by Ray Bradbury
Wolfe looked at the door. ‘I could run off.’
‘We control the machine. You wouldn’t get out of the house. I’d have you back here, by force, and inoculated. I anticipated some such trouble when the time came; there are five men waiting down below. One shout from me – you see, it’s useless. There, that’s better. Here now.’
Wolfe had moved back and now had turned to look at the old man and the window and this huge house. ‘I’m afraid I must apologize. I don’t want to die. So very much I don’t want to die.’
The old man came to him and took his hand. ‘Think of it this way: you’ve had two more months than anyone could expect from life, and you’ve turned out another book, a last book, a fine book, think of that.’
‘I want to thank you for this,’ said Thomas Wolfe, gravely. ‘I want to thank both of you. I’m ready.’ He rolled up his sleeve. ‘The inoculation.’
And while Bolton bent to his task, with his free hand Thomas Wolfe penciled two black lines across the top of the first manuscript and went on talking:
‘There’s a passage from one of my old books,’ he said, scowling to remember it. ‘… of wandering forever and the Earth … Who owns the Earth? Did we want the Earth? That we should wander on it? Did we need the Earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the Earth shall have the Earth; he shall be upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever …’
Wolfe was finished with the remembering.
‘Here’s my last book,’ he said, and on the empty yellow paper facing the manuscript he blocked out vigorous huge black letters with pressures of the pencil:
FOREVER AND THE EARTH, by Thomas Wolfe.
He picked up a ream of it and held it tightly in his hands, against his chest, for a moment. ‘I wish I could take it back with me. It’s like parting with my son.’ He gave it a slap and put it aside and immediately thereafter gave his quick hand into that of his employer, and strode across the room, Bolton after him, until he reached the door where he stood framed in the late-afternoon light, huge and magnificent. ‘Good-bye, good-bye!’ he cried.
The door slammed. Tom Wolfe was gone.
They found him wandering in the hospital corridor.
‘Mr Wolfe!’
‘What?’
‘Mr Wolfe, you gave us a scare, we thought you were gone!’
‘Gone?’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Where? Where?’ He let himself be led through the midnight corridors. ‘Where? Oh, if I told you where, you’d never believe.’
‘Here’s your bed, you shouldn’t have left it.’
Deep into the white death bed, which smelled of pale, clean mortality awaiting him, a mortality which had the hospital odor in it; the bed which, as he touched it, folded him into fumes and white starched coldness.
‘Mars, Mars,’ whispered the huge man, late at night. ‘My best, my very best, my really fine book, yet to be written, yet to be printed, in another year, three centuries away …’
‘You’re tired.’
‘Do you really think so?’ murmured Thomas Wolfe. ‘Was it a dream? Perhaps. A good dream.’
His breathing faltered. Thomas Wolfe was dead.
In the passing years, flowers are found on Tom Wolfe’s grave. And this is not unusual, for many people travel to linger there. But these flowers appear each night. They seem to drop from the sky. They are the color of an autumn moon, their blossoms are immense, and they burn and sparkle their cold, long petals in a blue and white fire. And when the dawn wind blows they drip away into a silver rain, a shower of white sparks on the air. Tom Wolfe has been dead many, many years, but these flowers never cease.…
The Handler
Mr Benedict came out of his little house. He stood on the porch, painfully shy of the sun and inferior to people. A little dog trotted by with clever eyes; so clever that Mr Benedict could not meet its gaze. A small child peered through the wrought-iron gate around the graveyard, near the church, and Mr Benedict winced at the pale, penetrant curiosity of the child.
‘You’re the funeral man,’ said the child.
Cringing within himself, Mr Benedict did not speak.
‘You own the church?’ asked the child, finally.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Benedict.
‘And the funeral place?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Benedict bewilderedly.
‘And the yards and the stones and the graves?’ wondered the child.
‘Yes,’ said Benedict, with some show of pride. And it was true. An amazing thing it was. A stroke of business luck really, that had kept him busy and humming nights over long years. First he had landed the church and the churchyard, with a few green-mossed tombs, when the Baptist people moved uptown. Then he had built himself a fine little mortuary, in Gothic style, of course, and covered it with ivy, and then added a small house for himself, way in back. It was very convenient to die for Mr Benedict. He handled you in and out of buildings with a minimum of confusion and a maximum of synthetic benediction. No need of a funeral procession! declared his large ads in the morning paper. Out of the church and into the earth, slick as a whistle. Nothing but the finest preservatives used!
The child continued to stare at him and he felt like a candle blown out in the wind. He was so inferior. Anything that lived or moved made him feel apologetic and melancholy. He was continually agreeing with people, never daring to argue or shout or say no. Whoever you might be, if Mr Benedict met you on the street he would look up your nostrils or perceive your ears or examine your hairline with his little shy, wild eyes and never look you straight in your eye, and he would hold your hand between his cold ones as if your hand was a precious gift, as he said to you:
‘You are definitely, irrevocably, believably correct.’
But, always, when you talked to him, you felt he never heard a word you said.
Now, he stood on his porch and said, ‘You are a sweet little child,’ to the little staring child, in fear that the child might not like him.
Mr Benedict walked down the steps and out the gate, without once looking at his little mortuary building. He saved that pleasure for later. It was very important that things took the right precedence. It wouldn’t pay to think with joy of the bodies awaiting his talents in the mortuary building. No, it was better to follow his usual day-after-day routine. He would let the conflict began.
He knew just where to go to get himself enraged. Half of the day he spent traveling from place to place in the little town, letting the superiority of the living neighbors overwhelm him, letting his own inferiority dissolve him, bathe him in perspiration, tie his heart and brain into trembling knots.
He spoke with Mr Rodgers, the druggist, idle, senseless morning talk. And he saved and put away all the little slurs and intonations and insults that Mr Rodgers sent his way. Mr Rodgers always had some terrible thing to say about a man in the funeral profession. ‘Ha, ha,’ laughed Mr Benedict at the latest joke upon himself, and he wanted to cry with miserable violence. ‘There you are, you cold one,’ said Mr Rodgers on this particular morning. ‘Cold one,’ said Mr Benedict, ‘ha, ha!’
Outside the drugstore, Mr Benedict met up with Mr Stuyvesant, the contractor. Mr Stuyvesant looked at his watch to estimate just how much time he dared waste on Benedict before trumping up some appointment. ‘Oh, hello, Benedict,’ shouted Stuyvesant. ‘How’s business? I bet you’re going at it tooth and nail. Did you get it? I said, I bet you’re going at it tooth and—’
‘Yes, yes,’ chuckled Mr Benedict vaguely. ‘And how is your business, Mr Stuyvesant?’ ‘Say, how do your hands get so cold, Benny, old man? That’s a cold shake you got there. You just get done embalming a frigid woman! Hey, that’s not bad. You heard what I said?’ roared Mr Stuyvesant, pounding him on the back. ‘Good, good!’ cried Mr Benedict, with a fleshless smile. ‘Good day.’
On it went, person after person. Mr Benedict, pummeled on from one to the next, was the lake into which all refuse w
as thrown. People began with little pebbles and then when Mr Benedict did not ripple or protest, they heaved a stone, a brick, a boulder. There was no bottom to Mr Benedict, no splash and no settling. The lake did not answer.
As the day passed he became more helpless and enraged with them, and he walked from building to building and had more little meetings and conversations and hated himself with a very real, masochistic pleasure. But the thing that kept him going most of all was the thought of the night pleasures to come. So he inflicted himself again and again with these stupid, pompous bullies and bowed to them and held his hands like little biscuits before his stomach, and asked no more than to be sneered at.
‘There you are, meat-chopper,’ said Mr Flinger, the delicatessen man. ‘How are all your corned beeves and pickled brains?’
Things worked to a crescendo of inferiority. With a final kettledrumming of insult and terrible self-effacement, Mr Benedict, seeking wildly the correct time from his wrist-watch, turned and ran back through the town. He was at his peak, he was all ready now, ready to work, ready to do what must be done, and enjoy himself. The awful part of the day was over, the good part was now to begin!
He ran eagerly up the steps to his mortuary.
The room waited like a fall of snow. There were white hummocks and pale delineations of things recumbent under sheets in the dimness.
The door burst open.
Mr Benedict, framed in a flow of light stood in the door, head back, one hand upraised in dramatic salute, the other hand upon the door-knob in unnatural rigidity.
He was the puppet-master come home.
He stood a long minute in the very center of his theater. In his head applause, perhaps, thundered. He did not move, but lowered his head in abject appreciation of this kind, applauding audience.
He carefully removed his coat, hung it up, got himself into a fresh white smock, buttoned the cuffs with professional crispness, then washed his hands together as he looked around at his very good friends.
It had been a fine week; there were any number of family relics lying under the sheets, and as Mr Benedict stood before them he felt himself grow and grow and tower and stretch over them.
‘Like Alice!’ he cried to himself in surprise. ‘Taller, taller. Curiouser and curiouser!’ He flexed his hands straight out and up.
He had never gotten over his initial incredulity when in the room with the dead. He was both delighted and bewildered to discover that here he was master of peoples, here he might do what he wished with men, and they must, by necessity, be polite and cooperative with him. They could not run away. And now, as on other days, he felt himself released and resilient, growing, growing like Alice. ‘Oh, so tall, oh, so tall, so very tall … until my head … bumps … the ceiling.’
He walked about among the sheeted people. He felt the same way he did when coming from a picture show late at night, very strong, very alert, very certain of himself. He felt that everyone was watching him as he left a picture show, and that he was very handsome and very correct and brave and all the things that the picture hero was, his voice oh, so resonant, persuasive and he had the right lilt to his left eyebrow and the right tap with his cane. And sometimes this movie-induced hypnosis lasted all the way home and persisted into sleep. Those were the only two times in his living he felt miraculous and fine, at the picture show, or here – in his own little theater of the cold.
He walked along the sleeping rows, noting each name on its white card.
‘Mrs Walters, Mr Smith. Miss Brown. Mr Andrews. Ah, good afternoon, one and all!’
‘How are you today, Mrs Shellmund?’ he wanted to know, lifting a sheet as if looking for a child under a bed. ‘You’re looking splendid, dear lady.’
Mrs Shellmund had never spoken to him in her life, she’d always gone by like a large, white statue with roller skates hidden under her skirts, which gave her an elegant, gliding, imperturbable rush.
‘My dear Mrs Shellmund,’ he said, pulling up a chair and regarding her through a magnifying glass. ‘Do you realize, my lady, that you have a sebaceous condition of the pores? You were quite waxen in life. Pore trouble. Oil and grease and pimples. A rich, rich diet, Mrs Shellmund, there was your trouble. Too many frosties and spongie cakes and cream candies. You always prided yourself on your brain, Mrs Shellmund, and thought I was like a dime under your toe, or a penny, really. But you kept that wonderful, priceless brain of yours afloat in parfaits and fizzes and limeades and sodas and were so very superior to me that now, Mrs Shellmund, here is what shall happen.…’
He did a neat operation on her. Cutting the scalp in a circle, he lifted it off then lifted out the brain. Then he prepared a cake-confectioner’s little sugar-bellows and squirted her empty head full of little whipped cream and crystal ribbons, stars and frollops, in pink, white and green, and on top he printed in a fine pink scroll, ‘SWEET DREAMS,’ and put the skull back on and sewed it in place and hid the marks with wax and powder. ‘So there!’ he said, finished.
He walked on to the next table.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Wren. Good afternoon. And how is the master of the racial hatreds today, Mr Wren? Pure, white, laundered Mr Wren. Clean as snow, white as linen, Mr Wren, you are. The man who hated Jews and Negroes. Minorities, Mr Wren, minorities.’ He pulled back the sheet. Mr Wren stared up with glassy, cold eyes. ‘Mr Wren, look upon a member of a minority. Myself. The minority of inferiors, those who speak not above a whisper, those afraid of talking aloud, those frightened little nonentities, mice. Do you know what I am going to do with you, Mr Wren? First, let us draw your blood from you, intolerant friend.’ The blood was drawn off. ‘Now – the injection of, you might say, embalming fluid.’
Mr Wren, snow-white, linen-pure, lay with the fluid going in him.
Mr Benedict laughed.
Mr Wren turned black; black as dirt, black as night.
The embalming fluid was – ink.
‘And hello to you, Edmund Worth!’ What a handsome body Worth had! Powerful, with muscles pinned from huge bone to huge bone, and a chest like a boulder. Women had grown speechless when he walked by, men had stared with envy and hoped they might borrow that body some night and ride home in it to the wife and give her a nice surprise. But Worth’s body had always been his own, and he had applied it to those tasks and pleasures which made him a conversational topic among all peoples who enjoyed sin.
‘And now, here you are,’ said Mr Benedict, looking down at the fine body with pleasure. For a moment he was lost in memory of his own body in his own past.
He had once tried strangling himself with one of those apparati you nail in a doorway and chuck under your jawbone and pull yourself up on, hoping to add an inch to his ridiculously short frame. To counteract his deadly pale skin he had lain in the sun, but he boiled and his skin fell off in pink leaflets, leaving only more pink, moist, sensitive skin. And what could he do about the eyes from which his mind peered? – those closest, glassy little eyes and the tiny wounded mouth. You can repaint houses, burn trash, move from the slum, shoot your mother, buy new clothes, get a car, make money, change all those outer environmentals for something new. But what’s the brain to do when caught like cheese in the throat of a mouse? His own environment thus betrayed him; his own skin, body, color, voice gave him no chance to extend out into that vast, bright world where people tickled ladies’ chins and kissed their mouths and shook hands with friends and traded aromatic cigars.
Thinking in this fashion, Mr Benedict stood over the magnificent body of Edmund Worth.
He severed Worth’s head, put it in a coffin on a small, satin pillow, facing up, then he placed one hundred and ninety pounds of bricks in the coffin and arranged some pillows inside a black coat and a white shirt and tie to look like the upper body, and covered the whole with a blanket of blue velvet, up to the chin. It was a fine illusion.
The body itself he placed in a refrigerating vault.
‘When I die, I shall leave specific orders, Mr Worth, that my head be se
vered and buried, joined to your body. By that time I will have acquired an assistant willing to perform such a rascally act, for money. If one cannot have a body worthy of love in life, one can at least gain such a body in death. Thank you.’
He slammed the lid on Edmund Worth.
Since it was a growing and popular habit in the town for people to be buried with the coffin lids closed over them during the service, this gave Mr Benedict great opportunities to vent his repressions on his hapless guests. Some he locked in their boxes upside down, some face down, or making obscene gestures. He had the most utterly wondrous fun with a group of old maiden ladies who were mashed in an auto on their way to an afternoon tea. They were famous gossips, always with heads together over some choice bit. What the onlookers at the triple funeral did not know (all three casket lids were shut) was that, as in life, all three were crowded into one casket, heads together in eternal, cold, petrified gossip. The other two caskets were filled with pebbles and shells and ravels of gingham. It was a nice service. Everybody cried. ‘Those three inseparables, at last separated.’ Everybody sobbed.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Benedict, having to hide his face in his grief.
Not lacking for a sense of justice, Mr Benedict buried one rich man stark naked. A poor man he buried wound in gold cloth, with five-dollar gold pieces for buttons and twenty-dollar coins on each eyelid. A lawyer he did not bury at all, but burned him in the incinerator – his coffin contained nothing but a pole-cat, trapped in the woods one Sunday.
An old maid, at her service one afternoon, was the victim of a terrible device. Under the silken comforter, parts of an old man had been buried with her. There she lay, insulted by cold organs, being made cold love to by hidden hands, hidden and planted other things. The shock showed on her face, somewhat.
So Mr Benedict moved from body to body in his mortuary that afternoon, talking to all the sheeted figures, telling them his every secret. The final body for the day was the body of one Merriwell Blythe, an ancient man afflicted with spells and comas. Mr Blythe had been brought in for dead several times, but each time had revived in time to prevent premature burial.
