"Where am I?"
"In the Village."
I dig my hand into the bowl and wrangle out an unruly white bloom of popcorn and cram it in my mouth. Salt clings to my oily fingers. Jean over-salted this batch. She tamps the bowl down to settle the salt.
"What do you want?" A voice-over demands in a British accent.
“Information” Another British voice-over replies.
My big sister Jean and I sit cross-legged on the dingy wall to wall carpet 18 inches from the TV. The volume is low since its 11:00 PM and we don’t want to wake our family. I’m confused already and this is just the opening credits. “Now, what this called, again?”
“‘The Prisoner’. Shhh. Just watch,” Jean’s nose twitches rhythmically from a nervous tic. People unfamiliar with Jean often ask me “why is your brother winking at me?” To which I reply, “She’s not.” Jean would sooner spit into the wind through the gap in her teeth than betray her steely core with a gesture so coy. She shimmies popcorn in her hand, like a lucky gambler blessing his dice, then tosses it in her mouth. I could watch her all day.
On the screen a man in a black suit-coat with hokey five-eighths-inch-wide white-piping around the lapel is running across a barren beach in white canvas boat shoes. This strangely dressed man is apparently the good guy. “You won't get it" we hear him declare.
Suddenly another man-- similarly attired in an outdated suit but with a mod elbow length cape and a rakish skipper’s cap-- rises up from the floor in a bubble shaped chair in a dome shaped room and cackles, "By hook or by crook, we will."
“I get it. This is supposed to be the future, right?” This is one of those old-fashioned notions of the future, which from the vantage point of the actual future, I can attest never panned out.
“Shhh!” Jean says. She recently flunked out of college and moved back home. She’s not quite a welcomed guest, and not quite a tolerated resident. Evidence of her presence--doors closed softly, warm pan soaking in the sink, a hush of shame lingering by a still smoldering cigarette butt—is everywhere, but she’s been maddeningly elusive. Even the muffled admonishments I hear whispered behind closed doors are not potent enough to void the house of the choke of grief that clings to a room even after Jean’s vacated it. Today she came into my bedroom and asked me a question so shocking I could answer only in a monosyllable.
“Want to watch something on TV with me?”
“Yes.”
To my knowledge we’ve never watched something together on purpose before. Being four years older than me and having 10 times my tensile strength, Jean has always had a more rugged taste in television. As children, we frequently came to blows. The Brady Bunch versus The Night Stalker. I scratched and flailed with all I had while Jean easily prevailed using only the necessary fraction of strength; a gentleman’s code.
"Who are you?" The good guy demands to know.
"The new Number Two." The man in the bubble chair replies.
For the next thirteen weeks Jean and I will gather here-- Friday at 11:00--and watch the prisoner try and fail to escape from this island. He’ll be repeatedly captured by a silly yet still terrifying white bubble which rises out of the ocean. They’ll drug him and hypnotize him and manipulate him with false friends in an effort to elicit information which he will never surrender.
“Who is number One?” the good-guy asks. Oh, good question!
"You are Number Six” the NewNumber two replies.
For thirteen weeks I will pepper every episode with irrelevant questions—Why does that guy have a top hat? What’s a penny farthing? Who are numbers 3, 4 and 5?-- that Jean will gently shush. I will fail to understand 90% of what I see; unfathomable to me, a puzzle I won’t decode for twenty more years.
Somewhere Jean will find a lapel button with a penny-farthing bicycle and the show’s catch phrase, “Be seeing you” which I will wear like a badge. Then Jean will confide to me that she thinks she’s gay and I’ll say, “Yeah.” And she’ll say, “I have to get out of this town.” And I’ll say, “Yeah.”
Some truths are so manifest they need no further exploration.
"I am not a number — I am a free man!" The prisoner screams shaking his fist at the sky.
At the end of our thirteen weeks Jean will make her escape by enlisting in the Navy, and what I had hoped was the beginning of a beautiful era for us will turn out to be have been our last best time.
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