Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (37 page)

She needed life outside of work to be worry-free, and he would make it that way for her as best he could. She already did so much for him. When he was at a business meeting or a cocktail party and veered off onto the wrong track, Silvie would guide him back. He wanted to do the same for her.

O
ne Saturday morning in March, MacGregor woke breathless from a dream of flight, still feeling the joyful energy of soaring above his house, moving at the speed of cars over the street below. He listened to the purr of Silvie’s snoring. He smelled her perfume from the day before and slowly turned his head on the pillow to gaze at her smooth face in the gray predawn light. She stayed over every Friday night, and in two months she would be there beside him every night, forever. Beyond her, on the nightstand, lay her current novel, silhouetted against the window. The pages were fluffed out prettily, suggesting that her book was part of her decorating scheme, which included the handsome off-white window dressings, the ribbed bedspread, and the new, slightly luminescent paint on the walls. She said remodeling made the room belong to them. This had been his parents’ bedroom, and MacGregor didn’t care what it looked like. He had grown up an only child, and the most important thing to him was having another soul lying beside him, sharing his life. He would go along with any remodeling Silvie wanted.

MacGregor’s chest prickled. Silvie had recently suggested he keep the tattoo covered all the time. She had walked in on him watching a story at work more than once, and she was concerned about the hold the tattoo had on him, how it was distracting him from more important things. He couldn’t argue with the truth of the matter, that the work of being president was tiresome to him, and he had taken to hiding out in his bathroom to revive himself. He had managed to resist looking in the mirror for more than a week now, until this morning, when a vision of flying without aid of any machine had invaded his dreams. If he hadn’t felt the urgent prickling, he would have remained in bed, absorbing the pleasures of lying with Silvie, would have wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close. Instead, he slipped out of bed, tiptoed to the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the light. Silvie had helped him to quit smoking, but giving up cigarettes had been easy compared with resisting his compulsion to look at the tattoo. He turned the lock on the door and stuffed a bit of tissue into the oversized keyhole. His heart was pounding as he looked around the small tiled room, at the modest claw-footed tub, at the old-fashioned light fixture covered with a frosted seashell glass shade. The old bathroom mirror had a funhouse quality; he and Silvie had stood beside each other in front of it and laughed at their distorted reflections.

MacGregor pressed his ear against the painted wood of the door. Silvie’s snore was one of his favorite household sounds, along with the toaster popping up and the dryer spinning. In the world outside, he loved the sounds of jets and rockets taking off, though he’d only heard the latter on television. MacGregor unbuttoned his pajama shirt. He slid his arms from the sleeves, and when he looked in the mirror, the color in the playing-card-sized tattoo dazzled him. He took a deep breath and let the tattoo expand and rush to fill the smooth skin of his chest. The first mysterious effect of the tattooing process had been that he had lost the modest amount of hair he’d had there, and it had never grown back. He took a deep breath and inhaled the colors, which smelled of air so rich and oxygenated that it filled not only his lungs but his whole being. When he exhaled, all the stress of the week fell away at once, and the picture of the bird and the branch and the stream and the sun began to change.

A rocket sat on a launchpad surrounded by complicated machines. The machines were operated by white-coated scientists whose faces glowed with intelligence and focus. MacGregor took another deep breath, and the men and women began to move, to tap their fingers on their whisper-thin handheld computers, to point out and discuss objects of interest around them, to compare calculations. As MacGregor’s focus returned to the rocket ship, he saw it increase in proportion to the scene, and the scientists disappeared from view. Somehow, as MacGregor’s heart pumped blood out through his arteries and back through his veins, the point of view moved so he could see inside the capsule atop the boosters, where two women and three men in silver suits were making final preparations and buckling themselves into their seats. To MacGregor they seemed perfect human specimens, strong-bodied and healthy, and their eyes showed a love of adventure. Or was there a shadow of something sinister crossing one man’s face? Did the fifth astronaut have an ungenerous spirit, a tendency toward cruelty or sullenness? Was his desire for space less pure than the others’? MacGregor’s concern faded as he felt the collective excitement of the other astronauts. He also felt their fear and sadness and understood that they were leaving behind their loved ones in order to journey into the unknown.

One of the men in the capsule resembled MacGregor, with blue eyes and thick eyebrows and dark, unruly hair. So much so that MacGregor was almost sure it
was
him. Neither of the women resembled Silvie, however. He knew Silvie wouldn’t venture into space, not even with him at her side, reassuring her. She didn’t like not knowing what was coming next. She was most content when she was following her routine of work and relaxation, having coffee on the patio in the morning or taking a brisk walk in the early evening. She was continually opening windows to let in breezes and wouldn’t like the cramped quarters of the space capsule, in which everything was designed for efficiency and maximum function.

MacGregor, too, would miss many things about Earth, especially the familiar objects from his house and his desk at work, the way his tools felt in his hands, but he knew that for him the memories of the objects could suffice in their absence. MacGregor would miss Silvie most of all, but he could take comfort in the memories of her that he would carry into space. Behind and beyond the rocket, there stretched the vision of MacGregor’s own planet’s beauty: a glittering silver desert and purple mountains. Beyond that, somehow, defying the laws of perspective, he could see the vast and shining ocean. From a high cliff, a giant bird launched itself, flew across the water on golden wings, and on the bird’s back was a young woman. Her arms were wrapped around the creature’s neck. Her hair whipped around in the wind, and she was laughing. At first he thought it was Silvie, hoped it was Silvie, but when she shook her head to get her hair out of her eyes, he saw that she was wearing glasses and that they were held fast to her head with an elastic strap, like the one he’d worn as a kid. MacGregor laughed with delight, realizing as he did so that he hadn’t felt delighted in quite a while. He fell backward against the door, and it rattled.

“Gerald?” Silvie called from the bedroom, and MacGregor’s heart seized.

“I’ll be right out,” he said just loudly enough to be heard, trying to not interrupt the flow of the story. The golden bird vanished behind a hill.

“I’m worried about you, Gerald. Please come out and talk to me,” Silvie said. She jiggled the doorknob, and the tissue fell out of the keyhole and onto the floor.

“Just a minute,” he whispered. When he was experiencing a story in this way, he knew how life could be extraordinary, how the simple four-chambered human heart and the primitive human brain could begin to understand the universe. And he thought that if Silvie would watch the story unfold with him—if she could shake her fears about how it might end—she would feel inspired as well. The rocket blasted off with a flame more brilliant than a lightning strike. MacGregor gripped the sink as the rocket tore free of the earth with a violence that seemed more than the rocket or the planet, or he himself, could endure—his heart felt nearly wrenched from his chest, and he was out of breath by the time the rocket was airborne. As he watched in the mirror, he could see magnificent Earth from space, its blue oceans and green lands still beautiful despite the pollution and all the other human folly that threatened to destroy it. As the planet shrank to the size of a marble, then a pale blue dot, the scene darkened, and then the rocket was swimming far from home, through the sea of stars. MacGregor kept hold of the sink to steady himself against the joyful energy of barreling through space.

“Are you looking at that tattoo?” Silvie asked. He could tell from her voice that her face was pressed up against the other side of the door.

Silvie had done so much for him. She had carried him through the grief of losing his parents. She had supported him as president of MacGregor Ball Bearing Inc., though she was better suited to run the company than he was. It was her ability to manage money, employees, and schedules that had allowed him to be anything more than an engineer.

“We need to get you some help, Gerald,” Silvie said thoughtfully.

MacGregor tore his eyes away from the mirror. He looked down at the tiny hexagonal tiles that made up the old floor, the same cool tile his bare feet had known when he was a kid. There was a slight rise near the radiator, where the floor had buckled, reminding him of a shoulder blade. As he studied the tiles, he began to see a vision move across the floor. The picture was not as vivid or colorful as his tattoo, but it played out in shadows that brought him feelings from a long time ago. Some boys filled a bottle with dry ice, shook it up, and shot a cork across a pond. They sent a model rocket two hundred feet into the air in the field behind his house. MacGregor both saw and felt himself riding his bike along the sidewalk and then gathering speed on the downslope, and though the adult MacGregor knew the poor boy was headed for a crash, he grinned at the wind in his face. MacGregor still felt like that kid, twenty-one years later.

“I saw a giant bird flying over the ocean, Silvie,” MacGregor said as he stepped into the bedroom. “Big enough that a girl was riding on its back.”

“Oh, Gerald,” Silvie said tiredly, “we both know what’s going to happen.” She was sitting on the bed with her back to him, and the bed was already made up. She wore the pearl-colored bathrobe she kept at his house.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“The rocket always crashes. The volcano always explodes and kills the villagers. I don’t want to see a girl plunge into the icy depths.”

“This is a new story. Things might be different.”

“Gerald, we’ve been through this. The lions in the veldt tear apart the sweet little gazelle. Cold, empty space swallows the astronauts. Somebody is going to shoot that big bird out of the air. I’ve lived with your stories for more than six months, and my hope has run out.”

“The rocket doesn’t always crash,” MacGregor insisted. “And the gazelle is the lions’ natural prey—that can’t be helped.”

“If the rocket doesn’t crash, if the astronauts land safely, then in the next story they go on to kill the peaceful inhabitants of the new planet with their human stupidity.”

“Oh, honey,” MacGregor said. “So what if some of the stories don’t exactly end happily? I just wish we could watch together, to experience the adventures together, the good and the bad.”

The sun was rising outside their window, and Silvie’s shiny bathrobe exploded with color. Shapes began to form across her shoulders, and MacGregor began to see a vision of himself and Silvie in the future. Her hair was white, and his was gray, and they were holding hands in the garden in spring. He didn’t understand how this was happening, how the stories were stretching beyond his own body, appearing all around him. In the vision, MacGregor clung with his free hand to a walker. White-haired Silvie lifted both hands to her head, groaned, and then collapsed to the flagstone path to lie among the tulips and daffodils.

Silvie gave no indication that she was seeing the images on her robe.

“I need my stories to be happily ever after,” she said. She picked up the novel from her nightstand and held it in MacGregor’s direction until her bookmark fell out. He saw on the cover a muscular, shirtless man with long hair and a woman with soulful eyes and even longer hair. “Why can’t you create a happily ever after for me?” she asked, tears glistening in her eyes.

“But the stories exist on their own, Silvie. They come to me just as they are.” He felt as though he were mainly a conduit for the stories, but maybe he was, somehow, creating them. Maybe his very nature was creating them. And maybe there would be a way to control them by force of will, but that wasn’t what he wanted.

“Gerald, I don’t think I can’t live with you this way.”

“What can I do, Silvie?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, and stared out the window. “And I don’t think I can marry you unless you have the tattoo removed.”

MacGregor’s heart thudded and slowed. He stumbled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, and there he saw the color drained from his skin, saw the brilliant visions replaced by a web of scar tissue, the explosion of life replaced by an expanse of angry flesh that pinched and stretched like the residue of a life-threatening burn. He felt physically ill. He bent at the waist, crossed his arms over his chest. He knew what Silvie didn’t know, that the tattoo was more than ink on skin. The tattoo could not be removed without gouging out his heart.

He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath, but when he breathed again, the sick feeling went away. His skin tingled as the spaceship hurtled through space, and he uncrossed his arms and saw the stars again. Inside the capsule, the five astronauts floated weightlessly and joked with one another. One woman was eating dried cherries, and she tossed one toward the open mouth of one of the men, but the cherry flew in impossibly slow motion, and the woman and the man both laughed and discussed their pea-plant experiment until the fruit finally reached the man, and he bit it out of the air. As a child, MacGregor had tried to eat like an astronaut—powdered drinks and vacuum-sealed protein bars. Now he tasted the sweet sourness of that dried cherry!