Richard Matheson
Now bray goodnight to Earth
For day is dun and man�fs estate
Is cast into the vault of time
Tuck in the graveclothes of forever
Snuff the candle of attempt
And let fall across our eyes
That secret shroud of fusion
With dark mystery.
He sat upon a rock and wrote his text on wood, using as pen a charcoaled finger. It is just, he mused, that the concluding theme should be set down with this digit in limbo, this beggarly palpus which once pointed at earth and sky to arrogate—I am your master, earth, your master, sky—and now lies grilled and temperate among the rubbish of our being.
I sit at Earth�fs wake and shed no tear.
Now he raised funereal eyes to float across the plain a glacial contemplation. Between his fingers rolled the sooty stylus and breath showed nasal evidence of his disgust. Now here am I, he brooded, perched upon a tepid boulder and inspecting that momentous joke which man has finally played upon himself.
He smote his brow and �gAh!�h he cried, spiritually swept overboard. His great despairing head flopped forward on his chest and quavering moans beset his form. Birthright disemboweled, he sorrowed, golden chance arust, man has found the way—but to extinction.
Then he straightened up to make his back a ramrod of defiance. I shall not be a cur bowwowing, he avowed. This mortuary moment shall not have the best of me. Yea, though death bestride me and plucks with spectral fingers at my sores I shall not cry for less; I am inviolate.
The tatters quivered royally upon his shoulders. He bent to write again:
Now let me relish death
As Earth gloats o�fer her own demise
With eyes of shimmering slag.
One leaden edge of tongue peeped out through barricades of lip. Now he was hot.
Birds crow a serenade to man
Incinerated he
Prostrate sautéed skeleton
For all the gods to see
Birds peck a saucy tune with bristly nibs
Upon the xylophone of man�fs forgotten ribs.
�gCapital! Capital!�h he cried, stamping one unbooted foot upon the ashy soil. In the excitement of the phrase, he dropped his pen and stopped to pluck it up. Here, deposed antennae, he grimaced the thought, and then he wrote again.
Odd it was, he scrolled, that man throughout his ill-tuned history never ceased to plot man�fs own destruction.
Chorus: More than fantastic
This alien two
Lived together
And never knew.
He paused. How to continue, he wondered, how go on with this concluding ledger of man�fs account? It demanded bite, a trenchant instantaneity and yet deceptive calm like forty fathom sea when gales are shrieking overhead. As there, so here, he thought, I must suggest the titanic with polished and well-mannered couplets. As for instance:
Tell me here
What difference there
To burn in bias
Or burn in fires.
I have no audience nor hope of one yet I go on composing till what needs be said is said. And then I go—my own way.
He reached into his pocket for the twenty-seventh time and drawing out the pistol, rolled its chamber with reflective finger. One bullet there he knew, his key to final rest. He gazed into the barrel�fs dark eye and did not quail. Yes, when it ends, he thought, when I have savored to the dregs this dark wine of most utter ruination, I shall press this to my head and blow away the last of man�fs complaints.
But now, he thought, back to my work. I have not done with mankind yet. A few words still remain, several discourteous racks of poesy. Shall I dispose so soon of what men always wanted most—the last word?
He flourished stylus, wrote:
Be this the final entry
In mankind�fs book of psalms
He knit his shroud with atoms
And dug his grave with bombs.
No. No, that did not catch the temper. He scratched it out. Let me see, he tapped a nail upon eroded teeth. What can I say? Ah!
Man the better
Man the higher
Man the pumps
The world�fs on fire.
But is this all quite fair, he mused amid chuckling, that I, as sole survivor, make such light of this unnatural tragedy which is the fall of man. Should I not instead sing out of mountainous regrets and summon tidal panegyrics which would wash away all bitterness with one great, cleansing surge. Should I not?
Man, man, he brooded, what have you done with your so excellent a world? Was it so small that you should scorn it, so drafty you should heat it to an incandescence, so unsightly you should rearrange its mountains and its seas?
�gAh,�h he said, �goh . . . ah!�h
His hands fell limp. A tear, two tears ran down his beak-shape nose to quiver on the tip, then fall upon the ground. And hiss.
What portent this, his mind groaned on, that I should be the last of Man�fs embittered tribe. The very last! Portent this, vast moment this—to be alone in all the world!
It is too much, he cried aloud within his head. I reel at the significance. He fingered the gun. How can I bear to hold this crushing weight upon my shoulders? Are my words appropriate, my sentiments all fit for this immensity of meaning?
He blinked, released the pistol. He was insulted by the question. What, I not up to it; what, my words inappropriate? He straightened up and bristled at the ash-envapored sky.
It is fitting, he declared, that these last measures be composed by a man alone. For shall a pack of masons clamor round the stone, entangling arms in clumsy eagerness to chisel out man�fs epitaph? And shall a host of scriveners haggle endlessly on man�fs obituary, muttering and wrangling like a coachless football team in huddle?
No this is best—one man to suffer beautiful agonies, one voice to speak the final words, then dot the I�fs and cross the t�fs and so farewell to Man�fs domain—ending, if not sustaining, in gentle poetry.
And I that man, I that voice! Blessed with this final opportunity, my words alone without a million others to dilute them, my phrases only to ring out through all eternity, uncontradicted.
He sighed, he wrote again.
It took this to make me individual
The killing of all men
Yea. . .
His head jerked up, alarmed, as, from far across the rubbled plain there came a sound.
�gEh?�h he muttered. �gWhat be that?�h
He blinked, re-focused blood-streaked eyes, shook his head, squinted. And then his lower jaw slipped down and down until his mouth became a yawning cave.
A man was hobbling across the plain, waving a crooked arm at him. He watched the ashes rise in clouds of powder around the limping man and, in his mind, a great numbness struck.
A fellow creature! A comrade, another voice to hear, another.. .
The man stumbled up.
�gFriend!�h cried the man from out his startled face.
And abruptly, hearing this human voice usurp the mountainous, brooding silence, something suddenly snapped within the poet�fs brain.
�gI shall not be robbed!�h he cried. And he shot the man neatly between the eyes. Then he stepped across the peaceful body and went over to another rock of fused sidewalk.
He sat, shook back his sleeve. And, just before he bent to work again, he spun the empty chambers in his hand.
Ah, well, he sighed, for this moment, to have this glorious, shining doom alone—it was worth it.
Sonnet to a Parboiled Planet, he began . . .