Long After Midnight

Death.

An end to doubt, to torture, to monotony, to want, to loneliness, to fear, an end to everything.

All men?

No. Not Craig. Craig was, perhaps, far luckier. A few men were like animals in the universe, not questioning, drinking at pools and breeding and raising their young and not doubting for a moment that life was anything but good. That was Craig. There were a handful like him. Happy animals on a great reservation, in the hand of God, with a religion and a faith that grew like a set of special nerves in them. The unneurotic men in the midst of the billionfold neurotics. They would only want death, later, in a natural manner. Not now. Later.

Beck raised the bottle. How simple, he thought, and how right. This is what I’ve always wanted. And nothing else.

Nothing.

The bottle was open and blue in the starlight. Beck took an immense draught of the air coming from the Blue Bottle, deep into his lungs.

I have it at last, he thought.

He relaxed. He felt his body become wonderfully cool and then wonderfully warm. He knew he was dropping down a long slide of stars into a darkness as delightful as wine. He was swimming in blue wine and white wine and red wine. There were candles in his chest, and fire wheels spinning. He felt his hands leave him. He felt his legs fly away, amusingly. He laughed. He shut his eyes and laughed.

He was very happy for the first time in his life.

The Blue Bottle dropped onto the cool sand.

At dawn, Craig walked along, whistling. He saw the bottle lying in the first pink light of the sun on the empty white sand. As he picked it up, there was a fiery whisper. A number of orange and red-purple fireflies blinked on the air, and passed on away.

The place was very still.

“I’ll be damned.” He glanced toward the dead windows of a nearby city. “Hey, Beck!”

A slender tower collapsed into powder.

“Beck, here’s your treasure! I don’t want it. Come and get it!”

“… and get it,” said an echo, and the last tower fell.

Craig waited.

“That’s rich,” he said. “The bottle right here, and old Beck not even around to take it.” He shook the blue container.

It gurgled.

“Yes, sir! Just the way it was before. Full of bourbon, by God!” He opened it, drank, wiped his mouth.

He held the bottle carelessly.

“All that trouble for a little bourbon. I’ll wait right here for old Beck and give him his damn bottle. Meanwhile—have an other drink, Mr. Craig. Don’t mind if I do.”

The only sound in the dead land was the sound of liquid running into a parched throat. The Blue Bottle flashed in the sun.

Craig smiled happily and drank again.

One Timeless Spring (#ulink_c72e05a6-ce66-5598-b41e-048062c78929)

That week, so many years ago, I thought my mother and father were poisoning me. And now, twenty years later, I’m not so sure they didn’t. There’s no way of telling.

It all comes back to me through the simple expedient of an examined trunk in the attic. This morning I pulled back the brass hasps and lifted the lid, and the immemorial odor of mothballs shrouded the unstrung tennis rackets, the worn sneakers, the shattered toys, the rusty roller skates. These implements of play, seen again through older eyes, make it seem only an hour ago that I rushed in from the shady streets, all asweat, the cry of “Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free!” still excitedly trembling on my lips.

I was a weird and ridiculous boy then with brooding and uncommon ideas; the poison and the fear were only part of me in those years. I began making notes in a lined nickel tablet when I was only twelve. I can feel the stubby pencil in my fingers now, writing in those timeless spring mornings.

I paused to lick my pencil, thoughtfully. I sat in my upstairs room at the beginning of a clear endless day, blinking at the rose-stamped wallpaper, my feet bare, my hair shorn to a hairbrush stubble, thinking.

“I didn’t know I was sick until this week,” I wrote. “I’ve been sick for a long time. Since I was ten. I’m twelve now.”

I scrouged up my face, bit my lips hard, focused blurrily on the tablet. “Mom and Dad have made me sick. Teachers at school also gave this—” I hesitated. Then I wrote: “Disease to me! The only ones who don’t scare me are the other kids. Isabel Skelton and Willard Bowers and Clarisse Mellin; they aren’t very sick yet. But I’m really bad off ….”

I laid the pencil down. I went to the bathroom mirror to see myself. My mother called me from downstairs to come to breakfast. I pressed close to the mirror, breathing so fast I made a big damp fog on the glass. I saw how my face was—changing.

The bones of it. Even the eyes. The pores of my nose. My ears. My forehead. My hair. All the things that’d been me for such a long time, starting to become something else. (“Douglas, come to breakfast, you’ll be late for school!”) As I took a quick wash I saw my body floating under me. I was inside it. There was no escape. And the bones of it were doing things, shifting, mixing around!

Then I began singing and whistling loud, so I wouldn’t think about it; until Father, rapping on the door, told me to quiet down and come eat.

I sat at the breakfast table. There was a yellow box of cereal and milk, white-cold in a pitcher, and shining spoons and knives, and eggs planked with bacon, Dad reading his paper, Mom moving around the kitchen. I sniffed. I felt my stomach lie down like a whipped dog.

“What’s wrong, son?” Dad looked at me casually. “Not hungry?”

“No, sir.”

“A boy should be hungry in the morning,” said Father.

“You go ahead and eat,” said Mother at me. “Go on now. Hurry.”

I looked at the eggs. They were poison. I looked at the butter. It was poison. The milk was so white and creamy and poisonous in its pitcher, and the cereal was brown and crisp and tasty in a green dish with pink flowers on it.

Poison, all of them, poison! The thought ran in my head like ants at a picnic. I caught my lip in my teeth.

“Unh?” said Dad, blinking at me. You said?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Except I’m not hungry.”

I couldn’t say I was ill and that food made me ill. I couldn’t say that cookies, cakes, cereals and soups and vegetables had done this to me, could I? No, I had to sit, swallowing nothing, my heart beginning to pound.

“Well, drink your milk at least, and go on,” said Mother. “Dad, give him money for a good lunch at school. Orange juice, meat, and milk. No candy.”

She didn’t have to warn me on candy. It was worst of all the poisons. I wouldn’t touch it again, ever!

I strapped my books and went to the door.

“Douglas, you didn’t kiss me,” said Mom.

“Oh,” I said, and shuffled to kiss her.