Over the Edge

by Harlan Ellison

  The bus slowed as the traffic streaming uptown clogged the downtown lanes. Finally it came to a halt, and through the front window could be seen nothing but cars and cabs and trucks backed bumper-on-bumper as the city’s terror-stricken multitudes fled the birthplace of their terror.

  The bus driver turned and looked behind the bus. His view was blocked by strap-hangers, and he sighed the door open, leaned out, and cursed softly. He closed the door and spoke to his passengers:

  “Hey, there’s a real jam up ahead, and back of me, too, so if any of you wanna get out and walk the rest of the way where yez goin’, I’d sujjest you get out here, y’know.”

  The crippled man rose automatically, and stepped forward, his eyes blank and his face a mask carved from alabaster.

  The bus driver looked at him oddly, but opened the door. The crippled man left the bus and began weaving his way between the halted cars.

  He continued walking downtown steadily, his step crooked, his pace constant. Finally, he saw the snaggle-tooth ruin that was the shadow-blasted skyscraper. Then, as though a blanking current had been cut away, his senses returned to him. He stopped beside a stalled Mercury with three women in it, and leaned against the car. His hand went to his face, and came away slick with sweat. He shook his head to let the acuteness fall into place, and again rubbed the bridge of his nose, his eyes. One of the women leaned forward and tapped the woman driving. She nudged her and indicated the crippled man.

  “Are you ill?” the woman asked through the window.

  The crippled man turned then, and smiled enigmatically. “Ill? No, at last I’m well. There is a God!”

  And he walked downtown.

  Obregon was detailing the plan for usurpation. He was black against the blasted white of the building front, as his subjects listened raptly.

  “We will demolish all communications first,” he said. “We will assassinate all leaders and defense heads, as I did away with the old woman who sought to return to her corporeal shackles. Then we will strike at the common man; men, women, and, most important, the children. All of them. By now the city has few slave-shadows, and those will recognize their freedom soon enough. Then we will quickly take over. The world will become shadowed, and we will have it all in our hands, after centuries of slavery. I promise you—”

  “Nothing—” a strong, willful voice broke in.

  Obregon spun, there on the wall, flat as flatness and thin as a whisper and black as a sin of calculation. He looked at the crippled man who stood among the assembled shadows, and he said, “Who are you, to come here? Kill him at once!”

  But no shadow moved to obey. “We cannot move against him,” they moaned, and it was true as the sunrise. They could not move against him. The crippled man came across the rubble-strewn sidewalk. He stood beneath the feet of the shadow form on the wall.

  “They cannot, nor can you, shadow man,” the crippled man said.

  “What are you, what do you want here? Do you know we are about to take over the world? You will be the first to go, twisted shape.”

  The crippled man chuckled low in his throat, and when his lips opened, they could all see the extremely long, shark-like teeth in his mouth. “You will do nothing.” He laughed at Obregon. “The time of your doing is done; you had a few hours, and no more. Just as the animals and the plants have all had their predators, to keep them in check, nature has provided one for you.”

  Obregon felt fear for the first time. A fear that struck from his shadow soul to his shadow brain.

  “Myself,” the crippled man said. “Myself alone.”

  “But the waves of force from which we’ve moved—” began Obregon.

  “—changed you…and also changed me,” the crippled man finished sardonically.

  Obregon felt the fear rising in him. The fear he had worked so diligently to instill in others. He fought against it, tried to press it back down with words.

  He used his most potent weapon, he spoke his secret name. The name that held his greatest strength. “You can’t hurt me. I am the name that all men fear. I am the name men speak when they need the name for evil. I was the shade of the great killer, the ultimate destroyer. He was Hitler. They called him Adolf Hitler, and his shadow fell across the world. I cloaked the world. I lived in Hitler, do you understand? In the one who tried to kill the world…Doesn’t that name drive you back, wrinkled thing, doesn’t it invoke the power that humbles you? That name all men fear?”

  “Nothing, shadow, nothing at all. I have no care at all for whatever great man you think you have been. I was a nothing; my life was a fear, a fear of you and all like you, because I feared myself and hated myself. But all that is past. The forces that changed and freed you, have changed me.

  “There have always been such forces, and those who have been affected by them have been known in mythology and have had strange names. But I am a new breed of that name.”

  Obregon stared and sputtered, and feared. But he could not move against the crippled man with the oddly burning eyes and the long canines.

  “You will have to get used to it,” the crippled man said, starting forward. “You will have to get used to the idea in the short moment you have left. Used to the idea of a shadow-vampire.”

  He advanced, and pulled the shadow from the wall, as simply as pulling a sheet from a bed, a paper from a stack, a bandage from skin. “How wonderful not to be crippled any longer,” he exulted. “How wonderful not to be useless any longer…” He held the limp, flabby, flat darkness in his hands.

  Then the crippled man began to feed.

  THE WORDS IN SPOCK’S MOUTH: AN ESSAY

  We live in an age where personality is king. The inept toe-tapper who graced a hundred grade “b” films becomes a U. S. Senator. He is a personality. The emcee of a late-night talk show suddenly becomes the arbiter of Constitutional values and public morality. He is a personality. The bad novelist who cannot write her way out of a pay toilet does saturation tv and her book suddenly soars to the top of the bestseller lists. She is a personality. The “image” becomes the thing; the facade, the front, the public face, the mask is more acceptable to the masses than the less-glittering reality of truth, the possibility that one’s heroes are merely men and women, even as you and I; and so, are subject to the same terrors and frailties as you and I. The lie is more acceptable than the bitter truth; the shadow is more supportable than the reality.

  Too frequently, the road to personality entails the shucking-off along the way of such unwieldy and unnecessary burdens as honesty, rationality, moderation, friendship. And so, at the final destination, the personality may be a George Wallace or a George Lincoln Rockwell or an Adam Clayton Powell or a George Hamilton. These are incomplete men; men who have lost pieces of themselves, of their humanity, along the road. Yet they are still personalities, and are worshipped. For the modern gods spark and glow on the television screen, not up there delivering a Sermon on the Mount or down here stopping the sheepherders from slaughtering the lambs to the worship of Kali. And too often the indiscriminate masses make no choices in those they honor, but merely accept all who are thrust before them, merely because they offer songs, dances and funny stories. Were this the best of all possible worlds, the personalities worshipped would be as elegant as a Kennedy, or a Stevenson, or a Styron, or a Leonard Nimoy.

  I am a writer. I write books. I also write television and films. I know Leonard Nimoy, for I have worked with him on Star Trek. I don’t worship him, because he is a human being, and the folly of worshipping a personality is hardly less demeaning to the personality than to the worshipper. But I know Leonard, and he is a good man, a frank and honest man, and were I to have to draw a judgment as to whether he deserves the adoration of a large mass of fans, I would be compelled to agree that far better Leonard than many other choices open to the public. I have worked at Synanon—the recuperative facility where junkies regain their dignity and their lives—where Len taught an acting class, and they speak of him with deep warmth; I h
ave discussed Len with other actors in Hollywood, and to a man they laud his intimacy in friendship and his forthright manner. It is this very dichotomy between the deep well of personal warmth and humanity which Len possesses and the chill, precise character he plays in Star Trek, that is (I feel) in large part responsible for the force with which Spock comes across in the series. It is impossible, even in the guise of an emotionless alien, to quell the sunshine of Len’s personality.

  So it gives me pleasure to see Leonard Nimoy adulated by thousands of Spockettes. I feel no slightest twinge of jealousy at the acceptance by millions of a man who is as entitled to such acceptance as any good man. I give Len all of this, and the vast amounts of money, and the personal satisfaction, and everything that goes with it. Without holding back a fragment of delight.

  Yet I wonder if those who worship the personality are as ready to worship the man. And finding that question in doubt, I wonder if these smiling fans are aware of the expertise and years of drudgery that went to make the man first a good man, then an actor, then a good actor, then a personality, and finally, a good personality? While it is true that Len is by no means a John Kennedy or a Gandhi or even a George Lincoln Rockwell, he is a role model for many youngsters, a symbol, an image; and while he is not adored on the level these others have been, nor for even remotely the same reasons, he has a responsibility to his fans and to himself, to be the sort of human being he seems to be. But Toulouse-Lautrec once ventured, “One should never meet a man whose work one admires, the man is always so much less than the work.”

  And so behind the facade of actor and personality, lies the truth of Leonard Nimoy. Unless a fan is willing to separate the shadow from the reality, the man from the image, the adulation is empty, witless and adolescent.

  And to thus separate image from substance, one must understand that when Leonard Nimoy stands before the camera, begins to interact with the others in a script, he does not stand alone. He has not sprung full-blown from the forehead of the television industry like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.

  He has received a script, and he has received direction, and he has been made-up, and he has been costumed, and if the teleplay calls for swordplay, well, he’s taken fencing lessons, and all of it is backed by his lean years learning his craft.

  From these native talents, and from these invisible supporters, emerge Leonard Nimoy’s public face, his image, the character he plays on Star Trek and the character he becomes in public appearances. Neither of the foregoing are the real Nimoy…nor should they be. They are the shadows, and the reality is quite another thing. I do not think the reality would care to be worshipped; the shadow, of needs, cannot help but be, and perhaps needs to be.

  To this end, the shadow personality relies heavily on all the props and preparations that combine to equip an actor stepping before television cameras.

  I would speak for a moment of the writer.

  One of Len’s most eloquent fans made (what was to her) a marginal error. She credited a script I had written for Star Trek to someone else. When the error was pointed out to her at first, she found it somewhat incomprehensible that I should take severe umbrage. Later, when the underlying emotions and precedents of the situation were explicated, she understood. And she asked that these words be set down to inform and enlighten the other Nimoy fans who might be guilty of the same error.

  For, you see, without the ideas and imaginations of the men and women who conceive the stories and lines Nimoy speaks—who plot these intricate and grandiloquent journeys through space and character—Leonard would be naked before the merciless eye of the television camera. It is not necessary here to enumerate the joys of having an actor of Len’s capacities to speak the lines; that is understood. But adulation for the actor is to be found in abundance; at this point I speak of the writer.

  Consider: a man goes through all the years and miles of his life, gathering experiences, learning the devilishly intricate craft of storytelling, paying dues in an arena where only the cleverest prevail, suffers, expends geysers of emotion, hones and tempers himself and his abilities in a fire of loneliness (for make no mistake, writing is the loneliest of the arts—an actor needs only one other person before whom to perform, and he is acting; a writer must do it facing a machine, with no one to cheer him on or smile if he gets it right, or soothe him when it is going badly). And when he has it learned well enough to be paid large monies for practicing his craft, his words are taken by others, twisted, altered, subverted, colloquialized, and issued from the mouth of one or another personality…and the fans don’t even know those lines were written. They think the words somehow leaped unbidden into the head of the actor.

  I have stood on shooting sets when tourists from The Real World have come to visit, and upon being introduced as The Man Who Wrote The Show, the kindly little old lady from Poughkeepsie has smiled at me and said in a voice vaguely reminiscent of Jonathan Winters as Maudie Frickett, “Oh, do you write them words they say into the air out of their faces, too?” Yes, ma’am, I reply. I write them words, too. “And do you tell them cameras to go up and down and back off like that?” Yes, ma’am, I do all that, too. Every camera angle. “And it must be nice for you that the actress had such a good idea for this story, isn’t it?” And what do you say? Do you say, you jerky little old uninformed illiterate you! What makes you think that nitwit starlet with rice pudding between her ears has the brains to have an idea about anything, much less the intricate plot of an entire story? No, you just smile wearily and say, Yes how nice it is that all those stories on all those shows are thought up by the actors.

  It seems incredible to me that people can be so ill-informed as to read books and not remember the name of the author (much less the title, 90% of the time), and then to be so goddammed stupid, and so painfully smug as to pooh-pooh it with a wave of the hand and a casual, “Oh, I never bother looking at who wrote it.”

  It seems equally incredible to me that people who are slaves to the Idiot Box consider all those names that come on after the teaser of a television segment to be a time-waster planned to allow them extra seconds for getting the Ritz Crackers and milk settled before they hunker down to suck up their night’s entertainment. There is a reason for the WRITTEN BY credit at the beginning or end of a show. It is there to say to all of you, this man labored out of the maelstrom of his own imagination to form a coherent story that would pleasure you.

  Much better if trumpets sounded, and gongs were struck, and the music of sackbut, lyre and dulcimer drew the beady eyes and beetle-brows of most TV viewers from their inattention, and proclaimed:

  THIS IS THE ONLY RECOGNITION THE MAN WHO MADE ALL THIS POSSIBLE WILL GET! HONOR HIM FOR THIS FIVE SECONDS!

  Know this: the greatest actor in the world is helpless working behind a bad script. He can be an Olivier, a Welles, a Barrymore, even a Nimoy…he can make you laugh and cry with the merest inflection of his voice, and with a script that is senseless and banal and imbecilically-written…he is a bum. Conversely, give a bum a brilliant piece of writing, and critics in the Great American Heartland will rave for days about that great show they saw. Not because the actor was such a brilliant talent, but because what he had to do was fresh and insightful and compelling.

  And given a fine script linked with an actor as fine as Nimoy, the usually vomitous level of television fare can be raised to something that approaches Art. It happens seldom, because the subsidiary factors are usually all conspiring to send out a product that is as meaningful as beets through a baby’s backside…but when it happens…there is glory there, and grandeur, and a sense of accomplishment, of having done something finer than merely selling living bras or cancer sticks.

  There were days when the artist was king. When the painter and the poet were subsidized by lairds and dukes and kings, when the Pope had Michelangelo painting ceilings for him. Those days are past, and in many ways it is a good thing. But rather than continuing to laud all kinds of creators, the quivering jellyfish masses have atroph
ied their pea-sized brains with lousy confession magazines and gibbering situation comedies and hack cornball bestsellers to the point where they can only support the performing arts in their ardour. The ones who caper most prominently, who bellow the loudest, who appear before them without any collaborative effort on the part of the viewer. And the artists and the writers and the poets struggle to survive.

  In the main the struggle is rewarding, not to mention handsomely paid. But the glory a creator needs to sustain him, to make him something more than a peddler of painted fish…ah, that is missing. The masses have heard of Hemingway, and Spillane, and Jacqueline Susann (God save us!) but do they know who wrote LORD JIM or DOMBEY AND SON or THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER? No, they only know that these pages have sprung up like wheat, unwritten, self-ordained. Just as the plot of each Star Trek miraculously appeared in the minds of the actors, and they got together down on the set one Monday morning and started doing it.

  The world is a strange place, filled with odd-shaped people. It is often ugly and squamish and stupid. Whether you know it or not, one of the few hopes you have to come through it with your head in place, is by relying on your writers. They preserve history for you. They tell you the truth. The newspapers won’t do that, television won’t do it, only the writers remain eternal…the good ones who care, and have not had their hearts and backs broken. The writer doesn’t write one book, or one play, or even one quatrain (as Irwin Shaw has said). He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper; he is on a journey and he is reporting in: “This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.”

  The writer is the core of the television industry. Without his ingenuity and his expertise, all the hardsell producers and all the clever-eyed directors and all the great strutting and fretting actors would be called upon to muddle up their own lines and stories. And we have only to look around the scene to see how well they do at the task. I can only think of two actors who have any real talent as writers: Peter Ustinov and Robert Shaw. All the others trick themselves up with hackneyed situations, and think they have devised a story. Then they call in a real writer and say, “Here, all you have to do is develop this.” Sure, Charlie. All the writer has to do is insert motivation, logic, characterization, tension, consistency, social impact, conscience, pace, progression, humor, internal rationale and a million other unnameable things it took him years of banging a typewriter to understand even by feel. And the actor thinks he has given the writer merely a “clean-up” job.