The Illustrated Man

‘This is the other shoe, Mayor, and the other foot,’ said Willie, not even looking at the mayor, looking at the faces beneath him, some of them smiling, some of them doubtful, others bewildered, some of them reluctant and drawing away, fearful.

‘You’ll be sorry,’ said the mayor.

‘We’ll have an election and get a new mayor,’ said Willie. And he glanced off at the town where up and down the streets signs were being hung, fresh-painted: LIMITED CLIENTELE: Right to serve customer revocable at any time. He grinned and slapped his hands. Lord! And streetcars were being halted and sections being painted white in back, to suggest their future inhabitants. And theatres were being invaded and roped off by chuckling men, while their wives stood wondering on the curbs and children were spanked into houses to be hid away from this awful time.

‘Are we all ready?’ called Willie Johnson, the rope in his hands with the noose tied and neat.

‘Ready!’ shouted half the crowd. The other half murmured and moved like figures in a nightmare in which they wished no participation.

‘Here it comes!’ called a small boy.

Like marionette heads on a single string, the heads of the crowd turned upward.

Across the sky, very high and beautiful, a rocket burned on a sweep of orange fire. It circled and came down, causing all to gasp. It landed, setting the meadow afire here and there; the fire burned out, the rocket lay a moment in quiet, and then, as the silent crowd watched, a great door in the side of the vessel whispered out a breath of oxygen, the door slid back and an old man stepped out.

‘A white man, a white man, a white man …’ The word travelled back in the expectant crowd, the children speaking in each other’s ears, whispering, butting each other, the words moving in ripples to where the crowd stopped and the streetcars stood in the windy sunlight, the smell of paint coming out of their opened windows. The whispering wore itself away and it was gone.

No one moved.

The white man was tall and straight, but a deep weariness was in his face. He had not shaved this day, and his eyes were as old as the eyes of a man can be and still be alive. His eyes were colourless; almost white and sightless with things he had seen in the passing years. He was as thin as a winter bush. His hands trembled and he had to lean against the portway of the ship as he looked out over the crowd.

He put out a hand and half smiled, but drew his hand back.

No one moved.

He looked down into their faces, and perhaps he saw but did not see the guns and the ropes, and perhaps he smelled the paint. No one ever asked him. He began to talk. He started very quietly and slowly, expecting no interruptions, and receiving none, and his voice was very tired and old and pale.

‘It doesn’t matter who I am,’ he said. ‘I’d be just a name to you, anyhow. I don’t know your names, either. That’ll come later.’ He paused, closed his eyes for a moment, and then continued:

‘Twenty years ago you left Earth. That’s a long, long time. It’s more like twenty centuries, so much has happened. After you left, the War came.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, the big one. The Third One. It went on for a long time. Until last year. We bombed all of the cities of the world. We destroyed New York and London and Moscow and Paris and Shanghai and Bombay and Alexandria. We ruined it all. And when we finished with the big cities we went to the little cities and atom-bombed and burned them.’

Now he began to name cities and places, and streets. And as he named them, a murmur rose up in his audience.

‘We destroyed Natchez …’

A murmur.

‘And Columbus, Georgia …’

Another murmur.

‘We burned New Orleans …’

A sigh.

‘And Atlanta …’

Still another.

‘And there was nothing left of Greenwater, Alabama.’

Willie Johnson jerked his head and his mouth opened. Hattie saw this gesture, and the recognition coming into his dark eyes.

‘Nothing was left,’ said the old man in the port, speaking slowly. ‘Cotton fields, burned.’

‘Oh,’ said everyone.

‘Cotton mills bombed out –’

‘Oh.’

‘And the factories, radioactive; everything radioactive. All the roads and the farms and the foods, radioactive. Everything.’ He named more names of towns and villages.

‘Tampa.’

‘That’s my town,’ someone whispered.

‘Fulton.’

‘That’s mine,’ someone else said.

‘Memphis.’

‘Memphis. Did they burn Memphis?’ A shocked query.

‘Memphis, blown up.’

‘Fourth Street in Memphis?’

‘All of it,’ said the old man.

It was stirring them now. After twenty years it was rushing back. The towns and the places, the trees and the brick buildings, the signs and the churches and the familiar stores, all of it was coming to the surface among the gathered people. Each name touched memory, and there was no one present without a thought of another day. They were all old enough for that, save the children.

‘Laredo.’

‘I remember Laredo.’

‘New York City.’

‘I had a store in Harlem.’

‘Harlem, bombed out.’

The ominous words. The familiar, remembered places. The struggle to imagine all of those places in ruins.

Willie Johnson murmured the words, ‘Greenwater, Alabama. That’s where I was born, I remember.’

Gone. All of it gone. The man said so.