A Graveyard for Lunatics by Ray Bradbury

practical as a bumbershoot, and Charlotte, fifty, as flower-fragile as she had always seemed to be. Both were frauds. Both hid boilerplates behind their rhino-ivory smiles.
    I looked for Clarence in that strange dead funeral bouquet. For Clarence had been the wildest: lugging huge twenty-pound photo portfolios from studio to studio. Red leather for Paramount, black for RKO, green for Warner Brothers.
    Clarence, summer and winter, wrapped in his oversize camel’s-hair coat, in which he filed pens, pads, and miniature cameras. Only on the hottest days did the wraparound coat come off. Then Clarence resembled a tortoise torn from its shell and panicked by life.
    I crossed the street to stop before the mob.
    “Hello, Charlotte,” I said. “Hiya, Ma.”
    The two women stared at me in mild shock.
    “It’s me,” I said. “Remember? Twenty years back. I was here. Space. Rockets. Time—?”
    Charlotte gasped and flung her hand to her overbite. She leaned forward as if she might fall off the curb.
    “Ma,” she cried, “why—it’s—the Crazy!”
    “The Crazy.” I laughed, quietly.
    A light burned in Mom’s eyes. “Why land’s sake.” She touched my elbow. “You
poor
thing. What’re you doing
here
? Still
collecting
—?”
    “No,” I said, reluctantly. “I work there.”
    “Where?”
    I nodded over my shoulder.
    “There?” cried Charlotte in disbelief.
    “In the mailroom?” asked Ma.
    “No.” My cheeks burned. “You might say… in the script department.”
    “You
mimeograph
scripts?”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ma.” Charlotte’s face burst with light. “He means
writing
, yes? Screenplays?!”
    This last was a true revelation. All the faces around Charlotte and Ma took fire.
    “Ohmigod,” cried Charlotte’s ma. “
Can’t
be!”
    “Is,” I almost whispered. “I’m doing a film with Fritz Wong.
Caesar and Christ
.
    There was a long, stunned silence. Feet shifted. Mouths worked.
    “Can—” said someone, “we have…”
    But it was Charlotte who finished it. “Your autograph.
Please
?”
    “I—But all the hands thrust out now, with pens and white cards.
    Shamefacedly, I took Charlotte’s and wrote my name. Ma squinted at it, upside down.
    “Put the name of the picture you’re working on,” said Ma. “
Christ and Caesar
.”
    “Put ‘The Crazy’ after your name,” Charlotte suggested.
    I wrote “The Crazy.”
    Feeling the perfect damn fool, I stood in the gutter as all the heads bent, and all the sad lost strange ones squinted to guess my identity.
    To cover my embarrassment, I said: “Where’s Clarence?”
    Charlotte and Ma gaped. “You remember
him
?”
    “Who could forget Clarence, and his portfolios, and his coat,” I said, scribbling.
    “He ain’t called in yet,” snapped Ma.
    “Called in?” I glanced up.
    “He calls on that phone across the street about this time, to see has so-and-so arrived, come out, stuff like that,” said Charlotte. “Saves time. He sleeps late, cause he’s usually out front restaurants midnights.”
    “I know.” I finished the last signature, glowing with an inadmissible elation. I still could not look at my new admirers, who smiled at me as if I had just leaped Galilee in one stride.
    Across the street the glass-booth phone rang.
    “That’s Clarence now!” said Ma.
    “Excuse me—” Charlotte started off.
    “Please,” I touched her elbow. “It’s been years. Surprise?” I looked from Charlotte to her Ma and back. “Yes?”
    “Oh, all right,” grumped Ma.
    “Go ahead,” said Charlotte.
    The phone rang. I ran to lift the receiver.
    “Clarence?” I said.
    “Who’s
this
!?” he cried, instantly suspicious.
    I tried to explain in some detail, but wound up with the old metaphor, “the Crazy.”
    That buttered no bread for Clarence. “Where’s Charlotte or Ma? I’m sick.”
    Sick, I wondered, or, like Roy, suddenly afraid.
    “Clarence,” I said, “where do you live?”
    “Why?!”
    “Give me your phone number, at least—”
    “
No one
has that! My place would be
robbed
! My photos. My
treasures
!”
    “Clarence,” I pleaded, “I was at the