The husband and wife laughed quietly.
“No, that’s not the joke yet, sorry,” the old man apologized. “The lunatic sat the comedian down to an empty table, no knives, no forks, no food. ‘Dinner is served!’ he cried. Afraid of murder, the comedian fell in with the make-believe. ‘Great!’ he cried, pretending to chew steak, vegetables, dessert. He bit nothings. ‘Fine!’ he swallowed air. ‘Wonderful!’ Eh … you may laugh now.”
But the husband and wife, grown still, only looked at their sparsely strewn plates.
The old man shook his head and went on. “The comedian, thinking to impress the madman, exclaimed, ‘And these spiced brandy peaches! Superb!’ ‘Peaches?’ screamed the madman, drawing a gun. ‘I served no peaches! You must be insane!’ And shot the comedian in the behind!”
The old man, in the silence which ensued, picked up the first pea and weighed its lovely bulk upon his bent tin fork. He was about to put it in his mouth when—
There was a sharp rap on the door.
“Special police!” a voice cried.
Silent but trembling, the wife hid the extra plate.
The husband rose calmly to lead the old man to a wall where a panel hissed open, and he stepped in and the panel hissed shut and he stood in darkness hidden away as, beyond, unseen, the apartment door opened. Voices murmured excitedly. The old man could imagine the special policeman in his midnight-blue uniform, with drawn gun, entering to see only the flimsy furniture, the bare walls, the echoing linoleum floor, the glassless, cardboarded-over windows, this thin and oily film of civilization left on an empty shore when the storm tide of war went away.
“I’m looking for an old man,” said the tired voice of authority beyond the wall. Strange, thought the old man, even the law sounds tired now. “Patched clothes …” But, thought the old man, I thought everyone’s clothes were patched! “Dirty. About eighty years old …” But isn’t everyone dirty, everyone old? the old man cried out to himself. “If you turn him in, there’s a week’s rations as reward,” said the police voice. “Plus ten cans of vegetables, five cans of soup, bonus.”
Real tin cans with bright printed labels, thought the old man. The cans flashed like meteors rushing by in the dark over his eyelids. What a fine reward! Not ten thousand dollars, not twenty thousand dollars, no no, but five incredible cans of real, not imitation soup, and ten, count them, ten brilliant circus-colored cans of exotic vegetables like string beans and sun-yellow corn! Think of it. Think!
There was a long silence in which the old man almost thought he heard faint murmurs of stomachs turning uneasily, slumbering but dreaming of dinners much finer than the hairballs of old illusion gone nightmare and politics gone sour in the long twilight since A. D., Annihilation Day.
“Soup. Vegetables,” said the police voice, a final time. “Fifteen solid-pack cans!”
The door slammed.
The boots stomped away through the ramshackle tenement, pounding coffin-lid doors to stir other Lazarus souls alive to cry aloud of bright tins and real soups. The poundings faded. There was a last banging slam.
And at last the hidden panel whispered up. The husband and wife did not look at him as he stepped out. He knew why and wanted to touch their elbows.
“Even I,” he said gently, “even I was tempted to turn myself in, to claim the reward, to eat the soup.”
Still they would not look at him.
“Why?” he asked. “Why didn’t you hand me over? Why?”
The husband, as if suddenly remembering, nodded to his wife. She went to the door, hesitated, her husband nodded again impatiently, and she went out, noiseless as a puff of cobweb. They heard her rustling along the hall, scratching softly at doors, which opened to gasps and murmurs.
“What’s she up to? What are you up to?” asked the old man.
“You’ll find out. Sit. Finish your dinner,” said the husband. “Tell me why you’re such a fool you make us fools who seek you out and bring you here.”
“Why am I such a fool?” The old man sat. The old man munched slowly, taking peas one at a time from the plate which had been returned to him. “Yes, I am a fool. How did I start my foolishness? Years ago I looked at the ruined world, the dictatorships, the desiccated states and nations, and said, ‘What can I do? Me, a weak old man, what? Rebuild a devastation? Ha!’ But as I lay half asleep one night an old phonograph record played in my head. Two sisters named Duncan sang out of my childhood a song called ‘Remembering.’ ‘Remembering is all I do, dear, so try and remember, too.’ I sang the song, and it wasn’t a song but a way of life. What did I have to offer a world that was forgetting? My memory! How could this help? By offering a standard of comparison. By telling the young what once was, by considering our losses. I found the more I remembered, the more I could remember! Depending on who I sat down with I remembered imitation flowers, dial telephones, refrigerators, kazoos (you ever play a kazoo?!), thimbles, bicycle clips, not bicycles, no, but bicycle clips! isn’t that wild and strange? Antimacassars. Do you know them? Never mind. Once a man asked me to remember just the dashboard dials on a Cadillac. I remembered. I told him in detail. He listened. He cried great tears down his face. Happy tears or sad? I can’t say. I only remember. Not literature, no, I never had a head for plays or poems, they slip away, they die. All I am, really, is a trash heap of the mediocre, the third-best-hand-me-down useless and chromed-over slush and junk of a race-track civilization that ran last over a precipice. So all I offer really is scintillant junk, the clamored-after chronometers and absurd machineries of a never-ending river of robots and robot-mad owners. Yet, one way or another, civilization must get back on the road. Those who can offer fine butterfly poetry, let them remember, let them offer. Those who can weave and build butterfly nets, let them weave, let them build. My gift is smaller than both, and perhaps contemptible in the long hoist, climb, jump toward the old and amiably silly peak. But I must dream myself worthy. For the things, silly or not, that people remember are the things they will search for again. I will, then, ulcerate their half-dead desires with vinegar-gnat memory. Then perhaps they’ll rattle-bang the Big Clock together again, which is the city, the state and then the world. Let one man want wine, another lounge chairs, a third a batwing glider to soar the March winds on and build bigger electropterodactyls to scour even greater winds, with even greater peoples. Someone wants moron Christmas trees and some wise man goes to cut them. Pack this all together, wheel in want, want in wheel, and I’m just there to oil them, but oil them I do. Ho, once I would have raved, ‘Only the best is best, only quality is true!’ But roses grow from blood manure. Mediocre must be, so most-excellent can bloom. So I shall be the best mediocre there is and fight all who say, Slide under, sink back, dust-wallow, let brambles scurry over your living grave. I shall protest the roving apeman tribes, the sheep-people munching the far fields prayed on by the feudal land-baron wolves who rarefy themselves in the few skyscraper summits and horde unremembered foods. And these villains I will kill with can opener and corkscrew. I shall run them down with ghosts of Buick, Kissel-Kar and Moon, thrash them with licorice whips until they cry for some sort of unqualified mercy. Can I do all this? One can only try.”
The old man rummaged the last pea, with the last words, in his mouth, while his Samaritan host simply looked at him with gently amazed eyes, and far off up through the house people moved, doors tapped open and shut, and there was a gathering outside the door of this apartment where now the husband said, “And you asked why we didn’t turn you in? Do you hear that out there?”
“It sounds like everyone in the apartment house.”
“Everyone. Old man, old fool, do you remember … motion picture houses, or, better, drive-in movies?”
The old man smiled. “Do you?”
“Almost. Look, listen, today, now, if you’re going to be a fool, if you want to run risks, do it in the aggregate, in one fell blow. Why waste your breath on one, or two, or even three, if …”
The husband opened
the door and nodded outside. Silently, one at a time and in couples, the people of the house entered. Entered this room as if entering a synagogue or church or the kind of church known as a movie or the kind of movie known as a drive-in and the hour was growing late in the day, with the sun going down the sky, and soon in the early evening hours, in the dark, the room would be dim and in the one light the voice of the old man would speak and these would listen and hold hands and it would be like the old days with the balconies and the dark, or the cars and the dark, and just the memory, the words, of popcorn, and the words for the gum and the sweet drinks and candy, but the words, anyway, the words …
And while the people were coming in and settling on the floor, and the old man watched them, incredulous that he had summoned them here without knowing, the husband said, “Isn’t this better than taking a chance in the open?”
“Yes. Strange. I hate pain. I hate being hit and chased. But my tongue moves. I must hear what it has to say. Still this is better.”
“Good.” The husband pressed a red ticket into his palm. “When this is all over, an hour from now, here is a ticket from a friend of mine in Transportation. One train crosses the country each week. Each week I get a ticket for some idiot I want to help. This week it’s you.”
The old man read the destination on the folded red paper: “ ‘Chicago Abyss,’ ” and added, “Is the Abyss still there?”
“This time next year Lake Michigan may break through the last crust and make a new lake in the pit where the city once was. There’s life of sorts around the crater rim, and a branch train goes west once a month. Once you leave here, keep moving, forget you met or know us. I’ll give you a small list of people like ourselves. A long time from now, look them up, out in the wilderness. But, for God’s sake, in the open, alone for a year, declare a moratorium. Keep your wonderful mouth shut. And here—” The husband gave him a yellow card. “A dentist I know. Tell him to make you a new set of teeth that will only open at mealtimes.”
A few people, hearing, laughed, and the old man laughed quietly and the people were in now, dozens of them, and the day was late, and the husband and wife shut the door and stood by it and turned and waited for this last special time when the old man might open his mouth.
The old man stood up.
His audience grew very still.
The train came, rusty and loud at midnight, into a suddenly snow-filled station. Under a cruel dusting of white, the ill-washed people crowded into and through the ancient chair cars, mashing the old man along the corridor and into an empty compartment that had once been a lavatory. Soon the floor was a solid mass of bed roll on which sixteen people twisted and turned in darkness, fighting their way into sleep.
The train rushed forth to white emptiness.
The old man, thinking, Quiet, shut up, no, don’t speak, nothing, no, stay still, think, careful, cease! found himself now swayed, joggled, hurled this way and that as he half crouched against a wall. He and just one other were upright in this monster room of dreadful sleep. A few feet away, similarly shoved against the wall, sat an eight-year-old boy with a drawn sick paleness escaping from his cheeks. Full awake, eyes bright, he seemed to watch, he did watch, the old man’s mouth. The boy gazed because he must. The train hooted, roared, swayed, yelled and ran.
Half an hour passed in a thunderous grinding passage by night under the snow-hidden moon, and the old man’s mouth was tight-nailed shut. Another hour, and still boned shut. Another hour, and the muscles around his cheeks began to slacken. Another, and his lips parted to wet themselves. The boy stayed awake. The boy saw. The boy waited. Immense sifts of silence came down the night air outside, tunneled by avalanche train. The travelers, very deep in invoiced terror, numbed by flight, slept each separate, but the boy did not take his eyes away and at last the old man leaned forward, softly.
“Sh. Boy. Your name?”
“Joseph.”
The train swayed and groaned in its sleep, a monster floundering through timeless dark toward a morn that could not be imagined.
“Joseph …” The old man savored the word, bent forward, his eyes gentle and shining. His face filled with pale beauty. His eyes widened until they seemed blind. He gazed at a distant and hidden thing. He cleared his throat ever so softly. “Ah …”
The train roared round a curve. The people rocked in their snowing sleep.
“Well, Joseph,” whispered the old man. He lifted his fingers softly in the air. “Once upon a time …”
The Anthem Sprinters
“There’s no doubt of it, Doone’s the best.”
“Devil take Doone!”
“His reflex is uncanny, his lope on the incline extraordinary, he’s off and gone before you reach for your hat.”
“Hoolihan’s better, any dayl”
“Day, hell. Why not now?”
I was at the far end of the bar at the top of Grafton Street listening to the tenors singing, the concertinas dying hard, and the arguments prowling the smoke, looking for opposition. The pub was the Four Provinces and it was getting on late at night, for Dublin. So there was the sure threat of everything shutting at once, meaning spigots, accordions, piano lids, soloists, trios, quartets, pubs, sweet shops and cinemas. In a great heave like the Day of Judgment, half Dublin’s population would be thrown out into raw lamplight, there to find themselves wanting in gum-machine mirrors. Stunned, their moral and physical sustenance plucked from them, the souls would wander like battered moths for a moment, then wheel about for home.
But now here I was listening to a discussion the heat of which, if not the light, reached me at fifty paces.
“Doone!”
“Hoolihan!”
Then the smallest man at the far end of the bar, turning, saw the curiosity enshrined in my all too open face and shouted, “You’re American, of course! And wondering what we’re up to? Do you trust my looks? Would you bet as I told you on a sporting event of great local consequence? If ‘Yes’ is your answer, come here!”
So I strolled my Guinness the length of the Four Provinces to join the shouting men, as one violinist gave up destroying a tune and the pianist hurried over, bringing his chorus with him.
“Name’s Timulty!” The little man took my hand.
“Douglas,” I said. “I write for the cinema.”
“Fillums!” cried everyone.
“Films,” I admitted modestly.
“What luck! Beyond belief!” Timulty seized me tighter. “You’ll be the best judge ever, as well as bet! Are you much for sports? Do you know, for instance, the cross-country, the four-forty, and such man-on-foot excursions?”
“I’ve witnessed two Olympic Games.”
“Not just fillums, but the world competition!” Timulty gasped. “You’re the rare one. Well, now what do you know of the special all-Irish decathlon event which has to do with picture theaters?”
“What event is that?”
“What indeed! Hoolihan!”
An even littler fellow, pocketing his harmonica, leaped forward, smiling. “Hoolihan, that’s me. The best Anthem Sprinter in all Ireland!”
“What sprinter?” I asked.
“A-n-t-,” spelled Hoolihan, much too carefully, “-h-e-m. Anthem. Sprinter. The fastest.”
“Since you been in Dublin,” Timulty cut in, “have you attended the cinema?”
“Last night,” I said, “I saw a Clark Gable film. Night before, an old Charles Laughton—”
“Enough! You’re a fanatic, as are all the Irish. If it weren’t for cinemas and pubs to keep the poor and workless off the street or in their cups, we’d have pulled the cork and let the isle sink long ago. Well.” He clapped his hands. “When the picture ends each night, have you observed a peculiarity of the breed?”
“End of the picture?” I mused. “Hold on! You can’t mean the national anthem, can you?”
“Can we, boys?” cried Timulty.
“We can!” cried all.
“Any night, every night, for tens of
dreadful years, at the end of each damn fillum, as if you’d never heard the baleful tune before,” grieved Timulty, “the orchestra strikes up for Ireland. And what happens then?”
“Why,” said I, falling in with it, “If you’re any man at all, you try to get out of the theater in those few precious moments between the end of the film and the start of the anthem.”
“You’ve nailed it!”
“Buy the Yank a drink!”
“After all,” I said casually, “I’m in Dublin four months now. The anthem has begun to pale. No disrespect meant,” I added hastily.
“And none taken!” said Timulty. “Or given by any of us patriotic I.R.A. veterans, survivors of the Troubles and lovers of country. Still, breathing the same air ten thousand times makes the senses reel. So, as you’ve noted, in that God-sent three-or four-second interval any audience in its right mind beats it the hell out. And the best of the crowd is—”
“Doone,” I said. “Or Hoolihan. Your Anthem Sprinters!”
They smiled at me. I smiled at them.
We were all so proud of my intuition that I bought them a round of Guinness.
Licking the suds from our lips, we regarded each other with benevolence.
“Now,” said Timulty, his voice husky with emotion, his eyes squinted off at the scene, “at this very moment, not one hundred yards down the slight hill, in the comfortable dark of the Grafton Street Theatre, seated on the aisle of the fourth row center is—”
“Doone,” said I.
“The man’s eerie,” said Hoolihan, lifting his cap to me.
“Well—” Timulty swallowed his disbelief—“Doone’s there all right. He’s not seen the fillum before, it’s a Deanna Durbin brought back by the asking, and the time is now …”
Everyone glanced at the wall clock.
“Ten o’clock!” said the crowd.