by Ray Bradbury
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 The Four Provinces.
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.
THE PUMPERNICKEL
MR. AND MRS. WELLES WALKED AWAY from the movie theater late at night and went into the quiet little store, a combination restaurant and delicatessen. They settled in a booth, and Mrs. Welles said, “Baked ham on pumpernickel.” Mr. Welles glanced toward the counter, and there lay a loaf of pumpernickel.
“Why,” he murmured, “pumpernickel . . . Druce’s Lake . . .”
The night, the late hour, the empty restaurant—by now the pattern was familiar. Anything could set him off on a tide of reminiscence. The scent of autumn leaves, or midnight winds blowing, could stir him from himself, and memories would pour around him. Now in the unreal hour after the theater, in this lonely store, he saw a loaf of pumpernickel bread and, as on a thousand other nights, he found himself moved into the past.
“Druce’s Lake,” he said again.
“What?” His wife glanced up.
“Something I’d almost forgotten,” said Mr. Welles. “In 1910, when I was twenty, I nailed a loaf of pumpernickel to the top of my bureau mirror. . . .”
In the hard, shiny crust of the bread, the boys at Druce’s Lake had cut their names: Tom, Nick, Bill, Alec, Paul, Jack. The finest picnic in history! Their faces tanned as they rattled down the dusty roads. Those were the days when roads were really dusty; a fine brown talcum floured up after your car. And the lake was always twice as good to reach as it would be later in life when you arrived immaculate, clean, and unrumpled.
“That was the last time the old gang got together,” Mr. Welles said.
After that, college, work, and marriage separated you. Suddenly you found yourself with some other group. And you never felt as comfortable or as much at ease again in all your life.
“I wonder,” said Mr. Welles. “I like to think maybe we all knew, somehow, that this picnic might be the last we’d have. You first get that empty feeling the day after high-school graduation. Then, when a little time passes and no one vanishes immediately, you relax. But after a year you realize the old world is changing. And you want to do some one last thing before you lose one another. While you’re all still friends, home from college for the summer, this side of marriage, you’ve got to have something like a last ride and a swim in the cool lake.”
Mr. Welles remembered that rare summer morning, he and Tom lying under his father’s Ford, reaching up their hands to adjust this or that, talking about machines and women and the future. While they worked, the day got warm. At last Tom said, “Why don’t we drive out to Druce’s Lake?”
As simple as that.
Yet, forty years later, you remember every detail of picking up the other fellows, everyone yelling under the green trees.
“Hey!” Alec beating everyone’s head with the pumpernickel and laughing. “This is for extra sandwiches, later.”
Nick had made the sandwiches that were already in the hamper—the garlic kind they would eat less of as the years passed and the girls moved in.
Then, squeezing three in the front, three in the rear, with their arms across one another’s shoulders, they drove through the boiling, dusty countryside, with a cake of ice in a tin washtub to cool the beer they’d buy.
What was the special quality of that day that it should focus like a stereoscopic image, fresh and clear, forty years later? Perhaps each of them had had an experience like his own. A few days before the picnic, he had found a photograph of his father twenty-five years younger, standing with a group of friends at college. The photograph had disturbed him, made him aware as he had not been before of the passing of time, the swift flow of the years away from youth. A picture taken of him as he was now would, in twenty-five years, look as strange to his own children as his father’s picture did to him—unbelievably young, a stranger out of a strange, never-returning time.
Was that how the final picnic had come about—with each of them knowing that in a few short years they would be crossing streets to avoid one another, or, if they met, saying, “We’ve got to have lunch sometime!” but never doing it? Whatever the reason, Mr. Welles could still hear the splashes as they’d plunged off the pier under a yellow sun. And then the beer and sandwiches underneath the shady trees.
We never ate that pumpernickel, Mr. Welles thought. Funny, if we’d been a bit hungrier, we’d have cut it up, and I wouldn’t have been reminded of it by that loaf there on the counter.
Lying under the trees in a golden peace that came from beer and sun and male companionship, they promised that in ten years they would meet at the courthouse on New Year’s Day, 1920, to see what they had done with their lives. Talking their rough easy talk, they carved their names in the pumpernickel.
“Driving home,” Mr. Welles said, “we sang ‘Moonlight Bay.’”
He remembered motoring along in the hot, dry night with their swimsuits damp on the jolting floorboards. It was a ride of many detours taken just for the hell of it, which was the best reason in the world.
“Good night.” “So long.” “Good night.”
Then Welles was driving alone, at midnight, home to bed.
He nailed the pumpernickel to his bureau the next day.
“I almost cried when, two years later, my mother threw it in the incinerator while I was off at college.”
“What happened in 1920?” asked his wife. “On New Year’s Day?”
“Oh,” said Mr. Welles. “I was walking by the courthouse, by accident, at noon. It was snowing. I heard the clock strike. Lord, I thought, we were supposed to meet here today! I waited five minutes. Not right in front of the courthouse, no. I waited across the street.” He paused. “Nobody showed up.”
He got up from the table and paid the bill. “And I’ll take that loaf of unsliced pumpernickel there,” he said.
When he and his wife were walking home, he said, “I’ve got a crazy idea. I often wondered what happened to everyone.”
“Nick’s still in town with his café.”
“But what about the others?” Mr. Welles’s face was getting pink and he was smiling and waving his hands. “They moved away. I think Tom’s in Cincinnati.” He looked quickly at his wife. “Just for the heck of it, I’ll send him this pumpernickel!”
“Oh, but—”
“Sure!” He laughed, walking faster, slapping the bread with the palm of his hand. “Have him carve his name on it and mail it on to the others if he knows their addresses. And finally back to me, with all their names on it!”
“But,” she said, taking his arm, “it’ll only make you unhappy. You’ve done things like this so many times before and . . .”
He wasn’t listening. Why do I never get these ideas by day? he thought. Why do I always get them after the sun goes down?
In the morning, first thing, he thought, I’ll mail this pumpernickel off, by God, to Tom and the others. And when it comes back I’ll have the loaf just as it was when it got thrown out and burned! Why not?
“Let’s see,” he said, as his wife opened the screen door and let him walk into the stuffy-smelling house to be greeted by silence and warm emptiness. “Let’s see. We also sang ‘Row Row Row Your Boat,’ didn’t we?”
In the morning, he came down the hall stairs and paused a moment in the strong full sunlight, his face shaved, his teeth freshly brushed. Sunlight brightened every room. He looked in at the breakfast table.
He sat down at the table in the warm sunlight, and reached for the newspaper.
She picked up a slice of the newly cut bread, and kissed him on the cheek. He patted her arm.
“One or two slices of toast, dear?” she asked gently.
“Two, I think,” he replied.
LAST RITES
HARRISON COOPER WAS NOT THAT OLD, only thirty-nine, touching at the warm rim of forty rather than the cold rim of thirty, which makes a great difference in temperature and attitude. He was a genius verging on the brilliant, unmarried, unengaged, with no children that he could honestly claim, so having nothing much else to do, woke one morning in the summer of 1999, weeping.
“Why!?”
Out of bed, he faced his mirror to watch the tears, examine his sadness, trace the woe. Like a child, curious after emotion, he charted his own map, found no capital city of despair, but only a vast and empty expanse of sorrow, and went to shave.
Which didn’t help, for Harrison Cooper had stumbled on some secret supply of melancholy that, even as he shaved, spilled in rivulets down his soaped cheeks.
“Great God,” he cried. “I’m at a funeral, but who’s dead?!”
He ate his breakfast toast somewhat soggier than usual and plunged off to his laboratory to see if gazing at his Time Traveler would solve the mystery of eyes that shed rain while the rest of him stood fair.
Time Traveler? Ah, yes.
For Harrison Cooper had spent the better part of his third decade wiring circuitries of impossible pasts and as yet untouchable futures. Most men philosophize in their as-beautiful-as-women cars. Harrison Cooper chose to dream and knock together from pure air and electric thunderclaps what he called his Möbius Machine.
He had told his friends, with wine-colored nonchalance, that he was taking a future strip and a past strip, giving them a now half twist, so they looped on a single plane. Like those figure-eight ribbons, cut and pasted by that dear mathematician A. F. Möbius in the nineteenth century.
“Ah, yes, Möbius,” friends murmured.
What they really meant was, “Ah, no. Good night.”
Harrison Cooper was not a mad scientist, but he was irretrievably boring. Knowing this, he had retreated to finish the Möbius Machine. Now, this strange morning, with cold rain streaming from his eyes, he stood staring at the damned contraption, bewildered that he was not dancing about with Creation’s joy.
He was interrupted by the ringing of the laboratory doorbell and opened the door to find one of those rare people, a real Western Union delivery boy on a real bike. He signed for the telegram and was about to shut the door when he saw the lad staring fixedly at the Möbius Machine.
“What,” exclaimed the boy, eyes wide, “is that?”
Harrison Cooper stood aside and let the boy wander in a great circle around his Machine, his eyes dancing up, over, and around the immense circling figure eight of shining copper, brass, and silver.
“Sure!” cried the boy at last, beaming. “A Time Machine!”
“Bull’s-eye!”
“When do you leave?” said the boy. “Where will you go to meet which person where? Alexander? Caesar? Napoleon! Hitler?!”
“No, no!”
The boy exploded his list. “Lincoln—”
“More like it.”
“General Grant! Roosevelt! Benjamin Franklin?”
“Franklin, yes!”
“Aren’t you lucky?”
“Am I?” Stunned, Harrison Cooper found himself nodding. “Yes, by God, and suddenly—”
Suddenly he knew why he had wept at dawn.
He grabbed the young lad’s hand. “Much thanks. You’re a catalyst—”
“Cat—?”
“A Rorschach test—making me draw my own list—now gently, swiftly—out! No offense.”
The door slammed. He ran for his library phone, punched numbers, waited, scanning the thousand books on the shelves.
“Yes, yes,” he murmured, his eyes flicking over the gorgeous sun-bright titles. “Some of you. Two, three, maybe four. Hello! Sam? Samuel! Can you get here in five minutes, make it three? Dire emergency. Come!”
He slammed the phone, swiveled to reach out and touch.
“Shakespeare,” he murmured. “Willy-William, will it be—you?”
The laboratory door opened and Sam/Samuel stuck his head in and froze.
For there, seated in the midst of his great Möbius figure eight, leather jacket and boots shined, picnic lunch packed, was Harrison Cooper, arms flexed, elbows out, fingers alert to the computer controls.
“Where’s your Lindbergh cap and goggles?” asked Samuel.
Harrison Cooper dug them out, put them on, smirking.
“Raise the Titanic, then sink it!” Samuel strode to the lovely machine to confront its rather outré occupant. “Well, Cooper, what?” he cried.
“I woke this morning in tears.”
“Sure. I read the phone book aloud last night. That did it!”
“No. You read me these!”
Cooper handed the books over.
“Sure! We gabbed till three, drunk as owls on English Lit!”
“To give me tears for answers!”
“To what?”
“To their loss. To the fact that they died unknown, unrecognized; to the grim fact that some were only truly recognized, republished, raved over from 1920 on!”
“Cut the cackle and move the buns,” said Samuel. “Did you call to sermonize or ask advice?”
Harrison Cooper leaped from his machine and elbowed Samuel into the library.
“You must map my trip for me!”
“Trip? Trip!”
“I go a-journeying, far-traveling, the Grand Literary Tour. A Salvation Army of one!”
“To save lives?”
“No, souls! What good is life if the soul’s dead? Sit! Tell me all the authors we raved on by night to weep me at dawn. Here’s brandy. Drink! Remember?”
“I do!”
“List them, then! The New England Melancholic first. Sad, recluse from land, should have drowned at sea, a lost soul of sixty! Now, what other sad geniuses did we maunder over—”
“God!” Samuel cried. “You’re going to tour them? Oh, Harrison, Harry, I love you!”
“Shut up! Remember how you write jokes? Laugh and think backward! So let us cry and leap up our tear ducts to the source. Weep for Whales to find minnows!”
“Last night I think I quoted—”
“Yes?”
“And then we spoke—”
“Go on—”
“Well.”
Samuel gulped his brandy. Fire burned his eyes.
“Write this down!”
They wrote and ran.
“What will you do when you get there, Librarian Doctor?”
Harrison Cooper, seated back in the shadow of the great hovering Möbius ribbon, laughed and nodded. “Yes! Harrison Cooper, L.M.D. Literary Meadow Doctor. Curer of fine old lions off their feed, in dire need of tender love, small applause, the wine of words, all in my heart, all on my tongue. Say ‘Ah!’ So long. Good-bye!”
“God bless!”
He slammed a lever, whirled a knob, and the machine, in a spiral of metal, a whisk of butterfly ribbon, very simply—vanished.
A moment later, the Möbius Machine gave a twist of its atoms and—returned.
“Voilà!” cried Harrison Cooper, pink-faced and wild-eyed. “It’s done!”
“So soon?” exclaimed his friend Samuel.
“A minute here, but hours there!”
“Did you succeed?”
“Look! Proof positive.”
For tears dripped off his chin.
“What happened? What?!”
“This, and this . . .and... this!”
A gyroscope spun, a celebratory ribbon spiraled endlessly on itself, and the ghost of a massive window curtain haunted the air, exhaled, and then ceased.
He touched the books and listened to the air in the dim hallway where dinnertime voices drifted up from below and a door stood wide near his elbow, from which the faint scent of illness came and went, arrived and departed, with the stilted breathing of some patient within the room. Plates and silverware sounded from the world of evening and quiet good health downstairs. The hall and the sickroom were for a time deserted. In a moment, someone might ascend with a tray for the half-sleeping man in the intemperate room.
Harrison Cooper rose with stealth, checking the stairwell, and then, carrying a sweet burden of books, moved into the room, where candles lit both sides of a bed on which the dying man lay supine, arms straight at his sides, head weighting the pillow, eyes grimaced shut, mouth set as if daring the ceiling, mortality itself, to sink and extinguish him.
At the first touch of the books, now on one side, now on the other, of his bed, the old man’s eyelids fluttered, his dry lips cracked; the air whistled from his nostrils:
“Who’s there?” he whispered. “What time is it?”
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can,” replied the traveler at the foot of the bed, quietly.
“What, what?” the old man in the bed whispered swiftly.
“It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation,” quoted the visitor, who now moved to place a book under each of the dying man’s hands where his tremoring fingers could scratch, pull away, then touch, Braille-like, again.
One by one, the stranger held up book after book, to show the covers, then a page, and yet another title page where printed dates of this novel surfed up, adrift, but to stay forever on some far future shore.
