More Stories from the Twilight Zone

by Carol Serling

  Less than half of that sank in. “How could there have been no Vietnam War? It’s the defining event of our generation!”

  “Herb.” She settled back into that reassuring one-note tone. “We met on a blind date. Your friend Brian Hurley fixed us up. He was dating my cousin. You and I hit it off right away. Wartime romances are for novelists.”

  This news was even more of a blow. He couldn’t tell her that Brian Hurley, his best friend since kindergarten, had died in a rice field during the siege of Khe Sanh. They would have named their child after him if they’d had a boy. Instead, his daughter had honored his request to christen her firstborn Brian. “Brian’s alive?” was all he could manage.

  She pressed her lips tight, then opened them wide enough to say, “He’s your supervisor at Meredith and Klugman. If I were mean enough to wish death on anyone, it would be that snake.”

  Penny made an appointment with Dr. Martin Sprague, who by luck happened to be in his office on Sunday and had a cancellation. “You’re overworked, is all,” she said, sounding unconvinced herself. “That Ipana account has been eating your lunch for weeks.” She offered to drive him, but he insisted on driving there alone; to clear his head, he said. Actually that monotonous catechism had begun to wear away at the last nerve he had left. He refrained from pointing out that Ipana toothpaste had gone out with The Dick Van Dyke Show. If she’d said, “Who’s Dick Van Dyke?” he’d have dived straight off the deep end.

  Assuming he hadn’t already.

  His car, at least, was the late-model Chrysler he knew well; he’d never cared to flaunt his affluence with a Cadillac or some sporty foreign job. The seat belt and airbag had vanished, but today that kind of discovery seemed to be the norm. He didn’t even register surprise when the billboard that had advertised a credit union on Friday was now flogging Marlboro cigarettes, complete with a stubbled cowboy puffing away with no Surgeon General’s Warning in sight. After the first hour or so, insanity seemed to have come with its own rules of consistency. He was sure now he was crazy, and even if political correctness did or did not exist in this strange new landscape, he felt he was entitled to use the term “crazy,” just as an African-American could be excused the N-word.

  He switched on the radio. It seemed he couldn’t punish himself enough on this day of all days.

  “. . . And they are mild! Returning to the news, President McCain is on his way to Cuba to meet with President John Gotti, Junior, regarding—”

  He punched another button.

  “Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, used the occasion of his eightieth birthday celebration to call for renewed efforts to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws in the South. Negroes throughout—”

  He punched another button.

  “—which will mark the Detroit Lions’ third straight trip to the Super Bowl. In late-breaking news, John F. Kennedy, Junior, was seen arriving at the funeral of his father, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, in the company of pop star Madonna, who wore a provocative—”

  The juniors had inherited the earth. He punched another button.

  “—despite rumors of a reconciliation, and possibly a new musical collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney—”

  He switched off the radio.

  “Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!” he confided to the headliner; and was embarrassed to observe the driver of a Studebaker with the dealer’s sticker still adhering to the passenger’s-side window staring at him at a stoplight.

  Herb Tarnower found a space next to the entrance of Dr. Sprague’s office (there were no handicapped spots in the lot) and amused himself with the latest issue of Collier’s until a nurse called his name. She, at least, wore one of those floral-print smocks that had taken the place of starched whites. That ruled out time travel.

  Dr. Sprague’s appearance shocked him. He’d always been overweight, but now he was positively obese, entering the examination room with a pronounced waddle, and Herb had never seen him smoking a cigar at the office before. He mentioned the cigar.

  The doctor took it out of his mouth and looked at it. “Yes, if the antitobacco lobby gets its way, I won’t even be able to enjoy one in a building I pay rent on.”

  Herb tried to remember when the state had passed a law against smoking in the workplace. Everything seemed to have been set back either a few years, or dozens.

  “Marty, I think I’m losing my mind. Penny thinks I’ve just been working too hard, but suddenly nothing makes sense anymore.”

  “Penny? Oh, yes, Mrs. Tarnower.” Sprague was looking at a sheet on a clipboard. “How is the little woman?”

  “See, that’s just the thing. You know her as Doctor Tarnower. You’ve been colleagues at Burgess General Hospital for fifteen years. You and I play golf.”

  “I gave up golf years ago, too fat to swing a club. Are you a drinking man, Mr. Tarnower? What you’re describing sounds like symptoms of prolonged alcoholic poisoning. It warps and destroys brain cells.”

  “If you’d asked me that this morning, I’d have told you I drink moderately when I drink at all. Now, for all I know, I’m a hopeless wino. Everything’s upside down.”

  “Well, undress and we’ll examine you head to toe. That should help determine whether your complaint is physical or psychological.”

  When it was over, Herb sat up in his paper robe while Sprague folded his stethoscope. “You’re a long way from a wreck. You could lose a few pounds, but look who’s talking. Tell me some more about these illusions you’ve been having.”

  “It might speed things along if I ask the questions. What do you know about President Kennedy?”

  “He’s dead; there’s no denying it if you own a television. He was okay in the White House, although I thought he showed the white feather when he withdrew his military advisors from Southeast Asia and failed to stop the spread of communism. He never faced the kind of challenge that separates the great leaders from the so-so ones. Lincoln had the Civil War, FDR the Depression and World War Two. JFK helped Jackie pick out the colors in the West Wing.”

  “What about the missile crisis?”

  “The nuclear arms race? Well, he did what he had to do to keep up with the USSR, but he became obsessed with it to the detriment of his other responsibilities. We’d have beaten the Russkies to the moon if he hadn’t let them distract him.”

  Herb couldn’t afford to bog himself down with that revelation. “I meant the Cuban missile crisis. He faced down Moscow and spared the world atomic annihilation.”

  “Cuba’s one of our closest allies, Mr. Tarnower. McCain and Gotti are discussing affairs of state right now.”

  “That’s another thing. John Gotti, Junior, is a notorious gangster, not a foreign leader. So was his father. John McCain lost the U.S. election to Barack Obama last November. We have our first African-American president.”

  “African-American?”

  “Black.”

  Sprague put out his cigar. “That’s a terribly racist term. ‘Colored’ is the polite designation. Those people aren’t making much progress in Washington, but that’s no reason to mock them.”

  “I’m not a bigot! I contribute to—”

  “I’m prescribing sleeping pills.” The doctor scribbled on a pad. “If you’re still feeling disoriented after a good night’s sleep, call the office and I’ll give you a list of names of recommended psychotherapists. Your wife is probably right. I see by your file you write copy for an advertising agency. That’s a high-pressure business, and your job requires a healthy imagination. You’ve just been overworking it. Gotti a gangster—that’s rich. A Negro president. And I suppose Jerry Lewis is the president of France.”

  Herb took the prescription sheet. “He’s not, is he?”

  “Go on with you! I have sick people to treat.” Sprague lit a cigar.

  He felt a little better with this professional opinion. It was just possible he had been putting in too many hours d
owntown; obsolete employment information in his medical file was nothing to panic over and he supposed a man could get his wires crossed and distort what he was hearing. It was inconceivable that Neil Armstrong had not been the first to take that giant leap for mankind, or that JFK could be discussed as a nonentity even by someone who disapproved of his performance as chief executive.

  Halfway home it struck Herb that he should have asked the doctor about 9/11; but better to let sleeping dogs lie, and more particularly get some sleep himself. He filled the prescription at his neighborhood chain pharmacy, whose personnel turned over so often he seldom saw the same face twice, told Penny of Sprague’s reassuring diagnosis, and they went to bed. The pills worked their magic as soon as his head touched linen.

  The clock radio clicked on during a Viagra commercial. That wasn’t conclusive, so he lay holding his breath until a news announcer described Barack Obama’s first meeting with Raul Castro, the president of Cuba, and his brother Fidel, who for health reasons had stepped aside but remained chairman of the Communist Party. He whooped, bringing an alarmed Penny out of the bathroom, clutching an electric toothbrush.

  He had to be sure. “You’re a doctor, yes?”

  “Herb, are you all right?”

  He hated that question. “Please, just humor me.”

  “Of course I’m a doctor, but you’re a little older than most of my patients. Should I call Marty?”

  “Marty, good old Marty. Your colleague, Marty Sprague.”

  She started to say something, but he leapt out of bed and padded in his pajamas into the living room. He felt like Jimmy Stewart in the last reel of It’s a Wonderful Life. Bedford Falls was still Bedford Falls, there was a satellite box on the shelf under the TV, and the carpet was new. Most wonderful of all, there were Becca, Rick, and the kids in their frames on the mantel. It had been a dream after all, a terrible nightmare that made a man grateful to be alive and awake.

  The clock radio clicked on during a Fizzies commercial. That sweet treat had not been available since cyclamates were banned by the FDA. The news announcer reported that Jerry Lewis had appointed three new members to the French cabinet.

  He’d been dreaming. The nightmare was the reality.

  Sanity was the illusion, and the situation was deteriorating. It wasn’t It’s a Wonderful Life, and he wasn’t Jimmy Stewart. He was Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, only much, much worse.

  He went through the motions of a normal Monday morning, showering, shaving, brushing his teeth, and dressing in a suit cheaper than any he’d owned in years. Penny had breakfast ready when he entered the kitchen. She asked him if he felt better.

  “Considerably.” He’d always heard that deranged people were skilled at feigning rational behavior. Sprague’s shrinks would commit him if they heard his story. He drank coffee and ate a slice of toast. Against his better judgment (assuming he had any) he glanced at the morning paper. The Soviet–based company that provided satellite service to the world was raising its rates; no wonder he couldn’t afford it on a copywriter’s pay. It stood to reason that the country that won the Space Race would run the industry. Reason was a relative thing, he was learning.

  Penny expressed concern when he told her he wasn’t hungry, but he kissed her good-bye and said he was late for work. He hoped Meredith and Klugman was where he’d left it Friday.

  Waiting for a light change, he saw a big white policeman snatch an elderly black man by the collar and haul him onto the curb when he failed to finish crossing before the pedestrian signal stopped flashing. He bellowed in the old man’s face, shrinking him inside his clothes.

  Herb rolled down the window. “Leave him alone, Officer. Can’t you see he can’t walk any faster?”

  “What’s it to you how fast them people shuffle along?” snarled the cop. “Mind your own business, or I’ll run you in for obstructing justice.”

  The light turned green. He resumed driving. Much, much, much worse than Groundhog Day.

  The radio offered no diversion. A number of women had been charged with creating a public nuisance by burning their bras in Central Park. Even the feminists were running slow.

  His corner office belonged to a man named Shatner, the lettering on the door informed him. He found his own name on a plate in a cubicle the size of the front seat of his car. He hung up his coat and turned to find himself face-to-face with Brian Hurley.

  Heavier and grayer, yes, but it was a face he’d once known as well as his own, and had had no chance to say good-bye to because Brian was sent home in a body bag and buried in a closed casket. Incredible joy surged through him—and withered in the glare of his childhood friend’s anger.

  “Tarnower, I’m sick of you thinking you can sneak in here late without my knowing it. From now on every minute you show up past the hour is a day off your vacation time.”

  “Why the attitude, Brian? We used to be close.”

  “That was before your wife tipped off her cousin I was running around on her. That was the money end of your crummy family: I had to bust my hump twice as hard as anyone else in the office for every promotion when I could’ve been slacking off, like some losers I could mention.”

  “Brian—”

  “That’s Mr. Hurley. Another slip like that and I’ll write you up for insubordination. I want that Ipana copy on my desk by noon sharp, or you can clean out your desk at twelve-oh-one.”

  Alone in the cubicle, Herb’s face felt hot. He had to re-educate himself on how to operate a model of computer he hadn’t seen in three years, but that wasn’t so bad because he’d been afraid that Silicon Valley was just a Herban Legend. When he accessed the writing program, however, he couldn’t motivate himself to find a new way to say “whiter teeth.” If he was going to survive in the Bizarro World, it was time he found out something about it. Google was still Google, thank God, even if the high-speed connection he was accustomed to had been scrapped in favor of an antiquated service that required patience. He got no hits on Lee Harvey Oswald, so he clicked on “Kennedy, John F.,” and spent the morning boning up on what he had come to regard as The Last Half-Century: The Director’s Cut.

  Kennedy, it developed, had served one lackluster term as president trying to make good on the anti-Communist platform he’d campaigned on. With no Cuban Missile Crisis to avert (and give the U.S. leverage over the Soviet Union), he had drained the budget struggling to match Moscow weapon-for-weapon. This caused him to underfund the space exploration program and fail to fulfill his inauguration promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. When Russia landed there first, the ineffectual JFK made an unlikely assassination target; hence obscurity for Oswald. The desperate decision to push the arms race forced Kennedy to ignore Southeast Asia, and when Saigon fell to the Communists in l964, he was defeated for re-election by Richard Nixon, who had lost to him in 1960.

  With no war to distract him, Nixon made an early diplomatic trip to China, leading to a free trade agreement that boosted the domestic economy. No war meant no student riots. Prosperity at home gave Nixon another term, unclouded by a Watergate, and a return to the postwar euphoria of the 1950s after four years of malaise under the previous adminstration. The only cloud on the horizon was the continuing Cold War, which kept the population busy digging fallout shelters and not thinking about civil rights or women’s liberation. Those seeds would be planted under President Goldwater.

  Lyndon Baines Johnson returned to the Senate. There would be no national office for Kennedy’s vice president, nor a chance at one for Kennedy’s brother Robert, who resigned as Attorney General on the day of Nixon’s inauguration as custom required. RFK served Massachusetts as governor for three terms and died aged sixty, a victim of lung cancer. Herb got no hits on Sirhan Sirhan.

  Gerald Ford: Former Michigan congressman, deceased. Jimmy Carter: Former Georgia governor, retired.

  Habitat for Humanity: No hits.

  Ronald Reagan: Former motion picture actor, deceased.

  George McGovern d
enied Barry Goldwater a second term in a close race attributed to liberal backlash after twelve years of conservative government. McGovern survived a challenge by Spiro Agnew, but right-wing pundits insisted that his timorous attempts at diplomacy missed a golden opportunity to bring down the Soviet Union with a hard-line stance. Actor Warren Beatty looked good in the Oval Office, struggled with the economy, but was relatively successful in foreign affairs; one affair in particular led to an international scandal, and he was pressured into resigning.

  In the most recent contest, Democratic hopeful John Edwards had lost by a landslide to John McCain. In a world at peace, both candidates’ lack of combat experience (no Vietnam, no POW McCain) was less important than the victor’s long tenure in the political arena: Change was dangerous. Typing in Barack Obama produced no results.

  Herb sat back, his brain reeling. It fit together somehow, or most of it, like a jigsaw puzzle assembled from separate boxes, but with some pieces left over.

  No President Reagan meant the Iron Curtain was left intact—and incidentally no Presidents Bush, which meant no Gulf wars.

  A powerful Russia crushed Afghanistan, handily preventing the Taliban from gaining traction there, therefore:

  No al-Qaeda.

  No 9/11. The date scored no significant hits.

  Which was good. No war in Vietnam was good, too, sparing fifty thousand American lives, although it had dealt a devastating blow to the Tarnowers, delaying Herb’s marriage to Penny until it was too late to raise a family. For him it was as if his daughter and grandchildren had been swept away by a tornado, leaving no trace, and Herb alone in his grief. Penny couldn’t share the burden, having no memory of them.

  Maybe God, or whatever force drove the universe, had decided it was Herb’s turn to make the sacrifice for a world without terrorists or meaningless conflicts. But he had not paid the price alone. A dominant world power based in Moscow was no good thing, no matter what situation one compared it to, and he had no idea why Ipana and Fizzies survived, or why it was suddenly okay to smoke in a doctor’s office, or for that matter why his best friend had been rescued from dying young only to become a jerk. Some things just seemed to have turned sideways and fallen through cracks in the cosmic renovation.