Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (33 page)

 
          
 
"I'm looking for an old man," said
the tired voice of authority beyond the wall. Strange, thought the old man even
the law sounds tired now. "Patched clothes . . ." But thought the old
man, I thought everyone's clothes were patched! "Dirty. About eighty years
old . . ." But isn't everyone dirty, everyone old? the old man cried out
to himself

           
 
"If you turn him in, there's a week's
rations as reward," said the police voice. "Plus ten cans of
vegetables, five cans of soup, bonus."

 
          
 
Real tin cans with bright printed labels,
thought the old man. The cans flashed like meteors rushing by in the dark over
his eyelids. What a fine reward 1 Not ten thousand dollars, not twenty thousand
dollars, no no, but five incredible cans of real, not imitation soup, and ten,
count them, ten brilliant circus-colored cans of exotic vegetables like string
beans and sun-yellow corn! Think of it. Think!

 
          
 
There was a long silence in which the old man
almost thought he heard faint murmurs of stomachs turning uneasily, slumbering
but dreaming of dinners much finer than the hairballs of old illusion gone
nightmare and politics gone sour in the long twilight since A. D., Annihilation
Day.

 
          
 
"Soup. Vegetables," said the police
voice, a final time. "Fifteen solid-pack cans!"

 
          
 
The door slammed.

 
          
 
The boots stomped away through the ramshackle
tenement, pounding coffin-lid doors to stir other Lazarus souls alive to cry
aloud of bright tins and real soups. The poundings faded. There was a last
banging slam.

 
          
 
And at last the hidden panel whispered up. The
husband and wife did not look at him as he stepped out He knew why and wanted
to touch their elbows.

 
          
 
"Even I," he said gently, "even
I was tempted to turn myself in, to claim the reward, to eat the soup."

 
          
 
Still they would not look at him.

 
          
 
“Why?" he asked. "Why didn't you
hand me over? Why?"

 
          
 
The husband, as if suddenly remembering,
nodded to his wife. She went to the door, hesitated, her husband nodded again
impatiently, and she went out, noiseless as a puff of cobweb. They heard her
rustling along the hall, scratching softly at doors, which opened to gasps and
murmurs.

 
          
 
"What's she up to? What are you up
to?" asked the old man.

 
          
 
"You’ll find out. Sit. Finish your
dinner," said the husband. "Tell me why you're such a fool you make
us fools who seek you out and bring you here."

 
          
 
"Why am I such a fool?" The old man
sat. The old man munched slowly, taking peas one at a time from the plate which
had been returned to him. "Yes, I am a fool. How did I start my
foolishness? Years ago I looked at the ruined world, the dictatorships, the
desiccated states and nations, and said, “What can I do? Me, a weak old man,
what? Rebuild a devastation? Ha!' But as I lay half asleep one night an old
phonograph record played in my head. Two sisters named Duncan sang out of my
childhood a song called 'Remembering.’ 'Remembering is all I do, dear, so try
and remember, too.' I sang the song, and it wasn't a song but a way of life.
What did I have to offer a world that was forgetting? My memory! How could this
help?
By offering a standard of comparison.
By telling the young what once way, by considering our losses.
I found the more I remembered, the more I could remember! Depending on who I
sat down with I remembered imitation flowers, dial telephones, refrigerators,
kazoos (you ever play a kazoo?!), thimbles, bicycle clips, not bicycles, no,
but bicycle clips!
isn't
that wild and strange?
Antimacassars.
Do you know them? Never mind. Once a man
asked me to remember just the dashboard dials on a Cadillac. I remembered. I
told him in detail. He listened. He cried great tears down his face.
Happy tears or sad?
I can't say. I only remember. Not
literature, no, I never had a head for plays or poems, they slip away,
they
die. All I am, really, is a trash heap of the mediocre,
the third-best-hand-me-down useless and chromed-over slush and junk of a
race-track civilization that ran last over a precipice. So all I offer really
is scintillant junk, the clamored-after chronometers and absurd machineries of
a never-ending river of robots and robot-mad owners. Yet, one way or another,
civilization must get back on the road. Those who can offer fine butterfly
poetry, let them remember, let them offer. Those who can weave and build
butterfly nets, let them weave, let them build. My gift is smaller than
both,
and perhaps contemptible in the long hoist, climb,
jump toward the old and amiably silly peak. But I must dream myself worthy. For
the things, silly or not, that people remember are the things they will search
for again. I will, then, ulcerate their half-dead desires with vinegar-gnat
memory. Then perhaps they'll rattle-bang the Big Clock together again, which is
the city, the state and then the world. Let one man want wine, another lounge
chairs, a third a batwing glider to soar the March winds on and build bigger
electropterodactyls to scour even greater winds, with even greater peoples.
Someone wants moron Christmas trees and some wise man goes to cut them. Pack
this all together, wheel in want, want in wheel, and I'm just there to oil them,
but oil them I do. Ho, once I would have raved, ‘
Only
the best is best, only quality is true!' But roses grow from blood manure.
Mediocre must be, so most-excellent can bloom. So I shall be the best mediocre
there is and fight all who say, Slide under, sink back, dust-wallow, let
brambles scurry over your living grave. I shall protest the roving apeman
tribes, the sheep-people munching the far fields prayed on by the feudal
land-baron wolves who’ rarefy themselves in the few skyscraper summits and
horde un-remembered foods. And these villains I will kill with can opener and
corkscrew. I shall nm them down with ghosts of Buick, Kissel-Kar and Moon,
thrash them with licorice whips until they cry for some sort of unqualified
mercy. Can I do all this? One can only try."

 
          
 
The old man rummaged the last pea, with the
last words, in his mouth, while his Samaritan host simply looked at him with
gently amazed eyes, and far off up through the house people moved, doors tapped
open and shut, and there was a gathering outside the door of this apartment
where now the husband said, "And you asked why we didn't turn you in? Do
you hear that out there?"

 
          
 
"It sounds like everyone in the apartment
house."

 
          
 
"Everyone. Old man, old fool, do you remember
. . . motion picture houses, or, better, drive-in movies?"

 
          
 
The old man smiled. "Do you?"

 
          
 
"Almost. Look, listen, today, now, if
you're going to be a fool, if you want to run risks, do it in the aggregate, in
one fell blow. Why waste your breath on one, or two, or even three, if
..."

 
          
 
The husband opened the door and nodded
outside. Silently, one at a time and in couples, the people of the house
entered. Entered this room as if entering a synagogue or church or the kind of
church known as a movie or the kind of movie known as a drive-in and the hour
was growing late in the day, with the sun going down the sky, and soon in the
early evening hours, in the dark, the room would be dim and in the one Ught the
voice of the old man would speak and these would listen and hold hands and it
would be like the old days with the balconies and the dark, or the cars and the
dark, and just the memory, the words, of popcorn, and the words for the gum and
the sweet drinks and candy, but the words, anyway, the words . . .

           
 
And while the people were coming in and
settling on the floor, and the old man watched them, incredulous that he had
summoned them here without knowing, the husband said, "Isn’t this better
than taking a chance in the open?"

 
          
 
"Yes. Strange. I hate pain. I hate being
hit and chased. But my tongue moves. I must hear what it has to say. Still this
is better."

 
          
 
"Good." The husband pressed a red
ticket into his palm. "When this is all over, an hour from now, here is a
ticket from a friend of mine in Transportation. One train crosses the country
each week. Each week I get a ticket for some idiot I want to help. This week
it's you."

 
          
 
The old man read the destination on the folded
red paper: "'Chicago Abyss,’" and added, "Is the Abyss still
there?"

 
          
 
"This time next year
Lake
Michigan
may break through the last crust and make a new lake in
the pit where the city once was. There's life of sorts around the crater rim,
and a branch train goes west once a month. Once you leave here, keep moving,
forget you met or know us. I'U
give
you a small list
of people like ourselves. A long time from now, look them up, out in the
wilderness. But, for God's sake, in the open, one for a year, declare a
moratorium. Keep your wonderful mouth shut. And here—" The husband gave
him a yellow card. "A dentist I know. Tell him to make you a new set of
teeth that will only open at mealtimes."

 
          
 
A few people, hearing, laughed, and the old
man laughed quietly and the people were in now, dozens of them, and the day was
late, and the husband and wife shut the door and stood by it and turned and
waited for this last special time when the old man might open his mouth.

 
          
 
The old man stood up.

 
          
 
His audience grew very still.

 
          
 
The train came, rusty and loud at
midnight
, into a suddenly snow-filled station.
Under a cruel dusting of white, the ill-washed people crowded into and through
the ancient chair cars, mashing the old man along the corridor and into an
empty compartment that had once been a lavatory. Soon the floor was a solid mass
of bed roll on which sixteen people twisted and turned in darkness, fighting
their way into sleep.

 
          
 
The train rushed forth to white emptiness.

           
 
The old man, thinking, Quiet, shut up, no,
don't speak, nothing, no, stay still, think, careful, cease! found himself now
swayed, joggled, hurled this way and that as he half crouched against a wall.
He and just one other were upright in this monster room of dreadful sleep. A
few feet away, similarly shoved against the wall, sat an eight-year-old boy
with a drawn sick paleness escaping from his cheeks. Full awake, eyes bright,
he seemed to watch, he did watch, the old man's mouth. The boy gazed because he
must. The train hooted, roared, swayed, yelled and ran.

 
          
 
Half an hour passed in a thunderous grinding passage
by night under the snow-hidden moon, and the old man's mouth was tight-nailed
shut. Another hour, and still boned shut Another hour, and the muscles around
his cheeks began to slacken. Another, and his lips parted to wet themselves.
The boy stayed awake. The boy saw. The boy waited. Immense sifts of silence
came down the night air outside, tunneled by avalanche train. The travelers,
very deep in invoiced terror, numbed by flight, slept each separate, but the
boy did not take his eyes away and at last the old man leaned forward, softly.

 
          
 
"Sh. Boy. Your name?"

 
          
 
"Joseph."

 
          
 
The train swayed and groaned in its sleep, a
monster floundering through timeless dark toward a mom that could not be
imagined.

 
          
 
"Joseph . . ." The old man savored
the word, bent forward, his eyes gentle and shining. His face filled with pale
beauty. His eyes widened until they seemed blind. He gazed at a distant and
hidden thing. He cleared his throat ever so softly. "Ah ..."

 
          
 
The train roared round a curve. The people
rocked in their snowing sleep.

 
          
 
"Well, Joseph," whispered the old
man. He lifted his fingers softly in the air. "Once upon a time . .
,"