The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury

The Illustrated Man

“Hey, the illustrated man!”

A calliope screamed, and Mr. William Philippus Phelps stood, arms folded, high on the summer-night platform, a crowd unto himself.

He was an entire civilization. In the Main Country, his chest, the Vasties lived—nipple-eyed dragons swirling over his fleshpot, his almost feminine breasts. His navel was the mouth of a slit-eyed monster—an obscene, in-sucked mouth, toothless as a witch.

And there were secret caves where Darklings lurked, his armpits, adrip with slow subterranean liquors, where the Darklings, eyes jealously ablaze, peered out through rank creeper and hanging vine.

Mr. William Philippus Phelps leered down from his freak platform with a thousand peacock eyes. Across the sawdust meadow he saw his wife, Lisabeth, far away, ripping tickets in half, staring at the silver belt buckles of passing men.

Mr. William Philippus Phelps’ hands were tattooed roses. At the sight of his wife’s interest, the roses shriveled, as with the passing of sunlight.

A year before, when he had led Lisabeth to the marriage bureau to watch her work her name in ink, slowly, on the form, his skin had been pure and white and clean.

He glanced down at himself in sudden horror. Now he was like a great painted canvas, shaken in the night wind! How had it happened? Where had it all begun?

It had started with the arguments, and then the flesh, and then the pictures. They had fought deep into the summer nights, she like a brass trumpet forever blaring at him. And he had gone out to eat five thousand steaming hot dogs, ten million hamburgers, and a forest of green onions, and to drink vast red seas of orange juice.

Peppermint candy formed his brontosaur bones, the hamburgers shaped his balloon flesh, and strawberry pop pumped in and out of his heart valves sickeningly, until he weighed three hundred pounds.

“William Philippus Phelps,” Lisabeth said to him in the eleventh month of their marriage, “you’re dumb and fat.”
That was the day the carnival boss handed him the blue envelope. “Sorry, Phelps. You’re no good to me with all that gut on you.”

“Wasn’t I always your best tent man, boss?”
“Once. Not anymore. Now you sit, you don’t get the work out.”
“Let me be your Fat Man.”

“I got a Fat Man. Dime a dozen.” The boss eyed him up and down. “Tell you what, though. We ain’t had a Tattooed Man since Gallery Smith died last year. . . .”

That had been a month ago. Four short weeks. From someone, he had learned of a tattoo artist far out in the rolling Wisconsin country, an old woman, they said, who knew her trade. If he took the dirt road and turned right at the river and then left . . .

He had walked out across a yellow meadow, which was crisp from the sun. Red flowers blew and bent in the wind as he walked, and he came to the old shack, which looked as if it had stood in a million rains.

Inside the door was a silent, bare room, and in the center of the bare room sat an ancient woman.

Her eyes were stitched with red resin-thread. Her nose was sealed with black wax-twine. Her ears were sewn, too, as if a darning-needle dragonfly had stitched all her senses shut. She sat, not moving, in the vacant room.

Dust lay in a yellow flour all about, unfootprinted in many weeks; if she had moved it would have shown, but she had not moved. Her hands touched each other like thin, rusted instruments.

Her feet were naked and obscene as rain rubbers, and near them sat vials of tattoo milk—red, lightning-blue, brown, cat-yellow. She was a thing sewn tight into whispers and silence.

Only her mouth moved, unsewn: “Come in. Sit down. I’m lonely here.”
He did not obey.
“You came for the pictures,” she said in a high voice. “I have a picture to show you first.”
She tapped a blind finger to her thrust-out palm. “See!” she cried.

It was a tattoo-portrait of William Philippus Phelps.
“Me!” he said.
Her cry stopped him at the door. “Don’t run.”

He held to the edges of the door, his back to her. “That’s me, that’s me on your hand!”
“It’s been there fifty years.” She stroked it like a cat, over and over.

He turned. “It’s an old tattoo.” He drew slowly nearer. He edged forward and bent to blink at it. He put out a trembling finger to brush the picture. “Old. That’s impossible! You don’t know me. I don’t know you. Your eyes, all sewed shut.”

“I’ve been waiting for you.” she said. “And many people.” She displayed her arms and legs, like the spindles of an antique chair. “I have pictures on me of people who have already come here to see me. And there are other pictures of other people who are coming to see me in the next one hundred years. And you, you have come.”

“How do you know it’s me? You can’t see!”

“You feel like the lions, the elephants, and the tigers to me. Unbutton your shirt. You need me. Don’t be afraid. My needles are as clean as a doctor’s fingers. When I’m finished with illustrating you, I’ll wait for someone else to walk along out here and find me.

And someday, a hundred summers from now, perhaps, I’ll just go lie down in the forest under some white mushrooms, and in the spring you won’t find anything but a small blue cornflower. . . .”

He began to unbutton his sleeves.

“I know the Deep Past and the Clear Present and the even Deeper Future,” she whispered, eyes knotted into blindness, face lifted to this unseen man. “It is on my flesh. I will paint it on yours, too. You will be the only real illustrated Man in the universe. I’ll give you special pictures you will never forget. Pictures of the Future on your skin.”
She pricked him with a needle.

He ran back to the carnival that night in a drunken terror and elation. Oh, how quickly the old dust-witch had stitched him with color and design. At the end of a long afternoon of being bitten by a silver snake, his body was alive with portraiture. He looked as if he had dropped and been crushed between the steel rollers of a print press, and come out like an incredible rotogravure. He was clothed in a garment of trolls and scarlet dinosaurs.

“Look!” he cried to Lisabeth. She glanced up from her cosmetics table as he tore his shirt away. He stood in the naked bulb-light of their car-trailer, expanding his impossible chest. Here, the Tremblies, half-maiden, half-goat, leaping when his biceps flexed. Here, the Country of Lost Souls, his chins.

In so many accordion pleats of fat, numerous small scorpions, beetles, and mice were crushed, held, hid, darting into view, vanishing, as he raised or lowered his chins.

“My God,” said Lisabeth. “My husband’s a freak.”

She ran from the trailer and he was left alone to pose before the mirror. Why had he done it? To have a job, yes, but, most of all, to cover the fat that had larded itself impossibly over his bones. To hide the fat under a layer of color and fantasy, to hide it from his wife, but most of all from himself.

He thought of the old woman’s last words. She had needled him two special tattoos, one on his chest, another for his back, which she would not let him see. She covered each with cloth and adhesive.

“You are not to look at these two,” she had said.
“Why?”

“Later, you may look. The Future is in these pictures. You can’t look now or it may spoil them. They are not quite finished. I put ink on your flesh, and the sweat of you forms the rest of the picture, the Future—your sweat and your thought.” Her empty mouth grinned. “Next Saturday night, you may advertise!

The Big Unveiling! Come see the Illustrated Man unveil his picture! You can make money in that way.

You can charge admission to the Unveiling, like to an art gallery. Tell them you have a picture that even you never have seen, that nobody has seen yet. The most unusual picture ever painted. Almost alive. And it tells the Future. Roll the drums and blow the trumpets. And you can stand there and unveil at the Big Unveiling.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said.
“But only unveil the picture on your chest,” she said. “That is first. You must save the picture on your back, under the adhesive, for the following week. Understand?”
“How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” she said. “If you walk with these pictures on you, I will be repaid with my own satisfaction. I will sit here for the next two weeks and think how clever my pictures are, for I make them fit each man himself and what is inside him. Now, walk out of this house and never come back. Good-bye.”
“Hey! The Big Unveiling!”

The red signs blew in the night wind: NO ORDINARY TATTOOED MAN! THIS ONE IS “ILLUSTRATED”! GREATER THAN MICHELANGELO! TONIGHT! ADMISSION 10 CENTS!
Now the hour had come. Saturday night, the crowd stirring their animal feet in the hot sawdust.

“In one minute—” the carny boss pointed his cardboard megaphone—“in the tent immediately to my rear, we will unveil the Mysterious Portrait upon the Illustrated Man’s chest! Next Saturday night, the same hour, same location, we’ll unveil the Picture upon the Illustrated Man’s back! Bring your friends!”

There was a stuttering roll of drums.
Mr. William Philippus Phelps jumped back and vanished; the crowd poured into the tent, and, once inside, found him re-established upon another platform,