Sam Weller - Shadow Show

In that instant, he saw backward into memory, backward into the night that had preceded the first thought.

Far away, a galaxy became as dust and vanished, leaving no print, no recollection, no residue. Then, one by one, in correct stately procession, the solitary stars went blind.

The question was answered: Sat çi sat bene .

“A painting is a sum of destructions.”

Running the unacceptable risk of writing an afterword oh by the way “note” a thousand times longer than the story itself, I sit down to explicate the “Bradbury connection” to this, perhaps my last-published story. Like Ray, I am now old, and there is an infinitude more to recollect and savor of links between Bradbury and Ellison. Truly, it should suffice for even the most marrow-sucking obsessive fan that Ray and I have known each other close on forever.

Ray contends that in very short order he and I will be sitting down together cutting up touches with Dickens and Dorothy Parker, shuckin’ ’n’ jivin’ with Aesop and Melville.

Uh… well, okay, Ray, if you say so.

(I am rather less condolent with that Hereafter stuff than is Ray. As has averred Nat Hentoff, I come from, and remain as one with, a grand and glorious tradition of stiff-necked Jewish atheists. Ray and I have a long-standing wager on this one, which of us is on the money and which is betting on a lame pony. Sadly, the winner will never collect.)

La dee dah. Back where we began. Too many words, yet I’ll attempt that undanceable rigadoon.

These days of the electronic babble, every doofus with some handheld device calls every other male he knows brother .

“Hey, Bro! Whussup, Bro? Howzit goin’, Bro?”

Strangers: brother. Casual acquaintances: brother. Same-skin-color supermarket bagger: brother. Other-skin-colored guy who tipped you when you parked his Beamer: brother. Much like the oafishly careless, empty, and repetitious whomping of the once-specific, cherished, and singular word awesome , the sacred word BROTHER has become, in inept mouths, a dull and wearisome trope. ( Awesome is the word one uses for Eleanor Roosevelt, Mount Kilimanjaro, and pitching a no-hit no-run ball game. Not available for the crappy cheese quesadilla you had this afternoon, or for anybody who Dances with the Stars. With or without a wooden leg.) Same goes for yo bruth -thuh.

I had only one sib, my late sister. The men of my lifelong existence whom I would countenance as my brother are less than the number of dactyls on my left hand, and they know who they are.

Apparently, Ray Bradbury and I are brothers .

Not in some absurd catchall absurdity of vacuous gibber, but actually and really, “we are brothers.”

Whence cometh this assertion?

From Ray Bradbury. That’s whence.

“You know, Harlan,” he said to me, leaning in and grinning that Midwestern just-fell-off-the-turnip-truck grin, “we are brothers, y’know. You and I, together.”

I grinned back at him with my hayseed Midwestern mien, onaccounta we are both paid liars, one from Waukegan and one from Cleveland, and I played his straight man by responding, “How’s that, Ray?”

(The players freeze in situ as the Bloviating Narrator fills in the background data, thus slowing the movie and thus shamefacedly doing the necessary bricklaying.)

The table across which Ray was leaning was in a booth at one of my and Ray’s all-time favorite restaurants, the Pacific Dining Car in downtown Los Angeles. The night was in 1965. Our dining companions had both gone off to the toilets. That is to say, she had gone off to one; her husband had gone off to another. Her name was Leigh Bracket; his name was Edmond Hamilton. The queen of fantasy writing. Great movies based on Hammett and Chandler. A legend in this life. The Eric John Stark stories. A kind and imperially gracious woman. One of the best people ever known to me. Ed looked like something out of American Gothic . They called him Galaxy Smasher—the true creator of the space opera. Dozens and dozens of stories all the way back to the advent of Gernsbach: The Star Kings series. All those great comic books, and the Captain Future pulp novelettes. Droll, cosmically smart, one helluva plotter, and kind to tots like me and Ray. They were the Strophe and Antistrophe of our literary infancy.

So, they’re gone, Bradbury and I are alone, grinnin’ & schmoozin’, and he proceeds to explain to me that he and I are brothers . Not my word, his word. (Not to make this too clear, but I have a chasmlike abomination of bloviating sf fans who, upon the death of someone they once met in an elevator, begin to leak like WikiAnything, just to buy themselves the face time at a memorial. “Oh, yes, I knew Isaac as if he were my brother…” “Oh, lawdy, I pluckt up rootabuggas with Cliff Simak in de fields…” “Yes, Octavia Butler and I were ever so close…”) This unlikely story I tell actually happened. Go ask Bradbury if you think I’m fudging it. But better hurry…

Anyhow, I says back to him, “How’s that, Ray?”

And he says back to me, “Them.”

And I says to him, “Ed and Leigh?”

And he says back to me, “Our father and mother. They raised us.” I have no memory of the rest of the actual verbiage.

Well, Sir, wasn’t that a keen moment!

You see, I was working at Paramount at the time, on one or another of the crippled creations Rouse and Greene had hired me to do for vast sums of money (I was in my “hot 15” at the time). And Leigh, whom I’d known since my teens in Ohio, was writing a dog for Howard Hawks called

Red Line 7000 , starring James Caan (who, coincidentally, played the role of Harlan Ellison in an Alfred Hitchcock Hour based on my Memos from Purgatory only a year or so earlier). Also at Paramount.

Our offices were near to hand.

Ray doesn’t drive. I drive. Every time we both got booked into the same lecture gig at some jerkwater literary potlatch, I drove. Bradbury lectured.

Me, he lectured. (Our politics are about as close as our faiths.)

So, I was always the wheelman on the caper.

Leigh didn’t have (what she used to call, to mock James M. Cain) a “short” that night, and I can’t remember what Ed’s story was. But I wound up doing the driving down to the Pacific Dining Car, and we left straight from the studio. Ray must’ve come by cab; he met us at the Bronson Gate, and I did my thing downtown for a good big T-bone dinner. Also Bermuda onion, Rondo Hatton’s jaw-sized tomatoes with Roquefort dressing, and Zucchini Florentine. Ray drank; I never touch the stuff. We had an absolutely nova-squooshing dinner.

Thus, before I run on at greater length, the answer to the question “Can you reminisce a bit about your Ray Bradbury connection?” is frozen in Ray’s asserveration: We’re brothers.

He said so.

But, not to make a big foofaraw of it, Ray has trouble remembering who I am, and who Harlan Ellison is. And then he’ll remember, howl “Live Forever!” or some such impossibility at me, and recall me as “Ah, yes, the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang.” And I’ll smile wanly, and scream back at him, “ Nothing lives forever, Ray, you crazy old coot! Not the Great Pyramid of Giza, not the polar ice caps, not a single blade of green grass, you nut-bag!”

And that is the link between us, the “connection.” Nobody ever writ it large on the northern massif of Mount Shazam… you gotta agree with your brother.

You just got to love him.

Our deepest gratitude goes to Ray Bradbury for his support and enthusiasm for this book. Thanks also to Ray’s daughter, Alexandra, for her assistance along the way. We are, of course, indebted to our all-star cast of writers, who interpreted Bradbury’s inspiration in myriad, imaginative ways.