Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (41 page)

“But listen,” Sharon added quickly. “I can keep a secret. Really. I won’t tell anybody.”

Hayleigh looked at her.

There was a noise at the top of the basement stairs. The board creaked sharply when the weight hit it, the concentrated mass of a booted foot.
Hayleigh’s dad can fix that
was the thought, lightning-quick, that came to Sharon.
He can fix that squeak. Bet it’s already on his to-do list.
She didn’t take her eyes away from Hayleigh’s eyes. The next noise was a heavy clumping transit down the stairs. With an extraordinarily fluid motion Hayleigh’s dad hooked his hand around Sharon’s neck, while with his other hand he covered her mouth, cutting off her scream.

He was dragging her toward the shiny metal in the corner, pulling her by her neck as if she were a large, lumpy sack, her fat legs useless and churning, and Sharon had a realization—extra-bright, extra-sharp, an explosion of insight illuminating her mind’s sky—that he had only pretended to be talking to his boss, that there hadn’t been any emergency at any job site. Then Sharon had another vision, just as bright, just as sharp, a vision of flying over rooftops and passing over her very own house, and down below were her mom and her dad and her sisters, Elizabeth and Meagan, and her dog, Oliver, and her chemistry set, the beakers and flasks lined up in a tidy row across the top of her bookshelf, just the way she’d left them. She imagined the sound of Hayleigh’s voice on the phone, earnest and concerned:
I don’t know Mrs. Leinart she left my house a while ago to walk home and she didn’t say she was stopping anywhere I don’t know we’ll call if we hear from her oh yes.

Then Sharon heard the shriek of the metal as it scraped against the basement floor, she saw the shiny flap of that metal as Hayleigh wrenched it back with experienced fingers, and she smelled a dirty, earthen smell, dark and wet and cold and final. Something pushed hard at her back and something smashed against the side of her head and Sharon was falling, falling bluntly and heavily, like a rocket from the sky.

About “Hayleigh’s Dad”

With Ray Bradbury, I ate dessert first. That is, as a kid with an insatiable literary sweet tooth, I devoured the science-fiction stories and the thrilling tales, inhaling them with awe and gusto the same way I gorged on Tootsie Rolls and Caravelle candy bars, reveling in
The Martian Chronicles
and
The Illustrated Man
. Later, as an adult, I came to the main course: the novels and the essays—and those same short stories upon which I had feasted as a child. Now, however, I could appreciate the artistic rigor that had gone into making them seem so effortlessly tossed off. They read like facts of nature, not like written works, which is the surest proof of Ray Bradbury’s phenomenal, cloud-topping imagination: His stories feel inevitable.

The direct inspiration for “Hayleigh’s Dad” is “The Whole Town’s Sleeping,” a diabolically creepy Bradbury story whose ending left me limp with exhaustion and buzzing with fear. Never before or since has a story taken hold of me in quite that way. As I read it the first time, it gripped my arm and carried me along, trusting and compliant—and then, at the end, it yanked the solid earth right out from under me and tossed me into darkness. I flailed. I gasped. And subsequently wondered what clever alien species had, under cover of night, delivered this bespectacled wizard to our unsuspecting world, this “Ray Bradbury,” this genial genius, this possessor of magical powers and inimitable narrative derring-do.

Discovering Ray’s book of essays
Zen in the Art of Writing
was a major turning point in my literary ambitions. He gave me permission to dream, to be bold, to take off the training wheels and snip the line tethering me to convention and propriety. “For the first thing a writer should be,” he declared, “is excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms,” whose words “slammed the page like a lightning bolt.” My fingertips still sizzle when I recall this passage.

To those aliens who gave us Ray Bradbury—what other plausible origin could there be for this brilliant, dazzling craftsman and poet, except one involving extraterrestrial intervention?—we ought to say thanks, and to make it very, very clear that they can’t have him back.

—Julia Keller

WHO KNOCKS?

Dave Eggers

W
hen I was a kid in the suburbs of Chicago, during the summer we’d go to Quetico Provincial Park up on the border of Minnesota and Canada. “Provincial” implies that the place was small, but Quetico was, and still is, a million-acre nature preserve—so big you could go days and days without seeing another soul.

We would go on camping trips up there—weeks of canoeing and portaging, spotting bears and moose and deer, sleeping under star-soaked skies. The park was isolated and so pristine that you could actually drink the water straight from the lakes. You’d stick your paddle in, tilt the wide part to the clouds, and let the water run into your mouth.

I miss Quetico, but I won’t be going back anytime soon. Not after what happened to a girl named Frances Brandywine.

This was a few years ago. Frances was seventeen at the time, black-haired and with a reckless nature, determined always to leave the well-trod path, to break new ground and be alone.

Frances was up in Quetico with her family, in a remote part of the park, camped on the shore of one of the deeper lakes—a lonely body of dark water carved millions of years ago by a passing glacier.

One night, after her family went to bed, Frances took the rowboat out, planning to find a quiet spot in the middle of the lake, lie on the bench of the boat, look up at the sky, and maybe write in her journal.

So she left the shore and rowed for about twenty minutes, and when she was satisfied that she was over the lake’s deepest spot, she lay down and looked up at the night sky. The stars were very bright, the aurora borealis shimmering like a neon lasso. She was feeling very peaceful.

Then she heard something strange. It was like a knock.
Clop clop
.

She sat up, guessing that the boat had drifted to shore and run aground. But she looked around the boat, and she was still a half mile from shore. She leaned over the side, to see if she’d hit anything. But she saw nothing. No log, no rocks.

She lay back down, telling herself that it could have been any number of things—a fish, a turtle, a stick that had drifted under the boat.

She relaxed again, and soon fell into a contented reverie. She had just closed her eyes when she heard another knock. This time it was louder, a crisp
clok clok clok
. Like the sound of someone knocking hard on a wooden door. Except this knocking was coming from the bottom of the boat.

Now she was scared. She leaned over the side again. It had to be an animal. But what kind of animal would knock like that, three short, loud knocks in rapid succession?

Her mouth went dry. She held on to each side of the boat, and now she could only wait to see if it happened again. The silence stretched out. A few minutes passed, and just as she began to think she’d imagined it all, the knocks came again. But this time louder.
Bam bam bam!

She had to leave. She lunged for the oars, got them into place, and began rowing. The water was very calm, so she should have made quick progress. But after rowing feverishly for minutes she looked around and realized, with cold dread, that she wasn’t moving at all. Something was keeping her exactly where she was.

Her mind clawed through options. She thought about leaving the boat, swimming to shore. But she knew the water was so cold that she’d freeze before getting far. And besides, whatever was knocking on the bottom of the boat
was in that water.

Again she tried rowing. She rowed and rowed, on the verge of tears, but she went nowhere.

She stopped. She was exhausted. Her heavy breathing filled the air. She cried. She sobbed. But soon she calmed herself, and the boat was silent again. For ten minutes, then twenty. Again she tricked herself into thinking she’d imagined it all.

But just like before, just when she was beginning to get a grip on herself, the knocking came again, this time as loud as a bass drum.
Boom boom boom!
The floorboards of the boat shook with each strike.

Now she made a bad decision. She decided to lower one of the oars into the black water, trying to feel if there was some landmass, even some
creature
she could touch. As soon as the oar had broken the water’s surface, though, she felt a strong, silent tug at the other end and the oar was pulled under.

She screamed and jumped back. Now she had no options. All she could do was sit, and hope, and wait. Wait for the morning to come. Wait for whatever was going to happen to happen.

The knocking went on through the night. Sometimes it was sudden and loud:
bam bam bam!
And sometimes quieter:
tap tap tap
. Every so often it was almost musical:
knock knock kno-ahk
.

She passed the time writing in her notebook, recording each sound, each strike. And it’s only because of this notebook that we know what happened that night. Frances can’t tell us. She was never seen again.

The boat was found on shore the next day, empty but for the journal. On those pages were her frantic jottings, all written in her distinctive hand.

All but the last page. When it was found, that page was still wet, and on it were four words, looking as if they’d been written quickly, with a muddy finger, perhaps in justification. They said: “I
did
knock first.”

About “Who Knocks?”

I was introduced to Ray Bradbury in grade school, when we read “A Sound of Thunder,” and the experience was powerful, knowing that he’d grown up in Waukegan, a few towns away from where I was raised. And every year or so thereafter, we were assigned one or another Bradbury text, and always I was floored by his boundless imagination. I have to admit, though, that I hadn’t read him in many years until a few years ago, when I picked up an old edition of an anthology edited by Alfred Hitchcock called
Stories Not for the Nervous
. In it was a Bradbury story about time travel, crime, marriage, and film, all set in the 1930s in Mexico—a lot to cover in a ten-page story. But Bradbury pulled it off, brilliantly, and my respect for his body of work—the breadth and scope of which is stunning—was renewed.

—Dave Eggers

RESERVATION 2020

Bayo Ojikutu

D
aily, Joseph descended the stairwell, then walked along the ground-floor path aside his housing unit. He’d slip coins into a red machine at corridor’s end to buy a can of Coca-Cola—and so he’d continue to believe that the old America was nearby. No matter the ninnies’ chants, nor what he did not see along the way to that symbol of vending democracy. No flags whipped in mountain wind, nor stone totem temples to founders and settlers, nor upright souls traipsing along paved gold—yet Coca-Cola remained the Chief Bottler of Empire, never to slough off into the abyss. Joseph tasted the nectar slowly, let bubbles sting along his lip and throat, and felt the bite at what remained of his kidneys, and he knew. That pang, according to the fathers who’d settled their compound, was the magic elixir of treasure snatched up from dirt, hands raking through the bounty, suicide left as the aftertaste of plunder, masked by syrup and sugar and coca dope. The soul that sipped, for spare silver coin—that soul swallowed all that was to be had from the living earth, God bless it.

Now when those options were taken, and the compound’s admin replaced Coke machines with a new set of off-brand selections for sale—or perhaps Royal Crown blue (did RC exist still? Perhaps in the Old World?)—while still demanding the same coin for the purchase, then he would listen to the rabble-rousing youths who blocked the square’s streets each rush hour. And he might accept then that all that was good in the life of liberty was kept from them.

“They caught Chevy yet?”

There was nothing to be had in pretending the question went unheard. “Not that I know.”

“Haven’t heard from him yourself neither?” Joseph looked at the peach-skinned bit of androgyny perched beneath his elbow as he lowered the Coke can. Hair whipped all about the youth’s shoulders; earrings poked both earlobes; another joined his nostrils together while dirty silver jutted from his upper bicuspid; eyeliner decorated the blink in doughy eyes. He carried a maroon-and-pink-checkered skateboard beneath his stubby left arm. Hadn’t the settlers come to their compound to eradicate, or at least escape, such living confusion among the young? Joseph brought the beverage back to his mouth.

“Truthfully,” the boyish teen purred. “You can trust me. I’m not with them.”

“Mmmh, ‘them.’ Surely.” Joseph stepped away as he mocked, although he recognized the teen as one of his son’s young clamoring followers from the neighboring downstairs units.

“For sure,” the boy begged. “I heard them chanting Chevy’s name today in the square, after school. On my way—”

“Yeah? You made it to school today dressed like that?”

“Of course, sir, I did.” He hopped and pumped a fist as if protesting in the center himself. “
Chevy! Chevy! Viva Chevy! Viva la libertad!
All afternoon, just like that.”

Carbonation bit Joseph’s innards as it passed along, and the soda shivered his empty gut. “In Foreigner, hey? That’s how they said it in the square? What does that mean, even?” He crinkled the Coke can’s rim, his taste finished.

The boy dropped his skateboard to the white stone path and scooted at Joseph’s side as they headed from the machine, west toward the center square. “Not sure,” he said. Lying, most likely, Joseph guessed. “Sounds like ‘life and liberty.’ For your son. Like he’s a hero—”

“But you’re not with them?” He did not intend for the boy to answer.

“I’m not with them who’s lying about Chevy, trying to mark us with criminal insult on the fortieth anniversary. Not them, sir. I’m with the people.”

“Demo,” Joseph said, repeating the strange word Chevy had used for the rabble-rousers of his class before leaving the compound’s walls.

“Yes, sir,” the boy agreed, two words blown in skateboard wind. “Demo crazy. That’s us.”

Joseph squinted to read the sideways words scribbled along the black cotton of the boy’s T-shirt, neck to hem, as he rolled along:
IN THIS DARK PIT, ALONE, YOU ARE LOST. BUT HERE, I CAN SEE. TAKE MY HAND. FOLLOW ME.

The wording recalled lines from one of the rhymeless poems Joseph had found on Chevy’s computer after the boy left to live with his mother. Joseph wondered who was behind printing and selling T-shirts of the boy’s scribble. He could fathom neither the culprit nor the youth whose skateboard cut through an alley angling toward Reagan Square. He heard no more chanting from the core of the compound either—if it had ever been more than a figment of the skateboarder’s imagination. There was only an echo of the translations of
freedom
and
love
and
life
. He wondered whether the skateboarder repeated the words while scooting off, singing another protest chant. Had he ever even mentioned love? The father tossed his Coke can into a recycling bin at alley’s edge.

H
is street-cleaning team perched at curbside, behind their electric municipal truck and its twelve-foot trailer, hiding themselves and their equipment from the rush-hour pedestrians in the square.

“You’re doing late shift, Joe.” Ali wielded no more authority within the compound’s officialdom than the others, yet he spoke louder than the center-square din, in the tenor of something more than a question: between a suggestion and a rough bit of advice for the most senior crew member. He continued, “Tonight’s your turn, all yours.”

Joseph glanced toward his chest, and his hand idly brushed the red-and-blue municipal badge stitched high on his work suit. “It’s Tuesday. I was just out here Sunday night.”

“So what?” Ali barked.

Sensing his compromised position, Joseph gazed at the white stone beneath them as he responded. “There’s still four of us.”

Marta and Harold interrupted their fiddle with the cumbersome water sprays and concrete blasters leaned between the corner and their electric truck. They watched Joseph in the corners of opposing eyes. “Can’t hold any of us accountable for this,” said Harold.

“But you,” Marta blurted in Joseph’s direction, “that’s something else. Can blame you and yours all day, hey?”

Joseph swallowed the first response to his mind. His eyes trailed along the sidewalk. The others did not continue their argument—Marta and Harold pushed the oblong cleaning machines along a ramp and into the municipal truck’s trailer, and Ali peeked around the cabin, watching as the rush-hour pedestrians faded, solemnly replaced by battalions of university youths, toting signs scrawled with demands that dripped blood—calling for recognized “dreams” and “hopes” and “changes” and “acts,” lest they begin “tearing down these walls” in their left fists, while their rights tossed cigarette butts off into the cracks and corners of the compound’s main square.

“Yeah,” Ali said over his shoulder. “You’re cleaning this mess, Joe. It’s on you.”

“By myself? Not if we’re going by a fair rotation.”

“Fair?” Ali growled. “Who promised—”

“We agreed, when we started working Reagan.”

“That was back before . . . ,” Marta blurted again. Harold’s and Ali’s unblinking stares stopped her.

Joseph walked the ramp’s incline, dragging a machine cord at his front. When he reached the trailer, he looked out on the center’s western arc of buildings. Glimmering steel temples of outgoing capital & commerce, energy & oversight, responsible for looming over the dwelling’s entirety and employing some 80 percent of the compound’s quarter million residents in one way or another. A bank of digital-projector screens reached from the pinnacle of each skyscraper, featuring permed and tanned bobble-head voices humming updates as to the happenings in the Old World beyond compound walls. Joseph turned to the Rocky Mountain sky above, then to the square’s crawling matinee and its repeated script. The day, time, and temperature according to the International Mercantile Bank Tower ticker blinked first and last against his eyelids as Marta and Harold jumped down from the trailer, escaping the father of the one whom the IM ticker had called an “anarchist” just two days prior.

2-July—60, 5:13P, 68 degrees-

He looked down at his coworkers. “I was out here Sunday—gets so quiet after eleven—begs you to think about things. Used to be when we were kids, remember, we all still carried the Old World’s ways on our shoulders. Still used the words we know better than to speak. My father hated the man in the unit next to ours, only because he was a foreigner, and that guy, I think his name was Arturo—Pops called him
el chico próximo
—his family hated us because they blamed bitter blackness for all that had gone wrong back in the Old World, said we’d ruined it for those who appreciated life bottom-up.”

“That’s what we used to say about
los negros
, too,” Marta recalled, glancing shiftily at Ali and Joseph. “Bitter. Not me, mind you, my family said so. No slight intended.”

“Slight?” Ali bristled. “Slight at what? Why’re you looking at me for? I look like
los negro
s to you? You blind or something?”

Ali raised a hand to his eyes, turned the limb palm to back in careful assessment. His coworkers took him in, too, from the flared beige jumpsuit bottoms tucked into rugged work boots to the nest of wiry black wool combed skyward atop his head.

“What do
los negros
supposed to look like?” redheaded Harold asked between clearing his throat. “I don’t remember.”

“Who remembers?” Joseph agreed. He rubbed callous hands together hungrily, then cupped the dome of his bald head as he recalled his point. “That’s what I was thinking about here the other night, too. You take away everything they said was true in the Old World: God and tongues and skin, and who you’re fucking. The only thing left to make sense of up and down is generations. Between us and our children.”

The protest sounded three blocks west of the electric truck, a murmur to the workers. “And our fathers, too. Maybe they knew nothing for no
n
words.” Harold looked toward the center square, or at Ali, as he spoke. “But they sure’d still call you ‘boy’ and get away with it.”

“What’re you talking about?” Ali spit and sneered, yet never glanced toward the trailer. “Did you say ‘age’ or ‘Aids’? Jeez . . . do you hear them out there? What kind of way to commemorate is this? What has it come to? You’re cleaning up for sure, Joe.”

“Who would’ve thunk it could’ve been your own child? Writing such vicious muck. Your son?” Marta spoke into her chest, and Joseph was the only one of the team to hear her. “Shame, you never imagine such a thing.”

“No shame to it. They know no better. The boy is nineteen, by God. Barely started university. Never had anything like a chance,” Joseph heard himself defending. Ali lifted the truck’s steel ramp from First Street. Marta looked up from herself as the metal jammed against narrow storage slits, and Joseph leapt down to street level. “Isn’t any such thing as ‘Post-Age,’ is there? Can’t even pretend it—what would it look like? Our years is the only difference we have.”

“What do they want?” Ali’s tantrum continued. “To go back out there? What do they know?”

The echo of bobble-head words streamed along the ticker between street cleaners and protesters:
Compound Police Still Seek Terrorist in Plot to Detonate Explosives Along High-Speed Muni-Train Route as Reagan Square Disturbance Heightens.

The nearest flank of protesters read the ticker, too, and they cheered. Joseph heard some small portion of the crowd chant his son’s name with clear and vigorous tongues above the murmur, just as the skateboarding boy had claimed.

He climbed into the municipal truck’s passenger seat, wondering at the connection the screens drew between plot and disturbance. He saw Chevy behind his eyelids, and he asked the specter: If a bunch of learn-ed university students went about rejecting all else the compound has told them, why were the very same ninnies so willing to cheer its most ridiculous link about you?

Ali cleared his throat behind the electric truck’s steering wheel, and Joseph caught the fake street-cleaning supervisor staring past Marta and Harold, watching him in the cab’s side-view mirror. He nodded.

“All right,” he said, and pointed to his municipal badge. “I’ll clock in to clean Reagan tonight.”

“Alone?”

Joseph nodded his acceptance again. The electric municipal truck veered to U-turn away from the compound protest. He told himself that he would decide whether some difference existed between anarchy and terror once midnight quiet fell over Reagan Square.

T
heir family had been among the compound’s first settlers. Joseph was five when they’d come, and he remembered only dim blinks, a few clipped and fading blurbs from the Old World. The tales of substance he’d passed on to his only son regarding the place of his birth were those given him by his elders.

They’d spoken of the end of water back home—decrepit fronts, shores, lines, and beaches where most of them had lived. They described the Old World as no different from those new compounds, except for the girded walls towering from the compound’s limits. Borders obstructing the horde’s glimpse into the world before them; blocking old privileged lenses, too, from gazing into lives led by those freed behind steel.

Otherwise, the Fed had promised Joseph’s elders—and they’d passed word on to the children—that the developments were but redesigned inner cities. A series of “Just Compounds,” they’d called the dwellings, concentrated east to west along the U.S. mountain and river chains, walled-off replicas with the red lining and crumbled rust of the belted Mid-Atlantic Mecca scoured clean. Leaving the neon, blinking amenities of civilization at the ready access of the poorest qualified souls who agreed to migrate.