Fantastic Metropolis

This month’s column will be shorter than those previous for the simple fact that there is no need for me to introduce Ray Bradbury to readers. I’m sure everyone has read at least one story by him in a school anthology, and many, I’m just as sure, have read nearly all his novels and stories. The difficulty this month is picking only one story of his for The Virtual Anthology. I had not mentioned this before, but I have decided on a rule of only one story per writer. Why? I haven’t got the slightest idea, but that’s the way it is going to be. Equally as certain is the fact that no decent anthology of the literature of the fantastic could be complete without a representative piece by Bradbury.

I first came across his work in the library of the grade school I attended. Bradbury did for me back then what Asimov could not. I appreciated Asimov’s brilliant imagination, I longed to feel that sense of weighty wonder that his book covers and the plot summaries on the backs of his books alluded to, but the writing always seemed flat, the characters mere names, and his books and stories never sparked my own imagination. Bradbury, on the other hand, writes stories with, for want of a better term, “personality.” The writing is both succinct and lyrical. He is a stylist whose writing lives through deftly drawn characters, idiosyncratic imagery and strong but deceptively nuanced plots. There is a simplicity in the execution of the lines but a great complexity of emotion always just beneath the surface.

You can tell me that The Martian Chronicles is a fix-up novel, but it is just this very collage effect that won me over as a reader. It is poetic, and some of its poetry may by now have edged into a kind of creaky nostalgia, but no other work more clearly showed me such wonderful new worlds of possibility for genre writing. In the works I had read previously to it in magazines like If and F&SF (we’re talking circa 1960’s here), the concentration had been fixed on the pell mell drive of a linear plot. Bradbury puts the character at the center of his fiction and often plays with structure and language. Although I am aware that he has many loyal fans and no need of an apologist, I think too many contemporary writers and readers dismiss Bradbury’s works as consisting completely of that rose colored nostalgia, but nothing could be further from the truth. Amidst the beautiful imagery and the occasionally irritating Gerard Manley Hopkins-sprung-rhythms of some of his fictions lurk disturbing scenes of frustration, desperation, dysfunction and real terror made more evident in contrast to the beauty of the writing.

Nothing describes 21^st century America better than Fahrenheit 451, with its listless population, following a kind of mindless devotion to bureaucracy and a government whose laws deny its citizens a medium that might contain a shred of truth. I’ve already begun memorizing Fahrenheit 451 for when USA PATRIOT Act III calls for the burning of books. In the realm of the short story, a quick review of “The Veldt” in The Illustrated Man might strike a reader with children as amazingly prescient of today’s parent/child relationships. Another piece that gets at the heart of the dysfunction of today’s society in a chilling way is “The Screaming Woman.” These are just a few examples of the “hard” realities that populate Bradbury’s work. I missed a lot of these aspects of his story telling as a young reader and have found that going back through the stories and novels reveals nuances that I was not mature enough at the time to grasp.

When I was trying to decide which story to choose for the anthology, I focused in on his early collection, The October Country. In this volume alone there were many that suggested themselves. “The Jar,” “The Crowd,” “The Wind,” are all favorites. Then I reread a story I had all but forgotten, “The Man Upstairs.” We don’t usually associate Bradbury with surrealist writing, but this story gets so damn bizarre in its own quiet way, it really took me aback when I read it. You could consider it a vampire story, I suppose, but whatever label you want to attend to it, one thing is for sure—it’s a first class creep show.

The story centers on the character of Douglas, a boy of ten, staying for the summer with his grandmother and grandfather in their boarding house. This character seems to be a kind of strange prototype of Douglas Spaulding, who would later become the main character of Dandelion Wine. The difference between the two is that the Douglas of “The Man Upstairs” is not so frenetically caught up in the wonder and magic of summer as is his namesake in the later novel, but instead has a keen interest in the inner organs of the body and a kind of bizarre, deadpan fascination with death. His favorite pastime for the summer is watching his grandmother butcher and prepare chickens for dinner. Check out part of this incredible first paragraph of the story:

He remembered how carefully and expertly Grandmother would fondle the cold cut guts of the chicken and withdraw the marvels therein; the wet shining loops of meat-smelling intestine, the muscled lump of heart, the gizzard with the collection of seeds in it. How neatly and nicely Grandma would slit the chicken and push her fat little hand in to deprive it of its medals…

The clear, concise writing, the visceral imagery, the implied excitement generated in the boy by this ritual, create an off-putting introduction to the character. Later, his grandfather speaks about a time when Douglas saw a woman killed at the train station. He just walked over and stared at her without reaction, “blood and all.” As much as you want to like the kid through the story, there is always the thought at the back of your mind that “this kid ain’t exactly right.” The way Bradbury mitigates this fascination of Douglas’s is by introducing the character of Koberman, who is also quite strange and an outsider to boot.

Koberman, a tall, gaunt, quiet man, comes to the house to rent a room. Douglas senses the man’s peculiar nature the moment he sees him. The grandmother takes the stranger in as a border, setting up the classic story plot of a “stranger in the house” (see Steppenwolfe by Hesse, or the Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt as two other examples). Koberman has some odd ways. He sleeps all day and goes out all night. He insists on eating with wooden dining implements he supplies himself. He carries no other change but copper pennies.

Douglas begins on a campaign to irritate Koberman in every way that he can. He bounces his basketball outside the man’s door while he is trying to sleep during the day, bangs a drum, calls out his name at the top of his voice for three straight minutes each afternoon. Still the man does not stir. Then one day, Douglas is standing by the large stained glass window (made up of sections of red, blue, yellow, purple, glass) in the hallway on the second floor of the house. He watches Koberman approaching the house in the early morning. Seeing the stranger through the red glass gives Douglas a new and totally unexpected view of him. It is as if he can see inside of the man’s body, and what he sees disturbs him.

Koberman catches Douglas spying on him through the colored glass and is immediately suspicious. Later that afternoon, while Douglas is out in the backyard in the sandbox, his basketball is thrown through the stained glass window, destroying it. The grandmother blames Douglas and beats him with a belt. The boy knows he’s been set up, and makes sure to salvage a piece of each different color glass from the remains of the window.

That day at dinner with his grandparents and the other boarders, Douglas hears them discuss an unsolved murder that has taken place in the town and also the disappearance of a young woman. Obviously, he, as well as the reader, suspects Koberman. One of the boarders mentions the idea of a vampire and tells how a creature of that sort can be killed with a silver bullet. The boy puts together the fact that Koberman is out all night, sleeps all day while the sun is up, will not eat with silverware, carries only copper pennies, and he decides to take action.

I’m dying to just tell what happens, but it has been my practice so far not to give away the endings of the stories I write about. Suffice it to say that there is no way, unless you have already read the story, that you will guess what transpires. The weirdness in this piece is a bit of inspired genius on Bradbury’s part. Since I can’t give away the ending, it circumvents me from discussing the piece in full, but allow me to pose two points for you to consider when you have finished your reading. 1) You must remember that Koberman has not been proven guilty of anything. 2) What’s the deal with the kid? Pretty peculiar course of action for a ten year old, if you ask me.

“The Man Upstairs” is, for me, a classic story of “the outsider,” “the alien,” “the stranger.” Bradbury’s writing in this piece, as evidenced by the quote above, is absolutely flawless—no excess baggage, no poetic gibberish. The point of view from which the story is told could very easily cause one to miss the depth of its grim nature on the first reading. Douglas and the man upstairs might have more in common than we at first suspect.

For readers and writers alike, one could do much worse than to review the fictions of Ray Bradbury and reassess what you thought you knew about his work. The October Country might be a good place to start.

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“Bradbury, The Man Upstairs” first appeared in s1ngularity in 2003.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of a trilogy of novels from Eos Harper Collins—The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond. His most recent novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque (Morrow/Harper Collins), was published in June 2002 as was his first story collection, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant & Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press). His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines—including Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCI FICTION and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet—and anthologies such as The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, The Green Man: Tales From the Mythic Forest, Leviathan 3, and The Journal of Pulse Pounding Narratives.

Ford lives in South Jersey with his wife, Lynn, and two sons, Jack and Derek. He teaches Writing and Early American Literature at Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County, New Jersey.