Is Ray Bradbury Alive and Well in the Multiverse?
I saw Ray Bradbury today, waiting for a bus, which makes perfect sense as he wasn’t fond of cars. His hair was a shocking winter white, and longer than I have ever seen his platinum strands. He was in total vacation mode, wearing short pants and a classic French-style t-shirt - the kind with the black and white stripes. I know, I know. Bradbury died in 2012, on June 5. He died the day before, eleven years later, when I was involved in a hit-and-run in 2023. An SUV shaped like a tank hit me. The three scoundrels took off on foot - they caught a city bus and got away. My talismanic, 92’ Mazda light truck named Azul sacrificed its life for me, its frame crumbled under the weight of gravity. Azul snapped in half.
“The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society - cars kill more than wars do.” — Ray Bradbury
The same day a decade ago fantasy writer Neil Gaiman wrote this dedication about his friend. Time slides backward and forwards. Now, I see things out of the corner of my eye all the time - usually, I imagine a vehicle hitting me at 80 miles an hour at every intersection. Today, instead of a car hurling towards me through space, I saw Ray Bradbury, waiting for a bus. The requestion: why Ray Bradbury? Why now?
It was him. Wearing that striped shirt and yellow shorts - the same yellow that matched the color of the place he called home for 50 years in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Cheviot Hills. 10265 Cheviot Drive. His house was the same color as my grandparent’s home in Florida. No. Not yellow. Softer. More pale. Buttercream.
I assume my grandparents’ cinder block house is still standing, I pray, I hope, but I can’t bear to search for it on Google Maps. I don’t want to see it mangled, crumbling, the lemon, avocado, and coconut trees undernourished or gone altogether. I will say this, I loved their house. Their small home was a fortress to me. I’ll unpack more about their house and those memories in a possible future. In the meantime, Bradbury’s house is gone. Built in 1937, the same year young Ray Douglas Bradbury bought his first typewriter for ten dollars. In 2014, his house sold for 1.765 million and some change. The place was purchased by a “starchitect” who unceremoniously knocked it down, stating in several articles like this one that anyone who wanted to preserve the house had ample time to have purchased it. Now there’s a lap pool instead of a library.
“It was one of the worst houses in the neighborhood. “We thought it was not keepable.” — Blythe Mayne, wife of the architect
It’s not only the house, but what it contained. The dreams, thoughts, characters yet to be manifested, floating in the air circulating in rooms. Words that scurried across the furniture, wiggling into the cracks in the linoleum on the kitchen counter. I looked for what was Bradbury’s house on Google Maps, near the corner of Cheviot Hills and Queensbury Drive. The new stack of bricks, or rather cantilevered, textured boxes, hide cleverly behind fast-growing, deep green hedges. The corner of Cheviot Hills and Queensbury Drive now looks like a well-maintained, overgrown beard. The wild spirits of stories like The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Fahrenheit 451 (although Fahrenheit was written at a public library) were released into the air. Into space. I supposed that’s appropriate, on the atomic level. Maybe I would not have seen him waiting for a bus in the desert today if his spirit was still roaming that ramshackle basement writing room. At least I saw him on the way to adventure. When you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.
“A Ray Bradbury story meant something on its own – it told you nothing about what the story would be about, but it told you about atmosphere, about language, about some sort of magic escaping into the world.” — Neil Gaiman
All is not lost. We have archives, letters, novels, poems, teleplays, landings, departures, spaceports, extraterrestrials, robots, ghosts, places of origin, and that terrifying moment in Something Wicked This Way Comes when that footballer’s leg he lost in WWI grew right back. Shiver. At the University of Iowa, in their massive zine/fanzine collection is Bradbury’s signature at the bottom of a letter championing anti-fascism - he was a teenager when he signed it. Then he grew up to create worlds where we never have to burn our books again if we collectively choose not to.
”Don’t try to describe the future, try to prevent it.”
— Ray Bradbury
Today, I saw a person out of the corner of my eye, shining through a sliver of my iris, in a way that reflected the essence of Bradbury, waiting for a bus, reminding me to look for hope at the shifting intersection of chaos and destruction.