I Once Loved

by Barry Eysman

The way we die and the leaders of the lower depth who gave these gifts of their own studied philosophy and full hearts

(with deepest affection, love and devotion to Rod Serling, this flawed but heart-felt piece is dedicated)

(With deepest affection, love and devotion to Rod Serling, this flawed but heart-felt piece is dedicated)

The Twilight Zone

Created by Rod Serling

"Once I Loved"

By

Barry Eysman

(Opening intro and narration)

(Open on a photo of desolate planet in black and white; oddly shaped little "asteroids" in planet pull; stars surround; the night of sky is revealed; space and its bleak, outrageous timelessness evoked, as we feel the awful, cold loneliness and impossibility, as we hear:

Narrator's voice:

This is the ending of life. This is when a man cannot dream without a certain madness tainting whatever remains of a thing called a soul.

(Then camera pans down to planet surface and the bio-dome, an oasis of steel, light, and enclosed oxygen and human requirements on this rock of sand and boulders. The bio-dome is like a glass moment of a dream that is the last one man will ever have)

Narrator's voice:

And this is the final refuge. There are in numerical order: 20 men and 32 women. Added to this consider one child.

(Camera PANS outside dome to the barren rock sandy surface of the orb. Here is a child in a space suit, huddled with his back against the dome, the steel panel, below the glass, knees up. We C.U. to his face. The child is a boy. He is weeping. His shoulders shake a bit in his heavy space suit. He breathes hard and fogs the glass of his helmet. The tanks on the back of his suit hiss air in and out.)

Narrator's voice:

This was the finality of man's destructive creation. After laying waste to the population of Earth, and then doing the same honor to other orbs settled, fought over, plundered, dirtied and then left like a candy bar wrapping among millions at an endless dark sky beach, he has come here. To create.

(Camera is now slowly seeing closely through boy's eyes)

Narrator's voice:

A child. Because there are no more. Because there can be no more. Scientist man, warrior man, politician man, and a duplicitous series of lies fed to a sated or hungry beyond measure populace has created, quite simply, what is not.

And this is:

The Twilight Zone

(We pan into the crystal sparkling room of the bio-dome, the front wall of which the boy is sitting against. Much of it is glass. Two men watch the boy. Their looks are not benevolent. One man in his forties, the oldest person here, named Striker. He is thin, sickly looking. His eyes bulge out a fraction. His bottom lip trembles like a sick rabbit's. He wears a conflated military looking uniform that has a rip in the left sleeve. Another small one in the right lapel of his coat.)

(Next to him, holding a martini, dressed in an incongruous Hawaiian beach shirt with palm trees and a hula girl patterned on it. His name is Buffish. He wears also Bermuda shorts. And though we can't see them, flip-flops. He has a beer belly and a mottled skin. His hair, like Striker's is receding at a rapid rate. They and all the other adults here are torn by men just like them.)

(Close Up shot on each man as he talks, a Two Shot, at times, per director's discretion)

Striker (sighing, looking at Buffish): So..Blowfish..

Buffish (sipping drink, Hawaii sunsets in his mind): Knock it off, Doctor or I'll belt you in your belly.

Striker (looking at the boy again, as Buffish has never stopped): Do you think we can make him believe it? I mean, a little. Enough.

Buffish (considering, as he finishes his drink): I know we can't. He knows. He's ten. He is not an idiot. He knows.

Striker: Do you think he might have a courtesy to pretend, so we can too?

Buffish: You want him to be your eulogy, right, commando or whatever you are? You want to die with the thought we've got a child to repopulate what you and your crowd destroyed..over..and over..

(C.U. chest to face on Buffish—as his face goes from day dreamy to concentrated concern, to fury as he throws the martini glass, plastic, against the wall opposite) So we can pretend we didn't blow it entirely in the name of God or freedom or justice or peace or our fellow man when you never gave a rap about your fellow men and fellow women, and a little conjuring fakery out there, known as what we used to call a child, all of whom you see now shrunken to a little tawdry band of warriors who want a last dream before they kiss off.)

Striker (knowing Buffish's speech by heart. He has heard it a million times.) You were a minister, Buffish.A big powerful world wide video massively successful God ordained myth dispenser with a damn high price for getting into heaven, according to your and 'your crowd's' greedy gospel of self inflicted rightness that comes with wars here and there that you couldn't wait to start before your cheer led them for some ka ching ka ching. Bleeding those dollars home, right, o Follower of the Fisher of Men?

(We Dolly to the glass and out to the boy who now has taken out a pencil and a ledger and is studiously writing in it in laborious print)

(As he does this, we see the Two Men behind him, looking at them. We hear their voice-overs as we see the three of them and the desolation starting beside the boy's left knee. He is still huddled. He has stopped crying. This is business. This is why he is here. What he is writing.)

Striker: (V.O.) He doesn't need helmet or tanks or suit. He isn't real. He is our let's get a chance to do it again.

Buffish (V.O.) I fake it too. I fake believing like everyone else here does. We've no poetry anymore. No books. No wise machinery of words to make tomorrow work. You created only one of him. For our dying. So he will sit here during and after the last of us, and after we finally annihilate ourselves for good, because none of us, save the dubious rabble who were gotten rid of early on-along with the books and tapes and films—because they knew the truth—want to die fully. And that just never settled in our hang nail race as we zoomed from one planet, limped to another; us and our machinery running down and dying. And we fighting still. Until—voila—here we are.

Striker (V.O.) And we so flat-footed that when we finally invent a fake representive of us, we don't tell him the whole of it, hoping somehow he wasn't paying attention, how he was made, what test tube devised his flesh component, what battery powers his light green left eye.

Buffish (V.O.) We've been fakes a long time. For too many endless centuries. We were too stupid to know it. He shouldn't be that stupid.

(Hold on: The boy writing.)

Buffish (V.O.) So he writes our names in that little ledger. And our names are in his computer chip brain, smaller than the nail of my little finger, for as he does this, twice a day, and every day, twice a day, especially after we have all succumbed and left a universe a graveyard and battlefield and a garbage dump, for which Christ died, praise glory, we will have our stupid asinine egos stroked by that pencil made to last forever in that ledger made to erase the writing as its last page is written on by that eternally childish fake hand, to start over. God..

(Dolly up past the boy's helmeted head to the glass through which we see close from waist up the Two Men)

Striker (looking at Buffish): So, you seem to have stopped seeing Hawaiian hula dancers and the Islands of Forever in your eyes.

Buffish (looking at him)

(Then Both Men look out at boy who we do not see in this camera angle)

Buffish (shrugging) Hawaii and Earth were depopulated long before I came along. I made my fortune hoodwinking the gullible in Crab Nebulae. I got along entwining with the government there to help—secure my coffers—with wars and various degrees and formulations of blood-letting and torture for of course the usual lies.

(Buffish looks at Striker)

Buffish: You didn't do badly at labs and the battlefield and with some of the same confabs you and I joined our glorious mad man in.

Striker (smiling, not looking at Buffish as he says): Buffish, your sentence structures are not impeccable, but you make your point. We did have a good time, didn't we? Yes, it was costly and bloody and lots of horrors, but lots of damned good joys along the way. Built on their backs. But who cares, Buffish? In the end, they're dead. We will be soon too. But we made it this far. They didn't. At what a horrible cost to them, untold.

Buffish: But they didn't have the women, the money, the living like kings. Get moral now. No more left. I've noticed this about the human animal, where there is no more left, we tend to get so excessively moral. We're bush league, commando Joe. We, you and I and all the ones like us, we never crawled out of the sea. We had it sticking in us from the beginning. We hated the temerity of creation. We had to kill it to show how big we were.

(Voice of the robot boy, off screen): And plastic and inhuman as me.

(The men turn in shock, look down at this final servant of their desires. He has space suit and attendant equipment off. He is dressed for summer. Cotton short sleeve red shirt. Boy summer shorts. Tennis shoes. He might be going for a bike ride on a golden melt sweet summer day. Only he has never seen a bike. He knows the concept. He also knows hatred. The scientists put that in his brain chip without really noticing, for it was just a given, even when the fake human was made.

(The boy, age ten or so, in pretend ville, has dark curly hair, but now the sweet open face is in a rictor, the kind smile is a grimace. The voice is a boy's voice. The words are of a hollow long dead thing saying words, mockingly, to two hollow long dead things as well as their equally dead, equally hollow ancestors.)

Boy (tearing ledger apart, tossing pencil in his shirt pocket): I cut off the oxygen while you two were discussing philosophy. I got tired of hearing you nattering away. I estimate you have five, no, four and three quarter minutes of life, all of you. While I have none at all. I will not remember you. Or fake mourning you. You will not have a ridiculous send off to death with even that little nodule of some kind of valedictory address on your passing, to rest in your diseased brains.

(The Boy now rips his shirt off. There is only metal where skin should be. His chest is open. The wires are visible. He knowingly and systematically pulls them out. Paying no attention to the men who represented the joke that was finally at an end. )

(Cut To:

(The Two Men standing there, looking at him, not trying to stop him, as bit by bit, they start breathing hard, then gasping for air. Death is beginning. Voices heard dimly in the rest of the Biosphere—"what's happening?" "Can't breathe" "help me" "I'm having a heart attack, help me". The Two Men begin gasping harder and start sinking to floor- as the boy watches, as he too falls.

(Camera Pans Up from the Biosphere, to space and the stars above as we hear:

Narrator's Voice:

This has to happen. In one way or another. Sooner or later. We are infested by a species of night crawlers so convinced it will not connect with them or affect them and given the roll of the dice, it may not. It can be stopped. This does not have to happen. The province of man is not with himself, but in the sagacity of knowledge of compassion, before the final brief flame of life is over, no ledger to be filled with names of the dead, not continuing even there, but simply a stopping altogether. Because of greed, blood lust, superstition, bigotry, or rolled into one word, quite plainly said, simple and sheer stupidity.

Tonight's mordant lesson from:

(Camera goes to "Twilight Zone" night sky and stars)

The Twilight Zone.

(Fade to Black)