The Illustrated Man

It’s October 19, 1969. Over coffee, a man asks his wife, “What would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?” She says she doesn’t know and checks if he’s serious. He confirms that he is. It is not a war or a bomb, he says, just a feeling he has—“the closing of a book” (112). He tells her about a strange dream he had four nights before, where a voice said things would stop on Earth. His coworker Stan Willis and others confirmed they had the same dream—it seems everyone has. The world will stop sometime during the night.

The wife wonders if they deserve this. Her husband replies that “It’s not a matter of deserving; it’s just things didn’t work out” (113). The wife admits she and other housewives in the neighborhood have had the dream too. The couple is not afraid because this seems to be a logical conclusion. They have not been egregiously bad people but have not been very good either. Rather, they just let the world do awful things around them. They reflect that they will miss only each other, their daughters, and the little pleasures of life, like a glass of ice water when it is hot.