Quicker Than the Eye (19 page)

He finished his drink and his wife half finished hers and gave it to the children to argue over, inch by compared inch. The old man stood silent, embarrassed by the thing he may have stirred up among them.

"Well, if you're ever out this way, drop in," he said. Clarence Travers reached for his wallet.

"No, no!" said the old man. "It's on the house."

"Thank you, thank you very much."

"A pleasure."

They climbed back into their car.

"If you want to get to the freeway," said the old man, peering through the front window into the cooked-upholstery smell of the car, "just take your old dirt road back. Don't rush, or you'll break an axle."

Clarence Travers looked straight ahead at the radiator fixture on the car front and started the motor.

"Good-bye," said the old man.

"Good-bye," the children yelled, and waved. The car moved away through the town.

"Did you hear what the old man said?" asked the wife.

"What?"

"Did you hear him say which way to the freeway?"

"I heard."

He drove through the cool, shady town, staring at the porches and the windows with the colored glass fringing them. If you looked from the inside of those windows out, people had different-colored faces for each pane you looked through. They were Chinese if you looked through one, Indian through another, pink, green, violet, burgundy, wine, chartreuse, the candy colors, the lemon-lime cool colors, the water colors of the windows looking out on lawns and trees and this car slowly driving past.

"Yes, I heard him," said Clarence Travers.

They left the town behind and took the dirt road to the freeway. They waited their chance, saw an interval between floods of cars hurtling by, swerved out into the stream, and, at fifty miles an hour, were soon hurtling toward the city.

"That's better," said Cecelia Travers brightly. She did not look over at her husband. 
"Now 
I know where we are."

Billboards flashed by; a mortuary, a pie crust, a cereal, a garage, a hotel. A hotel in the tar pits of the city, where one day is the pitiless glare of the noon sun, thought Mr. Travers, all of the great Erector-set buildings, like prehistoric dinosaurs, will sink down into the bubbling tar-lava and be encased, bone by bone, for future civilizations. And in the stomachs of the electric lizards, inside the iron dinosaurs, the probing scientists of A.D. One Million will find the little ivory bones, the thinly articulated skeletons of advertising executives and clubwomen and children. Mr. Travers felt his eyes flinch, watering. And the scientists will say, so 
this 
is what the iron cities fed on, is it? and give the bones a kick. So 
this 
is what kept the iron stomachs full, eh? Poor things, they never had a chance. Probably kept by the iron monsters who needed them in order to survive, who needed them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Aphids, in a way, aphids, kept in a great metal cage.

"Look, Daddy, look, 
look, 
before it's too late!"

The children pointed, yelling. Cecelia Travers did not look. Only the children saw it.

The old highway, two hundred yards away, at their left, sprang back into sight for an instant, wandered aimlessly through field, meadow, and stream, gentle and cool and quiet.

Mr. Travers swung his head sharply to see, but in that instant it was gone. Billboards, trees, hills rushed it away. A thousand cars, honking, shrieking, shouldered them, and bore Clarence and Cecelia Travers and their captive children stunned and silent down the concourse, onward ever onward into a city that had not seen them leave and did not look to see them return

“Let’s see if this car will do sixty or sixty-five,” said Clarence Travers.

It could and did.

      
When I was eight years old, in 1928, an incredible event occurred on the back wall outside the Academy motion picture theater in Waukegan, Illinois. An advertising broadside, some thirty feet long and twenty feet high, dramatized Black-stone the Magician in half a dozen miraculous poses: sawing a lady in half; tied to an Arabian cannon that exploded, taking him with it; dancing a live handkerchief in midair; causing a birdcage with a live canary to vanish between his fingers; causing an elephant to . . . well, you get the idea. I must have stood there for hours, frozen with awe. I knew then that someday I must become a magician.

That's what happened, didn't it? I'm not a science fiction, fantasy, magic-realism writer of fairy tales and surrealist poems. 
Quicker Than the Eye 
may well be the best title I have ever conjured for a new collection. I pretend to do one thing, cause you to blink, and in the instant seize twenty bright silks out of a bottomless hat.

How does he do that? may well be asked. I really can't say. I don't write these stories, 
they 
write 
me. 
Which causes me to live with a boundless enthusiasm for writing and life that some misinterpret as optimism.

Nonsense. I am merely a practitioner of optimal behavior, which means behave yourself; listen to your Muses, get your work done, and enjoy the sense that you just might live forever.

I don't have to wait for inspiration. It jolts me every morning. Just before dawn, when I would prefer to sleep in, the damned stuff speaks between my ears with my Theater of Morning voices. Yes, yes, I know, that sounds awfully artsy, and no, no, I am 
not
preaching some sort of Psychic Summons. The voices exist because I stashed them there every day for a lifetime by reading, writing, and living. They accumulated and began to speak soon after high school.

In other words, I do not greet each day with a glad cry but am forced out of bed by these whispering nags, drag myself to the typewriter, and am soon awake and alive as the notion/fancy/concept quits my ears, runs down my elbows and out my fingers. Two hours later, a new story is done that, all night, hid asleep behind my 
medulla oblongata.

That, don't you agree, is not optimism. It's behavior. Optimal.

I dare not oppose these morning voices. If I did, they would ransack my conscience all day. Besides, I am as out of control as a car off a cliff. What began as a numbed frenzy before breakfast, ends with elation at noon lunch.

How did I find 
these 
metaphors? Let me count the ways:

You discover your wife is pregnant with your first child soon to be born, so you name the embryonic presence "Sascha" and converse with this increasingly bright fetus that evolves into a story that you love but no one wants. So here it is.

You wonder whatever happened to Dorian Gray's portrait. Your second thoughts grow to an outsize horror by nightfall. You upchuck this hairball into your typewriter.

Some of these stories "happened" to me. "Quicker Than the Eye" was part of a magic show I attended where, with dismay, I saw someone much like myself being made a fool of onstage.

"No News, or What Killed the Dog?" was a Victrola record I played all day every day when I was five, until the neighbors offered to break me or the record, 
choose.

"That Woman on the Lawn" was first a poem that then turned into a story about my mother as a young and needful woman; a topic we care to discuss only with euphemisms.

"Another Fine Mess" resulted from my writing "The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair." There 
had 
to be a sequel, because when I arrived in Ireland forty years ago, the 
Irish Times 
announced LAUREL AND HARDY
, 
ONE TIME ONLY, IN PERSON! FOR THE IRISH ORPHANS. OLYMPIA THEATER, DUBLIN.
 
I rushed to the theater and bought the 
last 
ticket, front row center!

The curtain rose and there they were, Stan and Ollie, doing all their old, sweet, wondrous routines. I sat with happy tears streaming down my face. Later I went backstage and stood by their dressing room door watching them greet friends. I didn't introduce myself. I just wanted to warm my hands and heart. After twenty minutes of ambience bathing, I slipped away. Thus "Another Fine Mess."

"Unterderseaboat Doktor" is an example of people not hearing themselves talk. A writer friend at lunch some years back described his psychiatrist, a former submarine captain in Hitler's undersea fleet. "Holy God," I cried, "give me a pencil!" I scribbled a title and finished the tale that night. My writer friend hated me for weeks.

"Last Rites" wrote itself because I am the greatest lover of other writers, old or new, who ever lived. I have never been jealous of any writer, I only wanted to write and dream like them. That makes for an enormous list, some of them first-class ladies as well as writers first class: Willa Cather, Jessamyn West, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Weelty, and, long before her current fame, Edith Wharton. "Last Rites" shuttles in Time to pay my respects to three of my heroes, Poe, Melville, and a third writer, nameless until the finale. It crazed me to perceive that these giants died thinking they were to be buried unknown and unread. I 
had 
to invent a Time Machine to celebrate them on their deathbeds.

Some of the stories are self-evident. "At the End of the Ninth Year" is the sort of quasi-scientific factoid we all discuss a dozen times, but neglect to write.

"The Other Highway" lies beside the main route heading north from Los Angeles. It has all but vanished under grass, bushes, trees, and avalanched soil. Here and there you can still bike it for some few hundred yards before it melts into the earth.

"Once More, Legato" spontaneously combusted one afternoon when I heard a treeful of birds orchestrating Berlioz and then Albeniz.

If you know the history of Paris during the 1870s' Commune and Haussmann, who tore it down and built it back to the wonder it is now, and if you have experienced some Los Angeles earthquakes, you' could guess the genesis of "Zaharoff/Richter Mark V." During the last High Shake, two years ago, I thought: My God, the damn fools 
built 
the city on the San Andreas Fault! My next thought: what if they built it that way on 
purpose?!

Two hours later, the story was cooling on the windowsill.

That's not all, but it should do.

My final advice to myself; the boy magician grown old, and you?

When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses:

don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits.

Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real.

Make haste to live.

Oh, God, yes.

Live. And write. With great haste.