The Throwback Special (12 page)

JEFF HAD A THEORY
about marriage:

All it is, he said, and he said he learned this too late, but all it is, is watching someone and having someone watch you. He paced in front of the mute television, on which a pickup truck drove over boulders in slow motion. He sounded exasperated, as if the other eligible receivers in Room 440 (Randy, Steven, and Derek) had worn him down, forced him to defend his position, though in fact no one had asked him anything, and no one had been speaking about marriage. No one had been speaking much at all. That’s all it is, he said. He said when you’re a kid,
your parents watch your life. They know what’s going on, they’re watching you pretty carefully. Or at least let’s hope they are. They know you have a spelling quiz or a baseball game, they keep track of it all, and so you get the idea that your life is important, valuable. But then you grow up, Jeff said, and it turns out nobody is really watching anymore. It would be weird if your parents knew that you switched cereals in the morning, or that the power went out at your office for two hours. Nobody really knows what your days are like. Jeff said he wasn’t talking about the big things—moving to a new city or having a kid or losing your job. He said he was talking about the tiny, stupid crap that fills most of our days, and that you can’t tell people about because it’s too small and stupid. But it’s your life, Jeff said, right? It doesn’t matter to anyone else, he said, but it matters to you because it’s your life. The water in your basement, the strange smell in your shower drain. Changing your kid’s bedsheets in the middle of the night. Jeff said that life is a precious gift, sure, but usually what life is, is going to the store to buy a stupid piece of shit-ass hardware, and then buying the wrong size, and then having to go back to get the right goddamn size, except the store doesn’t have it. If you’re not married, Jeff said, chances are, nobody sees you make two trips to the store on Saturday morning for that hinge or flange that you don’t even get. Marriage—Jeff saw it so clearly now—what marriage does is at least guarantee that one person is watching. There’s one person who knows you got the oil changed today, or that you waited over an hour for your
dentist appointment, or that you’re trying a new shave gel, or that the running shoes you’ve worn for years got discontinued. On television an adopted child was reunited with her birth mother, but none of the men saw it. And here’s the thing, Jeff said. The wife does not have to care about any of this stuff. It would be weird if she did, Jeff said, right? Because it’s boring, he said, and because she has her own tiny crap she’s got going on in her own life, and that seems important to her. And you’re watching that for her, Jeff said. See? You don’t have to care, he said. You just have to watch. You just have to be sentient, a witness. You don’t even have to watch very carefully. You’re not a scientist. You’re not some astronomer. It’s not like that, Jeff said. It’s certainly not about keen perception, and it’s not about gratitude or sympathy or even appreciation. It really is not about giving or getting credit. Just, Jeff said, just trying to keep the squirrels out of the goddamn mulch. If that person who is watching happens to love you or respect you, or if that person concedes to have oral sex with you, that’s a bonus, Jeff said, but it’s not necessary. It’s not what marriage is for. It’s just vital to have someone who sees your life. It’s no small thing. And look, Jeff said to the men, if you want any more from marriage than that, you’ll be disappointed. He walked to the door, squinted into the peephole. If you want to be connected, Jeff said, or if you want to share a passion, or if you’re thinking
at all
in terms of big, old trees with thick roots, you’re going to end up on the couch. First the couch, he said, then a crappy studio apartment. The only thing marriage
can really give you is the sense that your life is witnessed by another person. A kind of validation, Jeff said. That’s it, he said, and it’s plenty. If you have that, you have a lot. You have everything. But here’s the thing, Jeff said. People don’t like being watched. They resent it. Jeff said that he resented it. He said he wanted to be free from it. He wanted his wife to mind her own business. But when he got away from it—when his wife was no longer watching—he didn’t feel free, he said. He didn’t feel relieved or liberated. He didn’t. He said now he just feels like there’s suddenly no point at all to buying the wrong kind of caulk for the windows. You’re not in a movie, Jeff said. He said that over and over. Nobody sees you, he said. He said that’s why people pretend they’re in movies. People say they want privacy, but they would actually like a camera out in their cold backyard at midnight, pointed through the kitchen window while they make a school lunch for their kids. They want someone to just notice, Jeff said. He said that’s what marriage is for. Otherwise, he said, honest to God, we’re all just like penguins at the North Pole, doing it all for no real reason.

Steven stood at the window, listening to the dark rain. Any weather, when sustained, begins to feel like an interrogation technique. He needed to call the front desk to report the theft of the lottery drum. He needed to tell Randy that Donnie Warren’s wrists are wrapped in tape. It looks like wristbands, but it’s not. It’s tape. Was Jeff still talking about marriage? Was he still yammering with his stupid face about squirrels digging up the mulch? Steven
didn’t care at all about anything Jeff said. Steven would rather hash things out with
George
than endure another speech from Jeff about human relationships. For some reason he found the mention of astronomy particularly infuriating. He checked his phone for pictures or news from the school play, but there was nothing. He was, of course, still glad he had come. He could not have not come.

Randy lay on the bed, flipping through a woodworking catalogue. He disliked Jeff, but not strongly, so he was free to ignore him. Derek lay beside Randy, bored and restless. He was not listening to Jeff. What if, Derek had been wondering, the offense just didn’t run the Throwback Special? What if they drew up another play in the dirt? What if they broke the huddle and then surprised the defense with some other play? They could change the snap, even go with a silent count. Why had this never occurred to him before? Was it crazy? Steven would never go along with it. Randy would. It was an insidious thought, and drunken. A draw is particularly effective against aggressive linebackers, Derek considered. Or a screen.

ADAM STOOD LOOKING
out the window of Room 212 like a homesteader during an April blizzard. The defensive backs, and particularly the safeties, were the least prominent of the players. They backpedaled from tragedy, like inverse first responders. Their job was essential, but
remote and untelevised. This feeling, of being important but unrecognized, distant from the hub, was all too familiar to most of the men. The long-standing notion was that the defensive backs’ room was the party room—“Vegas”—but the truth was that the room typically had a sour mood and an early bedtime.

“If you work in the automotive industry, you have to be thinking about the end of cars,” Adam said, still facing the window. “If you work in phones, you have to be preparing for the day when people don’t use phones anymore. If you work in laptops, you spend your days imagining what comes after laptops. Everything thriving is dying. Every industry has become the fashion industry. The car is dead, the book is dead, the PC is dead. My office is paperless.
Potatoes
are somehow bad for you. People don’t want to live in
houses
anymore. It’s exhausting.”

“Why were you so late, Adam?” Peter said.

“It was a domestic situation,” Adam said.

“What isn’t?” Peter said.

“It was a family emergency,” Adam said.

“You got that right,” Peter said.

The heating and cooling unit ticked and clanked. Chad sat in the orange chair, looking at his phone. His feet, in socks, were wet and cold. He felt that the cold, wet socks were emblematic of his folly and weakness. His throat burned from the cigarette he had bummed off that gray-faced marketer from Prestige Vista Solutions. He wished he had not smoked that cigarette. And it had been foolish to throw his shoes in the dumpster, he now realized.
The only other shoes he had were his cleats. At the time he had thrown his shoes in the dumpster he had felt a rush of defiance, but whom, exactly, had he defied? He liked the shoes, or had at one time, and so he had apparently defied only himself. He had spited his face. He had hoisted himself. His wife hated the shoes, and though she had not demanded or even suggested (nor would she, ever) that he discard the shoes, in discarding them he was, he now felt, executing remotely her unspoken wish. That the actualization of his wife’s desire had felt, out in the rain by the hotel dumpster, so authentically like the actualization of his own desire, meant either that they were soul mates, or that he lived under a totalitarian regime. How was it that he could not, here in his cold, wet socks, make any meaningful distinction between compliance and defiance, or ascertain to whom he had stuck it, if indeed he had stuck it to someone? It was true, however, that his wife was frugal, and she would no doubt object to his throwing away perfectly functional (though detestable) shoes, and so in this way perhaps the act was defiant in its profligacy, like the Boston Tea Party. He would teach her a lesson. He would show her not to not like his things. But that was not what he wanted! He wanted her to like his things, which meant that inevitably she would not like some things. He cared about what she thought. If your defiance reveals vulnerability, not strength, it’s really not very effective defiance. Chad’s original embarrassment about buying the shoes was now compounded by the embarrassment about throwing them away. He had acted like a maniac, and now
he wanted his shoes. A genuinely defiant act, he realized, would be to retrieve the shoes from the wet dumpster. That would be a bold expression of his life force. He could dry them with the hair dryer attached to the wall in the hotel bathroom. But what about Andy and Nate? They had thrown their shoes in the dumpster, too, in a spirit of inebriated and defiant camaraderie, and as an expression of their individual wills. They had all thrown their shoes away, together, instead of smoking a cigarette, but then the guy from Prestige Vista Solutions shuffled out of the side exit with a full pack, and they had all smoked a cigarette anyway, even though they had all quit. Chad
hated himself
. If he pulled his shoes out of the dumpster, Nate and Andy would no doubt see the shoes tomorrow, and they would consider the recovery a sign of weakness, not strength—a kind of capitulation to the overwhelming forces of (feminized) convention, a disavowal of their defiant ritual in the rain. Chad was trapped between two incommensurable systems of meaning. Sifting through the cold and soaking trash of the hotel dumpster would be both noble and craven, depending upon the interpretive community. “Fun here,” Chad texted to his wife. “Luv u.” Charles, who was either a psychologist or a psychiatrist, was here, in this room, and perhaps he could be of help to Chad, but he was at the moment occupied by Peter, who was troubled by a recent incident in the home.

(Chad had missed some of the story, but it seems that Peter had been roasting marshmallows
by himself
with his
gas stove
in the
middle of the night
when his seven-year-
old son entered the kitchen and witnessed the scene. I thought I smelled something, the child had said, staring at Peter warily, refusing to return to bed. Peter just stood there with two perfectly golden marshmallows on the end of a barbecue fork. Big deal, Adam said, still staring out the window. Continue, Charles said. He had the look of one betrayed, Peter said. I think he had a hard time with it, with the idea that this person he loved and trusted could roast marshmallows while he slept. It’s been a couple of weeks, and he’s had trouble falling asleep. He’s wet the bed a couple of times. I shouldn’t have done it, I guess, Peter said. It wasn’t a dessert night. A phone vibrated in a duffel bag
. I’m glad you’re here, Charles. Charles, I’m glad you’re here
. Chad waited in his wet socks, and the waiting felt emblematic.)

“WHERE’S ANDY?”
Gil said in the offensive linemen’s room.

“Probably out smoking,” Trent said.

“No, he quit,” Gil said.

“I could smell it on him earlier,” Trent said.

Trent was lying on his back in bed. The laptop quivered on his stomach like a dog on a roof. Gil stood in front of the television, flipping rapidly through channels.

“What are you looking for?” Trent said.

“What?” Gil said.

“What show are you looking for?”

“I don’t watch shows.”

“Then what do you watch?”

“I don’t care about individual programs,” Gil said. “That kind of vertical viewing doesn’t interest me.”

“What interests you?”

“This,” Gil said, continuing to cycle swiftly through the channels. “Holistic viewing.”

“I watch shows,” Trent said.

“Every channel, every show, is just part of one big show. Like every channel is a pixel, making up a larger picture, the big picture. I started watching like this, and I realized I was getting more and not really losing anything.”

“What does your wife think?” Trent said.

“She hides the remote,” Gil said. “But she’s not a horizontal processor. She doesn’t think that way. A lot of women don’t.”

“What about, like, cohesion?” Trent said. “Or suspense?”

“Suspense is an ancient value,” Gil said.

“Exactly,” Trent said. He steadied his wobbling laptop, and sent a message to the Fracture Compound about Gil’s horizontal viewing.

“I had an idea to program my remote to do it for me,” Gil said. “But then I realized I was thinking about it all wrong. Why alter the auxiliary technology when you could alter the primary technology? The ideal thing would be to have a dedicated channel, a station, that moved through all other channels at random. Horizon TV, I call it. I bet you could sell plenty of ad time because a thirty-second spot would seem, in contrast, like a vast narrative space.
And you’d basically have zero production and development costs. No writers, no producers, no actors. But I couldn’t see a way to get past the lawyers.”