IGCV9ER-LYHB P0PCF=SCH MFLCEECC0SPVTPZI rocked the refrigerator and shouted, hauling furiously on the door. I never wanted him to die! But I was pulling too hard, or from the wrong angle, or something. Inside, the weight shifted, the fridge slammed face-firs P3MQMTOMZQLT9 J16 Q X 8X FP VCM Y0
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The way it used to be—those words, right? But listen!
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Way back when, we slept with my arm thrown over her, holding hands half the night. Shawna’s left hand a tiny and immobile strength in my own left hand. Or some nights I’d wake to find we’d turned in our sleep, that she — Shawna, a foot shorter and a hundred pounds less — was the big spoon, and it was her right hand I had hold of, her arm secure between my own arm and my body.
Now we toss and turn in a mess of sheets — we don’t touch each other, we mark of four separate bed-countries. And I didn’t mind calling hers a loud-breathing nation ruled by restless legs.
But the way it was! — to lose so much — to feel yourself insulted like that. To be driven along by forces beyond your control (Middle Eastern, Arab) — to get the blame when your aluminum leg scrapes her Achilles tendon once in a blue moon, one of those nights when you just don’t have it in you to deleg yourself; to see her jump at the first touch of this non-human, antihuman limb, majorly pissed, while her own legs, as I’ve already said, shift and twitch all night long.
That is no fair.
I am hitting her with an absence. Not a real leg. And yet, she gets to hit me with real legs, with impunity.
My heart gets beating like /BTM2= 0E-19C PMQ2Q 6 RQG3LA5HL Q S 0FTO4 P1S0OG4
really shoves the blood through hard. I have fewer veins now, but my heart is the same size. So what about my blood pressure? So that’s just one more thing. So I had to fix things tonight, I was thinking — I really, really did.
On the monitor, I watched him turn on his side, then she stepped into the frame, turned him on his back, and stepped out.
I dialed the Gallant Arms, got the same old man- E A=TMHSALO CPMBT6 8EO OP1NPYQ7JKTEH
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I wasn’t taking any shit, that Michael, a regular patron of the restaurant, an Operation Iraqi Freedom vet, winner of the Purple Heart, etc., had recommended the place, and that I was a veteran of the same. Michael was my best friend, I said, and I wanted a table. “I’m getting a table,” I said.
He cleared his throat. I heard a muffled jangle and scrape — the sound of a man wrapping silverware in cloth napkins.
“I hate to correct you, sir,” the old man said, “but he was never your friend.”
I asked him to repeat himself.
“As you mentioned, sir, Michael was a regular here. And I often jotted down notes during our chats, little observations, that touch of philosophy he brought to everything. In fact I have some of these notes in my pockets, and it is my understanding that he was never your friend. I have a note here, sir, that says, ‘I am not that jerkwater’s friend. And I will never be his friend.’”
“That’s not me he’s talking about.”
He said my name. “That is your name, sir,” he said. “Is it not?”
“OK.”
“It is. Of course.”
“Sure. Right. I don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
The monitor on the desk went to static — I hadn’t been watching it, but out of the corner of my eye I saw the change when it happened.
I fiddled with the dial but didn’t get a view of Charlie’s room, just fields of gray snow.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Is anything the matter, sir?”
“It’s this damn baby monitor.”
I rapped it on the desk.
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir. Might I inquire, in your HPMPG0 H0C2 0 G1T5XC S S 5-L LDQMG0
are you experiencing some sort of interference?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, sir, was the device working before you dialed this number?”
“I was watching Charlie in his bed. My wife, she was just offscreen.”
“Very good, sir. I wonder if the culprit is the connection, then. Might I be so bold as to offer a suggestion? Take the phone from your ear and lower it to the cradle. Don’t hang up, just lower it gently. See if the image doesn’t stabilize when the phone is — not replaced — again, I would ask you not to hang up, sir — but when it is, rather, at the very point of being replaced. I’ll hold the line.”
Slow and steady, I lowered it to its cradle. And as I did so, an image revealed itself beneath the visual hiss — my wife kneeling at my son’s bedside, stroking his hair, singing softly — the speaker crackled, then sputtered, and then I heard it—“Next to come in was the ol’ gray cat. Next to come in was the ol’ gray cat.”
When I lifted the receiver back to my ear, black bars rolled across the screen. “That was it!” I said. “How did you know?”
“Just an intuition, sir. If I might further inquire: What is the screen showing now?”
I started to describe the bars, but already they were picking up speed — blurring past the point where I could follow them, and then in the blur there appeared a grainy black-and-white restaurant shot through an exterior window, a small room with checked tablecloths. I told him how the image seemed to shake a bit, like a crude animation, some flipbook a kid had drawn, yet at the same time it was all perfectly clear: the patrons in elegant suits or dresses, a votive candle at each table, and a single rose in a slender vase; a stout, beaming, aproned woman moving between the patrons; and in back an old man in a black suit, high collar, and white gloves, standing at a counter, hunched, wrapping silverware in napkins, the handset of an old rotary phone held between his shoulder and ear.
“A hunched old man! Ha ha ha! My goodness, how extraordinary. I should have known. It must be interference from our security camera. I wouldn’t be alarmed if I were you, sir. I’m certain that your wife and child are just fine. Indeed, I have found in my own life — I was blessed with a wife and son as well, you see — periods of enforced separation are often just the thing. What was it the poet said? Familiarity breeds contempt? Forget about them! No harm will come, not while you’re on the phone with me, sir, we can be sure of that.”
“You think — you think interference is coming through the phone line?”
“Oh yes, sir, it’s quite possible. Do you see?” The old man raised a hand and wiggled his fingers. “If you just saw what I did with my hand, it’s more than a possibility. Wires get crossed or tangled, electrical impulses do battle, and there are atmospheric conditions to take into account as well, along with the magnetic waves slicing across and through the planet at all times, to say nothing of the animals. Something as simple as the burrowing of rabbits could cause no end of mischief. Those warrens are vast, and each year the rabbits expand them and to link them one to the next, so that they may even now be reversing undetectable global polarities. The remarkable thing, when one considers the contraptions we equip ourselves with simply to get by these days, is, as my wife likes to say, most all of it gets on most all the time. Ha ha!” He placed a final napkin roll on the pyramid beside him and shifted the phone from shoulder to hand, his free hand flat on the countertop. “Now sir, if you’d find it convenient, perhaps we’d best return to our earlier conversation. I hate to take up more of your time than is absolutely necessary on such an important day.”