Grim Tales (14 page)

In another version of this story, the man had to leave his head overnight at a small appliance shop because the repairman was too busy with a toaster to examine it while he waited. The repairman thought it more than likely that a “screw was loose somewhere” in his head and finding it would not take long. The man came back the next morning, but the shop had burned down in the night.

The building was burning. They could not go down. They went up – past the rooftop, to safety.

They went the way shown on the map, though it was not the way they knew. The map had been purchased at a fair price from a dealer in rarities. It was thought to be early 18th century. The route, which was clearly indicated, no longer existed: the original path and road had long since been effaced by the accretions of time and civilization. But the travelers managed it because of the exact compass headings set down in the margin, as if the annotator had known that someone, nearly three centuries later, would attempt the journey, lured by the promise of “extraordinary pleasure and a clime exceedingly mild.” In the end, they entered a broad avenue of Dutch elms (trees no longer extant in the region) – just as the map showed – and were attacked by bandits, who robbed all, killed some and ravished the most beautiful of the women. It was not, as had been promised them, “paradise.”

In this story, the angel was weeping rust, its wings fused to its sides. It had not moved in a very long time. It was surrounded by a green hairpin fence. Poppies mocked its sober gravity. The sky was blue or not. The grass was green or not – depending on the time of year. Then a day came when the angel was summoned, by whom it is not known. It moved. It ceased its weeping. Its wings shed the ice-like sheath of inertia in which they had been pinioned. The angel flew to the city and destroyed every living inhabitant under a sky that was neither blue nor gray, but red – the red of poppies. Of blood when it is still fresh.

The first morning that the sun did not rise, they were only mildly concerned. They had other things on their minds. Work or money or love. The second morning when they woke again to darkness, they betrayed, most of them, anxiety – to their wives or husbands, to the man or woman sitting next to them on the bus. (The children seemed not to have missed daylight. It was winter, after all; and darkness is to be expected in winter.) The third morning they opened their eyes, slowly, afraid to find the room in darkness. It was. Outside, the streetlights were still lit. Those whose windows faced east hurried to them, hoping to see the sky lightening above the rooftops. But blackest night held sway. They turned from the windows, each of them wondering what it might mean. The fourth night no one went to sleep. They stood in the street and waited and talked among themselves. The lights in the houses and in the buildings burned all the more brightly for the darkness. The sun did not rise. The fifth night they closed the blinds, drew the curtains and faced away from their windows. They left the lights on in the rooms. In the morning the sun did rise again, but there was no one living to see it.

It's an old-wives' tale – he said – that a cat will suck the life out a baby in its crib. To prove it to her, who was always so backward and anxious, he put the cat into the room where the baby was sleeping. Later, when they went on tiptoe to see whether she had opened her pretty blue eyes, they found not a baby but a blue-eyed cat.

If history made a sound, it would be a cry, a moan, a scream, a roar, a hiss, a scream. Luckily, history is mute – its mouth stopped up with the dead, with ash, with mud, with blood, with bones, with the dead.

The man had been walking a long time when he came to a town. Hungry, he entered a bakery and bought a sweet roll. Paying for it, he thought the baker looked familiar. This turned out to be the case everywhere he went: tobacconist, newspaper seller, cinema cashier, hatcheck girl, cigarette girl – all were familiar to him. He had forgotten that they were, like him, dead and that in the city of the dead all recognize one another – or, more precisely, see in each other's face their own. He had forgotten this in the same way he had forgotten that the dead are not permitted to leave their city. For a brief time, he had strayed outside but soon returned, so powerful is the fascination of the dead world for those who inhabit it – so irresistible its attractions. So long as they live, the living will never understand this.

He received his sentence when he was still only a child and carried it with him always, without complaint, knowing there was nothing he could do to change it. When the day came for its execution, he took his own life rather than submit to his destiny.

Her commission of a stairway in the field behind the house struck many as the last elaborate conceit of a mind passing from eccentricity into madness. It was elegantly wrought. It displayed a workmanship that could only be called fabulous. It went nowhere. More precisely, it rose from a garden that had long ago been “let go to wrack and ruin,” turned gracefully on its newel and soared magisterially before ending abruptly high above a tangle of burdock. Soon after its completion, she was never seen again. The slippers found by police on the stairway's last step were considered the comic invention of a pathological mind: whether that of the woman (who was believed by some to have gone abroad) or that of an abductor (whom others believed had botched her kidnapping). That she might have continued to climb the stairs, having first discarded her slippers as unnecessary, was not seriously entertained.