The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (11 page)

Bedeker didn’t answer. He sat looking down at the tray of food on his lap and felt the rising bubbles of sadness and hopelessness and misery crawl up his body and he had to stifle a sob.

“Look at it this way,” the guard said philosophically. “What’s life, Mr. Bedeker? Forty years. Fifty years. Hell, you can do that standing on your head.” Bedeker could hear him as he went down the corridor. “That’s all. Forty, fifty years. Maybe not even that much—”

Bedeker set the tray on the floor and put his head in his hands. “Forty, fifty years,” he murmured to himself. “Forty or fifty years. Or sixty, or seventy, or a hundred, or two hundred.”

Numbers drifted across his mind. Five figure numbers. Six figure numbers. And he heard a voice thundering at him from no place in particular.

“After all, what are a few hundred years or a few thousand? Or five thousand or ten thousand? What is it in the scheme of things?” The voice ended on a note of laughter. Big laughter. Resounding, quaking laughter that came from the belly of a fat man.

Walter Bedeker looked up to see the corpulent blue-suited figure of Cadwallader standing in the middle of the cell grinning at him, his white teeth gleaming, his eyes suddenly coal red.

“Mr. Bedeker,” he rumbled. “Just think of it! Immortality…indestructibility...institutions fail, governments disintegrate, people die! But Walter Bedeker goes on and on.” His laugh was rolling thunder across the cell. “Walter Bedeker goes on and on. And on and on and on.”

Bedeker screamed and buried his face against the pillow on the cot. There was an odor in the cell. A burning odor. Was it brimstone? Very likely.

“Mr. Bedeker?” Cadwallader’s voice was soft now, the words arrived on velvet. “About that escape clause. Would you care to exercise it now?”

Bedeker never even raised his head from the pillow. He nodded and a moment thereafter felt a pain sear across his chest, a terrible pain. A pain more agonizing than anything he’d ever felt before. His body twitched convulsively and he fell off the cot to land on his back, his eyes staring lifelessly up toward the cell. Walter Bedeker was a dead body.

The thing that had been his soul let out a strangled scream and struggled inside the pocket of a blue suit as it was carried into another dimension.

The guard found Walter Bedeker during bed check that night. He opened the cell door, rushed in and felt for a pulse. Then he’d called the prison doctor and the warden. It was a heart attack and this was written on a cardboard tag that was attached to his chart.

A comment was made by one of the attendants in the prison morgue. It was something to the effect that he’d never seen a look of such utter horror on a man’s face as that which Walter Bedeker’s wore as they shoved him into a refrigerated compartment and closed the door.

From Rod Serling’s closing narration, “Escape Clause,”
The Twilight Zone
, November 6, 1959, CBS Television Network.

The CAMERA PANS away from the body and then slowly up the side of the cell until it stops on a shot of the barred window facing the outside.

NARRATOR’S VOICE

There’s a saying...every man is put on earth condemned to die. Time and method of execution unknown.

(a pause)

Perhaps this is as it should be. Case in point—Walter Bedeker, lately deceased. A little man with such a yen to live.

Now the CAMERA MOVES out and through the bars and is shooting up into the night sky.

NARRATOR’S VOICE

Beaten by the devil...by his own boredom...and by the scheme of things in this...The Twilight Zone.

FADE TO BLACK

Walking Distance

His name was Martin Sloan and he was thirty-six years old. As he looked at his reflection in the dresser mirror, he felt that recurring surprise that the tall, attractive man staring back was he, and beyond that was the wonder that the image bore no real relationship to the man himself. There was Martin Sloan, a tall six-foot-two with a lean, suntanned face, a straight nose and a square jaw; just a few threads of gray on either temple, medium-set eyes—a good face, all in all. The inventory continued down the glass. Brooks Brothers suit that fitted with casual perfection, Hathaway shirt and silk tie, thin gold watch, and all of it so appropriate, so full of taste.

He continued to stare at himself and marveled at how a veneer could be spread over a man’s frame to camouflage what was underneath. Because that’s what he was looking at at this moment—camouflage. Hell, yes, he was Martin Sloan, an ad agency exec, with a fabulous bachelor apartment on Park overlooking Sixty-Third, and he drove a red Mercedes-Benz and he was an agile-minded, very creative, oh, so subtly pushy kind of rising young man. He could order in French and call Jackie Gleason by his first name and feel the very odd warmth of status when the maître d’ at Sardi’s East, or the Colony, or Danny’s Hideway, called him by name, and smiled a quiet, respectful deference when he entered their places.

But the hell of it, the misery of it was that Martin Sloan had an incipient ulcer that at this moment began a slow, raking crawl over his insides. He knew panic a dozen times a day—that convulsive, breath-stopping, ice-cube feeling of doubt and indecision; of being second guessed, of being wrong; the effort to make his voice firm, his decisions sound irrevocable, when deep inside his gut—worse as each day passed—he felt a vague slipping away of all the props he conjured up and took on the stage with him when he faced the president of the agency, the clients, or the other account execs.

And that ulcer! That Goddamned ulcer. He felt it rise in him again and tensed himself like a man going into a cold shower. It burned across his stomach. After it subsided, he lit a cigarette and felt the wetness on his back as the hot June perspiration turned his Hathaway shirt into a clinging, itchy thing and made his palms sodden extensions of himself.

Martin Sloan went to the window to look out at New York. The lights were on along Park Avenue and he remembered the lights of his home town. He often thought about his home town lately. For the past several months he had been coming back to the apartment from the office to sit in the dark living room and drink long, solitary scotches; to think about himself as a boy, and where it had all begun—the chronology of the thirty-six-year-old man who had the world by the short hair, but at least three times a week felt like crying.

Sloan gazed down at the Park Avenue lights and thought about himself as a boy and the main street of his town and the drugstore that Mr. Wilson owned. Sporadic, unrelated remembrances, but part of a bittersweet pattern that made that room, the Scotch, the reflection in the mirror so unbearable. Again he felt that urge to cry and pushed it down deep inside of him along with the pain of the ulcer. A thought came to him. Get in the car and go. Get out of New York. Away from Madison Avenue. Away from the blathering, meaningless, mixed-metaphored jargon of his boss; the ratings and the “percentages-of-audience” and the cosmetic accounts and the three-million-dollar gross billings and that sick, ugly facade of good fellowship among strangers.

Some kind of ghostly billy club tapped at his ankles and told him it was later than he thought. He left his apartment, picked up his car, drove out on to Grand Central Parkway. Hunched over the wheel of his red Mercedes-Benz he asked himself very briefly just where the hell did he think he was going and he was undismayed by the fact that there wasn’t an answer. He wanted to think, that was all. He wanted to remember. And when he turned off on the New York Throughway and headed upstate he had no further resolves. He just kept driving on into the night and was only dimly aware that old man Wilson’s drugstore seemed strangely etched in his mind. It was this picture that sent his brain back on an errand to recapture memories of a time before. Memories of a place called Homewood, New York, a quiet, tree-filled little town of three thousand people. As he drove, he remembered what had been a minute fragment of his life, but God what a fragment! The wondrous time of growing up. Quiet streets on a summer night. The joy of parks and playgrounds. The uninhibited freedom of a child. Memories ebbed back and forth across his mind and left him with a strange, indefinable hunger that subconsciously he realized was not just for a place but for a time. He wanted to be a boy again. That was what he wanted. He wanted to turn around in his life and go backwards. He wanted to run past the years to find the one in which he was eleven years old.

Martin Sloan, in a Brooks Brothers suit, driving a red sports car, headed out into the night and away from New York. He drove with an urgency and a purpose without really knowing his destination. This was no week-end drive. It was no momentary turning of his back to convention and habit. This was an exodus. This was flight. Somewhere at the end of a long, six-lane highway that stretched out across the rolling hills of upstate New York, Martin Sloan was looking for sanity.

He stopped at a motel near Binghamton, New York, slept a few hours, and was on his way again, and at nine in the morning pulled into a gas station off the State highway. He’d been going fast and the car squealed to a stop sending up clouds of dust. A little of the drive that sustained him in New York, a little of the impatience that pushed him through the days, clung to him now and he honked the horn persistently. The attendant, a nice-looking kid in dungarees, looked up from the tire he was repairing a few yards away, wiped his hands with a cloth and stood listening to Martin Sloan’s horn.

“How about some service?” Martin yelled.

“How about some quiet?” the attendant answered him.

Martin bit his lower lip and turned away, gripping the steering wheel, studying the dashboard.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly.

The attendant came toward him.

“Would you fill it up, please?” Martin asked.

“Sure.”

“I said I was sorry,” Martin said.

“I heard you,” the attendant answered. “You take high-test in these things, don’t you?”

Martin nodded, handed him the keys to the gas tank. The attendant went around to the rear of the car and unlocked the tank.

“How about an oil change and a lube job, too?” Martin asked him.

“Sure,” the attendant said. “It’ll take about an hour.”

Martin said, “I’ve got plenty of time.”

He turned to look across the road at a sign which read, “Homewood, 1 ½ miles.”

“That’s Homewood up ahead, isn’t it?” Martin asked.

The attendant said, “Yep.”

“I used to live there. Grew up there as a matter of fact. I haven’t been back in eighteen...twenty years.”

He got out of the car, reached in his pocket for a cigarette and noticed that it was his last one. There was a cigarette machine in front of the station. Martin got a pack of cigarettes from it and came back, still talking. “Eighteen...twenty years. And then last night I—I just got in the car and drove. Reached a point where I, well—I had to get out of New York. One more board meeting, phone call, report, problem—” He laughed and the laugh sounded hollow and tired.

“New York, is that where you’re from?” the attendant asked.

“That’s right. New York.”

“I see you guys all the time,” the attendant said. “Take a drive in the country—gotta go a hundred miles an hour. Stop for a red light, somebody beats you startin’ up when she turns green, then your day’s ruined. God, how do you guys keep at it?”

Martin turned away and fiddled with the side mirror on his car. “We just do,” he answered. “We just keep at it and then there comes a June night—when we suddenly take off.” He looked across the road again toward the sign. “A mile and a half,” he mused. “That’s walking distance.”

“For some people,” the attendant answered him.

Martin grinned. “But not for New York executives in red sports cars, huh?”

The attendant shrugged.

“I’ll come back for the car later on.” Martin grinned. “A mile and a half—that’s walking distance!”

He took off his coat and slung it over his shoulder and tramped down the road to Homewood, a little over a mile away—and twenty years later.