The Ravine Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 towrite 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.”
    My mother shrugged and headed back to the kitchen. She took her ashtray with her. Apparently she was done with the television set.

    “Van der … Glick?”
    “Ah. McQuidgey.”
    “One thing I can count on, you never give me grief for waking you up.”
    “’Cause I don’t sleep. Sleep is for the