"I couldn't find anything good playing, and I didn't feel like going home again, and just then I saw this garish poster of a bullfighter. Above it the movie marquee said, 'Blood and Sand.' I'd seen the movie before, and didn't think it was anything so special. But I remembered the color, real vivid and romantic. So I decided to go see it again. It was better than going back to the apartment."
"You said the word color again," the stranger interrupted, "you better try to explain that to me right now. Color, I mean."
"I can't," Eddie answered sadly. "If you've never seen it, I just can't. I told you I tried before. Anyway, that night there was still color, that is, up until the time I walked into that movie house. I came in in the middle of the film, during a scene which had impressed me a lot. The big bull ring with the golden-yellow sand, and the bullfighters wearing blue and green and gold and many other colors—the words are probably new to you—and the bright red cape. I tell you, I remembered that scene so clearly because of the colors, and now it was all black and white and grey.
"Those at least are words that you know: black and white and grey, and you know what 'tone' means. Well, color has tone too, but there is so much more, such great differences.... It can't be described, but everything had it. Of course even in those days they made many movies in just black and white. But this particular one had been in color, as I said, and really fine color.
"When I came in then, as I said, in the middle of the bullfight scene and saw it was all just black and white, the red cape and the blue sky and all, I thought at first that I'd gone crazy, that my memory was playing terribly inventive tricks on me. Then came other scenes of which I'd remembered the color in great detail. I decided that I couldn't just have invented all that color so precisely and believed that I'd really seen it. It occurred to me that maybe this was just a cheap black and white reprint of the original color film.
"Well, I stayed till the end of the film because, as I said, I didn't feel like going home that night, and I got pretty much used to the black and white, though the film was certainly much poorer that way.
"I stayed till the bull fight scene came around again, and when I first got out into the lobby I was too blinded by the sudden bright light to notice anything. It was out in the street that I got the shock. There was no color out there at all. The posters, the neon signs, people's clothes were just shades of grey, if they weren't black or white. I looked into a mirror on the side of a store window, and my own maroon tie was just a sort of darkish grey. It was as if everything, all life, had become a black and white movie.
"I was terribly frightened. I thought something had happened to my eyes, or to my brain. I ran back to the movie house, but the ticket booth was already closed. I asked a man who was just coming out, 'was that movie in color?' and he looked at me as if he thought me crazy, and walked on without answering. Of course it was a silly question, and what difference did it make if that movie was in color or not if I couldn't see color anywhere?
"So I walked towards the subway to go home. I told myself I was dreaming, or else I was over-tired or something. It would have been quite a natural thing to happen to me if I had been over-tired, because I'm a commercial artist, and used to be always working with color. Sort of an occupational disease maybe. I told myself that if after a good night's sleep I still didn't see color, I'd go to a doctor. That way I calmed myself a bit, and I slept like a log all night.
"Next morning I still didn't see any color, so I called up the agency and said I wouldn't be in that day because I was sick. Then I went to see a doctor. I just went to a man who had an office down the street, because I've never been sick since I got to New York, and hadn't any special doctor to go to. I had to wait a long time, and in the waiting room there was a copy of Holiday Magazine, a magazine that was always full of color pictures, and of course they were all black and white now. I got so worried glancing through it that I put it away, and closed my eyes till my name should be called.