Fahrenheit 451 (6 page)

            "It doesn't matter," She was up in the bathroom now, and he heard the water running, and the swallowing sound she made.

            "No, I guess not," he said.

            He tried to count how many times she swallowed and he thought of the visit from the two zinc-oxide-faced men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths and the electronic-eyed snake winding down into the layer upon layer of night and stone and stagnant spring water, and he wanted to call out to her, how many have you taken
tonight!
the capsules! how many will you take later and not know? and so on, every hour! or maybe not tonight, tomorrow night! And me not sleeping, tonight or tomorrow night or any night for a long while; now that this has started. And he thought of her lying on the bed with the two technicians standing straight over her, not bent with concern, but only standing straight, arms folded. And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of
not crying
at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty.

            How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn't it? "What a shame! You're not in love with anyone!" And why not?

            Well, wasn't there a wall between him and Mildred, when you came down to it? Literally not just one, wall but, so far, three! And expensive, too! And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree-apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud. He had taken to calling them relatives from the very first. "How's Uncle Louis today?"

            "Who?"

            "And Aunt Maude?" The most significant memory he had of Mildred, really, was of a little girl in a forest without trees (how odd!) or rather a little girl lost on a plateau where there used to be trees (you could feel the memory of their shapes all about) sitting in the centre of the "living-room." The living-room; what a good job of labelling that was now. No matter when he came in, the walls were always talking to Mildred.

            "Something must be done!"

            "Yes, something must be
done!
"

            "Well, let's not stand and talk!"

            "Let's
do
it!"

            "I'm so mad I could
spit!
"

            What was it all about? Mildred couldn't say. Who was mad at whom? Mildred didn't quite know. What were they going to do? Well, said Mildred, wait around and see.

            He had waited around to see.

            A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never―quite―touched―bottom―never―never―quite―no not quite―touched―bottom... and you fell so fast you didn't touch the sides either . . . never . . . quite . . . touched . . . anything.

            The thunder faded. The music died.

            "There," said Mildred, And it was indeed remarkable. Something had happened. Even though the people in the walls of the room had barely moved, and nothing had really been settled, you had the impression that someone had turned on a washing-machine or sucked you up in a gigantic vacuum. You drowned in music and pure cacophony. He came out of the room sweating and on the point of collapse. Behind him, Mildred sat in her chair and the voices went on again: "Well, everything will be all right now," said an "aunt."

            "Oh, don't be too sure," said a "cousin."

            "Now, don't get angry!"

            "Who's angry?"

            "
You
are!"

            "
I
am?"

            "You're mad!"

            "Why would I be mad!"

            "Because!"

            "That's all very well," cried Montag, "but what are they mad about? Who
are
these people? Who's that man and who's that woman? Are they husband and wife, are they divorced, engaged, what? Good God,
nothing's
connected up."

            "They―" said Mildred. "Well, they―they had this fight, you see. They certainly fight a lot. You should listen. I think they're married. Yes, they're married. Why?"

            And if it was not the three walls soon to be four walls and the dream complete, then it was the open car and Mildred driving a hundred miles an hour across town, he shouting at her and she shouting back and both trying to hear what was said, but hearing only the scream of the car. "At least keep it down to the minimum!" he yelled: "What?" she cried. "Keep it down to fifty-five, the minimum!" he shouted. "The what?" she shrieked. "Speed!" he shouted. And she pushed it up to one hundred and five miles an hour and tore the breath from his mouth.

            When they stepped out of the car, she had the Seashells stuffed in her ears.

            Silence. Only the wind blowing softly.

            "Mildred." He stirred in bed.

            He reached over and pulled one of the tiny musical insects out of her ear. "Mildred. Mildred?"

            "Yes." Her voice was faint.

            He felt he was one of the creatures electronically inserted between the slots of the phono-colour walls, speaking, but the speech not piercing the crystal barrier. He could only pantomime, hoping she would turn his way and see him. They could not touch through the glass.

            "Mildred, do you know that girl I was telling you about?"

            "What girl?" She was almost asleep.

            "The girl next door."

            "What girl next door?"

            "You know, the high-school girl. Clarisse, her name is."

            "Oh, yes," said his wife.

            "I haven't seen her for a few days―four days to be exact. Have you seen her?"

            "No."

            "I've meant to talk to you about her. Strange."

            "Oh, I know the one you mean."

            "I thought you would."

            "Her," said Mildred in the dark room.

            "What about her?" asked Montag.

            "I meant to tell you. Forgot. Forgot."

            "Tell me now. What is it?"

            "I think she's gone."

            "Gone?"

            "Whole family moved out somewhere. But she's gone for good. I think she's dead."

            "We couldn't be talking about the same girl."

            "No. The same girl. McClellan. McClellan, Run over by a car. Four days ago. I'm not sure. But I think she's dead. The family moved out anyway. I don't know. But I think she's dead."

            "You're not sure of it!"

            "No, not sure. Pretty sure."

            "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

            "Forgot."

            "Four days ago!"

            "I forgot all about it."

            "Four days ago," he said, quietly, lying there.

            They lay there in the dark room not moving, either of them. "Good night," she said.

            He heard a faint rustle. Her hands moved. The electric thimble moved like a praying mantis on the pillow, touched by her hand. Now it was in her ear again, humming.

            He listened and his wife was singing under her breath.

            Outside the house, a shadow moved, an autumn wind rose up and faded away But there was something else in the silence that he heard. It was like a breath exhaled upon the window. It was like a faint drift of greenish luminescent smoke, the motion of a single huge October leaf blowing across the lawn and away.

            The Hound, he thought. It's out there tonight. It's out there now. If I opened the window . . .

            He did not open the window.

            He had chills and fever in the morning.

            "You can't be sick," said Mildred.

            He closed his eyes over the hotness. "Yes."

            "But you were all right last night."

            "No, I wasn't all right " He heard the "relatives" shouting in the parlour.

            Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon. He could remember her no other way.

            "Will you bring me aspirin and water?"

            "You've got to get up," she said. "It's noon. You've slept five hours later than usual."

            "Will you turn the parlour off?" he asked.

            "That's my family."

            "Will you turn it off for a sick man?"

            "I'll turn it down."

            She went out of the room and did nothing to the parlour and came back. "Is that better?"

            "Thanks."

            "That's my favourite programme," she said.

            "What about the aspirin?"

            "You've never been sick before." She went away again.

            "Well, I'm sick now. I'm not going to work tonight. Call Beatty for me."

            "You acted funny last night." She returned, humming.

            "Where's the aspirin?" He glanced at the water-glass she handed him.

            "Oh." She walked to the bathroom again. "Did something happen?"

            "A fire, is all."

            "I had a nice evening," she said, in the bathroom.

            "What doing?"

            "The parlour."

            "What was on?"

            "Programmes."

            "What programmes?"

            "Some of the best ever."

            "Who?".

            "Oh, you know, the bunch."

            "Yes, the bunch, the bunch, the bunch." He pressed at the pain in his eyes and suddenly the odour of kerosene made him vomit.

            Mildred came in, humming. She was surprised. "Why'd you do that?"

            He looked with dismay at the floor. "We burned an old woman with her books."

            "It's a good thing the rug's washable." She fetched a mop and worked on it. "I went to Helen's last night."

            "Couldn't you get the shows in your own parlour?"

            "Sure, but it's nice visiting."

            She went out into the parlour. He heard her singing.

            "Mildred?" he called.

            She returned, singing, snapping her fingers softly.

            "Aren't you going to ask me about last night?" he said.

            "What about it?"

            "We burned a thousand books. We burned a woman."

            "Well?"

            The parlour was exploding with sound.

            "We burned copies of Dante and Swift and Marcus Aurelius."

            "Wasn't he a European?"

            "Something like that."

            "Wasn't he a radical?"

            "I never read him."

            "He was a radical." Mildred fiddled with the telephone. "You don't expect me to call Captain Beatty, do you?"

            "You must!"

            "Don't shout!"

            "I wasn't shouting." He was up in bed, suddenly, enraged and flushed, shaking. The parlour roared in the hot air. "I can't call him. I can't tell him I'm sick."

            "Why?"

            Because you're afraid, he thought. A child feigning illness, afraid to call because after a moment's discussion, the conversation would run so: "Yes, Captain, I feel better already. I'll be in at ten o'clock tonight."

            "You're not sick," said Mildred.

            Montag fell back in bed. He reached under his pillow. The hidden book was still there.

            "Mildred, how would it be if, well, maybe, I quit my job awhile?"

            "You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because, one night, some woman and her books―"

            "You should have seen her, Millie!"

            "She's nothing to me; she shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility, she should have thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing."

            "You weren't there, you didn't
see
," he said. "There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."

            "She was simple-minded."

            "She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burned her."

            "That's water under the bridge."

            "No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smoulders for days. Well, this fire'll last me the rest of my life. God! I've been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I'm crazy with trying."

            "You should have thought of that before becoming a fireman."

            "Thought!" he said. "Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my sleep, I ran after them."

            The parlour was playing a dance tune.

            "This is the day you go on the early shift," said Mildred. "You should have gone two hours ago. I just noticed."

            "It's not just the woman that died," said Montag. "Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before." He got out of bed.