As Beck watched, the bodies began to melt. They vanished away into rises of steam, into dewdrops and crystals. In a moment they were gone.
Beck felt the coldness in his body as the flakes rained across his eyes, flicking his lips and his cheeks.
He did not move.
The plump man. Dead and vanishing. Craig’s voice: ‘Some new weapon…’
No, Not a weapon at all.
The Blue Bottle.
They had opened it to find what they most desired. All of the unhappy, desiring men down the long and lonely years had opened it to find what they most wanted in the planets of the universe. And all had found it, even as had these three. Now it could be understood, why the bottle passed on so swiftly, from one to another, and the men vanishing behind it. Harvest chaff fluttering on the sand, along the dead sea rims. Turning to flame and fireflies. To mist.
Beck picked up the bottle and held it away from himself for a long moment. His eyes shone clearly. His hands trembled.
So this is what I’ve been looking for, he thought. He turned the bottle and it flashed blue starlight.
So this is what all men really want? The secret desire, deep inside, hidden all away where we never guess? The subliminal urge? So this is what each man seeks, through some private guilt, to find?
Death.
An end to doubt, to torture, to monotony, to want, to loneliness, to fear, an end to everything.
All men?
No. Not Craig. Craig was, perhaps, far luckier. A few men were like animals in the universe, not questioning, drinking at pools and breeding and raising their young and not doubting for a moment that life was anything but good. That was Craig. There were a handful like him. Happy animals on a great reservation, in the hand of God, with a religion and a faith that grew like a set of special nerves in them. The unneurotic men in the midst of the billionfold neurotics. They would only want death, later, in a natural manner. Not now. Later.
Beck raised the bottle. How simple, he thought, and how right. This is what I’ve always wanted. And nothing else.
Nothing.
The bottle was open and blue in the starlight. Beck took an immense draught of the air coming from the Blue Bottle, deep into his lungs.
I have it at last, he thought.
He relaxed. He felt his body become wonderfully cool and then wonderfully warm. He knew he was dropping down a long slide of stars into a darkness as delightful as wine. He was swimming in blue wine and white wine and red wine. There were candles in his chest and fire wheels spinning. He felt his hands leave him. He felt his legs fly away, amusingly. He laughed. He shut his eyes and laughed.
He was very happy for the first time in his life.
The Blue Bottle dropped onto the cool sand.
At dawn, Craig walked along, whistling. He saw the bottle lying in the first pink light of the sun on the empty white sand. As he picked it up, there was a fiery whisper. A number of orange and red-purple fireflies blinked on the air, and passed on away.
The place was very still.
‘I’ll be damned.’ He glanced toward the dead windows of a nearby city. ‘Hey, Beck!’
A slender tower collapsed into powder.
‘Beck, here’s your treasure! I don’t want it. Come and get it!’
‘…and get it,’ said an echo, and the last tower fell.
Craig waited.
‘That’s rich,’ he said. ‘The bottle right here, and old Beck not even around to take it.’ He shook the blue container.
It gurgled.
‘Yes, sir! Just the way it was before. Full of bourbon, by God!’ He opened it, drank, wiped his mouth.
He held the bottle carelessly.
‘All that trouble for a little bourbon. I’ll wait right here for old Beck and give him his damn bottle. Meanwhile—have another drink, Mr Craig. Don’t mind if I do.’
The only sound in the dead land was the sound of liquid running into a parched throat. The Blue Bottle flashed in the sun.
Craig smiled happily and drank again.
Long After Midnight
The police ambulance went up into the palisades at the wrong hour. It is always the wrong hour when the police ambulance goes anywhere, but this was especially wrong, for it was long after midnight and nobody imagined it would ever be day again, because the sea coming in on the lightless shore below said as much, and the wind blowing salt cold in from the Pacific reaffirmed this, and the fog muffling the sky and putting out the stars struck the final, unfelt-but-disabling blow. The weather said it had been here forever, man was hardly here at all, and would soon be gone. Under the circumstances it was hard for the men gathered on the cliff, with several cars, the headlights on, and flashlights bobbing, to feel real, trapped as they were between a sunset they hardly remembered and a sunrise that would not be imagined.
The slender weight hanging from the tree, turning in the cold salt wind, did not diminish this feeling in any way.
The slender weight was a girl, no more than nineteen, in a light green gossamer party frock, coat and shoes lost somewhere in the cool night, who had brought a rope up to these cliffs and found a tree with a branch half out over the cliff and tied the rope in place and made a loop for her neck and let herself out on the wind to hang there swinging. The rope made a dry scraping whine on the branch, until the police came, and the ambulance, to take her down out of space and place her on the ground.
A single phone call had come in about midnight telling what they might find out here on the edge of the cliff and whoever it was hung up swiftly and did not call again, and now the hours had passed and all that could be done was done and over, the police were finished and leaving, and there was just the ambulance now and the men with the ambulance to load the quiet burden and head for the morgue.
Of the three men remaining around the sheeted form there were Carlson, who had been at this sort of thing for thirty years, and Moreno, who had been at it for ten, and Latting, who was new to the job a few weeks back. Of the three it was Latting now who stood on the edge of the cliff looking at that empty tree limb, the rope in his hand, not able to take his eyes away. Carlson came up behind him. Hearing him, Latting said, ‘What a place, what an awful place to die.’
‘Any place is awful, if you decide you want to go bad enough,’ said Carlson. ‘Come on, kid.’
Latting did not move. He put out his hand to touch the tree, Carlson grunted and shook his head. ‘Go ahead. Try to remember it all.’
‘Any reason why I shouldn’t?’ Latting turned quickly to look at that emotionless gray face of the older man. ‘You got any objections?’
‘No objections. I was the same way once. But after a while you learn it’s best not to see. You eat better. You sleep better. After a while you learn to forget.’
‘I don’t want to forget,’ said Latting. ‘Good God, somebody died up here just a few hours ago. She deserves—’
‘She deserved, kid, past tense, not present. She deserved a better shake and didn’t get it. Now she deserves a decent burial. That’s all we can do for her. It’s late and cold. You can tell us all about it on the way.’
‘That could be your daughter there.’
‘You won’t get to me that way, kid. It’s not my daughter, that’s what counts. And it’s not yours, though you make it sound like it was. It’s a nineteen-year-old girl, no name, no purse, nothing. I’m sorry she’s dead. There, does that help?’
‘It could if you said it right.’
‘I’m sorry, now pick up the other end of the stretcher.’
Latting picked up one end of the stretcher but did not walk with it and only looked at the figure beneath the sheet.
‘It’s awful being that young and deciding to just quit.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Carlson, at the other end of the stretcher, ‘I get tired, too.’
‘Sure, but you’re—’ Latting stopped.
‘Go ahead, say it, I’m old. Somebody fifty, sixty, it’s okay, who gives a damn, somebody ninetee
n, everybody cries. So don’t come to my funeral, kid, and no flowers.’
‘I didn’t mean…’ said Latting.
‘Nobody means, but everybody says, and luckily I got the hide of an iguana. March.’
They moved with the stretcher toward the ambulance where Moreno was opening the doors wider.
‘Boy,’ said Latting, ‘she’s light. She doesn’t weigh anything.’
‘That’s the wild life for you, you punks, you kids.’ Carlson was getting into the back of the ambulance now and they were sliding the stretcher in. ‘I smell whiskey. You young ones think you can drink like college fullbacks and keep your weight. Hell, she don’t even weigh ninety pounds, if that.’
Latting put the rope in on the floor of the ambulance. ‘I wonder where she got this?’
‘It’s not like poison,’ said Moreno. ‘Anyone can buy rope and not sign. This looks like block-and-tackle rope. She was at a beach party maybe and got mad at her boyfriend and took this from his car and picked herself a spot…’
They took a last look at the tree out over the cliff, the empty branch, the wind rustling in the leaves, then Carlson got out and walked around to the front seat with Moreno, and Latting got in the back and slammed the doors.
They drove away down the dim incline toward the shore where the ocean laid itself, card after white card, in thunders, upon the dark sand. They drove in silence for a while, letting their headlights, like ghosts, move on out ahead. Then Latting said. ‘I’m getting myself a new job.’
Moreno laughed. ‘Boy, you didn’t last long. I had bets you wouldn’t last. Tell you what, you’ll be back. No other job like this. All the other jobs are dull. Sure, you get sick once in a while. I do. I think: I’m going to quit. I almost do. Then I stick with it. And here I am.’
‘Well, you can stay,’ said Latting. ‘But I’m full up. I’m not curious any more. I seen a lot the last few weeks, but this is the last straw. I’m sick of being sick. Or worse. I’m sick of your not caring.’
‘Who doesn’t care?’
‘Both of you!’
Moreno snorted. ‘Light us a couple, huh, Carlie?’ Carlson lit two cigarettes and passed one to Moreno, who puffed on it, blinking his eyes, driving along by the loud strokes of the sea. ‘Just because we don’t scream and yell and throw fits—’
‘I don’t want fits,’ said Latting, in the back, crouched by the sheeted figure, ‘I just want a little human talk, I just want you to look different than you would walking through a butcher’s shop. If I ever get like you two, not worrying, not bothering, all thick skin and tough—’
‘We’re not tough,’ said Carlson, quietly, thinking about it, ‘we’re acclimated.’
‘Acclimated, hell, when you should be numb?’
‘Kid, don’t tell us what we should be when you don’t even know what we are. Any doctor is a lousy doctor who jumps down in the grave with every patient. All doctors did that, there’d be no one to help the live and kicking. Get out of the grave, boy, you can’t see nothing from there.’
There was a long silence from the back, and at last Latting started talking, mainly to himself:
‘I wonder how long she was up there alone on the cliff, an hour, two? It must have been funny up there looking down at all the campfires, knowing you were going to wipe the whole business clean off. I suppose she was to a dance, or a beach party, and she and her boyfriend broke up. The boyfriend will be down at the station tomorrow to identify her. I’d hate to be him. How he’ll feel—’
‘He won’t feel anything. He won’t even show up,’ said Carlson, steadily, mashing out his cigarette in the front-seat tray. ‘He was probably the one found her and made the call and ran, Two bits will buy you a nickel he’s not worth the polish on her little fingernail. Some slobby lout of a guy with pimples and bad breath. Christ, why don’t these girls learn to wait until morning.’
‘Yeah,’ said Moreno. ‘Everything’s better in the morning.’
‘Try telling that to a girl in love,’ said Latting.
‘Now a man,’ said Carlson, lighting a fresh cigarette, ‘he just gets himself drunk, says to hell with it, no use killing yourself for no woman.’
They drove in silence awhile past all the small dark beach houses with only a light here or there, it was so late.
‘Maybe,’ said Latting, ‘she was going to have a baby.’
‘It happens.’
‘And then the boyfriend runs off with someone and this one just borrows his rope and walks up on the cliff,’ said Latting. ‘Answer me, now, is that or isn’t it love?’
‘It,’ said Carlson, squinting, searching the dark, ‘is a kind of love. I give up on what kind.’
‘Well, sure,’ said Moreno, driving. ‘I’ll go along with you, kid. I mean, it’s nice to know somebody in this world can love that hard.’
They all thought for a while, as the ambulance purred between quiet palisades and now-quiet sea and maybe two of them thought fleetingly of their wives and tract houses and sleeping children and all the times years ago when they had driven to the beach and broken out the beer and necked up in the rocks and lay around on the blankets with guitars, singing and feeling like life would go on just as far as the ocean went, which was very far, and maybe they didn’t think that at all. Latting, looking up at the backs of the two older men’s necks, hoped or perhaps only nebulously wondered if these men remembered any first kisses, the taste of salt on the lips. Had there ever been a time when they had stomped the sand like mad bulls and yelled out of sheer joy and dared the universe to put them down?
And by their silence, Latting knew that yes, with all his talking, and the night, and the wind, and the cliff and the tree and the rope, he had gotten through to them; it, the event, had gotten through to them. Right now, they had to be thinking of their wives in their warm beds, long dark miles away, unbelievable, suddenly unattainable while here they were driving along a salt-layered road at a dumb hour half between certainties, bearing with them a strange thing on a cot and a used length of rope.
‘Her boyfriend,’ said Latting, ‘will be out dancing tomorrow night with somebody else. That gripes my gut.’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Carlson, ‘beating the hell out of him.’
Latting moved the sheet. ‘They sure wear their hair crazy and short, some of them. All curls, but short. Too much make-up. Too—’ He stopped.
‘You were saying?’ asked Moreno.
Latting moved the sheet some more. He said nothing. In the next minute there was a rustling sound of the sheet, moved now here, now there. Latting’s face was pale.
‘Hey,’ he murmured, at last. ‘Hey.’
Instinctively, Moreno slowed the ambulance.
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘I just found out something,’ said Latting. ‘I had this feeling all along, she’s wearing too much make-up, and the hair, and—’
‘So?’
‘Well, for God’s sake,’ said Latting, his lips hardly moving, one hand up to feel his own face to see what its expression was. ‘You want to know something funny?’
‘Make us laugh,’ said Carlson.
The ambulance slowed even more as Latting said, ‘It’s not a woman. I mean, it’s not a girl. I mean, well, it’s not a female. Understand?’
The ambulance slowed to a crawl.
The wind blew in off the vague morning sea through the window as the two up front turned and stared into the back of the ambulance at the shape there on the cot.
‘Somebody tell me,’ said Latting, so quietly they almost could not hear the words. ‘Do we stop feeling bad now? Or do we feel worse?’
The Utterly Perfect Murder
It was such an utterly perfect, such an incredibly delightful idea for murder, that I was half out of my mind all across America.
The idea had come to me for some reason on my forty-eighth birthday. Why it hadn’t come to me when I was thirty or forty, I cannot say. Perhaps those were good years and I sailed through them unaware of time
and clocks and the gathering of frost at my temples or the look of the lion about my eyes…
Anyway, on my forty-eighth birthday, lying in bed that night beside my wife, with my children sleeping through all the other quiet moonlit rooms of my house, I thought:
I will arise and go now and kili Ralph Underhill.
Ralph Underhill! I cried, who in God’s name is he?
Thirty-six years later, kill him? For what?
Why, I thought, for what he did to me when I was twelve.
My wife woke, an hour later, hearing a noise.
‘Doug?’ she called. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Packing,’ I said. ‘For a journey.’
‘Oh,’ she murmured, and rolled over and went to sleep.
‘’Board! All aboard!’ The porter’s cries went down the train platform.
The train shuddered and banged.
‘See you!’ I cried, leaping up the steps.
‘Someday,’ called my wife, ‘I wish you’d fly!’
Fly? I thought, and spoil thinking about murder all across the plains? Spoil oiling the pistol and loading it and thinking of Ralph Underhill’s face when I show up thirty-six years late to settle old scores? Fly? Why, I would rather pack cross-country on foot, pausing by night to build fires and fry my bile and sour spit and eat again my old, mummified but still-living antagonisms and touch those bruises which have never healed. Fly?!
The train moved. My wife was gone.
I rode off into the Past.
Crossing Kansas the second night, we hit a beaut of a thunderstorm. I stayed up until four in the morning, listening to the rave of winds and thunders. At the height of the storm, I saw my face, a darkroom negativeprint on the cold window glass, and thought:
Where is that fool going?
To kill Ralph Underhill!
Why? Because!
Remember how he hit my arm? Bruises. I was covered with bruises, both arms; dark blue, mottled black, strange yellow bruises. Hit and run, that was Ralph, hit and run—