“I’m sick of this cable shit,” he says. “This time it’s a 295 error code.”
“I know. I can see it. You know, I’m really glad I went with the Buffy Comforter. It has natural eucalyptus. Imagine! I wonder how they get it inside the cloth? It smells so fresh.” I stretch my legs in the bed. “I wonder what happened to error code 255?”
“How the hell should I know? It’s the same box with the same you are fucked again message. Only this time the error code is different.”
Yawning I say, “Guess you’ll have to phone them.”
“You phone them, Ellie! You phone them for once!” He chucks the remote across the bedroom. Bellamy makes a lunge for it.
I push off the comforter and scramble out of bed. “No Bellamy! Don’t touch it!” The big yellow lab stands his ground, the remote clamped between his teeth; he’s not giving up so easy.
“Dammit, Jeremy, did you have to throw it! He thinks it’s like a ball.”
But he’s on the phone yelling at the cable company, pausing to hiss at me. “You get that remote away from him.”
I start to moan. “I was sooo comfortable. I was just about to drift off in a cloud of eucalyptus.”
“Our nude?” I hear him say into the phone. “What nude?”
Nude? Automatically I look down my body. You hear nude and immediately you check: Did I go out of the house without my pants? That sort of thing. But all is normal. Blue nightgown. Not even sheer. For a moment I think about those devices – the kind spies use to see long range through windows. I’ve read the really powerful devices can see clear through entire buildings.
“What do you mean by our nude is out?” he’s saying into the phone.
I never close the shades. No houses across the way. Just a sloped valley thick with trees, the city lights in the distance. But to be on the safe side I dash around the bedroom pulling down the window shades, at the same time yelling at the dog. “Give me that remote Bellamy! Hand it over!” On his belly he squirms under our four poster. “Now we’ll never get it back.”
Jeremy covers the phone saying, “Tempt him out with a cookie.” Then saying into the phone, “I don’t have control of my remote at the moment.” Then saying to me, “The cable guy wants me to switch channels.”
“Can’t you do it manually?”
“Oh, yeah, forgot. Manually.”
“Jesus!” I just wanted to doze off to Friends. I had a rough day. One of my travel agent accounts stole millions from a big national tour group. The Asia tour. I’ve been working on it half a year. Everything all in place. That crook! Now we can’t locate her. I figure she skipped the country for China. “That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” I mutter to myself; picking a scab I’ve been picking for months on my leg. It starts to bleed. I have this sense I never want it to heal.
“I’m not sure,” Jeremy’s telling the cable guy.
“Bellamy!” I scream for the dog to emerge. Nothing. “The remote’s going to be full of dog slobber.” I shoot Jeremy my darkest look. He’s way too engaged with the cable guy to notice. “Jeremy!”
He squints in my direction. “What is it?”
What is it? It’s… everything.
I can see he’s sparing me about one second to answer him. When I don’t he goes on a long tangent with the cable guy: how we get the black box every other night, the 255 error code, that we can’t see our favorite shows, now it’s the 295 code, we’re paying all this money, what the fuck and blah blah blah.
Then a few moments of silence.
“Did the guy hang up on you?”
“I don’t get this,” Jeremy says into the phone. “We don’t have a nude. No nudes! Just me and Ellie and Bellamy here. What nude is out? Out where?”
“Oh my god that nude thing again? Out where? Oh my god hang up! Just hang up and start over with a new cable guy! A normal one. This guy is a pervert.”
Jeremy waves at me to shush. He’s saying, “Can you spell that please?” He covers the phone to tell me the guy has a strange accent. Then he tells the guy, “All you cable guys sound exactly the same.”
Suddenly he’s all palsy-walsy with this guy? Then he’s says, “Now I get it.”
I tug on his arm. “Spell what?”
He shrugs me off. He’s nodding into the phone like it’s a tangible presence. He covers the mouth part, telling me, “They have to hide their voices behind this special voice anti-recognition program. Like on the news when an informant’s face is blanked out and the voice sounds muffled. That’s why all these cable guys sound the same when I call. It’s not an accent! It’s for their personal protection.”
Like I could give a shit. I watch Bellamy poke his nose out. When he sees me, he beelines back under.
“Wow,” I say. “With the kind of service this cable company provides I can believe they need protecting.” I’m picturing hordes of people stampeding the cable company office screaming about the error codes. Then it hits me: Our monthly bill never has their actual street address, only a PO Box. Because they totally suck and know they need protection.
“Ah ha!” Jeremy’s saying into the phone. “Our node.” He winks at me.
“Node?”
He shakes his head grinning. “Our node is out.”
“What about our nude? I thought our nude was out.”
“Ten four,” he tells the cable guy.
Nude to node. Just one of those nights. Jeremy clicks off looking satisfied. Why? We still have code 295 and no picture. We also don’t have a remote. Exhausted, I lean against the armoire. Picturing a huge transformer board with a million nodes burning bright red. But not our node. Our’s is out. Cold and dead.
“Could be a long term problem,” says Jeremy. “Our node being out and all.”
No picture. Nothing to watch. Yet he seems sort of neutral about the whole thing. Kind of brainwashed. He stayed on the phone a pretty long time. Was Jeremy indoctrinated into the cable cult? Will we ever have a picture again?
“Don’t worry,” he says.
Bellamy sticks his head out, the remote clenched in his jaw. When I don’t scold, he comes all the way out, lying down on the floor near my feet, tail thumping. I place my heel against his wide forehead. Soft and squishy like a big stuffed animal. “Bellamy you bad, bad boy! If you made teeth marks in the remote you are in such deep shit!”
His eyes roll then he darts back into hiding.
“Ellie, way to go.”
“You’re the one who threw the damn thing in the first place!”
“Must you constantly cuss and swear?”
Me? He has become so de-charged it’s worrisome. What exactly did that cable guy say to him? It suddenly occurs to me: Get nude. If it is a long range vision-finder type of thing, I’m going to give these spies their money’s worth. Let them look clear through the bricks of our house. Somebody’s got to have a little fun. I tear off my nightgown swinging it in the air. Bellamy comes out and makes a leap for it.
“Quick, the remote, he dropped it!” shouts Jeremy.
The remote. Nothing about my nudity. Not a word. Nothing about my nude being out. Nothing whatsoever.
END
Susan Tepper is the author of nine published books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent titles are CONFESS (poetry published by Cervena Barva Press, 2020) and the road novel WHAT DRIVES MEN (Wilderness House Press, 2019). Tepper has received many honors and awards. She’s a native New Yorker. www.susantepper.com
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Just enough hidden under the lighter lines to hint of deeper goings on and make it a good literary piece as well as entertaining. Loved it.
ReplyDeleteLoved the pace and multiple action. The ending was totally unexpected. :)
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