Lindsey Markel Writes About True Things

I tried to write a letter to Ray Bradbury last year. It began, “Dear Mr. Bradbury, my name is Lindsey Markel, and this is the first fan letter I’ve ever written.” I wanted to tell him how hearing “The Veldt” read to me in sixth grade changed my life in a way that was undetectable at the time. I remember my teacher, Mr. Frazier, shuddering at the end, encouraging us to sink deep into the uneasiness of the story the same way he did each time he re-read it. Later that same year, my dad and I stopped at a thrift store after church one Sunday and I spied a paperback copy of The Martian Chronicles in the used book bin. Ten minutes later, I was sitting in my dad’s parked pickup truck as he ran a farmer’s errand, reading about the people moving to Mars, the strange weather and the yellow skies.

I couldn’t finish my letter. Fan letters feel embarrassing and clunky by nature; despite my best efforts to be personal and transparent, my letter fell into a cliché formula. And furthermore, after reading what I’d already written, I realized that Mr. Frazier was the one to thank.

On Friday night, I showed twelve-year-old Sydney his first episode of The Twilight Zone. We watched the same one I first saw when I was his age, “The Invaders.” An old woman who lives alone in a rural, primitive house is cooking dinner one night when she hears a crash. She takes a lit lamp up a wooden ladder into the attic to investigate and finds what viewers recognize as a UFO, about the diameter of a hula hoop. Two small creatures dressed in robotic metal suits climb out, and the rest of the episode consists of her battle with them; they shoot her with tiny ray guns, cut her hands and feet with knives, and bomb the base of her house with tiny explosives. The woman is nearly driven insane by the end of the episode; she drools and pants and roars with frustration. But she never speaks. The tentframe of the tension in the episode is silence; the aliens never speak, either. The necessary of their silence is clear in the end, when the one surviving alien radios his home base as the woman takes an axe to the spaceship in an exhausted rage; he speaks English, and the camera pans to show “U.S. Air Force” painted on the side of the spaceship.

It’s the twist endings like the one in “The Invaders” that hooked me on The Twilight Zone when I was young. The stories in the episodes run a gamut of moods; some are quiet ruminations on time or love or greed; others are slow-burning fuses that end in a satisfying twist. As I got older, I began to also appreciate the literary structure of the episodes; each one is like a short story or a one-act play. We drop in for twenty minutes with our unflappable guide in his suit and cigarette, and as the camera pans out, we get the sense that the world we’ve just sampled will continue to spin long after we are gone. When I came home to visit from college, I would often opt to stay the night in the living room instead of my old bedroom, which felt strange and hollowed out with memories at that age. The SciFi network showed Twilight Zone marathons on long holiday weekends, and I would be fighting sleep at 3am to see for myself how the talkative man won the year-long bet of silence, what photos the mysterious antique camera would spit out next, what happened to the obsolete man, the doomed thief, the last person on Earth.

Once a year, Mr. Frazier, my sixth grade reading teacher, brought in cotton pillowcases knotted at the top and swollen heavy with snakes at the bottom, his pets from home. He encouraged my classmates and me to be quiet and calm, to come close and touch the snakes’ smooth, cool skin. He pointed out the elegance of the creatures, the simplicity of their design, and in our wonder, we forgot to be scared. Mr. Frazier was a popular teacher at the junior high, funny and relatable and kind. He loved to read aloud to us, and was the last teacher to ever do so for our class. Throughout the rest of the school day, we memorized the Constitution and recreated the table of elements, but in Mr. Frazier’s classroom, resting our heads in our hands on the cool laminate of our desks, we listened to chapters of Where the Red Fern Grows and The Hobbit, and, once we’d shown interest in The Twilight Zone, we heard “The Veldt,” then his favorite Martian Chronicles chapters. He also told tall tales; one Monday, he told us a story about how his wife had accidentally driven away from a gas pump with the nozzle still lodged in her gas tank, and how it had triggered a series of explosions that eventually leveled the whole station. “Poor woman,” he said, shaking his head, then promptly moved on with the day’s tasks, leaving the rest of us swiveling at our desks to look at one another with guarded disbelief. I revisit these stories often today, and think of his poor wife every time I fill up my gas tank.

By the time you’re in sixth grade, you recognize a movie shown during class as a painless way to pass the hour, an easy out for a substitute or a teacher who didn’t get enough sleep, but a movie in Mr. Frazier’s classroom was a film viewing. He fed tapes into the school VCR eagerly, telling us what plot points to look out for and camera tricks to notice, hungry to share them with us. He showed us “The Invaders,” angrily shushing my classmates who groaned at the long silences or snickered at the old lady’s drool. I always got the sense that a few other teachers had a quiet distaste for him; they were jealous, maybe, of how popular he was with students who were aggressively bored in other classes, rolling our eyes at grammar and algebra and geography. In Mr. Frazier’s classroom, we yelled over each other with right answers and laughed loudly enough to be heard from the hallway. While most teachers followed their prescribed lesson plans with an air of defeated resentment, Mr. Frazier shared the stories he loved.

Syd insisted we watch another episode after “The Invaders” ended. Unsurprisingly, he wanted to see one with a scary story, so I put on “Eye of the Beholder,” remembering the shock of the twist when I was younger. He huddled close to me on the couch in the dark, wondering aloud what the woman’s face might look like under all those bandages, how disfigured and monstrous she must be. We were waiting for a pizza delivery for dinner, and ten minutes into the episode, we opened the front door so we wouldn’t scream at the delivery guy’s sudden knock.

At the climax of “Eye of the Beholder,” as the woman’s bandages were removed to reveal, of course, a classically beautiful face, Syd was confused. Did the screaming woman really still believe that she was the monster, or was she fleeing from the disfigured race of people running the hospital? The stories often look as if they take place in our world, but there are always tweaks; the Twilight Zone is not only a dimension of the senses like ours, but is also, as Rod Serling tells us, a dimension “of mind,” where rules are replaceable and metaphor stands as truth.    

I was in the room when Sydney, who will become my stepson in less than a month, heard his first Beatles song (“Strawberry Fields Forever”) at age seven. I nearly cried when he brought home A Wrinkle in Time from fourth grade and we were able to have a conversation in the slithery voice of Mrs. Which. I ate with him when he charred his first s’more on his first camping trip. I burned a copy of Weezer’s self-titled blue album for him yesterday and we listened to it twice in a row in my car, which is the best place to hear a Weezer album. And on Friday night, my first Twilight Zone episode became his first, too. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized none of Mr. Frazier’s tall tales could be fully true, not that the truth mattered. To a girl who grew up in the outskirts of a Midwestern town with a population of five hundred, the fantastical stories he conjured up were more than escapist fun. They were the flying saucer crash-landing in the attic, allowing us to crawl into a world of giants. They were the wooden ladder. They were the lit lamp.

(Originally published on youareamongfriends.com)