‘Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, you old fool you! So this is your odd coffin!’ Tears of laughter welled into Richard’s eyes. ‘Nothing more than a coffin which plays its own dirge. Oh, my sainted grandma!’
He lay and listened critically, for it was beautiful music and there was nothing he could do until Rogers came up and let him out. His eyes roved aimlessly, his fingers tapped soft little rhythms on the satin cushions. He crossed his legs idly. Through the glass lid he saw sunlight shooting through the French windows, dust particles dancing on it. It was a lovely blue day.
The sermon began.
The organ music quieted and a gentle voice said:
‘We are gathered together, those who loved and those who knew the deceased, to give him our homage and our due—’
‘Charlie, bless you, that’s your voice!’ Richard was delighted. ‘A mechanical funeral, by God. Organ music and lecture. And Charlie giving his own oration for himself!’
The soft voice said. ‘We who knew and loved him are grieved at the passing of—’
‘What was that?’ Richard raised himself, startled. He didn’t quite believe what he had heard. He repeated it to himself just the way he had heard it:
‘We who knew and loved him are grieved at the passing of Richard Braling.’
That’s what the voice had said.
‘Richard Braling,’ said the man in the coffin. ‘Why. I’m Richard Braling.’
A slip of the tongue, naturally. Merely a slip. Charlie had meant to say ‘Charles’ Braling. Certainly. Yes. Of course. Yes. Certainly. Yes. Naturally. Yes.
‘Richard was a fine man,’ said the voice, talking on. ‘We shall see no finer in our time.’
‘My name again!’
Richard began to move about uneasily in the coffin.
Why didn’t Rogers come?
It was hardly a mistake, using that name twice. Richard Braling. Richard Braling. We are gathered here. We shall miss—We are grieved. No finer man. No finer in our time. We are gathered here. The deceased. Richard Braling. Richard Braling.
Whirrrr. Spung!
Flowers! Six dozen bright blue, red, yellow, sun-brilliant flowers leaped up from behind the coffin on concealed springs!
The sweet odor of fresh-cut flowers filled the coffin. The flowers swayed gently before his amazed vision, tapping silently on the glass lid. Others sprang up until the coffin was banked with petals and color and sweet odors. Gardenias and dahlias and daffodils, trembling and shining.
‘Rogers!’
The sermon continued.
‘—Richard Braling, in his life, was a connoisseur of great and good things—’
The music sighed, rose and fell, distantly.
‘Richard Braling savored of life, as one savors of a rare wine, holding it upon the lips—’
A small panel in the side of the box flipped open. A swift bright metal arm snatched out. A needle stabbed Richard in the thorax, not very deeply. He screamed. The needle shot him full of a colored liquor before he could seize it. Then it popped back into a receptacle and the panel snapped shut.
‘Rogers!’
A growing numbness, Suddenly he could not move his fingers or his arms or turn his head. His legs were cold and limp.
‘Richard Braling loved beautiful things. Music. Flowers,’ said the voice.
‘Rogers!’
This time he did not scream it. He could only think it. His tongue was motionless in his anaesthetized mouth.
Another panel opened. Metal forceps issued forth on steel arms. His left wrist was pierced by a huge sucking needle.
His blood was being drained from his body.
He heard a little pump working somewhere.
‘—Richard Braling will be missed among us—’
The organ sobbed and murmured.
The flowers looked down upon him, nodding their bright-petalled heads.
Six candles, black and slender, rose up out of hidden receptacles, and stood behind the flowers, flickering and glowing.
Another pump started to work. While his blood drained out one side of his body, his right wrist was punctured, held, a needle shoved into it, and the second pump began to force formaldehyde into him.
Pump, pause, pump, pause, pump, pause, pump, pause.
The coffin moved.
A small motor popped and chugged. The room drifted by on either side of him. Little wheels revolved. No pallbearers were necessary. The flowers swayed as the casket moved gently out upon the terrace under a blue clear sky.
Pump, pause, Pump, pause.
‘Richard Braling will be missed—’
Sweet soft music.
Pump, pause.
‘Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last—’ Singing.
‘Braling, the gourmet—’
‘Ah, at last I have the secret of it all—’
Staring, staring, his eyes egg-blind, at the little card out of the corners of his eyes:
THE BRALING ECONOMY CASKET…
DIRECTIONS SIMPLY PLACE BODY IN COFFIN—AND MUSIC WILL START.
A tree swung by overhead. The coffin rolled gently through the garden, behind some bushes, carrying the voice and the music with it.
‘Now it is the time when we must consign this part of this man to the earth—’
Little shining spades leaped out of the sides of the casket.
They began to dig.
He saw the spades toss up dirt. The coffin settled. Bumped, settled, dug, bumped and settled, dug, bumped and settled again.
Pulse, pause, pulse, pause. Pump, pause.
pulse, pump, pause.
‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—’
The flowers shook and jolted. The box was deep. The music played.
The last thing Richard Braling saw was the spading arms of the Braling Economy Casket reaching up and pulling the hole in after it.
‘Richard Braling, Richard Braling, Richard Braling, Richard Braling, Richard Braling…’
The record was stuck.
Nobody minded. Nobody was listening.
The Crowd
Mr Spallner put his hands over his face.
There was the feeling of movement in space, the beautifully tortured scream, the impact and tumbling of the car with wall, through wall, over and down like a toy, and him hurled out of it. Then—silence.
The crowd came running. Faintly, where he lay, he heard them running. He could tell their ages and their sizes by the sound of their numerous feet over the summer grass and on the lined pavement, and over the asphalt street; and picking through the cluttered bricks to where his car hung half into the night sky, still spinning its wheels with a senseless centrifuge.
Where the crowd came from he didn’t know. He struggled to remain aware and then the crowd faces hemmed in upon him, hung over like the large glowing leaves of down-bent trees. They were a ring of shifting, compressing, changing faces over him, looking down, looking down, reading the time of his life or death by his face, making his face into a moon-dial, where the moon cast a shadow from his nose out upon his cheek to tell the time of breathing or not breathing any more ever.
How swiftly a crowd comes, he thought, like the iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere.
A siren. A police voice. Movement. Blood trickled from his lips and he was being moved into an ambulance. Someone said, ‘Is he dead?’ And someone else said, ‘No, he’s not dead.’ And a third person said, ‘He won’t die, he’s not going to die.’ And he saw the faces of the crowd beyond him in the night, and he knew by their expressions that he wouldn’t die. And that was strange. He saw a man’s face, thin, bright, pale: the man swallowed and bit his lips, very sick. There was a small woman, too, with red hair and too much red on her cheeks and lips. And a little boy with a freckled face. Others’ faces. An old man with a wrinkled upper lip, an old woman, with a mole upon her chin. They had all come from—where? Houses, cars, alleys, from the immediate and the accident-shocked world. Out of alleys and out of hotels and out of streetcars an
d seemingly out of nothing they came.
The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn’t put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now.
The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man’s agony by their frank curiosity.
The ambulance drove off. He sank back and their faces still stared into his face, even with his eyes shut.
The car wheels spun in his mind for days. One wheel, four wheels, spinning, spinning, and whirring, around and around.
He knew it was wrong. Something wrong with the wheels and the whole accident and the running of feet and the curiosity. The crowd faces mixed and spun into the wild rotation of the wheels.
He awoke.
Sunlight, a hospital room, a hand taking his pulse.
‘How do you feel?’ asked the doctor.
The wheels faded away. Mr Spallner looked around.
‘Fine—I guess.’
He tried to find words. About the accident. ‘Doctor?’
‘Yes?’
‘That crowd—was it last night?’
‘Two days ago. You’ve been here since Thursday. You’re all right, though. You’re doing fine. Don’t try and get up.’
‘That crowd. Something about wheels, too. Do accidents make people, well, a—little off?’
‘Temporarily, sometimes.’
He lay staring up at the doctor. ‘Does it hurt your time sense?’
‘Panic sometimes does.’
‘Makes a minute seem like an hour, or maybe an hour seem like a minute?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let me tell you then.’ He felt the bed under him, the sunlight on his face. ‘You’ll think I’m crazy. I was driving too fast, I know. I’m sorry now. I jumped the curb and hit that wall. I was hurt and numb, I know, but I still remember things. Mostly—the crowd.’ He waited a moment and then decided to go on, for he suddenly knew what it was that bothered him. ‘The crowd got there too quickly. Thirty seconds after the smash they were all standing over me and staring at me…it’s not right they should run that fast, so late at night…’
‘You only think it was thirty seconds,’ said the doctor. ‘It was probably three or four minutes. Your senses—’
‘Yeah, I know—my senses, the accident. But I was conscious! I remember one thing that puts it all together and makes it funny, God, so damned funny. The wheels of my car, upside down. The wheels were still spinning when the crowd got there!’
The doctor smiled.
The man in bed went on. ‘I’m positive! The wheels were spinning and spinning fast—the front wheels! Wheels don’t spin very long, friction cuts them down. And these were really spinning!’
‘You’re confused,’ said the doctor.
‘I’m not confused. That street was empty. Not a soul in sight. And then the accident and the wheels still spinning and all those faces over me, quick, in no time. And the way they looked down at me, I knew I wouldn’t die…’
‘Simple shock,’ said the doctor, walking away into the sunlight.
They released him from the hospital two weeks later. He rode home in a taxi. People had come to visit him during his two weeks on his back, and to all of them he had told his story, the accident, the spinning wheels, the crowd. They had all laughed with him concerning it, and passed it off.
He leaned forward and tapped on the taxi window.
‘What’s wrong?’
The cabbie looked back. ‘Sorry, boss. This is one helluva town to drive in. Got an accident up ahead. Want me to detour?’
‘Yes. No. No! Wait. Go ahead. Let’s—let’s take a look.’
The cab moved forward, honking.
‘Funny damn thing,’ said the cabbie. ‘Hey, you! Get that fleatrap out the way!’ Quieter. ‘Funny thing—more damn people. Nosy people.’
Mr Spallner looked down and watched his fingers tremble on his knee. ‘You noticed that, too?’
‘Sure,’ said the cabbie. ‘All the time. There’s always a crowd. You’d think it was their own mother got killed.’
‘They come running awfully fast,’ said the man in the back of the cab.
‘Same way with a fire or an explosion. Nobody around. Boom. Lotsa people around. I dunno.’
‘Ever seen an accident—at night?’
The cabbie nodded. ‘Sure. Don’t make no difference. There’s always a crowd.’
The wreck came in view. A body lay on the pavement. You knew there was a body even if you couldn’t see it. Because of the crowd. The crowd with its back toward him as he sat in the rear of the cab. With its back toward him. He opened the window and almost started to yell. But he didn’t have the nerve. If he yelled they might turn around.
And he was afraid to see their faces.
‘I seem to have a penchant for accidents,’ he said, in his office. It was late afternoon. His friend sat across the desk from him, listening. ‘I got out of the hospital this morning and first thing on the way home, we detoured around a wreck.’
‘Things run in cycles,’ said Morgan.
‘Let me tell you about my accident.’
‘I’ve heard it. Heard it all.’
‘But it was funny, you must admit.’
‘I must admit. Now how about a drink?’
They talked on for half an hour or more. All the while they talked, at the back of Spallner’s brain a small watch ticked, a watch that never needed winding. It was the memory of a few little things. Wheels and faces.
At about five-thirty there was a hard metal noise in the street. Morgan nodded and looked out and down. ‘What’d I tell you? Cycles. A truck and a cream-colored Cadillac. Yes, yes.’
Spallner walked to the window. He was very cold and as he stood there, he looked at his watch, at the small minute hand. One two three four five seconds—people running—eight nine ten eleven twelve—from all over, people came running—fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen seconds—more people, more cars, more horns blowing. Curiously distant, Spallner looked upon the scene as an explosion in reverse, the fragments of the detonation sucked back to the point of impulsion. Nineteen, twenty, twentyone seconds and the crowd was there. Spallner made a gesture down at them, wordless.
The crowd had gathered so fast.
He saw a woman’s body a moment before the crowd swallowed it up.
Morgan said, ‘You look lousy. Here. Finish your drink.’
‘I’m all right, I’m all right. Let me alone. I’m all right. Can you see those people? Can you see any of them? I wish we could see them closer.’
Morgan cried out. ‘Where in hell are you going?’
Spallner was out the door, Morgan after him, and down the stairs, as rapidly as possible. ‘Come along, and hurry.’
‘Take it easy, you’re not a well man!’
They walked out on to the street. Spallner pushed his way forward. He thought he saw a red-haired woman with too much red color on her cheeks and lips.
‘There!’ He turned wildly to Morgan. ‘Did you see her?’
‘See who?’
‘Damn it; she’s gone. The crowd closed in!’
The crowd was all around, breathing and looking and shuffling and mixing and mumbling and getting in the way when he tried to shove through. Evidently the red-haired woman had seen him coming and run off.
He saw another familiar face! A little freckled boy. But there are many freckled boys in the world. And, anyway, it was no use; before Spallner reached him, this little boy ran away and vanished among the people.
‘Is she dead?’ a voice asked. ‘Is she dead?’
‘She’s dying,’ someone else replied. ‘She’ll be dead before the ambulance arrives. They shouldn’t have moved her. They shouldn’t have moved her.’
> All the crowd faces—familiar, yet unfamiliar, bending over, looking down, looking down.
‘Hey, mister, stop pushing.’
‘Who you shovin’, buddy?’
Spallner came back out, and Morgan caught hold of him before he fell. ‘You damned fool. You’re still sick. Why in hell’d you have to come down here?’ Morgan demanded.
‘I don’t know, I really don’t. They moved her, Morgan, someone moved her. You should never move a traffic victim. It kills them. It kills them.’
‘Yeah. That’s the way with people. The idiots.’
Spallner arranged the newspaper clippings carefully.
Morgan looked at them. ‘What’s the idea? Ever since your accident you think every traffic scramble is part of you. What are these?’
‘Clippings of motor-car crackups, and photos. Look at them. Not at the cars,’ said Spallner, ‘but at the crowds around the cars.’ He pointed. ‘Here. Compare this photo of a wreck in the Wilshire District with one in Westwood. No resemblance. But now take this Westwood picture and align it with one taken in the Westwood District ten years ago.’ Again he motioned. ‘This woman is in both pictures.’
‘Coincidence. The woman happened to be there once in 1936, again in 1946.’
‘A coincidence once, maybe. But twelve times over a period of ten years, when the accidents occurred as much as three miles from one another, no. Here.’ He dealt out a dozen photographs. ‘She’s in all of these!’
‘Maybe she’s perverted.’
‘She’s more than that. How does she happen to be there so quickly after each accident? And why does she wear the same clothes in pictures taken over a period of a decade?’
‘I’ll be damned, so she does.’
‘And, last of all, why was she standing over me the night of my accident, two weeks ago?’
They had a drink. Morgan went over the files. ‘What’d you do, hire a clipping service while you were in the hospital to go back through the newspapers for you?’ Spallner nodded. Morgan sipped his drink. It was getting late. The street lights were coming on in the streets below the office. ‘What does all this add up to?’