by Ray Bradbury
The sick man’s eyes lingered over the covers, the titles, 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 and 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 breaches, he rises, he breaches, 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 bookbag. 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 tomb 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 WATCHFUL POKER CHIP OF H. MATISSE
WHEN FIRST WE MEET GEORGE GARVEY he is nothing at all. Later he’ll wear a white poker chip monocle, with a blue eye painted on it by Matisse himself. Later, a golden bird cage might trill within George Garvey’s false leg, and his good left hand might possibly be fashioned of shimmering copper and jade.
But at the beginning—gaze upon a terrifyingly ordinary man.
“Financial section, dear?”
The newspapers rattle in his evening apartment.
“Weatherman says ‘rain tomorrow.’”
The tiny black hairs in his nostrils breathe in, breathe out, softly, softly, hour after hour.
“Time for bed.”
By his look, quite obviously born of several 1907 wax window dummies. And with the trick, much admired by magic
ians, of sitting in a green velour chair and—vanishing! Turn your head and you forgot his face. Vanilla pudding.
Yet the merest accident made him the nucleus for the wildest avant-garde literary movement in history!
Garvey and his wife had lived enormously alone for twenty years. She was a lovely carnation, but the hazard of meeting him pretty well kept visitors off. Neither husband nor wife suspected Garvey’s talent for mummifying people instantaneously. Both claimed they were satisfied sitting alone nights after a brisk day at the office. Both worked at anonymous jobs. And sometimes even they could not recall the name of the colorless company which used them like white paint on white paint.
Enter the avant-garde! Enter The Cellar Septet!
These odd souls had flourished in Parisian basements listening to a rather sluggish variety of jazz, preserved a highly volatile relationship six months or more, and, returning to the United States on the point of clamorous disintegration, stumbled into Mr. George Garvey.
“My God!” cried Alexander Pape, erstwhile potentate of the clique. “I met the most astounding bore. You simply must see him! At Bill Timmins’ apartment house last night, a note said he’d return in an hour. In the hall this Garvey chap asked if I’d like to wait in his apartment. There we sat, Garvey, his wife, myself! Incredible! He’s a monstrous Ennui, produced by our materialistic society. He knows a billion ways to paralyze you! Absolutely rococo with the talent to induce stupor, deep slumber, or stoppage of the heart. What a case study. Let’s all go visit!”
They swarmed like vultures! Life flowed to Garvey’s door, life sat in his parlor. The Cellar Septet perched on his fringed sofa, eyeing their prey.
Garvey fidgeted.
“Anyone wants to smoke—” He smiled faintly. “Why—go right ahead—smoke.”
Silence.
The instructions were: “Mum’s the word. Put him on the spot. That’s the only way to see what a colossal norm he is. American culture at absolute zero!”
After three minutes of unblinking quiet, Mr. Garvey leaned forward. “Eh,” he said, “what’s your business. Mr. . . .?”
“Crabtree. The poet.”
Garvey mused over this.
“How’s,” he said, “business?”
Not a sound.
Here lay a typical Garvey silence. Here sat the largest manufacturer and deliverer of silences in the world; name one, he could provide it packaged and tied with throat-clearings and whispers. Embarrassed, pained, calm, serene, indifferent, blessed, golden, or nervous silences; Garvey was in there.
Well, The Cellar Septet simply wallowed in this particular evening’s silence. Later, in their cold-water flat, over a bottle of “adequate little red wine” (they were experiencing a phase which led them to contact real reality) they tore this silence to bits and worried it.
“Did you see how he fingered his collar! Ho!”
“By God, though, I must admit he’s almost ‘cool.’ Mention Muggsy Spanier and Bix Beiderbecke. Notice his expression. Very cool. I wish I could look so uncaring, so unemotional.”
Ready for bed, George Garvey, reflecting upon this extraordinary evening, realized that when situations got out of hand, when strange books or music were discussed, he panicked, he froze.
This hadn’t seemed to cause undue concern among his rather oblique guests. In fact, on the way out, they had shaken his hand vigorously, thanked him for a splendid time!
“What a really expert A-number-1 bore!” cried Alexander Pape, across town.
“Perhaps he’s secretly laughing at us,” said Smith, the minor poet, who never agreed with Pape if he was awake.
“Let’s fetch Minnie and Tom; they’d love Garvey. A rare night. We’ll talk of it for months!”
“Did you notice?” asked Smith, the minor poet, eyes closed smugly. “When you turn the taps in their bathroom?” He paused dramatically. “Hot water.”
Everyone stared irritably at Smith.
They hadn’t thought to try.
The clique, an incredible yeast, soon burst doors and windows, growing.
“You haven’t met the Garveys? My God! lie back down in your coffin! Garvey must rehearse. No one’s that boorish without Stanislavsky!” Here the speaker, Alexander Pape, who depressed the entire group because he did perfect imitations, now aped Garvey’s slow, self-conscious delivery:
“‘Ulysses? Wasn’t that the book about the Greek, the ship, and the one-eyed monster! Beg pardon?’” A pause. “‘Oh.’” Another pause. “‘I see.’” A sitting back. “‘Ulysses was written by James Joyce? Odd. I could swear I remember, years ago, in school . . .’”
In spite of everyone hating Alexander Pape for his brilliant imitations, they roared as he went on:
“‘Tennessee Williams? Is he the man who wrote that hillbilly “Waltz?”’”
“Quick! What’s Garvey’s home address?” everyone cried.
“My,” observed Mr. Garvey to his wife, “life is fun these days.”
“It’s you,” replied his wife. “Notice, they hang on your every word.”
“Their attention is rapt,” said Mr. Garvey, “to the point of hysteria. The least thing I say absolutely explodes them. Odd. My jokes at the office always met a stony wall. Tonight, for instance, I wasn’t trying to be funny at all. I suppose it’s an unconscious little stream of wit that flows quietly under everything I do or say. Nice to know I have it in reserve. Ah, there’s the bell. Here we go!”
“He’s especially rare if you get him out of bed at four a.m.,” said Alexander Pape. “The combination of exhaustion and fin de siècle morality is a regular salad!”
Everyone was pretty miffed at Pape for being first to think of seeing Garvey at dawn. Nevertheless, interest ran high after midnight in late October.
Mr. Garvey’s subconscious told him in utmost secrecy that he was the opener of a theatrical season, his success dependent upon the staying power of the ennui he inspired in others. Enjoying himself, he nevertheless guessed why these lemmings thronged to his private sea. Underneath, Garvey was a surprisingly brilliant man, but his unimaginative parents had crushed him in the Terribly Strange Bed of their environment. From there he had been thrown to a larger lemon-squeezer: his Office, his Factory, his Wife. The result: a man whose potentialities were a time bomb in his own parlor. The Garveys’ repressed subconscious half recognized that the avant-gardists had never met anyone like him, or rather had met millions like him but had never considered studying one before.
So here he was, the first of autumn’s celebrities. Next month it might be some abstractionist from Allentown who worked on a twelve-foot ladder shooting house-paint, in two colors only, blue and cloud-gray, from cake-decorators and insecticide-sprayers on canvas covered with layers of mucilage and coffee grounds, who simply needed appreciation to grow! or a Chicago tin-cutter of mobiles, aged fifteen, already ancient with knowledge. Mr. Garvey’s shrewd subconscious grew even more suspicious when he made the terrible mistake of reading the avant-garde’s favorite magazine, Nucleus.
“This article on Dante, now,” said Garvey, “Fascinating. Especially where it discusses the spatial metaphors conveyed in the foothills of the Antipurgatorio and the Paradiso Terrestre on top of the Mountain. The bit about Cantos XV–XVIII, the so-called ‘doctrinal cantos’ is brilliant!”
How did the Cellar Septet react?
Stunned, all of them!
There was a noticeable chill.
They departed in short order when instead of being a delightfully mass-minded, keep-up-with-the-Joneses, machine-dominated chap leading a wishy-washy life of quiet desperation, Garvey enraged them with opinions on Does Existentialism Still Exist? or Is Krafft-Ebing? They didn’t want opinions on alchemy and symbolism given in a piccolo voice, Garvey’s subconscious warned him. They only wanted Garvey’s good old-fashioned plain white bread and churned country butter, to be chewed on later at a dim bar, exclaiming how priceless! Garvey retreated.
Next night he was his old precious self. Dale C
arnegie? Splendid religious leader! Hart Schaffner & Marx? Better than Bond Street! Member of the After-Shave Club? That was Garvey! Latest Book-of-the-Month? Here on the table! Had they ever tried Elinor Glyn?
The Cellar Septet was horrified, delighted. They let themselves be bludgeoned into watching Milton Berle. Garvey laughed at everything Berle said. It was arranged for neighbors to tape-record various daytime soap operas which Garvey replayed evenings with religious awe, while the Cellar Septet analyzed his face and his complete devotion to Ma Perkins and John’s Other Wife.
Oh, Garvey was getting sly. His inner self observed: You’re on top. Stay there! Please your public! Tomorrow, play the Two Black Crows records! Mind your step! Bonnie Baker, now . . . that’s it! They’ll shudder, incredulous that you really like her singing. What about Guy Lombardo? That’s the ticket!
The mob-mind, said his subconscious. You’re symbolic of the crowd. They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they’re fascinated with the snake-pit.
Guessing his thought, his wife objected. “They like you.”
“In a frightening sort of way,” he said. “I’ve lain awake figuring why they should come see me! Always hated and bored myself. Stupid, tattletale-gray man. Not an original thought in my mind. All I know now is: I love company. I’ve always wanted to be gregarious, never had the chance. It’s been a ball these last months! But their interest is dying. I want company forever! What shall I do?”
His subconscious provided shopping lists.
Beer. It’s unimaginative.
Pretzels. Delightfully “passé.”
Stop by Mother’s. Pick up Maxfield Parrish painting, the flyspecked, sunburned one. Lecture on same tonight.
By December Mr. Garvey was really frightened.
The Cellar Septet was now quite accustomed to Milton Berle and Guy Lombardo. In fact, they had rationalized themselves into a position where they acclaimed Berle as really too rare for the American public, and Lombardo was twenty years ahead of his time; the nastiest people liked him for the commonest reasons.