She shook her head slowly, looking at the windows, the gray walls, the dark pictures on the walls. She tightened her hands. She started to open her mouth.
“I’ll think tonight,” he said. “I’ll stay up awhile. By morning I’ll know what to do.”
“Be careful with the children. It wouldn’t be good, their knowing all this.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Let’s not talk anymore, then. I’ll finish dinner!” She jumped up and put her hands to her face and then looked at her hands and at the sunlight in the windows. “Why, the kids’ll be home any minute.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
“You got to eat, you just got to keep on going.” She hurried off, leaving him alone in the middle of a room where not a breeze stirred the curtains, and only the gray ceiling hung over him with a lonely bulb unlit in it, like an old moon in a sky. He was quiet. He massaged his face with both hands. He got up and stood alone in the dining-room door and walked forward and felt himself sit down and remain seated in a dining-room chair. He saw his hands spread on the white tablecloth, open and empty.
“All afternoon,” he said, “I’ve thought.”
She moved through the kitchen, rattling silverware, crashing pans against the silence that was everywhere.
“Wondering,” he said, “if you put the bodies in the trucks lengthwise or endwise, with the heads on the right, or the feet on the right. Men and women together, or separated? Children in one truck, or mixed with men and women? Dogs in special trucks, or just let them lie? Wondering how many bodies one garbage truck can hold. And wondering if you stack them on top of each other and finally knowing you must just have to. I can’t figure it.
I can’t work it out. I try, but there’s no guessing, no guessing at all how many you could stack in one single truck.”
He sat thinking of how it was late in the day at his work, with the truck full and the canvas pulled over the great bulk of garbage so the bulk shaped the canvas in an uneven mound. And how it was if you suddenly pulled the canvas back and looked in. And for a few seconds you saw the white things like macaroni or noodles, only the white things were alive and boiling up, millions of them.
And when the white things felt the hot sun on them they simmered down and burrowed and were gone in the lettuce and the old ground beef and the coffee grounds and the heads of white fish. After ten seconds of sunlight the white things that looked like noodles or macaroni were gone and the great bulk of garbage silent and not moving, and you drew the canvas over the bulk and looked at how the canvas folded unevenly over the hidden collection, and underneath you knew it was dark again, and things beginning to move as they must always move when things get dark again.
He was still sitting there in the empty room when the front door of the apartment burst wide. His son and daughter rushed in, laughing, and saw him sitting there, and stopped.
Their mother ran to the kitchen door, held to the edge of it quickly, and stared at her family. They saw her face and they heard her voice:
“Sit down, children, sit down!” She lifted one hand and pushed it toward them. “You’re just in time.”
The Smile
In the town square the queue had formed at five in the morning, while cocks were crowing far out in the rimed country and there were no fires. All about, among the ruined buildings, bits of mist had clung at first, but now with the new light of seven o’clock it was beginning to disperse. Down the road, in twos and threes, more people were gathering in for the day of marketing, the day of festival.
The small boy stood immediately behind two men who had been talking loudly in the clear air, and all of the sounds they made seemed twice as loud because of the cold. The small boy stomped his feet and blew on his red, chapped hands, and looked up at the soiled gunny-sack clothing of the men, and down the long line of men and women ahead.
“Here, boy, what’re you doing out so early?” said the man behind him.
“Got my place in line, I have,” said the boy.
“Whyn’t you run off, give your place to someone who appreciates?”
“Leave the boy alone,” said the man ahead, suddenly turning.
“I was joking.” The man behind put his hand on the boy’s head. The boy shook it away coldly. “I just thought it strange, a boy out of bed so early.”
“This boy’s an appreciator of arts, I’ll have you know,” said the boy’s defender, a man named Grigsby. “What’s your name, lad?”
“Tom.”
“Tom here is going to spit clean and true, right, Tom?”
“I sure am!”
Laughter passed down the line.
A man was selling cracked cups of hot coffee up ahead. Tom looked and saw the little hot fire and the brew bubbling in a rusty pan. It wasn’t really coffee. It was made from some berry that grew on the meadowlands beyond town, and it sold a penny a cup to warm their stomachs; but not many were buying, not many had the wealth.
TOM STARED AHEAD to the place where the line ended, beyond a bombed-out stone wall.
“They say she smiles,” said the boy.
“Aye, she does,” said Grigsby.
“They say she’s made of oil and canvas, and she’s four centuries old.”
“Maybe more. Nobody knows what year this is, to be sure.”
“It’s 2251!”
“That’s what they say. Liars. Could be 3000 or 5000 for all we know, things were in a fearful mess there for a while. All we got now is bits and pieces.”
They shuffled along the cold stones of the street.
“How much longer before we see her?” asked Tom, uneasily.
“Oh, a few minutes, boy. They got her set up with four brass poles and velvet rope, all fancy, to keep people back. Now mind, no rocks, Tom, they don’t allow rocks thrown at her.”
“Yes, sir.”
They shuffled on in the early morning which grew late, and the sun rose into the heavens bringing heat with it which made the men shed their grimy coats and greasy hats.
“Why’re we all here in line?” asked Tom at last. “Why’re we all here to spit?”
Grigsby did not glance down at him, but judged the sun. “Well, Tom, there’s lots of reasons.” He reached absently for a pocket that was long gone, for a cigarette that wasn’t there. Tom had seen the gesture a million times. “Tom, it has to do with hate. Hate for everything in the Past. I ask you, Tom, how did we get in such a state, cities all junk, roads like jigsaws from bombs, and half the cornfields glowing with radioactivity at night? Ain’t that a lousy stew, I ask you?”
“Yes, sir. I guess so.”
“It’s this way, Tom. You hate whatever it was that got you all knocked down and ruined. That’s human nature. Unthinking, maybe, but human nature anyway.”
“There’s hardly nobody or nothing we don’t hate,” said Tom.
“Right! The whole blooming kaboodle of them people in the Past who run the world. So here we are on a Thursday morning with our guts plastered to our spines, cold, live in caves and such, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t nothing except have our festivals, Tom, our festivals.”
AND TOM THOUGHT OF THE FESTIVALS in the past few years. The year they tore up all the books in the square and burned them and everyone was drunk and laughing. And the festival of science a month ago when they dragged in the last motor car and picked lots and each lucky man who won was allowed one smash of a sledge-hammer at the car.
“Do I remember that, Tom? Do I remember? Why, I got to smash the front window, the window, you hear? My god, it made a lovely sound! Crash!”
Tom could hear the glass falling in glittering heaps.
“And Bill Henderson, he got to bash the engine. Oh, he did a smart job of it, with great efficiency. Wham!”
But best of all, recalled Grigsby, there was the time they smashed a factory that was still trying to turn out airplanes.
“Lord, did we feel good blowing it up,” said Grigsby. “And then we found that newspaper plant and the munitions depot and exploded them together. Do you understand, Tom?”
Tom puzzled over it. “I guess.”
It was high noon. Now the odors of the ruined city stank on the hot air and things crawled among the tumbled buildings.
“Won’t it ever come back, mister?”
“What, civilization? Nobody wants it. Not me!”
“I could stand a bit of it,” said the man behind another man. “There were a few spots of beauty in it.”
“Don’t worry your heads,” shouted Grigsby. “There’s no room for that, either.”
“Ah,” said the man behind the man. “Someone’ll come along some day with imagination and patch it up. Mark my words. Someone with a heart.”
“No,” said Grigsby.
“I say yes. Someone with a soul for pretty things. Might give us back a kind of limited sort of civilization, the kind we could live in in peace.”
“First thing you know there’s war!”
“But maybe next time it’d be different.”
At last they stood in the main square. A man on horseback was riding from the distance into the town. He had a piece of paper in his
