A Pleasure to Burn

A
FTER A WHILE YOU WILL GET OVER THE INFERIORITY
complex. Maybe. There's nothing you can do about it. Just be careful to walk around at night. The hot sun is certainly difficult on you. And summer nights aren't particularly helpful. So the best thing for you to do is wait for chilly weather. The first six months are your prime. The seventh month the water will seep through and the maggots will begin. By the end of the eighth month your usefulness will dwindle. By the tenth month you'll lie exhausted and weeping the sorrow without tears, and you will know then that you will never move again.

But before that happens there is so much to be thought about, and finished. Many thoughts to be renewed, many old likes and dislikes to be turned in your mind before the sides of your skull fall away.

It is new to you. You are born again. And your womb is silk-lined and fine-smelling of tuberoses and linens, and there is no sound before your birth except the beating of the Earth's billion insect hearts. Your womb is wood and metal and satin, offering no sustenance, but only an implacable slot of close air, a pocket within the mother soil. And there is only one way you can live, now. There must be an emotional hand to slap you on the back to make you move. A desire, a want, an emotion. Then the first thing you know you quiver and rise and strike your brow against silk-skinned wood. That emotion surges through you, calling you. If it is not strong enough, you will settle down wearily, and will not wake again. But if you grow with it, somehow, if you claw upward, if you work tediously, slowly, many days, you find ways of displacing earth an inch at a time, and one night you crumble the darkness, the exit is completed, and you wriggle forth to see the stars.

Now you stand, letting the emotion lead you as a slender antenna shivers, led by radio waves. You bring your shoulders to a line, you make a step, like a new born babe, stagger, clutch for supportâand find a marble slab to lean against. Beneath your trembling fingers the carved brief story of your life is all too tersely told: BornâDied.

You are a stick of wood. Learning to unbend, to walk naturally again, is not easy. But you don't worry about it. The pull of this emotion is too strong in you, and you go on, outward from the land of monuments, into twilight streets, alone on the pale sidewalks, past brick walls, down stony paths.

You feel there is something left undone. Some flower yet unseen somewhere where you would like to see, some pool waiting for you to dive into, some fish uncaught, some lip unkissed, some star unnoticed. You are going back, somewhere, to finish whatever there is undone.

All the streets have grown strange. You walk in a town you have never seen, a sort of dream town on the rim of a lake. You become more certain of your walking now, and can go quite swiftly. Memory returns.

You know every cobble of this street, you know every place where asphalt bubbled from mouths of cement in the hot oven summer. You know where the horses were tethered sweating in the green spring at these iron posts so long ago it is a feeble maggot in your brain. This cross street, where a light hangs high like a bright spider spinning a light web across this one solitudinous spot. You soon escape its web, going on to sycamore gloom. A picket fence dances woodenly beneath probing fingers. Here, as a child, you rushed by with a stick in hand manufacturing a machine-gun racket, laughing.

These houses, with the people and memories of people in them. The lemon odor of old Mrs. Hanlon who lived there, remember? A withered lady with withered hands and gums withered when her teeth gleamed upon the cupboard shelf smiling all to their porcelain selves. She gave you a withered lecture every day about cutting across her petunias. Now she is completely withered like a page of ancient paper burned. Remember how a book looks burning? That's how she is in her grave now, curling, layer upon layer, twisting into black rotted and mute agony.

The street is quiet except for the walking of a man's feet on it. The man turns a corner and you unexpectedly collide with one another.

You both stand back. For a moment, examining one another, you understand something about one another.

The stranger's eyes are deep-seated fires in worn receptacles. He is a tall, slender man in a very neat dark suit, blond and with a fiery whiteness to his protruding cheekbones. After a moment, he bows slightly, smiling. “You're a new one,” he says. “Never saw you before.”

And you know then
what
he is. He is dead, too. He is walking, too. He is “different” just like yourself.

You sense his differentness.

“Where are you going in such a hurry?” he asks, politely.

“I have no time to talk,” you say, your throat dry and shrunken. “I am going somewhere, that is all. Please, step aside.”

He holds onto your elbow firmly. “Do you know what I am?” He bends closer. “Do you not realize we are of the same legion? The dead who walk. We are as brothers.”

You fidget impatiently. “IâI have no time.”

“No,” he agrees, “and neither have I, to waste.”

You brush past, but cannot lose him, for he walks with you. “I know where you're going.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” he says, casually. “To some childhood haunt. To some river. To some house or some memory. To some woman, perhaps. To some old friend's cottage. Oh, I know, all right, I know everything about our kind. I know,” he says, nodding in the passing light and dark.

“You know, do you?”

“That is always why the dead walk. I have discovered that. Strange, when you think of all the books ever written about the dead, about vampires and walking cadavers and such, and never once did the authors of those most worthy volumes hit upon the true secret of why the dead walk. Always it is for the same reasonâa memory, a friend, a woman, a river, a piece of pie, a house, a drink of wine, everything and anything connected with life andâLIVING!” He made a fist to hold the words tight. “Living! REAL living!”

Wordless, you increase your stride, but his whisper paces you:

“You must join me later this evening, my friend. We will meet with the others, tonight, tomorrow night and all the nights until we have our victory.”

Hastily. “Who are the others?”

“The other dead.” He speaks grimly. “We are banding together against intolerance.”

“Intolerance?”

“We are a minority. We newly dead and newly embalmed and newly interred, we are a minority in the world, a persecuted minority. We are legislated against. We have no rights!” he declares heatedly.

The concrete slows under your heels. “Minority?”

“Yes.” He takes your arm confidentially, grasping it tighter with each new declaration. “Are we wanted? No! Are we liked? No! We are feared! We are driven like sheep into a marble quarry, screamed at, stoned and persecuted like the Jews of Germany! People hate us from their fear. It's wrong, I tell you, and it's unfair!” He groans. He lifts his hands in a fury and strikes down. You are standing still now, held by his suffering and he flings it at you, bodily, with impact. “Fair, fair, is it fair? No. I ask you. Fair that we, a minority, rot in our graves while the rest of the continent sings, laughs, dances, plays, rotates and whirls and gets drunk! Fair, is it fair, I ask you that they love while our lips shrivel cold, that they caress while our fingers manifest to stone, that they tickle one another while maggots entertain us!

“No! I shout it! It is ungodly unfair! I say down with them, down with them for torturing our minority! We deserve the same rights!” he cries. “Why should we be dead, why not the others?”

“Perhaps you are right.”

“They throw us down and slam the earth in our white faces and load a carven stone over our bosom to weigh us with, and shove flowers into an old tin can and bury it in a small spaded hole once a year. Once a year? Sometimes not even that! Oh, how I hate them, oh how it rises in me, this full blossoming hatred for the living. The fools. The damn fools! Dancing all night and loving, while we lie recumbent and full of disintegrating and helpless passion! Is that right?”

“I hadn't thought about it,” you say, vaguely.

“Well,” he snorts, “well, we'll fix them.”

“What will you do?”

“There are thousands of us gathering tonight in the Elysian Park and I am the leader! We will destroy humanity!” he shouts, throwing back his shoulders, lifting his head in rigid defiance. “They have neglected us too long, and we shall kill them. It's only right. If we can't live, then they have no rights to live, either! And you will come, won't you, my friend?” he says, hopefully. “I have coerced many, I have spoken with scores. You will come and help. You yourself are bitter with this embalming and this suppression, are you not, else you would not be out tonight. Join us. The graveyards of the continent will explode like overripened apples, and the dead will pour out to overflow the villages! You will come?”

“I don't know. Yes. Perhaps I will,” you say. “But I must go now. I have some place ahead of me to find. I will come.”

“Good,” he says, as you walk off, leaving him in shadow. “Good, good, good.”

Up the hill now, as quick as you can. Thank God there is a coolness upon the Earth tonight. If it was a hot night it would be terrible to be above the ground in your condition.

You gasp happily. There, in all its rococo magnificence, is the house where Grandma sheltered her boarders. Where you as a child sat on the porch Fourth of July, watching sky rockets climb in fiery froth, the pinwheels cursing, sputtering sparks, the fire-crackers beating at your ears from the metal cannon of Uncle Bion who loved noise and bought fifty dollars worth of crackers just to explode them with his hand-rolled cigarette.

Now, standing, trembling with this emotion of recapturence, you know why the dead walk. To see again things like this. Here, on nights when dew invaded the grass, you crushed the wet petals and grass-blades and leaves as your boy bodies wrestled, and you knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

Inside that grand old tall house the incredible Saturday nights took place, the Boston-baked beans in hordes saturated with thick juices, panoplied with platforms of bacon. Oh, yes, all of that. And the huge black piano that cried out at you when you performed musical dentistry upon its teeth â¦

And here, here, man, remember? This is Kim's house. That yellow light, around the back, that's her room. Do you realize that she might be in it now, painting her pictures or reading her books? In one moment, glance over that house, the porch, the swing before the door where you sat on August evenings. Think of it. Kim, your wife. In a moment you will see her again!

You bang the gate wide and hurry up the walk. You think to call, but instead slip quietly around the side. Her mother and father would go crazy if they saw you. Bad enough, the shock to Kim.

Here is her room. Glowing and square and soft and empty. Feed upon it. Is it not good to see again?

Your breath forms upon the window a symbol of your anxiety; the cold glass films with fog and blurs the exact and wonderful details of her existence there.

As the fog vanishes the form of her room emerges. The pink spread upon the low soft bed, the cherry-wood flooring, brilliantly waxed; throw-rugs like bright heavily furred dogs slumbering acenter it. The mirror. The small cosmetic table, where her sorcery is enacted in an easy pantomime. You wait.

She comes into the room.

Her hair is a lamp burning, bound behind her ears by her moving, she looks tired, her eyes are half-lidded, but even in this uncertain light, blue. Her dress is short and firm to her figure.

Breathlessly, you listen against the cold shell of glass, and as from deep under a sea you hear a song. She sings so softly it is already an echo before it leaves her mouth. You wonder what she thinks as she sings and combs out her hair at the mirror.

The cold brine of you stirs and beats. Certainly she must hear your heart's cold thunder!

Thoughtless, you tap upon the window.

She goes on stroking her hair gently, thinking that you are only the autumn wind outside the glass.

You tap again, anxiously, a bit afraid.

This time she sets down the comb and brush and rises to investigate, calm and certain.

At first she sees nothing. You are shadowed. Her eyes, as she walks toward the window, are focused on the gleaming squares of glass. Then, she looks
through.
She sees a dim figure beyond the light. She still does not recognize.

“Kim!” You cannot help yourself. “It is I! I am here!”

Your eager face pushes to the light, as a submerged body must surge upon some black tide, suddenly floating, triumphant, with shimmering dark eyes!

The color drops from her cheeks. Her hands open to release sanity which flies away on strange wings. Her hands clasp again, to recapture some last sane thought. She does not scream. Only her eyes are wide as windows seen on a white house amidst a terrific lightning-shaft in a sudden summer squall, shadeless, empty and silvered with that terrific bolt of power!

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