Hitchcock Episode 18 Second Chance

Audio Clicks --- Hitchcock Episode 18 Second Chance

Alfred Hitchcock

Episode 18: Second Chance

　　On his sixty-fifth birthday, Oscar Brown pushed his wife down the stairs and killed her.

　　He probably wouldn't have done it if he hadn't found the old yellowed book, which he had found the day before when he was cleaning the attic.

　　The book was strangely named, "Recipes for Miracle Drugs," and as Oscar flipped through the yellowed book, a title caught his eye: "The Formula That Makes a Miraculous Change in Your Life." Underneath this quirky title is a recipe that surprised Oscar because the ingredients in it could be found in any pantry. Underneath the recipe, there is an important note: "Drink this recipe only after you have rid yourself of the person or thing that annoys you." You should mix all the ingredients together and mix well and drink them. Miracles will then happen, and you will get everything you deserve from life. "

　　Oscar felt the note was a joke: If you get rid of the person or thing that annoys you, why would you need this recipe? Still, Oscar remembers the house where he and his wife lived, and the former owner was said to be an old woman who had been hanged for witchcraft. Oscar repeated the words, "Miracles will happen later..." If he hadn't strolled into the park the next day, he might have forgotten about it.

　　It was his birthday. He was sixty-five years old, too old to die; he sat in the park, watching mournfully the lovers walking in the sun, the young lad's arms wrapped around the young girl's slender waist; he heard the girl's sensual laughter before the kiss.

　　The cruel contrast between his wife and the young girls in the park was unbearable.

　　Nadine always wore a turtleneck feather dress. At night, in their bedroom, she dressed neatly, always putting on a long flannel pajamas, and under the cover of this dress, she began to undress. She always woke up half an hour before dawn every day, shook Oscar awake, and then began to nag and accuse the evils of the world, nagging until he went to bed at nine o'clock at night. She cleaned the house spotlessly and asked him to clean it for her. She paid special attention to cleaning the keyholes. Oscar found the act symbolic and frustrated.

　　So Oscar sat in the park, looking at the young lovers, realizing that his youth had passed, and couldn't help but shed tears of self-pity. He deserved the girls, but he didn't. He had never been given an emotional hug from a young girl, never heard a young girl moaning passionately, all because he had married Nadine for money at the age of twenty-five.

　　When he finally walked home, his heart was burning with desire, so he pushed his wife down the stairs.

　　Before reporting to the police that his wife had an accident, he concocted the potion according to the recipe in the old book, and drank it all while it was a little salty.

　　At first, no miracles happened at all, except for finding out that I was really rich.

　　He married Nadine for money, but after getting married, he found that Nadine was very serious about the money. That money is only now in his hands. In addition, he worked hard for forty years, and Nadine took all the money he earned and saved it. Nadine was frugal and rarely used money except for daily expenses.

　　So, now he found that he got more than a million yuan at once.

　　For a whole month, it seemed that Oscar had been suffering all his life in exchange for this money.

　　But, just then, the miracle began.

　　His hair began to slowly change from gray to brown. His limbs began to move forward. His appetite was getting better and better. The glasses he was wearing began to blur, and finally the ophthalmologist advised him to take them off. He complied, and found that he had regained the good eyesight he had seen in his youth.

　　His expectations were getting higher and higher, and he couldn't wait, but he tried to control himself and wait patiently until his third tooth grew out of his upper gum.

　　He's getting younger!

　　This of course created a conundrum for him, but he had a solution. Before anyone noticed that he had changed, he had quietly left his hometown and gone to a hotel five hundred miles away, where he had drawn up a plan that he had been unswervingly carrying out ever since.

　　He had lived forty years with Nadine, and now he had decided to erase those forty years until he had returned to twenty-five, when he would find or buy a silly, beautiful blonde and have fun with her.

　　He would have to marry the blonde, for it was only by this method that he could monopolize her; but he felt that there was nothing wrong with you marrying a mistress instead of a wife.

　　But he should avoid detection. If the world knew he was one year younger every six months, they might be interested in him. The government might lock him up in a house with barbed wire around it, and no blonde would come to see him unless she bought a ticket to see him. Of course, if a blonde knew that he was too young to need her to change his diaper by the time of their silver wedding, she would certainly not marry him, no matter how stupid she was.

　　So Oscar moved every six months, swapping his fortune from one bank to another.

　　He had always been a man, but it wasn't because of Nadine, in those quiet rooms, when he had retreated from sixty-five to sixty, fifty-five, fifty, and he sat there, overjoyed, sometimes muttering to himself, wondering what he was going to do once he was back twenty-five.

　　He was approaching thirty, and he found it hard not to flirt with the girls; and when he was past thirty and into his twenties, the devil kept whispering in his ear that it didn't matter if he started a few years in advance. But Oscar Brown knows that it's hard for a person to be steadfast in his or her own way, and he shouldn't break his original plan.

　　So, in order to enjoy it better in the future, he lived an ascetic life like a resentful partner.

　　When he reached the age of twenty-six and a half, he hurried to New York, rented an apartment on Park Avenue, and before he could open his luggage, he rushed to Manhattan at dusk.

　　He didn't have to abstain tonight.

　　Most twenty-six-year-olds who crave sexual pleasure think that just love is enough, but that's because they don't understand human nature. Oscar had studied human nature for eighty-five years, and he knew perfectly well that lovers who did not spend money were not welcome.

　　So for those six months, Oscar had been spending money. He spent his money in nightclubs and haute couture stores, on fine food and expensive liquor, on expensive brown-haired women's expensive clothes.

　　He looked for the brown-haired girl for acting, because his twenty-fifth birthday was coming soon.

　　Finally, he went looking for his blonde, and he found her in the stripper's at the Hikers' nightclub. Her name was Gloria, and she fell in love with him as soon as she saw his wallet.

　　She was the kind of poor girl who was common. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother was a washerwoman with many lovers. She has many siblings. In her home town, decent people looked down on her.

　　"I think I'm a dreamer," she said. "I want to live a good life."

　　So she hitchhiked to New York.

　　"I want to live a better life," she said.

　　According to Oscar's observation, she did find that she was with men who spent so much money, attending crazy dances, eating and drinking, and drunkenly dreaming of death.

　　Oscar never met a man who was more flattering to men than Gloria.

　　So on his twenty-fifth birthday, Oscar married her.

　　The next morning, she surprised him.

　　She restored her hair to its original brown color.

　　"I'm finally a decent person," she said.

　　She took out many ugly, inferior clothes from her dowry box.

　　She was required to go to bed at nine o'clock at night and not to drink spirits at home.

　　She checked his books and announced that from now on, she would be in charge of the money.

　　She told him he should get a good job and get a good job. "I know you're rich, but you can't waste your life," she said.

　　He filed for divorce and she said it was undignified and he'd better not think about it because she wouldn't give him a reason to divorce, and she's not that kind of girl anymore.

　　From the day he married her, Oscar, like everyone else, was getting old again.

　　As it promised, that recipe gave him what he deserved.

　　He spent another forty years with Gloria.