by Ray Bradbury
“I thought you were leading the way. I only know one thing.” I moved, this time half a step ahead of him. “Blind Henry was searching for some unwashed shirts, dirty underclothes, bad breath. He found and named them for me.”
I did not repeat the dread epithet. But Shrank, with each word, was diminished.
“Why would a blind man want me?” said Shrank at last.
I didn’t want to give it all away at once. I had to test and try. “Because of Janus, the Green Envy Weekly” I said. “I’ve seen copies in your place, through your window.”
That was pure lie, but it struck midriff.
“Yes, yes,” said Shrank. “But a blind man, and you—?”
“Because.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “You’re Mr. Fixit”
Shrank shut his eyes, spun his thoughts, chose a reaction. Laughed.
“Fixit? Fixit! Ridiculous! Why would you think?”
“Because.” I walked on, making him dog-trot to follow. I talked to the mist which gathered ahead. “Henry smelled someone crossing the street, many nights ago. The same smell was in his tenement hall, and here now tonight. And the smell is you.”
The rabbit palpitation shook the little man again, but he knew he was still clear. Nothing was proven!
“Why,” he gasped, “would I prowl some downtown lousy tenement I wouldn’t dream to live in, why?”
“Because,” I said, “you were looking for Lonelies. And damn fool stupid dumb me, blinder than Henry, helped you find them. Fannie was right. Constance was right! I was the death goat after all. Christ, I was Typhoid Mary. I carried the disease, you, everywhere. Or at least you followed. To find Lonelies.” A drumbeat of breath. “Lonelies.”
Almost as I said it, both Shrank and I were seized with what were almost paroxysms. I had spoken a truth that was like a furnace lid thrown back so the heat scorched out to sear my face, my tongue, my heart, my soul. And Shrank? I was describing his unguessed life, his need; all yet to be revealed and admitted, but I knew I had at last yanked the asbestos up and the fire was in the open.
“What was that word?” asked Shrank, some ten yards off and motionless as a statue.
“Lonelies. You said the word. You described them last month. Lonelies.”
And it was true. A funeral march of souls went by in a breath, on soundless feet, in drifts of fog. Fannie and Sam and Jimmy and Cal and all the rest. I had never put a proper label on them. I had never seen the carry-over that tied them all and made them one.
“You’re raving,” said Shrank. “Guessing. Making up. Lying. None of this has to do with me.”
But he was looking down at the way his coat was run up on his skinny wrists and the weathermarks of late-night sweats down his coat. His suit seemed to be diminishing even as I watched. He writhed in his own pale skin, underneath.
I decided to attack.
“Christ, you’re rotting even as you stand there. You’re an affront. You hate everything, all, anything in the world. You told me that just now. So you attack it with your dirt, your breath. Your underwear is your true flag, so you run it up a pole to ruin the wind. A. L. Shrank. Proprietor of the Apocalypse!”
He was smiling, he was overjoyed. I had complimented him with insults. I was paying attention. His ego roused. Without knowing it, I had made and baited a trap.
What now? I thought. What, what, for God’s sake do I say now, now? How draw him out? How finish him?
But he was walking ahead again now, all inflated with insults, all magnificent with the medals of ruin and despair I had pinned to his greasy tie.
We walked. We walked. We walked.
My God, I thought, how long do we walk, how long do we talk, how long does this go on?
This is a movie, I thought, one of those unbelievable scenes that continue and continue when people explain and others talk back and people say again,
It can’t be.
It is.
He’s not sure what I know and I’m not sure that I know, either, and both of us wonder if the other is armed.
“And both of us are cowards,” said Shrank.
And both are afraid to test the other.”
The Carpenter went on. The Oyster followed.
We walked.
And it was not a scene from a good or bad film where people talked too much; it was a scene growing late at night and the moon vanishing to reappear as the fog thickened and I was having a dialogue with Hamlet’s father’s idiot psychiatrist’s friend’s ghost.
Shrank, I thought. What a name. Shrink from this, shrink from that, you wind up shrunk! How had it started? Out of college, on top of the world, hang a shingle; then the great earthquake of some year, did he recall? the year his legs and mind broke and there was the long slide without a toboggan, just on his skinny backside, and no women between him and the downfall pit to ease the concussion, lubricate the nightmare, stop his crying at midnight and hatred at dawn? And one morning, he got out of bed and found himself, where?
Venice, California, and the last gondola long since departed and the lights going out and the canals filling with oil and old circus wagons with only the tide roaring behind the bars....
“I have a little list,” I said.
“What?” said Shrank.
“The Mikado,” I told him. “One song explains you. Your object all sublime, you will achieve in time. To make the punishment fit the crime. The Lonelies. All of them. You put them on your list, in the words of the song, they never will be missed. Their crime was giving up or never having tried. It was mediocrity or failure or lostness. And their punishment, my God, was you.”
He was puffed now, with a peacock stride.
“Well?” he said, walking ahead. “Well?”
I loaded my tongue and took aim and fired a round.
“I imagine,” I said, “that somewhere nearby is the decapitated head of Scott Joplin.”
He could not help the impulse that moved his right hand to his greasy coat pocket. He pretended to pat it in place, found himself staring with pleasure at that hand, glanced away, and went on walking.
One shot, one hit. I glowed. Detective Lieutenant Crumley, I thought, wish you were here.
I fired a second round.
“Canaries for sale,” I said in a tiny voice like the faded lead-pencil lettering on the cardboard in the old lady’s window. “Hirohito ascends throne. Addis Ababa. Mussolini.”
His left hand twitched with secret pride toward his left coat pocket.
Christ! I thought. He’s carrying her old bottom-of-the-birdcage headlines with him!
Bull’s-eye!
He strode. I followed.
Target three. Aim three. Fire three.
“Lion cage. Old man. Ticket office.”
His thin dropped toward his breast pocket.
There, by God, would be found punchout ticket confetti from a train never taken!
Shrank plowed on through the mist, absolutely oblivious of the fact that I was butterfly-netting his crimes. He was a happy child in the fields of the Antichrist. His tiny shoes flinted on the planks. He beamed.
What next? My mind swarmed. Ah, yes.
I saw Jimmy in the tenement hall with his new choppers, all grin. Jimmy in the bathtub, turned over and six fathoms deep.
“False teeth,” I said. “Uppers. Lowers.”
Thank God, Shrank did not pat his pockets again. I might have shouted a terrible laugh of dread to think he carried a dead grin about. His glance over his shoulder told me it was back (in a glass of water?) In his hut.
Target five, aim, fire!
“Dancing Chihuahuas, preening parakeets!”
Shrank’s shoes did a dog-dance on the pier. His eyes jumped to his left shoulder. There were bird-claw marks and droppings there! One of Pietro Massinello’s birds was back there in the hut.
Target six.
“Moroccan fort by an Arabian sea.”
Shrank’s little lizard tongue made a tiny whiplash along his thirsty lips.
&
nbsp; One bottle of Rattigan’s champagne, shelved behind us, leaning on De Quincey in his dope, Hardy in his gloom.
A wind rose.
I shuddered, for suddenly I sensed that ten dozen candy wrappers, all mine, were blowing along after Shrank and me, ghost rodent hungers from other days, rustling along the night pier.
And at last I had to say and could not say but finally made myself say the terrible final sad words that broke my tongue even as something burst in my chest.
“Midnight tenement. Full icebox. Tosca.”
Like a black discus hurled across the town, the first side of Tosca struck, rolled, and slid under A. L. Shrank’s midnight door.
The list had been long. I was poised on the near rim of hysteria, panic, terror, delight at my own perception, my own revulsion, my own sadness. I might dance, strike, or shriek at any moment.
But Shrank spoke first, eyes dreaming, the whispered arias of Puccini turning and turning in his head.
“The fat woman’s at peace now. She needed peace. I gave it to her.”
I hardly remember what happened next.
Somebody yelled. Me. Someone else yelled. Him.
My arms thrust up, Henry’s cane in it.
Murder, I thought. Kill.
Shrank fell back only in time as the cane chopped down. Instead of him, it struck the pier and was shocked from my grip. It fell, rattled, and was kicked by Shrank so it sailed over the edge of the pier and down into the sand.
Now I could only lunge at the little man with empty fists and lurch to a halt as he stepped aside because a final thing had broken in me.
I gagged, I wept. Days ago, the crying in the shower was only a start. Now the full flood came. My bones began to crumble. I stood weeping and Shrank, astounded, almost reached out to touch me and murmur, there, there.
“It’s all right,” he said at last. “She’s at peace. You should thank me for that.”
The moon went behind a great bank of fog and gave me time to recover. I was all slow motion now. My tongue dragged and I could hardly see.
“What you mean is,” I said, at last, underwater, “they’re all gone and I should thank you for all of them. Yes?”
It must have been a terrible relief for him, having waited all these months or years to tell someone, no matter who, no matter where, no matter how. The moon came out again. His lips trembled with the renewed light and the need for release.
“Yes. I helped them all.”
“My God,” I gasped. “Helped? Helped?”
I had to sit down. He helped me to do that and stood over me, astonished at my weakness, in charge of me and the night’s future, the man who could bless people with murder, keep them from suffering, put off their loneliness, sleep them from their private dooms, save them from life. Benefit them with sunsets.
“But you helped, too,” he said, reasonably. “You’re a writer. Curious. All I had to do was follow, collecting your candy wrappers as you went. Do you know how easy it is to follow people? They never look back. Never. You never did. Oh dear, you never knew. You were my good dog of death, for more times than you guess. Over a year. You showed me the people you were collecting for your books. All the gravel on the path, chaff in the wind, empty shells on the shore, dice with no spots, cards with no pips. No past, no present. So I gave them no future.”
I looked up at him. My strength was coming back. The sadness was just about over for now. My anger built a slow pressure.
“You admit it all, do you?”
“Why not? It’s all sour breath on the wind. If when we finish here and I actually walk you to the police station, which I will, you have no proof of what I’ve said. It’s all lost hot air.”
“Not quite,” I said. “You couldn’t resist taking one thing from each victim. Your godawful place is full of phonograph records, champagne, and old newspapers.”
“Son-of-a-bitch!” said Shrank, and stopped. He barked a laugh and then made a grin. “Pretty smart. Got it out of me, eh?”
He rocked on his heels, thinking about it.
“Now,” he said, “I’ll just have to kill you.”
I jumped up. I was a foot taller and not brave, but he jumped back.
“No,” I said. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not!”
“Because,” I said, “you can’t lay hands on me. You didn’t lay hands on them. It was all hands off. I see it now. Your logic was to get people to do things to themselves, or destroy them indirectly. Right?”
“Right!” His pride was involved again. He forgot me standing there and looked off at his bright and glorious past.
“Train ticket office old man. All you did was get him drunk? Knock his head on the edge of the canal, maybe, then jump in and make sure he got in the lion cage.”
“Right!”
“Canaries-for-sale old lady. All you did was stand over her bed and make faces?”
“Right!”
“Sam. Gave him enough hard liquor to put him in the hospital.”
“Right!”
“Jimmy. Made sure he had three times too much booze. You didn’t even have to turn him over in the bathtub. Rolled over himself, gone.”
“Right!”
“Pietro Massinello. You wrote the city government to come get him and his ten dozen dogs, cats, and birds. If he isn’t dead now, soon will be?”
“Right!”
“Cal the barber, of course.”
“I stole Scott Joplin’s head,” said Shrank.
“So Cal, scared, left town. John Wilkes Hopwood. Him and his immense ego. Wrote him using Constance Rattigan’s stationery, got him to come naked on the beach every night. Scaring Constance out to drown herself?”
“Indeed!”
“Then got rid of Hopwood by letting him know you had seen him on the beach the night Constance vanished. You added a really terrible dirty letter, calling him everything vile.”
“Everything he was.”
“And Fannie Florianna. Left your ad by her door. And when she called and you made an appointment, all you did was come over, burst in, same as with the old canary lady, frighten Fannie so she ran backward, yes, fell and couldn’t get up, and all you had to do was stand over her to make sure she didn’t, yes?”
He knew better than to say yes to this, to say anything, for I was furious now, still shaky but getting strength from my own madness.
“You made only one mistake all along the way over the weeks. Sending the papers to Fannie, leaving them, marked. When you remembered this and went back and broke in, you couldn’t find them. The one place you didn’t think to look was the icebox. Your newspaper notice put under the jars to catch drips. I found it there. That’s why I’m here. And not about to be the next on your list. Or do you have other plans?”
“Yes.”
“No, and do you know why not? For two reasons. One, I’m not a Lonely. I’m not a failure. I’m not lost. I’m going to make it. I’m going to be happy. I’m going to marry and have a good wife and children. I’m going to write damned fine books and be loved. That doesn’t fit your pattern. You can’t kill me, you damn stupid jerk, because I’m okay. You see? I’m going to live forever. Secondly, you can’t lay a finger on me. No one else has been touched by you. If you touch me, it spoils your record. You got all your other deaths by fear or intimidation. But now if you try to prevent my going to the police, you’ll have to commit real murder, you sick bastard.”
I plowed off with him running after in utter confusion, almost tugging at my elbows for attention. “Right, right. I almost killed you a year ago. But then you made those sales to magazines and then you met that woman and I decided to just follow you and collect people, yes, that was it. And it really began that night on the Venice train, in the storm, and me drunk. You were so close to me that night on the train, I could have reached out and touched. And the rain came down and if you had just turned, but you didn’t, you would have seen me and known me, but you didn’t and—”
We were off th
e pier and in the dark street by the canal now and moving swiftly over the bridge. The boulevard was empty. I saw no cars, no lights. I rushed.
In the middle of the bridge over the canal, by the lion cages, Shrank stopped and caught hold of the railing.
“Why don’t you understand me, help me!” he wailed. “I wanted to kill you, I did! But it would have been like killing Hope, and there has to be some of that in the world, doesn’t there, even for people like me?”
I stared at him. “Not after tonight.”
“Why?” he gasped, “why?” looking at the cold oily water.
“Because you’re utterly and completely insane,” I said.
“I’ll kill you now.”
“No,” I said, with immense sadness. “There’s only one person left to kill. One last Lonely. The empty one. You.”
“Me?” shrieked the little man.
“You.”
“Me?” he screamed. “Damn, damn, damn you!”
He spun. He grabbed the rails. He leaped.
His body went down in darkness.
He sank in waters as oiled and scummy as his coat, as terrible and dark as his soul, to be covered and lost.
“Shrank!” I yelled.
He did not rise.
Come back, I wanted to yell.
But then, suddenly, I was afraid he would.
“Shrank,” I whispered. “Shrank.” I bent over the bridge rail, staring at the green scum and the gaseous tide. “I know you’re there.”
It just couldn’t be over. It was too simple. He was somewhere out of the light, brooding like a dark toad, under the bridge, maybe, eyes up, waiting, face green, sucking air, very quietly. I listened. Not a drip. Not a ripple. Not a sign.
“Shrank,” I whispered.
Shrank, echoed the timbers under the bridge.
Off along the shore, the great oil beasts lifted their heads up at my summons, sank them down again, in time to a long sighing roll of water on the coast.
Don’t wait, I thought I heard Shrank murmuring. It’s nice down here. Quiet at last. I think I’ll stay.
Liar, I thought. You’ll come up when I least expect it.
The bridge creaked. I whirled.
