The coffee is still hot. Before anything larger has gone wrong in the roadside diner outside Oakwood, that small fact is already at work: a pot left over the flame, pies set out under glass, a jukebox turned up to the volume a room uses when there are people in it to talk over. The young man who comes in off the road does not behave like someone entering an abandoned building. He behaves like a customer. He calls toward the kitchen that somebody is waiting out front. He asks what the name of the town up the road is. He orders ham and eggs.
None of this is fear. It is closer to mild impatience, the ordinary annoyance of a man who has walked a long way and would like some service. And it is among the truest things in the episode, because it shows what a diner actually is. Not a room with food in it. A promise made in advance to whoever comes through the door. Nobody arrives at a lunch counter and then decides to want breakfast; the counter proposes the wanting. The stools, the menu, the pot kept hot against an arrival nobody could have predicted — all of it is addressed to a stranger, and the stranger is expected to answer by sitting down and asking for something. He answers. He gives the room the response it was built for. What he cannot get is a reply.
That asymmetry is the whole of the town, and it is worth being exact about it, because “empty” is not what Oakwood is. Oakwood is fully occupied by intention. Every surface in it is turned outward toward a person who is supposed to arrive. A shop window is a sentence with you in it. A price painted on glass, a doorway held open by its own hinges, a bench, a crossing signal, a lit marquee. These are not neutral objects that happen to have lost their users. They are addresses. They speak, in the only way an object can, and what they say is: you, whoever you are, come here, sit, look, buy, cross. The town talks to him constantly. It cannot hear a word he says.
This is why a desert would be a mercy. Wilderness has the decency to make no offers. A man alone in a canyon is alone in a place indifferent to whether he exists, and indifference, whatever else it does, does not raise expectations. Oakwood raises them on every corner and then declines to be present for any of them. A wilderness contains no company and no suggestion of company. A town is a machine for suggesting company, running at full power, with the company subtracted. The horror is not that nothing is there. It is that everything is there except the one thing all of it was for.
The episode establishes its cruelty in the first few minutes and then simply keeps its word. He does not walk into a ruin. He walks into a place that has been vacated so recently that the vacating seems still to be in progress. Coffee on the boil. Pies fresh. In the police station, a cigar left burning in an ashtray, a tap running, and in one of the cells the leavings of a man who has just been shaving. In the drugstore, a rack of paperbacks already turning when he comes to it, as though someone has just spun it and stepped away. Oakwood is not in the past tense. It is in a tense that barely exists in English, the tense of a minute ago, and it never leaves that tense for a second. He is never told that the world has ended. He is told, over and over, at every threshold, that he has just missed everybody.
Nothing else the episode does is as psychologically shrewd as this. The town does not withhold people. It withholds them by four or five minutes, repeatedly, for half an hour, and four or five minutes is precisely the distance that keeps a man walking. Ruins would release him. A skeleton at the counter would release him. What he is given instead is a continuous, freshly renewed reason to try the next door. Hope is not the consolation running underneath his ordeal; hope is what the ordeal is made of. Each new sign of recent life is another turn of the same screw, and the episode is honest enough to let the screw turn in silence rather than have anyone explain it.
Loneliness of this kind does something particular to time. Duration stops being a river he is floating on and becomes a distance between himself and other people, a gap he might close by moving faster. So he moves faster. He crosses the square, he tries the next building, he runs. The town has converted time into geography and then made the geography impassable. And because every clue is minutes old, he never accumulates any information at all; the twentieth empty room tells him exactly what the first one did. He is learning nothing, and the not-learning is disguised as searching.
Earl Holliman plays the first half of this like a man doing a bit for an audience he assumes is just out of sight. That is the performance’s real intelligence and it is easy to miss, because it looks at first ...
