The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (2 page)

Yet Serling’s real inspirations were a lot closer to home. If many elements of his fantasies are, inevitably, universal superheroes and saviors, pacts with the devil, wishes with unexpected consequences, magic spells and several Deadly Sins, characters who overreach themselves and meet ironic but appropriate dooms, a modern-day jetliner whose mysterious fate recalls the lost ships in sea legends of old, extra-terrestrials who drift in and out of the tales at will, meddling in human affairs like the gods of Greek myth—there is also something uniquely American in these tales. Presided over by a pantheon of home-grown heroes—baseball stars, Hollywood stars, astronauts, gunfighters, and ingenious inventors, as well as such lesser figures as snake-oil salesmen, soda jerks, admen, shady small-time politicians, and a handful of endearing losers—they are set amid classic American locales: suburbia, the wild West, the seductive glitter of Las Vegas, the Mexican border, the ballpark, the prizefight ring (which provided the background for his celebrated
Requiem for a Heavyweight
and which Serling knew from the inside, having boxed during his army days), and the corporate boardroom (another territory he’d explored before, in the TV play
Patterns
). While, like fairy tales, his stories are not afraid to teach a moral lesson, many of them focus on such modern American concerns as business ethics, brotherhood, and the ever-present threat of nuclear war.

They are also invincibly democratic, displaying a typical American irreverence for stuffed shirts and snobs. At times they approach the tall tale in their penchant for exaggeration and slapstick. Characters in “Casey” blunder into water buckets and swallow lit cigars, and a nervous young pitcher throws the rosin bag instead of the ball.

(“As it turned out, this was his best pitch of the evening.”) The inept cowboy hero of “Showdown with Rance McGrew,” unable to extricate his gun from its holster, eventually sends it flying over his shoulder to shatter a barroom mirror.

You have a sense of Serling enjoying himself in these scenes, adding a bit of wise-guy humor to the story out of sheer high spirits: “The sigh Bertram Beasley heaved was the only respectable heave going on within a radius of three hundred feet of home plate.” And:

The three pitchers that scout Maxwell Jenkins had sent over turned out to be pitchers in name only One of them, as a matter of fact, had looked so familiar that McGarry swore he’d seen him pitch in the 1911 World Series. As it turned out, McGarry had been mistaken. It was not he who had pitched in the 1911World Series but his nephew.

One hears, in the rhythm of that passage, echoes of Runyon and Twain.

There’s even a hint of the later, bitter Twain—the Twain of “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”—in “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” and “The Fever,” with their bleak view of the human species in extremis. You’ll find it, too, in Serling’s three cynical end-of-the-world fantasies: “The Shelter” (with its hero “suddenly realizing that underneath...we’re an ugly race of people”); “The Midnight Sun” (in which man’s darker nature emerges only briefly); and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (with its deliberate parallels to the Communist witch-hunt of the fifties).

Serling resembles Twain, as well, in his love-hate relationship with that modern American god, the machine—a god on whom we’ve come to depend, but of whose disposition we’re a little uncertain. Serling’s fascination, so apparent in the TV series as well as in this book, dates back to the early fifties, to a youthful radio script,
A Machine to Answer the Question
, about a computer that “can break down every human problem into a mathematical equation”—and provide the answer to whatever question it’s asked, even as to the prospect of an alien invasion. (Says the script’s pre-
Twilight Zone
narrator: “Man’s small mind can only project so far... What’s needed is a device to explain the mystery, to probe the void—a machine.”)

In fact, Serling himself seems to have had, in the words of the title of one of his stories, “A Thing About Machines.” That particular tale—the paranoid fantasy of a man whose relation to mechanical objects is one of, at best, uneasy coexistence—ascribes to machines a distinctly human will, and a pitiless one at that. So does “The Fever,” in which a fiendishly inimical machine defeats a mere mortal...or helps him, rather, to defeat himself. The inhabitants of “Maple Street” prove ripe for conquest because of their reliance on modern conveniences (to conquer them “just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers”); one suspects that the passengers and crew of “Flight 33” are similarly undone by their unquestioning trust in machinery and the known laws of the universe. Robots, a constant presence in Serling’s TV series, come to humanity’s aid in “The Mighty Casey” and “The Lonely”; though the mannequin in “Where Is Everybody?,” like the impersonal voice at the end of the phone (“This is a recording”), makes the hero’s agony all the greater as he longs for the touch of a fellow human being.

This last aspect of modern American life—its underlying loneliness and sense of dislocation—provides an even more fundamental theme. Like so many of the televised episodes, the tales in this book are pervaded by a fear of being alone; it is presented, in fact, as the most unbearable of punishments. In “Escape Clause,” “The Lonely,” and “Where Is Everybody?’ (in which the ubiquitous presence of brand names and advertising slogans proves to be of little comfort), the anguish of isolation can drive a man to madness or death. Characters in this unsettling world are perpetually in danger of getting lost (sometimes at the most unlikely moments), disconnected from their fellows, disoriented in time as well as space. “Showdown with Rance McGrew” is a comic nightmare about being yanked willy-nilly into the past; “The Odyssey of Flight 33 is the same nightmare on a grander and more horrifying scale (if tempered by a boyish excitement at the idea of seeing real dinosaurs). “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” is a cautionary tale about travel in the opposite direction.

But for an unhappy few, traveling in time seems the only way out—because the sense of dislocation, which in some tales appears as the most hellish of fates, is depicted, in others, as an inescapable condition of modern American life. Lost in a world of high pressures, power plays, and false values, the alienated heroes of “Walking Distance” and “A Stop at Willoughby” yearn for the simplicity and serenity of the past: in the former tale, for the hometown, Homewood, of the hero’s own past; in the latter, for the quintessential small town of America’s past. (Though Wiloughby itself is an idealized construction found only in Currier-&-Ives-induced dreams, the story, like “Walking Distance,” must have had a personal meaning for Serling, who’d spent the early days of his career commuting from Connecticut to New York on the New Haven line.) Of Homewood we read, “Somewhere at the end of a long, six-lane highway...Martin Sloan was looking for sanity,” while Wiloughby, too, is described as “a doorway that leads to sanity.” Clearly both towns offer solace in the same achingly desirable form—a return, through time, to the timelessness of childhood—and both, typically, are stumbled upon in the full flush of summertime. Perhaps, as a character observes, “There’s only one summer to a customer,” but Serling, it seems, got more than his share.

-T. E.D. Klein

The Mighty Casey

There is a large, extremely decrepit stadium overgrown by weeds and high grass that is called, whenever it is referred to (which is seldom nowadays), Tebbet’s Field and it lies in a borough of New York known as Brooklyn. Many years ago it was a baseball stadium housing a ball club known as the Brooklyn Dodgers, a major league baseball team then a part of the National League. Tebbet’s Field today, as we’ve already mentioned, houses nothing but memories, a few ghosts and tier after tier of decaying wooden seats and cracked concrete floors. In its vast, gaunt emptiness nothing stirs except the high grass of what once was an infield and an outfield, in addition to a wind that whistles through the screen behind home plate and howls up to the rafters of the overhang of the grandstand.

This was one helluva place in its day, and in its day, the Brooklyn Dodgers was one rip-roaring ball club. In the last several years of its existence, however, it was referred to by most of the ticket-buying, turnstile-passers of Flatbush Avenue as “the shlumpfs!”. This arose from the fact that for five years running, the Brooklyn Dodgers were something less than spectacular. In their last year as members of the National League, they won exactly forty-nine ball games. And by mid-August of that campaign a “crowd” at Tebbet’s Field was considered to be any ticket-buying group of more than eighty-six customers.

After the campaign of that year, the team dropped out of the league. It was an unlamented, unheralded event pointing up the fact that baseball fans have a penchant for winners and a short memory for losers. The paying customers proved more willing to travel uptown to the Polo Grounds to see the Giants, or crosstown to Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees, or downtown to any movie theater or bowling alley than to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers stumble around in the basement of the league season after season. This is also commentative on the forgetfulness of baseball enthusiasts, since there are probably only a handful who recollect that for a wondrous month and a half, the Brooklyn Dodgers were a most unusual ball club that last season. They didn’t start out as an unusual ball club. They started out as shlumpfs as any Dodger fan can articulately and colorfully tell you. But for one month and one half they were one helluva club. Principally because of a certain person on the team roster.

It all began this way. Once upon a time a most unusual event happened on the way over to the ball park. This unusual event was a left-hander named Casey!

It was tryout day for the Brooklyn Dodgers and Mouth McGarry, the manager of the club, stood in the dugout, one foot on the parapet, both hands shoved deep into his hip pockets, his jaw hanging several inches below his upper lip. “Try-out days” depressed Mouth McGarry more than the standing of his ball club, which was depressing enough as it stood, or lay—which would be more apt, since they were now in last place, just thirty-one games out of first. Behind him, sitting on a bench, was Bertram Beasley, the general manager of the ball club. Beasley was a little man whose face looked like an X-ray of an ulcer. His eyes were sunk deep into his little head, and his little head was sunk deep in between two narrow shoulder blades. Each time he looked up to survey McGarry, and beyond him, several gentlemen in baseball uniforms, he heaved a deep sigh and saw to it that his head sank just a few inches deeper into his shoulder blades. The sigh Bertram Beasley heaved was the only respectable heave going on within a radius of three hundred feet of home plate. The three pitchers that scout Maxwell Jenkins had sent over turned out to be pitchers in name only. One of them, as a matter of fact, had looked so familiar that McGarry swore he’d seen him pitch in the 1911 World Series. As it turned out, McGarry had been mistaken. It was not he who had pitched in the 1911 World Series but his nephew.

Out on the field McGarry watched the current crop of tryouts and kept massaging his heart. Reading left to right they were a tall, skinny kid with three-inch-thick glasses; a seventeen-year-old fat boy who weighed about two hundred and eighty pounds and stood five-foot-two; a giant, hulking farm boy who had taken off his spike shoes; and the aforementioned ‘‘pitcher” who obviously had dyed his hair black, but it was not a fast color and the hot summer sun was sending black liquid down both sides of his face. The four men were in the process of doing calisthenics. They were all out of step except the aging pitcher who was no longer doing calisthenics. He had simply sat down and was fanning himself with his mitt.

Beasley rose from the bench in the dugout and walked over to McGarry. Mouth turned to look at him.

“Grand-looking boys!”

“Who were you expecting?” Beasley said, sticking a cigar in his mouth. “The All Stars? You stick out a tryout sign for a last division club—” he pointed to the group doing the calisthenics, “and this is the material you usually round up.” He felt a surge of anger as he stared into the broken-nosed face of Mouth McGarry. “Maybe if you were any kind of a manager, McGarry, you’d be able to whip stuff like this into shape.”

McGarry stared at him like a scientist looking through a microscope at a bug. “I couldn’t whip stuff like that into shape,” he said, “if they were eggs and I was an electric mixer. You’re the general manager of the club. Why don’t you give me some ballplayers?”

“You’d know what to do with them?” Beasley asked. “Twenty games out of fourth place and the only big average we’ve got is a manager with the widest mouth in either league. Maybe you’d better get reminded that when the Brooklyn Dodgers win one game we gotta call it a streak! Buddy boy,” he said menacingly, “when contract time comes around, you don’t have to.” His cigar went out and he took out a match and lit it. Then he looked up toward home plate where a pitcher was warming up. “How’s Fletcher doing?” he asked.

“Are you kidding?” Mouth spat thirty-seven feet off to the left. “Last week he pitched four innings and allowed only six runs. That makes him our most valuable player of the month!”