(I hate them all.)
-He hates them all-
A moaning in the earth, a trembling, a drumming as of a billion billion hoofs. The tower sways queasily. A swelling, ragged shriek of sound.
The Wave comes.
Over the horizon, climbing, growing larger, stretching higher, filling up the sky, cutting off the sunlight, water in a green wall like glass hundreds of feet high, topped with fangs of foam, the Wave beginning to topple in like the closing fist of God. Its shadow over everything, night at noon as it sweeps in, closes down. The Towers etched like thin lines against its bulk. It is curling overhead is the sky now there is no sky now but the underbelly of the Wave coming down. I have time to see the Towers snapped like matchsticks broken stumps of fangs before it hits with the scream of grating steel and blackness clogs my throat to
(I have destroyed the world.)
-The shadow of the mesh on his face-
Sometimes you can see other people in the other tower apartments, looking out from their own balconies. I wonder how they destroy the world.
-He turns away, dimly remembering a business appointment. Outside the lazy hooting of rush-hour traffic. There is a cartoon carnival on Channel Five-
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* * * *
HARLAN ELLISON
ONE LIFE, FURNISHED IN EARLY POVERTY
And so it was—strangely, strangely—that I found myself standing in the backyard of the house I had lived in when I was seven years old. At thirteen minutes till midnight on no special magical winter’s night, in a town that had held me only till I was physically able to run away. In Ohio, in winter, near midnight—certain I could go back.
Not truly knowing why I even wanted to go back. But certain that I could. Without magic, without science, without alchemy, without supernatural assistance; just go back. Because I had to, I needed to ... go back.
Back; thirty-five years and more. To find myself at the age of seven, before any of it had begun; before any of the directions had been taken; to find out what turning point in my life it had been that had wrenched me from the course all little boys took to adulthood and set me on the road of loneliness and success that ended here, back where I’d begun, in a backyard at now-twelve minutes to midnight.
At forty-two I had come to the point in my life I had struggled toward since I was a child: a place of security, importance, recognition. The only one from this town who had made it. The ones who had had the most promise in school were now milkmen, used-car salesmen, married to fat, stupid dead women who had themselves been girls of exceeding promise in high school. They had been trapped in this little Ohio town, never to break free. To die there, unknown. I had broken free, had done all the wonderful things I’d said I would do.
Why should it all depress me now?
Perhaps it was because Christmas was nearing and I was alone, with bad marriages and lost friendships behind me.
I walked out of the studio, away from the wet-ink-new fifty-thousand-dollar contract, got in my car and drove to International Airport. It was a straight line made up of inflight meals and jet airliners and rental cars and hastily purchased winter clothing. A straight line to a backyard I had not seen in over thirty years.
I had to find the dragoon to go back.
Crossing the rime-frosted grass that crackled like cellophane, I walked under the shadow of the lightning-blasted pear tree. I had climbed in that tree endlessly when I was seven years old. In summer, its branches hung far over and scraped the roof of the garage. I could shinny out across the limb and drop onto the garage roof. I had once pushed Johnny Mummy off that garage roof...not out of meanness, but simply because I had jumped from it many times and I could not understand anyone’s not finding it a wonderful thing to do. He had sprained his ankle, and his father, a fireman, had come looking for me. I’d hidden on the garage roof.
I walked around the side of the garage, and there was the barely visible path. To one side of the path I had always buried my toy soldiers. For no other reason than to bury them, know I had a secret place, and later dig them up again, as if finding treasure.
(It came to me that even now, as an adult, I did the same thing. Dining in a Japanese restaurant, I would hide small pieces of pakkai or pineapple or terriyaki in my rice bowl and pretend to be delighted when, later in the meal, my chopsticks encountered the tiny treasures down in among the rice grains.)
I knew the spot, of course. I got down on my hands and knees and began digging with the silver penknife on my watch chain. It had been my father’s penknife—almost the only thing he had left when he died.
The ground was hard, but I dug with enthusiasm, and the moon gave me more than enough light. Down and down I dug, knowing eventually I would come to the dragoon.
He was there. The bright paint rusted off his body, the saber corroded and reduced to a stub. Lying there in the grave I had dug for him thirty-five years before. I scooped the little metal soldier out of the ground and cleaned him off as best I could with my paisley dress handkerchief. He was faceless now, and as sad as I felt.
I hunkered there, under the moon, and waited for midnight, only a minute away, knowing it was all going to come right for me. After so terribly long.
The house behind me was silent and dark. I had no idea who lived there now. It would have been unpleasant if the strangers who now lived here had been unable to sleep and, rising to get a glass of water, had idly looked into the backyard. Their backyard. I had played here and built a world for myself here, from dreams and loneliness. Using talismans of comic books and radio programs and matinee movies and potent charms like the sad little dragoon in my hand.
My wristwatch said midnight, one hand laid straight on the other.
The moon faded. Slowly, it went gray and shadowy, till the glow was gone, and then even the gray afterimage was gone.
The wind rose. Slowly, it came from somewhere far away, and built around me. I stood up, pulling the collar of my topcoat around my neck. The wind was neither warm nor cold, yet it rushed, without even ruffling my hair. I was not afraid.
The ground was settling. Slowly, it lowered me the tiniest fractions of inches. But steadily, as though the layers of tomorrows that had been built up were vanishing.
My thoughts were of myself: I’m coming to save you. I’m coming, Gus. You won’t hurt anymore...you’ll never have hurt.
The moon came back. It had been full; now it was new. The wind died. It had carried me where I’d needed to go. The ground settled. The years had been peeled off.
I was alone in the backyard of the house at 89 Harmon Drive. The snow was deeper. It was a different house, though it was the same. It was not recently painted. The Depression had not been long ago; money was still tight. It wasn’t weather-beaten, but in a year or two my father would have it painted. Light yellow.
There was a sumac tree growing below the window of the dinette. It was nourished by lima beans and soup and cabbage.
“You’ll just sit there until you finish every drop of your dinner. We’re not wasting food. There are children starving in Russia.”
I put the dragoon in my topcoat pocket. He had worked more than hard enough. I walked around the side of the house. I smiled as I saw again the wooden milk box by the side door. In the morning, very early, the milkman would put three quarts of milk there, but before anyone could bring them in, this very cold winter morning in December, the cream would push its way up and the little cardboard caps would be an inch above the mouths of the bottles.
The gravel talked beneath my feet. The street was quiet and cold. I stood in the front yard, beside the big oak tree, and looked up and down.
It was the same. It was as though I’d never been away. I started to cry. Hello.
* * * *
Gus was on one of the swings in the playground. I stood outside the fence of Lathrop Grade School, and watched him standing on the seat, gripping the ropes, pumping his little legs. He was smaller than I’d remembered him. He wasn’t smilin
g as he tried to swing higher. It was serious to him.
Standing outside the hurricane fence, watching Gus, I was happy. I scratched at a rash on my right wrist, and smoked a cigarette, and was happy.
I didn’t see them until they were out of the shadows of the bushes, almost on him.
One of them rushed up and grabbed Gus’s leg, and tried to pull him off the seat, just as he reached the bottom of his swing. Gus managed to hold on, but the chain ropes twisted crazily and when the seat went back up, it hit the metal leg of the framework.
Gus fell, rolled face down in the dust of the playground, and tried to sit up. The boys pushed through between the swings, avoiding the berserk one that clanged back and forth.
Gus managed to get up, and the boys formed a circle around him. Then Jack Wheeldon stepped out and faced him. I remembered Jack Wheeldon.
He was taller than Gus. They wereall taller than Gus, but Wheeldon was beefier. I could see shadows surrounding him. Shadows of a boy who would grow into a man with a beer stomach and thick arms. But the eyes would always remain the same.
He shoved Gus in the face. Gus went back, dug in and charged him. Gus came at him low, head tucked under, fists tight, arms braced close to the body. He hit him in the stomach and wrestled him around. They struggled together like inept club fighters, raising dust.
One of the boys in the circle took a step forward and hit Gus hard in the back of the head. Gus turned his face out of Wheeldon’s stomach, and Wheeldon punched him in the mouth. Gus started to cry.
I’d been frozen, watching it happen, but he was crying—
I looked both ways down the fence and found the break far to my right. I threw the cigarette away as I dashed down the fence, trying to look behind me. Then through the break and I was running toward them the long distance from far right field of the baseball diamond, toward the swings and seesaws. They had Gus down now, and they were kicking him.
When they saw me coming, they started to run away. Jack Wheeldon paused to kick Gus once more in the side; then he, too, ran.
Gus was lying there, on his back, the dust smeared into mud on his face. I bent down and picked him up. He wasn’t moving, but he wasn’t really hurt. I held him very close and carried him toward the bushes that rose on a small incline at the side of the playground. The bushes were cool overhead and they canopied us, hid us; I laid him down and used my handkerchief to clean away the dirt. His eyes were very blue. I smoothed the straight brown hair off his forehead. He wore braces; one of the rubber bands hooked onto the pins of the braces, used to keep them tension-tight, had broken. I pulled it free.
He opened his eyes and started crying again.
Something hurt in my chest.
He started snuffling, unable to catch his breath. He tried to speak, but the words were only mangled sounds, huffed out with too much air and pain.
Then he forced himself to sit up and rubbed the back of his hand across his runny nose.
He stared at me. It was panic and fear and confusion and shame at being seen this way. “Th-they hit me from in back,” he said, snuffling,
“I know. I saw.”
“D’jou scare’m off?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t say thank you. It wasn’t necessary. The backs of my thighs hurt from squatting. I sat down.
“My name is Gus,” he said, trying to be polite.
I didn’t know what name to give him. I was going to tell him the first name to come into my head, but heard myself say, “My name is Mr. Rosenthal.”
He looked startled. “That’s my name, too. Gus Rosenthal!”
“Isn’t that peculiar,” I said. We grinned at each other, and he wiped his nose again.
* * * *
I didn’t want to see my mother or father. I had those memories. They were sufficient. It was little Gus I wanted to be with. But one night I crossed Into the backyard at 89 Harmon Drive from the empty lots that would later be a housing development.
And I stood in the dark, watching them eat dinner.
There was my father. I hadn’t remembered him being so handsome. My mother was saying something to him, and he nodded as he ate. They were in the dinette. Gus was playing with his food.Don’t mush your food around like that, Gus. Eat, or you can’t stay up to hear Lux Presents Hollywood.
But they’re doing “Dawn Patrol.”
Then don’t mush your food.
“Momma,” I murmured, standing in the cold, “Momma, there are children starving in Russia.” And I added, thirty-five years late, “Name two, Momma.”
* * * *
I met Gus downtown at the newsstand.
“Hi.”
“Oh. Hullo.”
“Buying some comics?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You ever read Doll Man and Kid Eternity?”
“Yeah, they’re great. But I got them.”
“Not the new issues.”
“Sure do.”
“Bet you’ve got last months. He’s just checking in the new comics right now.”
So we waited while the newsstand owner used the heavy wire snips on the bundles, and checked off the magazines against the distributor’s long white mimeographed sheet. And I bought GusAir boy and Jingle Jangle Comics and Blue Beetle and Whiz Comics and Doll Man and Kid Eternity.
Then I took him to Isaly’s for a hot fudge sundae. They served it in a tall tulip glass with the hot fudge in a little pitcher. When the waitress had gone to get the sundaes, little Gus looked at me. “Hey, how’d you know I only liked crushed nuts, an’ not whipped cream or a cherry?”
I leaned back in the high-walled booth and smiled at him.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Gus?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Somebody put a nickel in the Wurlitzer in his booth, and Glenn Miller swung into “String of Pearls.”
“Well, did you ever think about it?”
“No, huh-uh. I like cartooning, maybe I could draw comic books.”
“That’s pretty smart thinking, Gus. There’s a lot of money to be made in art.” I stared around the dairy store, at the Coca-Cola posters of pretty girls with pageboy hairdos, drawn by an artist named Harold W. McCauley whose style would be known throughout the world, whose name would never be known.
He stared at me. “It’s fun, too, isn’t it?”
I was embarrassed. I’d thought first of money, he’d thought first of happiness. I’d reached him before he’d chosen his path. There was still time to make him a man who would think first of joy, all through his life.
“Mr. Rosenthal?”
I looked down and across, just as the waitress brought the sundaes. She set them down and I paid her. When she’d gone, Gus asked me, “Why did they call me a dirty Jewish elephant?”
“Who called you that, Gus?”
“The guys.”
“The ones you were fighting that day?”
He nodded. “Why’d they say elephant?”
I spooned up some vanilla ice cream, thinking. My back ached, and the rash had spread up my right wrist onto my forearm. “Well, Jewish people are supposed to have big noses, Gus.” I poured the hot fudge out of the little pitcher. It bulged with surface tension for a second, then spilled through its own dark-brown film, covering the three scoops of ice cream. “I mean, that’s what some people believe. So I suppose they thought it was smart to call you an elephant, because an elephant has a big nose...a trunk. Do you understand?”
“That’s dumb. I don’t have a big nose ... do I?”
“I wouldn’t say so, Gus. They most likely said it just to make you mad. Sometimes people do that.”
“That’s dumb.”
We sat there for a while and talked. I went far down inside the tulip glass with the long-handled spoon, and finished the deep dark, almost black bittersweet hot fudge. They hadn’t made hot fudge like that in many years. Gus got ice cream up the spoon handle, on his fingers, on his chin, and on his T-shirt. We talked about
a great many things.
We talked about how difficult arithmetic was. (How I would still have to use my fingers sometimes even as an adult.) How the guys never gave a short kid his “raps” when the sandlot ball games were in progress. (How I overcompensated with women from doubts about stature.) How different kinds of food were pretty bad-tasting. (How I still used ketchup on well-done steak.) How it was pretty lonely in the neighborhood with nobody for friends. (How I had erected a facade of charisma and glamor so no one could reach me deeply enough to hurt me.) How Leon always invited all the kids over to his house, but when Gus got there, they slammed the door and stood behind the screen laughing and jeering. (How even now a slammed door raised the hair on my neck and a phone receiver slammed down, cutting me off, sent me into a senseless rage.) How comic books were great. (How my scripts sold so easily because I had never learned how to rein in my imagination.)
Orbit 8 - [Anthology] Page 3
