In an
eighth grade "Language Arts" course, my classmates and I were
required to do a book report-oral presentation combo. We could select a book of
our choice, but it had to be approved by Ms. Hunt, our teacher. Students were
permitted to pair up, too, and so my friend Manny and I opted to read Deathman,
Do Not Follow Me, A YA by Jay Bennett. I do not remember much about the
book, except that I—as a thirteen-year-old—really liked it and a kid by the
name of Danny Morgan was the main protagonist. He was daydreaming in history
class at some point in the story and, if memory serves, inadvertently got
entangled with shady sorts— art thieves, I believe.
Anyway,
Manny and I made the equivalent of an abridged book-on-tape. We were
trailblazers here. This would be the presentation part. Anything to avoid
doing it live. As fate would have it, though, we never went public with the
thing. The reason why escapes me, but it certainly redounded in our favor. For
starters, nobody would have understood what was going on in the recording. And
we flubbed our lines on occasion as well. In the role of narrator, Manny meant
to say "art exhibition" but said "art expedition" instead.
What made
me resurrect Deathman, Do Not Follow Me after all these years is a
recent encounter I had with a passerby. I saw this man coming toward me who
uncannily resembled someone I once knew—a fellow named Jerry, who had been dead
for thirteen years. What hurtled through my mind as the distance that separated
us narrowed—and he looked more and more, and not less and less, like Jerry—was:
What if he said hello to me as if it was him? What if it were akin to our
past chance meetings—we lived in the same neighborhood—when we would briefly
chat about nothing especially important, like his love for Reno, Nevada, a
"great walking town."
After all,
if he were standing there as Jerry in the flesh and knew me by name, I could
not very well tell him that he was deceased and that I attended both his wake
and funeral service. This potential scenario quite literally played in my brain
in the several seconds leading up to us passing one another. He was a dead
ringer for Jerry all right, but Jerry was still among the dead.
Had it
been Jerry, what would I have done? Would I have turned around and gone home,
presuming I had either lost my marbles or was still asleep and dreaming? Or
would I have continued running my errands, believing that maybe—just maybe—I
had entered The Twilight Zone—"the middle ground between light and
shadow, between science and superstition” You know the place between “the pit
of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge.” For one brief shining moment,
yes, I wished it really had been old Jerry that I spied on the street. But upon
further reflection, I was grateful that it was not. Being cast in a "Nothing
in the Dark" Twilight Zone remake, with yours truly in the Gladys
Cooper role, is not for me—not yet anyway.
