The Ravine (4 page)

“What did they do, exactly,” we both asked aloud, “to Norman Kitchen?”

“Fuck off.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“Fuck off.”

“Look, there is no reason we can’t have a conversation like two adult human beings.”

“Hmm, perhaps you’re right—no you’re not, fuck off.”

“But if you would only tell me why you’re so mad at me.”

“Fuck off.”

“It seems to have something to do with my marriage breaking up, but that can’t be right, I mean, you’ve managed to ruin
three
marriages …”

“Fuck off.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might need like a friend, a confidant, a shoulder to cry on, a
brother
, right now?”

“Fuck off.”

“You
fuck off.”

“All right. Bye-bye.”

IN A SENSE, THIS BOOK IS BEING WRITTEN BY A BOY WHO WATCHED TOO
much television. That is the most salient point about me, I think, that for some astounding length of accumulated time—ten of my nearly fifty years, maybe, a fifth of my life—I have sat in front of a television set, my face bombarded by electrons, my mouth hanging slightly agape. Mind you, I have managed to become well-read and my friends consider me quite a film fanatic. This all goes to show how little of my life I have actually spent having anything resembling human contact.

So then, the television. Here’s how it all began.

I remember the front door yawing open and my Uncle Johnny backing through. He was a large, square man and seemed to not comfortably fit through the opening. The impression of squareness was exacerbated by the black overcoat he wore, which was huge at the shoulders and draped like a tombstone. Uncle Johnny craned his head around, both to locate the little riser that led from the mud room to the kitchen and to herald, in a booming voice, his gift. “Who ordered one deluxe television set?”

My mother and I were in the kitchen. Here’s how the two of us prepared dinner: my mother smoked a long cigarette (her lipstick staining the last quarter-inch of the filter) and drank a tall drink
(little half-kisses adorned the rim) and read a novel (she’d broken the spine, even though it was a library book) that lay on the kitchen counter. There was a pot on the element, boiling merrily, and there were macaroni noodles in that pot, and it was my job to spear one occasionally and test its toothiness. I would eat a noodle, count thirty steamboats and eat another. I was at about twenty-three steamboats when Uncle Johnny backed in.

“Who ordered one deluxe television set?”

“Hmm,” went my mother, and she pressed her cigarette out in a standing ashtray she kept always by her side, as though it were life-support. “I suppose that would be us.”

I extracted a piece of macaroni and shoved it into my mouth. I was diligent back then, and almost always hungry. It was eight o’clock at night, far past the hour when normal families ate dinner.

Uncle Johnny kept backing up the little flight of stairs, and I saw that he hugged to his chest a burnished wooden box that held a dark glass eye. I had, of course, seen television sets before (all of the neighbours owned one) but never, I don’t know, held aloft or something. The image of this television, obscured as it was by my uncle’s broad back, burned itself into my eyes. Even now I can see the dial and read the numbers; I can remember wondering why there was no “1.”

Having achieved the kitchen, Uncle Johnny turned left and headed for the living room. That’s all there was to the ground floor of my childhood home, a kitchen and a living room. As the television turned, I saw that Uncle Johnny’s assistant in the moving process was my Aunt Jane, a tiny woman who was surprisingly strong.

My mother moved forward and, although I’m certain she only meant to assist her sister-in-law, what she did in fact was shoulder Aunt Jane into the wall, quickly grabbing the back end of the television set before it plummeted to the ground.

I fished out another piece of macaroni. The noodles were ready, so I turned off the heat and moved the pot aside. I knew that by the time cheese arrived (my mother was distracted enough without there being an actual distraction) the noodles would be mush. Unless I drained the noodles right then, in which case they would be cold. Either way, it was going to be another typical family meal, inedible to everyone but a stout little lad such as myself.

“Hi, Philip,” said Aunt Jane.

My Aunt Jane made me nervous. It was almost as though I knew that in five years she was going to be the first woman I ever saw naked. (I barged into the washroom at their home on Christmas Day; Aunt Jane was staring at her denuded self in the full-length mirror. I’ll never know why she was naked in the afternoon with a turkey roasting in the oven, but it was a fine gift to give a thirteen-year-old boy.) I stirred uneasily and said, “Hi,” but I am not certain that any sound came out.

“We’ve brought you a television set,” said Aunt Jane, which was the kind of declarative statement she favoured. She had tiny features that were clustered together near the centre of her face.

“Not just any television set,” shouted Uncle Johnny from the living room, “but a goddam
deluxe
television set!”

Through the service bay, I could see that my mother and her brother had placed the set in the farthest corner, beside the sliding glass doors that opened onto the backyard. My mother took a step back and held her hand to her chin; something, clearly, was not right. Uncle Johnny held the electrical cord in one hand and was searching for some place to plug it in.

It occurred to my mother what was amiss, and she returned to the kitchen for her free-standing ashtray. She saw that the pot’s boiling had been quieted, so she took a moment to hurl the noodles into the waiting colander.

A cold meal, then.
Fine.

My uncle had spied a power source deep in the room’s corner, and his wide keister was occupying much of the shadow over there as, on hands and knees, he poked around with the plug and tried to make a connection. I don’t know why our living room was so gloomy, especially since almost all of one wall was made up of the sliding glass doors. It’s not as though outside there were towering buildings, or even other modest houses, plunging our home into shadow. Past our backyard was a ditch and a field that spread out in all directions. To the left there was the schoolhouse, to the right the church, but they were both hundreds of yards distant. Why sunlight never managed to light our pale green carpeting is something of a mystery.

Uncle Johnny straightened up laboriously (he’d been a football star in high school, but this hardly rendered him limber in his adulthood; his body was possessed by cramps and creaks) and turned a knob. After a crisp click, a tiny dot of light, about the size of a dime, appeared on the dark oval of glass. I held my breath and waited. Then I exhaled and held my breath again. Then let it out. The tiny dot of light seemed to have little intention of becoming anything larger.

Uncle Johnny brought the heel of his hand down upon the cherry wood housing and the dot blossomed, its soft black edges pushing outward to the rim of the glass. Inside the oval of light there was a figure, indistinct and wavering. The man (even though the television screen was absolutely grey, there was darkness enough to suggest a black suit) spoke in a voice cluttered with static, but I heard, and I remember, what he said. “You are entering another dimension of time and space …”

“Hey,” said my mother, “this thing works better than I thought it would.”

“Hold on,” said Uncle Johnny, and he reached into the pocket of his overcoat and removed a pair of rabbit ears. I guess it says something
about my uncle and his dimensions that he could produce one of these portable antennae in this surprising and wizardly manner. He placed the plastic base on top of the console and went behind the set to do the wiring. I peeked around to see what he was up to. I don’t remember leaving the kitchen for the living room—I guess I’d moved forward in a sort of trance.

My uncle was removing two screws from a little brass plate at the back with his thumbnail, huge and chipped and stained yellow by the cigarettes he smoked hoodlum-style. Then he positioned the metal u’s at the end of the antenna’s wiring and drove the screws back in.

The image of the man suddenly hove into focus. He was weedy and sallow and had dark shellacked hair. Despite his elegant black suit, he, like my uncle, smoked his cigarette hoodlum-style, squeezed between thumb and index finger, the ember pointed palmward.

“Submitted for your approval,” said this man, “‘Time Enough at Last.’”

All right, there are a number of ways to proceed here, at least three different areas that must be covered, and while a better writer might be able to continue forward in a linear manner, juggling them all, I’m just not up to it.

So in a blocky and unimaginative form, here are the three things you should hear about.

The television show was
The Twilight Zone
, a continuing series of one-offs (excuse the argot), strange and twisted fictions largely written by the man in the black suit, Rod Serling. I think Serling is one of the great dramatists of the twentieth century—at least, I have made this claim at various industry seminars, and I have supported the claim by belligerently (usually drunkenly) refusing to brook any argument. But there is something to it. Even ignoring some of his wonderful long-form stuff
(Requiem for a Heavyweight
, for example),
many of the episodes of
The Twilight Zone
have made lasting impressions. Ask anyone over a certain age to name their favourite, and it will be quickly forthcoming. Rainie van der Glick was always very partial to an episode entitled “The Eye of the Beholder,” which featured a woman whose entire face was swathed in post-plastic-surgery bandaging. Doctors surround the woman (we see them only from the back, or hidden by shadow) and, as they cut away the gauze, they wonder and hope aloud about the success of the operation. The bandages are removed to reveal a woman of stunning beauty; the doctors and nurses are then shown to be hideously deformed. And, of course, the medical people are repulsed, because beauty is in …

“Time Enough at Last” is likewise a famous episode, starring Burgess Meredith, who plays Henry Bemis, a meek bank teller and bibliophile. Reading constitutes the whole of this man’s life and passion. He resents even the most innocent demands on his time, and can’t wait for lunchtime, when he can escape to the huge vault with his bagged lunch. (Henry is also burdened with a shrewish wife, something I am a little hesitant to bring up, for reasons that may make themselves clear.) Anyway, Henry is in the vault one afternoon when suddenly he is rendered unconscious by shock waves. When he comes around, he discovers that the world has been destroyed by a hydrogen bomb (and such was the temper of those times that this little plot point struck no one in our living room as particularly unlikely). Bemis stumbles around in the debris, mournful and despairing. Suddenly, though, his face lights up—he spots a library and realizes that finally he has “time enough at last,” i.e., nothing to do but read, read, read.

Serling, of course, is a master of the plot-twist, so the story is not quite over. Before I relate the dramatic irony—the ghost of Rod Serling would not want me to spill the beans too quickly—I want to
write about how my Uncle Johnny enhanced the reception by using his wife as a human antenna. He spun the little dial on the front of the rabbit ears and pulled the metal rods in various directions, but found that it was awkward to both do this and judge the results—whenever he let go of the rods the picture would revert to its bleak snowiness. He therefore told Aunt Jane to hold onto the antennae, and he instructed her on how to move them. When the reception was as good as it could get, he snapped, “Stay there! Don’t move.” My aunt was beside and slightly behind the television set, her trunk twisted awkwardly. She couldn’t see the show, and would regularly ask, “What’s going on now?” We took turns answering her, although none of us was very helpful. My uncle grunted, my mother was always waiting for additional information and I was pretty much engrossed.

Through this oval piece of glass was another world, I discovered. It was indistinct and it was in black and white, but it was a magical place. I was also drawn by one specific aspect of this episode of
The Twilight Zone
, namely, that the Burgess Meredith character was burdened by thick spectacles—as I had been since the age of three. When those fuckwits in the ravine called me “Philly Four-Eyes” they were coming as close as they could to a kind of forbearance, even mercy, because my corrective lenses, which were as thick as pucks and housed in what looked like welder’s goggles, made me look distinctly freakish. I thought it was intriguing that the man on the television wore cumbersome glasses. And herein lies Rod Serling’s little narrative trick. When Henry Bemis, who has arranged hundreds of books on the bombed-out library steps, bends over to pick one up, the spectacles slip from the bridge of his nose and smash on the ground below. Suddenly the post-apocalyptic world is nothing but a blur.

“Son of a bitch,” muttered my uncle.

“What’s going on?” asked Aunt Jane.

“Well, that’s no good,” said my mother, lighting one cigarette from another and grinding out the spent butt in the ashtray.

“What’s no good?” asked Aunt Jane.

“
That.
” My mother gestured as the credits rolled. “The story was just about to get interesting.”

“What do you mean?” asked my uncle.

“Well, the way it ends now, it’s just about hopelessness. About the death of hope. But there’s always hope. Right, Philip?”

I shrugged.

“I’m telling you there is. He could, I don’t know, find some pieces of glass and grind some lenses himself. You know what? He could check all the corpses until he found one wearing some glasses that would work.”

“Maybe all the glasses got destroyed in the nuclear war,” suggested Uncle Johnny.

“What nuclear war?” asked Aunt Jane.

“Maybe, but he’d better go check. Check all the dead bodies for appropriate spectacles.”