Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1 by Ray Bradbury

Author:Ray Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

The Happiness Machine

On Sunday morning Leo Auffmann moved slowly through his garage, expecting some wood, a curl of wire, a hammer or wrench to leap up crying. ‘Start here!’ But nothing leaped, nothing cried for a beginning.

Should a Happiness Machine, he wondered, be something you can carry in your pocket?

Or, he went on, should it be something that carries you in its pocket?

‘One thing I absolutely know,’ he said aloud. ‘It should be bright!’

He set a can of orange paint in the center of the workbench, picked up a dictionary, and wandered into the house.

‘Lena?’ He glanced at the dictionary. ‘Are you “pleased, contented, joyful, delighted”? Do you feel “lucky, fortunate”? Are things “clever and fitting,” “successful and suitable” for you?’

Lena stopped slicing vegetables and closed her eyes. ‘Read me the list again, please,’ she said.

He shut the book.

‘What have I done, you got to stop and think an hour before you can tell me? All I ask is a simple yes or no! You’re not contented, delighted, joyful?’

‘Cows are ‘contented,’ babies and old people in second childhood are “delighted.” God help them,’ she said. ‘As for “joyful,” Leo? Look how I laugh scrubbing out the sink …’

He peered closely at her and his face relaxed. ‘Lena, it’s true. A man doesn’t appreciate. Next month, maybe, we’ll get away.’

‘I’m not complaining!’ she cried. ‘I’m not the one comes in with a list saying. “Stick out your tongue,” Leo, do you ask what makes your heart beat all night? No! Next will you ask, “What’s marriage?” Who knows, Leo? Don’t ask. A man who thinks like that, how it runs, how things work, falls off the trapeze in the circus, chokes wondering how the muscles work in the throat. Eat, sleep, breathe, Leo, and stop staring at me like I’m something new in the house!’

Lena Auffmann froze. She sniffed the air.

‘Oh, my God, look what you done!’

She yanked the oven door open. A great cloud of smoke poured through the kitchen.

‘Happiness!’ she wailed. ‘And for the first time in six months we have a fight! Happiness, and for the first time in twenty years it’s not bread, it’s charcoal for supper!’

When the smoke cleared, Leo Auffmann was gone.

The fearful clangor, the collision of man and inspiration, the flinging about of metal, lumber, hammer, nails, T square, screwdriver, continued for many days. On occasion, defeated, Leo Auffmann loitered out through the streets, nervous, apprehensive, jerking his head at the slightest sound of distant laughter, listened to children’s jokes, watching what made them smile. At night he sat on neighbors’ crowded porches, listening to the old folks weigh and balance life, and at each explosion of merriment Leo Auffmann quickened like a general who has seen the forces of darkness routed and whose strategy has been reaffirmed. On his way home he felt triumphant until he was in his garage with the dead tools and the inanimate lumber. Then his bright face fell away in a pale funk, and to cover his sense of failure he banged and crashed the parts of his machine about as if they really did make sense.

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