“You think about a lot of things for a girl,” said Montag, looking over at her.
“I have to. I have so much time to think. I never watch TV or go to the races or the fun parks or any of that. So I have time to think lots of crazy things. Have you noticed the elongated billboards in the country, two hundred feet long. Did you know that once those billboards were only 25 feet long? But cars started going by them so swiftly they had to stretch them out so they could be seen?”
“I didn’t know that.” Montag laughed.
“I bet I know something else you don’t know,” she said.
“What?”
“There’s dew on the grass in the morning.”
“Is there?” He couldn’t remember, and it suddenly frightened him.
“And there’s a man in the moon if you look.”
He had never looked. His heart began to beat rapidly.
They walked silently from there on. When they reached her house the lights were all on, it was the only house on the street with bright lights.
“What’s going on?” said Montag. He had never seen that many lights.
“Oh just my mother and father and my uncle and aunt. They’re sitting around talking. It’s like being a pedestrian, only rarer. Come over some time and try the water.”
“But what do you talk about?”
She laughed at this and said good night and was gone.
At three o’clock in the morning he got out of bed and looked out the window. The moon was rising and there was a man in the moon, and upon the broad lawn, a million jewels of dew sparkled and glittered. “I’ll be damned,” he said, and went back to bed.
He saw Clarisse many afternoons sitting on her green lawn, studying the autumn leaves, or returning from the woods with wild flowers, or looking at the sky, even while it was raining.
“Isn’t it nice?” she said.
“What?”
“The rain, of course.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Believe me, it is nice.”
He always laughed embarrassedly, whether at her, or at himself, he was never certain. “I believe you.”
“Do you really? Do you ever smell old leaves? Don’t they smell like cinnamon.”
“Well—”
“Here, smell.”
“Why, it is cinnamon, yes!”
She gazed at him with her clear grey eyes. “My gosh, you don’t really know very much do you.” It was not unkind, but concerned with him.
“I don’t suppose any of us do.”
“I do,” she said. “Because I’ve time to look.”
“Don’t you attend school?”
“Oh, no, they say I’m anti-social. I don’t mix. And the yelling extrovert is the thing this season, you know.”
“It’s been a long season,” observed Mr. Montag, and stood shocked at his own perception.
“Then you’ve noticed?”
“Where are your friends?” he asked.
“I haven’t any.”
“None?”
“No. That’s supposed to mean I’m abnormal. But they’re always packed around the TV, or rushing in cars, or shouting or hurting each other. Do you notice how people hurt people nowadays?”
“You sound ancient.”
“I am. I know about rain. That makes me ancient to them. They kill each other. It didn’t used to be that way, did it? Children killing each other all the time. Four of my friends have been shot in the past year. I’m afraid of them.”
“Maybe it was always this way.”
“My father says no, says his grandfather remembers when children didn’t kill each other, when children were seen and not heard. But that was a long time ago when they had discipline. When they had responsibility. Do you know, I’m disciplined. I’m beat when I need it. And I’ve responsibility, I tend to the whole house three days a week.”
“And you know about rain,” said Mr. Montag.
“Yes. It tastes good if you lean back and open your mouth. Go on!”
He leaned back and gaped.
“Why,” he said, “it’s wine!”
THAT HAD NOT BEEN THE END OF IT. The girl, while only 16, was always about, it seemed, and he caught himself looking for her. She was the only one who had ever given him the dandelion test.
“It proves you’re in love or not.
That was the day he knew he didn’t love Mildred.
Clarisse passed the dandelion under his chin.
“Oh, you’re not in love with anyone. What a shame!”
And he thought, when did I stop loving Mildred, and the answer was never! For he had never known her. She was the pale sad goldfish that swam in the subterranean illumination of the TV set, her natural habitat the yeasty chairs especially placed for viewing.
“It’s the dandelion you used,” he protested. “Use another.”
“No,” said Clarisse. “You’re not in love. A dandelion won’t help.” She got up. “Well, I’ve got to go see my psychiatrist. The school sends me to him. So I can go back to school, he’s trying to make me normal.”
“I’ll kill him if he does!”
He didn’t see Clarisse for a month. He watched for her each day. And after some forty days had passed, one afternoon, he mentioned it to his wife.
“Oh, her,” said Mildred, with the radio music jarring the table plates. “Why, she was killed by an auto a month ago.”
“A month!” He leaped up. “But why didn’t you tell me!”
“Didn’t I? A car hit her.”
“Did they find whose car it was?”
“No. You know how those things are. What do you want for supper, dear, frozen steak or an omelet?”
And so with the death of the girl, 1 percent of the world died. And the other 99 percent was on the instant revealed to him for what it was. He saw what she had been and what Mildred had been, was, and always would be, what he himself was but didn’t want to be any more, what Millie’s friends were and would forever be. And he saw that it was no idle, separate thing, Mildred’s suicide attempts, the lovely dark girl with the flowers and the leaves being ground under a motor-car, it was a thing of the world they lived in, it was all a parcel of the world, it was part of the screaming average, of the pressing down of people into electric moulds, it was the vacuum of civilization in its meaningless cam-shaft rotations down a rotary track to smash against its own senseless tail. Suddenly Millie’s attempts at death were a symbol.
She was trying to escape from Nothingness. Whereas the girl had been fighting nothingness with something, with being aware instead of forgetting, with walking instead of sitting, with going to get life instead of having it brought to her. And the civilization had killed her for her trouble, not purposely no, but with a fine ironic sense, for no purpose at all, simply the blind rushing destruction of a car driven by a vanilla-faced idiot going nowhere for nothing, and very irritated that he had been detained for 120 seconds while the police investigated and released him on his way to some distant base that he must tag before running for home.
Mildred. Clarisse. Life. And his own work, growing aware for the first time of what he was doing. And now, tonight. Burning that woman. And last night, the man’s book, and him into an asylum. It was all such a nightmare that only a nightmare could be used as an escape from it.
He lay there all night, thinking, smelling the smoke on his hands, in the dark.
He awoke with chills and fever in the morning.
“You can’t be sick,” said Mildred.
He looked at his wife. He closed his eyes upon the hotness and the trembling. “Yes.”
“But you were all right, last night.”
“I’m sick now.” He heard the radio shouting in the parlor.
She stood over the bed, curiously. He felt her there, looking at him but he didn’t open his eyes. He felt his body shake as if there was another person in it somewhere pounding away at his ribs, someone pulling at the bars of a prison screaming, with no one to hear. Did Mildred hear?
“Will you bring me some water and aspirin.”
“You’ve got to get up,” she said. “It’s noon. You’ve slept five hours later than usual.”
There she lay with her hair burnt to straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract far behind the pupils unseen but suspect, and the reddened, pouting lips, and the body as thin as a praying mantis from diet, and the flesh like thin milk, and the voice with that metallic ferocity that came from imitating radio voices. He could remember her no other way.
“Will you turn the radio off?”
“That’s my program.”
“Will you turn it off for a sick man?”
“I’ll turn it down,” she said.
She went out of the room and did nothing to the radio. She came back. “Is that better?”
He opened his eyes and wondered at her. “Thanks.”
“That’s my favorite program,” she said.
“What about the aspirin?” he said.
“You’ve never been sick before.” She went away again.
“Well, I’m sick now. I’m not going to work this evening. Call Healy for me.”
“You acted funny last night,” she said, coming back, humming.
“Where’s the aspirin,” he said, looking at the glass of water she handed him.
“Oh,” she said, and went off again. “Did something happen?”
“A fire, is all.”
“I had a nice evening,” she said, in the bathroom.
“What doing?”
“Television.”
“What was on.”
“Programs.”
“What programs?”
“Some of the best ever.”
“Who?”
“Oh, you know, the bunch.”
“Yes, the bunch, the bunch, the bunch.” He pressed at the pain in his eyes and suddenly the odor of kerosene was so strong that
