I’m dead, he thought again.
And it feels fine, thanks.
He awoke to feel a smile on his face.
He was seated in the vehicle.
Twice dead, he thought, and feeling better each time. Why? isn’t that odd? Curiouser and curiouser. Queer beyond queerness.
He thrummed the motor again.
What this time?
Does it locomote? he wondered. How about a big black choo-choo train out of half-primordial times?
And he was on his way, an engineer. The sky flicked over, and the motion-picture screens or whatever they were pressed in with swift illusions of pouring smoke and steaming whistle and huge wheel within wheel on grinding track, and the track ahead wound through hills, and far on up around a mountain came another train, black as a buffalo herd, pouring belches of smoke, on the same two rails, the same track, heading toward wondrous accident.
“I see,” said the poet. “I do begin to see. I begin to know what this and what used for, for such as me, the poor wandering idiots of a world, confused, and sore put upon by mothers as soon as dropped from wombs, insulted with Christian guilt, and gone mad from the need of destruction, and collecting a pittance of hurt here and scar tissue there, and a larger portable wife grievance beyond, but one thing sure, we do want to die, we do want to be killed, and here’s the very thing for it, in convenient quick pay! So pay it out, machine, dole it out, sweet raving device! Rape away, death! I’m your very man.”
And the two locomotives met and climbed each other. Up a black ladder of explosion they wheeled and locked their drive shafts and plastered their slick Negro bellies together and rubbed boilers and beautifully banged the night in a single outflung whirl and flurry of shrapnel and flame. Then the locomotives, in a cumbrous rapine dance, seized and melted together with their violence and passion, gave a monstrous curtsy and fell off the mountain and took a thousand years to go all the way down to the rocky pits.
The poet awoke and immediately grabbed the controls. He was humming under his breath, stunned. He was singing wild tunes. His eyes flashed. His heart beat swiftly.
“More, more, I see it now, I know what to do, more, more, please, Oh God, more, for the truth shall set me free, more!”
He hoofed three, four, five pedals.
He snapped six switches.
The vehicle was auto-jet-locomotive-glider-missile-rocket.
He ran, he steamed, he roared, he soared, he flew.
Cars veered toward him. Locomotives loomed. Jets rammed. Rockets screamed.
And in one wild three-hour spree he hit two hundred cars, rammed twenty trains, blew up ten gliders, exploded forty missiles, and, far out in space, gave up his glorious soul in a final Fourth of July Death celebration as an interplanetary rocket going two hundred thousand miles an hour struck an iron meteor and went beautifully to hell.
In all, in a few short hours he figured he must have been torn apart and put back together a few times less than five hundred.
When it was all over, he sat not touching the wheel, his feet free of the pedals.
After a half hour of sitting there, he began to laugh. He threw his head back and let out great war-whoops. Then he got up, shaking his head, drunker than ever in his life, really drunk now, and he knew he would stay that way forever, and never need drink again.
I’m punished, he thought, really punished at last. Really hurt at last, and hurt enough, over and over, so I will never need hurt again, never need to be destroyed again, never have to collect another insult, or take another wound, or ask for a simple grievance.
God bless the genius of man and the inventors of such machines, that enable the guilty to pay and at last be rid of the dark albatross and the awful burden. Thank you, City, thank you, old blueprinter of needful souls. Thank you. And which way out?
A door slid open.
His wife stood waiting for him.
“Well, there you are,” she said. “And still drunk.”
“No,” he said. “Dead.”
“Drunk.”
“Dead,” he said, “beautifully dead at last. Which means, free. I won’t need you any more, dead Meg, Meggy-Megan. You’re set free, also, like an awful conscience. Go haunt someone else, girl.
Go destroy. I forgive you your sins on me, for I have at last forgiven myself. I am off the Christian hook. I am the dear wandering dead who, dead, can at last: live. Go and do likewise, lady. Inside with you. Be punished and set free. So long, Meg. Farewell. Toodle-oo.”
He wandered away.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she cried.
“Why, out into life and the blood of life and happy at last.”
“Come back here!” she screamed.
“You can’t stop the dead, for they wander the universe, happy as children in the dark field.”
“Harpwell!” she brayed. “Harpwell!”
But he stepped on a river of silver metal.
And let the dear river bear him laughing until the tears glittered on his cheeks, away and away from the shriek and the bray and the scream of that woman, what was her name? no matter, back there, and gone.
And when he reached the Gate he walked out and along the canal in the fine day, heading toward the far towns.
By that time, he was singing every old tune he had known as a child of six.
It was a church.
No, not a church.
Wilder let the door swing shut.
He stood in cathedral darkness, waiting.
The roof, if roof there was, breathed up in a great susoense, flowed up beyond reach or sight.
The floor, if floor there was, was a mere firmness beneath. It, too, was black.
And then, the stars came out. It was like that first night of childhood when his father had taken him out beyond the city to a hill where the lights could not diminish the Universe. And there were a thousand, no ten thousand, no ten million billion stars filling the darkness.
The stars were manifold arid bright, and they did not care. Even then he had known: they do not care. If I breathe or do not breathe, live or die, the eyes that look from all around don’t care. And he had seized his father’s hand and gripped tight, as if he might fall up into that abyss.
Now, in this building, he was full of the old terror and the old sense of beauty and the old silent crying out after mankind. The stars filled him with pity for small men lost in so much size.
Then yet another thing happened.
Beneath his feet, space opened wide and let through yet another billion sparks of light.
He was suspended as a fly is held upon a vast telescopic lens. He walked on a water of space. He stood upon a transparent flex of great eye, and all about him, as on a night in winter, beneath foot and above head, in all directions, were nothing but stars.
So, in the end, it was a church, it was a cathedral, a multitude of farflung universal shrines, here a worshipping of Horsehead Nebula, there Orion’s galaxy, and there Andromeda, like the head of God, fiercely gazed and thrust through the raw dark stuffs of night to stab his soul and pin it writhing against the backside of his flesh.
God, everywhere, fixed him with shutterless and unblinking eyes.
And he, a bacterial shard of that same Flesh, stared back and winced but the slightest.
He waited. And a planet drifted upon the void. It spun by once with a great mellow autumn face. It circled and came under him.
And he stood upon a far world of green grass and great lush trees, where the air was fresh, and a river ran by like the rivers of childhood, flashing the sun and leaping with fish.
He knew that he had traveled very far to reach this world. Behind him lay the rocket. Behind lay a century of travel, of sleeping, of waiting, and now, here was the reward.
“Mine?” he asked the simple air, the simple grass, the long simplicity of water that spelled by in the shallow sands.
And the world answered wordless: yours.
Yours without the long travel and the boredom, yours without ninety-nine years of flight from Earth, of sleeping in kept tubes, of intravenous feedings, of nightmares dreamt of Earth lost and gone, yours without torture, without pain, yours without trial and error, failure and destruction. Yours without sweat and terror. Yours without a falling down of tears. Yours. Yours.
But Wilder did not put out his hands to accept.
And the sun dimmed in the alien sky.
And the world drifted from under his feet.
And yet another world swam up and passed in a huge parade of even brighter glories.
And this world, too, spun up to take his weight. And here, if anything, the fields were richer green, the mountains capped with melting snows, far fields ripening with strange harvests, and scythes waiting on the edge of fields for him to lift and sweep arid cut the grain and live out his life any way that he might.
Yours. The merest touch of weather upon the hairs within his ear said this. Yours.
And Wilder, without shaking his head, moved back. He did not say no. He thought his rejection.
And the grass died in the fields.
The mountains crumbled.
The river shallows ran to dust.
And the world sprang away.
And Wilder stood again in space where God had stood before creating a world out of Chaos.
And at last he spoke
