In The Prisoner, 1955, Alec Guinness played a Cardinal Mindszenty-type priest, brainwashed in a Communist prison, in which one of the techniques was to keep him in a windowless room where he would never know the time, or day from night. There’s a strong scene where, in his efforts to invent a clock, he’s shown failing to make a pendulum out of a button and a piece of string. His intensity there is so complete, and so apparently natural, and so understated, that I’ve always used that as my model when I’ve had a scene to play involving tight attention on a difficult or muddled or futile task. And now I had another use for that scene: It told me not to think about time, not to worry about it. There’s nothing to be done. Think about something else.
Like getting out of here.
Like, before that, getting my wits about me.
There was soap in the tiny lavatory, and a small facecloth, but no toothpaste or any way to shave. I stripped, gave myself a rudimentary sponge bath, put my shorts and socks back on, and went out to the other room to exercise. The pale gray industrial carpeting was just soft enough for the purpose. I did my running in place and my arm swings and my knee bends, and was on my back doing my sit-ups when I heard the door being unlocked.
The original purpose of this door, of course, was to keep people out, not in, so it opened inward and was equipped on this side with dead bolts top and bottom. On the other side there was only a simple lock and key, but with this door it was sufficient. The hinge joint showed in here, and with a pair of ordinary hinges I might have been able to remove the pins and get out that way, but this heavy weight was held up and in balance by an entire length of piano hinge, impossible to do anything about.
I was on my feet, trying to take controlled deep breaths, when the door opened. Two men came in, one bearing a tray. Both had revolvers stuck under their belts. One or more other men stayed out in the hall, and with the door open I could hear some sort of twangy plucked music, with a dragging rhythm. Rather loud too.
My visitors glanced at my shorts and socks, but showed no reaction. The one put the tray on the coffee table and stepped back, while the other closed the door (which shut off the music), turned to me, and said, “Eat.”
A pretty efficient system. They would both stay until I was finished. Breakfast was finger food — overcooked hamburger on an English muffin, and a pear, so no need for knives and forks. Lukewarm unsweetened black coffee was in a plastic cup.
I forced myself to eat, though it wasn’t easy with two armed men standing over me. But at least if they were feeding me, it meant I still had time, they weren’t planning to kill me just yet.
I couldn’t keep from wondering what the time was right now, but I wouldn’t ask. They might have answered — they weren’t out to brainwash me, like Alec Guinness’s cardinal, merely store me until I could be conveniently killed — but what good would it do to know that right now was eight forty-three or ten-seventeen?
I finished eating, and dropped the pear core into the plastic cup. They watched me, standing over by the door, silent and impassive, and when I was done, they picked up the tray and left. The music twanged, then was silent. I heard the key in the lock.
I washed again. For some reason this room made me feel dusty, a little smudged. I don’t like being afraid; the emotion itself can make you feel dirty, abused.
I will break out of here, I promised myself. But there’s no point trying anything during the day. Two meals from now, I’ll have to be ready. I breathed deep, standing in the middle of the room, commanding my nerves to stop jittering. An actor knows how to deal with nerves, doesn’t he? So deal with them.
Where to start? What to do? I looked at the shelves of Ross’s old scripts, lined up in their folders, their titles in red magic marker on white Mystic tape on their spines.
Would one of those contain some clever way to get out of a locked room?
43
Here’s what was in the room:
Two old unpainted wooden bookcases, six feet high by under three feet wide, next to each other, containing scripts in folders, boxed manuscripts, videotapes labeled on tape and box, and one shelf of scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings about shows or movies Ross had been connected with.
One fireproof metal four-door filing cabinet, not quite six feet tall, with several show posters on top of it, rolled up and secured with rubber bands.
The sagging sofa and the small square Parsons-style wooden coffee table.
Two posters for television series, both about twelve by eighteen, in glass-fronted metal-sided assemble-it-yourself frames, stored in the space between the side of the filing cabinet and the wall.
Thin wood-veneer paneling nailed to vertical furring strips presumably nailed to the concrete block wall. A Sheetrock ceiling with a two-by-four-foot rectangle in which the fluorescent light was set, and a foot-square metal grid where air was drawn out. Industrial carpeting glued to the concrete floor, with an air-inlet grid against the wall opposite the door. Sheetrock-and-stud construction of the lavatory cubicle in one corner.
An old-fashioned premodular telephone jack — without the telephone — close to the floor on the wall behind the door.
The steel door leading out, and the simple flush door leading to the bathroom, the latter with an ordinary brass lockset with a locking mechanism on the inside knob.
The bathroom itself contained a simple toilet, a small corner sink, a small rectangular pale blue plastic wastebasket, a round fluorescent ceiling fixture, and a small wood-framed mirror hung on a hook on one of the Sheetrock walls. The industrial carpeting continued into this room.
And myself, wearing pullover polo shirt, slacks without belt, shorts, and socks. All pockets empty.
That was what I had to work with.
I was mad, and I was scared. Another man’s stupidity had gotten me into this mess, his stupidity and my own dumb efforts to be his friend. I did not want to die here in this room. No matter how undeserved my sweet life was, no matter how much it was a result of luck and chance, it was still a sweet life and the only life I had, and I was not ready yet to give it up.
I was mad, and I was scared, and I was mad because I was scared. I didn’t like it that these people, nothing to me and me nothing to them, could come out of the blue and frighten me. I didn’t like it at all.
I have been half-trained in a lot of things: acting, police work, soldiering, basketball, writing. Nobody is actually trained for the kind of position I found myself in now, but still I could have wished I was better at something useful. Karate, for instance. I know just enough to make the moves look good for the camera, but not anywhere near enough to deal with two armed men in a small closed room with a lot of their friends waiting outside.
People had tried to kill me twice in the past, before this crowd here. Both times I was on duty, and the result was that I have killed two men, but none of that trained me for anything. It only showed me I don’t have a taste for it, and I don’t like the aftertaste. The first time was in Germany when I was on patrol in my MP persona, walking with my partner down a cobbled street in the raunchy part of Kaiserslautern at two in the morning, and a very drunk black GI came reeling out of a bar with a stained bayonet in his hand. Later it turned out he’d just killed his German girlfriend in there. All we knew was that he saw us and, instead of running away, ran at us, flailing with the bayonet.