Three-Eighty a Night

A man stands at the mirror of a rented room and works his jaw. He is not shaving and he is not admiring himself. What he is doing looks closer to labor: the eyes narrow, the mouth pulls, the muscles of the face are asked to hold a shape they were never built to hold, and for a second the whole head seems to resist him. Then the image gives way, and when it settles the man in the mirror is somebody else. Nothing in the room has changed. The bureau, the bed, the two bags, the newspaper clippings he has brought with him, the rate of three dollars and eighty cents a night that Rod Serling’s voice has just quoted with clerical distaste: all of it is exactly as it was. Only the face is new, and the face, as the next twenty minutes will show, is the one thing in the room that does not belong to the man who paid for it.[^1]

“The Four of Us Are Dying” begins by telling us nearly everything. Serling’s opening narration is an indictment delivered before the trial, and it is unusually specific about the defendant. His name is Arch Hammer; he is thirty-six; he has been a salesman, a dispatcher, a truck driver, a con man, a bookie, a part-time bartender. The list rewards a pause, because every job on it is a job of passing things along. A salesman moves goods he did not make, a dispatcher moves trucks he does not drive, a bookie moves money that was never his, a bartender pours what the distillery bottled. Nothing in Hammer’s history required him to build, keep, or answer for anything, and the narration’s judgment follows from the list rather than decorating it. This is “a cheap man, a nickel-and-dime man,” Serling says, and the cheapness goes past the suit and the shirt, into mind and taste, into “a tawdry little shine on the seat of his conscience.”[^2] What makes the narration more than a prosecutor’s summary is its final turn. Hammer has one thing, “this much he does have,” and it is a talent discovered early: he can change his face. The sentence grants the gift the way a judge grants a mitigating circumstance. Everything before it was subtraction. The face is the only possession, and the episode is going to spend its half hour discovering that the possession was never really his either.

Harry Townes plays the man who owns that face, and he needs to be looked at before the mirror starts its work, because the episode will not give us much more of him. Townes was forty-five when he made the episode, nearly a decade older than the character the narration describes, and the discrepancy is legible on screen: Hammer’s own face looks used, a little pouched, a face that has been up late in bad rooms for longer than thirty-six years would explain.[^3] Townes gives him a quick, sour, forward-leaning energy. He handles the clippings with the impatience of a man who has read them many times and is checking only that they still say what he needs them to say. He does not look at the mirror the way a vain man does, lingering; he looks at it the way a mechanic looks at an engine, waiting for it to turn over. The performance keeps insisting on one quality above the others, and that quality is hurry. Hammer is a man with a schedule. He has come to this city with two bags, some clippings, and what Serling calls “a master plan to destroy some lives,” and the plan has a timetable, and he is behind.

Hurry is the first clue to what the episode thinks a self might be, because hurry is the absence of history. A man with a past moves through a city carrying it; he is slowed by the people who know him, by the loyalties and grudges and old promises that attach to his name. Hammer moves fast because nothing attaches to him. The talent that lets him wear other faces has, over the years, guaranteed that his own face collects no history worth the name, and the narration’s résumé confirms it: a man who could be anyone has been, in sequence, nobody in particular, at a rate of three-eighty a night. The power is not new. He discovered it “at a very early age,” which means he has had it through every one of those jobs, and it has brought him to a cheap hotel at thirty-six with a plan that depends on three dead or absent strangers. The episode’s most disturbing proposition arrives before a single transformation has taken place. The face can be changed at will, and changing it has made nothing.

The clippings define the limits of the gift more precisely than the narration does. Hammer does not become men. He becomes their pictures. Each of the three faces he will wear has reached him through print: a newspaper story about a trumpet player killed when his car was struck by a train, a story about a gangster shot and dropped in the river, and, later, a fight poster pasted to an alley wall. He can only borrow a face that the city has already reproduced, and what he reproduces is the reproduction, the halftone version, the face as it looked ...