"You, night watchman!"
Out of the shadows hurries a stranger in overalls, calling:
"Hey, what's-your-name!"
The old man turns. "The name's Smith."
"Okay, Smith, what in hell's the idea!"
The watchman eyes the stranger quietly. "Who are you?"
"Kelly, foreman of the wrecking gang."
The old man nods. "Ah. The ones who tear everything down. You've done plenty today. Why aren't you home bragging about it?"
Kelly hawks and spits. "There was some machinery over on the Singapore set I had to check." He wipes his mouth.... "Now, Smith, what in Christ's name you think you're doing? Drop that hammer. You're building it all up again! We tear it down and you put it up. You crazy?"
The old man nods. "Maybe I am. But somebody has to put it up again."
"Look, Smith. I do my work, you do yours, everyone's happy. But I can't have you messing, see? I'm turning you in to Mr. Douglas."
The old man goes on with his hammering. "Call him up. Send him around. I want to talk to him. He's the crazy one."
Kelly laughs. "You kidding? Douglas don't see nobody." He jerks his hand, then bends to examine Smith's newly finished work. "Hey, wait a minute! What kind of nails you using? Single-heads! Now, cut that! It'll be hell to pay tomorrow, trying to pull 'em out!"
Smith turns his head and looks for a moment at the other man swaying there. "Well, it stands to reason you can't put the world together with double-headed nails. They're too easy to yank out. You got to use single-headed nails and hammer 'em way in. Like this!"
He gives a steel nail one tremendous blow that buries it completely in the wood.
Kelly works his hands on his hips. "I'll give you one more chance. Quit putting things back together and I'll play ball with you."
"Young man," says the night watchman, and keeps on hammering while he talks, and thinks about it, and talks some more, "I was here long before you were born. I was here when all this was only a meadow. And there was a wind set the meadow running in waves. For more than thirty years I watched it grow, until it was all of the world together. I lived here with it. I lived nice. This is the real world to me now. That world out there, beyond the fence, is where I spend time sleeping. I got a little room on a little street, and I see headlines and read about wars and strange, bad people. But here? Here I have the whole world together and it's all peace. I been walking through the cities of this world since 1920. Any night I feel like it, I have a one-o'clock snack at a bar on the Champs Elysees! I can get me some fine amontillado sherry at a sidewalk cafe in Madrid, if I want. Or else me and the stone gargoyles, high up there--you see them, on top Notra Dame?--we can turn over great state matters and reach big political decisions!"
"Yeah, Pop, sure." Kelly waves impatiently.
"And now you come and kick it down and leave only that world out there which hasn't learned the first thing about peace that I know from seeing this land here inside the barbed wire. And so you come and rip it up and there's no peace any more, anywhere. You and your wreckers so proud of your wrecking. Pulling down towns and cities and whole lands!"
"A guy's got to live," says Kelly. "I got a wife and kids."
"That's what they all say. They got wives and kids. And they go on, pulling apart, tearing down, killing. They had orders! Somebody told them. They had to do it!"
"Shut up and gimme that hammer!"
"Don't come any closer!"
"Why, you crazy old--"
"This hammer's good for more than nails!" The old man whistles the hammer through the air; the wrecker jumps back.
"Hell," says Kelly, "you're insane! I'm putting a call through to the main studio; well get some cops here quick. My God, one minute you're building things up and talking crazy, but how do I know two minutes from now you won't run wild and start pouring kerosene and lighting matches!"
"I wouldn't harm the smallest piece of kindling in this place, and you know it," says the old man.
"Might burn the whole goddam place down, hell," says Kelly. "Listen, old man, you just wait right there!"
The wrecker spins about and runs off into the villages and the ruined cities and the sleeping two-dimensional towns of this night world, and after his footsteps fade there is a music that the wind plays on the long silver barbed wires of the fence, and the old man hammering and hammering and selecting long boards and rearing walls until a time finally comes when his mouth is gasping, his heart is exploding; the hammer drops from his open fingers, steel nails tinkle like coins on the pavement, and the old man cries out to himself alone: "It's no use, no use. I can't put it all back up before they come. I need so very much help I don't know what to do."
The old man leaves his hammer lying on the road and begins to walk with no direction, with no purpose, it seems, save that he is thinking to make one last round and take one last look at everything and say good-by to whatever there is or was in this world to say good-by to. And so he walks with the shadows all around and the shadows all through this land where time has grown late indeed, and the shadows are of all kinds and types and sizes, shadows of buildings, and shadows of people. And he doesn't look straight at them, no, because if he looked at them straight, they would all blow away. No, he just walks, down the middle of Piccadilly Circus... the echo of his steps... or the Rue de la Paix... the sound of him clearing his throat... or Fifth Avenue... and he doesn't look right or left. And all around him, in dark doorways and empty windows, are his many friends, his good friends, his very good friends. Far away there are the hiss and steam and soft whispering of a caffe espresso machine, all silver and chrome, and soft Italian singing... the flutter of hands in darkness over the open mouths of balalaikas, the rustle of palm trees, a touching of drums with the chimes chiming and small bells belling, and a sound of summer apples dropped in soft night grass which are not apples at all but the motion of women's bared feet slowly dancing a circle to the chimes' faint chiming and the belling of the tiny golden bells. There is the munch of maize kernels crushed on black volcanic stone, the sizzle of tortillas drowned in hot fat, the whisk of charcoals tossing up a thousand fireflies of spark at the blowing of a mouth and the wave of a papaya frond; everywhere faces and forms, everywhere stirs and gestures and ghost fires which float the magical torch-colored faces of Spanish gypsies in air as on a fiery water, the mouths crying out the songs that tell of the oddness and the strangeness and the sadness of living. Everywhere shadows and people, everywhere people and shadows and singing to music.