah, for cri-yi, she's nuts," said Timothy.
"No, she's afraid," said Grandma.
"Of you?" I said, blinking.
"Not of me so much as what I might do," she said.
"You wouldn't do anything to hurt her."
"No, but she thinks I might. We must wait for her to find that her fears have no foundation. If I fail, well, I will send myself to the showers and rust quietly."
There was a titter of laughter. Agatha was hiding in the hall.
Grandma finished serving everyone and then sat at the other side of the table facing Father and pretended to eat. I never found out, I never asked, I never wanted to know, what she did with the food. She was a sorcerer. It simply vanished.
And in the vanishing, Father made comment:
"This food. I've had it before. In a small French restaurant over near Les Deux Magots in Paris, twenty, oh, twenty-five years ago!" His eyes brimmed with tears, suddenly.
"How do you do it?" he asked, at last, putting down the cutlery, and looking across the table at this remarkable creature, this device, this what? woman?
Grandma took his regard, and ours, and held them simply in her now empty hands, as gifts, and just as gently replied:
"I am given things which I then give to you. I don't know that I give, but the giving goes on. You ask what I am? Why, a machine. But even in that answer we know, don't we, more than a machine. I am all the people who thought of me and planned me and built me and set me running. So I am people. I am all the things they wanted to be and perhaps could not be, so they built a great child, a wondrous toy to represent those things."
"Strange," said Father. "When I was growing up, there was a huge outcry at machines. Machines were bad, evil, they might dehumanize—"
"Some machines do. It's all in the way they are built. It's all in the way they are used. A bear trap is a simple machine that catches and holds and tears. A rifle is a machine that wounds and kills. Well, I am no bear trap. I am no rifle. I am a grandmother machine, which means more than a machine."
"How can you be more than what you seem?"
"No man is as big as his own idea. It follows, then, that any machine that embodies an idea is larger than the man that made it. And what's so wrong with that?"
"I got lost back there about a mile," said Timothy. "Come again?"
"Oh, dear," said Grandma. "How I do hate philosophical discussions and excursions into esthetics. Let me put it this way. Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer. Only at noon can a man fit his own shoes, his own best suit, for a few brief minutes. But now we're in a new age where we can think up a Big Idea and run it around in a machine. That makes the machine-more than a machine, doesn't it?"
"So far so good," said Tim. "I guess."
"Well, isn't a motion-picture camera and projector more than a machine? It's a thing that dreams, isn't it? Sometimes fine happy dreams, sometimes nightmares. But to call it a machine and dismiss it is ridiculous."
"I see that!" said Tim, and laughed at seeing.
"You must have been invented then," said Father, "by someone who loved machines and hated people who said all machines were bad or evil."
"Exactly," said Grandma. "Guido Fantoccini, that was his real name, grew up among machines. And he couldn't stand the clichés any more."
"Clichés?"
"Those lies, yes, that people tell and pretend they are truths absolute. Man will never fly. That was a cliché truth for a thousand thousand years which turned out to be a lie only a few years ago. The earth is flat, you'll fall off the rim, dragons will dine on you; the great lie told as fact, and Columbus plowed it under. Well, now, how many times have you heard how inhuman machines are, in your life? How many bright fine people have you heard spouting the same tired truths which are in reality lies; all machines destroy, all machines are cold, thoughtless, awful.
"There's a seed of truth there. But only a seed. Guido Fantoccini knew that. And knowing it, like most men of his kind, made him mad. And he could have stayed mad and gone mad forever, but instead did what he had to do; he began to invent machines to give the lie to the ancient lying truth.
"He knew that most machines are amoral, neither bad nor good. But by the way you built and shaped them you in turn shaped men, women, and children to be bad or good. A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that's how it turned out."
Grandma circled the table, refilling our glasses with clear cold mineral spring water from the tappet in her left forefinger. "Meanwhile, you must use other compensating machines. Machines that throw shadows on the earth that beckon you to run out and fit that wondrous casting-forth. Machines that trim your soul in silhouette like a vast pair of beautiful shears, snipping away the rude brambles, the dire horns and hooves to leave a finer profile. And for that you need examples."
"Examples?" I asked.
"Other people who behave well, and you imitate them. And if you act well enough long enough all the hair drops off and you're no longer a wicked ape."
Grandma sat again.
"So, for thousands of years, you humans have needed kings, priests, philosophers, fine examples to look up to and say, 'They are good, I wish I could be like them. They set the grand good style.' But, being human, the finest priests, the tenderest philosophers make mistakes, fall from grace, and mankind is disillusioned and adopts indifferent skepticism or, worse, motionless cynicism and the good world grinds to a halt while evil moves on with huge strides."
"And you, why, you never make mistakes, you're perfect, you're better than anyone ever!"
It was a voice from the hall between kitchen and dining room where Agatha, we all knew, stood against the wall listening and now burst forth.
Grandma didn't even turn in the direction of the voice, but went on calmly addressing her remarks to the family at the table.
"Not perfect, no, for what is perfection? But this I do know: being mechanical, I cannot sin, cannot be bribed, cannot be greedy or jealous or mean or small. I do not relish power for power's sake. Speed does not pull me to madness. Sex does not run me rampant through the world. I have time and more than time to collect the information I need around and about an ideal to keep it clean and whole and intact. Name the value you wish, tell me the Ideal you want and I can see and collect and remember the good that: will benefit you all. Tell me how you would like to be: kind, loving, considerate, well-balanced, humane … and let me run ahead on the path to explore those ways to be just that. In the darkness ahead, turn me as a lamp in all directions. I can guide your feet."
"So," said Father, putting the napkin to his mouth, "on the days when all of us are busy making lies—"
"I'll tell the truth."
"On the days when we hate—"
"I'll go on giving love, which means attention, which means knowing all about you, all, all, all about you, and you knowing that I know but that most of it I will never tell to anyone, it will stay a warm secret between us, so you will never fear my complete knowledge."
And here Grandma was busy clearing the table, circling, taking the plates, studying each face as she passed, touching Timothy's cheek, my shoulder with her free hand flowing along, her voice a quiet river of certainty bedded in our needful house and lives.
"But," said Father, stopping her, looking her right in the face. He gathered his breath. His face shadowed. At last he let it out. "All this talk of love and attention and stuff. Good God, woman, you, you're not in there!"
He gestured to her head, her face, her eyes, the hidden sensory cells behind the eyes, the miniaturized storage vaults and minimal keeps.
"You're not in there!"
Grandmother waited one, two, three silent beats.
Then she replied: "No. But you are. You and Thomas and Timothy and Agatha.
"Everything you ever say, everything you ever do, I'll keep, put away, treasure. I shall be all the things a family forgets it is, but senses, half-remembers. Better than the old family albums you used to leaf through, saying here's this winter, there's that spring, I shall recall what you forget. And though the debate may run another hundred thousand years: What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream …
"I am family memory and, one day perhaps, racial memory, too, but in the round, and at your call. I do not know myself. I can neither touch nor taste nor feel on any level. Yet I exist. And my existence means the heightening of your chance to touch and taste and feel. Isn't love in there somewhere in such an exchange? Well … "
She went on around the table, clearing away, sorting and stacking, neither grossly humble nor arthritic with pride.
"What do I know?
"This, above all: the trouble with most families with many children is someone gets lost. There isn't time, it seems, for everyone. Well, I will give equally to all of you. I will share out my knowledge and attention with everyone. I wish to be a great warm pie fresh from the oven, with equal shares to be taken by all. No one will starve. Look! someone cries, and I'll look. Listen! someone cries, and I hear. Run with me on the river path! someone says, and I run. And at dusk I am not tired, nor irritable, so I do not scold out of some tired irritability. My eye stays clear, my voice strong, my hand firm, my attention constant."
"But," said Father, his voice fading, half convinced, but pi:tting up a last faint argument, "you're not there. As for love—"
"If paying attention is love, I am love.
"If knowing is love, I am love.
"If helping you not to fall into error and to be good is love, I am love.
"And again, to repeat, there are four of you. Each, in a way never possible before in history, will get my complete attention. No matter if you all speak at once, I can channel and hear this one and that arid the other, clearly. No one will go hungry. I will, if you please, and accept the strange word, 'love' you all."
"I don't accept!" said Agatha.
And even Grandma turned now to see her standing in the door.
"I won't give you permission, you can't, you mustn't!" said Agatha. "I won't let you! It's lies! You lie. No one loves me. She said she did, but she lied. She said but lied!"
"Agatha!" cried Father, standing up.
"She?" said Grandma. "Who?"
"Mother!" came the shriek. "Said: Love you! Lies! Love you! Lies! And you're like her! You lie. But you're empty, anyway, and so that's a double lie! I hate her. Now, I hate you!"
Agatha spun about and leapt down the hall.
The front door slammed wide.
Father was in motion, but Grandma touched his arm.
"Let me."
And she walked and then moved swiftly, gliding down the hall and then suddenly, easily, running, yes, running very fast, out the door.
It was a champion sprint by the time we all reached the lawn, the sidewalk, yelling.
Blind, Agatha made the curb, wheeling about, seeing us close, all of us yelling, Grandma way ahead, shouting, too, and Agatha off the curb and out in the street, halfway to the middle, then the middle and suddenly a car, which no one saw, erupting its brakes, its horn shrieking and Agatha flailing about to see and Grandma there with her and hurling her aside and down as the car with fantastic energy and verve selected her from our midst, struck our wonderful electric Guido Fantoccini-produced dream even while she paced upon the air and, hands up to ward off, almost in mild protest, still trying to decide what to say to this bestial machine, over and over she spun and down and away even as the car jolted to a halt and I saw Agatha safe beyond and Grandma, it seemed, still coming down or down and sliding fifty yards away to strike and ricochet and lie strewn and all of us frozen in a line suddenly in the midst of the street with one scream pulled out of all our throats at the same raw instant.
Then silence and just Agatha lying on the asphalt, intact, getting ready to sob.
And still we did not move, frozen on the sill of death, afraid to venture in any direction, afraid to go see what lay beyond the car and Agatha and so we began to wail and, I guess, pray to ourselves as Father stood amongst us: Oh, no, no, we mourned, oh no, God, no, no …
Agatha lifted her already grief-stricken face and it was the face of someone who has predicted dooms and lived to see and now did not want to see or live any more. As we watched, she turned her gaze to the tossed woman's body and tears fell from her eyes. She shut them and covered them and lay back down forever to weep …
I took a step and then another step and then five quick steps and by the time I reached my sister her head was buried deep and her sobs came up out of a place so far down in her I was afraid I could never find her again, she would never come out, no matter how I pried or pleaded or promised or threatened or just plain said. And what little we could hear from Agatha buried there in her own misery, she said over and over again, lamenting, wounded, certain of the old threat known and named and now here forever. " … like I said … told you … lies … lies … liars … all lies … like the other … other … just like … just … just like the other … other … other … !"
I was down on my knees holding onto her with both hands, trying to put her back together even though she wasn't broken any way you could see but just feel, because I knew it was no use going on to Grandma, no use at all, so I just touched Agatha and gentled her and wept while Father came up and stood over and knelt down with me and it was like a prayer meeting in the middle of the street and lucky no more cars coming, and I said, choking, "Other what, Ag, other what?"
Agatha exploded two words.
"Other dead!"
"You mean Mom?"
"O Mom," she wailed, shivering, lying down, cuddling up like a baby. "O Mom, dead, O Mom and now Grandma dead, she promised always, always, to love, to love, promised to be different, promised, promised and now look, look … I hate her, I hate Mom, I hate her, I hate them!!"
"Of course," said a voice. "It's only natural. How foolish of me not to have known, not to have seen."
And the voice was so familiar we were all stricken.
We all jerked.
Agatha squinched her eyes, flicked them wide, blinked, and jerked half up, staring.
"How silly of me," said Grandma, standing there at the edge of our circle, our prayer, our wake.
"Grandma!" we all said.
And she stood there, taller by far than any of us in this moment of kneeling and holding and crying out. We could only stare up at her in disbelief.
"You're dead!" cried Agatha. "The car—"
"Hit me," said Grandma, quietly. "Yes. And threw me in the air and tumbled me over and for a few moments there was a severe concussion of circuitries. I might have feared a disconnection, if fear is the word. But then I sat up and gave myself a shake and the few molecules of paint, jarred loose on one printed path or another, magnetized back in position and resilient creature that I am, unbreakable thing that I am, here I am."
"I thought you were—" said Agatha.
"And only natural," said Grandma. "I mean, anyone else, hit like that, tossed like that. But, O my dear Agatha, not me. And now I see why you were afraid and never trusted me. You didn't know. And I had not as yet proved my singular ability to survive. How dumb of me not to have thought to show you. Just a second." Somewhere in her head, her body, her being, she fitted together some invisible tapes, some old information made new by interblending. She nodded. "Yes. There. A book of child-raising, laughed at by some few people years back when the woman who wrote the book said, as final advice to parents: 'Whatever you do, don't die. Your children will never forgive you.' "
"Forgive," some one of us whispered.
"For how can children understand when you just up and go away and never come back again with no excuse, no apologies, no sorry note, nothing."
"They can't," I said.
"So," said Grandma, kneeling down with us beside Agatha who sat up now, new tears brimming her eyes, but a different kind of tears, not tears that drowned, but tears that washed clean. "So your mother ran away to death. And after that, how could you trust anyone? If everyone left, vanished finally, who was there to trust? So when I came, half wise, half ignorant, I should have known, I did not know, why you would not accept me. For, very simply and honestly, you feared I might not stay, that I lied, that I was vulnerable, too. And two leavetakings, two deaths, were one too many in a single year. But now, do you see, Abigail?"
"Agatha," said Agatha, without knowing she corrected.
"Do you understand, I shall always, always be here?"
"Oh, yes," cried Agatha, and broke down into a solid weeping in which we all joined, huddled together and cars drew up and stopped to see just how many people were hurt and how many people were getting well right there.
End of story.
Well, not quite the end.
We lived happily ever after.
Or rather we lived together, Grandma, Agatha-Agamemnon-Abigail, Timothy, and I, Tom, and Father, and Grandma calling us to frolic in great fountains of Latin and Spanish and French, in great seaborne gouts of poetry like Moby Dick sprinkling the deeps with his Versailles jet somehow lost in calms and found in storms; Grandma a constant, a clock, a pendulum, a face to tell all time by at noon, or in the middle of sick nights when, raved with fever, we saw her forever by our beds, never gone, never away, always waiting, always speaking kind words, her cool hand icing our hot brows, the tappet of her uplifted forefinger unsprung to let a twine of cold mountain water touch our flannel tongues. Ten thousand dawns she cut our wildflower lawn, ten thousand nights she wandered, remembering the dust molecules that fell in the still hours before dawn, or sat whispering some lesson she felt needed teaching to our ears while we slept snug.
Until at last, one by one, it was time for us to go away to school, and when at last the youngest, Agatha, was all packed, why Grandma packed, too.
On the last day of summer that last year, we found Grandma down in the front room with various packets and suitcases, knitting, waiting, and though she had often spoken of it, now that the time came we were shocked and surprised.
"Grandma!" we all said. "What are you doing?"
"Why going off to college, in a way, just like you," she said. "Back to Guido Fantoccini's, to the Family."
"The Family?"
"Of Pinocchios, that's what he called us for a joke, at first. The Pinocchios and himself Gepetto. And then later gave us his own name: the Fantoccini. Anyway, you have been my family here. Now I go back to my even larger family there, my brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, all robots who—"
"Who do what?" asked Agatha.
"It all depends," said Grandma. "Some stay, some linger. Others go to be drawn and quartered, you might say, their parts distributed to other machines who have need of repairs. They'll weigh and find me wanting or not wanting. It may be I'll be just the one they need tomorrow and off I'll go to raise another batch of children and beat another batch of fudge."
"Oh, they mustn't draw and quarter you!" cried Agatha.
"No!" I cried, with Timothy.
"My allowance," said Agatha, "I'll pay anything … ?"
Grandma stopped rocking and looked at the needles and the pattern of bright yarn. "Well, I wouldn't have said, but now you ask and I'll tell. For a very small fee, there's a room, the room of the Family, a large dim parlor, all quiet and nicely decorated, where as many as thirty or forty of the Electric Women sit and rock and talk, each in her turn. I have not been there. I am, after all, freshly born, comparatively new. For a small fee, very small, each month and year, that's where I'll be, with all the others like me, listening to what they've learned of the world and, in my turn, telling how it was with Tom and Tim and Agatha and how fine and happy we were. And I'll tell all I learned from you."
"But … you taught us!"
"Do you really think that?" she said. "No, it was turnabout, roundabout, learning both ways. And it's all in here, everything you flew into tears about or laughed over, why, I have it all. And I'll tell it to the others just as they tell their boys and girls and life to me. We'll sit there, growing wiser and calmer and better every year and every year, ten, twenty, thirty years. The Family knowledge will double, quadruple, the wisdom will not be lost. And we'll be waiting there in that sitting room, should you ever need us for your own children in time of illness, or, God prevent, deprivation or death. There we'll be, growing old but not old, getting closer to the time, perhaps, someday, when we live up to our first strange joking name."
"The Pinocchios?" asked Tim.
Grandma nodded.
I knew what she meant. The day when, as in the old tale, Pinocchio had grown so worthy arid so fine that the gift of life had been given him. So I saw them, in future years, the entire family of Fantoccini, the Pinocchios, trading and re-trading, murmuring and whispering their knowledge in the great parlors of philosophy, waiting for the day. The day that could never come.
Grandma must have read that thought in our eyes.
"We'll see," she said. "Let's just wait and see."
"Oh, Grandma," cried Agatha and she was weeping as she had wept many years before. "You don't have to wait. You're alive. You've always been alive to us!"
And she caught hold of the old woman and we all caught hold for a long moment and then ran off up in the sky to faraway schools and years and her last words to us before we let the helicopter swarm us away into autumn were these:
"When you are very old and gone childish-small again, with childish ways and childish yens and, in need of feeding, make a wish for the old teacher nurse, the dumb yet wise companion, send for me. I will come back. We shall inhabit the nursery again, never fear."
"Oh, we shall never be old!" we cried. "That will never happen!"
"Never! Never!"
And we were gone.
And the years are flown.
And we are old now, Tim and Agatha and I.
Our children are grown and gone, our wives and husbands vanished from the earth and now, by Dickensian coincidence, accept it as you will or not accept, back in the old house, we three.
I lie here in the bedroom which was my childish place seventy, O seventy, believe it, seventy years ago. Beneath this wallpaper is another layer and yet another-times-three to the old wallpaper covered over when I was nine. The wallpaper is peeling. I see peeking from beneath, old elephants, familiar tigers, fine and amiable zebras, irascible crocodiles. I have sent for the paperers to carefully remove all but that last layer. The old animals will live again on the walls, revealed.
And we have sent for someone else.
The three of us have called:
Grandma! You said you'd come back when we had need.
We are surprised by age, by time. We are old. We need.
And in three rooms of a summer house very late in time, three old children rise up, crying out in their heads: We loved you! We love you!
There! There! in the sky, we think, waking at morn. Is that the delivery machine? Does it settle to die lawn?
There! There on the grass by the front porch. Does the mummy case arrive?
Are our names inked on ribbons wrapped about the lovely form beneath the golden mask?!
And the kept gold key, forever hung on Agatha's breast, warmed and waiting? Oh God, will it, after all these years, will it wind, will it set in motion, will it, dearly, fit?!

Version History

[14 apr 2003—scanned by BookWorm]

[16 jun 2003—proofread by Wiz3]

"i sing the body electric" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC!

Ray Bradbury

CONTENTS

Version History

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC!

Ray Bradbury

CONTENTS

Version History