I Sing the Body Electric

I nodded.

“So you think that grave up on the hill is a wrong grave for a right man, do you?”

“That’s about it,” I said.

“You think there are all kinds of graves along the road for all of us?”

“Could be,” I said.

“And if we could see all our life one way or another, we’d choose better? At the end, looking back,” said the hunter, “we’d say, hell, that was the year and the place, not the other year and the other place, but that one year, that one place. Would we say that?”

“Since we have to choose or be pushed finally,” I said, “yes.”

“That’s a nice idea,” said the hunter. “But how many of us have that much sense? Most of us don’t have brains enough to leave a party when the gin runs out. We hang around.”

“We hang around,” I said, “and what a shame.”

We ordered some more beer.

The hunter drank half the glass and wiped his mouth.

“So what can you do about wrong graves?” he said.

“Treat them as if they didn’t exist,” I said. “And maybe they’ll go away, like a bad dream.”

The hunter laughed once, a kind of forlorn cry. “God, you’re crazy. But I like listening to crazy people. Blow some more.”

“That’s all,” I said.

“Are you the Resurrection and the Life?” said the hunter.

“No.”

“You going to say Lazarus come forth?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“I just want, very late in the day,” I said, “to choose right places, right times, right graves.”

“Drink that drink,” said the hunter. “You need it. Who in hell sent you?”

“Me,” I said. “I did. And some friends. We all chipped in and picked one out of ten. We bought that truck out on the street and I drove it across country. On the way I did a lot of hunting and fishing to put myself in the right frame. I was in Cuba last year. Spain the summer before. Africa the summer before that. I got a lot to think about. That’s why they picked me.”

“To do what, to do what, goddammit?” said the hunter urgently, half wildly, shaking his head. “You can’t do anything. It’s all over.”

“Most of it,” I said. “Come on.”

I walked to the door. The hunter sat there. At last, examining the fires lit in my face by my talking, he grunted, got up, walked over, and came outside with me.

I pointed at the curb. We looked together at the truck parked there.

“I’ve seen those before,” he said. “A truck like that, in a movie. Don’t they hunt rhino from a truck like that? And lions and things like that? Or at least travel in them around Africa?”

“You remember right.”

“No lions around here,” he said. “No rhino, no water buffalo, nothing.”

“No?” I asked.

He didn’t answer that.

I walked over and touched the open truck.

“You know what this is?”

“I’m playing dumb from here on,” said the hunter. “What is it?”

I stroked the fender for a long moment.

“A Time Machine,” I said.

His eyes widened and then narrowed and he sipped the beer he was carrying in one large hand. He nodded me on.

“A Time Machine,” I repeated.

“I heard you,” he said.

He walked out around the safari truck and stood in the street looking at it. He wouldn’t look at me. He circled the truck one entire round and stood back on the curb and looked at the cap on the gas tank.

“What kind of mileage you get?” he said.

“I don’t know yet.”

“You don’t know anything,” he said.

“This is the first trip,” I said. “I won’t know until it’s over.”

“What do you fuel a thing like that with?” he said.

I was silent.

“What kind of stuff you put in?” he asked.

I could have said: Reading late at night, reading many nights over the years until almost morning, reading up in the mountains in the snow or reading at noon in Pamplona, or reading by the streams or out in a boat somewhere along the Florida coast. Or I could have said: All of us put our hands on this Machine, all of us thought about it and bought it and touched it and put our love in it and our remembering what his words did to us twenty years or twenty-five or thirty years ago. There’s a lot of life and remembering and love put by here, and that’s the gas and the fuel and the stuff or whatever you want to call it; the rain in Paris, the sun in Madrid, the snow in the high Alps, the smoke off the guns in the Tyrol, the shine of light off the Gulf Stream, the explosion of bombs or explosions of leapt fish, that’s the gas and the fuel and the stuff here; I should have said that, I thought it, but I let it stay unsaid.

The hunter must have smelled my thought, for his eyes squinted up and, telepath that he was from long years in the forest, chewed over my thinking.