A Pleasure to Burn

by Ray Bradbury

  The sound of its death came after.

  AND MONTAG LYING THERE, his eyes shut, gasping and crying out, suddenly thought, “Now I remember another thing. Now I remember the Book of Job.” He said it over to himself, lying tight to the earth; he said the words of it many times and they were perfect without trying. “Now I remember the Book of Job. Now I do remember …”

  “There,” said a voice, Granger’s voice.

  The men lay like gasping fish on the grass.

  They did not get up for a long time, but held to the earth as children hold to a familiar thing, no matter how cold or dead, no matter what has happened or will happen. Their fingers were clawed into the soil, and they were all shouting to keep their ears in balance and open, Montag shouting with them, a protest against the wind that swept them, shaking their hair, tearing at their lips, making their noses bleed.

  Montag watched the blood drip into the earth with such an absorption that the city was effortlessly forgotten.

  The wind died.

  The city was flat, as if one had taken a heaping tablespoon of flour and passed one finger over it, smoothing it to an even level.

  The men said nothing. They lay a while like people on the dawn edge of sleep, not yet ready to arise and begin the day’s obligations, its fires and foods, its thousand details of putting foot after foot, hand after hand, its deliveries and functions and minute obsessions. They lay blinking their stunned eyelids. You could hear them breathing faster, then slower, then with the slowness of normality.

  Montag sat up. He did not move any farther, however. The other men did likewise. The sun was touching the black horizon with a faint red tip. The air was cool and sweet and smelled of rain. In a few minutes it would smell of dust and pulverized iron, but now it was sweet.

  And across the world, thought Montag, the cities of the other nations are dead, too, almost in the same instant.

  Silently, the leader of the small group, Granger, arose, felt of his arms and legs, touched his face to see if everything was in its place, then shuffled over to the blown-out fire and bent over it. Montag watched.

  Striking a match, Granger touched it to a piece of paper and shoved this under a bit of kindling, and shoved together bits of straw and dry wood, and after a while, drawing the men slowly, awkwardly to it by its glow, the fire licked up, coloring their faces pink and yellow, while the sun rose slowly to color their backs.

  THERE WAS NO SOUND except the low and secret talk of men at morning, and the talk was no more than this:

  “How many strips?”

  “Two each.”

  “Good enough.”

  The bacon was counted out on a wax paper. The frying pan was set to the fire and the bacon laid in it. After a moment it began to flutter and dance in the pan and the sputter of it filled the morning air with its aroma. Eggs were cracked in upon the bacon and the men watched this ritual, for the leader was a participant, as were they, in a religion of early rising, a thing man had done for many centuries, thought Montag, a thing man had done over and over again, and Montag felt at ease among them, as if during the long night the walls of a great prison had vaporized around them and they were on the land again and only the birds sang on or off as they pleased, with no schedule, and with no nagging human insistence.

  “Here,” said Granger, dishing out the bacon and eggs to each from the hot pan. They each held out the scratched tin plates that had been passed around.

  Then, without looking up, breaking more eggs into the pan for himself, Granger slowly and with a concern both for what he said, recalling it, rounding it, and for making the food also, began to recite snatches and rhythms, even while the day brightened all about as if a pink lamp had been given more wick, and Montag listened and they all looked at the tin plates in their hands, waiting a moment for the eggs to cool, while the leader started the routine, and others took it up, here or there, round about.

  WHEN IT WAS MONTAG’S TURN, he spoke too:

  “To everything there is a season,

  And a time to every purpose under the heaven…

  A time to be born, and a time to die…

  A time to kill, and a time to heal …”

  ORKS MOVED IN THE PINK LIGHT. Now each of the men remembered a separate and different thing, a bit of poetry, a line from a play, an old song. And they spoke these little bits and pieces in the early morning air:

  “Man that is born of a woman

  Is of few days and full of trouble …”

  A WIND BLEW IN THE TREES.

  “To be or not to be, that is the question …”

  THE SUN WAS FULLY UP.

  “Oh, do you remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt … ?”

  Montag felt fine.

  Bonus Stories

  THE DRAGON WHO ATE HIS TAIL

  SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN

  TO THE FUTURE

  The Dragon Who Ate His Tail

  WHAT DID THEY WISH MOST? DID THEY WISH TO LINGER IN old Chicago, to smell the grit and grime, to touch the strange buildings, to inhabit the reeking subways of Manhattan, to taste the lime popsicles of some forgotten summer, to listen to scratchy phonographs in 1910, would they board the ships of Nelson for Trafalgar, would they have a day with Socrates prior to the hemlock, would they stroll Athens on the busiest day and see the flash of knees in the sunlit gas, in what idea and magnificent fashion would they most dearly love to spend the next hour, the next day, the next month, the next year. The rates were extremely reasonable, as on any excursion! So much down, so much a day, and you could fetch yourself home any time antiquity annoyed or bored or frightened you. Here was a way to learn your history! Here was a frontier for you, ready, waiting, alive, fresh and new.

  Come along, now!

  “Do you think you’d like it, Alice?”

  “I hadn’t thought. I imagine.”

  “Would you like to go?”

  “Where?”

  “Paris, 1940. London, 1870. Chicago, 1895? Or the Saint Louis exposition around 1900, I hear it was naïve and tremendous.”

  The husband and wife sat at their mechanical breakfast table being fed exact portions of magnificently browned toast adrip with synthetic and therefore absolutely guaranteed pure butter.

  Oh, that empty future, when the dragon has devoured his radioactive tail, when the people of that time, dismayed and utterly discouraged, their faces blanched by explosions and their hair burned to the root, and their hope scorched and twisted to a shapeless mass in their hearts, when those people turn backward, turn backward, oh time in thy flight, makes us a child again just for tonight!

  And so they were picking up, picking up and going, the law couldn’t stop, the law-makers couldn’t stop them, the police, the tribunals, the silly senates and corruptible congresses, the talkers and pounders and wavers of lists couldn’t stop them, the world was emptying. The plug was pulled, and the people were gushing down the drain of time into yesterday.

  Alice and John Weathers stood outside their door. The houses on their street were empty and silent. The children were gone from the trees, their stomachs no longer distended with green and hideous fruit. The curbs were empty of cars and the sky of ships, and the windows of light motion.

  “Did you forget to turn off the bath tap?”

  “It’s off?”

  “The gas?”

  “Off.”

  “The electricity?”

  “Why must you worry?”

  “Now, lock the door.”

  “No one’s going to come in.”

  “The wind might.”

  “Oh, the wind, that’s different.”

  “But lock it anyway, please, John.”

  And so they locked it and walked off down the lawn with their clothes left behind and all the furniture neatly sheeted. Everything in its place.

  “Do you think we’ll ever come back?”

  “No.”

  “Never at all.”

  “Never.”

  “I wonder if we’ll ever remember this
house on Elm Terrace, the furniture, the electric lights, the parties, all of it, and, in the past, remember that there was such a time or place?”

  “No, we’ll never remember. They put you in a machine that takes memory away. And gives you a new memory. I’m going to be John Sessions, accountant in the city of Chicago in the year 1920, and you’re my wife.”

  They walked along the twilight street.

  “And just think,” she said, quietly, “someday we’ll meet Edgar and his wife on the street, in Chicago, and they’ll look at us, and we’ll look at them and think, Where’ve I seen those faces before, but walk on, strangers, never guessing we met a hundred and ninety years in the future.”

  “Yes, strangers, that is an odd thought.”

  “And all of us, a million or more, hiding in the Past, not knowing each other, but fitting into the pattern, never guessing that we are all from another age.”

  “We’re running away,” he said, stopping, and looking at the dead houses. “I don’t like running away from a problem.”

  “What else can we do?”

  “Stay and fight it out.”

  “Against the hydrogen bomb?”

  “Make laws against it.”

  “And have them broken.”

  “Keep trying, keep trying, that’s what we ought to do, instead of run.”

  “It’s no use.”

  “No, of course it isn’t,” he said. “I realize now that as long as there is one unscrupulous scientist and one dirty politician they’ll get together and make the bomb for whatever silly reason they have. It used to be we had weapons, the little man, to fight back with, a musket, the minute men, a revolution of the people against tyranny, there were always spears to throw or guns to point, but we can’t point a gun at the hydrogen explosion nor any of its keepers for fear of reprisal. The thing is so vast, we are like currants lost in a great yeast, baked before we know it. Come on, it’s no use talking.”

  They went on away from the dead street, into the silence of the business section of town.

  BUT OFTEN NIGHTS, when the great El rounds the corner near their sixth story room and for an instant flashes their bed with yellow and mechanical light, and trembles and jounces their bones in their sleeping flesh, she shudders and cries out to her husband’s back in his slumber, and he, waking turns to whisper, “Now, now, what was it?”

  “Oh, Charles,” she tells him in the now silent, now dark and empty and lost room, “I dreamt we were at breakfast in another time, with a mechanical table feeding us, and rockets in the air, and all sorts of strange things and inventions.”

  “There, there, a nightmare,” he says.

  And a minute later, clutched very tight together, they are tremblingly asleep once more.

  Sometime Before Dawn

  IT WAS THE CRYING LATE AT NIGHT, PERHAPS, THE HYSTERIA, and then the sobbing violently, and after it had passed away into a sighing, I could hear the husband’s voice through the wall. “There, there,” he would say, “there, there.”

  I would lie upon my back in my night bed and listen and wonder, and the calendar on my wall said August 2002. And the man and his wife, young, both about thirty, and fresh-looking, with light hair and blue eyes, but lines around their mouths, had just moved into the rooming house where I took my meals and worked as a janitor in the downtown library.

  Every night and every night it would be the same thing, the wife crying, and the husband quieting her with his soft voice beyond my wall. I would strain to hear what started it, but I could never tell. It wasn’t anything he said, I was positive of this, or anything he did. I was almost certain, in fact, that it started all by itself, late at night, about two o’clock. She would wake up, I theorized, and I would hear that first terrorized shriek and then the long crying. It made me sad. As old as I am, I hate to hear a woman cry.

  I remember the first night they came here, a month ago, an August evening here in this town deep in Illinois, all the houses dark and everyone on the porches licking ice-cream bars. I remember walking through the kitchen downstairs and standing in the old smells of cooking and hearing but not seeing the dog lapping water from the pan under the stove, a nocturnal sound, like water in a cave. And I walked on through to the parlor in the dark, with his face devilish pink from exertion, Mr. Fiske, the landlord, was fretting over the air conditioner, which, damned thing, refused to work. Finally in the hot night he wandered outside onto the mosquito porch—it was made for mosquitoes only, Mr. Fiske averred, but went there anyway.

  I went out onto the porch and sat down and unwrapped a cigar to fire away my own special mosquitoes, and there were Grandma Fiske and Alice Fiske and Henry Fiske and Joseph Fiske and Bill Fiske and six other boarders and roomers, all unwrapping Eskimo pies.

  It was then that the man and his wife, as suddenly as if they had sprung up out of the wet dark grass, appeared at the bottom of the steps, looking up at us like the spectators in a summer night circus. They had no luggage. I always remembered that. They had no luggage. And their clothes did not seem to fit them.

  “Is there a place for food and sleep?” said the man, in a halting voice. Everyone was startled. Perhaps I was the one who saw them first, then Mrs. Fiske smiled and got out of her wicker chair and came forward. “Yes, we have rooms.”

  “Twenty dollars a day, with meals.”

  They did not seem to understand. They looked at each other.

  “Twenty dollars,” said Grandma.

  “We’ll move into here,” said the man.

  “Don’t you want to look first?” asked Mrs. Fiske

  They came up the steps, looking back, as if someone was following.

  That was the first night of the crying.

  BREAKFAST WAS SERVED every morning at seven-thirty, large, toppling stacks of pancakes, huge jugs of syrup, islands of butter, toast, many pots of coffee, and cereal if you wished. I was working on my cereal when the new couple came down the stairs, slowly. They did not come into the dining room immediately, but I had a sense they were just looking at everything. Since Mrs. Fiske was busy I went in to fetch them, and there they were, the man and wife, just looking out the front window, looking and looking at the green grass and the big elm trees and the blue sky. Almost as if they had never seen them before.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  They ran their fingers over antimacassars or through the bead-curtain-rain that hung in the dining room doorway. Once I thought I saw them both smile very broadly at some secret thing. I asked them their name. At first they puzzled over this but then said,

  “Smith.”

  I introduced them around to everyone eating and they sat and looked at the food and at last began to eat.

  They spoke very little, and only when spoken to, and I had an opportunity to remark the beauty in their faces, for they had fine and graceful bone structures in their chins and cheeks and brows, good straight noses, and clear eyes, but always that tiredness about the mouths.

  Half through the breakfast, an event occurred to which I must call special attention. Mr. Britz, the garage mechanic, said, “Well, the president has been out fund-raising again today, I see by the paper.”

  The stranger, Mr. Smith, snorted angrily. “That terrible man! I’ve always hated Westercott.”

  Everyone looked at him. I stopped eating.

  Mrs. Smith frowned at her husband. He coughed slightly and went on eating.

  Mr. Britz scowled momentarily, and then we all finished breakfast, but I remember it now. What Mr. Smith had said was, “That terrible man! I’ve always hated Westercott.”

  I never forgot.

  THAT NIGHT SHE CRIED AGAIN, as if she was lost in the woods, and I stayed awake for an hour, thinking.

  There were so many things I suddenly wanted to ask them. And yet it was almost impossible to see them, for they stayed locked in the room constantly.

  The next day, however, was Saturday. I caught them momentarily in the garden looking at the pink roses, just standing and looking, n
ot touching, and I said, “A fine day!”

  “A wonderful, wonderful day!” they both cried, almost in unison, and then laughed embarrassedly.

  “Oh, it can’t be that good.” I smiled.

  “You don’t know how good it is, you don’t know how wonderful it is—you can’t possibly guess,” she said, and then quite suddenly there were tears in her eyes.

  I stood bewildered. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes.” She blew her nose and went off a distance to pick a few flowers. I stood looking at the apple tree hung with red fruit, and at last I got the courage to inquire, “May I ask where you’re from, Mr. Smith?”

  “The United States,” he said slowly, as if piecing the words together.

  “Oh, I was rather under the impression that—”

  “We were from another county?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are from the United States.”

  “What’s your business, Mr. Smith?”

  “I think.”

  “I see,” I said, for all the answers were less than satisfactory. “Oh, by the way, what’s Westercott’s first name?”

  “Lionel,” said Mr. Smith, and then stared at me. The color left his face. He turned in a panic. “Please,” he cried, softly. “Why do you ask these questions?” They hurried into the house before I could apologize. From the stair window they looked out at me as if I were the spy of the world. I felt contemptible and ashamed.

  ON SUNDAY MORNING I helped clean the house. Tapping on the Smiths’ door I received no answer. Listening, for the first time, I heard the tickings, the little clicks and murmurs of numerous clocks working away quietly in the room. I stood entranced. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick! Two, no, three clocks. When I opened their door to fetch their wastepaper basket, I saw the clocks, arrayed, on the bureau, on the windowsill, and by the nightstand, small and large clocks, all set to this hour of the late morning, ticking like a roomful of insects.