“Another reason I keep my collar buttoned up,’ he said, opening his eyes, ‘is the children. They follow me along country roads. Everyone wants to see the pictures, and yet nobody wants to see them.’
He took his shirt off and wadded it in his hands. He was covered with illustrations from the blue tattooed ring about his neck to his belt line.
‘It keeps right on going,’ he said, guessing my thought. ’ All of me is illustrated. Look.’ He opened is hand. On his palm was a rose, fresh cut, with drops of crystal water among the soft pink petals. I put my hand out to touch it, but was only an illustration.
As for the rest of him, I cannot say how I sat and stared, for he was a riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you could hear the voices murmuring small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body. When his flesh twitched, the tiny mouths flickered, the tiny green-and-gold eyes winked, the tiny pink hands gestured. There were yellow meadows and blue rivers and mountains ad stars and suns and planets spread in a Milky Way across his chest. The people themselves were in twenty or more odd groups upon his arms, shoulders, back, sides, and wrists, as well as on the flat of his stomach. You found them in forests of hair, lurking among a constellation of freckles, or peering from armpit caverns, diamond eyes aglitter.
Each seemed intent upon is own activity; each was a separate gallery portrait.
‘Why, they’re beautiful!’ I said."n
n
“The sun was gone. Now the first stars were shining and the moon had brightened the fields of grass and wheat. Still the Illustrated Mans pictures glowed like charcoals in the half-light, like scattered rubies and emeralds, with Rouault colours and Picasso colours and the long, pressed-out El Greco bodies.
‘So people fire me when my pictures move. They don’t like it when violent things happen in my illustrations. Each illustration is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale. In three hours of looking you could see eighteen or twenty stories acted right on my body, you could hear voices and think thoughts. It’s all here, just waiting for you to look. “
n “And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illuminated for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, ‘ There was a happy day, there was a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,’ the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.
From this outer edge of life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.
Did all dying people feel his way, as if they had never lived?
Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath?
Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?
(A rather comical response from one character)
One of the other men, Lespere, was talking. ‘Well, I had me a good time: I had a wife on Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Each of them had money and treated me swell. I got drunk and once I gambled away twenty thousand dollars.”n
n “ ‘Tell us some more!’
‘Well, ‘the white people live on Earth, which is where we all come from, twenty years ago. We just up and walked away and came to Mars and set down and built town’s and here we are. Now, were Martians instead of Earth people. And no white me’ve come up here in all that time. That’s the story.’
‘Why didn’t they come up, Mom?’
‘Well, ‘cause. Right after we got up here, Earth got in a atom war. They blew each other up terribly. They forgot us. When they finished fighting, after years, they didn’t have any rockets. Took them until recently to build more. So here they come now, twenty years later, to visit.’n
n “It was stirring them now. After twenty years it was rushing back. The towns and the places, the trees and the brick buildings, the signs and the churches and the familiar stores, all of it was coming to the surface among the gathered people. Each name touched memory, ad there was no one present without a thought of another day. They were all old enough for that, save the children.
‘Laredo.’
‘I remember Laredo.’
‘New York City.’
‘I had a store in Harlem.’
‘Harlem, bombed out.’
The ominous words. The familiar, remembered places.
The struggle to imagine all of those places in ruins.
Willie Johnson murmured the words,’Greenwater, Alabama. That’s where I was born, I remember.’
Gone. All of it gone. The man said so.
The man continued, ‘So we destroyed everything and ruined everything, like the fools that we were and the fools that we are. We killed millions. I don’t think there are more than five hundred thousand people left in the world, all kinds and types.n
n “Willie stood with the rope in his hands.
He was remembering Earth, the green Earth and the green town where he was born and raised, and he was thinking now of that town, gone to pieces, to ruin, blown up ad scattered, all of the landmarks with it, all of the hard men gone, the stables, the iron-smiths, the curio shops, the soda founts, the gin mills, the river bridges, the lynching trees, the buckshot-covered hills, the roads, the cows, the mimosas, and his own house as well as those big-pillared houses down near the long river, those white mortuaries where the women as delicate as moths fluttered in the autumn light, distant, far away. Those houses where the old men rocked, with glasses of drink in their hands, guns leaned against the porch newels, sniffing the autumn airs and considering death. Gone, all gone; gone and never coming back. Now, for certain, all of that civilization ripped into confetti and strewn at their feet. Nothing, nothing of it left to hate- not an empty brass gun shell, or twisted hemp, or a tree, or even a hill of it to hate. Nothing but some alien people in a rocket, people who might shine his shoes and ride in the back of trolleys or sit far up in midnight theatres….”n
