«In blizzards we got a icebox mausoleum to stash the dead, undelivered mail, until spring and a whole month of shovels and spades.»
«Seeding and planting time, eh?» The stranger laughed.
«You might say that.»
«Don't you dig in winter anyhow? For special funerals? Special dead?»
«Some yards got a hose-shovel contraption. Pump hot water through the blade; shape a grave quick, like placer mining, even with the ground an ice-pond. We don't cotton to that. Use picks and shovels.»
The young man hesitated. «Does it bother you?»
«You mean, I get scared ever?»
«Well . . . yes.»
The old man at last took out and stuffed his pipe with tobacco, tamped it with a callused thumb, lit it, let out a small stream of smoke.
«No,» he said at last.
The young man's shoulders sank. «Disappointed?» said the old man. «I thought maybe once .
«Oh, when you're young, maybe. One time …»
«Then there was a time!» The young man shifted up a step. The old man glanced at him sharply, then resumed smoking. «One time.» He stared at the marbled hills and the dark trees. «My grandpa owned this yard. I was born here. A gravedigger's son learns to ignore things.»
The old man took a number of deep puffs and said:
«I was just eighteen, folks off on vacation, me left to tend things, alone, mow the lawn, dig holes and such. Alone, four graves to dig in October and a cold came hard off the lake, frost on the graves, tombstones like snow, ground froze solid.
«One night I walked out. No moon. Hard grass underfoot, could see my breath, hands in my pockets, walking, listening.»
The old man exhaled frail ghosts from his thin nostrils. «Then I heard this sound, deep under. I froze. It was a voice, screaming. Someone woke up buried, heard me walk by, cried out. I just stood. They screamed and screamed. Earth banged. On a cold night, ground's like porcelain, rings, you see?
«Well-« The old man shut his eyes to remember. «I stood like the wind off the lake stopped my blood. A joke? I searched around and thought, Imagination! No, it was underfoot, sharp, clear. A woman's voice. I knew all the gravestones.» The old man's eyelids trembled. «Could recite them alphabetical, year, month, day. Name any year, and I'll tell. How about 1899? Jake Smith departed. And 1923? Betty Dallman lost. And 1933? P. H. Moran! Name a month. August? August last year, buried Henrietta Wells. August 1918? Grandma Hanlon, whole family! Influenza! Name a day, August fourth? Smith, Burke, Shelby carried off. Williamson? He's on that hill, pink marble. Douglas? By the creek …»
«The story,» the young man urged.
«Eh?»
«The story you were telling.»
«Oh, the voice below? Well, I knew all the stones. Standing there, I guessed that voice out of the ground was Henrietta Fremwell, fine girl, twenty-four years, played piano at the Elite Theatre. Tall, graceful, blond. How did I know her voice? I stood where there was only men's graves. Hers was the only woman's. I ran to put my ear on her stone. Yes! Her voice, way down, screaming!
«'Miss Fremwell!' I shouted.
«'Miss Fremwell,' I yelled again.
«Deep down I heard her, only weeping now. Maybe she heard me, maybe not. She just cried. I ran downhill so fast I tripped and split my head on a stone, got up, screamed myself! Got to the tool shed, all blood, dragged out the tools, and just stood there in the moonlight with one shovel. The ground was ice solid, solid. I fell back against a tree. It would take three minutes to get back to her grave, and eight hours of cold night to dig to her box. The ground was like glass. A coffin is a coffin; only so much space for air. Henrietta Fremwell had been buried two days before the freeze, been asleep all that time, using up air, and it rained just before the cold spell and the earth over her, soaked with rainwater now, froze. I'd have to dig maybe eight hours. And the way she cried, there wasn't another hour of air left.»
The old man's pipe had gone out. He rocked in his chair, back and forth, back and forth, silently.
«But,» said the young man, «what did you do?»
«Nothing,» said the old man.
«Nothing!?»
«Nothing I could do. That ground was solid. Six men couldn't have dug that grave. No hot water near. And she might've been screaming hours before I heard, so . .
«You did-nothing?»
«Something Put the shovel and pick back in the tool shed, locked it and went back to the house and built a fire and drank some hot chocolate, shivering and shivering. Would you have done different?»
«I-«
«Would you have dug for eight hours in hard ice rock so's to reach her when she was truly dead of exhaustion, cold, smothered, and have to bury her all over again? Then call her folks and tell them?»
The young man was silent. On the porch, the mosquitoes hummed about the naked light bulb.
«I see,» said the young man.
The old man sucked his pipe. «I think I cried all night because there was nothing I could do.» He opened his eyes and stared about, surprised, as if he had been listening to someone else.
«That's quite a story,» said the young man.
«No,» said the old man, «God's truth. Want to hear more? See that big stone with the ugly angel? That was Adam Crispin's. Relatives fought, got a writ from a judge, dug him up hoping for poison. Found nothing. Put him back, but by that time the dirt from his grave mixed with other dirts. We shoveled in stuff from all around. Next plot, the angel with broken wings? Mary-Lou Phipps. Dug her up to lug her off to Elgin, Illinois. More relatives. Where she'd been, the pit stayed open, oh, three weeks. No funerals. Meanwhile, her dirt got cross-shoveled with others. Six stones over, one stone north, that was Henry Douglas Jones. Became famous sixty years after no one paid attention. Now he's planted under the Civil War monument. His grave lay wide two months, nobody wanted to utilize the hole of a Southerner, all of us leaning North with Grant. So his dirt got scattered. That give you some notion of what that FREE DIRT sign means?»
The young man eyed the cemetery landscape. «Well,» he said, «where is that dirt you're handing out?»
The old man pointed with his pipe and the stranger looked and indeed, by a nearby wall was a sizable hillock some ten feet long by about three feet high, loam and grass tufts of many shades of tan, brown, and burnt umber.
«Go look,» said the old man.
The young man walked slowly over to stand by the mound.
«Kick it,» said the old man. «See if it's real.»
The young man kicked and his face paled.
«Did you hear that?» he said.
«What?» said the old man, looking somewhere else.
The stranger listened and shook his head. «Nothing.»
«Well, now,» said the old man, knocking out the ashes from his pipe. «How much free dirt you need?»
«I hadn't thought.»
«Yes, you have,» said the old man, «or you wouldn't have driven your lightweight delivery truck up by the cemetery gate. I got cat's ears. Heard your motor just when you stopped. How much?»
«Oh,» said the young man uneasily. «My backyard's eighty feet by forty. I could use a good inch of topsoil. So …?»
«I'd say,» said the old man, «half of that mound there. Hell, take it all. Nobody wants it.»
«You mean-«
«I mean, that mound has been growing and diminishing, diminishing and growing, mixtures up and down, since Grant took Richmond and Sherman reached the sea. There's Civil dirt there, coffin splinters, satin casket shreds from when Lafayette met the Honor Guard's Edgar Allan Poe. There's funeral flowers, blossoms from ten hundred obsequies. Condolence-card confetti for Hessian troopers, Parisian gunners who never shipped home. That soil is so laced with bone meal and casket corsages, I should charge you to buy the lot. Grab a spade before I do.»
«Stay right there.» The young man raised one hand.
«I'm not going anywhere,» said the old man. «Nor is anyone else nearby.»
The half-truck was pulled up by the dirt mound and the young man was reaching in for a spade when the old man said:
«No, I think not.»
The old man went on:
«Graveyard spade's best. Familiar metal, familiar soil. Easy digging when like takes to like. So.»
The old man's head indicated a spade half stuck in the dark mound. The young man shrugged and moved.
The cemetery spade came free with a soft whispering. Pellets of ancient mound fell with similar whispers.
He began to dig and shift and fill the back of his half-truck as the old man from the corners of his eyes observed:
«It's more than dirt, as I said. War of 1812, San Juan Hill, Manassas, Gettysburg, October flu epidemic 1918, all strewn from graves filled and evicted to be refilled. Various occupants leavened out to dust, various glories melted to mixtures, rust from metal caskets, coffin handles, shoelaces but no shoes, hairs long and short. Ever see wreaths made of hair saved to weave crowns to fix on mortal pictures? All that's left of a smile or that funny look in the eyes of someone who knows she's not alive anymore, ever. Hair, epaulettes, not whole ones, but one strand of epaulette, all there along with blood that's gone to silt.»
The young man finished, sweating, and started to thrust the spade back in the earth when the old man said:
«Take it. Cemetery dirt, cemetery spade, like takes to like.»
«I'll bring it back tomorrow.» The young man tossed the spade into the mounded truck.
«No. You got the dirt, so keep the spade. Just don't bring the free dirt back.»
«Why would I do that?»
«Just don't,» said the old man, but did not move as the young man climbed in his truck to start the engine.
He sat listening to the dirt mound tremble and whisper in the flatbed.
«What're you waiting for?» asked the old man.
* * *
The flimsy half-truck ran toward the last of the twilight, pursued by the ever-encroaching dark. Clouds raced overhead, perturbed by the invisible. Back on the horizon, thunder sounded. A few drops of rain fell on the windshield, causing the young man to ram his foot on the gas and swerve into his home street even as the sun truly died, the wind rose, and the trees around his cottage bent and beckoned.
Climbing out, he stared at the sky and then his house and then the empty garden. A few drops of cold rain on his cheeks decided him; he drove the rattling half-truck into the empty garden, unlatched the metal back-flap, opened it just an inch so as to allow a proper flow, and then began motoring back and forth across the garden, letting the dark stuffs whisper down, letting the strange midnight earth sift and murmur, until at last the truck was empty and he stood in the blowing night, watching the wind stir the black soil.
Then he locked the truck in the garage and went to stand on the back porch, thinking, I won't need water. The storm will soak the ground.
He stood for a long while simply staring at the graveyard mulch, waiting for rain, until he thought, what am I waiting for? Jesus! And went in.
At ten o'clock a light rain tapped on the windows and sifted over the dark garden. At eleven it rained so steadily that the gutter drains swallowed and rattled.
At midnight the rain grew heavy. He looked to see if it was eroding the new dark earth but saw only the black muck drinking the downpour like a great black sponge, lit by distant flares of lightning.
Then, at one in the morning, the greatest Niagara of all shuddered the house, rinsed the windows to blindness, and shook the lights.
And then, abruptly, the downpour, the immense Niagara ceased, followed by one great downfell blow of lightning which plowed and pinioned the dark earth close by, near, outside, with explosions of light as if ten thousand flashbulbs had been fired off. Then darkness fell in curtains of thunder, cracking, breaking the bones.
In bed, wishing for the merest dog to hold for lack of human company, hugging the sheets, burying his head, then rising full to the silent air, the dark air, the storm gone, the rain shut, and a silence that spread in whispers as the last drench melted into the trembling soil.
He shuddered and then shivered and then hugged himself to stop the shivering of his cold flesh, and he was thirsty but could not make himself move to find the kitchen and drink water, milk, leftover wine, anything. He lay back, dry-mouthed, with unreasonable tears filling his eyes.
Free dirt, he thought. My God, what a damn-fool night. Free dirt!
At two o'clock he heard his wristwatch ticking softly.
At two-thirty he felt his pulse in his wrists and ankles and neck and then in his temples and inside his head.
The entire house leaned into the wind, listening.
Outside in the still night, the wind failed and the yard lay soaked and waiting.
And at last … yes. He opened his eyes and turned his head toward the shaded window.
He held his breath. what? Yes? Yes? What?
Beyond the window, beyond the wall, beyond the house, outside somewhere, a whisper, a murmur, growing louder and louder. Grass growing? Blossoms opening? Soil shifting, crumbling?
A great whisper, a mix of shadows and shades. Something rising. Something moving.
Ice froze beneath his skin. His heart ceased.
Outside in the dark, in the yard.
Autumn had arrived.
October was there.
His garden gave him …
A harvest
Last Rites
The Other Highway
«Seeding and planting time, eh?» The stranger laughed.
«You might say that.»
«Don't you dig in winter anyhow? For special funerals? Special dead?»
«Some yards got a hose-shovel contraption. Pump hot water through the blade; shape a grave quick, like placer mining, even with the ground an ice-pond. We don't cotton to that. Use picks and shovels.»
The young man hesitated. «Does it bother you?»
«You mean, I get scared ever?»
«Well . . . yes.»
The old man at last took out and stuffed his pipe with tobacco, tamped it with a callused thumb, lit it, let out a small stream of smoke.
«No,» he said at last.
The young man's shoulders sank. «Disappointed?» said the old man. «I thought maybe once .
«Oh, when you're young, maybe. One time …»
«Then there was a time!» The young man shifted up a step. The old man glanced at him sharply, then resumed smoking. «One time.» He stared at the marbled hills and the dark trees. «My grandpa owned this yard. I was born here. A gravedigger's son learns to ignore things.»
The old man took a number of deep puffs and said:
«I was just eighteen, folks off on vacation, me left to tend things, alone, mow the lawn, dig holes and such. Alone, four graves to dig in October and a cold came hard off the lake, frost on the graves, tombstones like snow, ground froze solid.
«One night I walked out. No moon. Hard grass underfoot, could see my breath, hands in my pockets, walking, listening.»
The old man exhaled frail ghosts from his thin nostrils. «Then I heard this sound, deep under. I froze. It was a voice, screaming. Someone woke up buried, heard me walk by, cried out. I just stood. They screamed and screamed. Earth banged. On a cold night, ground's like porcelain, rings, you see?
«Well-« The old man shut his eyes to remember. «I stood like the wind off the lake stopped my blood. A joke? I searched around and thought, Imagination! No, it was underfoot, sharp, clear. A woman's voice. I knew all the gravestones.» The old man's eyelids trembled. «Could recite them alphabetical, year, month, day. Name any year, and I'll tell. How about 1899? Jake Smith departed. And 1923? Betty Dallman lost. And 1933? P. H. Moran! Name a month. August? August last year, buried Henrietta Wells. August 1918? Grandma Hanlon, whole family! Influenza! Name a day, August fourth? Smith, Burke, Shelby carried off. Williamson? He's on that hill, pink marble. Douglas? By the creek …»
«The story,» the young man urged.
«Eh?»
«The story you were telling.»
«Oh, the voice below? Well, I knew all the stones. Standing there, I guessed that voice out of the ground was Henrietta Fremwell, fine girl, twenty-four years, played piano at the Elite Theatre. Tall, graceful, blond. How did I know her voice? I stood where there was only men's graves. Hers was the only woman's. I ran to put my ear on her stone. Yes! Her voice, way down, screaming!
«'Miss Fremwell!' I shouted.
«'Miss Fremwell,' I yelled again.
«Deep down I heard her, only weeping now. Maybe she heard me, maybe not. She just cried. I ran downhill so fast I tripped and split my head on a stone, got up, screamed myself! Got to the tool shed, all blood, dragged out the tools, and just stood there in the moonlight with one shovel. The ground was ice solid, solid. I fell back against a tree. It would take three minutes to get back to her grave, and eight hours of cold night to dig to her box. The ground was like glass. A coffin is a coffin; only so much space for air. Henrietta Fremwell had been buried two days before the freeze, been asleep all that time, using up air, and it rained just before the cold spell and the earth over her, soaked with rainwater now, froze. I'd have to dig maybe eight hours. And the way she cried, there wasn't another hour of air left.»
The old man's pipe had gone out. He rocked in his chair, back and forth, back and forth, silently.
«But,» said the young man, «what did you do?»
«Nothing,» said the old man.
«Nothing!?»
«Nothing I could do. That ground was solid. Six men couldn't have dug that grave. No hot water near. And she might've been screaming hours before I heard, so . .
«You did-nothing?»
«Something Put the shovel and pick back in the tool shed, locked it and went back to the house and built a fire and drank some hot chocolate, shivering and shivering. Would you have done different?»
«I-«
«Would you have dug for eight hours in hard ice rock so's to reach her when she was truly dead of exhaustion, cold, smothered, and have to bury her all over again? Then call her folks and tell them?»
The young man was silent. On the porch, the mosquitoes hummed about the naked light bulb.
«I see,» said the young man.
The old man sucked his pipe. «I think I cried all night because there was nothing I could do.» He opened his eyes and stared about, surprised, as if he had been listening to someone else.
«That's quite a story,» said the young man.
«No,» said the old man, «God's truth. Want to hear more? See that big stone with the ugly angel? That was Adam Crispin's. Relatives fought, got a writ from a judge, dug him up hoping for poison. Found nothing. Put him back, but by that time the dirt from his grave mixed with other dirts. We shoveled in stuff from all around. Next plot, the angel with broken wings? Mary-Lou Phipps. Dug her up to lug her off to Elgin, Illinois. More relatives. Where she'd been, the pit stayed open, oh, three weeks. No funerals. Meanwhile, her dirt got cross-shoveled with others. Six stones over, one stone north, that was Henry Douglas Jones. Became famous sixty years after no one paid attention. Now he's planted under the Civil War monument. His grave lay wide two months, nobody wanted to utilize the hole of a Southerner, all of us leaning North with Grant. So his dirt got scattered. That give you some notion of what that FREE DIRT sign means?»
The young man eyed the cemetery landscape. «Well,» he said, «where is that dirt you're handing out?»
The old man pointed with his pipe and the stranger looked and indeed, by a nearby wall was a sizable hillock some ten feet long by about three feet high, loam and grass tufts of many shades of tan, brown, and burnt umber.
«Go look,» said the old man.
The young man walked slowly over to stand by the mound.
«Kick it,» said the old man. «See if it's real.»
The young man kicked and his face paled.
«Did you hear that?» he said.
«What?» said the old man, looking somewhere else.
The stranger listened and shook his head. «Nothing.»
«Well, now,» said the old man, knocking out the ashes from his pipe. «How much free dirt you need?»
«I hadn't thought.»
«Yes, you have,» said the old man, «or you wouldn't have driven your lightweight delivery truck up by the cemetery gate. I got cat's ears. Heard your motor just when you stopped. How much?»
«Oh,» said the young man uneasily. «My backyard's eighty feet by forty. I could use a good inch of topsoil. So …?»
«I'd say,» said the old man, «half of that mound there. Hell, take it all. Nobody wants it.»
«You mean-«
«I mean, that mound has been growing and diminishing, diminishing and growing, mixtures up and down, since Grant took Richmond and Sherman reached the sea. There's Civil dirt there, coffin splinters, satin casket shreds from when Lafayette met the Honor Guard's Edgar Allan Poe. There's funeral flowers, blossoms from ten hundred obsequies. Condolence-card confetti for Hessian troopers, Parisian gunners who never shipped home. That soil is so laced with bone meal and casket corsages, I should charge you to buy the lot. Grab a spade before I do.»
«Stay right there.» The young man raised one hand.
«I'm not going anywhere,» said the old man. «Nor is anyone else nearby.»
The half-truck was pulled up by the dirt mound and the young man was reaching in for a spade when the old man said:
«No, I think not.»
The old man went on:
«Graveyard spade's best. Familiar metal, familiar soil. Easy digging when like takes to like. So.»
The old man's head indicated a spade half stuck in the dark mound. The young man shrugged and moved.
The cemetery spade came free with a soft whispering. Pellets of ancient mound fell with similar whispers.
He began to dig and shift and fill the back of his half-truck as the old man from the corners of his eyes observed:
«It's more than dirt, as I said. War of 1812, San Juan Hill, Manassas, Gettysburg, October flu epidemic 1918, all strewn from graves filled and evicted to be refilled. Various occupants leavened out to dust, various glories melted to mixtures, rust from metal caskets, coffin handles, shoelaces but no shoes, hairs long and short. Ever see wreaths made of hair saved to weave crowns to fix on mortal pictures? All that's left of a smile or that funny look in the eyes of someone who knows she's not alive anymore, ever. Hair, epaulettes, not whole ones, but one strand of epaulette, all there along with blood that's gone to silt.»
The young man finished, sweating, and started to thrust the spade back in the earth when the old man said:
«Take it. Cemetery dirt, cemetery spade, like takes to like.»
«I'll bring it back tomorrow.» The young man tossed the spade into the mounded truck.
«No. You got the dirt, so keep the spade. Just don't bring the free dirt back.»
«Why would I do that?»
«Just don't,» said the old man, but did not move as the young man climbed in his truck to start the engine.
He sat listening to the dirt mound tremble and whisper in the flatbed.
«What're you waiting for?» asked the old man.
* * *
The flimsy half-truck ran toward the last of the twilight, pursued by the ever-encroaching dark. Clouds raced overhead, perturbed by the invisible. Back on the horizon, thunder sounded. A few drops of rain fell on the windshield, causing the young man to ram his foot on the gas and swerve into his home street even as the sun truly died, the wind rose, and the trees around his cottage bent and beckoned.
Climbing out, he stared at the sky and then his house and then the empty garden. A few drops of cold rain on his cheeks decided him; he drove the rattling half-truck into the empty garden, unlatched the metal back-flap, opened it just an inch so as to allow a proper flow, and then began motoring back and forth across the garden, letting the dark stuffs whisper down, letting the strange midnight earth sift and murmur, until at last the truck was empty and he stood in the blowing night, watching the wind stir the black soil.
Then he locked the truck in the garage and went to stand on the back porch, thinking, I won't need water. The storm will soak the ground.
He stood for a long while simply staring at the graveyard mulch, waiting for rain, until he thought, what am I waiting for? Jesus! And went in.
At ten o'clock a light rain tapped on the windows and sifted over the dark garden. At eleven it rained so steadily that the gutter drains swallowed and rattled.
At midnight the rain grew heavy. He looked to see if it was eroding the new dark earth but saw only the black muck drinking the downpour like a great black sponge, lit by distant flares of lightning.
Then, at one in the morning, the greatest Niagara of all shuddered the house, rinsed the windows to blindness, and shook the lights.
And then, abruptly, the downpour, the immense Niagara ceased, followed by one great downfell blow of lightning which plowed and pinioned the dark earth close by, near, outside, with explosions of light as if ten thousand flashbulbs had been fired off. Then darkness fell in curtains of thunder, cracking, breaking the bones.
In bed, wishing for the merest dog to hold for lack of human company, hugging the sheets, burying his head, then rising full to the silent air, the dark air, the storm gone, the rain shut, and a silence that spread in whispers as the last drench melted into the trembling soil.
He shuddered and then shivered and then hugged himself to stop the shivering of his cold flesh, and he was thirsty but could not make himself move to find the kitchen and drink water, milk, leftover wine, anything. He lay back, dry-mouthed, with unreasonable tears filling his eyes.
Free dirt, he thought. My God, what a damn-fool night. Free dirt!
At two o'clock he heard his wristwatch ticking softly.
At two-thirty he felt his pulse in his wrists and ankles and neck and then in his temples and inside his head.
The entire house leaned into the wind, listening.
Outside in the still night, the wind failed and the yard lay soaked and waiting.
And at last … yes. He opened his eyes and turned his head toward the shaded window.
He held his breath. what? Yes? Yes? What?
Beyond the window, beyond the wall, beyond the house, outside somewhere, a whisper, a murmur, growing louder and louder. Grass growing? Blossoms opening? Soil shifting, crumbling?
A great whisper, a mix of shadows and shades. Something rising. Something moving.
Ice froze beneath his skin. His heart ceased.
Outside in the dark, in the yard.
Autumn had arrived.
October was there.
His garden gave him …
A harvest
Last Rites
1994 year
Harrison Cooper was not that old, only thirty-nine, touching at the warm rim of forty rather than the cold rim of thirty, which makes a great difference in temperature and attitude. He was a genius verging on the brilliant, unmarried, unengaged, with no children that he could honestly claim, so having nothing much else to do, woke one morning in the summer of 1999, weeping.
«Why!?»
Out of bed, he faced his mirror to watch the tears, examine his sadness, trace the woe. Like a child, curious after emotion, he charted his own map, found no capital city of despair, but only a vast and empty expanse of sorrow, and went to shave.
Which didn't help, for Harrison Cooper had stumbled on some secret supply of melancholy that, even as he shaved, spilled in rivulets down his soaped cheeks.
«Great God,» he cried. «I'm at a funeral, but who's dead?!»
He ate his breakfast toast somewhat soggier than usual and plunged off to his laboratory to see if gazing at his Time Traveler would solve the mystery of eyes that shed rain while the rest of him stood fair.
Time Traveler? All, yes.
For Harrison Cooper had spent the better part of his third decade wiring circuitries of impossible pasts and as yet untouchable futures. Most men philosophize in their as-beautiful-as-women cars. Harrison Cooper chose to dream and knock together from pure air and electric thunderclaps what he called his Mobius Machine.
He had told his friends, with wine-colored nonchalance, that he was taking a future strip and a past strip, giving them a now half twist, so they looped on a single plane. Like those figure-eight ribbons, cut and pasted by that dear mathematician A. F. Mobius in the nineteenth century.
«Ah, yes, Mobius,» friends murmured.
What they really meant was, «Ah, no. Good night.»
Harrison Cooper was not a mad scientist, but he was irretrievably boring. Knowing this, he had retreated to finish the Mobius Machine. Now, this strange morning, with cold rain streaming from his eyes, he stood staring at the damned contraption, bewildered that he was not dancing about with Creation's joy.
He was interrupted by the ringing of the laboratory doorbell and opened the door to find one of those rare people, a real Western Union delivery boy on a real bike. He signed for the telegram and was about to shut the door when he saw the lad staring fixedly at the Mobius Machine.
«What,» exclaimed the boy, eyes wide, «is that?»
Harrison Cooper stood aside and let the boy wander in a great circle around his Machine, his eyes dancing up, over, and around the immense circling figure eight of shining copper, brass, and silver.
«Sure!» cried the boy at last, beaming. «A Time Machine!»
''Bull's-eye!''
«When do you leave?» said the boy. «Where will you go to meet which person where? Alexander? Caesar? Napoleon! Hitler?!»
«No, no!»
The boy exploded his list. «Lincoln-«
«More like it.»
«General Grant! Roosevelt! Benjamin Franklin?»
«Franklin, yes!»
«Aren't you lucky?»
«Am I?» Stunned, Harrison Cooper found himself nodding. «Yes, by God, and suddenly-«
Suddenly he knew why he had wept at dawn. He grabbed the young lad's hand. «Much thanks. You're a catalyst-«
«Cat-?»
«A Rorschach test-making me draw my own list-now gently, swiftly-out! No offense.»
The door slammed. He ran for his library phone, punched numbers, waited, scanning the thousand books on the shelves.
«Yes, yes, he murmured, his eyes flicking over the gorgeous sun-bright titles. «Some of you. Two, three, maybe four. Hello! Sam? Samuel! Can you get here in five minutes, make it three? Dire emergency. Come!»
He slammed the phone, swiveled to reach out and touch.
«Shakespeare,» he murmured. «Willy-William, will it be-you?»
The laboratory door opened and Sam/Samuel stuck his head in and froze.
For there, seated in the midst of his great Mobius figure eight, leather jacket and boots shined, picnic lunch packed, was Harrison Cooper, arms flexed, elbows out, fingers alert to the computer controls.
«Where's your Lindbergh cap and goggles?» asked Samuel.
Harrison Cooper dug them out, put them on, smirking. «Raise the Titanic; then sink it!» Samuel strode to the lovely machine to confront its rather outre' occupant. «Well, Cooper, what?» he cried.
«I woke this morning in tears.»
«Sure. I read the phone book aloud last night. That did it!»
«No. You read me these!»
Cooper handed the books over.
«Sure! We gabbed till three, drunk as owls on English Lit!''
«To give me tears for answers!»
«To what?»
«To their loss. To the fact that they died unknown, unrecognized; to the grim fact that some were only truly recognized, republished, raved over from 1920 on!»
«Cut the cackle and move the buns,» said Samuel. «Did you call to sermonize or ask advice?»
Harrison Cooper leaped from his machine and elbowed Samuel into the library.
«You must map my trip for me!»
«Trip? Trip!»
«I go a-journeying, far-traveling, the Grand Literary Tour. A Salvation Army of one!»
«To save lives?»
«No, souls! What good is life if the soul's dead? Sit! Tell me all the authors we raved on by night to weep me at dawn. Here's brandy. Drink! Remember?»
«I do!»
«List them, then! The New England Melancholic first. Sad, recluse from land, should have drowned at sea, a lost soul of sixty! Now, what other sad geniuses did we maunder over-«
«God!» Samuel cried. «You're going to tour them? Oh, Harrison, Harry, I love you!»
«Shut up! Remember how you write jokes? Laugh and think backwards! So let us cry and leap up our tear ducts to the source. Weep for Whales to find minnows!»
«Last night I think I quoted-«
«Yes?»
«And then we spoke-«
«Go on-«
''Well.''
Samuel gulped his brandy. Fire burned his eyes.
«Write this down!»
They wrote and ran.
«What will you do when you get there, Librarian Doctor?»
Harrison Cooper, seated back in the shadow of the great hovering Mobius ribbon, laughed and nodded. «Yes! Harrison Cooper, L.M.D. Literary Meadow Doctor. Curer of fine old lions off their feed, in dire need of tender love, small applause, the wine of words, all in my heart, all on my tongue. Say 'Ah!' So long. Good-bye!»
«God bless!»
He slammed a lever, whirled a knob, and the machine, in a spiral of metal, a whisk of butterfly ribbon, very simply-vanished.
A moment later, the Mobius Machine gave a twist of its atoms and-returned.
«Voila!» cried Harrison Cooper, pink-faced and wild-eyed. 'It's done!»
«So soon?» exclaimed his friend Samuel «A minute here, but hours there!»
«Did you succeed?»
«Look! Proof positive.»
For tears dripped off his chin.
«What happened? what?!»
«This, and this … and …this!»
A gyroscope spun, a celebratory ribbon spiraled endlessly on itself, and the ghost of a massive window curtain haunted the air, exhaled, and then ceased.
As if fallen from a delivery-chute, the books arrived almost before the footfalls and then the half-seen feet and then the fog-wrapped legs and body and at last the head of a man who, as the ribbon spiraled itself back into emptiness, crouched over the volumes as if warming himself at a hearth.
He touched the books and listened to the air in the dim hallway where dinnertime voices drifted up from below and a door stood wide near his elbow, from which the faint scent of illness came and went, arrived and departed, with the stilted breathing of some patient within the room. Plates and silverware sounded from the world of evening and quiet good health downstairs. The hall and the sickroom were for a time deserted. In a moment, someone might ascend with a tray for the half-sleeping man in the intemperate room.
Harrison Cooper rose with stealth, checking the stairwell, and then, carrying a sweet burden of books, moved into the room, where candles lit both sides of a bed on which the dying man lay supine, arms straight at his sides, head weighting the pillow, eyes grimaced shut, mouth set as if daring the ceiling, mortality itself, to sink and extinguish him.
At the first touch of the books, now on one side, now on the other, of his bed, the old man's eyelids fluttered, his dry lips cracked; the air whistled from his nostrils:
«who's there?» he whispered. «what time is it?»
«whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can,» replied the traveler at the foot of the bed, quietly.
«what, what?» the old man in the bed whispered swiftly. «It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation,» quoted the visitor, who now moved to place a book under each of the dying man's hands where his tremoring fingers could scratch, pull away, then touch, Braille-like, again.
One by one, the stranger held up book after book, to show the covers, then a page, and yet another title page where printed dates of this novel surfed up, adrift, but to stay forever on some far future shore.
The sick man's eyes lingered over the covers, the tides, the dates, and then fixed to his visitor's bright face. He exhaled, stunned. «My God, you have the look of a traveler. From where?»
«Do the years show?» Harrison Cooper leaned forward. «Well, then-I bring you an Annunciation.»
«Such things come to pass only with virgins,» whispered the old man. «No virgin lies here buried under his unread books.»
«I come to unbury you. I bring tidings from a far place.» The sick man's eyes moved to the books beneath his trembling hands.
«Mine?» he whispered.
The traveler nodded solemnly, but began to smile when the color in the old man's face grew warmer arid the expression in his eyes and on his mouth was suddenly eager.
«Is there hope. then?»
«There is!»
«I believe you.» The old man took a breath and then wondered, «Why?»
«Because,» said the stranger at the foot of the bed, «I love you.»
«I do not know you, sir!»
«But I know you fore and aft, port to starboard, main topgallants to gunnels, every day in your long life to here!»
«Oh, the sweet sound!» cried the old man. «Every word that you say, every light from your eyes, is foundation-of-the-world true! How can it be?» Tears winked from the old man's lids. «Why?»
«Because I am the truth,» said the traveler. «I have come a long way to find and say: you are not lost. Your great Beast has only drowned some little while. In another year, lost ahead, great and glorious, plain and simple men will gather at your grave and shout: he breeches, he rises, he breeches, he rises! and the white shape will surface to the light, the great terror lift into the storm and thunderous St. Elmo's fire and you with him, each bound to each, and no way to tell where he stops and you start or where you stop and he goes off around the world lifting a fleet of libraries in his and your wake through nameless seas of sub-sub-librarians and readers mobbing the docks to chart your far journeyings, alert for your lost cries at three of a wild morn.»
«Christ's wounds!» said the man in his winding-sheet bedclothes. «To the point, man, the point! Do you speak truth!?»
«I give you my hand on it, and pledge my soul and my heart's blood.» The visitor moved to do just this, and the two men's fists fused as one. «Take these gifts to the grave. Count these pages like a rosary in your last hours. Tell no one where they came from. Scoffers would knock the ritual beads from your fingers. So tell this rosary in the dark before dawn, and the rosary is this: you will live forever. You are immortal.»
«No more of this, no more! Be still.»
«I can not. Hear me. Where you have passed a fire path will burn, miraculous in the Bengal Bay, the Indian Seas, Hope's Cape, and around the Horn, past perdition's landfall, as far as living eyes can see.»
He gripped the old man's fist ever more tightly.
«I swear. In the years ahead, a million millions will crowd your grave to sleep you well and warm your bones. Do you hear?»
«Great God, you are a proper priest to sound my Last Rites. And will I enjoy my own funeral? I will.»
His hands, freed, clung to the books at each side, as the ardent visitor raised yet other books and intoned the dates:
«Nineteen twenty-two . . . 1930 . . .1935. . . 1940 . 1955… 1970. Can you read and know what it means?»
He held the last volume close to the old man's face. The fiery eyes moved. The old mouth creaked.
«Nineteen ninety?»
«Yours. One hundred years from tonight.»
«Dear God!»
«I must go, but I would hear. Chapter One. Speak.»
The old man's eyes slid and burned. He licked his lips, traced the words, and at last whispered, beginning to weep:
«'Call me Ishmael.'
There was snow and more snow and more snow after that. In the dissolving whiteness, the silver ribbon twirled in a massive whisper to let forth in an exhalation of Time the journeying librarian and his book bag. As if slicing white bread rinsed by snow, the ribbon, as the traveler ghosted himself to flesh, sifted him through the hospital wall into a room as white as December. There, abandoned, lay a man as pale as the snow and the wind. Almost young, he slept with his mustaches oiled to his lip by fever. He seemed not to know nor care that a messenger had invaded the air near his bed. His eyes did not stir, nor did his mouth increase the passage of breath. His hands at his sides did not open to receive. He seemed already lost in a bomb and only his unexpected visitor's voice caused his eyes to roll behind their shut lids.
«Are you forgotten?» a voice asked.
«Unborn,» the pale man replied.
«Never remembered?»
«Only. Only in. France.»
«Wrote nothing at all?»
«Not worthy.»
«Feel the weight of what I place on your bed. No, don't look. Feel.»
«Tombstones.»
«With names, yes, but not tombstones. Not marble but paper. Dates, yes, but the day after tomorrow and tomorrow and ten thousand after that. And your name on each.»
«It will not be.»
«Is. Let me speak the names. Listen. Masque?»
«Red Death.»
«The Fall of-« —
«Usher!»
«Pit?»
«Pendulum!»
«Tell-tale?»
«Heart! My heart. Heart!»
«Repeat: for the love of God, Montresor.» «Silly.»
«Repeat: Montresor, for the love of God.» «For the love of God, Montresor'.»
«Do you see this label?»
«I see!»
«Read the date.»
«Nineteen ninety-four. No such date.»
«Again, and the name of the wine.»
«Nineteen ninety-four. Amontillado. And my name!»
«Yes! Now shake your head. Make the fool's-cap bells ring. Here's mortar for the last brick. Quickly. I'm here to bury you alive with books. When death comes, how will you greet him? With a shout and-?»
«Requiescat in pace?»
«Say it again.»
«Requiescat in pace!»
The Time Wind roared, the room emptied. Nurses ran in, summoned by laughter, and tried to seize the books that weighed down his joy.
«What's he saying?» someone cried.
In Paris, an hour, a day, a year, a minute later, there was a run of St. Elmo's fire along a church steeple, a blue glow in a dark alley, a soft tread at a street corner, a turnabout of wind like an invisible carousel, and then footfalls up a stair to a door which opened on a bedroom where a window looked out upon cafes filled with people and far music, and in a bed by the window, a tall man lying, his pale face immobile, until he heard alien breath in his room.
The shadow of a man stood over him and now leaned down so that the light from the window revealed a face and a mouth as it inhaled and then spoke. The single word that the mouth said was:
«Oscar?»
Harrison Cooper was not that old, only thirty-nine, touching at the warm rim of forty rather than the cold rim of thirty, which makes a great difference in temperature and attitude. He was a genius verging on the brilliant, unmarried, unengaged, with no children that he could honestly claim, so having nothing much else to do, woke one morning in the summer of 1999, weeping.
«Why!?»
Out of bed, he faced his mirror to watch the tears, examine his sadness, trace the woe. Like a child, curious after emotion, he charted his own map, found no capital city of despair, but only a vast and empty expanse of sorrow, and went to shave.
Which didn't help, for Harrison Cooper had stumbled on some secret supply of melancholy that, even as he shaved, spilled in rivulets down his soaped cheeks.
«Great God,» he cried. «I'm at a funeral, but who's dead?!»
He ate his breakfast toast somewhat soggier than usual and plunged off to his laboratory to see if gazing at his Time Traveler would solve the mystery of eyes that shed rain while the rest of him stood fair.
Time Traveler? All, yes.
For Harrison Cooper had spent the better part of his third decade wiring circuitries of impossible pasts and as yet untouchable futures. Most men philosophize in their as-beautiful-as-women cars. Harrison Cooper chose to dream and knock together from pure air and electric thunderclaps what he called his Mobius Machine.
He had told his friends, with wine-colored nonchalance, that he was taking a future strip and a past strip, giving them a now half twist, so they looped on a single plane. Like those figure-eight ribbons, cut and pasted by that dear mathematician A. F. Mobius in the nineteenth century.
«Ah, yes, Mobius,» friends murmured.
What they really meant was, «Ah, no. Good night.»
Harrison Cooper was not a mad scientist, but he was irretrievably boring. Knowing this, he had retreated to finish the Mobius Machine. Now, this strange morning, with cold rain streaming from his eyes, he stood staring at the damned contraption, bewildered that he was not dancing about with Creation's joy.
He was interrupted by the ringing of the laboratory doorbell and opened the door to find one of those rare people, a real Western Union delivery boy on a real bike. He signed for the telegram and was about to shut the door when he saw the lad staring fixedly at the Mobius Machine.
«What,» exclaimed the boy, eyes wide, «is that?»
Harrison Cooper stood aside and let the boy wander in a great circle around his Machine, his eyes dancing up, over, and around the immense circling figure eight of shining copper, brass, and silver.
«Sure!» cried the boy at last, beaming. «A Time Machine!»
''Bull's-eye!''
«When do you leave?» said the boy. «Where will you go to meet which person where? Alexander? Caesar? Napoleon! Hitler?!»
«No, no!»
The boy exploded his list. «Lincoln-«
«More like it.»
«General Grant! Roosevelt! Benjamin Franklin?»
«Franklin, yes!»
«Aren't you lucky?»
«Am I?» Stunned, Harrison Cooper found himself nodding. «Yes, by God, and suddenly-«
Suddenly he knew why he had wept at dawn. He grabbed the young lad's hand. «Much thanks. You're a catalyst-«
«Cat-?»
«A Rorschach test-making me draw my own list-now gently, swiftly-out! No offense.»
The door slammed. He ran for his library phone, punched numbers, waited, scanning the thousand books on the shelves.
«Yes, yes, he murmured, his eyes flicking over the gorgeous sun-bright titles. «Some of you. Two, three, maybe four. Hello! Sam? Samuel! Can you get here in five minutes, make it three? Dire emergency. Come!»
He slammed the phone, swiveled to reach out and touch.
«Shakespeare,» he murmured. «Willy-William, will it be-you?»
The laboratory door opened and Sam/Samuel stuck his head in and froze.
For there, seated in the midst of his great Mobius figure eight, leather jacket and boots shined, picnic lunch packed, was Harrison Cooper, arms flexed, elbows out, fingers alert to the computer controls.
«Where's your Lindbergh cap and goggles?» asked Samuel.
Harrison Cooper dug them out, put them on, smirking. «Raise the Titanic; then sink it!» Samuel strode to the lovely machine to confront its rather outre' occupant. «Well, Cooper, what?» he cried.
«I woke this morning in tears.»
«Sure. I read the phone book aloud last night. That did it!»
«No. You read me these!»
Cooper handed the books over.
«Sure! We gabbed till three, drunk as owls on English Lit!''
«To give me tears for answers!»
«To what?»
«To their loss. To the fact that they died unknown, unrecognized; to the grim fact that some were only truly recognized, republished, raved over from 1920 on!»
«Cut the cackle and move the buns,» said Samuel. «Did you call to sermonize or ask advice?»
Harrison Cooper leaped from his machine and elbowed Samuel into the library.
«You must map my trip for me!»
«Trip? Trip!»
«I go a-journeying, far-traveling, the Grand Literary Tour. A Salvation Army of one!»
«To save lives?»
«No, souls! What good is life if the soul's dead? Sit! Tell me all the authors we raved on by night to weep me at dawn. Here's brandy. Drink! Remember?»
«I do!»
«List them, then! The New England Melancholic first. Sad, recluse from land, should have drowned at sea, a lost soul of sixty! Now, what other sad geniuses did we maunder over-«
«God!» Samuel cried. «You're going to tour them? Oh, Harrison, Harry, I love you!»
«Shut up! Remember how you write jokes? Laugh and think backwards! So let us cry and leap up our tear ducts to the source. Weep for Whales to find minnows!»
«Last night I think I quoted-«
«Yes?»
«And then we spoke-«
«Go on-«
''Well.''
Samuel gulped his brandy. Fire burned his eyes.
«Write this down!»
They wrote and ran.
«What will you do when you get there, Librarian Doctor?»
Harrison Cooper, seated back in the shadow of the great hovering Mobius ribbon, laughed and nodded. «Yes! Harrison Cooper, L.M.D. Literary Meadow Doctor. Curer of fine old lions off their feed, in dire need of tender love, small applause, the wine of words, all in my heart, all on my tongue. Say 'Ah!' So long. Good-bye!»
«God bless!»
He slammed a lever, whirled a knob, and the machine, in a spiral of metal, a whisk of butterfly ribbon, very simply-vanished.
A moment later, the Mobius Machine gave a twist of its atoms and-returned.
«Voila!» cried Harrison Cooper, pink-faced and wild-eyed. 'It's done!»
«So soon?» exclaimed his friend Samuel «A minute here, but hours there!»
«Did you succeed?»
«Look! Proof positive.»
For tears dripped off his chin.
«What happened? what?!»
«This, and this … and …this!»
A gyroscope spun, a celebratory ribbon spiraled endlessly on itself, and the ghost of a massive window curtain haunted the air, exhaled, and then ceased.
As if fallen from a delivery-chute, the books arrived almost before the footfalls and then the half-seen feet and then the fog-wrapped legs and body and at last the head of a man who, as the ribbon spiraled itself back into emptiness, crouched over the volumes as if warming himself at a hearth.
He touched the books and listened to the air in the dim hallway where dinnertime voices drifted up from below and a door stood wide near his elbow, from which the faint scent of illness came and went, arrived and departed, with the stilted breathing of some patient within the room. Plates and silverware sounded from the world of evening and quiet good health downstairs. The hall and the sickroom were for a time deserted. In a moment, someone might ascend with a tray for the half-sleeping man in the intemperate room.
Harrison Cooper rose with stealth, checking the stairwell, and then, carrying a sweet burden of books, moved into the room, where candles lit both sides of a bed on which the dying man lay supine, arms straight at his sides, head weighting the pillow, eyes grimaced shut, mouth set as if daring the ceiling, mortality itself, to sink and extinguish him.
At the first touch of the books, now on one side, now on the other, of his bed, the old man's eyelids fluttered, his dry lips cracked; the air whistled from his nostrils:
«who's there?» he whispered. «what time is it?»
«whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can,» replied the traveler at the foot of the bed, quietly.
«what, what?» the old man in the bed whispered swiftly. «It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation,» quoted the visitor, who now moved to place a book under each of the dying man's hands where his tremoring fingers could scratch, pull away, then touch, Braille-like, again.
One by one, the stranger held up book after book, to show the covers, then a page, and yet another title page where printed dates of this novel surfed up, adrift, but to stay forever on some far future shore.
The sick man's eyes lingered over the covers, the tides, the dates, and then fixed to his visitor's bright face. He exhaled, stunned. «My God, you have the look of a traveler. From where?»
«Do the years show?» Harrison Cooper leaned forward. «Well, then-I bring you an Annunciation.»
«Such things come to pass only with virgins,» whispered the old man. «No virgin lies here buried under his unread books.»
«I come to unbury you. I bring tidings from a far place.» The sick man's eyes moved to the books beneath his trembling hands.
«Mine?» he whispered.
The traveler nodded solemnly, but began to smile when the color in the old man's face grew warmer arid the expression in his eyes and on his mouth was suddenly eager.
«Is there hope. then?»
«There is!»
«I believe you.» The old man took a breath and then wondered, «Why?»
«Because,» said the stranger at the foot of the bed, «I love you.»
«I do not know you, sir!»
«But I know you fore and aft, port to starboard, main topgallants to gunnels, every day in your long life to here!»
«Oh, the sweet sound!» cried the old man. «Every word that you say, every light from your eyes, is foundation-of-the-world true! How can it be?» Tears winked from the old man's lids. «Why?»
«Because I am the truth,» said the traveler. «I have come a long way to find and say: you are not lost. Your great Beast has only drowned some little while. In another year, lost ahead, great and glorious, plain and simple men will gather at your grave and shout: he breeches, he rises, he breeches, he rises! and the white shape will surface to the light, the great terror lift into the storm and thunderous St. Elmo's fire and you with him, each bound to each, and no way to tell where he stops and you start or where you stop and he goes off around the world lifting a fleet of libraries in his and your wake through nameless seas of sub-sub-librarians and readers mobbing the docks to chart your far journeyings, alert for your lost cries at three of a wild morn.»
«Christ's wounds!» said the man in his winding-sheet bedclothes. «To the point, man, the point! Do you speak truth!?»
«I give you my hand on it, and pledge my soul and my heart's blood.» The visitor moved to do just this, and the two men's fists fused as one. «Take these gifts to the grave. Count these pages like a rosary in your last hours. Tell no one where they came from. Scoffers would knock the ritual beads from your fingers. So tell this rosary in the dark before dawn, and the rosary is this: you will live forever. You are immortal.»
«No more of this, no more! Be still.»
«I can not. Hear me. Where you have passed a fire path will burn, miraculous in the Bengal Bay, the Indian Seas, Hope's Cape, and around the Horn, past perdition's landfall, as far as living eyes can see.»
He gripped the old man's fist ever more tightly.
«I swear. In the years ahead, a million millions will crowd your grave to sleep you well and warm your bones. Do you hear?»
«Great God, you are a proper priest to sound my Last Rites. And will I enjoy my own funeral? I will.»
His hands, freed, clung to the books at each side, as the ardent visitor raised yet other books and intoned the dates:
«Nineteen twenty-two . . . 1930 . . .1935. . . 1940 . 1955… 1970. Can you read and know what it means?»
He held the last volume close to the old man's face. The fiery eyes moved. The old mouth creaked.
«Nineteen ninety?»
«Yours. One hundred years from tonight.»
«Dear God!»
«I must go, but I would hear. Chapter One. Speak.»
The old man's eyes slid and burned. He licked his lips, traced the words, and at last whispered, beginning to weep:
«'Call me Ishmael.'
There was snow and more snow and more snow after that. In the dissolving whiteness, the silver ribbon twirled in a massive whisper to let forth in an exhalation of Time the journeying librarian and his book bag. As if slicing white bread rinsed by snow, the ribbon, as the traveler ghosted himself to flesh, sifted him through the hospital wall into a room as white as December. There, abandoned, lay a man as pale as the snow and the wind. Almost young, he slept with his mustaches oiled to his lip by fever. He seemed not to know nor care that a messenger had invaded the air near his bed. His eyes did not stir, nor did his mouth increase the passage of breath. His hands at his sides did not open to receive. He seemed already lost in a bomb and only his unexpected visitor's voice caused his eyes to roll behind their shut lids.
«Are you forgotten?» a voice asked.
«Unborn,» the pale man replied.
«Never remembered?»
«Only. Only in. France.»
«Wrote nothing at all?»
«Not worthy.»
«Feel the weight of what I place on your bed. No, don't look. Feel.»
«Tombstones.»
«With names, yes, but not tombstones. Not marble but paper. Dates, yes, but the day after tomorrow and tomorrow and ten thousand after that. And your name on each.»
«It will not be.»
«Is. Let me speak the names. Listen. Masque?»
«Red Death.»
«The Fall of-« —
«Usher!»
«Pit?»
«Pendulum!»
«Tell-tale?»
«Heart! My heart. Heart!»
«Repeat: for the love of God, Montresor.» «Silly.»
«Repeat: Montresor, for the love of God.» «For the love of God, Montresor'.»
«Do you see this label?»
«I see!»
«Read the date.»
«Nineteen ninety-four. No such date.»
«Again, and the name of the wine.»
«Nineteen ninety-four. Amontillado. And my name!»
«Yes! Now shake your head. Make the fool's-cap bells ring. Here's mortar for the last brick. Quickly. I'm here to bury you alive with books. When death comes, how will you greet him? With a shout and-?»
«Requiescat in pace?»
«Say it again.»
«Requiescat in pace!»
The Time Wind roared, the room emptied. Nurses ran in, summoned by laughter, and tried to seize the books that weighed down his joy.
«What's he saying?» someone cried.
In Paris, an hour, a day, a year, a minute later, there was a run of St. Elmo's fire along a church steeple, a blue glow in a dark alley, a soft tread at a street corner, a turnabout of wind like an invisible carousel, and then footfalls up a stair to a door which opened on a bedroom where a window looked out upon cafes filled with people and far music, and in a bed by the window, a tall man lying, his pale face immobile, until he heard alien breath in his room.
The shadow of a man stood over him and now leaned down so that the light from the window revealed a face and a mouth as it inhaled and then spoke. The single word that the mouth said was:
«Oscar?»
The Other Highway
1996 year
They drove into green Sunday-morning country, away from the hot aluminum city, and watched as the sky was set free and moved over them like a lake they had never known was there, amazingly blue and with white breakers above them as they traveled.
Clarence Travers slowed the car and felt the cool wind move over his face with the smell of cut grass. He reached over to grasp his wife's hand and glanced at his son and daughter in the backseat, not fighting, at least for this moment, as the car moved through one quiet beauty after another in what might be a Sunday so lush and green it would never end.
«Thank God we're doing this,» said Cecelia Travers. «It's been a million years since we got away.» He felt her hand hug his and then relax completely. «when I think of all those ladies dropping dead from the heat at the cocktail parry this afternoon, welt»
«Well, indeed,» said Clarence Travers. «Onward!»
He pressed the gas pedal and they moved faster. Their progress out of the city had been mildly hysterical, with cars shrieking and shoving them toward islands of wilderness praying for picnics that might not be found. Seeing that he had put the car in the fast lane, he slowed to gradually move himself and his family through the banshee traffic until they were idling along at an almost reasonable fifty miles an hour. The scents of flowers and trees that blew in the window made his move worthwhile. He laughed at nothing at all and said:
«Sometimes, when I get this far out, I think let's just keep driving, never go back to the damned city.»
«Let's drive a hundred miles,» shouted his son.
«A thousand!» cried his daughter.
«A thousand!» said Clarence Travers. «But one slow mile at a time.» And then said, softly, «Hey!»
And as suddenly as if they had dreamed it up, the lost highway came into view. «Wonderful!» said Mr. Clarence Travers.
«What?» asked the children.
«Look!» said Clarence Travers, leaning over his wife, pointing. «That's the Old road. The one they used a long time ago.»
«That?» said his wife.
«It's awfully small,» said his son.
«Well, there weren't many cars then, they didn't need much.»
«It looks like a big snake,» said his daughter.
«Yeah, the old roads used to twist and turn, all right. Remember?»
Cecelia Travers nodded. The car had slowed and they gazed over at that narrow concrete strip with the green grass buckling it gently here or there and sprays of wildflowers nestling up close to either side and the morning sunlight coming down through the high elms and maples and oaks that led the way toward the forest.
«I know it like the nose on my face,» said Clarence Travers. «How would you like to ride on it?»
«Oh, Clarence, now
«I mean it.»
«Oh, Daddy, could we?»
«All right, we'll do it,» he said decisively.
«We can't!» said Cecelia Travers. «It's probably against the law. It can't be safe.»
But before his wife could finish, he turned off the freeway and let all the swift cars rush on while he drove, smiling at each bump, down over a small ditch, toward the old road.
«Clarence, please! we'll be arrested!»
«For going ten miles an hour on a highway nobody uses anymore? Let's not kick over any beehives, it's too nice a day. I'll buy you all soda pops if you behave.»
They reached the old road.
«See how simple? Now which way, kids?»
«That way, that way!»
«Easy as pie!»
And he let the car take them away on the old highway, the great white-gray boa constrictor that lashed now slowly this way in green moss-velvet meadows, looped over gentle hills, and lowered itself majestically into caves of moist-smelling trees, through the odor of cricks and spring mud and crystal water that rustled like sheets of cellophane over small stone falls. They drove slow enough to see the waterspiders' enigmatic etchings on quiet pools behind dams of last October's leaves.
«Daddy, what are those?»
«What, the water-skaters? No one has ever caught one. You wait and wait and put your hand out and bang! The spider's gone. They're the first things in life you can't grab onto. The list gets bigger as you grow old, so start small. Don't believe in them. They're not really there.»
«It's fun thinking they are.»
«You have just stated a deep philosophical truth. Now, drive on, Mr. Travers.» And obeying his own command with good humor, he drove on.
And they came to a forest that had been like November all through the winter and now, reluctantly, was putting out green flags to welcome the season. Butterflies in great tosses of confetti leaped from the deeps of the forest to ramble drunkenly on the air, their thousand torn shadows following over grass and water.
«Let's go back now,» said Cecelia Travers.
«Aw, Mom,» said the son and daughter.
«Why?» said Clarence Travers. «My God, how many kids back in that damned hot town can say they drove on a road nobody else has used in years? Not one! Not one with a father brave enough to cross a little grass to take the old way. Right?»
Mrs. Travers lapsed into silence.
«Right there,» said Clarence Travers, «over that hill, the highway turns left, then right, then left again, an S curve, and another S. Wait and see.»
«Left.»
«Right.»
«Left.»
«An S curve.»
The car purred.
«Another S!»
«Just like you said!»
«Look.» Clarence Travers pointed. A hundred yards across the way from them, the freeway suddenly appeared for a few yards before it vanished, screaming behind stacks of playing-card billboards. Clarence Travers stared fixedly at it and the grass between it and this shadowed path, this silent place like the bottom of an old stream where tides used to come but came no more, where the wind ran through nights making the old sound of far traffic.
«You know something,» said the wife. «That freeway over there scares me.»
«Can we drive home on this old road instead, Dad?» said the son.
«I wish we could.»
«I've always been scared,» said the wife, watching that other traffic roaring by, gone before it arrived.
«We're all afraid,» said Clarence Travers. «But you pay your money and take your chance. Well?»
His wife sighed. «Damn, get back on that dreadful thing.»
«Not quite yet,» said Clarence Travers and drove to reach a small, very small village, all quite unexpected, a settlement no more than a dozen white clapboard houses mossed under giant trees, dreaming in a green tide of water and leaf-shadow, with wind shaking the rocking chairs on weathered porches and dogs sleeping in the cool nap of grass-carpeting at noon, and a small general store with a dirty red gas pump out front.
They drew up there and got out and stood, unreal in the sudden lack of motion, not quite accepting these houses lost in the wilderness.
The door to the general store squealed open and an old man stepped out, blinked at them, and said, «Say, did you folks just come down that old road?»
Clarence Travers avoided his wife's accusing eyes. «Yes, sir.
«No one on that road in twenty years.»
«We were out for a lark,» said Mr. Travers. «And found a peacock,» he added.
«A sparrow,» said his wife.
«The freeway passed us by, a mile over there, if you want it,» said the old man. «When the new road opened, this town just died on the vine. We got nothing here now but people like me. That is: old.»
«Looks like there'd be places here to rent.»
«Mister, just walk in, knock out the bats, stomp the spiders, and any place is yours for thirty bucks a month. I own the whole town.»
«Oh, we're not really interested,» said Cecelia Travers.
«Didn't think you would be,» said the old man. «Too far out from the city, too far off the freeway. And that dirt road there slops over when it rains, all muck and mud. And, heck, it's against the law to use that path. Not that they ever patrol it.» The old man snorted, shaking his head. «And not that I'll turn you in. But it gave me a nice start just now to see you coming down that rut. J had to give a quick look at my calendar, by God, and make sure it wasn't 1929!»
Lord, I remember, thought Clarence Travers. This is Fox Hill. A thousand people lived here. I was a kid, we passed through on summer nights. We used to stop here late late, and me sleeping in the backseat in the moonlight. My grandmother and grandfather in back with me. It's nice to sleep in a car driving late and the road all white, watching the stars turn as you take the curves, listening to the grown-ups' voices underwater, remote, talking, talking, laughing, murmuring, whispering. My father driving, so stolid. Just to be driving in the summer dark, up along the lake to the Dunes, where the poison ivy grew out on the lonely beach and the wind stayed all the time and never went away. And us driving by that lonely graveyard place of sand and moonlight and poison ivy and the waves tumbling in like dusty ash on the shore, the lake pounding like a locomotive on the sand, coming and going. And me crumpled down and smelling Grandmother's wind-cooled coat and the voices comforting and blanketing me with their solidity and their always-will-be-here sounds that would go on forever, myself always young and us always riding on a summer night in our old Kissel with the side flaps down. And stopping here at nine or ten for Pistachio and Tutti-frutti ice cream that tasted, faintly, beautifully, of gasoline. All of us licking and biting the cones and smelling the gasoline and driving on, sleepy and snug, toward home, Green Town, thirty years ago.
He caught himself and said:
«About these houses, would it be much trouble fixing them up?» He squinted at the old man.
«Well, yes and no, most of 'em over fifty years old, lots of dust. You could buy one off me for ten thousand, a real bargain now, you'll admit. If you were an artist, now, a painter, or something like that.»
«I write copy in an advertising firm.»
«Write stories, too, no doubt? Well, now, you get a writer out here, quiet, no neighbors, you'd do lots of writing.»
Cecelia Travers stood silently between the old man and her husband. Clarence Travers did not look at her, but looked at the cinders around the porch of the general store. «I imagine I could work here.»
«Sure,» said the old man.
«I've often thought,» said Mr. Travers, «it's time we got away from the city and took it a little easy.»
«Sure,» said the old man.
Mrs. Travers said nothing but searched in her purse and took out a minor.
«Would you like some drinks?» asked Clarence Travers with exaggerated concern. «Three Orange Crushes, make it four,» he told the old man. The old man moved inside the store, which smelled of nails and crackers and dust.
When the old man was gone, Mr. Travers turned to his wife, and his eyes were shining. «We've always wanted to do it! Let's!»
«Do what?» she said.
«Move out here, snap decision, why not? Why? We've promised ourselves every year: get away from the noise, the confusion, so the kids'd have a place to play. And . .
«Good grief» the wife cried.
The old man moved inside the store, coughing. «Ridiculous.» She lowered her voice. «We've got the apartment paid up, you've got a fine job, the kids have school with friends, I belong to some fine clubs. And we've just spent a bundle redecorating. We-«
«Listen,» he said, as if she were really listening. « None of that's important. Out here, we can breathe. Back in town, hell, you complain …»
«Just to have something to complain about.»
«Your clubs can't be that important.»
«It's not clubs, it's friends!»
«How many would care if we dropped dead tomorrow?» he said. «If I got hit in that traffic, how many thousand cars would run over me before one stopped to see if I was a man or dog left in the road?»
«Your job . . .» she started to say.
«My God, ten years ago we said, in two more years we'll have enough money to quit and write my novel! But each year we've said next year! and next year and next year!»
«We've had fun, haven't we?»
«Sure! Subways are fun, buses are fun, martinis and drunken friends are fun. Advertising? Yeah! But I've used all the fun there is! I want to write about what I've seen now, and there's no better place than this. Look at that house over there! Can't you just see me in the front window banging the hell out of my typewriter?»
«Stop hyperventilating!»
«Hyperventilate? God, I'd jump for joy to quit. I've gone as far as I can go. Come on, Cecelia, let's get back some of the spunk in our marriage, take a chance!»
«The children
«We'd love it here!» said the son.
«I think,» said the daughter.
«I'm not getting any younger,» said Clarence Travers.
«Nor am I,» she said, touching his arm. «But we can't play hopscotch now. When the children leave, yes, we'll think about it.»
«Children, hopscotch, my God, I'll take my typewriter to the grave!»
«It won't be long. We-«
The shop door squealed open again and whether the old man had been standing in the screen shadow for the last minute, there was no telling. It did not show in his face. He stepped out with four lukewarm bottles of Orange Crush in his rust-spotted hands.
«Here you are,» he said.
Clarence and Cecelia Travers turned to stare at him as if he were a stranger come out to bring them drinks. They smiled and took the bottles.
The four of them stood drinking the soda pop in the warm sunlight. The summer wind blew through the grottoes of trees in the old, shady town. It was like being in a great green church, a cathedral, the trees so high that the people and cottages were lost far down below. All night long you would imagine those trees rustling Their leaves like an ocean on an unending shore. God, thought Clarence Travers, you could really sleep here, the sleep of the dead and the peace-fill-of-heart.
He finished his drink and his wife half finished hers and gave it to the children to argue over, inch by compared inch. The old man stood silent, embarrassed by the thing he may have stirred up among them.
«Well, if you're ever out this way, drop in,» he said. Clarence Travers reached for his wallet.
«No, no!» said the old man. «It's on the house.»
«Thank you, thank you very much.»
«A pleasure.»
They climbed back into their car.
«If you want to get to the freeway,» said the old man, peering through the front window into the cooked-upholstery smell of the car, «just take your old dirt road back. Don't rush, or you'll break an axle.»
Clarence Travers looked straight ahead at the radiator fixture on the car front and started the motor.
«Good-bye,» said the old man.
«Good-bye,» the children yelled, and waved. The car moved away through the town.
«Did you hear what the old man said?» asked the wife.
«What?»
«Did you hear him say which way to the freeway?»
«I heard.»
He drove through the cool, shady town, staring at the porches and the windows with the colored glass fringing them. If you looked from the inside of those windows out, people had different-colored faces for each pane you looked through. They were Chinese if you looked through one, Indian through another, pink, green, violet, burgundy, wine, chartreuse, the candy colors, the lemon-lime cool colors, the water colors of the windows looking out on lawns and trees and this car slowly driving past.
«Yes, I heard him,» said Clarence Travers.
They left the town behind and took the dirt road to the freeway. They waited their chance, saw an interval between floods of cars hurtling by, swerved out into the stream, and, at fifty miles an hour, were soon hurtling toward the city.
«That's better,» said Cecelia Travers brightly. She did not look over at her husband. «Now I know where we are.»
Billboards flashed by; a mortuary, a pie crust, a cereal, a garage, a hotel. A hotel in the tar pits of the city, where one day is the pitiless glare of the noon sun, thought Mr. Travers, all of the great Erector-set buildings, like prehistoric dinosaurs, will sink down into the bubbling tar-lava and be encased, bone by bone, for future civilizations. And in the stomachs of the electric lizards, inside the iron dinosaurs, the probing scientists of A.D. One Million will find the little ivory bones, the thinly articulated skeletons of advertising executives and clubwomen and children. Mr. Travers felt his eyes flinch, watering. And the scientists will say, so this is what the iron cities fed on, is it? and give the bones a kick. So this is what kept the iron stomachs full, eh? Poor things, they never had a chance. Probably kept by the iron monsters who needed them in order to survive, who needed them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Aphids, in a way, aphids, kept in a great metal cage.
«Look, Daddy, look, look, before it's too late!»
The children pointed, yelling. Cecelia Travers did not look. Only the children saw it.
The old highway, two hundred yards away, at their left, sprang back into sight for an instant, wandered aimlessly through field, meadow, and stream, gentle and cool and quiet.
Mr. Travers swung his head sharply to see, but in that instant it was gone. Billboards, trees, hills rushed it away. A thousand cars, honking, shrieking, shouldered them, and bore Clarence and Cecelia Travers and their captive children stunned and silent down the concourse, onward ever onward into a city that had not seen them leave and did not look to see them return
«Let's see if this car will do sixty or sixty-five,» said Clarence Travers.
It could and did.
They drove into green Sunday-morning country, away from the hot aluminum city, and watched as the sky was set free and moved over them like a lake they had never known was there, amazingly blue and with white breakers above them as they traveled.
Clarence Travers slowed the car and felt the cool wind move over his face with the smell of cut grass. He reached over to grasp his wife's hand and glanced at his son and daughter in the backseat, not fighting, at least for this moment, as the car moved through one quiet beauty after another in what might be a Sunday so lush and green it would never end.
«Thank God we're doing this,» said Cecelia Travers. «It's been a million years since we got away.» He felt her hand hug his and then relax completely. «when I think of all those ladies dropping dead from the heat at the cocktail parry this afternoon, welt»
«Well, indeed,» said Clarence Travers. «Onward!»
He pressed the gas pedal and they moved faster. Their progress out of the city had been mildly hysterical, with cars shrieking and shoving them toward islands of wilderness praying for picnics that might not be found. Seeing that he had put the car in the fast lane, he slowed to gradually move himself and his family through the banshee traffic until they were idling along at an almost reasonable fifty miles an hour. The scents of flowers and trees that blew in the window made his move worthwhile. He laughed at nothing at all and said:
«Sometimes, when I get this far out, I think let's just keep driving, never go back to the damned city.»
«Let's drive a hundred miles,» shouted his son.
«A thousand!» cried his daughter.
«A thousand!» said Clarence Travers. «But one slow mile at a time.» And then said, softly, «Hey!»
And as suddenly as if they had dreamed it up, the lost highway came into view. «Wonderful!» said Mr. Clarence Travers.
«What?» asked the children.
«Look!» said Clarence Travers, leaning over his wife, pointing. «That's the Old road. The one they used a long time ago.»
«That?» said his wife.
«It's awfully small,» said his son.
«Well, there weren't many cars then, they didn't need much.»
«It looks like a big snake,» said his daughter.
«Yeah, the old roads used to twist and turn, all right. Remember?»
Cecelia Travers nodded. The car had slowed and they gazed over at that narrow concrete strip with the green grass buckling it gently here or there and sprays of wildflowers nestling up close to either side and the morning sunlight coming down through the high elms and maples and oaks that led the way toward the forest.
«I know it like the nose on my face,» said Clarence Travers. «How would you like to ride on it?»
«Oh, Clarence, now
«I mean it.»
«Oh, Daddy, could we?»
«All right, we'll do it,» he said decisively.
«We can't!» said Cecelia Travers. «It's probably against the law. It can't be safe.»
But before his wife could finish, he turned off the freeway and let all the swift cars rush on while he drove, smiling at each bump, down over a small ditch, toward the old road.
«Clarence, please! we'll be arrested!»
«For going ten miles an hour on a highway nobody uses anymore? Let's not kick over any beehives, it's too nice a day. I'll buy you all soda pops if you behave.»
They reached the old road.
«See how simple? Now which way, kids?»
«That way, that way!»
«Easy as pie!»
And he let the car take them away on the old highway, the great white-gray boa constrictor that lashed now slowly this way in green moss-velvet meadows, looped over gentle hills, and lowered itself majestically into caves of moist-smelling trees, through the odor of cricks and spring mud and crystal water that rustled like sheets of cellophane over small stone falls. They drove slow enough to see the waterspiders' enigmatic etchings on quiet pools behind dams of last October's leaves.
«Daddy, what are those?»
«What, the water-skaters? No one has ever caught one. You wait and wait and put your hand out and bang! The spider's gone. They're the first things in life you can't grab onto. The list gets bigger as you grow old, so start small. Don't believe in them. They're not really there.»
«It's fun thinking they are.»
«You have just stated a deep philosophical truth. Now, drive on, Mr. Travers.» And obeying his own command with good humor, he drove on.
And they came to a forest that had been like November all through the winter and now, reluctantly, was putting out green flags to welcome the season. Butterflies in great tosses of confetti leaped from the deeps of the forest to ramble drunkenly on the air, their thousand torn shadows following over grass and water.
«Let's go back now,» said Cecelia Travers.
«Aw, Mom,» said the son and daughter.
«Why?» said Clarence Travers. «My God, how many kids back in that damned hot town can say they drove on a road nobody else has used in years? Not one! Not one with a father brave enough to cross a little grass to take the old way. Right?»
Mrs. Travers lapsed into silence.
«Right there,» said Clarence Travers, «over that hill, the highway turns left, then right, then left again, an S curve, and another S. Wait and see.»
«Left.»
«Right.»
«Left.»
«An S curve.»
The car purred.
«Another S!»
«Just like you said!»
«Look.» Clarence Travers pointed. A hundred yards across the way from them, the freeway suddenly appeared for a few yards before it vanished, screaming behind stacks of playing-card billboards. Clarence Travers stared fixedly at it and the grass between it and this shadowed path, this silent place like the bottom of an old stream where tides used to come but came no more, where the wind ran through nights making the old sound of far traffic.
«You know something,» said the wife. «That freeway over there scares me.»
«Can we drive home on this old road instead, Dad?» said the son.
«I wish we could.»
«I've always been scared,» said the wife, watching that other traffic roaring by, gone before it arrived.
«We're all afraid,» said Clarence Travers. «But you pay your money and take your chance. Well?»
His wife sighed. «Damn, get back on that dreadful thing.»
«Not quite yet,» said Clarence Travers and drove to reach a small, very small village, all quite unexpected, a settlement no more than a dozen white clapboard houses mossed under giant trees, dreaming in a green tide of water and leaf-shadow, with wind shaking the rocking chairs on weathered porches and dogs sleeping in the cool nap of grass-carpeting at noon, and a small general store with a dirty red gas pump out front.
They drew up there and got out and stood, unreal in the sudden lack of motion, not quite accepting these houses lost in the wilderness.
The door to the general store squealed open and an old man stepped out, blinked at them, and said, «Say, did you folks just come down that old road?»
Clarence Travers avoided his wife's accusing eyes. «Yes, sir.
«No one on that road in twenty years.»
«We were out for a lark,» said Mr. Travers. «And found a peacock,» he added.
«A sparrow,» said his wife.
«The freeway passed us by, a mile over there, if you want it,» said the old man. «When the new road opened, this town just died on the vine. We got nothing here now but people like me. That is: old.»
«Looks like there'd be places here to rent.»
«Mister, just walk in, knock out the bats, stomp the spiders, and any place is yours for thirty bucks a month. I own the whole town.»
«Oh, we're not really interested,» said Cecelia Travers.
«Didn't think you would be,» said the old man. «Too far out from the city, too far off the freeway. And that dirt road there slops over when it rains, all muck and mud. And, heck, it's against the law to use that path. Not that they ever patrol it.» The old man snorted, shaking his head. «And not that I'll turn you in. But it gave me a nice start just now to see you coming down that rut. J had to give a quick look at my calendar, by God, and make sure it wasn't 1929!»
Lord, I remember, thought Clarence Travers. This is Fox Hill. A thousand people lived here. I was a kid, we passed through on summer nights. We used to stop here late late, and me sleeping in the backseat in the moonlight. My grandmother and grandfather in back with me. It's nice to sleep in a car driving late and the road all white, watching the stars turn as you take the curves, listening to the grown-ups' voices underwater, remote, talking, talking, laughing, murmuring, whispering. My father driving, so stolid. Just to be driving in the summer dark, up along the lake to the Dunes, where the poison ivy grew out on the lonely beach and the wind stayed all the time and never went away. And us driving by that lonely graveyard place of sand and moonlight and poison ivy and the waves tumbling in like dusty ash on the shore, the lake pounding like a locomotive on the sand, coming and going. And me crumpled down and smelling Grandmother's wind-cooled coat and the voices comforting and blanketing me with their solidity and their always-will-be-here sounds that would go on forever, myself always young and us always riding on a summer night in our old Kissel with the side flaps down. And stopping here at nine or ten for Pistachio and Tutti-frutti ice cream that tasted, faintly, beautifully, of gasoline. All of us licking and biting the cones and smelling the gasoline and driving on, sleepy and snug, toward home, Green Town, thirty years ago.
He caught himself and said:
«About these houses, would it be much trouble fixing them up?» He squinted at the old man.
«Well, yes and no, most of 'em over fifty years old, lots of dust. You could buy one off me for ten thousand, a real bargain now, you'll admit. If you were an artist, now, a painter, or something like that.»
«I write copy in an advertising firm.»
«Write stories, too, no doubt? Well, now, you get a writer out here, quiet, no neighbors, you'd do lots of writing.»
Cecelia Travers stood silently between the old man and her husband. Clarence Travers did not look at her, but looked at the cinders around the porch of the general store. «I imagine I could work here.»
«Sure,» said the old man.
«I've often thought,» said Mr. Travers, «it's time we got away from the city and took it a little easy.»
«Sure,» said the old man.
Mrs. Travers said nothing but searched in her purse and took out a minor.
«Would you like some drinks?» asked Clarence Travers with exaggerated concern. «Three Orange Crushes, make it four,» he told the old man. The old man moved inside the store, which smelled of nails and crackers and dust.
When the old man was gone, Mr. Travers turned to his wife, and his eyes were shining. «We've always wanted to do it! Let's!»
«Do what?» she said.
«Move out here, snap decision, why not? Why? We've promised ourselves every year: get away from the noise, the confusion, so the kids'd have a place to play. And . .
«Good grief» the wife cried.
The old man moved inside the store, coughing. «Ridiculous.» She lowered her voice. «We've got the apartment paid up, you've got a fine job, the kids have school with friends, I belong to some fine clubs. And we've just spent a bundle redecorating. We-«
«Listen,» he said, as if she were really listening. « None of that's important. Out here, we can breathe. Back in town, hell, you complain …»
«Just to have something to complain about.»
«Your clubs can't be that important.»
«It's not clubs, it's friends!»
«How many would care if we dropped dead tomorrow?» he said. «If I got hit in that traffic, how many thousand cars would run over me before one stopped to see if I was a man or dog left in the road?»
«Your job . . .» she started to say.
«My God, ten years ago we said, in two more years we'll have enough money to quit and write my novel! But each year we've said next year! and next year and next year!»
«We've had fun, haven't we?»
«Sure! Subways are fun, buses are fun, martinis and drunken friends are fun. Advertising? Yeah! But I've used all the fun there is! I want to write about what I've seen now, and there's no better place than this. Look at that house over there! Can't you just see me in the front window banging the hell out of my typewriter?»
«Stop hyperventilating!»
«Hyperventilate? God, I'd jump for joy to quit. I've gone as far as I can go. Come on, Cecelia, let's get back some of the spunk in our marriage, take a chance!»
«The children
«We'd love it here!» said the son.
«I think,» said the daughter.
«I'm not getting any younger,» said Clarence Travers.
«Nor am I,» she said, touching his arm. «But we can't play hopscotch now. When the children leave, yes, we'll think about it.»
«Children, hopscotch, my God, I'll take my typewriter to the grave!»
«It won't be long. We-«
The shop door squealed open again and whether the old man had been standing in the screen shadow for the last minute, there was no telling. It did not show in his face. He stepped out with four lukewarm bottles of Orange Crush in his rust-spotted hands.
«Here you are,» he said.
Clarence and Cecelia Travers turned to stare at him as if he were a stranger come out to bring them drinks. They smiled and took the bottles.
The four of them stood drinking the soda pop in the warm sunlight. The summer wind blew through the grottoes of trees in the old, shady town. It was like being in a great green church, a cathedral, the trees so high that the people and cottages were lost far down below. All night long you would imagine those trees rustling Their leaves like an ocean on an unending shore. God, thought Clarence Travers, you could really sleep here, the sleep of the dead and the peace-fill-of-heart.
He finished his drink and his wife half finished hers and gave it to the children to argue over, inch by compared inch. The old man stood silent, embarrassed by the thing he may have stirred up among them.
«Well, if you're ever out this way, drop in,» he said. Clarence Travers reached for his wallet.
«No, no!» said the old man. «It's on the house.»
«Thank you, thank you very much.»
«A pleasure.»
They climbed back into their car.
«If you want to get to the freeway,» said the old man, peering through the front window into the cooked-upholstery smell of the car, «just take your old dirt road back. Don't rush, or you'll break an axle.»
Clarence Travers looked straight ahead at the radiator fixture on the car front and started the motor.
«Good-bye,» said the old man.
«Good-bye,» the children yelled, and waved. The car moved away through the town.
«Did you hear what the old man said?» asked the wife.
«What?»
«Did you hear him say which way to the freeway?»
«I heard.»
He drove through the cool, shady town, staring at the porches and the windows with the colored glass fringing them. If you looked from the inside of those windows out, people had different-colored faces for each pane you looked through. They were Chinese if you looked through one, Indian through another, pink, green, violet, burgundy, wine, chartreuse, the candy colors, the lemon-lime cool colors, the water colors of the windows looking out on lawns and trees and this car slowly driving past.
«Yes, I heard him,» said Clarence Travers.
They left the town behind and took the dirt road to the freeway. They waited their chance, saw an interval between floods of cars hurtling by, swerved out into the stream, and, at fifty miles an hour, were soon hurtling toward the city.
«That's better,» said Cecelia Travers brightly. She did not look over at her husband. «Now I know where we are.»
Billboards flashed by; a mortuary, a pie crust, a cereal, a garage, a hotel. A hotel in the tar pits of the city, where one day is the pitiless glare of the noon sun, thought Mr. Travers, all of the great Erector-set buildings, like prehistoric dinosaurs, will sink down into the bubbling tar-lava and be encased, bone by bone, for future civilizations. And in the stomachs of the electric lizards, inside the iron dinosaurs, the probing scientists of A.D. One Million will find the little ivory bones, the thinly articulated skeletons of advertising executives and clubwomen and children. Mr. Travers felt his eyes flinch, watering. And the scientists will say, so this is what the iron cities fed on, is it? and give the bones a kick. So this is what kept the iron stomachs full, eh? Poor things, they never had a chance. Probably kept by the iron monsters who needed them in order to survive, who needed them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Aphids, in a way, aphids, kept in a great metal cage.
«Look, Daddy, look, look, before it's too late!»
The children pointed, yelling. Cecelia Travers did not look. Only the children saw it.
The old highway, two hundred yards away, at their left, sprang back into sight for an instant, wandered aimlessly through field, meadow, and stream, gentle and cool and quiet.
Mr. Travers swung his head sharply to see, but in that instant it was gone. Billboards, trees, hills rushed it away. A thousand cars, honking, shrieking, shouldered them, and bore Clarence and Cecelia Travers and their captive children stunned and silent down the concourse, onward ever onward into a city that had not seen them leave and did not look to see them return
«Let's see if this car will do sixty or sixty-five,» said Clarence Travers.
It could and did.