The Human Comedy by William Saroyan

Author:William Saroyan [Saroyan, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: literature, fiction, american
Publisher: Harcourt
Published: 1943-02-24T20:00:00+00:00

23. The Nightmare

Homer Macauley was in bed at last, tossing and turning. He dreamed he was running the two-twenty low hurdles again, but every time he got to a hurdle, Byfield was there to stop him. He hurdled anyway and they went down. At every hurdle Byfield was there. Finally the injury to Homer's leg was so painful that when he tried to run, he fell. He got up and pasted Byfield in the mouth. He shouted at the man, "You can't stop me! You can never stop me—low hurdles, high hurdles, any kind of hurdles!"

He began to run again, limping at first but soon running well, but the next hurdle was inhumanly high—eight feet —nevertheless, Homer Macauley, perhaps the greatest man in Ithaca, California, went over the hurdle with perfect form.

Next in the dream he was in his uniform riding his bicycle swiftly down a narrow street. Suddenly Byfield stood in the way. But Homer pushed toward the man more swiftly than ever. "I told you—you can't stop me!" He lifted upward on the handlebars, and the bicycle began to rise and fly. It flew directly over Byfield's head and came down lightly on the other side of him. But just as it reached the pavement, Byfield stood in the way again! Again the bicycle left the street and flew over the man. But this time it stayed aloft, suspended twenty feet over Byfield's head. The man stood in the street, amazed and displeased. "You can't do that!" he shouted. "You're breaking the law of gravity."

"What do I care about the law of gravity?" Homer shouted at the man in the street. "Or the law of averages, or the law of supply and demand, or any other law? You can't stop me! Worm, rust and rot—I have no time for you." The messenger rode on through space, leaving the ugly man alone in the street, as inferior as any inferiority could ever be.

Now Homer flew high, among dark clouds. As the messenger rode through the sky, he watched another bicycle rider in a messenger's uniform very much like his own but moving even faster than himself, push out of black cloud. The second messenger, strangely, seemed to be Homer himself, but at the same time he seemed to be someone Homer feared. Homer raced after the second messenger to find out who he really was.

The two riders raced a good long distance before Homer began to catch up. Suddenly the other messenger turned, and Homer was amazed that the messenger looked exactly like himself, but at the same time was unmistakably—not so much in appearance as in feeling—the messenger of Death. The riders were swiftly coming to Ithaca. Homer raced after the messenger of Death, moving swifter than ever before. Far down in the distance he could see the lonely lights of the town and the lonely streets and houses. Homer was determined to head off the other messenger, to keep him away from Ithaca. Nothing in the world was more important than to keep this messenger from reaching Ithaca.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.