In an obscure episode of The Twilight Zone, rarely seen in rebroadcast, the viewer beholds a woman in a late-model American car. The scene begins in medias res without background information. We only know that we encounter someone here who is gripped with primal fear. We don’t know what she is fleeing from, or why it is hunting her down. We only know that it is. She is running for her life.
The action unfolds in the dead of winter, possibly three or four in the morning. The landscape is dark and devoid of life. For a only brief instant, the woman’s attention drifts, but in that split second, her tires screech into an uncontrolled skid and the car careens out of control.
It lurches to a stop. Slowly she takes her hands from her face and looks beyond the passenger cabin. She is trapped on a railroad trestle, the engine stalled. A locomotive bears down. We watch her flail helplessly as the train barrels closer. There is an explosion of white.
Then…somehow (this part is always confusing)… she’s OK. Miraculously she has escaped. Badly shaken, she pulls over to the shoulder of the road and watches in stunned silence as the dark box cars hurtle past. She really shouldn’t be alive.
Now, the real nightmare begins.
She drives on, deeper into the darkness, traversing a landscape from which there never be any returning—we know that innately—she is alone, lost, afraid to go on, but just as terrified to stop. She rubs her eyes, squints ahead, and drives. Suddenly, dead ahead, dead ahead, a man in a gray suit leaps from the murk, climbing up the embankment of a ditch and then leaping directly into her path. He holds a battered suitcase. He is flagging her down.
The Hitchhiker. His face is gaunt and cragged, his eyes burnt out sockets. She jams the accelerator pedal to the floor. He whirls around to watch her as she flies past.
A growing river of asphalt soon reassures. It spills out in her rear view mirror, putting him farther and farther behind. His dwindling shadow tells her that she’s getting away. But somehow she senses him all the same, hovering around her, breathing in her ear. In her rearview mirror, she sees that he is still watching her, too. Even from this distance he keeps his eyes on her. He smiles and then tugs on the brim of his hat. He's doffing it to her… She stomps the accelerator pedal repeatedly. Seconds and minutes pass. She starts to take a deep breath. The speedometer needle quivers at 95. The car buffets and rocks.
Directly ahead! She sees him instantly it-can’t-be-but-it-is-it’s-him-all-right-Oh-my-god-Oh-my-god-Oh-my-god-God-have-mercy-on-my-soul-he’s-coming-God-have-mercy-on-my-soul-I’m-lost-I’m-afraid-Mommy-I’m-afraid-have-mercy-on-my-soul-O-my-soul…O-my-soul.
The episode now acquires a leaden monotony. She keeps escaping. He keeps reappearing. Again and again...
She finally understands. He will never call off his pursuit.
...
Who is the hitchhiker? Who is the woman? What’s going on here?
For starters, I think it’s safe to assume that the woman is you, me, all of us. And we already know deep down what she is trying to flee from. Don’t we?
Or, there could be many things?
Guilt perhaps…
As a psychiatrist, I can see myself saying something along those lines. “She’s fleeing from some terrible crime that she has committed, perhaps in reality, or perhaps only in her wishes.” I can see myself saying that. “But we mustn’t forget that, in the human unconscious, thoughts are remembered later as actual occurrences. If you repeat a fabricated event often enough the brain is overrun. It becomes steadfastly convinced over time that the story actually happened…
“So, the Hitchhiker is Guilt.”
Something along those lines. But I think the currents run deeper.
There is something so vastly lonely and sinister about it, and yet so highly personal and intimate. It’s just the two of them out there, after all. Do we all know the hitchhiker?
I have no definitive answer there. But something is going on around me, every day, everywhere I turn, that makes me feel vaguely pursued. I’ll be walking down a congested street, eating a burger, shopping for a shirt. Fear seizes me.
I see mushroom clouds. I see children covered with boils, sloughing off their skin. Yeah. That, too. I see him, too. I worry—is he trying to reach me before it’s too late? But we are miles apart. All hell is erupting.
I say to myself, "Now that’s sure playing out your personal fantasies on a grandiose stage.” Except. This is reality. Listen to what George Bush said today. “The game is over.”
In these moments of cold illumination I lose my hearing. There is no sound at all. All I have to connect with are eyes. I peer into the faces swirling around mine. I see eyes gleaming with intensity. Yet none will lock gazes with my eyes. Is it because no one except me is thinking these things? Or because we all are?
I feel the way a paranoid does maybe. I see evidence of evil everywhere. Yet when I search the crowds, wanting to know if others see what I see, I am at a loss. One moment, I see only empty faces. The next, who needs words? All of humanity is singing the final chords of the last requiem we will ever dedicate to our final moments. The title of the piece is “A Silent Scream.”
In 2000, David lost his only son to Parental Alienation Syndrome. "Before my divorce in 2000," he says, "I had never been charged with anything worse than a speeding ticket...They threw me in jail and dragged me into a courtroom handcuffed, weeping, and manacled to a chain. The proceeding required less than ten minutes. I never saw my son again... I'm no 'expert.' I'm just one more broken man. I hope to do something positive with what is left of me. My resume is one line long--I am a father who lost the most beloved person in his life--my son. I do what I can now, not because I'm noble, but because I have no choice. I try to do the right thing because I sense that this is my only hope. My ideals are all that, in the end, they couldn't take from me. I refuse to accept a world where hatred routinely prevails over love, and where the destruction of our children is viewed as simply the cost of doing business. I'm no saint. I'm dazed and terrified. I'm not sure what "God" even means, and I'm sure as hell no hero. But I will stand up to any legal system, hateful mob, or totalitarian regime whose code of ethics is built around cruelty, power, and lying; and whose only god is money."
