Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (20 page)

 
          
I
t was an afternoon of rain, and lamps
lighted against the gray. For a long while the two sisters had been in the
dining-room. One of them, Juliet, embroidered tablecloths; the younger, Anna,
sat quietly on the window seat, staring out at the dark street and the dark
sky.

 
          
Anna
kept her brow pressed against the pane, but her lips moved and after reflecting
a long moment, she said, “I never thought of that before.”

 
          
“Of
what?” asked
Juliet.

 
          
“It
just came to me. There’s actually a city under a city.
A dead
city, right here, right under our feet.”

 
          
Juliet
poked her needle in and out the white cloth. “Come away from the window. That
rain’s done something to you.”

 
          
“No, really.
Didn’t you ever think of the cisterns before?
They’re all through the town, there’s one for every street, and you can walk in
them without bumping your head, and they go everywhere and finally go down to
the sea,” said Anna, fascinated with the rain on the asphalt pavement out there
and the rain falling from the sky and vanishing down the gratings at each
corner of the distant intersection. “Wouldn’t you like to live in a cistern?”

 
          
“I
would not!”

 
          
“But wouldn’t it be fun—I mean, very secret?
To live in the
cistern and peek up at people through the slots and see them and them not see
you? Like when you were a child and played hide-and-seek and nobody found you,
and there you were in their midst all the time, all sheltered and hidden and
warm and excited. I’d like that. That’s what it must be like to live in the
cistern.”

 
          
Juliet
looked slowly up from her work. “You
are
my sister, aren’t you, Anna? You
were
born, weren’t you? Sometimes, the way you talk, I think Mother found you under
a tree one day and brought you home and planted you in a pot and grew you to
this size and there you are, and you’ll never change.”

 
          
Anna
didn’t reply, so Juliet went back to her needle. There was no color in the
room; neither of the two sisters added any color to it. Anna held her head to
the window for five minutes. Then she looked way off into the distance and
said, “I guess you’d call it a dream. While I’ve been here, the last hour, I
mean.
Thinking.
Yes, Juliet, it was a dream.”

 
          
Now
it was Juliet’s turn not to answer.

 
          
Anna
whispered. “All this water put me to sleep a while, I guess, and then I began
to think about the rain and where it came from and where it went and how it
went down those little slots in the curb, and then I thought about deep under,
and suddenly there
they
were. A
man .
 . . and a woman. Down in that cistern, under
the road.”

 
          
“What
would they be doing there?” asked Juliet.

 
          
Anna
said, “Must they have a reason?”

 
          
“No,
not if they’re insane, no,” said Juliet. “In that case no reasons are
necessary. There they are in their cistern, and let them stay.”

 
          
“But
they aren’t just in the cistern,” said Anna, knowingly, her head to one side,
her eyes moving under the half-down lids. “No, they’re in love, these two.”

 
          
“For
heaven’s sake,” said Juliet, “did love make them crawl down there?”

 
          
“No,
they’ve been there for years and years,” said Anna.

 
          
“You
can’t tell me they’ve been in that cistern for years, living together,”
protested Juliet.

 
          
“Did
I say they were alive?” asked Anna, surprised.
“Oh, but no.
They’re dead.”

 
          
The
rain scrambled in wild, pushing pellets down the window. Drops came and joined
with others and made streaks.

 
          
“Oh,”
said Juliet.

 
          
“Yes,”
said Anna, pleasantly.
“Dead.
He’s dead and she’s
dead.” This seemed to satisfy her; it was a nice discovery, and she was proud
of it. “He looks like a very lonely man who never traveled in all his life.”

 
          
“How
do you know?”

 
          
“He
looks like the kind of man who never traveled but wanted to. You know by his
eyes.”

 
          
“You
know what he looks like, then?”

 
          
“Yes.
Very ill and very handsome.
You know how it is with a
man made handsome by illness? Illness brings out the bones in the face.”

 
          
“And
he’s dead?” asked the older sister.

 
          
“For
five years.” Anna talked softly, with her eyelids rising and falling, as if she
were about to tell a long story and knew it and wanted to work into it slowly,
and then faster and then faster, until the very momentum of the story would
carry her on, with her eyes wide and her lips parted. But now it was slowly,
with only a slight fever to the telling. “Five years ago this man was walking
along a street and he knew he’d been walking the same street on many nights and
he’d go on walking it, so he came to a manhole cover, one of those big iron
waffles in the center of the street, and he heard the river rushing under his
feet, under the metal cover, rushing toward the sea.” Anna put out her right
hand. “And he bent slowly and lifted up the cistern lid and looked down at the
rushing foam and the water, and he thought of someone he wanted to love and
couldn’t, and then he swung himself onto the iron rungs and walked down them
until he was all gone. . . .”

 
          
“And
what about her?” asked Juliet, busy. “When’d she die?”

 
          
“I’m
not sure. She’s new. She’s just dead, now. But she is dead.
Beautifully,
beautifully dead.”
Anna admired the image she had in her mind. “It takes
death to make a woman really beautiful, and it takes death by drowning to make
her most beautiful of all. Then all the stiffness is taken out of
her,
and her hair hangs up on the water like a drift of
smoke.” She nodded her head, amusedly. “All the schools and etiquettes and
teachings in the world can’t make a woman move with this dreamy ease, supple
and
ripply
and fine.” Anna tried to show how fine,
how
ripply
, how graceful, with her broad, coarse
hand.

 
          
“He’d
been waiting for her, for five years. But she hadn’t known where he was till
now. So there they are, and will be, from now on. . . . In the
rainy season they’ll live. But in the
dry seasons—that’s
sometimes months—they’ll have long rest periods, they’ll lie in little hidden
niches, like those Japanese water flowers, all dry and compact and old and
quiet.”

 
          
Juliet
got up and turned on yet another little lamp in the corner of the dining-room.
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about it.”

 
          
Anna
laughed. “But let me tell you about how it starts, how they come back to life.
I’ve got it all worked out.” She bent forward, held onto her knees, staring at
the street and the rain and the cistern mouths. “There they are, down under,
dry and quiet, and up above the sky gets electrical and powdery.” She threw
back her dull, graying hair with one hand. “At first
all the
upper world is pellets. Then there’s lightning and then thunder and the dry
season is over, and the little pellets run along the gutters and get big and
fall into the drains. They take gum wrappers and theater tickets with them, and
bus transfers!”

 
          
“Come
away from that window, now.”

 
          
Anna
made a square with her hands and imagined things. “I know just what it’s like
under the pavement, in the big square cistern. It’s huge. It’s all empty from
the weeks with nothing but sunshine. It echoes if you talk. The only sound you
can hear standing down there is an auto passing above.
Far up
above.
The whole cistern is like a dry, hollow camel bone in a desert,
waiting.”

 
          
She
lifted her hand, pointing, as if she herself were down in the cistern, waiting.
“Now, a little trickle.
It comes down on the floor.
It’s like something was hurt and bleeding up in the outer world. There’s some
thunder! Or was it a truck going by?”

 
          
She
spoke a little more rapidly now, but held her body relaxed against the window,
breathing out, and in the next words: “It seeps down. Then, into all the other
hollows come other seepages.
Little twines and snakes.
Tobacco-stained water.
Then it moves. It joins others.
It makes snakes and then one big constrictor which rolls along on the flat,
papered floor. From everywhere, from the north and south, from other streets,
other streams come and they join and make one hissing and shining coil. And the
water writhes into those two little dry niches I told you about. It rises
slowly around those two, the man and the woman, lying there like Japanese flowers.”

 
          
She
clasped her hands, slowly, working finger into finger, interlacing.

 
          
“The
water soaks into them. First, it lifts the woman’s hand.
In a
little move.
Her hand’s the only live part of her. Then her arm lifts
and one foot. And her
hair .
 . .” she touched
her own hair as it hung about her shoulders “. . . unloosens and
opens out like a flower in the water. Her shut eyelids are
blue. . . .”

 
          
The
room got darker, Juliet sewed on, and Anna talked and told all she saw in her
mind. She told how the water rose and took the woman with it, unfolding her out
and loosening her and standing her full upright in the cistern. “The water is
interested in the woman, and she lets it have its way. After a long time of
lying still, she’s ready to live again, any life the water wants her to have.”

 
          
Somewhere
else, the man stood up in the water also. And Anna told of that, and how the
water carried him slowly, drifting, and her, drifting, until they met each
other. “The water opens their eyes. Now they can see but not see each other.
They circle, not touching yet.” Anna made a little move of her head, eyes
closed. “They watch each other. They glow with some kind of phosphorus. They
smile. . . . They— touch hands.”

 
          
At
last Juliet, stiffening, put down her sewing and stared at her sister, across
the gray, rain-silent room.

 
          
“Anna!”

 
          
“The
tide—makes them touch. The tide comes and puts them together. It’s a perfect
kind of love, with no ego to it, only two bodies, moved by the water, which
makes it clean and all right. It’s not wicked, this way.”