I’d been silent on the matter. But for weeks I watched television on a small, soundless, 14″ black and white set that had, without explanation, replaced my big 72″ HD/3D screen. No words. No reason. I felt I should say nothing, an that I should pretend to be satisfied and enriched by the barely-visible, no-audio device that had replaced my somewhat absurdly behemoth albatross of a set.
Finally I asked. “Did something happen to my big TV?” A big smile blanketed her face. “Yes. Mr. Duffie had been asking about it. It’s his now. I wanted him to have it so that you could get back on your original path, get back to what you started.”
She could have been referring to many things, many projects and careers started and left aside. The irony of the television replacement is that I spent far more time watching it than I ever spent with the big screen. Soundless, ambiguous, I could barely even see what program or event was being broadcast. Unlike the big set, where every nose hair and dirty fingernail was so clear you could trim it yourself, this set was more of a hazy phantasm.
I stepped into the bathroom, asking myself how Bruce Duffie knew anything about my television. How did my mother even who Bruce Duffie was? When was the last time the name Bruce Duffie so much as entered my mind?
I closed the bathroom door and found myself not alone, but in the company of a rat. A big fat, snickering beast feasting on something I cared not to declare. I had shut the door but promptly reopened it, softly striking the rat and causing it to scamper away into a large hole next to the sink. I asked “When did rats get here?” I had never seen them here. She just laughed “Oh, that one’s a cutie.”
