When you awaken from a nightmare you do not normally find its ruins lying about your bedroom. This is one way of telling whether or not something was only a bad dream, or whether or not you are really awake. We walked the streets in great boots. Mud was everywhere. It was in basements and in machinery and in sewers and in living room clothes closets. It was on buildings and on cars and on people and on the branches of trees. It was broken brown blisters drying and waiting to be peeled off from clean tissue. Swarms of skytoads rose into the air when we approached, hovered like dragon-flies, returned to spoiling food stores after we had passed. Insects were having a heyday, too. Betty would have to be deloused. So many things were overturned or fallen down, and half-buried in the brown Sargassos of the streets. The dead had not yet been numbered. The water still ran by, but sluggish and foul. A stench was beginning to rise across the city. There were smashed-in store fronts and there was glass everywhere, and bridges fallen down and holes in the streets…But why go on? If you don’t get the picture by now, you never will. It was the big morning after, following a drunken party by the gods. It is the lot of mortal man always to clean up their leavings or be buried beneath them. So clean we did, but by noon Eleanor could no longer stand. So I took her home with me, because we were working down near the harbor section and my place was nearer. That’s almost the whole story–light to darkness to light–except for the end, which I don’t really know. I’ll tell you of its beginning, though…
I dropped her off at the head of the alleyway, and she went on toward
my apartment while I parked the car. Why didn’t I keep her with me?
I don’t know. Unless it was because the morning sun made the world
seem at peace, despite its filth. Unless it was because I was in love
and the darkness was over, and the spirit of the night had surely
departed.
I parked the car and started up the alley. I was halfway before
the corner where I had met the org when I heard her cry out.
I ran. Fear gave me speed and strength and I ran to the corner
and turned it.
The man had a bag, not unlike the one Chuck had carried away with
him, lying beside the puddle in which he stood. He was going through
Eleanor’s purse, and she lay on the ground–so still!–with blood on the
side of her head.
I cursed and ran toward him, switching on my cane as I went. He
turned, dropped her purse, and reached for the gun in his belt.
We were about thirty feet apart, so I threw my cane.
He drew his gun, pointed it at me, and my cane fell into the
puddle in which he stood.
Flights of angels sang him to his rest, perhaps.
She was breathing, so I got her inside and got hold of a doctor–I
don’t remember how, not too clearly, anyway–and I waited and waited.
She lived for another twelve hours and then she died. She
recovered consciousness twice before they operated on her, and not
again after. She didn’t say anything. She smiled at me once, and
went to sleep again.
I don’t know.
Anything, really.
It happened that I became Betty’s mayor, to fill in until
November, to oversee the rebuilding. I worked, I worked my head off,
and I left her bright and shiny, as I had found her. I think I could
have won if I had run for the job that fall, but I did not want it.
The Town Council overrode my objections and voted to erect a
statue of Godfrey Justin Holmes beside the statue of Eleanor Schirrer
which was to stand in the Square across from cleaned-up Wyeth. I
guess it’s out there now.
I said that I would never return, but who knows? In a couple of
years, after some more history has passed, I may revisit a Betty full
of strangers, if only to place a wreath at the foot of the one statue.
Who knows but that the entire continent may be steaming and clanking
and whirring with automation by then, and filled with people from
shore to shining shore?
There was a Stopover at the end of the year and I waved goodbye
and climbed aboard and went away, anywhere.
I went aboard and went away, to sleep again the cold sleep.
Delirium of ship among stars–
Years have passed, I suppose. I’m not really counting them
anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there _is_ a Golden
Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time
somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don’t
know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?
In the invisible city?
Inside me?
It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There
is no sense of movement.
There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken
diamonds, all.