And the people who would burn the words, the people who would take the books from the shelves, the firemen and the ignorant, the ones afraid of tales and words and dreams and Hallowe’en and people who have tattooed themselves with stories and Boys! You Can Grow Mushrooms in Your Cellar! and as long as your words which are people which are days which are my life, as long as your words survive, then you lived and you mattered and you changed the world and I cannot remember your name.
I learned your books. Burned them into my mind. In case the firemen come to town.
But who you are is gone. I wait for it to return to me. Just as I waited for my dictionary or for my radio, or for my boots, and with as meager a result.
All I have left is the space in my mind where you used to be. And I am not so certain about even that.
I was talking to a friend. And I said, “Are these stories familiar to you?” I told him all the words I knew, the ones about the monsters coming home to the house with the human child in it, the ones about the lightning salesman and the wicked carnival that followed him, and the Martians and their fallen glass cities and their perfect canals. I told him all the words, and he said he hadn’t heard of them. That they didn’t exist.
And I worry.
I worry I was keeping them alive. Like the people in the snow at the end of the story, walking backwards and forwards, remembering, repeating the words of the stories, making them real.
I think it’s God’s fault.
I mean, he can’t be expected to remember everything, God can’t. Busy chap. So perhaps he delegates things, sometimes, just goes, “You! I want you to remember the dates of the Hundred Years’ War. And you, you remember okapi. You, remember Jack Benny who was Benjamin Kubelsky from Waukegan, Illinois.” And then, when you forget the things that God has charged you with remembering, bam. No more okapi. Just an okapi-shaped hole in the world, which is halfway between an antelope and a giraffe. No more Jack Benny. No more Waukegan. Just a hole in your mind where a person or a concept used to be.
I don’t know.
I don’t know where to look. Have I lost an author, just as once I lost a dictionary? Or worse: did God give me this one small task, and now I have failed him, and because I have forgotten him he has gone from the shelves, gone from the reference works, and now he only exists in our dreams . . .
My dreams. I do not know your dreams. Perhaps you do not dream of a veldt that is only wallpaper but that eats two children. Perhaps you do not know that Mars is heaven, where our beloved dead go to wait for us, then consume us in the night. You do not dream of a man arrested for the crime of being a pedestrian.
I dream these things.
If he existed, then I have lost him. Lost his name. Lost his book titles, one by one by one. Lost the stories.
And I fear that I am going mad, for I cannot just be growing old.
If I have failed in this one task, oh God, then only let me do this thing, that you may give the stories back to the world.
Because, perhaps, if this works, they will remember him. All of them will remember him. His name will once more become synonymous with small American towns at Hallowe’en, when the leaves skitter across the sidewalk like frightened birds, or with Mars, or with love. And my name will be forgotten.
I am willing to pay that price, if the empty space in the bookshelf of my mind can be filled again, before I go.
Dear God, hear my prayer.
A . . . B . . . C . . . D . . . E . . . F . . . G . . .
Excerpt from The Ocean at the End of the Lane
2013
IT WAS THE first day of the spring holidays: three weeks of no school. I woke early, thrilled by the prospect of endless days to fill however I wished. I would read. I would explore.
I pulled on my shorts, my T-shirt, my sandals. I went downstairs to the kitchen. My father was cooking, while my mother slept in. He was wearing his dressing gown over his pajamas. He often cooked breakfast on Saturdays. I said, “Dad! Where’s my comic?” He always bought me a copy of SMASH! before he drove home from work on Fridays, and I would read it on Saturday mornings.
“In the back of the car. Do you want toast?”
“Yes,” I said. “But not burnt.”
My father did not like toasters. He toasted bread under the grill, and, usually, he burnt it.
I went outside into the drive. I looked around. I went back into the house, pushed the kitchen door, went in. I liked the kitchen door. It swung both ways, in and out, so servants sixty years ago would be able to walk in or out with their arms laden with dishes empty or full.
“Dad? Where’s the car?”
“In the drive.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“What?”
The telephone rang, and my father went out into the hall, where the phone was, to answer it. I heard him talking to someone.
The toast began to smoke under the grill. I got up on a chair and turned the grill off.
“That was the police,” my father said. “Someone’s reported seeing our car abandoned at the bottom of the lane. I said I hadn’t even reported it stolen yet. Right. We can head down now, meet them there. Toast!”
He pulled the pan out from beneath the grill. The toast was smoking and blackened on one side.
“Is my comic there? Or did they steal it?”
“I don’t know. The police didn’t
