A Pleasure to Burn (16 page)

She pressed her mouth to his ear.

“What if,” she whispered, “what if the cricket's in our bedroom, here?”

“They wouldn't dare!” he cried.

“Shh!” she said.

“They wouldn't dare,” he whispered angrily. “Of all the nerve!”

She was moving away from him. He tried to hold her, but she moved firmly away and turned her back. “It would be just like them,” he heard her whisper. And there he was, stranded on the white cold beach with the tide going out.

Cricket, he thought, I'll never forgive you for this.

The next day being Tuesday, he rushed off to the studio, had a busy day, and returned, on time, flinging open the front door with a cheery “Hey there, lovely!”

When his wife appeared, he kissed her solidly, patted her rump, ran an appreciative hand up and down her body, kissed her again, and handed her a huge green parcel of pink carnations.

“For me?” she said.

“You!” he replied.

“Is it our anniversary?”

“Nonsense, no. I just got them because, that's all, because.”

“Why, how nice.” Tears came to her eyes. “You haven't brought me flowers for months and months.”

“Haven't I? I guess I haven't!”

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you,” he said, and kissed her again. They went, holding hands, into the living room.

“You're early,” she said. “You usually stop off for a quick one with the boys.”

“To hell with the boys. You know where we're going Saturday, darling? Instead of my sleeping in the backyard on the lounge, we're going to that fashion show you wanted me to go see.”

“I thought you hated—”

“Anything you want, peaches,” he said. “I told the boys I won't make it Sunday for the fishing trip. They thought I was crazy. What's for supper?”

He stalked smiling to the kitchen, where he appreciatively ladled and spooned and stirred things, smelling, gasping, tasting everything, “Shepherd's pie!” he cried, opening the oven and peering in, gloriously, “My God! My favorite dish. It's been since last June we had that!”

“I thought you'd like it!”

He ate with relish, he told jokes, they ate by candlelight, the pink carnations filled the immediate vicinity with a cinnamon scent, the food was splendid, and, topping it off, there was black-bottom pie fresh from the refrigerator.

“Black-bottom pie! It takes hours and genius to make a really good black-bottom pie.”

“I'm glad you like it, dear.”

After dinner he helped her with the dishes. Then they sat on the living-room floor and played a number of favorite symphonies together, they even waltzed a bit to the
Rosenkavalier
pieces. He kissed her at the end of the dance and whispered in her ear, patting her behind, “Tonight, so help me God, cricket or no cricket.”

The music started over. They swayed together.

“Have you found it yet?” he whispered.

“I think so. It's near the fireplace and the window.”

They walked over to the fireplace. The music was very loud as he bent and shifted a drape, and there it was, a beady black little eye, not much bigger than a thumbnail. They both stared at it and backed away. He went and opened a bottle of champagne and they had a nice drink.

The music was loud in their heads, in their bones, in the walls of the house. He danced with his mouth up close to her ear.

“What did you find out?” she asked.

“The studio said to sit tight. Those damn fools are after everyone. They'll be tapping the zoo telephone next.”

“Everything's all right?”

“Just sit tight, the studio said. Don't break any equipment, they said. You can be sued for breaking government property.”

They went to bed early, smiling at each other.

On Wednesday night he brought roses and kissed her a full minute at the front door. They called up some brilliant and witty friends and had them over for an evening's discussion, having decided, in going over their phone list, that these two friends would stun the cricket with their repertoire and make the very air shimmer with their brilliance. On Thursday afternoon he called her from the studio for the first time in months, and on Thursday night he brought her an orchid, some more roses, a scarf he had seen in a shop window at lunchtime, and two tickets for a fine play. She in turn had baked him a chocolate cake from his mother's recipe, on Wednesday, and on Thursday had made Toll House cookies and lemon chiffon pie, as well as darning his socks and pressing his pants and sending everything to the cleaners that had been neglected previous times. They rambled about the town Thursday night after the play, came home late, read Euripides to one another out loud, went to bed late, smiling again, and got up late, having to call the studio and claim sickness until noon, when the husband, tiredly, on the way out of the house, thought to himself, This can't go on. He turned and came back in. He walked over to the cricket near the fireplace and bent down to it and said:

“Testing, one, two, three. Testing. Can you hear me? Testing.”

“What're you doing?” cried his wife in the doorway.

“Calling all cars, calling all cars,” said the husband, lines under his eyes, face pale. “This is me speaking. We know you're there, friends. Go away. Go away. Take your microphone and get out. You won't hear anything from us. That is all. That is all. Give my regards to J. Edgar. Signing off.”

His wife was standing with a white and aghast look in the door as he marched by her, nodding, and thumped out the door.

She phoned him at three o'clock.

“Darling,” she said, “it's gone!”

“The cricket?”

“Yes, they came and took it away. A man rapped very politely at the door and I let him in and in a minute he had unscrewed the cricket and taken it with him. He just walked off and didn't say boo.”

“Thank God,” said the husband. “Oh, thank God.”

“He tipped his hat at me and said thanks.”

“Awfully decent of him. See you later,” said the husband.

This was Friday. He came home that night about six-thirty, having stopped off to have a quick one with the boys. He came in the front door, reading his newspaper, passed his wife, taking off his coat and automatically putting it in the closet, went on past the kitchen without twitching his nose, sat in the living room and read the sports page until supper, when she served him plain roast beef and string beans, with apple juice to start and sliced oranges for dessert. On his way home he had turned in the theater tickets for tonight and tomorrow, he informed her; she could go with the girls to the fashion show, he intended to bake in the backyard.

“Well,” he said, about ten o'clock. “The old house seems different tonight, doesn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Good to have the cricket gone. Really had us going there.”

“Yes,” she said.

They sat awhile. “You know,” she said later, “I sort of miss it, though, I really sort of miss it. I think I'll do something subversive so they'll put it back.”

“I beg your pardon?” he said, twisting a piece of twine around a fly he was preparing from his fishing box

“Never mind,” she said. “Let's go to bed.”

She went on ahead. Ten minutes later, yawning, he followed after her, putting out the lights. Her eyes were closed as he undressed in the semi-moonlit darkness. She's already asleep, he thought.

The Pedestrian

T
O ENTER OUT INTO THAT SILENCE THAT WAS THE CITY AT
eight o'clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do. He would stand upon the corner of an intersection and peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in this world of A.D. 2131, or as good as alone, and with a final decision made, a path selected, he would stride off, sending patterns of frosty air before him like the smoke of a cigar.

Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard, because only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest themselves upon inner walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomblike building was still open.

 

M
R
. L
EONARD
M
EAD WOULD PAUSE
,
cock his head, listen, look, and march on, his feet making no noise on the lumpy walk. For a long while now the sidewalks had been vanishing under flowers and grass. In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time.

He now wore sneakers when strolling at night, because the dogs in intermittent squads would parallel his journey with barkings if he wore hard heels, and lights might click on and faces appear, and an entire street be startled by the passing of a lone figure, himself, in the early November evening.

On this particular evening he began his journey in a westerly direction toward the hidden sea. There was a good crystal frost in the air; it cut the nose going in and made the lungs blaze like a Christmas tree inside; you could feel the cold light going on and off, all the branches filled with invisible snow. He listened to the faint push of his soft shoes through autumn leaves with satisfaction, and whistled a cold quiet whistle between his teeth, occasionally picking up a leaf as he passed, examining its skeletal pattern in the infrequent lamplights as he went on, smelling its rusty smell.

“Hello, in there,” he whispered to every house on every side as he moved. “What's up tonight on Channel 4, Channel 7, Channel 9? Where are the cowboys rushing, and do I see the United States Cavalry over the next hill to the rescue?”

The street was silent and long and empty, with only his shadow moving like the shadow of a hawk in mid-country. If he closed his eyes and stood very still, frozen, he imagined himself upon the center of a plain, a wintry, windless Arizona country with no house in a thousand miles, and only dry riverbeds, the streets, for company.

“What is it now?” he asked the houses, noticing his wristwatch. “Eight-thirty p.m. Time for a dozen assorted murders? A quiz? A revue? A comedian falling off the stage?”

Was that a murmur of laughter from within a moon-white house? He hesitated, but went on when nothing more happened. He stumbled over a particularly uneven section of walk as he came to a cloverleaf intersection which stood silent where two main highways crossed the town. During the day it was a thunderous surge of cars, the gas stations open, a great insect rustling and ceaseless jockeying for position as the scarab beetles, a faint incense puttering from their exhausts, skimmed homeward to the far horizons. But now these highways too were like streams in a dry season, all stone and bed and moon radiance.

 

H
E TURNED BACK
on a side street, circling around toward his home. He was within a block of his destination when the lone car turned a corner quite suddenly and flashed a fierce white cone of light upon him. He stood entranced, not unlike a night moth, stunned by the illumination and then drawn toward it.

A metallic voice called to him:

“Stand still. Stay where you are! Don't move!”

He halted.

“Put up your hands.”

“But—” he said.

“Your hands up! Or we'll shoot!”

The police, of course, but what a rare, incredible thing; in a city of three million, there was only one police car left. Ever since a year ago, 2130, the election year, the force had been cut down from three cars to one. Crime was ebbing; there was no need now for the police, save for this one lone car wandering and wandering the empty streets.

“Your name?” said the police car in a metallic whisper. He couldn't see the men in it for the bright light in his eyes.

“Leonard Mead,” he said.

“Speak up!”

“Leonard Mead!”

“Business or profession?”

”I guess you'd call me a writer.”

“No profession,” said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.

“You might say that,” said Mr. Mead. He hadn't written in years. Magazines and books didn't sell any more. Everything went on in the tomblike houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their expressionless faces but never really touching them.

“No profession,” said the phonograph voice, hissing. “What are you doing out?”

“Walking,” said Leonard Mead.

“Walking!”

“Just walking,” he said, simply, but his face felt cold.

“Walking, just walking, walking?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Walking where? For what?”

“Walking for air. Walking to see.”

“Your address!”

“Eleven South St. James Street.”

“And there is air in your house, you have an air-conditioner, Mr. Mead?”

“Yes.”

“And you have a viewing screen in your house to see with?”

“No.”

 

“N
O
?” T
HERE WAS A CRACKLING
quiet that in itself was an accusation.

“Are you married, Mr. Mead?”

“No.”

“Not married,” said the police voice behind the fiery beam. The moon was high and clear among the stars and the houses were gray and silent.

“Nobody wanted me,” said Leonard Mead, with a smile.

“Don't speak unless you're spoken to!”

Leonard Mead waited in the cold night.

“Just walking, Mr. Mead?”

“Yes.”

“But you haven't explained for what purpose.”

“I explained: for air and to see, and just to walk.”

“Have you done this often?”

“Every night for years.”

The police car sat in the center of the street with its radio throat faintly humming.

“Well, Mr. Mead,” it said.

“Is that all?” he asked politely.

“Yes,” said the voice. “Here.” There was a sigh, a pop. The back door of the police car sprang wide. “Get in.”

“Wait a minute, I haven't done anything!”

“Get in.”

“I protest!”

“Mr. Mead.”

He walked like a man suddenly drunk. As he passed the front window of the car he looked in. As he had expected, there was no one in the front seat, no one in the car at all.

“Get in.”

He put his hand to the door and peered into the back seat, which was a little cell, a little black jail with bars. It smelled of riveted steel. It smelled of harsh antiseptic; it smelled too clean and hard and metallic. There was nothing soft there.

“Now if you had a wife to give you an alibi,” said the iron voice. “But—”

“Where are you taking me?”

The car hesitated, or rather gave a taint whirring click, as if information, somewhere, was dropping card by punch-slotted card under electric eyes. “To the psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.”

He got in. The door shut with a soft thud. The police car rolled through the night avenues, flashing its dim lights ahead.

They passed one house on one street a moment later, one house in an entire city of houses that were dark, but this one particular house had all its electric lights brightly lit, every window a loud yellow illumination, square and warm in the cool darkness.

“That's my house,” said Leonard Mead.

No one answered him.

The car moved down the empty river bed streets and off away, leaving the empty streets with the empty sidewalks, and no sound and no motion all the rest of the chill November night.