Ray Bradbury. Last Rites

                Ray Bradbury
                http://blogs.myspace.com/mysteryal

                Last Rites
                1994

     Harrison  Cooper  was  not that old, only thirty-nine, touching at the warm
rim  of forty rather than the cold rim of thirty, which makes a great difference
in  temperature  and  attitude.  He  was  a  genius  verging  on  the brilliant,
unmarried,  unengaged,  with no children that he could honestly claim, so having
nothing much else to do, woke one morning in the summer of 1999, weeping.
     "Why!?"
     Out  of  bed,  he faced his mirror to watch the tears, examine his sadness,
trace  the  woe.  Like  a  child, curious after emotion, he charted his own map,
found  no  capital city of despair, but only a vast and empty expanse of sorrow,
and went to shave.
     Which  didn't  help, for Harrison Cooper had stumbled on some secret supply
of  melancholy  that,  even  as  he  shaved, spilled in rivulets down his soaped
cheeks.
     "Great God," he cried. "I'm at a funeral, but _who's_ dead?!"
     He  ate  his breakfast toast somewhat soggier than usual and plunged off to
his  laboratory to see if gazing at his Time Traveler would solve the mystery of
eyes that shed rain while the rest of him stood fair.
     Time Traveler? All, yes.
     For  Harrison  Cooper  had spent the better part of his third decade wiring
circuitries  of  impossible  pasts  and  as  yet  untouchable  futures. Most men
philosophize in their as-beautiful-as-women cars. Harrison Cooper chose to dream
and  knock  together  from pure air and electric thunderclaps what he called his
Mobius Machine.
     He  had told his friends, with wine-colored nonchalance, that he was taking
a future strip and a past strip, giving them a now half twist, so they looped on
a  single  plane.  Like  those figure-eight ribbons, cut and pasted by that dear
mathematician A. F. Mobius in the nineteenth century.
     "Ah, yes, Mobius," friends murmured.
     What they really meant was, "Ah, _no._ Good night."
     Harrison  Cooper  was not a mad scientist, but he was irretrievably boring.
Knowing  this,  he had retreated to finish the Mobius Machine. Now, this strange
morning,  with cold rain streaming from his eyes, he stood staring at the damned
contraption, bewildered that he was not dancing about with Creation's joy.
     He was interrupted by the ringing of the laboratory doorbell and opened the
door  to  find  one of those rare people, a real Western Union delivery boy on a
real bike. He signed for the telegram and was about to shut the door when he saw
the lad staring fixedly at the Mobius Machine.
     "What," exclaimed the boy, eyes wide, "is _that?"_
       Harrison  Cooper  stood  aside  and  let the boy wander in a great circle
around  his  Machine, his eyes dancing up, over, and around the immense circling
figure eight of shining copper, brass, and silver.
     "Sure!" cried the boy at last, beaming. "A _Time_ Machine!"
     ''Bull's-eye!''
     "When  do you leave?" said the boy. "Where will you go to meet which person
where? Alexander? Caesar? Napoleon! Hitler?!"
     "No, no!"
     The boy exploded his list. "Lincoln-"
     "More _like_ it."
     "General Grant! Roosevelt! Benjamin Franklin?"
     "Franklin, yes!"
     "Aren't you _lucky?"_
       "Am I?" Stunned, Harrison Cooper found himself nodding. "Yes, by God, and
suddenly-"
     Suddenly  he knew why he had wept at dawn. He grabbed the young lad's hand.
"Much thanks. You're a catalyst-"
     "Cat-?"
     "A  Rorschach test-making me draw my _own_ list-now gently, swiftly-out! No
offense."
     The  door  slammed.  He ran for his library phone, punched numbers, waited,
scanning the thousand books on the shelves.
     "Yes,  yes,  he  murmured,  his  eyes flicking over the gorgeous sun-bright
titles.  "Some  of  you. Two, three, maybe four. Hello! Sam? Samuel! Can you get
here in five minutes, make it three? Dire emergency. Come!"
     He slammed the phone, swiveled to reach out and touch.
     "Shakespeare," he murmured. "Willy-William, will it _be-you?"_
    
    
     The laboratory door opened and Sam/Samuel stuck his head in and froze.
     For  there,  seated  in the midst of his great Mobius figure eight, leather
jacket  and boots shined, picnic lunch packed, was Harrison Cooper, arms flexed,
elbows out, fingers alert to the computer controls.
     "Where's your Lindbergh cap and goggles?" asked Samuel.
     Harrison  Cooper dug them out, put them on, smirking. "Raise the _Titanic;_
then sink it!" Samuel strode to the lovely machine to confront its rather outre'
occupant. "Well, Cooper, _what?"_ he cried.
     "I woke this morning in tears."
     "Sure. I read the phone book aloud last night. That _did_ it!"
     "No. You read me _these!"_
      Cooper handed the books over.
     "Sure! We gabbed till three, drunk as owls on English Lit!''
     "To give me tears for _answers!"_
      "To what?"
     "To  their  loss.  To the fact that they died unknown, unrecognized; to the
grim  fact  that  some  were only truly recognized, republished, raved over from
1920 on!"
     "Cut the cackle and move the buns," said Samuel. "Did you call to sermonize
or ask advice?"
     Harrison  Cooper  leaped  from  his  machine  and  elbowed  Samuel into the
library.
     "You must map my trip for me!"
     "Trip? Trip!"
     "I  go  a-journeying,  far-traveling,  the Grand Literary Tour. A Salvation
Army of one!"
     "To save lives?"
     "No,  souls!  What  good is life if the soul's dead? _Sit!_ Tell me all the
authors  we  raved  on  by  night  to  weep  me  at  dawn. Here's brandy. Drink!
Remember?"
     "I _do!"_
       "List  them,  then!  The New England Melancholic first. Sad, recluse from
land,  should  have  drowned at sea, a lost soul of sixty! Now, what _other_ sad
geniuses did we maunder over-"
     "God!"  Samuel  cried. "You're going to tour _them?_ Oh, Harrison, Harry, I
love you!"
     "Shut up! Remember how you write jokes? Laugh and think _backwards!_ So let
us  cry  and  leap  up  our  tear  ducts  to the source. Weep for Whales to find
minnows!"
     "Last night I think I quoted-"
     "Yes?"
     "And then we spoke-"
     "Go on-"
     ''Well.''
     Samuel gulped his brandy. Fire burned his eyes.
     "Write _this_ down!"
     They wrote and ran.
    
    
     "What will you do when you get there, Librarian Doctor?"
     Harrison  Cooper,  seated  back  in the shadow of the great hovering Mobius
ribbon,  laughed  and  nodded.  "Yes!  Harrison  Cooper,  L.M.D. Literary Meadow
Doctor.  Curer  of  fine  old lions off their feed, in dire need of tender love,
small  applause,  the  wine  of  words,  all  in my heart, all on my tongue. Say
_'Ah!'_ So long. Good-bye!"
     "God bless!"
     He  slammed a lever, whirled a knob, and the machine, in a spiral of metal,
a whisk of butterfly ribbon, very simply-vanished.
     A moment later, the Mobius Machine gave a twist of its atoms and-returned.
     "Voila!" cried Harrison Cooper, pink-faced and wild-eyed. 'It's _done!"_
    
    
     "So soon?" exclaimed his friend Samuel "A minute here, but hours there!"
     "Did you succeed?"
     "Look! Proof positive."
     For tears dripped off his chin.
     "What happened? what?!"
     "This, and this ... and ..._this_ !"
    
    
     A  gyroscope  spun,  a celebratory ribbon spiraled endlessly on itself, and
the ghost of a massive window curtain haunted the air, exhaled, and then ceased.
     As  if  fallen  from  a delivery-chute, the books arrived almost before the
footfalls and then the half-seen feet and then the fog-wrapped legs and body and
at  last  the  head  of  a  man  who,  as  the  ribbon spiraled itself back into
emptiness, crouched over the volumes as if warming himself at a hearth.
     He  touched  the  books  and  listened  to the air in the dim hallway where
dinnertime  voices  drifted  up from below and a door stood wide near his elbow,
from  which the faint scent of illness came and went, arrived and departed, with
the  stilted  breathing  of  some patient within the room. Plates and silverware
sounded from the world of evening and quiet good health downstairs. The hall and
the  sickroom were for a time deserted. In a moment, someone might ascend with a
tray for the half-sleeping man in the intemperate room.
     Harrison  Cooper  rose  with  stealth,  checking  the  stairwell, and then,
carrying  a  sweet  burden of books, moved into the room, where candles lit both
sides  of  a  bed on which the dying man lay supine, arms straight at his sides,
head  weighting  the  pillow,  eyes  grimaced  shut,  mouth set as if daring the
ceiling, mortality itself, to sink and extinguish him.
     At  the first touch of the books, now on one side, now on the other, of his
bed,  the  old  man's  eyelids fluttered, his dry lips cracked; the air whistled
from his nostrils:
     "who's there?" he whispered. "what time is it?"
     "whenever  I  find  myself  growing  grim about the mouth, whenever it is a
damp,  drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to sea as
soon as I can," replied the traveler at the foot of the bed, quietly.
     "what, what?" the old man in the bed whispered swiftly. "It is a way I have
of  driving  off the spleen and regulating the circulation," quoted the visitor,
who  now  moved  to  place  a book under each of the dying man's hands where his
tremoring fingers could scratch, pull away, then touch, Braille-like, again.
     One  by one, the stranger held up book after book, to show the covers, then
a  page, and yet another title page where printed dates of this novel surfed up,
adrift, but to stay forever on some far future shore.
     The  sick  man's  eyes  lingered over the covers, the tides, the dates, and
then  fixed to his visitor's bright face. He exhaled, stunned. "My God, you have
the look of a traveler. From _where?"_
       "Do  the years show?" Harrison Cooper leaned forward. "Well, then-I bring
you an Annunciation."
     "Such  things  come  to pass only with virgins," whispered the old man. "No
virgin lies here buried under his unread books."
     "I  come  to  unbury you. I bring tidings from a far place." The sick man's
eyes moved to the books beneath his trembling hands.
     "Mine?" he whispered.
     The  traveler nodded solemnly, but began to smile when the color in the old
man's  face  grew  warmer  arid  the expression in his eyes and on his mouth was
suddenly eager.
     _"Is_ there hope. then?"
     "There is!"
     "I believe you." The old man took a breath and then wondered, "Why?"
     "Because," said the stranger at the foot of the bed, "I love you."
     "I do not _know_ you, sir!"
     "But  I  know  you  fore  and  aft,  port to starboard, main topgallants to
gunnels, every day in your long life to here!"
     "Oh,  the  sweet sound!" cried the old man. "Every word that you say, every
light  from  your  eyes,  is foundation-of-the-world true! How can it be?" Tears
winked from the old man's lids. "Why?"
     "Because  I  _am_ the truth," said the traveler. "I have come a long way to
find  and  say:  you are not lost. Your great Beast has only drowned some little
while.  In  another  year,  lost ahead, great and glorious, plain and simple men
will  gather  at  your  grave  and shout: he breeches, he rises, he breeches, he
rises! and the white shape will surface to the light, the great terror lift into
the  storm  and thunderous St. Elmo's fire and you with him, each bound to each,
and  no  way  to tell where he stops and you start or where you stop and he goes
off  around  the world lifting a fleet of libraries in his and your wake through
nameless  seas of sub-sub-librarians and readers mobbing the docks to chart your
far journeyings, alert for your lost cries at three of a wild morn."
     "Christ's  wounds!"  said  the man in his winding-sheet bedclothes. "To the
point, man, the _point!_ Do you speak truth!?"
     "I  give  you  my hand on it, and pledge my soul and my heart's blood." The
visitor moved to do just this, and the two men's fists fused as one. "Take these
gifts  to the grave. Count these pages like a rosary in your last hours. Tell no
one  where  they  came  from.  Scoffers  would  knock the ritual beads from your
fingers.  So  tell  this rosary in the dark before dawn, and the rosary is this:
you will live forever. You are immortal."
     "No more of this, no more! Be still."
     "I  can  not.  Hear  me.  Where  you  have  passed  a  fire path will burn,
miraculous in the Bengal Bay, the Indian Seas, Hope's Cape, and around the Horn,
past perdition's landfall, as far as living eyes can see."
     He gripped the old man's fist ever more tightly.
     "I  swear.  In the years ahead, a million millions will crowd your grave to
sleep you well and warm your bones. Do you hear?"
     "Great  God,  you  are  a  proper priest to sound my Last Rites. And will I
enjoy my own funeral? I will."
     His  hands,  freed,  clung to the books at each side, as the ardent visitor
raised yet other books and intoned the dates:
     "Nineteen  twenty-two  .  . . 1930 . . ._1935_ . . . 1940 . _1955..._ 1970.
Can you read and know what it means?"
     He  held the last volume close to the old man's face. The fiery eyes moved.
The old mouth creaked.
     "Nineteen ninety?"
     "Yours. One hundred years from tonight."
     "Dear God!"
     "I must go, but I _would_ hear. Chapter One. Speak."
     The  old  man's eyes slid and burned. He licked his lips, traced the words,
and at last whispered, beginning to weep:
     "'Call me Ishmael.'
    
    
     There  was  snow  and more snow and more snow after that. In the dissolving
whiteness,  the  silver  ribbon  twirled in a massive whisper to let forth in an
exhalation  of  Time  the  journeying  librarian and his book bag. As if slicing
white  bread  rinsed  by  snow,  the  ribbon, as the traveler ghosted himself to
flesh,  sifted  him  through the hospital wall into a room as white as December.
There,  abandoned,  lay a man as pale as the snow and the wind. Almost young, he
slept  with  his  mustaches oiled to his lip by fever. He seemed not to know nor
care  that  a messenger had invaded the air near his bed. His eyes did not stir,
nor did his mouth increase the passage of breath. His hands at his sides did not
open  to  receive.  He  seemed  already  lost  in a bomb and only his unexpected
visitor's voice caused his eyes to roll behind their shut lids.
     "Are you forgotten?" a voice asked.
     "Unborn," the pale man replied.
     "Never remembered?"
     "Only. Only in. France."
     "Wrote nothing at all?"
     "Not worthy."
     "Feel the weight of what I place on your bed. No, don't look. _Feel."_
      "Tombstones."
     "With names, yes, but not tombstones. Not marble but paper. Dates, yes, but
the  day  after tomorrow and tomorrow and ten thousand after that. And your name
on each."
     "It will not be."
     _"Is._ Let me speak the names. Listen. Masque?"
     "Red Death."
     "The Fall of-" -
     "Usher!"
     "Pit?"
     "Pendulum!"
     "Tell-tale?"
     "Heart! _My_ heart. Heart!"
     "Repeat: for the love of God, Montresor." "Silly."
     "Repeat:   Montresor,  for  the  love  of  God."  "For  the  love  of  God,
Montresor'."
     "Do you see this label?"
     "I see!"
     "Read the date."
     "Nineteen ninety-four. No such date."
     "Again, and the name of the wine."
     "Nineteen ninety-four. Amontillado. And my name!"
     "Yes!  Now  shake  your head. Make the fool's-cap bells ring. Here's mortar
for  the  last brick. Quickly. I'm here to bury you alive with books. When death
comes, how will you greet him? With a shout and-?"
     _"Requiescat in pace?"_
      "Say it again."
     _"Requiescat in pace!"_
       The  Time  Wind  roared,  the  room  emptied.  Nurses ran in, summoned by
laughter, and tried to seize the books that weighed down his joy.
     "What's he _saying?"_ someone cried.
    
    
     In  Paris,  an  hour, a day, a year, a minute later, there was a run of St.
Elmo's fire along a church steeple, a blue glow in a dark alley, a soft tread at
a  street  corner,  a  turnabout  of  wind  like an invisible carousel, and then
footfalls  up  a stair to a door which opened on a bedroom where a window looked
out  upon  cafes filled with people and far music, and in a bed by the window, a
tall man lying, his pale face immobile, until he heard alien breath in his room.
     The  shadow  of  a man stood over him and now leaned down so that the light
from  the  window  revealed a face and a mouth as it inhaled and then spoke. The
single word that the mouth said was:
     "Oscar?"