Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury Read Free Page B

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 . . .
     
    About “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury”
     
    I wanted to write about Ray Bradbury. I wanted to write about him in the way that he wrote about Poe in “Usher II”—a way that drove me to Poe.
    I was going to read something in an intimate theatre space, very late at night, during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My wife, Amanda, and I were hosting a midnight show of songs and readings. I promised myself that I would finish it in time to read it to forty people seated on sofas and on cushions on the floor in a tiny, beautiful room that normally contained the Belt Up Theatre Company’s intimate plays.
    Very well, it would be a monologue, if I was going to read it.
    The inspiration came from forgetting a friend of mine. He died a decade ago. And I went to look in my head for his name, and it was gone. I knew everything else about him—the periodicals he had written for, his favourite brand of bourbon. I could have recited every conversation he and I had ever had, told you what we talked about. I could remember the names of the books he had written.
    But his name was gone. And it scared me. I waited for his name to return, promised myself I wouldn’t Google it, would just wait and remember. But nothing came. It was as if there was a hole in the universe the size of my friend. I would walk home at night trying to think of his name, running through names in alphabetical order. “Al? No. Bob? No. Charles? Chris? Not them . . .”
    And I thought, What if it were an author? What if it was everything he’d done? What if everyone else had forgotten him too?
    I wrote the