Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

He walked back down the hall to the master bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet there and retrieved the little bottle of pain pills and the blister packs of Imitrex and swallowed the tablets with a handful of water. Then he showered and put on his bathrobe, returning to the bed and propping the single pillow against the headboard and reclining there with his finger on the remote control. The images on the television were of faces and bodies in motion, their expressions like false mirrors. They thought he had lost it somehow. He could not imagine how any of this could be true and yet his phone had been silent. Voice mail empty. E-mail in-box empty save for human resources circulars regarding open enrollment for health insurance.

After a few moments he rose and retrieved another beer from the refrigerator downstairs even though he knew he was already well on his way to being drunk, and opened it as he returned to the bedroom, stepping past the dropcloth he had left in the stairwell. Then a heavy slump onto the bed. He clicked the television remote again. Talking faces and gesturing bodies and occasional cartoon figures and commercials. How many times had he flashed through the stations in their endless loop already? Twice? Three times?

Drive-by shootings in towns he had never heard of. The usual economic terror. Foreclosures everywhere. Apparently the entire country was suddenly unemployed. A small plane crashing into the freeway. There were forests somewhere according to the news, but they were all aflame. Where were these places? And floods somewhere else. A kind of biblical mayhem then. The earthbound comet again.

Inexplicably, he thought of his neighbor, Jennifer, who was probably across the street even now, and actually felt himself rise to the thought of her. He went through the channels once more, hoping in some distant part of himself that there might be some adult channel somewhere that he had missed but he found nothing and after an additional trip through the stations he dropped the remote to the bed again and then tried to adjust the pillow behind him but nothing he could do was particularly comfortable. The giant sofa remained downstairs, a piece of furniture he hated and had not wanted to buy but which now felt like a beacon. There had been a huge flat-screen television in the corner across from it at one point, another purchase Barb had made, but of course that was gone with everything else. It occurred to him that he could certainly move this television downstairs, a prospect that immediately seemed a logical solution to the current problem of his aching body and mind and his general state of anger and boredom and frustration.

In some other moment than this he might have thought the action through, or least might have considered it more carefully than he did now but this was not such a moment. Instead he downed the remainder of the beer and rose from the bed, his head fuzzy from the mixture of painkillers and alcohol, and shifted the armoire away from the wall with some effort and unplugged the television and the cable jack and then stepped back and wrapped his arms around the television itself and lifted it. Like the armoire itself, the television was much heavier than it looked and the smooth angles made for tentative purchase. He jogged it in his hands for a better grip, his mind aching from the effort, and then started for the doorway leading to the hall and then the stairs, his bathrobe flapping at his calves as he moved. Who did they think he was? Who the hell did they think he was? He banged the corner of the television against the wall, staggered back a step and shifted his hands for a better grip. “Crap,” he said aloud.

He managed the first run of stairs to the landing and momentarily leaned the corner of the television against the wall, using the angle to reposition his hands again, the box square but with smoothed angles and rounded corners so there was little to hold with any confidence. Then he leaned away from the wall and turned and began to step forward again, his back aching and his arms already like rubber.

Had he been less exhausted or more sober he might have remembered the dropcloth that remained in the stairwell. But of course that was not the case. When his feet went out from under him he reacted with self-preservation, pushing the heavy object in his hands away from him with explosive force as his body dropped all at once to a sitting position, the impact driving sharp needles of pain through the back of his skull. And there he sat, watching, as if in slow motion, as the television rocketed end-over-end down the remainder of the stairs, his arms remaining outstretched in front of him as if he could somehow will the flying plastic and glass box back into his grip. But then it was already over, the television slamming into the far wall between the entryway and the living room and knocking a triangular hole through the freshly painted drywall with a resounding crack.

He sat midway down the stairs as if that had been his intent all along, his vision already clear and the shock of pain subsiding into the fuzz that was his drunken mind. Crap. Crap crap crap. He closed his eyes and took one long breath. Then he opened them again and rose to his feet and kicked the dropcloth out of the way, descending to the television and shifting it out of the hole it had made in the wall. Tufts of pink insulation. Something else to repair and repaint. Fantastic. But surprisingly the television itself looked intact. He twisted it slightly so that it was propped up on one corner, shifting it into his grip and closing his eyes for a moment before rising to his feet with a loud grunt, the television cradled awkwardly in his arms. Every thought he had left was focused on lying down on the sofa and closing his eyes.

He entered the living room and managed to set the television in the empty space once occupied by the big flat-screen. There was no stand of any kind in the corner and the small television looked pathetic there on the carpet, the enormous gray leather sofa facing it as if the black box was something of grand importance.

At first nothing happened when he plugged it in and pressed the power button. Then, from somewhere far inside, a hissing and popping followed by the faint smell of burning plastic. He jerked the power cable out of the wall and sat there in front of the television on the floor as the whole house rocked woozily around him. The gray sofa lay in silence in the center of the room, a sofa he had told Barb he disliked when they first saw it at the furniture store but which she had purchased anyway after he had returned to Houston for more training. Now it was one of the few items she had left behind, a lumbering whale that had beached there in a room lined with blue masking tape and stinking of paint. The scene was enough to make him wonder why he had chosen to bring the television downstairs at all.

“Goddammit,” he said aloud. Then he said it again, loudly and drawn into a kind of angry howl, “Goddammit!”

He returned to the front door and opened it and stepped outside into the night, wheeling the big garbage bin from the side of the house to the front door and returning to retrieve the television. The pain in his mind was constant now despite the Vicodin and beer, as if his slip on the stairs had broken a glass jar inside his skull and the pieces were now free to rattle and scrape the raw red tissue there. He staggered outside with the set, attempting first to heave it into the open garbage container, but the television was simply too large to do much more than sit on the top and so he lifted it again and shuffled out toward the curb, the whole box slipping repeatedly in his grasp.

He might have thrown it against the concrete. There was certainly that urge. The screen would shatter. The sound of it would reverberate through the streets and houses and the vacant lot. But someone was moving down the street toward him and so he knelt and awkwardly lowered the box to the sidewalk, panting, his arms weak and his hands numb from the effort. For a brief moment he tried to stand but instead sat on the television itself, trying to catch his breath, his bathrobe slumping over him like a burial shroud.