Driving Blind by Ray Bradbury Page A

waved, but stopped for he could not make himself move.
    He staggered as if struck in the chest. His face grew pale as he groped toward me and gasped.
    “Dad! What’re you doing
here?
”
    I felt my heart stop.
    “You
can’t
be here!” the young man cried, tears brimming his eyes. “You’re
dead!
Died two years ago! Can’t be. What? How?”
    “No.” I said at last. “I’m not …”
    “Dad!” He seized my arms. “Oh, God! God!”
    “Don’t!” I said. “Not me!”
    “Then
who?
” he pleaded and crushed his head against my chest. “What’s going
on?
Christ!”
    “Please.” I broke his grip. “They’re
waiting!
”
    He fell back. “I don’t understand,” he said, the tears flowing.
    “
I
don’t understand,” I said.
    He lurched forward. I raised my hand swiftly. “No. Don’t.”
    “Will you,” he mourned, “be here …
after?
”
    “Yes,” I said, agonized. “No. I don’t
know
.”
    “At least
watch
,” he said.
    I was silent.
    “Please,” he said.
    At last I nodded and saw color in his face.
    “What’s going
on?
” he asked again, bewildered.
    They say that drowning victims’ lives flash through their heads. Here, with William Clark Henderson frozen in the processional, my thoughts, sunk in revelations, sought answers, found none. Were there families worldwide with similar thoughts, plans, dreams locked in mirror-image flesh? Was there a genetic plot to seize the future? Would a day dawn when these unseen, unrecognized fathers, brothers, nephews, cousins rose as rulers? Or was this just God’s ghost and spirit, his Providence, his unfathomable Will? Were we all identical seeds hurled forth in wide broadcasts so as not to collide?
    Were we then in some broad and incalculable fashion, brother to wolves, birds, and antelope, all inked, spotted, colored the same, year on year and generationon generation back as far as minds could see? To what purpose? To economize on genes and chromosomes? Why? Would the faces of this Family, grown apart, vanish by 2001? Or would the replicas increase to envelop all cousined flesh? Or was it just a miracle of mere existence, misunderstood by two stunned fools shouting across blind generations on a summer’s graduation day?
    All this, all this exploded light dark, light dark across my gaze.
    “What’s going on?” the other me repeated.
    For the line of young men and women was almost gone, quitting a scene where two idiots raved with two similar voices.
    I said something, quietly, which he could not hear. When this is done, I thought, I must tear up the pictures, burn the notes. To continue this way, with old annuals, lost faces:
madness!
Trash it all, I thought.
Now
.
    The young man’s mouth trembled. I read his lips.
    “
What
did you just say?” he asked.
    “Nothing changes,” I whispered.
    Then, louder:
    “Nothing changes!”
    I waited to hear Kipling’s words to that song of great sadness: “
Lord God of old, be with us yet. Lest we forget
.”
    Lest we forget.
    When I saw the diploma go into the hands of William Clark Henderson—
    I backed off, weeping, and ran.

That Old Dog Lying in the Dust
    T hey say that Mexicali has changed. They say it has many people and more lights and the nights are not so long there anymore and the days are better.
    But I will not go see.
    For I remember Mexicali when it was small and alone and like an old dog lying out in the dust in the middle of the road. And if you drove up and honked it just lay there and twitched its tail and smiled with its rusty brown eyes.
    But most of all I remember a lost-and-gone one-ring Mexican circus.
    In the late summer of 1945, with the war ending beyond the world somewhere, and tires and gas rationed, a friend called to ask if I would like to ramble down past the Salton Sea to Calexico.
    We headed south in a beat-up Model A which steamed and seeped brown rust-water when westopped in the late hot afternoon to skinny-dip in the cool irrigation canals that make the desert