Bradbury, Ray - SSC 21

by Long After Midnight (v1. 1)

  Days like this, I thought, all the things you never did catch up with you, unravel your laces, itch your beard. God help any man who hasn't paid his debts this day.

  Drearily, I turned like a weathercock in a slow wind, Started my remote feet back toward the hotel.

  Right then, it happened.

  I stopped. I stood very still. I listened.

  For it seemed the wind had shifted and now blew from the west country and brought with it a prickling and tingling: the strum of a harp.

  "Well," I whispered.

  As if a cork had been pulled, all the heavy gray sea waters vanished roaring down a hole in my shoe; I felt my sadness go.

  And around the comer I went.

  And there sat a little woman, not half so big as her harp, her hands held out in the shivering strings like a child feeling a fine clear rain.

  The harp threads flurried; the sounds dissolved like shudders of disturbed water nudging a shore. "Danny Boy" leaped out of the harp. "Wearin' of the Green" sprang after, full-clothed. Then "Limerick Is My Town, Sean Liam Is My Name" and "The Loudest Wake That Ever Was." The harp sound was the kind of thing you feel when champagne, poured in a full big glass, prickles your eyelids, sprays soft on your cheeks.

  My mouth was pinned high at both corners. Spanish oranges bloomed in my cheeks. My breath fifed my nostrils. My feet minced, hidden, a secret dancing in my motionless shoes.

  The harp played "Yankee Doodle."

  Had the lady seen me stand near with my idiot fever? No, I thought, coincidence.

  And then I turned sad again.

  For look, I thought, she doesn't see her harp. She doesn't hear her music!

  True. Her hands, all alone, jumped and frolicked on the air, picked and pringled the strings, two ancient spiders busy at webs quickly built, then, torn by wind, rebuilt. She let her fingers play abandoned, to themselves, while her face turned this way and that, as if she lived in a nearby house and need only glance out on occasion to see her hands had come to no harm. —"Ah ..." My soul sighed in me.

  Then:

  Here's your chance! I almost shouted. Good God, of course!

  But I held to myself and let her reap out the last full falling sheaves of "Yankee Doodle."

  Then, heartbeat in throat, I said:

  "You play beautifully."

  One hundred pounds melted from my body.

  The woman nodded and began "Summer on the Shore," her fingers weaving mantillas from mere breath.

  "You play very beautifully indeed," I said.

  Another seventy pounds fell from my limbs.

  "When you play forty years," she said, "you don't notice."

  "You play well enough to be in a theater."

  "Be off with you!" Two sparrows pecked in the shuttling loom. "Why should I think of orchestras and bands?" -

  "It's indoors work," I said.

  "My father," she said, while her hands went away and returned, "made this harp, played it fine, taught me how. God's sake, he said, keep out from under roofs!"

  The old woman blinked, remembering. "Play out back, in front, around the sides of theaters, Da said, but don't play in where the music gets snuffed. Might as well harp in a coffin!"

  "Doesn't this rain hurt your instrument?"

  "Ifs inside places hurt harps with heat and steam, Da said. Keep it out, let it breathe, take fine tones and timbres from the air. Besides, Da said, when people buy tickets, each thinks ifs in him to yell if you don't play up, down, sideways, for him alone. Shy off from that, Da said; they'll call you handsome one year, brute the next. Get where they'll pass on by; if they like your song—hurrah! Those that don't will run from your life. That way, girl, you'll meet just those who lean from natural bent in your direction. Why closet yourself with demon fiends when you can live in the streets' fresh wind with abiding angels? But I do go on. Ah, now, why?"

  She peered at me for the first time, like someone come from a dark room, squinting.

  "Who are you?" she asked. "You set my tongue loose! What're you up to?"

  "Up to no good until a minute ago when I came around this corner," I said. "Ready to knock over Nelson's pillar. Ready to pick a theater queue and brawl along it, half weeping and half blasphemous . . ."

  "I don't see you doing it." Her hands wove out another yard of song. "What changed your mind?"

  "You," I said.

  I might have fired a cannon in her face.

  "Me?" she said.

  "You picked the day up off the stones, gave it a whack, set it running with a yell again."

  "I did that?"

  For the first time, I heard a few notes missing from the tune.

  "Or, if you like, those hands of yours that go about their work without your knowing."

  "The clothes must be washed, so you wash them."

  I felt the iron weights gather in my limbs.

  "Don't!" I said. "Why should we, coming by, be happy with this thing, and not you?"

  She cocked her head; her hands moved slower still.

  "And why should you bother with the likes of me?"

  I stood before her, and could I tell what the man told me in the lulling quiet of Doole/s Pub? Could I mention the hill of beauty that had risen to fill my soul through a lifetime, and myself with a toy sand-shovel doling it back to the world in dribs and drabs? Should I list all my debts to people on stages and silver screens who made me laugh or cry or just come alive, but no one in the dark theater to turn to and dare shout, "If you ever need help, I'm your friend!" Should I recall for her the man on a bus ten years before who chuckled so easy and light from the last seat that the sound of him melted everyone else to laughing warm and rollicking off out the doors, but with no one brave enough to pause and touch the man's arm and say, "Oh, man, you've favored us this night; Lord bless you!" Could I tell how she was just one part of a great account long owed and due? No, none of this could I tell. So I put it this way:

  "Imagine something."

  "I'm ready," she said.

  "Imagine you're an American article writer, looking for material, far from home, wife, children, friends, in a hard winter, in a cheerless hotel, on a bad gray day with naught but broken glass, chewed tobacco, and sooty snow in your soul. Imagine you're walking in the damned winter streets and turn a corner, and there's this little woman with a golden harp and everything she plays is another season, autumn, spring, summer, coming, going in a free-for-all. And the ice melts, the fog lifts, the wind burns with June, and ten years shuck off your life. Imagine, if you please."

  She stopped her tune.

  She was shocked at the sudden silence.

  "You are daft," she said.

  "Imagine you're me," I said. "Going back to my hotel now. And on my way I'd like to hear anything, anything at all. Play. And when you play, walk off around the comer and listen."

  She put her hands to the strings and paused, working her mouth. I waited. At last she sighed, she moaned. Then suddenly she cried:

  "Go on!"

  "What... ?"

  "You've made me all thumbs! Look! You've spoilt it!"

  "I just wanted to thank—"

  "—me behind!" she cried. "What a clod, what a brute! Mind your business! Do your work! Let be, man! Ah, these poor fingers, mint, mint!"

  She stared at them and at me with a terrible glaring fixity.

  "Get!" she shouted.

  I ran around the comer in despair.

  There! I thought, you've done it! really done it! By thanks destroyed, that's her story. And yours, too, you must live with it! Fool! why didn't you keep your mouth shut?

  I sank, I leaned, against a building. A minute must have ticked by.

  Please, woman, I thought, come on. Play. Not for me. Play for yourself. Forget what I said! Please.

  I heard a few faint, tentative harp whispers.

  Another pause.

  Then, when the wind blew again, it brought the sound of her very slow playing.

  The song was an old one, and I knew
the words. I said them to myself.

  Tread lightly to the music,

  Nor bruise the tender grass,

  Life passes in the -weather

  As the sand storms down the glass.

  Yes, I thought, go on.

  Drift easy in the shadows,

  Bask lazy in the sun,

  Give thanks for thirsts and quenches,

  For dines and wines and wenches,

  Give thought to life soon over,

  Tread softly on the clover,

  So bruise not any lover.

  So exist from the living,

  Salute and make thanksgiving,

  Then sleep when all is done,

  That sleep so dearly won.

  Why, I thought, how wise the old woman is.

  Tread lightly to the music.

  And I'd almost squashed her with praise.

  So bruise not any lover.

  And she was covered with bruises from my kind thoughtlessness.

  But now with a song that taught more than I could say, she was soothing herself.

  I waited until she was well into the third chorus before I walked by again, tipping my hat.

  But her eyes were shut and she was listening to what her hands were up to, moving in the strings like the fresh hands of a very young girl who has first known rain and washes her palms in its clear waterfalls.

  She had gone through caring not at all, and then caring too much, and was now busy caring just the right way.

  The corners of her mouth were pinned up, gently.

  A close call, I thought. Very close.

  I left them like two friends met in the street, the harp and herself.

  I ran for the hotel to thank her the only way I knew how: to do my own work and do it well.

  But on the way I stopped at Doole/s.

  The music was still being treaded lightly and the clover was still being treaded softly, and no lover at all was being bruised as I let the pub door hush and looked all around for the man whose hand I most wanted to shake.

  Drink This: Against the Madness of Crowds

  It was one of those night that are so damned hot you lie flat out lost until 2 :oo a.m., then sway upright, baste yourself with your own sour brine, and stagger down into the great bake-oven subway where the lost trains shriek in.

  "Hell," whispered Will Morgan.

  And hell it was, with a lost army of beast people wandering the night from the Bronx on out to Coney and back, hour on hour, searching for sudden inhalations of salt ocean wind that might make you gasp with Thanksgiving.

  Somewhere, God, somewhere in Manhattan or beyond was a cool wind. By dawn, it must be found. . . .

  "Damn!"

  Stunned, he saw maniac tides of advertisements squirt by with toothpaste smiles, his own advertising ideas pursuing him the whole length of the hot night island.

  The train groaned and stopped.

  Another train stood on the opposite track.

  Incredible. There in the open train window across the way sat Old Ned Amminger. Old? They were the same age, forty, but .. .

  Will Morgan threw his window up.

  "Ned, you son of a bitch!"

  "Will, you bastard. You ride late like this often?"

  "Every damn hot night since 1946I"

  "Me, too! Glad to see you!"

  "Liar!"

  Each vanished in a shriek of steel.

  God, thought Will Morgan, two men who hate each other, who work not ten feet apart grinding their teeth over the next step up the ladder, knock together in Dante's Inferno here under a melting city at 3:00 A.M. Hear our voices echo, fading:

  "Liar . . . !"

  Half an hour later, in Washington Square, a cool wind touched his brow. He followed it into an alley where . . .

  The temperature dropped ten degrees.

  "Hold on," he whispered.

  The wind smelled of the Ice House when he was a boy and stole cold crystals to rub on his cheeks and stab inside his shirt with shrieks to kill the heat.

  The cool wind led him down the alley to a small shop where a sign read:

  MELISSA TOAD, WITCH

  LAUNDRY SERVICE:

  CHECK YOUR PROBLEMS HERE BY NINE A.M. PICK THEM UP, FRESH-CLEANED, AT DUSK

  There was a smaller sign:

  SPELLS, PHILTRES AGAINST DREAD CLIMATES, HOT OR COLD. POTIONS TO INSPIRE EMPLOYERS AND ASSURE PROMOTIONS. SALVES, UNGUENTS & MUMMY-DUSTS RENDERED DOWN FROM ANCIENT CORPORATION HEADS. REMEDD2S FOR NOISE. EMOLLIENTS FOR GASEOUS OR POLLUTED AIRS. LOTIONS FOR PARANOID TRUCK DRIVERS. MEDICINES TO BE TAKEN BEFORE TRYING TO SWIM OFF THE NEW YORK DOCKS.

  A few bottles were strewn in the display window, labeled:

  PERFECT MEMORY.

  BREATH OF SWEET APRIL WIND.

  SILENCE AND THE TREMOR OF FINE BDiDSONG.

  He laughed and stopped.

  For the wind blew cool and creaked a door. And again there was the memory of frost from the white Ice House grottoes of childhood, a world cut from winter dreams and saved on into August.

  "Come in," a voice whispered.

  The door glided back.

  Inside, a cold funeral awaited him.

  A six-foot-long block of clear dripping ice rested like a giant February remembrance upon three sawhorses.

  "Yes," he murmured. In his hometown-hardware-store window, a magician's wife, miss i. sickle, had been stashed in an immense rectangle of ice melted to fit her calligraphy. There she slept the nights away, a Princess of Snow. Midnights, he and other boys snuck out to see her smile in her cold crystal sleep. They stood half the summer nights staring, four or five fiery-furnace boys of some fourteen years, hoping their red-hot gaze might melt the ice. ...

  The ice had never melted.

  "Wait," he whispered. "Look . . ."

  He took one more step within this dark night shop.

  Lord, yes. There, in this ice! Weren't those the outlines where, only moments ago, a woman of snow napped away in cool night dreams? Yes. The ice was hollow and curved and lovely. But... the woman was gone. Where?

  "Here," whispered the voice.

  Beyond the bright cold funeral, shadows moved in a far comer.

  "Welcome. Shut the door."

  He sensed that she stood not far away in shadows. Her flesh, if you could touch it, would be cool, still fresh from her time within the dripping tomb of snow. If he just reached out his hand—

  "What are you doing here?" her voice asked, gently.

  "Hot night. Walking. Riding. Looking for a cool wind. I think I need help."

  "You've come to the right place."

  "But this is mail I don't believe in psychiatrists. My friends hate me because I say Tinkerbell and Freud died twenty years back, with the circus. I don't believe in astrologers, numerologists, or palmistry quacks—"

  "I don't read palms. But... give me your hand."

  He put his hand out into the soft darkness.

  Her fingers tapped his. It felt like the hand of a small girl who had just rummaged an icebox. He said:

  "Your sign reads melissa toad, witch. What would a Witch be doing in New York in the summer of 1974?"

  "You ever know a city needed a Witch more than New York does this year?'?

  "Yes. We've gone mad. But, you?"

  "A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time," she said. "I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. Now you come, not knowing, to find me. Give me you other hand."

  Though her face was only a ghost of cool flesh in the shadows, he felt her eyes move over his trembling palm.

  "Oh, why did you wait so long?" she mourned. "If s almost too late."

  "Too late for what?"

  "To be saved. To take the gift that I can give."

  His heart pounded. "What can you give me?"

  "Peace," she said. "Serenity. Quietness in the midst of bedlam. I am a child of the poisonous wind that copulated with the East River on an oil-slick, garbage-infested midnight. I turn about on my
own parentage. I inoculate against those very biles that brought me to light. I am a serum born of venoms. I am the antibody of all Time. I am the Cure. You die of the City, do you not? Manhattan is your punisher. Let me be your shield."

  "How?"

  "You would be my pupil. My protection could encircle you, like an invisible pack of hounds. The subway train would never violate your ear. Smog would never blight your lung or nostril or fever your vision. I could teach your tongue, at lunch, to taste the rich fields of Eden in the merest cut-rate too-ripe frankfurter. Water, sipped from your office cooler, would be a rare wine of a fine family. Cops, when you called, would answer. Taxis, off-duty rushing nowhere, would stop if you so much as blinked one eye. Theater tickets would appear if you stepped to a theater window. Traffic signals would change, at high noon, mind you! if you dared to drive your car from Fifty-eighth down to the Square, and not one light red. Green all the way, if you go with me.

  "If you go with me, our apartment will be a shadowed jungle glade full of bird cries and love calls from the first hot sour day of June till the last hour after Labor Day when the living dead, heat-beat, go mad on stopped trains coming back from the sea. Our rooms will be filled with crystal chimes. Our kitchen an Eskimo hut in July where we might share out a provender of Popsicles made of Mumm's and Chateau Lafite Rothschild. Our larder?—fresh apricots in August or February. Fresh orange juice each morning, cold milk at breakfast, cool kisses at four in the afternoon, my mouth always the flavor of chilled peaches, my body the taste of rimed plums. The flavor begins at the elbow, as Edith Wharton said.

  "Any time you want to come home from the office the middle of a dreadful day, I will call your boss and it will be so. Soon after, you will be the boss and come home, anyway, for cold chicken, fruit wine punch, and me. Summer in the Virgin Isles. Autumns so ripe with promise you will indeed go lunatic in the right way. Winters, of course, will be the reverse. I will be your hearth. Sweet dog, lie there. I will fall upon you like snowflakes.

  "In sum, everything will be given you. I ask little in return. Only your soul."

  He stiffened and almost let go of her hand.

  "Well, isn't that what you expected me to demand?" She laughed. "But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again. Shall I tell you what I really want from you?"