A Pleasure to Burn (29 page)

“It doesn't matter.” She was up, in the bathroom now. He heard the water rushing, the swallowing sound.

“No, I guess not,” he said.

And he wondered, did she take twenty tablets now, like a year ago, when we had to pump her stomach, and me shouting to keep her awake, walking her, asking her why she did it, why she wanted to die, and she saying she didn't know, she didn't know, she didn't know anything about anything!

She didn't belong to him; he didn't belong to her. She didn't know herself, him, or anyone; the world didn't need her, she didn't need herself, and in the hospital he had realized that if she died he would not cry. For it was the dying of an unknown, a street face, a face in the newspaper, and it was suddenly so wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of
not
crying at death, a silly empty man beside an empty woman while the doctors emptied her still more.

And why are we empty, lonely, and not in love? he had asked himself, a year ago.

They were never together. There was always something between, a radio, a televisor, a car, a plane, a game, nervous exhaustion, or, simply, a little pheno-barbitol. They didn't know each other; they knew things, inventions. They had both applauded science while it had built a beautiful glass structure, a glittering miracle of contraptions about them, and, too late, they had found it to be a glass wall. They could not shout through the wall; they could only pantomime silently, never touching, hearing, barely seeing each other.

Looking at Mildred at the hospital, he had thought, does it matter if we live or die?

That might not have been enough if the people had not moved next door with their daughter.

Perhaps that had been the start of his awareness of his job, his marriage, his life.

 

O
NE NIGHT—IT WAS SO LONG AGO
—
he had gone out for a long walk. In the moonlight, he realized that he had come out to get away from the nagging of his wife's television set. He walked, hands in pockets, blowing steam from his mouth into the cold air.

“Alone.” He looked at the avenues ahead. “By God, I'm alone. Not another pedestrian in miles.” He walked swiftly down street after street. “Why, I'm the only pedestrian in the entire city!” The streets were empty and long and quiet. Distantly, on crosstown arteries, a few cars moved in the dark. But no other man ventured upon the earth to test the use of his legs. In fact, it had been so many years since the sidewalks were used that they were buckling, becoming obscured with grass.

So he walked alone, aware of his loneliness, until the police car pulled up and flashed its cold white light upon him.

“What're you doing?” shouted a voice.

“I'm out for a walk.”

“He says he's out for a walk.”

The laughter, the cold, precise turning over of his identity cards, the careful noting of his address.

“Okay, mister, you can
walk
now.”

He had gone on, stomping his feet, jerking his mouth and hands, eyes blazing, gripping his elbows. “The nerve! The nerve! Is there a law against pedestrians?”

The girl turned a corner and walked toward him.

“Why, hello,” she said, and put out her hand. “You're my neighbor, aren't you ?”

“Am I?” he said.

She was smiling quietly. “We're the only live ones, aren't we?” She waved at the empty sidewalks. “Did the police stop you, too?”

“Walking's a crime.”

“They flashed their lights on me, but saw I was a woman—” She was no more than sixteen, Montag estimated, with eyes and hair as dark as mulberries, and a paleness about her that was not illness but radiance. “Then they drove away. I'm Clarisse McClellan. And you're Mr. Montag, the fireman.”

They walked together. And she began to talk for both of them.

“Isn't it a graveyard, this town,” she said. “I like to walk just to keep my franchise on the sidewalks.”

He looked, and it was true. The city was like a dark tomb, every house deep in television dimness, not a sound or move anywhere.

 

“H
AVE YOU EVER NOTICED
all the cars rushing?” she asked. “On the big boulevards down that way, day and night. I sometimes think they don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly. If you showed them a green blur, oh yes! They'd say, that's grass! A pink blur, yes, that's
roses!
” She laughed to herself. “And a white blur's a house. Quick brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slow on a highway once. They threw him in jail. Isn't that funny and sad, too?”

“You think about a lot of things for a girl,” said Montag, uneasily.

“That's because I've got time to think. I never watch TV or go to games or races or funparks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long billboards in the country? Well, did you know that once billboards were only twenty-five feet long? But cars started going by so quickly, they had to stretch the advertising out so it could be seen.”

“I didn't know that.” Montag laughed abruptly.

“I bet I know something else you don't.”

“What?”

“There's dew on the grass in the morning.”

He couldn't remember, and it suddenly frightened him.

“And, if you look, there's a man in the moon.”

He had never looked. His heart beat rapidly.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. When they reached her house, its lights were all blazing. It was the only house, in a city of a million houses, with its lights burning brightly.

“What's going on?” Montag had never seen that many house lights.

“Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. It's like being a pedestrian, only rarer.”

“But what do they
talk
about?”

She laughed at this, said good night, and was gone.

At three o'clock in the morning, he got out of bed and stuck his head out the front window. The moon was rising and there was a man in the moon. Over the broad lawn, a million jewels of dew sparkled.

“I'll be damned,” said Montag, and went back to bed.

 

H
E SAW
C
LARISSE MANY AFTERNOONS
and came to hope he would be seeing her, found himself watching for her sitting on her green lawn, studying the autumn leaves with a fine casual air, or returning from a distant woods with wild yellow flowers, or looking at the sky, even while it was raining.

“Isn't rain nice?” she said.

“I hadn't noticed.”

“Believe me, it
is
nice.”

He always laughed embarrassedly. Whether at her, or at himself, he wasn't sure. “I believe you.”

“Do you really? Do you ever smell old leaves? Don't they smell like cinnamon? Here.”

“Why, it is cinnamon, yes!”

She gazed at him with her clear dark eyes. “My gosh, you don't really know very much, do you?” She was not unkind, just concerned for him.

“I don't suppose any of us know much.”

“I do,” she said, quietly, “because I've time to look.”

“Don't you attend school?”

“Oh, no. They say I'm anti-social. I don't mix. And the yelling bully is the thing among kids this season, you know.”

“It's been a long season,” observed Mr. Montag, and stood somewhat shocked at his own perception.

“Then you've noticed?”

“Yes. But what about your friends?”

“I haven't any. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But they're always packed around the TV, or racing in cars, or shouting or beating one another. Do you notice how people hurt one another nowadays?”

“You sound ancient.”

“I am. I know about rain. That makes me ancient to them. They kill each other. It didn't used to be that way, did it? Children killing each other all the time? Four of my friends have been shot in the past year. I'm afraid of children.”

“Maybe it was always this way.”

“My father says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other, when children were seen and not heard. But that was a long time ago, when they had discipline and responsibility. Do you know, I'm disciplined. I'm spanked when I need it, and I've responsibility. I do all the shopping and housecleaning. By hand.”

“And you know about rain,” said Mr. Montag, with the rain beating on his hat and coat.

“It tastes good if you lean back and open your mouth. Go on.”

He leaned back and gaped.

“Why,” he said, “it's
wine.
”

 

T
HAT HAD NOT BEEN THE END OF IT
.
The girl had talked to him one bright afternoon and given him the dandelion test.

“It proves you're in love or not.”

She brushed a dandelion under his chin. “What a shame! You're not in love with anyone.”

And he thought, when did I stop loving Mildred? and the answer was never! For he had never known her. She was the pale, sad goldfish that swam in the subterranean illumination of the television parlor, her natural habitat.

“It's the dandelion you use,” protested Montag.

“No,” said Clarisse, solemnly. “You're not in love. A dandelion won't help.” She tossed the flower away. “Well, I've got to go see my psychiatrist. My teachers are sending me to him. He's trying to make me normal.”

“I'll throttle him if he does!”

“Right now he's trying to figure out why I go away from the city and walk in the forests once a day. Have you ever walked in a forest? No? It's so quiet and lovely, and nobody rushing. I like to watch the birds and the insects. They don't rush.”

Before she left him to go inside, she looked at him suddenly and said, “Do you know, Mr. Montag, I can't believe you're a fireman.”

“Why not?”

“Because you're so nice. Do you mind if I ask one last question?”

“I don't mind.”

“Why do you do what you
do?
”

But before he knew what she meant or could make a reply, she had run off, embarrassed at her own frankness.

“What did she mean, why do I do what I do?” he said to himself. “I'm a fireman, of course. I burn books. Is
that
what she meant?”

He didn't see Clarisse for a month. He watched for her each day, but made no point of her absence to his wife. He wanted to go rap on her parents' door, but decided against it; he didn't want them misunderstanding his interest in the child. But after thirty-six days had passed, he brought Clarisse's name up offhand.

“Oh, her?” said Mildred, with the radio music jarring the table plates. “Why, didn't you know?”

“Know what?”

“She was killed by an automobile a month ago.”

“A month! But why didn't someone tell me!”

“Didn't I? I suppose it slipped my mind. Yes, a car hit her.”

“Did they find whose car it was?”

“No. You know how those things are. What do you want for supper, frozen steak or chops?”

And so Clarisse was dead. No, disappeared! For in a large city you didn't die, you simply vanished. No one missed you, no one saw you go; your death was as insignificant as that of a butterfly carried secretly away, caught in the radiator grille of a speeding car.

And with Clarisse's death, half of the world was dead, and the other half was instantly revealed to him for what it was.

He saw what Mildred was and always would be, what he himself was but didn't want to be any more. And he saw that it was no idle thing, Mildred's suicide attempts, the lovely dark girl with the flowers being ground under a car; it was a thing of the world they lived in. It was a part of the screaming, pressing down of people into electric molds. It was the meaningless flight of civilization down a rotary track to smash its own senseless tail. Mildred's flight was trying to die and escape nothingness, whereas Clarisse had been fighting nothingness with something, with being aware instead of forgetting, with walking instead of sitting, with going to get life instead of having it brought to her.

And the civilization had killed her for her trouble. Not purposely, no, but with a fine ironic sense, for no purpose at all. Killed by a vanilla-faced idiot racing nowhere for nothing and irritated that he had been detained 120 seconds while the police investigated and released him on his way to some distant base that he must tag frantically before running for home.

Montag felt the slow gathering of awareness. Mildred, Clarisse. The firemen. The murdering children. Last night, the old man's books burned and him in an asylum. Tonight, that woman burned before his eyes. It was such a nightmare that only another nightmare, less horrible, could be used to escape from it, and Clarisse had died weeks ago and he had not seen her die, which made it somehow crueler and yet more bearable.