Death Is a Lonely Business

by Ray Bradbury

  A piano box waited in the alley below the tenement.

  “Mine,” said Fannie. “The day I die, bring the piano box up, tuck me in, hoist me down. Mine. Oh, and while you’re at it, there’s a dear soul, hand me that mayonnaise jar and that big spoon.”

  I stood at the front door of the tenement, listening.

  Her voice flowed down through the halls. It started out as pure as a stream of fresh mountain water and cascaded through the second to the first and then along the hall. I could almost drink her singing, it was that clear.

  Fannie.

  As I climbed up the first-floor steps she trilled a few lines from La Traviata. As I moved on the second flight, pausing, eyes shut, to listen, Madame Butterfly sang welcome to the bright ship in the harbor and the lieutenant in his whites.

  It was the voice of a slender Japanese maiden on a hill on a spring afternoon. There was a picture of that maid, aged seventeen, on a table near the window leading out onto the second-floor tenement porch. The girl weighed 120 pounds at most, but that was a lone time ago. It was tier voice that pulled me up through the old stairwell—a promise of brightness to come.

  I knew that when I got to the door, the singing would stop.

  “Fannie,” I’d say. “I heard someone singing up here just now.”

  “Did you?”

  “Something from Butterfly.”

  “How strange. I wonder who it could have been?”

  We had played that game for years, talked music, discussed symphony/ballet/opera, listened to it on radios, played it on her old Edison crank-up phono, but never, never once in three thousand days, had Fannie ever sung when I was in the room with her.

  But today was different.

  As I reached the second floor her singing stopped. But she must have been thinking, planning. Maybe she had glanced out and seen the way I walked along the street. Maybe she read my skeleton through my flesh. Maybe my voice, calling far across town on the phone (impossible) had brought the sadness of the night and the rain with it. Anyway, a mighty intuition heaved itself aware in Fannie Florianna’s summer bulk. She was ready with surprises.

  I stood at her door, listening.

  Creaks as of an immense ship blundering through tides. A great conscience stirred there.

  A soft hissing: the phonograph!

  I tapped on the door.

  “Fannie;” I called. “The Crazy is here.”

  “Voilà!”

  She opened the door to a thunderclap of music. Great lady, she had put the shaved wooden needle on the hissing record, then surged to the door, held the knob, waiting. At the whisk of the baton down, she had flung the door wide. Puccini flooded out, gathered round, pulled me in. Fannie Florianna helped.

  It was the first side of Tosca. Fannie planted me in a rickety chair, lifted my empty paw, put a glass of good wine in it. “I don’t drink, Fannie.”

  “Nonsense. Look at your face. Drink!” She surged around like those wondrous hippos turned light as milkweed in Fantasia, and sank like a terribly strange bed upon her helpless chair.

  By the end of the record I was crying.

  “There, there,” whispered Fannie, refilling my glass. “There, there.”

  “I always cry at Puccini, Fannie.”

  “Yes, dear man, but not so hard.”

  “Not so hard, true.” I drank half of the second glass. It was a 1938 St. Emilion from a good vineyard, brought and left by one of Fannie’s rich friends who came clear across town for good talk, long laughs, better times for both, no matter whose income was higher. I had seen some of Toscanini’s relatives going up the stairs one night, and waited. I had seen Lawrence Tibbett coming down, once, and we had nodded, passing. They always brought the best bottles with their talk, and they always left smiling. The center of the world can be anywhere. Here it was on the second floor of a tenement on the wrong side of L.A.

  I wiped tears on my jacket cuff.

  “Tell me,” said the great fat lady.

  “I found a dead man, Fannie. And no one will listen to me about it!”

  “My God.” Her round face got rounder as her mouth opened, her eyes went wide, then softened to commiseration. “Poor boy. Who?”

  “It was one of those nice old men who sit in the ticket office down at the Venice Short Line stop, been sitting there since Billy Sunday thumped the Bible and William Jennings Bryan made his Cross of Gold speech. I’ve seen them there since I was a kid. Four old men. You felt they’d be there forever, glued to the wooden benches. I don’t think I ever saw one of them up and around. They were there all day, all week, all year, smoking pipes or cigars, and talking politics thirteen to the dozen and deciding what to do with the country. When I was fifteen one of them looked at me and said, ‘You going to grow up and change the world only for the best, boy?’ ‘Yes, sir!’ I said. ‘I think you’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Won’t he, gents?’ ‘Yes,’ they all said, and smiled at me. The old man who asked me that, he’s the one I found in the lion cage last night.”

  “In the cage?”

  “Under water, in the canal.”

  “This calls for one more side of Tosca.”

  Fannie was an avalanche getting up, a tide flowing to the machine, a mighty force cranking the windup arm, and God’s whisper putting the needle down on a new surface.

  As the music rose, she came back into her chair like a ghost ship, regal and pale, quiet and concerned.

  “I know one reason why you’re taking this so hard,” she said. “Peg. She still in Mexico, studying?”

  “Been gone three months. Might as well be three years,” I said. “Christ, I’m lonely.”

  “And vulnerable,” said Fannie. “Shouldn’t you call her?”

  “Christ, Fannie, I can’t afford. And I don’t want to reverse the charges. I’ll just have to hope she’ll phone me in the next day or so.”

  “Poor boy. Sick with love.”

  “Sick with death. The awful thing is, Fannie, I didn’t even know that old man’s name! And isn’t that a shame?”

  The second side of Tosca really did it. I sat there, head down, with the tears running off the tip of my nose into the wine.

  “You’ve ruined your St. Emilion,” said Fannie gently, when the record ended.

  “Now I’m mad,” I said.

  “Why?” Fannie, standing, like a great pomegranate mother, by the phonograph, sharpened a new needle and found a happier record. “Why?”

  “Someone killed him, Fannie. Someone stuffed him in that cage. There was no other way for him to have gotten in.”

  “Oh, dear,” she murmured.

  “When I was twelve, one of my uncles back east was shot in a holdup late at night, in his car. At his funeral, my brother and I vowed we’d find the murderer and do him in. But he’s still in the world somewhere. And that was a long time back in another town. This time, it’s here. Whoever drowned the old man lives within a few blocks of me in Venice. And when I find him—”

  “You’ll turn him over to the police.” Fannie leaned forward in one massive but tender motion. “You’ll feel better after a good sleep.”

  Then she read my face.

  “No,” she said at my funeral, “you won’t feel better. Well, go on. Be the fool all men are. God, what lives we women lead, watching the fools kill each other and the killers loll the killers, and us over on the sidelines yelling stop and nobody listening. Can’t you hear me, love?”

  She put another record on and let the needle down like a loving lass to the grooves, and came surging over to touch my cheek with her great pink chrysanthemum fingers.

  “Oh, please, do be careful. I don’t like Venice. Not enough streetlights. And those damned oil wells pumping all night long, no letup, with a case of the moans.”

  “Venice won’t get me, Fannie, or whatever it is wandering around Venice.”

  Standing in halls, waiting, I thought, outside old men’s and old women’s doors.

  Fannie became a giant glacier standing over me.
/>
  She must have seen my face again, where everything was given away, nothing hidden. Instinctively, she glanced at her own door, as if a shadow had passed outside. Her intuition stunned me.

  “Whatever you do”—her voice was lost deep down in hundreds of pounds of suddenly haunted flesh—“don’t bring it here.”

  “Death isn’t a thing you can bring with you, Fannie.”

  “Oh, yes it is. Scrape your feet before coming in downstairs. Do you have money to get your suit dry-cleaned? I’ll give you some. Shine your shoes. Brush your teeth. Don’t ever look back. Eyes can kill. If you look at someone, and they see you want to be killed, they tag alone. Come here, dear boy, but wash up first and look straight ahead.”

  “Horsefeathers, Fannie, and hogwash. That won’t keep death away and you know it. Anyway, I wouldn’t bring anything here to you but me; lots of years, Fannie, and love.”

  That melted the snow in the Himalayas.

  She turned in a slow carousel motion. Suddenly we both heard the music that had long since started on the hissing record.

  Carmen.

  Fannie Florianna sank her fingers into her bosom and seized forth a black-lace fan, flitted it to full blossom, flirted it before her suddenly flamenco eyes, shut her lashes demurely, and let her lost voice spring forth reborn, fresh as cool mountain water, young as I had felt only last week.

  She sang. And as she sang, she moved.

  It was like watching the heavy curtain lift daintily high at the Metropolitan to be draped around the Rock of Gibraltar and whirled at the gesturings of a maniac conductor who knew how to electrify elephant ballets and call spirit-spout white whales from the deeps.

  By the end of the first song, I was crying again.

  This time, with laughter.

  Only later did I think to myself, my God. For the first time. In her room. She sang.

  For me!

  Downstairs, it was afternoon.

  I stood in the sunlit street, swaying, savoring the aftertaste of the wine, looking up at the second floor of the tenement.

  The strains sounded of the song of farewell; the leave-taking of Butterfly by her young lieutenant, all in white, sailing away.

  Fannie loomed on her porch, looking down at me, her little rosebud mouth smiling sadly, the young girl trapped in her round harvest-moon face, letting the music behind her speak our friendship and my leave-taking for now.

  Seeing her there made me think of Constance Rattigan locked away in her Moorish fort by the sea. I wanted to call up and ask about the similarity.

  But Fannie waved. I could only wave back.

  I was ready for Venice in clear weather now.

  Little balding man who doesn’t look like a detective—Elmo Crumley, I thought, here I come!

  But all I did was loiter in front of the Venice Police Station feeling like a gutless wonder.

  I couldn’t decide whether Crumley was Beauty or the Beast inside there.

  Such indecision made me ache out on the sidewalk until someone who looked like Crumley glanced out of an upstairs jail window.

  I fled.

  The thought of him opening his mouth like a blowtorch to scorch the peach fuzz on my cheeks made my heart fall over like a prune.

  Christ, I thought, when will I face up to him at last to unload all the dark wonders that are collecting like tombstone dust in my manuscript box? When?

  Soon.

  During the night, it happened.

  A small rainstorm arrived out front of my apartment about two in the morning.

  Stupid! I thought, in bed, listening. A small rainstorm? How small? Three feet wide, six feet tall, all just in one spot? Rain drenching my doormat, falling nowhere else, and then, quickly, gone!

  Hell!

  I leaped to yank the door wide.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The stars were bright, with no mist, no fog. There was no way for rain to get there.

  Yet there was a pool of water by my door.

  And a set of footprints arriving, pointed toward me, and another set, barefoot, going away.

  I must have stood there for a full ten seconds until I exploded. “Now, hold on!”

  Someone had stood there, wet, for half a minute, almost ready to knock, wondering if I was awake, and then walked off to the sea.

  No. I blinked. Not to the sea. The sea was on my right, to the west.

  These naked footprints went to my left, east.

  I followed them.

  I ran as if I could catch up with the miniature storm.

  Until I reached the canal.

  Where the footprints stopped at the rim—

  Jesus!

  I stared down at the oily waters.

  I could see where someone had climbed out and walked along the midnight street to my place, and then run back, the strides were bigger, to—

  Dive in?

  God, who would swim in those filthy waters?

  Someone who didn’t care, never worried about disease? Someone who loved night arrivals and dark departures for the hell, the fun, or the death of it?

  I edged along the canal bank, adjusting my eyes, watchful to see if anything broke the black surface.

  The tide went away and came back, surging through a lock that had rusted open. A herd of small seals drifted by, but it was only kelp going nowhere.

  “You still there?” I whispered. “What did you come for? Why to my place?”

  I sucked air and held it.

  For in a hollowed-out concrete cache, under a small cement bunker, on the far side of a rickety bridge …

  I thought I saw a greasy fringe of hair rise, and then an oiled brow. Eyes stared back at me. It could have been a sea-otter or a dog or a black porpoise somehow strayed and lost in the canal.

  The head stayed for a long moment, half out of water.

  And I remembered a thing I had read as a boy leafing African novels. About crocodiles that infested the subterranean caves under the rims of Congo riverbanks. The beasts sank down and never came up. Submerged, they slid to hide up inside the secret bank itself, waiting for someone foolish enough to swim by. Then the reptiles squirmed out of their underwater dens to feed.

  Was I staring at a similar beast? Someone who loved night tides, who hid in caches under the banks to rise and step softly to leave rain where he walked?

  I watched the dark head in the water. It watched me, with gleaming eyes.

  No. That can’t be a man!

  I shivered. I jumped forward, as one jumps toward a horror to make it vanish, to scare spiders, rats, snakes away. Not bravery but fear made me stomp.

  The dark head sank. The water rippled.

  The head did not rise again.

  Shuddering, I walked back along the trail of dark rain that had come to visit my doorstep.

  The small pool of water was still there on my sill.

  I bent and plucked up a small mound of seaweed from the middle of the pool.

  Only then did I discover I had run to and from the canal dressed only in my jockey shorts.

  I gasped, glanced swiftly around. The street was empty. I leaped in to slam the door.

  Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll go shake my fists at Elmo Crumley.

  In my right fist, a handful of trolley ticket dust.

  In my left, a clump of moist seaweed.

  But not at the police station!

  Jails, like hospitals, sank me to my knees in a faint.

  Crumley’s home was somewhere.

  Shaking my fists. I’d find it.

  For about 150 days a year in Venice, the sun doesn’t show through the mist until noon.

  For some sixty days a year the sun doesn’t come out of the fog until it’s ready to go down in the west, around four or five o’clock.

  For some forty days it doesn’t come out at all.

  The rest of the time, if you’re lucky, the sun rises, as it does for the rest of Los Angeles and California, at five-thirty or six in the morning and stays all day.

&
nbsp; It’s the forty- or sixty-day cycles that drip in the soul and make the riflemen clean their guns. Old ladies buy rat poison on the twelfth day of no sun. But on the thirteenth day, when they are about to arsenic their morning tea, the sun rises wondering what everyone is so upset about, and the old ladies feed the rats down by the canal, and lean back to their brandy.

  During the forty-day cycles, the foghorn lost somewhere out in the bay sounds over and over again, and never stops, until you feel the people in the local graveyard beginning to stir. Or, late at night, when the foghorn gets going, some variety of amphibious beast rises in your id and swims toward land. It is swimming somewhere yearning, maybe only for sun. All the smart animals have gone south. You are left stranded on a cold dune with an empty typewriter, an abandoned bank account, and a half-warm bed. You expect the submersible beast to rise some night while you sleep. To get rid of him you get up at three a.m. and write a story about him, but don’t send it out to any magazines for years because you are afraid. Not Death, but Rejection in Venice is what Thomas Mann should have written about.