Time Enough at Last, Revisited: The Unfortunate End of Randy Baggs
Randy had no time of his own. There was his wife, Julie, who made for plans for every minute of Randy’s life that his employer, Malibu Savings & Loan, did not buy. Randy was allowed only enough time to get to and fromwork – that in itself being a considerable task, twice each day, from his Valley-side residence.
Little time was left for Randy or his recently-resurrected hobby, which he generally accepted as all but a hopelessly fantastic dream. His clean, white surfboard, barely a year old, already hung high in the garage rafters. It had seen action only sparingly since its purchase. On a couple runs (or were they sprints?) to the local beachbreak closer to home, he caught some waves and was able to practice. Snuck in about an hour of watertime – felt the tail through a bottom turn or two, found a few turns, and drew a few lines. But the walled-out conditions he was forced into during those all-too-rare free hours were not rekindling his stoke; he wanted to revel in the flawless surf he passed every summer morning and eve on his way to and from the office. Unfortunately for Randy, the consistently thick, swarming pack of younger, intimidating, and more-experienced waveriders constantly competing for every nook of lineup space along the point made himnervous enough never to even attempt a session with the rest of the after-work or weekend – warrior crowds.It looked as though Randy’s ambition would never be realized. Then something happened which changed all that.
Randy was down in the vault, doing a project for Mr. Rightsdale, when it happened. He had stolen a few solitary moments at a sole desk, supposedly filing and re-organizing the paperwork files, while, instead, flipping through the dull gray pages of the morning’s news. Folded accordingly, he had barely begun an international tale entitled “The New Weapons and What They’ll Do to YOU”, when all the noise inthe world crashed upon his eardrums. The steel-enforced floor shook and rose at him through the gaudy red carpet, and the gold polished ceiling fell toward him, and, for a fleeting second, Randy thought of a television story he had started to watch once called “Time Enough at Last”. He regretted in that manic moment that he never had time to sit in peace for that hour-long satire to see how it came out. Then all was darkness and quiet and unconsciousness.
When Randy awoke, it was obvious that something was desperately wrong with the Malibu Savings & Loan.The heavy vault door was buckled and twisted. The file cabinets were considerably upset, and a slim, slitheringhaze of smoke hung above the entirely eerie setting. Randy slowly rose to his feet, moving arms and legse xperimentally. He tried lifting a large chunk of the table that blocked the doorway, the same desk he wassitting at just seconds (or was it hours?) before, but his misshapen, desk jockey physique ensured it tookeverything he could muster to move it just enough to squeeze through. He made a mental note to find furthertime for workouts.
He suddenly realized, without the realization actually entering his conscious thoughts, that something momentous had happened, something worse than the boiler blowing up, something worse than the gas main exploding, something worse than anything that had ever happened before. He felt that way because it was so quiet. There was no whine of sirens, no shouting, no running, just an ominous and all-pervading silence.
Still dazed, Randy carefully stumbled toward the vault’s exit. The elevator that had lowered him into the bank’s belly sat crushed at the base of shaft like a crumpled aluminum can. There was something inside ofthe car that he could not look at, something that had once been a person, or perhaps several people, it was impossible to tell now.
Feeling sick, he turned away from the chilly sight, toward the staircase. The once-steep flights now formed a sort of slow recline, its broken concrete mussed into shambles. More resembling a hiking trail, Randy crawled on all fours to the top of the pile despite a few missteps, peering into the lobby of the bank. Sunlight streaks beamed through the roof and onto the hills of shattered ceiling tiles that covered much of the carpet. Huddled bumps of unpleasantness laid everywhere, making Randy sick as he tried not to look at them. Once he cracked and squashed something with his feet, and he barely kept from wretching at the thought that leapt to mind.
His curiosity could not be overcome, and Randy hesitantly snuck a quick glance at the mound beneath his feet.He could see the arm and shoulder out from under a huge, fallen column of marble as his stare lengthened. In the buttonhole of the jacket was the yellow rose Mr. Rightsdale had worn that morning.
Randy thought of doing something to help, or calling someone; but one look outside calmed his desire.
The street was not much different than the inside, bright sunlight and so much concrete to crawl over, but the unpleasantness was much, much worse… He looked at the smashed automobiles, some of their four wheels pointed skyward like the stiffened legs of dead animals… He had a feeling that there wasn’t anyone safefor a long, long way, maybe not in the whole state or the whole country, or the whole world.
He wondered about Julie. She had been a pretty good wife, he thought, now that all was said and done. It wasn’t exactly her fault that people didn’t have time to surf nowadays. It was just that there was the house, and the bank, and the yard, and the bills. There were the Joneses for poker and the Kellys for kings and Pictionary with the O’Salleys.
Randy increased his hiking pace, but he hurried too much. He cut his shoulder on a sharp slice of metal that stuck horizontally from a brick wall. He thought of things like excessive blood loss and gangrene and thatunfortunate woman on Dateline, and his hand trembled as he tied his pocket handkerchief around the wound.The bright silence was all around him, only disturbed by the occasional rumblings of waves surging into thebay. As he walked further, he recognized a heap of rubble and thrashed rental boards as the remains of thelocal surf shop. Across the hollow street, the asphalt parking lot at the pier had fallen in upon itself,its paid customers’ automobiles left dangling somewhere in the middle. The clown-faced burger stop was completely flattened, neon lights out.
Around a bend, at the base of the pier pilings, sat complete unpleasantness. Stripped of its floorboards andform, the classic structure laid shredded to its skeleton. Broken longboards and floating lumps huddled and rebounded against a mountain of whitewashed, wooden debris. Randy, again, barely kept from retching. He crammed his eyes closed and turned away from the whole scene, taking a slow, deep breath and directing hisstare out to where the lifeguard tower once stood. The flagpole now leaned to the south, adorned by a blackand tattered version of the American icon.
Randy’s mind spun uncontrollably. He thought of Julie, he thought of Mr. Rightsdale and the people at the bank. He thought of everyone. The magnitude was overwhelming. He collapsed in the warm sand.
Randy awoke some time later to the wet splash of saltwater lapping at his legs. The quiet was still there, but now it sung with the intermittent crash of south swells. Slowly rising, he made out the sounds of wondrous righthanders approaching, one after another, initially cresting hundreds of yards out to seabefore beautifully peeling shoreward, all in perfect form and unison. He rubbed his eyes to make sure hewas awake (or was it alive?). He looked up the point again and saw a pair of beached longboards at the lagoon’s mouth that had probably washed in with the tide. Again he looked to the sea, begging a strangequestion. Dead or not, he thought, opportunity was finally knocking for Randy Baggs. The time was now. For the first time all day (or was it all decade?) Randy showed a smile.
He reached down to lift himself from the ground when his left arm buckled, dropping Randy back to earthwith a thud. His shoulder and arm were numb and coated with dried blood and sand. He sat up on the seatof his slacks and rolled clockwise onto his knees, cringing as he raised his worn body to its feet. Hebegan stumbling toward the boards, following the glistening line of water-packed sand at the ocean’s edge.The noon sun burnt hotter today, he thought. A flash of white enveloped his frame. Randy fell again.
For a second, he imagined dipping his arms elbow-deep into the cool blue water, pushing past the whitewaterand bouldered reef; patiently waiting for a fine set of lines swinging around Second Point, motionless, knowing he would choose his favorite unchallenged; finding the perfect takeoff hole and setting the railof an abandoned noserider over Kiddie Bowl’s shallows and wrapping it into the small bay; furiously trimming toward the pier (or, rather, what was the pier) to reach the soft sand inside. Randy smiled again.
He scratched his head for composure and looked back. He had only managed three steps. Disappointed but still determined, again he pushed forward; again he fell. Grabbing his useless arm and trying like hell to keep afirm focus ahead, Randy could only manage a blurred, Impressionist’s vision of the beautifully blue and whitewaves in front of him. Randy sat as another solid set of empty, overhead waves marched onto the point andpassed him by.
He began to cry.
Quotes taken from (and story mammothly borrowed from) Lynn A. Venable’s short story “Time Enough at Last”, which was formed into a teleplay by the great Rod Serling for The Twilight Zone, which aired December 20, 1959.
