Bradbury, Ray - Chapbook 13

by Ahmed

  "Oh," gasped Ahmed, flailing his arms in panic to swim the air, "what is buried here? A city long dead or a city as yet unbirthed, waiting to be born?"

  "Both!"

  "How can that be?" Ahmed sank, then rose, exclaiming, "How so?"

  "One is lost memory. The second is remembered forward beyond tomorrow. We call that 'dream.' To recall rebuilds the past. To imagine builds the future. One city fits within the other. Life sits in death. Our futures rise from the grave. Two cities. One unreal because it has vanished. The other unreal because it rests in that living grave between a sleeper's ears. The past exists because it once was real. The future exists because we need it to be real. Look upon this phantom scene. Tell me, what is lost, what is yet to be found? What left behind, what far ahead? Are they not twins? Is not the future a mirror reflecting the past, aching to be born? Be silent. Witness. Then speak!"

  Ahmed hovered and stared, stared and blinked, scanned this wasteland lit by sunrise a thousand years past or sunset in a calendar as yet unprinted. And then he said:

  "I feel . . . many men, many women lost under the sand, coming and going with their sons and daughters. I feel great stones. Is this a graveyard, then, with catacombs and tombs along this dry sea? Catacombs, tombs, mummies, death!" shouted Ahmed, wrapped in ice, drowning in cold winds. "Death!"

  "No!" cried Gonn, reaching out to seize the boy. "Cellars. Library cellars to be filled with thoughts, fancies, impossible futures brought to life!"

  "Death!" Ahmed cried, and then, looking to the far countries of sand where untouchable beasts walked away and away from him, "Father!"

  "Do not cry out to fathers," said Gonn. "Cry out to yourself to be saved."

  "Death!" And Ahmed, in one mournful cry, fell.

  And as he fell, swift, diminished, exhaled, punctured like a vast aerial balloon, so fell Gonn, moaning, into the dunes. Where he struck like a mighty meteor, only a crater of dust showed his ruin, even as Ahmed, similarly fallen, did not sink to dust but sprawled, stunned, to pick himself up under an empty sky and an empty procession of moonlit dunes.

  "Gonn!" he said.

  No answer.

  "Gonn!" he bleated.

  Silence.

  The merest suction of sand dimpled in, murmuring, near his cheek.

  "See," said a hollow whisper. "What?" said the lost voice. "You ..." More sand sank upon itself. ". . . have done?" Fading: "I die. You . . . have . . . killed . . . me."

  "No!" Ahmed clutched at the funneling hole in the dune. "Come back, Gonn. I need you!"

  "No ..." came the voice beneath the sand, "not me ..."

  Ahmed dug frantically and groped and dug only sand and air.

  "Gonn. Where are you? Rise."

  "Your father weighs me down."

  "He can't. He mustn't!"

  "He is your past. You must be your future. Put him away. Remove him from my limbs, my heart, my head!"

  "How, how??!!" Ahmed dug deeper to nothing and more nothing.

  "Avert your gaze. Look not to horizons with blood of your heart and beasts that stay fastened to the earth. Dance upon my grave."

  "What?"

  "Dance. No more tears or I am flooded as well as brought to slaughter. I am almost gone. Dance."

  And wiping his eyes and looking not at the horizon where his to-be-forgotten father lived, Ahmed danced.

  And beneath the cold dune long after midnight he felt a stir, a mighty commotion as if a god's heart had started up.

  'Dance upon my grave.''

  And he danced more.

  "Sing ..." said the mighty whisper.

  And Ahmed not only danced to kick away the dust, but sang as if from the highest minaret in a great land, and the large heart hidden grew larger and banged itself to life.

  And if for an instant Ahmed lifted his gaze to search the land, prepared to cry out, then the huge heart slackened and the sand froze, so that he fixed his gaze only on his feet, which moved and leaped and pummeled the hidden heart as he shouted wild words of love to exhume, to revive, to prolong, to rouse.

  "YesV came the mighty whisper, the buried voice. "Ah, yes, son of my heart and life, he who dances to waken fire and know no limits to the sky or earth. Dance, sing, dance, there!"

  And with this last explosion, the sands were riven and, like a mountain, a storm, a celebratory rocket, Gonn was rebirthed, soared, and lifted Ahmed with him.

  Among the clouds, both laughed and Ahmed's tears were tears of relief and joy, and so accepted, as Gonn hurled questions:

  "Does the caravan exist?"

  "No," said Ahmed.

  "Do you see it anywhere?"

  "No," replied Ahmed.

  "And the men of that long march?"

  "Are gone," Ahmed responded.

  "And someone's father with them?"

  "And that father with them."

  "Which means this present cannot blind you to the future? Good," said this great mouth in this great head on this great body. "See morel Be a proper gravedigger. Let your soul instruct your heart, let your heart speak to your tongue. Exhale. Celebrate. Shout!"

  Ahmed inhaled deeply of the high sweet clear-water air.

  "Let go!" said the huge mouth, almost engulfing him.

  Ahmed exploded out all of that incredible air.

  And the dry sea below, the ocean tide of shore on shore of dunes shouldering dunes, shivered.

  " Again!"

  Ahmed exhaled.

  And the sand swarmed up like locust flights.

  And what lay beneath was revealed.

  "Great Gonn." Ahmed was panicked into delight. "Have I done this?"

  "All this has Ahmed done."

  And below were not cities buried stone on stone, but marble cliffs from which one day those towns would be built, and atop the cliffs were blood, bone, and webbed creatures that flung themselves out to kite-sail like scythes to cut the wind; grinning reptiles with oiled, unsavory smiles.

  "How terrible!" Ahmed flinched and raised his hands to shield his face. "What made them?"

  "Why, the One God whose nightmare gave them birth."

  "How are they called?"

  "Don't call, they might come. Nameless they were for a million beast generations, until on museum walls they were given names. But these bony kites were shut like fans long before you woke in the womb. Their wingprint smiles are fixed in stone below the cliffs. No ape or man ever witnessed their flight. Only their hieroglyph smiles remain. Quick!"

  And Gonn and Ahmed fled upward in a midnight explosion of bats fired from caves, flung out to feed on winds of locust and moth and mosquito.

  And the sky was empty now as trees arose and batwing squirrels capered across the moon.

  "Flight," whispered Gonn. "And flight again. High journeys to drive men mad with envy when at last man came. Flight."

  "Flight," said Ahmed.

  And then the mighty friend to Ahmed exhaled, as did the boy, and more sand sifted away on a shoreline as vast as the eternal sky to reveal streets and towns and people fixed like statues there, stranded as the dry sea vanished and they all looked to the cliffs where once the dread kites soared, but now as the sun rose in the midst of darkness a man and his son, clothed in golden feathers embedded in bright wax, stood atiptoe on the cliff's rim. "Higher," cried Ahmed, "I must see!" And Gonn-Ben-Allah spun higher to see the man and his son with golden wings leap, thrust, fly off the cliff, with the son mounting higher and higher as the old man, alarmed, tried to shout him down. But the noon sun fired his wings to melt the wax to golden tears which dripped from wrist, elbow, and arm. And he fell like a stone from the sky.

  "Catch him!" Ahmed exclaimed. "I cannot."

  "You are a god who can do anything." "And he is a mortal who must try everything." And the flier with golden wings struck the sea and sank in bright rings, and the sea was silent as the sun died and the moon returned.

  "How terrible!" Ahmed exclaimed.

  "Oh, how brave," said Gonn.

  They circled to see
the father hover to mourn above the quiet surf.

  "Did," said Ahmed, "all this truly happen? It must be so."

  "Then it is so."

  "Though his wings melted and he fell?"

  "Even so. There is never failure in trying. Not to try is the greater death."

  "But what does it mean?"

  "It means," said Gonn-Ben-Allah, "that you must toss feathers in the wind and guess their directions to all points of the heart's compass. It means you must jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down!"

  "And fall? And never fear?"

  "Fear, yes, but brave beyond fear."

  "That is a big thing for a boy."

  "Grow with its bigness, let it burst your skin to let forth—lol—the butterfly. Quick!"

  And they raced the windstream over the earth and beheld:

  An airship made up of thistles, pollen, milkweed, a craft so light it trembled at a child's breath. Its masts and spars were immense reeds that bent with the weight of ghost dandelions. The sails were cobweb and swamp-mist and its ship's captain a weightless mummy of tobacco weed and autumn leaf that rustled even as the sails above him shuffled the storm wind. An acre of ship with an ounce of cargo. Sneezel Ahmed did! And it vanished in flakes.

  As they raced the windstream again to find:

  A balloon as ripe as a peach and as tall as ten acrobats, filled with hot wind from a basket of fire slung beneath its gulping mouth, inhaling flame, ascending with its passengers—a rooster, and a dog barking at the moon, and two men waving at an audience sea below.

  And a woman in a strange dress and bonnet, laughing in the clouds as her balloon caught fire and fell, shrieking.

  "No!" cried Ahmed.

  "Refuse no sight. People fall but to rise again!" whispered the Great God of Time and Storms. "Open your eyes!"

  Ahmed blinked and saw the curve of earth where a kite was flung up in a cloud stream. In a vast bamboo frame with silk banners, like a spider caught in its bright web, a man struggled to tilt the kite. Ambling over and down with the tidal winds, he soared up like a wild exclamation point.

  "1 fly," he cried, "I fly!"

  And knew the joy of being high above a world of night.

  But hearing his high laughter at conquering hills of cloud and storm, a hundred men did mutter in their sleep, and shout confusions to deny his high trajectory. Hid from his upward truth, slammed their eyes shut, erased his flight, as if it never were, and with empty guns and empty minds fired the sky.

  Even as a blizzard of arrows rose to pierce his triumph of paper and silk, the Chinese emperor's symbol on each dart. The soaring man was struck, pinned to a cloud, as his last shout "I fly" became "die, I die," and fell as if lightning had torn his silks. Where he had been was air and emptiness.

  He was gone as if he had never been. Gunshot by men who refused his sight, destroyed by doubt and envy, the flier had let go his joy, let loose the wings from remembered birds, and fallen.

  And suddenly, as if pinned against the sky himself, Ahmed shook like a paper toy.

  Gonn-Ben-Allah said, "Have you no words?"

  "No words for what I have seen," mourned the boy. "Oh, mighty one, how I wish for one glimpse of my father and my camel."

  "Patience. You must be strong without that medicine and so survive to give me birth. ..."

  Ahmed was astonished. "But you are already born1. I speak to you. You are real."

  "Only the promise of the real, the possibility of birth."

  "But I speak, you answer!"

  "Do you not talk in your sleep?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "Well, then. Without you, I will never be truly born. Without me, you will be the walking dead. Are you strong enough to birth a god?"

  "If gods can be born of boys, then yes. And now?" He gazed up into the immense bronze face of the half-dreamt deity. "What?"

  "This!" cried Gonn-Ben-Allah.

  And below, along the endless seacoast of dead sand, a volcano of buildings erupted.

  "What are those?" Ahmed wondered.

  "Men who flew in stone, marble, and clay, who dreamed wings but settled for arches and beams, palaces and pyramids, each mightier than the last, destined to fly in place, then fall to dust. Because they could not stretch high, loom free, they chose the lower road, which, still seen, made their hearts grow wings in their breasts and made their blood rise heavenward with that strange sound joy makes, laughing to see such buildings as opened their windows to set their souls free.

  "But that was not true flight, for their feet were caught in clay. Even on those towers, where wings might soar, all hope died and men sank back to dreaming.

  "So behold a pyramid here, a Great Wall beyond. Perches from which boys, grown men, might leap to die, hoping for wings."

  And the winds blew and the sands recovered the cities and Ahmed and Gonn sailed on.

  To see men who wove carpets and hurled them with shouts: "Rise!" But the carpets floundered and fell.

  And saw a collector of butterflies sew up a thousand small bright wings, a bloom of spring flight which, as he stepped from his roof, exploded at his first shout of joy and last shout of silence.

  And saw a thousand umbrellas fall as Earth's gravity flattened a mad boy in summer grass.

  And saw yet other machines, all fans and whirligigs and hummingbird flickerings, driven before the rain, dissolved into a mindless sea.

  "I see!" Ahmed exclaimed.

  "See more. From all you have found this night, call forth each foundling toyl Fill the sky, then burn their shadows in your head, so as never to be lost. Now!"

  "Yes!" Ahmed spun to shout: "All you ghosts of Forever, rise! Who says?"

  "Ahmed," whispered Gonn.

  "Ahmed!" echoed the boy.

  "Of the Oblivion Machines."

  Ahmed hesitated, then: "Of the Oblivion Machines!"

  And where before had been a hundred, now ten thousand wasp, dragonfly, reptile shapes flicker-lit the moon. And all about was a sound on sound of rivers, then Amazons, then mighty oceans of wings.

  And Ahmed slapped his hand and all the heavens were thunderclaps of applause with no lightning, drumshots of clamor: bone-breaking eruptions of boys and men, woven skeletons across the clouds.

  "Of the oblivion Machines"

  "Silence!" commanded Ahmed, guessing from the silent mouth of Gonn what to shout. "Hold still!"

  And the thunder died and the half-seen, half-guessed phantoms were transfixed against a sky half sight of moon, half glimpse of sun.

  "Now," whispered Gonn. "In all the beds and all the rooms of the world."

  "In all the beds," recited Ahmed. "In all the world's rooms, go to your windows to see what must be seen!"

  And below now lay all the cities and towns of sleeping dreamers.

  "Wake!" cried Ahmed with Gonn's voice. "Wake while the sky is full of shapes. See! Find!"

  "Gods, oh, fellow gods," cried Gonn suddenly, gasping, clutching his throat, his chest, feeling his wrists, his elbows and arms. "I fall, oh, brother gods, I falter, I will fall!"

  And great Gonn snatched at the wind with his fingers, his hands, beat his arms up and down, churned the clouds with frantic legs, glancing with fear down at the sleeping cities.

  "They have buried me, killed me a thousand times to fit in a thousand tombs with no names."

  "Who?" cried Ahmed.

  "The dreamers that do not dream, the dreamers that do not do. The doubters who kill the dream. The walking dead who see birdless skies and shipless seas and horseless highways with not a carriage, not a wheel. Those who bed early and rise late and sleep at noon and eat figs and drink wine and cherish only flesh. They, oh, they, they, them!"

  Ahmed stared down, blinking wildly, trying to find what was described.

  "But they're not doing anything! They're all asleep."

  "Their silence stops my ears." 1 hey re snoring!

  "They breathe in but not out. They take air and give nothing! I die of it!"

 
; And Ahmed saw the cause:

  The cities slept and the dust buried the sleepers, who were as dust, and the dream died in them, the bones of dreams with no flesh, with no men to man them, no pilots to steer and guide them, no flesh for the bones of the Oblivion Machines. They were ghost kites, ruins in the sky destined to tatter and snow into dinosaur graves and elephant tombyards.

  No man stirred.

  "How can they hurt you, Gonn? They're not even moving."

  "They play at Statues and would make me one!'

  "They don't know you exist!"

  "Truth! And their not knowing further diminishes me. Witness, I lose substance, flesh, and weight. I melt with disbelief."

  And as Ahmed watched, this, too, was true.

  Great Gonn, as if burned in a sluice of invisible flame, flailed out arms and legs that were dwindling to shank and marrow. Where vast balcony chest was, now ribs emerged. His chin sharpened to a sword, his nose a razor, his lips a waxen grin over death's-head teeth.

  "Oh, great Gonn, stop!" Ahmed cried.

  "I am a tombyard god. Only living flesh and blood and human dream can help. I, a whale, am now carp and minnowed fingerling. Who will save me?"

  "Gonn, oh, Gonn:" The boy writhed to find the words. "Me!"

  "You!?" shouted Gonn. "Have you learned the first lesson well?"

  "Yes!" yelled Ahmed.

  At which Gonn's face suffused with pinks and crimson fires and his diminishment ceased and his bones, his ribs, sank back in refurbished skin.

  "How dare you!"

  "Because I'm the only one awake! Do you see anyone else? I'm up here, Gonn, but they don't know I am here, either! Oh, blast them, Gonn, and burn the fools!"

  And Gonn gained further weight. His lips hid his skull's teeth. His sunken eyes blossomed in fuller lids.

  "Would you be a god; then, like Gonn, and forgotten and maybe dead before your time?"

  "Why not?"

  "Courageous boy."

  "No, only mad!"

  "Madness is courage! Your madness is a meal. Fatten me!"

  The boy seized Gonn's hand. Gonn, a balloon, ascended.

  Ahmed stared at his hand gripped in the fist of this sick deity made well.