I Sing the Body Electric (43 page)
Read I Sing the Body Electric Online
Authors: Ray Bradbury
At one minute to twelve, Mr. Binns, over the intercom, told them to line up by their desks. They lined up. They waited, swaying. The temperature stood at ninety-seven. Slowly, Binns began to stalk down the long line. A white-hot sizzle of invisible flies hung about him.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “You all know there is a recession, no matter how happily the President of the United States put it. I would rather knife you in the stomach than stab you in the back. Now, as I move down the line, I will nod and whisper, âYou.' To those of you who hear this single word, turn, clean out your desks, and be gone. Four weeks' severance pay awaits you on the way out. Hold on! Someone's missing!”
“Old Ned Amminger,” said Will Morgan, and bit his tongue.
“
Old
Ned?” said Mr. Binns, glaring. “Old?
Old?
”
Mr. Binns and Ned Amminger were exactly the same age.
Mr. Binns waited, ticking.
“Ned,” said Will Morgan, strangling on self-curses, “should be hereâ”
“Now,” said a voice.
They all turned.
At the far end of the line, in the door, stood Old Ned or Ned Amminger. He looked at the assembly of lost souls, read destruction in Binn's face, flinched, but then slunk into line next to Will Morgan.
“All right,” said Binns. “Here goes.”
He began to move, whisper, move, whisper, move, whisper. Two people, four, then six turned to clean out their desks.
Will Morgan took a deep breath, held it, waited.
Binns came to a full stop in front of him.
Don't say it? thought Morgan. Don't!
“You,” whispered Binns.
Morgan spun about and caught hold of his heaving desk.
You
, the word cracked in his head,
you!
Binns stepped to confront Ned Amminger.
“Well,
old
Ned,” he said.
Morgan, eyes shut, thought: Say it, say it to him, you're fired, Ned,
fired!
“Old Ned,” said Binns, lovingly.
Morgan shrank at the strange, the friendly, the sweet sound of Binns's voice.
An idle South Seas wind passed softly on the air. Morgan blinked and stood-up, sniffing. The sun-blasted room was filled with scent of surf and cool white sand.
“Ned, why dear old Ned,” said Mr. Binns, gently.
Stunned, Will Morgan waited. I am mad, he thought.
“Ned,” said Mr. Binns, gently. “Stay with us. Stay on.”
Then, swiftly: “That's all, everyone. Lunch!”
And Binns was gone and the wounded and dying were leaving the field. And Will Morgan turned at last to look full at Old Ned Amminger, thinking, Why, God,
why?
And got his answerâ¦
Ned Amminger stood there, not old, not young, but somehow in-between. And he was not the Ned Amminger who had leaned crazily out a hot train window last midnight or shambled in Washington Square at four in the morning.
This Ned Amminger stood quietly, as if hearing far green country sounds, wind and leaves and an amiable time which wandered in a fresh lake breeze.
The perspiration had dried on his fresh pink face. His eyes were not bloodshot but steady, blue, and quiet. He was an island oasis in this dead and unmoving sea of desks and typewriters which might start up and scream like electric insects. He stood watching the walking-dead depart. And he cared not. He was kept in a splendid and beautiful isolation within his own calm cool beautiful skin.
“No!” cried Will Morgan, and fled.
He didn't know where he was going until he found himself in the men's room frantically digging in the wastebasket.
He found what he knew he would find, a small bottle with the label:
DRINK ENTIRE: AGAINST THE MADNESS OF CROWDS
Trembling, he uncorked it. There was the merest cold blue drop left inside. Swaying by the shut hot window, he tapped it to his tongue.
In the instant, his body felt as if he had leaped into a tidal wave of coolness. His breath gusted out in a fount of crushed and savored clover.
He gripped the bottle so hard it broke. He gasped, watching the blood.
The door opened. Ned Amminger stood there, looking in. He stayed only a moment, then turned and went out. The door shut.
A few moments later, Morgan, with the junk from his desk rattling in his briefcase, went down in the elevator.
Stepping out, he turned to thank the operator.
His breath must have touched the operator's face.
The operator smiled.
A wild, an incomprehensible, a loving, a
beautiful
smile!
The lights were out at midnight in the little alley, in the little shop. There was no sign in the window which said
MELISSA TOAD, WITCH
. There were no bottles.
He beat on the door for a full five minutes, to no answer. He kicked the door for another two minutes.
And at last, with a sigh, not wanting to, the door opened.
A very tired voice said: “Come in.”
Inside he found the air only slightly cool. The huge ice slab, in which he had seen the phantom shape of a lovely woman, had dwindled, had lost a good half of its weight, and now was dripping steadily to ruin.
Somewhere in the darkness, the woman waited for him. But he sensed that she was clothed now, dressed and packed, ready to leave. He opened his mouth to cry out, to reach, but her voice stopped him:
“I warned you. You're too late.”
“It's never too late!” he said.
“Last night it wouldn't have been. But in the last twenty hours, the last little thread snapped in you. I feel. I know. I tell. It's gone, gone, gone.”
“What's gone, God damn it?”
“Why, your soul, of course. Gone. Eaten up. Digested. Vanished. You're empty. Nothing there.”
He saw her hand reach out of darkness. It touched at his chest. Perhaps he imagined that her fingers passed through his ribs to probe about his lights, his lungs, his beating and pitiful heart.
“Oh, yes, gone,” she mourned. “How sad. The city unwrapped you like a candy bar and ate you all up. You're nothing but a dusty milk bottle left on a tenement porch, a spider building a nest across the top. Traffic din pounded your marrow to dust. Subway sucked your breath like a cat sucks the soul of a babe. Vacuum cleaners got your brain. Alcohol dissolved the rest. Typewriters and computers took your final dregs in and out their tripes, printed you on paper, punched you in confettis, threw you down a sewer vent. TV scribbled you in nervous
tics on old ghost screens. Your final bones will be carried off by a big angry bulldog crosstown bus holding you munched in its big rubber-lipped mouth door.”
“No!” he cried. “I've changed my mind! Marry me! Marryâ”
His voice cracked the ice tomb. It shattered on the floor behind him. The shape of the beautiful woman melted into the floor. Spinning about, he plunged into darkness.
He fell against the wall just as a panel slammed shut and locked.
It was no use screaming. He was alone.
At dusk in July, a year later, in the subway, he saw Ned Amminger for the first time in 365 days.
In all the grind and ricochet and pour of fiery lava as trains banged through, taking a billion souls to hell, Amminger stood as cool as mint leaves in green rain. Around him wax people melted. He waded in his own private trout stream.
“Ned!” cried Will Morgan, running up to seize his hand and pump it. “Ned, Ned! The best friend I ever had!”
“Yes, that's true, isn't it?” said young Ned, smiling.
And oh God, how true it was! Dear Ned, fine Ned, friend of a lifetime! Breathe upon me, Ned! Give me your life's breath!
“You're president of the company, Ned! I heard!”
“Yes. Come along home for a drink?”
In the raging heat, a vapor of iced lemonade rose from his creamy fresh suit as they looked for a cab. In all the curses, yells, horns, Ned raised his hand.
A cab pulled up. They drove in serenity.
At the apartment house, in the dusk, a man with a gun stepped from the shadows.
“Give me everything,” he said.
“Later,” said Ned, smiling, breathing a scent of fresh summer apples upon the man.
“Later.” The man stepped back to let them pass. “Later.”
On the way up in the elevator, Ned said, “Did you know I'm married? Almost a year. Fine wife.”
“Is she,” said Will Morgan, and stopped, “â¦beautiful?”
“Oh, yes. You'll love her. You'll love the apartment.”
Yes, thought Morgan; a green glade, crystal chimes, cool grass for a carpet. I know, I know.
They stepped out into an apartment that was indeed a tropic isle. Young Ned poured huge goblets of iced champagne.
“What shall we drink to?”
“To you, Ned. To your wife. To me. To midnight, tonight.”
“Why midnight?”
“When I go back down to that man who is waiting downstairs with his gun. That man you said âlater' to. And he agreed âlater.' I'll be there alone with him. Funny, ridiculous, funny. And
my
breath just ordinary breath, not smelling of melons or pears. And him waiting all those long hours with his sweaty gun, irritable with heat. What a grand joke. Well ⦠a toast?”
“A toast!”
They drank.
At which moment, the wife entered. She heard each of them laughing in a different way, and joined in their laughter.
But her eyes, when she looked at Will Morgan, suddenly filled with tears.
And he knew whom she was weeping for.
CANTATA CELEBRATING THE EIGHTH DAY OF CREATION AND THE PROMISE OF THE NINTH.
A
Voice spoke in the dark,
And there was Light.
And summoned up by Light upon the Earth
The creatures swam
And moved unto the land
And lived in garden wilderness;
All this, we know.
The Seven Days are written in our blood
With hand of Fire.
And now we children of the seven eternal days
Inheritors of this, the Eighth Day of God,
The long Eighth Day of Man,
Stand upright in a weather of Time
In downfell snow
And hear the birds of morning
And much want wings
And look upon the beckonings of stars,
And need their fire.
In this time of Christmas,
We celebrate the Eighth Day of Man,
The Eighth Day of God,
Two billion years unending
From the first sunrise on Earth
To the last sunrise at our Going Away.
And the Ninth Day of the History of God
And the flesh of God which names itself Man
Will be spent on wings of fire
Claimed from sun and far burnings of sun starlight.
And the Ninth Day's sunrise
Will show us forth in light and wild surmise
Upon an even further shore.
We seek new Gardens there to know ourselves.
We seek new Wilderness,
And send us forth in wandering search.
Apollo's missions move, and Christus seek,
And wonder as we look among the stars
Did He know these?
In some far universal Deep
Did He tread Space
And visit worlds beyond our blood-warm dreaming?
Did He come down on lonely shore by sea
Not unlike Galilee
And are there Mangers on far worlds that knew His light?
And Virgins?
Sweet Pronouncements?
Annunciations? Visitations from angelic hosts?
And, shivering vast light among ten billion lights,
Was there some Star much like the star at Bethlehem
That struck the sight with awe and revelation
Upon a cold and most strange morn?
On worlds gone wandering and lost from this
Did Wise Men gather in the dawn
In cloudy steams of Beast
Within a place of straw now quickened to a Shrine
To look upon a stranger Child than ours?
How many stars of Bethlehem burnt bright
Beyond Orion or Centauri's blinding arc?
How many miracles of birth all innocent
Have blessed those worlds?
Does Herod tremble there
In dread facsimile of our dark and murderous King?
Does that mad keeper of an unimaginable realm
Send stranger soldiers forth
To slaughter down the Innocents
Of lands beyond the Horsehead Nebula?
It must be so.
For in this time of Christmas
In the long Day totalling up to Eight,
We see the light, we know the dark;
And creatures lifted, born, thrust free of so much night
No matter what the world or time or circumstance
Must
love the light,
So, children of all lost unnumbered suns
Must fear the dark
Which mingles in a shadowing-forth on air.
And swarms the blood.
No matter what the color, shape, or size
Of beings who keep souls like breathing coals
In long midnights,
They
must
need saving of themselves.
So on far worlds in snowfalls deep and clear
Imagine how the rounding out of some dark year
Might celebrate with birthing one miraculous child!
A child?
Born in Andromeda's out-swept mysteries?
Then count its hands, its fingers,
Eyes, and most incredible holy limbs!
The sum of each?
No matter. Cease.
Let Child be fire as blue as water under Moon.
Let Child sport free in tides with human-seeming fish.
Let ink of octopi inhabit blood
Let skin take acid rains of chemistry
All falling down in nightmare storms of cleansing burn.
Christ wanders in the Universe
A flesh of stars,
He takes on creature shapes
To suit the mildest elements,
He dresses him in flesh beyond our ken.
There He walks, glides, flies, shambling of strangeness.
Here He walks Men.
Among the ten trillion beams
A billion Bible scrolls are scored
In hieroglyphs among God's amplitudes of worlds;
In alphabet multitudinous
Tongues which are not quite tongues
Sigh, sibilate, wonder, cry:
As Christ comes manifest from a thunder-crimsoned sky.
He walks upon the molecules of seas
All boiling stews of beast
All maddened broth and brew and rising up of yeast.
There Christ by many names is known.
We call him thus.
They call him otherwise.
His name on any mouth would be a sweet surprise.
He comes with gifts for all,
Here: wine and bread.
There: nameless foods
At breakfasts where the morsels fall from stars
And Last Suppers are doled forth with stuff of dreams.
So sit they there in times before the Man is crucified.
Here He has long been dead.
There He has not yet died.
Yet, still unsure, and all being doubt,
Much frightened man on Earth does cast about
And clothe himself in steel
And borrow fire
And himself in the great glass of the careless Void admire.
Man builds him rockets
And on thunder strides
In humble goings-forth
And most understandable prides.
Fearing that all else slumbers,
That ten billion worlds lie still,
We, grateful for the Prize and benefit of life,
Go to offer bread and harvest wine;
The blood and flesh of Him we Will
To other stars and worlds about those stars.
We cargo holy flesh
On stranger visitations,
Send forth angelic hosts,
To farflung worlds
To tell our walking on the waters of deep Space,
Arrivals, swift departures
Of most miraculous man
Who, God fuse-locked in every cell
Beats holy blood
And treads the tidal flood
And ocean shore of Universe,
A miracle of fish
We father, gather, build and strew
In metals to the winds
That circle Earth and wander Night beyond all Nights.
We soar, all arch-angelic, fire-sustained
In vast cathedral, acry apse, in domeless vault
Of constellations all blind dazzlement.
Christ is not dead
Nor does God sleep
While waking Man
Goes striding on the Deep
To birth ourselves anew
And love rebirth
From fear of straying long
On outworn Earth.
One harvest in, we broadcast seed for further reaping.
Thus ending Death
And Night,
And Time's demise,
And senseless weeping.
We seek for mangers in the Pleides
Where man the god-fleshed wandering babe
May lay him down with such as these
Who once drew round and worshipped innocence.
New Mangers lie waiting!
New Wise men Descry
Our hosts of machineries
Which write immortal life
And sign it God!
Down, down Alien skies.
And flown and gone, arrived and bedded safe to sleep
Upon some winters morning deep
Ten billion years of light
From where we stand us now and sing,
There will be time to cry eternal gratitudes
Time to know and see and love the Gift of Life itself,
Always diminished,
Always restored,
Out of one hand and into the other
Of the Lord.
Then wake we in that far lost
Nightmare keep of Beast
And see our star recelebrated in an East
Beyond all Easts.
Beyond a snowdrift sifting down of stars.
In this time of Christmas
Think on that Morn ahead!
For this let all your fears, your cries,
Your tears, your blood and prayers be shed!
All numb and wild one day
You shall be reborn
And hear the Trump break forth from rocket-trembled air
All humbled, all shorn
Of pride, but free of despair.
Now listen! Now hear!
It is the Ninth Day's morn!
Christ is risen!
God survives!
Gather, Universe!
Look, ye stars!
In the exultant countries of Space
In a sudden simple pasture
Far beyond Andromeda!
O Glory, Glory, a New Christmas
Torn
From the very pitch and rim of Death,
Snatched from his universal grip,
His teeth, his most cold breath!
Under a most strange sun
O Christ, O God,
O man breathed out of most incredible stuffs.
You are the Savior's Savior,
God's pulse and heart companion,
You! The Host
He
lifts
On high to consecrate;
His dear need to know and touch and cry wonders
At Himself.
In this time of Christmas
Prepare
In this holy time
Know yourself most rare!
Beyond the vast Abyss
See those men grown Wise
Who gather with their gifts
Which are but Life!
And Life that knows no end.
Behold the rockets, more than chaff, on air,
All seed that save a holy seed
And cast it everywhere in mindless Dark.
In this time of Christmas
This holy time of Christmas,
Like Him, you are God's son!
One Son? Many?
All are gathered now to One
And will wake cradled in Beast-summer breath
That warms the sleeping child to life eternal.
You must go there.
In the long winter of Space
And lie you down in grateful innocence
At last to sleep.
O New Christmas,
O God, far-motioning.
O Christ-of-many-fleshed made one,
Leave Earth!
God Himself cries out.
He Goes to Prepare the Way
For your rebirth
In a new time of Christmas,
A holy time of Christmas,
This New Time of Christmas,
From all
this
stay?
No, Man. You must not linger, wonder.
No, Christ. You must not pause.
Now.
Now.
It is the Time of Going Away.
Arise, and go.
Be born. Be born.
Welcome the morning of the Ninth Day.
It is the Time of Going away.
Praise God for this Annunciation!
Give praise,
Rejoice!
For the time of Christmas
And the Ninth Day,
Which is Forever's Celebration!