|
Bill
Lowery, a salesman whose company has switched to a medical supply product
line, stays up all night studying the new catalog to memorize the hundreds
of pages of new medical terminology, in order to be ready to sell it in
a weeks' time. His wife is worried about their son, who doesn't feel well.
Bill goes off to work, hearing his neighbor call his dog an "encyclopedia".
He shrugs it off, thinking he just didn't hear it right. He puts in a
full day of trying to cope with the new words, and the jibes from the
younger salesmen about teaching old dogs new "trumpets." He's
surprised when he begins to hear people say things that he doesn't understand,
but doesn't question it till later. At first it's just a word or two,
completely out of place and meaning something entirely different to him,
but obviously not to the other person.
Then, as the next few days go by,
everyone starts to speak gibberish to him and he is now very scared. When
he gets home, his wife is really upset about their son, who's got a very
high fever now. Bill can't understand a word she's saying. Instead of
wasting time trying to figure out what she's saying, he picks up the little
boy and they go to the emergency room. His wife has to explain everything
to the doctors, while Bill doesn't understand what she's saying. He's
truly worried about his son. He sits in the waiting room with his wife,
as people all around him speak a language he doesn't know anymore. When
the doctors come out to tell them that their son is okay, the only way
he can tell that is that his wife begins smiling. As the episode closes,
Bill sits down in his son's bedroom, and picks up one of the ABC books.
He begins studying the basics of a language he needs to relearn.
A
question trembles in the silence: Why did this remarkable thing happen
to this perfectly ordinary man. It may not matter why the world shifted
so drastically for him. Existence is slippery at the best of times. What
does matter is that Bill Lowery isn't ordinary. He's one of us. A man
determined to prevail in the world that was, and the world that is, or
the world that will be. In the Twilight Zone.
|
|