From Rip Rense's novel, "The Oaks."

69. Be Seeing You

He had started the summer of ’68 greasy-haired, nervous, timid. "The Creep.” Rudy had taken care of the hair, though, advising him for the first time in his life to keep the grease away by washing it every day, and to let it grow out from Laine's P.O.W. cut. Well, why not? Laine had been gone, and Fred Bogle didn't seem to pay much attention to him, and once Laine came back, she didn’t, either. So The Duke's Panama hat with the brown band now covered a head full of longer blondish strands. Then there had been Dr. Jean and the Pig and an enchanting month in Isla Vista, followed by a message of encouragement from The Beatles. . .

But there was one more ingredient in the summer of ’68.

Every Saturday night at 8:30 p.m., Charlie planted himself, focused, quiet, still, his bedroom TV on channel 28, the "educational" station. It was there that they showed the summer series from England, "The Prisoner,” with Patrick McGoohan.

Lanza. . .Beethoven. . .Mahler. . .The Beatles. . .McGoohan. . .

The opening montage was almost too much to take. It spoke to Charlie’s spinal cord. The agent resigned from the British Secret Service, slammed his fist on the desk of his supervisor, roared around in that strange little sports car. . .Just the way his shoes clomped on the echoey corridor on his way to tell his boss off. . .The storm clouds and that cataclysmic thunderclap. . . It all said. . .defiance. . .contempt. “The Village," the idyllic seaside hamlet where they exiled the resigned agent after kidnapping him---a mechanically jolly place of brainwashed residents in striped outfits forced to merrily salute one another with the officially approved greeting, “Be seeing you,” and the response, “And you.” The happy-talk loudspeakers and omnipresent cameras, watching, watching, watching. No one had names. Every one was a number.

"I am not a number! I am a free man!"

McGoohan shouted it with the force of that thunderclap.

Charlie thrilled at every syllable of that statement, for reasons he intuited more than understood, and thrilled every time he heard them during the weeks the show was broadcast. He sat transfixed as each new "Number Two" tried insidious and fiendish and sometimes incomprehensible ways to find out just why Number Six had resigned. That's all they wanted to know. Yet McGoohan wouldn't tell them. Why?

"It's a matter of conscience."

Conscience. Personal feeling. Private decision. Choice. Number Six was his own man, and no one---no one!---would change that. No institution, torture, manipulation, bribery, promise, allure of a woman. . .nothing would crack the bedrock foundation of Number Six's total, massive, granite integrity. What if he had resigned because of an ingrown toenail? Didn't matter. It was his business. No one else's.

"I will not be pushed, stamped, filed. . ."

Eyebrows raised and eyes wide, Charles Bogle took these words very seriously, instinctively responding to McGoohan's intense, ever-uncompromising, inflexible, unshakable, unyielding contempt for irrational authority. For unthinking, intruding, unwarranted, tyrannical interference by those with zero integrity. By those who played games, and engaged in cruelty and artifice. Those who loyalties were to self-aggrandisement. Those who. . .compromised. Those who. . .lied. Those. . .phonies.

This wasn’t just acting. This wasn’t just a story.

The theme music played in Charlie's head all the time, joining the Beatles and Beethoven and Mario and Mahler and all the other. . .uncompromising, unyielding purveyors of integrity and individuality and freedom. He heard trombones and saxes as he rode the bus to school---the ones that played at the beginning of every show right when McGoohan was gassed in his own apartment, before being kidnapped and taken to The Village. At high school, he adopted a pose of intensity, and walked quickly through the school corridors, as if the school was. . .The Village. As if the world was. . .The Village.

When the last episode aired late in the summer, the wacko surreal episode full of masked tribunal jurors chanting "I, I, I," mocking Number Six's individuality, all the neurons in the boy’s imagination went pinballing. And then came. . . The Beatles---my God, The Beatles!---kicking in with "All You Need Is Love." The Beatles in “The Prisoner!”. . .This was hardly mere coincidence. As Number Six's Alice-in-Wonderland trial continued, Charlie thought---knew---that he was seeing an important truth of some exotic and complex sort. He didn't know what the hell it all meant, but he felt it meant something vital. McGoohan understood. The Beatles understood. McGoohan and The Beatles understood each other. He trusted them. Just as he trusted the certainty of Beethoven, the angst of Mahler, and the unhinged passion of Lanza, the cockeyed triumphs of W.C. Fields. And that ending. . .The masked judges, jeering at freedom and individuality, the importance of "All You Need is Love," yet in the end. . .McGoohan somehow ejected and returned to England---with one of the Number Twos! (Leo McKern). . .The Village destroyed, the camera pulling way, way back, showing only Number Six calmly, freely, walking the streets of London to a resigned, nostalgic melody on the soundtrack. . .and one word superimposed. . .

"Prisoner."

            One morning, as he walked out the door, Charlie turned to Laine, raised two fingers to ironically arched eyebrow, and spoke:
            “Be seeing you.”
            He felt subversive, clever, yet she only chuckled, as if he was just being cute. Cute? No matter! She was Number Two, and now, once and for all, he knew what he was. . .

The Prisoner.

McGoohan understood.