I learned your books. Burned them into my mind. In case the firemen come to town.
But who you are is gone. I wait for it to return to me. Just as I waited for my dictionary or for my radio, or for my boots, and with as meagre a result.
All I have left is the space in my mind where you used to be.
And I am not so certain about even that.
I was talking to a friend. And I said, “Are these stories familiar to you?” I told him all the words I knew, the ones about the monsters coming home to the house with the human child in it, the ones about the lightning salesman and the wicked carnival that followed him, and the Martians and their fallen glass cities and their perfect canals. I told him all the words, and he said he hadn’t heard of them. That they didn’t exist.
And I worry.
I worry I was keeping them alive. Like the people in the snow at the end of the story, walking backwards and forwards, remembering, repeating the words of the stories, making them real.
I think it’s God’s fault.
I mean, he can’t be expected to remember everything, God can’t. Busy chap. So perhaps he delegates things, sometimes, just goes, “You! I want you to remember the dates of the Hundred Years’ War. And you, you remember okapi. You, remember Jack Benny who was Benjamin Kubelsky from Waukegan, Illinois.” And then, when you forget the things that God has charged you with remembering, bam. No more okapi. Just an okapi-shaped hole in the world, which is halfway between an antelope and a giraffe. No more Jack Benny. No more Waukegan. Just a hole in your mind where a person or a concept used to be.
I don’t know.
I don’t know where to look. Have I lost an author, just as once I lost a dictionary? Or worse: Did God give me this one small task, and now I have failed him, and because I have forgotten him he has gone from the shelves, gone from the reference works, and now he only exists in our dreams…
My dreams. I do not know your dreams. Perhaps you do not dream of a veldt that is only wallpaper but that eats two children. Perhaps you do not know that Mars Is Heaven, where our beloved dead go to wait for us, then consume us in the night. You do not dream of a man arrested for the crime of being a pedestrian.
I dream these things.
If he existed, then I have lost him. Lost his name. Lost his book titles, one by one by one. Lost the stories.
And I fear that I am going mad, for I cannot just be growing old.
If I have failed in this one task, oh God, then only let me do this thing, that you may give the stories back to the world.
Because, perhaps, if this works, they will remember him. All of them will remember him. His name will once more become synonymous with small American towns at Hallowe’en, when the leaves skitter across the sidewalk like frightened birds, or with Mars, or with love. And my name will be forgotten.
I am willing to pay that price, if the empty space in the bookshelf of my mind can be filled again, before I go.
Dear God, hear my prayer.
A… B… C… D… E… F… G…
I wanted to write about Ray Bradbury. I wanted to write about him in the way that he wrote about Poe in “Usher II”—a way that drove me to Poe.
I was going to read something in an intimate theatre space, very late at night, during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My wife, Amanda, and I were hosting a midnight show of songs and readings. I promised myself that I would finish it in time to read it to forty people seated on sofas and on cushions on the floor in a tiny, beautiful room that normally contained the Belt Up Theatre Company’s intimate plays.
Very well, it would be a monologue, if I was going to read it.
The inspiration came from forgetting a friend of mine. He died a decade ago. And I went to look in my head for his name, and it was gone. I knew everything else about him—the periodicals he had written for, his favourite brand of bourbon. I could have recited every conversation he and I had ever had, told you what we talked about. I could remember the names of the books he had written.
But his name was gone. And it scared me. I waited for his name to return, promised myself I wouldn’t Google it, would just wait and remember. But nothing came. It was as if there was a hole in the universe the size of my friend. I would walk home at night trying to think of his name, running through names in alphabetical order. “Al? No. Bob? No. Charles? Chris? Not them…”
And I thought, What if it were an author? What if it was everything he’d done? What if everyone else had forgotten him too?
I wrote the story by hand. I finished it five minutes before we had to leave the house to go to the theatre. I was a mass of nerves—I’d never read something to an audience straight out of the pen.
When I read it, I finished it with a recital of the whole alphabet.
Then I typed it out and sent it to Ray for his ninety-first birthday.
I was there at his seventieth birthday, in the Natural History Museum in London.
It was, like everything else about the man and his work, unforgettable.
HEADLIFE
Margaret Atwood
Everything on the list,” says Quentin.
“Expensive,” says Dr. Derwent. “You’re sure?”
“Dave, I own this fucking place,” says Quentin. He’s taken to swearing more as the decades have worn on. An inhibition thing disappears out of the brain with age, he’s read that somewhere. Angry old men capering around in their institutional PJs, dribbling pee and yelling at the nurses. That won’t be me.
“So, everything?” says Dr. Derwent, smiling his unctuous, ass-kissing smile. He seems nervous. Hope he’s not on drugs, wouldn’t want those pricey fingers to slip.
“I told you,” says Quentin irritably. “We went over it point by point. I said everything.”
“I suggest you read the contract,” says Dr. Derwent, smiling like a half-dead newt.
“Suzie read it,” says Quentin. “I pay her to read shit like that. Anyway I wrote the fucking contract in the first place, remember? And I already signed it.”
He pays Suzie for other stuff too, she’s added a whole new dimension to the Personal Assistant job description, but no need to go into that with Dr. Dave. He resists the impulse to add, You stupid dipshit. He’s seen the lecherous bloodsucker planting his hand on Suzie’s mercenary, gold-digging bee-shaped rump. And worse, he’s seen how she responds: the wet lips, the boob-heaving exhale, the butt arched up like a cat’s—a sequence of moves he knows intimately. She might as well be wearing a T-shirt: I’M IN HEAT. Though for him she was most likely faking it.
They think they’re unseen, but I notice every fucking thing; I didn’t get where I am without noticing. I’ll settle scores with Suzie as well, once I make my comeback. With my new eight-incher and never a limp moment, no pills or injections needed ever again. She won’t know whether to scream Stop! or More! She’ll be terminally fucked in all senses of the word, and then I’ll toss her out. Snivelling and cringing, shuddering and begging and Oh pleasing. Naked onto the street. That would be a five-star vision. No more pitying looks, no more pretend orgasms from her, nor from her successors. Her many, many successors. Praise the Lord, as his mother would have said, the hypocritical old baby-torturer. Though Quentin himself wasn’t in the habit of praising anyone.