A Pleasure to Burn (30 page)

“Clarisse. Clarisse.”

Montag lay all night long, thinking, smelling the smoke on his hands, in the dark.

 

H
E HAD CHILLS AND FEVER IN THE MORNING
.

“You can't be sick,” said Mildred.

He closed his eyes upon the hotness. “Yes.”

“But you were all right last night.”

“No, I wasn't all right.” He heard the radio in the parlor. Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there; he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burned by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of mental 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 raw milk. He could remember her no other way.

“Will you bring me an analgesic 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 radio off?” he asked

“That's my favorite program.”

“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 radio and came back. “Is that better?”

“Thanks.”

“That's my favorite program,” she repeated, as if she had not said it a thousand times before.

“What about the analgesic?”

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

“Well, I'm sick now. I'm not going to work tonight. Call Leahy for me.”

“You acted funny last night.” She returned, humming.

“Where's the analgesic?” He glanced at the water glass.

“Oh.” She walked to the bath again. “Did something happen?”

“A fire, that's all.”

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

“What doing?”

“Television.”

“What was on.”

“Programs.”

“What programs?”

“Some of the best ever.

“Who?”

“Oh, you know, the big shows.”

“Yes, the big shows, big, big, big.” He pressed at the pain in his eyes and suddenly the odor 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 swabbed clumsily at it. “I went to Helen's last night.”

“Couldn't you get the shows on your own TV?”

“Sure, but it's nice visiting.”

“Did Helen get over that finger infection?”

“I didn't notice.”

 

S
HE WENT OUT INTO THE LIVING ROOM
.
He heard her by the radio, 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 and a woman.”

“
Forbidden
books.”

The radio was exploding in the parlor.

“Yes: copies of Plato and Socrates and Marcus Aurelius.”

“Foreigners?”

“Something like that.”

“Then they were radicals?”

“All foreigners can't be radicals.”

“If they wrote books, they were.” Mildred fiddled with the telephone. “You don't expect me to call Mr. Leahy, do you?”

“You must!”

“Don't shout.”

“I wasn't shouting!” he cried. He was up in bed, suddenly, enraged and flushed, shaking. The radio roared in the hot air. “I can't call him. I can't tell him I'm sick.”

“Why?”

“Because …”

Because you're afraid, he thought, pretending illness, afraid to call Leahy because after a moment's discussion the conversation would run so: “Yes, Mr. Leahy, I feel better already. I'll be in at ten o'clock tonight.”

“You're not sick,” she said.

Montag fell back in bed. He reached under his pillow and groped for the hidden book. It was still there.

“Mildred, how would it be if—well, maybe I quit my job a while?”

“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've thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next 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, whole worlds we don't dream about, to make a woman stay in a burning house. There must be something fine there. You don't stay and burn for nothing.”

“She was simple-minded.”

“She was as rational as you or I, and we burned her!”

“That's water under the bridge.”

“No, not water, Millie, but fire. You ever see a burned house? It smolders for days. Well, this fire'll last me half a century. My God, I've been trying put it out, in my mind, all night, and I'm crazy with trying!”

“You should've thought of that before becoming a fireman.”

 

“
T
HOUGHT
!
” HE SAID.
“Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world
is not
to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can't afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize what I've done. My grandfather and father were firemen. Walking in my sleep, I followed them.”

The radio was playing a dance tune.

“I've been killing the brain of the world for ten years, pouring kerosene on it. Millie, a book is a brain. It isn't only that woman we destroyed, or others like her, in these years, but it's the thoughts I burned and never knew it.”

He got out of bed.

“It took some man a lifetime to put some of his thoughts on paper, looking after all the beauty and goodness in life, and then we come along in two minutes and heave it in the incinerator!”

“Let me alone,” said Mildred.

“Let
you
alone!” He almost cried out with laughter. “Letting you alone is easy, but how can I leave
myself
alone? That's what's wrong. We need
not
to be let alone. We need to be upset and stirred and bothered, once in a while, anyway. Nobody bothers any more. Nobody thinks. Let a baby alone, why don't you? What would you have in twenty years? A savage, unable to think or talk—like us!”

Mildred glanced out the window. “Now you've done it. Look who's here.”

“I don't give a damn.” He was feeling better but didn't know why.

“It's Mr. Leahy.”

The elation drained away. Mr. Montag slumped. “Go open the door,” he said, at last. “Tell him I'm sick.”

“Tell him yourself.”

He made sure the book was hidden behind the pillow, climbed back into bed, and had made himself tremblingly comfortable, when the door opened and Mr. Leahy strolled in, hands in pockets.

“Shut the radio off,” said Leahy, abstractedly.

This time, Mildred obeyed.

Mr. Leahy sat down in a comfortable chair with a look of strange peace in his pink face. He did not look at Montag.

“Just thought I'd come by and see how the sick man is.”

“How'd you guess?”

“Oh.” Leahy smiled his pink smile, and shrugged. “I'm an old hand at this. I've seen it all. You were going to call me and tell me you needed a day off.”

“Yes.”

 

“W
ELL, TAKE A DAY OFF
,”
said Leahy, looking at his hands. He carried an eternal match with him at times in a little case which said,
Guaranteed: One Million Cigarettes Can Be Lit with this Match,
and kept striking this abstractedly against its case as he talked. “Take a day off. Take two. But
never
take three.” He struck the match and looked at the flame and blew it out. “When will you be well?”

“Tomorrow, the next day, first of the week. I …”

“We've been wondering about you.” Leahy put a cigar in his mouth. “Every fireman goes through this. They only need understanding, need to know how the wheels run, what the history of our profession is. They don't give it to rookies any more. Only fire chiefs remember it now. I'll let you in on it.” He lit the cigar leisurely.

Mildred fidgeted.

“You ask yourself about the burning of books, why, how, when.” Leahy exuded a great gray cloud of smoke.

“Maybe,” said Montag.

“It started around about the Civil War, I'd say. Photography discovered. Fast printing presses coming up. Films at the early part of the Twentieth Century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass, Montag,
mass.
”

“I see.”

“And because they had mass, they became simpler. Books now. Once they appealed to various small groups of people, here and there. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of mass and elbows. Films and radios and magazines and books had to level down to a sort of paste-pudding norm. Do you follow me?”

“I think so.”

Leahy looked through a veil of smoke, not at Montag, but at the thing he was describing. “Picture it. The nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, and slow living. You might call him a slow motion man. Then in the Twentieth Century you speed up the camera.”

“A good analogy.”

“Splendid. Books get shorter. Condensations appear. Digests. Tabloids. Radio programs simplify. Everything sublimates itself to the gag, the snap ending.”

“Snap ending.” Mildred nodded approvingly. “You should have heard last night—”

“Great classics are cut to fit fifteen minute shows, then two minute book columns, then two line digest resumes. Magazines become picture books! Out of the nursery to the college, back to the nursery, in a few short centuries!”

 

M
ILDRED AROSE
.
She was losing the thread of the talk, Montag knew, and when this happened she began to fiddle with things. She went about the room, picking up.

“Faster and faster the film, Mr. Montag!
Quick, Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now! Flick, Flash, Here, There, Swift, Up, Down, Why, How, Who, Eh?
Mr. Montag, digest-digests, political affairs in one column, a sentence, a headline, and then, in mid-air, vanish! The mind of man, whirling so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, publicists, ad men, broadcasters that the centrifuge throws off all ideas! He is unable to concentrate!”

Mildred was smoothing the bed now. Montag felt panic as she approached his pillow to straighten it. In a moment, with sublime innocence, she would be pulling the hidden book out from behind the pillow and displaying it as if it were a reptile!

Leahy blew a cumulus of cigar smoke at the ceiling. “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling neglected, finally ignored. Life is immediate. The job counts. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting bolts?”

“Let me fix your pillow,” said Mildred, being the video housewife.

“No,” whispered Montag.

“The zipper replaces the button. Does a man have time to think while dressing in the morning, a philosophical time?”

“No,” said Montag, automatically.

Mildred tugged at the pillow.

“Get away,” said Montag.

“Life becomes one big Prat Fall, Mr. Montag. No more subtleties. Everything is bang and boff and wow!”

“Wow,” reflected Mildred, yanking the pillow edge.

“For God's sake, let me be!” said Montag, passionately.

Leahy stared.

Mildred's hand was frozen behind the pillow. Her hand was on the book, her face stunned, her mouth opening to ask a question …

“Theaters stand empty, Mr. Montag, replaced by television and baseball and sports where nobody has to think at all, not at all, at all.” Now Leahy was almost invisible, a voice somewhere back of a choking screen of cigar smoke.

“What's this?” asked Mildred, with delight, almost. Montag crushed and heaved back against her hands. “What've you hid here?”