Hear the Wind Sing

32

In spite of Derek Hartfield’s large volume of work, when it came to the subjects of life, dreams, love, and the like, he was an extremely rare writer. Comparatively serious (‘serious’ meaning stories without appearances by spacemen and monsters) was his 1937 semi-autobiographical book Halfway ‘Round the Rainbow, in which, through all the irony, jokes, insults, and paradoxes, he revealed just a little bit of his true feelings.

“My most sacred books are in this room, and by that I mean the stack of alphabetized phonebooks on which I swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but. The truth is this: life is empty. However, help is available. If you know that from the outset, it’s almost as if life’s not really meaningless at all. We’ve really worked tirelessly to build it all up, and then tried with all our might to wear it down, and now it’s empty. No matter how hard you work, or how hard your try to bring it down, none of that’ll be written here. ‘Cause it’s a real pain in the ass. For those of you who really want to know, you can read about it in Romain Rolland’s novel Jean-Christophe. It’s all there, written out for you.”

The reason Hartfield was so terribly enamored with Jean-Christophe is, quite simply, because it diligently outlined the life of one person from birth until death and, moreover, it was a terribly long novel. In his opinion, a novel could present information even better than graphs, chronologies, and the like, and he thought the accuracy was comparable as well.

He was always critical of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

‘Of course, I have no problem with the length of it,’

he noted. ‘It’s that it lacks a clear conceptualization of outer space, and the author has given the reader a mishmash of impressions.’ The phrase

‘conceptualization of space,’ the way he uses it, usually meant ‘sterility.’

The novel he liked the most was A Dog of Flanders.

‘Hey, you. Can you believe a dog died just for a picture?’

During an interview, a newspaper reporter once asked Hartfield this:

“Your book’s protagonist, Waldo, has died twice on Mars, and once on Venus. Isn’t this some kind of contradiction?”

Hartfield’s reply was this:

“Do you know how time flows in the void of space?”

“No,” he responded, “but nobody knows that.”

“If writers only wrote about things everybody knew, what the hell would be the point of writing?”

* * *

Out of all of Hartfield’s works, one story, The Wells of Mars stands out, almost suggesting a hint of Ray Bradbury’s future appearance on the writing scene. It was a long time ago when I read it, and I forget most of the details, so I’m only going to give you the most important points.

This story is about the countless bottomless wells dug into the surface of Mars and the young man who climbed down into one. These wells were dug by the Martians tens of thousands of years ago, and that’s well-known, but the strange thing is that all of them, and I mean all of them, were dug so they wouldn’t strike water. So the question of why the hell they bothered to dig them is something nobody knew. As for the Martians themselves, aside from these wells, there wasn’t a trace of them left. Their written language, their dwellings, their plates and bowls, metallic infrastructure, their graves, their rockets, their vending machines, even their shells, there was absolutely nothing left. Just those wells. And the Earthlings had a hell of a time deciding whether or not you could even call that civilization, but those wells were definitely really well made, and all those tens of thousands of years later there wasn’t even so much as a single brick of a ruin.

To be sure, a few adventurers and explorers went down into those wells. They descended with their ropes in hand, but due to the depth of the wells and length of the caves, they had to turn back for the surface, and of those without ropes, not a single soul ever returned.

One day, there was this young guy wandering around in outer space, and he went into one of the wells. He was sick of the utter hugeness of space, and he wanted to die alone, without anybody around. As he descended, the well started to feel like a more and more relaxing and pleasant place, and this uncanny, familiar power started to envelop his body. After going down an entire kilometer, he found a real cave and climbed into it, and he continued to walk along, following its winding paths along intently. He had no idea how long he was walking along. This is because his watch stopped. It could have been two hours, but it just as easily could have been two days. It was like he couldn’t feel hunger or exhaustion, and the previously-mentioned strange power continuing to encase his body just as before. And then, all of a sudden, he felt sunlight. Turns out the cave was connected to a different well. He clambered up out of the well, and once again he was above ground. He sat on the edge of the well and stared at wasteland ahead of him free of any obstacles, and then he gazed at the sun. Something about it was different. The smell of the wind, the sun…the sun was in the middle of the sky, an orange twilight sun that had become an enormous orange blob.

“In 250,000 years, the sun is going to explode.

*Click*…OFF. 250,000 years. Not such a long time,”

the wind whispered to him.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m just the wind. If you want to call me that, or call me a Martian, that’s okay, too. I’m not an evil echo. But then, words don’t mean anything to me.”

“But, you’re speaking.”

“Me? You’re the one talking. I’m just giving your spirit a little hint, a little prodding.”

“What the hell happened to the sun?”

“It’s old. It’s dying. Me, you, there’s nothing either of us can do.”

“How’d it happen so quickly…?”

“Not quickly at all. In the time it took you to get out of that well, fifteen hundred million years have passed. As your people say, time flies. That well you came from was built along a distortion in spacetime. To put it another way, we wander around through time. From the birth of the universe ‘til its death. And so we never live, and we never die. We’re the wind.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Ask away.”

“What have you learned?”

The atmosphere shook a little, and the wind laughed. And then, the stillness of eternity once again covered the surface of Mars. The young man pulled a revolver out of his pocket, put the muzzle to his temple, and pulled the trigger.