Lee Read online

  He pressed on, past a tavern full of failed people licking their wounds. It was a land of patriots—already he had espied two flags—whereas in his own view, patriotism ought be restricted to the spirit world. (He no longer acknowledged nations. What he saw was everywhere a sandstorm of individuals, most of them of very bad quality indeed.) Suddenly he noted a white youth looking coldly at him, as if imagining it would be an easy matter to take an old man’s wallet away. Lee slowed. This could be a very good thing—he would enjoy someone risking fifty years of forthcoming life against the few months he had left for wagering.

  The next block was full of gas stations and garages, where a soiled people were being eaten alive by cars with hoods agape. This sullen attraction between the ignorant and vehicles—what was it? Among it all he spotted a splotched woman in jewelry and blond wig with a face that showed she had never read a book. He did not like the common people, they did not like him. Anything might happen. Even with his cane he was in danger, especially if any should ever guess what he was thinking. And they could guess; indeed, they needed only a glance to see that nothing stood between themselves and outright slavery, save only his inability to bring it off.

  Suddenly he stopped short. A child was sitting in a kind of blue-eyed ignorance in his path. Lee had seen these things before. This child, however, was lapping much too happily at the slime that issued in so much plenty from both nostrils at once. Lee reeled. He could see in this snot-nosed infant that taxpayer and sports fan of the future who was to be given as much voting power as he himself had ever had. He took one step forward, then, slowly, lifted his cane. By and large he had found that “the people” behaved better when treated from the beginning like filth. Now he was on the verge of striking this one out of existence, but at the same time incurring three witnesses. One observer, presumably the father, was striding forward quickly to protect his spawn. Lee grinned.

  “What in the . . . !”

  “Can you tell me where Quintard Street is?”

  The man was weak. Lee’s gaze had ten thousand books behind it.

  “I know where Quintard Avenue is.”

  “That’s it.”

  “You’re headed right for it.”

  “So.”

  He went on slowly. In the next block was a grocery and nearby was a music shop with four or five vacuous-looking youths sniffing one another’s crotches. How he loathed the young! Body-people, of all earth’s creatures most distant from the truth. He could see in their faces that they thought life had just begun, whereas in fact, because they were uneducated, it was almost done. In his day these types had grown up listening to country music; now, they had taken over the tastes of the spoiled class.

  He had made his tour and was back on the street that divided the poor from the prosperous parts of town. He was tired, it was hot, he wanted to get himself home before afternoon came on.

  Three

  THREE TIMES HE WENT DOWN, passing slowly in front of the lobby (with people watching him), and then shuffled back to his room with an armload of books. The chest itself had been parked upside down. As a result, the more immature stuff was now on top—mere novels and whatnot that he had long ago eschewed.

  While his rooms were capacious, they stank of linoleum and paint. He had work to do, if he seriously planned on turning this into that scriptorium he had in view. First, he must people it with souls, unobtrusive types in the form of fine books. For he had as lief be finished with life at once as to go on without aid of books—if not for reading, then at least to rest his head upon.

  It was on his fourth trip—he loathed having to expose himself thus to people sitting about in the lobby—that he noted one woman in particular who had fixed on him suspiciously. Lee stopped. She too had a cane, it too was heavy; moreover, she held it in a hand that was meaty and covered with freckles. At once he could feel his confidence ebbing. Nevertheless, he forced himself to turn and face her, to make his eyes goggle, and begin to pick conspicuously at his nose.

  It was a bad place full of old people, invested everywhere with the smell of medicine and paint. All his days he had been a student and a reader, but there were no readers nor students here. He was, however, grateful for the quiet and the moroseness, the absence of that ubiquitous “music” that had done so much to embitter him. He was grateful, too, that he had been posted to the third floor, where he could speculate down on those beneath him, instead of the other way around. Perhaps most of all, he was grateful for the windows that looked, one of them, into the slum and, the other, out to countryside where even now a single plaid cow could be seen wending homeward. There was a chair, and reaching for it, he seated himself comfortably.

  These last twenty years he had been reading in the Greeks, so much so indeed that he could sit in bed and summon up from out of history real happenings that most people, mercifully, could not have endured to imagine. His wisdom was increasing; his hatred, too: He now thought of himself as the unacknowledged prophet of the crumbling of the West. This was the good of books: for toying with Time. Old drawings in old books—he preferred this so much more than anything that was happening in the outside world. To his thinking, it were far more laudable to have been alive than to be alive, or than to be scheduled for the future. And anyway, he still thought of the Greeks as having taken to a cave somewhere, all of them coughing and nudging impatiently, all quite ready to come back on stage someday.

  The first book was a little green number, celery-colored, that he cherished in his heart. This one had true knowledge in it and an author now in paradise. He took it, opening upon a little colored map so childish and naive that it could only have been done by one of the ancients himself, someone who had actually set eyes upon the place. It was odd: He could touch down at random with his pencil point and hit each time upon a murder, or battle, or famous crime. He had also the uncanny ability of setting himself down in the empty spaces and drifting for days, as it were, from one little wretched town to the next. He simply could not understand how humans could be what they were while the books made by them were so often as good as they were. It was a puzzle. This one was very good; moreover, coming near, he could see where someone had made some very cogent notes in the margin and these too were good. It was seldom he had an aesthetic experience in the middle of the day, especially not with a crowd of older people, nonreaders, in the same building with him. It needed all that he had to put them out of mind, to take up the book again and then, as it were, lick, lick, lick until the ink began to run.

  Frequently, he would wake to find that two or three volumes had joined him in bed. This time he rose, got out of bed, and walked around the room. The night was dark and had something in it that sounded like rain. In his time the town had teemed with crickets, now only a very few hoarse ones were clinging on. For him this was the most grueling part of the night, when he must resort to his box of photographs and, taking up one of his wife, concentrate upon it long enough and diligently enough until such time as death might or might not relinquish her up for a spell. This time it was a small square snapshot, rather faded, showing her in the full splendor of nineteen years of age. He shivered. His method was to hold a lighted match to various parts of himself, the better to bring forth the groans at once and pay the full cost here and now rather than letting it fester. Then, too, he needed to draw the attention of those who could let her out for an hour or two. One great embarrassment—the mortician who must one day see what he had done to himself.

  Perhaps he could grow inured to it someday, but not yet, not now. He was weak, and trembling so much he could hardly do his work. Fainting was no good; he simply had to stop and start again. A full minute passed that seemed to go on longer than the day. He envied the dead, the sick, those awaiting execution.

  There was a humming sound when she stepped out of the picture, aged nineteen. These new surroundings had her confused, however. He waited while she made a circuit of the place, blinking at it, coming back.

  “Is this where we live now?
”

  “Right.”

  She nodded slowly and then went suddenly to check on the kitchen.

  This now was the good time—all the rest of the world turning in to sleep and lights going out one by one. There were only a few lighted places left where someone might be working late or simply loath to be in the dark. Knowing them the way he did, he could virtually see them through walls, whole families of them sleeping in knots. One single car was still nosing from one address to another, as if trying to recollect where to berth. Also, he could see a radio tower with three lilac lights and remembered it from the old days. It was this tower that had always seemed to give the command for children to get to bed.

  To his mind nothing could be more odd than that, for all these hundreds of years, so many generations had been retreating at certain specified hours into special chambers, there to lie in silence, stunned for a certain duration. As if the great Zodiac required surcease in order to plot tomorrow’s day. Coming near, he saw his own features in the window, then next a much larger face in the sky, huge and wise and with an airplane toiling through its beard of stars.

  He liked to rove mentally into the countryside, flying as it were at about two feet above the level of the earth. It was for this imagination-work, and nothing else, that he had been given a stint in the flesh in the first place. No doubt there was a chill; his disembodied mind, however, felt none of it. Itself, the moon, was thin (two holes in it) and looked as frail as manuscript. He could hear a train making a run for it and, further away, the noise of night animals—all of them quite prepared to perish if only they might first inflict some mortal injury. Now there came up to the window what for him was the last touch—he couldn’t credit his eyes—a grinning toad riding athwart a bat.

  Gingerly, he got into his gown and cap and lowered himself into bed, one withered leg after another. Judy was asleep already, as was her habit; he had always admired the blamelessness that let her, as it were, float out to sea and stay for hours in steadfast slumber. Looking at close range into that face with still so much of the child in it, so much of fifty-year-old photographs, he could not begin to envision the civilizations she had seen—pastel lands, hilltops with music, dogs more laughable than any on earth and able also to converse, etc., etc. Whatever it was, she kept it in her head.

  In truth, this bed was hardly wide enough for the two of them and the books, pistol, and dictionary besides. Also the candle was weak and gave off a series of little explosions that smelled like a faintly remembered camphor from out of the past. Down below the other tenants had long ago lapsed off in the simplistic dreams of their kind, like so many low-grade films being shown simultaneously in the cells. The last thing he wanted was for his own dreams, which were complex and based upon actual historical fact, to be mixing in with someone else’s dead child.

  Apparently he slept, longer than usual. Judy was gone; the candle, shorter. It was yet a good three or four hours before daybreak; he could see one star putting up real resistance before blinking out forever. Someone somewhere was singing, a fine voice, but broken suddenly by the most startling sound (he could feel his heart freeze) of an ape or orangutan shrieking horribly at no great distance from his quarters.

  Four

  HE WOKE, FULL OF GAS. HE had two minutes to get him a cup of coffee; either that or he would fall unconscious again. As for food and breakfast, he had lost the knack of it.

  He dressed hurriedly; then, taking his stick, he limped down to the “tea room” where already some half-dozen blue-haired monsters were sitting indignantly, eyes bulging, munching on crumpets. The waiter was an obsequity in a jacket, so adept at back bending he seemed to have a hinge—he would go far. Lee looked at him coldly and after ordering coffee, went out to retrieve more books. If these had been anything else in the world, he could never have trusted them to be left alone. Even so, a white dew had formed over the topmost of them. He didn’t care; the condition of things no longer mattered. Indeed, so that he might leave nothing behind, he actually preferred that his belongings should deteriorate at the same pace as himself.

  It intrigued him how little noise came from his footfall in fair weather. He saw a woman standing on a porch, and then, there was the same little brown dog yapping at him in high-pitched voice. These bourgeois dogs! Very brave were they in a world without dangers. This one had defecated at sighting a real dog from outside the gates. Lee slowed, hobbling, hoping to lure the thing a little closer. Across the way the woman was watching darkly, even as he swung suddenly and caught the dog smartly on the crupper—a good sound followed up by a cry and a yelp and a rolling in the grass. Lee grinned. The woman herself had dropped her broom, watching in openmouthed disbelief. Huge was his temptation, huge, to march across and give her one or two whacks as well, she had so many places for it.

  The next block was his own, but there was still no sign of the inhabitants who might be taking up his old room, or of the woman making use of his mother’s kitchen. In his time, there had always been a flurry, comings and goings, children playing and playing hard all day in the sun. Where were they now? His tree house had gone to ruins, nothing left to it but one or two boards dangling in the branches where once he used to scan all the way to Tennessee. He could hear television voices from several places at once. There was something ill about these latter days, something in the elongated forms and darkened homes, all of it reminiscent, it seemed to him, of the last phase of the Mayan culture, before the final visitation from afar.

  He left the houses, crossed the road, and strolled the two hundred yards to the golf course. Here he had wasted must of his youth in chasing down balls for the rich, smiling for his coins even while harboring up schemes for their extinction. (If he had to specify any one greatest disappointment, it was that he had never yet witnessed that Revolution and the attendant bloodletting he thought he had been promised as a boy.) Lee stopped. Two women, rich ones too, were coming toward him with their golf instruments and wearing peculiar hats. He could feel his old excitement. Each step drew them further and further from protection and nearer and nearer to him. For days he had been itching to thrash someone within an inch or two of his or her life, to do it in such fashion as to alert the town that he was back, and this time with a cane.

  The women themselves came by, chatting happily of interior decorating and other people’s divorces. Lee followed, goggling, until one turned off into the weeds and began swiping ineptly at her ball. She didn’t have to be good at this, or at anything, and wasn’t. He had a view of her buttock, thirty-five-year-old material that was rather too pudgy and on the verge of breaking down. Just then, the caddie came up out of nowhere; he was a sizeable black man with a sizeable moustache. Again Lee felt the wonder of it: Strong as he was, and large, why then did he not slaughter the both of them and become rich himself? Indeed, he went off some fifty feet to give the man his chance. Neither of these women had read so much as one percent of the world’s best literature and yet, somehow, had found the time to be stymied on the green. Lee could feel his contempt, an acute pain that started at the base of his skull, could feel it overflowing and filling the earth.

  They went on, four of them in file. It was amazing, how the women ignored the black man, who was so much more of a presence than the two of them combined. For one golden minute, Lee thought he was about to take action. Instead, that moment, a little motorized cart came up with two more golfers in it. Never had he seen so many lips and teeth in so many Southern smiles. And so much cordial Southern shrieking! He put it down to the effects of too much prosperity too far prolonged, just as Toynbee said.

  However, it was now that time in the day when his age was beginning to tell. He never came out of doors without a volume in his coat, a thin one such as would slip in and out of his pocket with a grace. This day it was Polemon of Ilium, or rather what remained of him in the form of the few fragments that had come down. He sought for and found a comfy nook with pine needles, apparently set aside just for elderly readers. Yet no sooner
had he settled, than there was an insect in his underwear.

  He read, slowly at first, trying to get the gist of it, especially the cruel Greek verb that had been his bane for so many years. He stumbled now upon one thirty letters long and with so many excrescences on it, fore and aft, that its meaning would be too deeply buried ever to dig out. Anyway, he couldn’t read in daytime, not out of doors, not with thrips crawling in his pants.

  It was hot, so hot, and yet, looking up, he wished it were much hotter still. What the world could not know was that his wife had hit upon this way of communicating with him. Lately, it had proved an aid to thinking too. He had done so much reading that he needed only to shut his eyes to see things as they were a billion years ago: the perturbed stars, a sterilized sea (thin and tenuous as naphtha), and some few gastropods (life’s noblest products) tottering down a spotless shore.

  He could hear a radio and, further away, a dog barking desultorily. It was but life—he knew it well—bicycles and children, business and news, a roar from deep within a shell. As for himself, he wanted to be without body in a glassine world for cultivated people, with books to be read a thousand at a time.

  His own book was lying uncomfortably; he didn’t care. These days he could snooze without so much as a slowdown in thought. Then too, he liked to get his sleeping out of the way before night came on. He saw now a yellow bird had come in closer and seemed to be watching, as for the kill. He had been dreaming the sun was in one place, whereas, in fact, it was in another, and never had it appeared more artificial.