Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07

by Twice Twenty-two (v2. 1)

  It did not change back. It was still something else.

  The wind blew outside. Leaves fell against the cool window.

  At four o'clock his other hand changed. It seemed almost to become a fever. It pulsed and shifted, cell by cell. It beat like a warm heart. The fingernails turned blue and then red. It took about an hour for it to change and when it was finished, it looked just like any ordinary hand. But it was not ordinary. It no longer was him any more. He lay in a fascinated horror and then fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Mother brought the soup up at six. He wouldn't touch it. "I haven't any hands," he said, eyes shut.

  "Your hands are perfectly good," said mother.

  "No," he wailed. "My hands are gone. I feel like I have stumps. Oh, Mama, Mama, hold me, hold me, I'm scared!"

  She had to feed him herself.

  "Mama," he said, "get the doctor, please, again. I'm so sick."

  "The doctor'll be here tonight at eight," she said, and went out.

  At seven, with night dark and close around the house, Charles was sitting up in bed when he felt the thing happening to first one leg and then the other. "Mama! Come quick!" he screamed.

  But when mama came the thing was no longer happening.

  When she went downstairs, he simply lay without fighting as his legs beat and beat, grew warm, red-hot, and the room filled with the warmth of his feverish change. The glow crept up from his toes to his ankles and then to his knees.

  "May I come in?" The doctor smiled in the doorway.

  "Doctor!" cried Charles. "Hurry, take off my blankets!"

  The doctor lifted the blankets tolerantly. "There you are. Whole and healthy. Sweating, though. A little fever. I told you not to move around, bad boy." He pinched the moist pink cheek. "Did the pills help? Did your hand change back?"

  "No, no, now it's my other hand and my legs!"

  "Well, well, I'll have to give you three more pills, one for each limb, eh, my little peach?" laughed the doctor.

  "Will they help me? Please, please. What've I got?"

  "A mild case of scarlet fever, complicated by a slight cold."

  "Is it a germ that lives and has more little germs in me?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you sure it's scarlet fever? You haven't taken any tests!"

  "I guess I know a certain fever when I see one," said the doctor, checking the boy's pulse with cool authority.

  Charles lay there, not speaking until the doctor was crisply packing his black kit. Then in the silent room, the boy's voice made a small, weak pattern, his eyes alight with remembrance. "I read a book once. About petrified trees, wood turning to stone. About how trees fell and rotted and minerals got in and built up and they look just like trees, but they're not, they're stone." He stopped. In the quiet warm room his breathing sounded.

  "Well?" asked the doctor.

  "I've been thinking," said Charles after a time. "Do germs ever get big? I mean, in biology class they told us about one-celled animals, amoebas and things, and how millions of years ago they got together until there was a bunch and they made the first body. And more and more cells got together and got bigger and then finally maybe there was a fish and finally here we are, and all we are is a bunch of cells that decided to get together, to help each other out. Isn't that right?" Charles wet his feverish Ups.

  "What's all this about?" the doctor bent over him.

  "I've got to tell you this. Doctor, oh, I've got to!" he cried. 'What would happen, oh just pretend, please pretend, that just like in the old days, a lot of microbes got together and wanted to make a bunch, and reproduced and made more — "

  His white hands were on his chest now, crawling toward his throat.

  "And they decided to take over a person!" cried Charles.

  "Take over a person?"

  "Yes, become a person. Me, my hands, my feet! What if a disease somehow knew how to kill a person and yet live after him?"

  He screamed.

  The hands were on his neck.

  The doctor moved forward, shouting.

  At nine o'clock the doctor was escorted out to his car by the mother and father, who handed him his bag. They conversed in the cool night wind for a few minutes. "Just be sure his hands are kept strapped to his legs," said the doctor. "I don't want him hurting himself."

  "Will he be all right, Doctor?" The mother held to his arm a moment.

  He patted her shoulder. "Haven't I been your family physician for thirty years? It's the fever. He imagines things."

  "But those bruises on his throat, he almost choked himself." "Just you keep him strapped; he'll be all right in the morning." The car moved off down the dark September road.

  At three in the morning, Charles was still awake in his small black room. The bed was damp under his head and his back. He was very warm. Now he no longer had any arms or legs, and his body was beginning to change. He did not move on the bed, but looked at the vast blank ceiling space with insane concentration. For a while he had screamed and thrashed, but now he was weak and hoarse from it, and his mother had gotten up a number of times to soothe his brow with a wet towel. Now he was silent, his hands strapped to his legs.

  He felt the walls of his body change, the organs shift, the lungs catch fire like burning bellows of pink alcohol. The room was lighted up as with the flickerings of a hearth.

  Now he had no body. It was all gone. It was under him, but it was filled with a vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly lopped off his head, and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow while the body, below, still alive, belonged to somebody else. The disease had eaten his body and from the eating had reproduced itself in feverish duplicate. There were the little hand hairs and the fingernails and the scars and the toenails and the tiny mole on his right hip, all done again in perfect fashion.

  I am dead, he thought. I've been killed, and yet I live. My body is dead, it is all disease and nobody will know. I will walk around and it will not be me, it will be something else. It will be something all bad, all evil, so big and so evil it's hard to understand or think about. Something that will buy shoes and drink water and get married some day maybe and do more evil in the world than has ever been done.

  Now the warmth was stealing up his neck, into his cheeks, like a hot wine. His lips burned, his eyelids, like leaves, caught fire. His nostrils breathed out blue flame, faintly, faintly.

  This will be all, he thought. It'll take my head and my brain and fix each eye and every tooth and all the marks in my brain, and every hair and every wrinkle in my ears, and there'll be nothing left of me.

  He felt his brain fill with a boiling mercury. He felt his left eye clench in upon itself and, like a snail, withdraw, shift. He was blind in his left eye. It no longer belonged to him. It was enemy territory. His tongue was gone, cut out. His left cheek was numbed, lost. His left ear stopped hearing. It belonged to someone else now. This thing that was being born, this mineral thing replacing the wooden log, this disease replacing healthy animal cell.

  He tried to scream and he was able to scream loud and high and sharply in the room, just as his brain flooded down, his right eye and right ear were cut out, he was blind and deaf, all fire, all terror, all panic, all death.

  His scream stopped before his mother ran through the door to his side.

  It was a good, clear morning, with a brisk wind that helped carry the doctor up the path before the house. In the window above, the boy stood, fully dressed. He did not wave when the doctor waved and called, "What's this? Up? My God!"

  The doctor almost ran upstairs. He came gasping into the bedroom.

  "What are you doing out of bed?" he demanded of the boy. He tapped his thin chest, took his pulse and temperature. "Absolutely amazing! Normal. Normal, by God!"

  "I shall never be sick again in my life," declared the boy, quietly, standing there, looking out the wide window. "Never."

  "I hope not. Why, you're looking fine, Charles."

  "Doctor
?"

  "Yes, Charles?"

  "Can I go to school now?" asked Charles.

  "Tomorrow will be time enough. You sound positively eager."

  "I am. I like school. All the kids. I want to play with them and wrestle with them, and spit on them and play with the girls' pigtails and shake the teacher's hand, and rub my hands on all the cloaks in the cloakroom, and I want to grow up and travel and shake hands with people all over the world, and be married and have lots of children, and go to libraries and handle books and—all of that I want to!" said the boy, looking off into the September morning. "What's the name you called me?"

  "What?" The doctor puzzled. "I called you nothing but Charles."

  "It's better than no name at all, I guess." The boy shrugged.

  "I'm glad you want to go back to school,” said the doctor.

  "I really anticipate it," smiled the boy. "Thank you for your help, Doctor. Shake hands."

  "Glad to."

  They shook hands gravely, and the clear wind blew through the open window. They shook hands for almost a minute, the boy smiling up at the old man and thanking him.

  Then, laughing, the boy raced the doctor downstairs and out to his car. His mother and father followed for the happy farewell.

  "Fit as a fiddle!" said the doctor. "Incredible!"

  "And strong," said the father. "He got out of his straps himself during the night. Didn't you, Charles?"

  "Did I?" said the boy.

  "You did! How?"

  "Oh," the boy said, "that was a long time ago."

  "A long time ago!"

  They all laughed, and while they were laughing, the quiet boy moved his bare foot on the sidewalk and merely touched, brushed against a number of red ants that were scurrying about on the sidewalk. Secretly, his eyes shining, while his parents chatted with the old man, he saw the ants hesitate, quiver, and lie still on the cement. He sensed they were cold now.

  "Good-by!"

  The doctor drove away, waving.

  The boy walked ahead of his parents. As he walked he looked away toward the town and began to hum "School Days" under his breath.

  "It's good to have him well again," said the father.

  "Listen to him. He's so looking forward to school!"

  The boy turned quietly. He gave each of his parents a crushing hug. He kissed them both several times.

  Then without a word he bounded up the steps into the house.

  In the parlor, before the others entered, he quickly opened the bird cage, thrust his hand in, and petted the yellow canary, once.

  Then he shut the cage door, stood back, and waited.

  7 THE MARRIAGE MENDER

  In the sun the headboard was like a fountain, tossing up plumes of clear light. It was carved with lions and gargoyles and bearded goats. It was an awe-inspiring object even at midnight, as Antonio sat on the bed and unlaced his shoes and put his large calloused hand out to touch its shimmering harp. Then he rolled over into this fabulous machine for dreaming, and he lay breathing heavily, his eyes beginning to close.

  "Every night," his wife's voice said, "we sleep in the mouth of a calliope."

  Her complaint shocked him. He lay a long while before daring to reach up his hard-tipped fingers to stroke the cold metal of the intricate headboard, the threads of this lyre that had sung many wild and beautiful songs down the years.

  "This is no calliope," he said.

  "It cries like one," Maria said. "A billion people on this world tonight have beds. Why, I ask the saints, not us?"

  "This," said Antonio gently, "is a bed." He plucked a little tune on the imitation brass harp behind his head. To his ears it was "Santa Lucia."

  "This bed has humps like a herd of camels was under it."

  "Now, Mama," Antonio said. He called her Mama when she was mad, though they had no children. "You were never this way," he went on, "until five months ago when Mrs. Brancozzi downstairs bought her new bed."

  Maria said wistfully, "Mrs. Brancozzi's bed. It's like snow. It's all flat and white and smooth."

  "I don't want any damn snow, all flat and white and smooth! These springs-feel them!" he cried angrily. "They know me. They recognize that this hour of night I lie thus, at two o'clock, so! Three o'clock this way, four o'clock that. We are like a tumbling act, we've worked together for years and know all the holds and falls."

  Maria sighed, and said, "Sometimes I dream we're in the taffy machine at Bartole's candy store."

  "This bed," he announced to the darkness, "served our family before Garibaldi! From this wellspring alone came precincts of honest voters, a squad of clean-saluting Army men, two confectioners, a barber, four second leads for El Trovatore and Rigoletto, and two geniuses so complex they never could decide what to do in their lifetime! Not to forget enough beautiful women to provide ballrooms with their finest decoration. A cornucopia of plenty, this bed! A veritable harvesting machine!"

  "We have been married two years," she said with dreadful control over her voice. "Where are our second leads for Rigoletto, our geniuses, our ballroom decorations?"

  "Patience, Mama."

  "Don't call me Mama! While this bed is busy favoring you all night, never once has it done for me. Not even so much as a baby girl!

  He sat up. "You've let these women in this tenement ruin you with their dollar-down, dollar-a-week talk. Has Mrs. Brancozzi children? Her and her new bed that she's had for five months?"

  "No! But soon! Mrs. Brancozzi says . . . and her bed, so beautiful."

  He slammed himself down and yanked the covers over him. The bed screamed Hke all the Furies rushing through the night sky, fading away toward the dawn.

  The moon changed the shape of the window pattern on the floor. Antonio awoke. Maria was not beside him.

  He got up and went to peer through the half-open door of the bathroom. His wife stood at the mirror looking at her tired face.

  "I don't feel well," she said.

  "We argued." He put out his hand to pat her, "I'm sorry. We'll think it over. About the bed, I mean. We'll see how the money goes. And if you're not well tomorrow, see the doctor, eh? Now, come back to bed."

  At noon the next day, Antonio walked from the lumberyard to a window where stood fine new beds with their covers invitingly turned back.

  "I," he whispered to himself, "am a beast."

  He checked his watch. Maria, at this time, would be going to the doctor's. She had been like cold milk this morning; he had told her to go. He walked on to the candy-store window and watched the taffy machine folding and threading and pulling. Does taffy scream? he wondered. Perhaps, but so high we cannot hear it. He laughed. Then, in the stretched taffy, he saw Maria. Frowning, he turned and walked back to the furniture store. No. Yes. No. Yes! He pressed his nose to the icy window. Bed, he thought, you in there, new bed, do you know me? Will you be kind to my back, nights?

  He took out his wallet slowly, and peered at the money. He sighed, gazed for a long time at that flat marbletop, that unfamiliar enemy, that new bed. Then, shoulders sagging, he walked into the store, his money held loosely in his hand.

  "Maria!" He ran up the steps two at a time. It was nine o'clock at night and he had managed to beg off in the middle of his overtime at the lumberyard to rush home. He rushed through the open doorway, smiling.

  The apartment was empty.

  "Ah," he said disappointedly. He laid the receipt for the new bed on top of the bureau where Maria might see it when she entered. On those few evenings when he worked late she visited with any one of several neighbors downstairs.

  I’ll go find her, he thought, and stopped. No. I want to tell her alone. I'll wait. He sat on the bed. "Old bed," he said, "good-by to you. I am very sorry." He patted the brass Hons nervously. He paced the floor. Come on, Maria. He imagined her smile.

  He listened for her quick running on the stair, but he heard only a slow, measured tread. He thought: That's not my Maria, slow like that, no.

  The doorknob turned.

&n
bsp; "Maria!"

  "You're early!" She smiled happily at him. Did she guess? Was it written on his face? "I've been downstairs," she cried, "telling everyone!"

  "Telling everyone?"

  "The doctor! I saw the doctor!"

  "The doctor?" He looked bewildered. "And?"

  "And, Papa, and —"

  "Do you mean—Papa?"

  "Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa!"

  "Oh," he said, gently, "you walked so carefully on the stairs."

  He took hold of her, but not too tight, and he kissed her cheeks, and he shut his eyes, and he yelled. Then he had to wake a few neighbors and tell them, shake them, tell them again. There had to be a little wine and a careful waltz around, an embracing, a trembling, a kissing of brow, eyelids, nose, lips, temples, ears, hair, chin—and then it was past midnight.

  "A miracle," he sighed.

  They were alone in their room again, the air warm from the people who had been here a minute before, laughing, talking. But now they were alone again.

  Turning out the light, he saw the receipt on the bureau.

  Stunned, he tried to decide in what subtle and delicious way to break this additional news to her.

  Maria sat upon her side of the bed in the dark, hypnotized with wonder. She moved her hands as if her body was a strange doll, taken apart, and now to be put back together again, limb by limb, her motions as slow as if she lived beneath a warm sea at midnight. Now, at last, careful not to break herself, she lay back upon the pillow.

  "Maria, I have something to tell you."

  "Yes?" she said faintly,

  "Now that you are as you are." He squeezed her hand. "You deserve the comfort, the rest, the beauty of a new bed."

  She did not cry out happily or turn to him or seize him. Her silence was a thinking silence.

  He was forced to continue. "This bed is nothing but a pipe organ, a calliope."

  "It is a bed," she said.

  "A herd of camels sleep under it."

  "No," she said quietly, "from it will come precincts of honest voters, captains enough for three armies, two ballerinas, a famous lawyer, a very tall policeman, and seven basso profundos, altos, and sopranos."