Voices murmured excitedly. The old man could imagine the special policeman in his midnight-blue uniform, with drawn gun, entering to see only the flimsy furniture, the bare walls, the echoing linoleum floor, the glassless, cardboarded-over windows, this thin and oily film of civilization left on an empty shore when the storm tide of war went away.
“I’m looking for an old man,” said the tired voice of authority beyond the wall. Strange, thought the old man, even the law sounds tired now . “Patched clothes…” But, thought the old man, I thought everyone’s clothes well patched! “Dirty. About eighty years old…” But isn’t everyone dirty, everyone old? the old man cried out to himself.
“If you turn him in, there’s a week’s rations as reward,” said the police voice. “Plus ten cans of vegetables, five cans of soup, bonus.”
Real tin cans with bright printed labels, thought the old man.
The cans flashed like meteors rushing by in the dark over his eyelids.
What a fine reward! Not ten thousand dollars, not twenty thousand dollars, no no, but five incredible cans of real, not imitation soup, and ten, count them, ten brilliant circus-colored cans of exotic vegetables like string beans and sun-yellow corn! Think of it.
Think!
There was a long silence in which the old man almost thought he heard faint murmurs of stomachs turning uneasily, slumbering but dreaming of dinners much finer than the hairballs of old illusion gone nightmare and politics gone sour in the long twilight since A. D. Annihilation Day. “Soup. Vegetables,” said the police voice, a final time.
“Fifteen solid-pack cans!” The door slammed . The boots stomped away through the ramshackle tenement, pounding coffin-lid doors to stir other Lazarus souls alive to cry aloud of bright tins and real soups.
The poundings faded . There was a last banging slam.
And at last the hidden panel whispered up. The husband and wife did not look at him as he stepped out. He knew why and wanted to touch their elbows. “Even I,” he said gently, “even I was tempted to turn myself in, to claim the reward, to eat the soup.”
Still they would not look at him. “Why?” he asked. “Why didn’t you hand me over? Why?” The husband, as if suddenly remembering, nodded to his wife. She went to the door, hesitated, her husband nodded again impatiently, and she went out, noiseless as a puff of cobweb. They heard her rustling along the hall, scratching softly at doors, which opened to gasps and murmurs.
“What’s she up to? What are you up to?” asked the old man.
“You’ll find out. Sit. Finish your dinner,” said the husband. “Tell me why you’re such a fool you make us fools who seek you out and bring you here.”
“Why am I such a fool?” The old man sat. The old man munched slowly, taking peas one at a time from the plate which had been returned to him. “Yes, I am a fool. How did I start my foolishness?
Years ago I looked at the ruined world, the dictatorships, the desiccated states and nations and said, “What can I do? Me, a weak old man, what? Rebuild a devastation? Ha!” But as I lay half asleep one night an old phonograph record played in my head. Two sisters named Duncan sang out of my childhood a song called ‘Remembering’.”
“‘Remembering is all I do, dear, so try and remember, too.’ I sang the song, and it wasn’t a song but a way of life. What did I have to offer a world that was forgetting? My memory! How could this help? By offering a standard of comparison.
By telling the young what once was, by considering our losses. I found the more I remembered, the more I could remember! Depending on who I sat down with I remembered imitation flowers, dial telephones, refrigerators, kazoos (you ever play a kazoo?!), thimbles, bicycle clips, not bicycles, no, but bicycle clips, isn’t that wild and strange? Antimacassars. Do you know them?”
“Never mind. Once a man asked me to remember just the dashboard dials on a Cadillac. I remembered. I told him in detail. He listened. He cried great tears down his face. Happy tears or sad? I can’t say. I only remember. Not literature, no, I never had a head for plays or poems, they slip away, they die.
All I am, really, is a trash heap of the mediocre, the third-best-hand-me-down useless and chromed-over slush and junk of a race-track civilization that ran last over a precipice. So all I offer really is scintillant junk, the clamored-after chronometers and absurd machineries of a never-ending river of robots and robot-mad owners. Yet, one way or another, civilization must get back on the road.
Those who can offer fine butterfly poetry, let them remember, let them offer. Those who can weave and build butterfly nets, let them weave, let them build. My gift is smaller than both, and perhaps contemptible in the long hoist, climb, jump toward the old and amiably silly peak. But I must dream myself worthy. For the things, silly or not, that people remember are the things they will search for.
I will, then, ulcerate their half-dead desires with vinegar-gnat memory. Then perhaps they’ll rattle-bang the Big Clock together again, which is the city, the state and then the world. Let one man want wine, another lounge chairs, a third a batwing glider to soar the March winds on, to build bigger electropterodactyls to soar winds even greater with even greater people.
Someone wants moron Christmas trees and some wise man goes to cut them. Pack this all together, wheel in want, want in wheel, and I’m just there to oil them, but oil them I do. Ho, once I would have raved, ‘Only the best is best, only quality is true!’
But roses grow from blood manure. Mediocre must be, so most-excellent can bloom. So I shall be the best mediocre there is and fight all who say, ‘Slide under, sink back, dust-wallow, let brambles scurry over your living grave’. I shall protest the roving apeman tribes, the sheep-people munching the far fields prayed on by the feudal land-baron wolves who rarefy themselves in the few skyscraper summits and horde unremembered foods. And these villains I will kill with can opener and corkscrew.”
“I shall run them down with ghosts of Buick, Kissel-Kar and Moon, thrash them with licorice whips until they cry for some sort of unqualified mercy. Can I do all this? One can only try.”
The old man rummaged the last pea, with the last words, in his mouth, while his Samaritan host simply looked at him with gently amazed eyes, and far off up through the house people moved, doors tapped open and shut, and there was a gathering outside the door of this apartment where now the husband said, “And you asked why we didn’t turn you in? Do you hear that out there?”
“It sounds like everyone in the apartment house.”
“Everyone. Old man, old fool, do you remember… motion picture houses, or, better, drive-in movies?” The old man smiled. “Do you?”
“Almost. Look, listen, today, now, if you’re going to be a fool, if you want to run risks, do it in the aggregate, in one fell blow. Why waste your breath on one, or two, or even three, if…”
The husband opened the door and nodded outside. Silently, one at a time and in couples, the people of the house entered. Entered this room as if entering a synagogue or church or the kind of church known as a movie or the kind of movie known as a drive-in and the hour was growing late in the day, with the sun going down the sky, and soon in the early evening hours, in the dark, the room would be full and in the one light the voice of the old man would speak and these would listen and hold hands and it would be like the old days.
With the balconies and the dark, or the cars and the dark, and just the memory, the words, of popcorn, and the words for the gum and the sweet drinks and candy, but the words, anyway, the words…
And while the people were coming in and settling on the floor, and the old man watched them, incredulous that he had summoned them here without knowing, the husband said, “Is this better than taking a chance in the open?”
“Yes. Strange. I hate pain. I hate being hit and chased. But my tongue moves. I must hear what it has to say. Still this is better.”
“Good.” The husband pressed a red ticket into his palm. “When this is all over, an hour from now, here is a ticket from a friend of mine in Transportation. One train crosses the country each week. Each week I get a ticket for some idiot I want to help. This week it’s you.” The old man read the destination on the folded red paper: “Chicago Abyss”, and added, “Is the Abyss still there?”
“This time next year Lake Michigan may break through the last crust and make a new lake in the pit where the city once was. There’s life of sorts around the crater rim, and a branch train goes west once a month. Once you leave here, keep moving, forget you met or know us.
I’ll give you a small list of people like ourselves. Look them up, out in the wilderness. But, for God’s sake, in the open, alone for a year, declare a moratorium. Keep your wonderful mouth shut. And here–” The husband gave him
