Free The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan

all the insane things about the machines getting into them and destroying them and destroying everything decent in them.
    They stopped working Sundays and began going across the bay to Marin County. Every Sunday they walked into the hills of Marin County, talking about the house. All during September and October, 1927, they were together on Sundays, walking in the hills across the bay from San Francisco.
    The feeling of being lost began to leave him. There was at least one person in the world who knew that he was alive and attached some importance to the fact, and for a while it looked as if the house he had wanted so long would actually materialize, and he would enter it with this girl, laughing, and they would be in it together, forever and forever.
    I have said that he was nineteen.
    Forever and forever
, this is the amusing part. All day long at the teletype machine he would hear the music,
one two three four five six seven eight
, forever and forever and forever, and this girl and this music and the house that was to be, all mingled, and for a while he believed in the inevitability of his hope.
    I am coming now to the truth. I am not permitting myself to make a story.
    In August and September and October, because of something inexplicable, atmospheric if you like, they were splendidly one, melody and counterpoint, precisely, perfectly, and the dream of eternity was not a fantastic dream.
    The house, they wanted. They wanted it desperately. In August and September and October. They wanted themselves desperately. And so on.
    Things happen. They happen subtly, quietly, strangely. Everything for a moment is thus: then when one looks again, everything is changed and is now
thus:
a new configuration, the blood thus, the earth thus, and the meaning of life thus. There is nothing you can do about it. Only art is precise and everlastingly itself: everlastingly dependable.
    They did not quarrel. The girl did not get sick and die. She did not run off with another young man or with an older rich man.
    All of a sudden, the melody was silenced, the counterpoint faded away. It was November.
    I used to sit in my room, trying to understand what had happened to us. The house. Why, it was laughable. How would I ever be able to own a house on my salary? The feeling of being lost. That was nonsense. It was absolutely stupid. I used to walk up and down my room, smoking one cigarette after another, trying to understand the sudden toppling of the edifice we had built for ourselves. I wanted to know why we no longer wanted to go away from the city. It was not the girl alone. I myself had stopped talking about the house. I myself had stopped hearing the music, and suddenly the silence had returned, and I was standing in the midst of it, again lost, but now without the wish to return to myself. Let it go, I felt. Let it stand as it is. And so on.
    During the winter they gradually fell away from one another, and then suddenly in March, 1928, he knew that the whole business was a thing of the past, that it was dead.
    Something happened to her. She lost her job. She moved away, to another address, to another city, he didn’t know which. He lost track of her.
    In June something happened to him.
    One afternoon I was sitting at the teletype machine, working it, and all of a sudden I began to hear the passage,
one two three four five six seven eight
, swiftly, and I began to see her face and the landscapethat was her eyes, and I began to hear her laughter,
one two three four five six seven eight
, and as I worked the machine this music and the remembrance of this girl and the resurrection of the house we were to have made for ourselves, all these things began to be in my mind the way they had been in the summer, as truth and reality, and I began to feel lost and bewildered and confused.
    That evening he played the record, but he listened to it only once because it brought tears to his eyes. He had laughed at the tears, but he had not dared to listen to