What's On Tonight
Today we accidentally watched the news. Taking it at first for a sitcom; who could blame us? A nation’s leader, playing that classic part of oafish blundering neighbor, putting those living in his orbit on absolute edge, seemingly incapable of spouting a single comment below a bellow.
“Try finding something better?” I suggested to my partner. “I mean I know we could use a laugh…”
“Have we laughed once,” my partner replied, “since this program purred on?”
Then I readjusted my eyes. The sitcom seemed to have switched without our involvement. Now, a dark docudrama filled our screen. Clusters of menacing storms staining a meteorologist’s radar, marching up the Caribbean in cyclic military progression, followed by another grim shot: homes alit and carpeted by spreading wildfire. And this tragic tableau was followed by yet a third: birds washing up along desecrated shorelines, embalmed in the sheen of spilled crude oil.
“We should send money to the residents,” I suggested, with consternation. “Contain whatever mess we can with our wallet.”
My partner parted our purple curtains, opening up a vista of hazy ash. “We’re the residents. That’s happening six blocks away.”
I hadn’t known, or hadn’t known I was quite so capable of not knowing.
Then I thought that my partner must have surfed our remote onto a soap opera. The actors onscreen were positioning themselves as moral compasses one moment, and making licentious claims of conquest the next; the haughty kabuki of their leadership wilting into blame whenever constituents peeped even the most meager concerns and complaints. Jovial as they announced blocking services and the supply of civic sacraments from reaching and aiding any lesser lights who dared share or challenge their stage. That’s when I recognized it as news.
“This isn’t worth watching,” I concluded. “Want to go out tonight instead?”
I meant to a wine bar, or the screening of a new film already promoted to such a saturation point that all plot beats could be inferred from the trailers, and yet, not seeing it seemed somehow an insult. But my partner was no longer behind me. With the screen briefly darkened, I saw our reflected front door, slightly open. I asked my question again, in the dim quiet. This time I spoke my question directly into my partner’s face. Or, at least, its image. The screen had filled with my companion’s form, strolling our shoreline, wearing boots and rubber gloves while I watched, carting cleaning products, part of the show’s newest episode, its reboot, arms outstretched to scrub some stunned seabird, beginning the work to make things right.
