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Page - CW 221 NMC Gilda Povolo Nancy Griesinger

REMOTE CONTROL

Clara gazes at the stilled  picture on the television screen. She closes her eyes. Moments before children had been playing on the screen. They were on a playground swirling about on a merry-go-round. Happy twirling children, arms waving, going round and round. Now stillness.  Frozen little creatures in a  still-born picture, as if the tape has gotten caught on something.

Clara turns the volume down. She won't need to hear the sound until he comes home. Not until he comes ambling up the walk, empty lunch bucket in hand.

She puts the remote control device in her apron pocket.
She wants to zap the world. Silence all the voices. Wants to close her mind as well as her eyes. She wishes, with all her heart, she could click the world off. Wishes she could use the remote control to silence him, stop him in his tracks, drown him out. If she could have him there in front of her now frozen like the children on the screen maybe she could breathe again. Even live again.

Clara wants to drown in whatever sea of information she can find. She longs to die there somewhere inside that box.
She roams through channels, her brain like a magnet, trolling for anything magical.

When he is at home she mashes the buttons hard, pauses a moment, stops.
No! She moves on.
Like a butterfly, she flits from place to place. A humming bird taking minute sips of the world. She roams the tube, an unsettled creature.

Her husband listens to the infernal zap, click, buzz, between sound bites of human voices being blipped out of existence. 
"Can't take much more," his jaw clenches.　
"Damned odd programs," he thinks,."Damned odd woman."  
 PBS at five-thirty in the morning, full of philosophy, human behavior.
 "Brought to you by a grant from the Katherine B..." something or other.

The room, black as pitch, welcomes the screen's gradual light. A picture of Stonehenge illuminates the set. Fluorescence washes over her. She watches in the purple darkness, and wishes she could see her self bathed in artificial light.
She is cruising the channels, looking for romance and wisdom in pin dots, seeping sieve-like from the screen. Knowledge, is everything.
She has been seeking  knowledge her whole life, but she is lazy.  What she really wants, is to learn by osmosis. Television has become her textbook. So she scans it night and day, and relishes the feeling of power, and control.

Perhaps in conversation with educators, she remembers thinking, if she listened carefully, something would rub off. One day, she was sure, if she stayed attached to a better class of person, she would awaken and feel whole, filled with witty sayings and profound statements. But in social situations she sat on the sidelines, motionless, as if watching a play.

No matter. She was content to sit...and watch.

She learned a great deal from TV. Zap!

Over to commercial programming.

EYE WITNESS NEWS! "There are political ramifications...." CLICK.

"Mylanta!"

Old NBC programs.    "Witt-Thomas."  Reruns of comedy shows. Blip!


He moves at a snail's pace.  Tiptoes behind her. Out the corner of her eye she sees a flutter of white shirt tail.  She stares straight ahead refusing to acknowledge his presence.

The commentator's voice. Something about love being a vapor. She laughs. The high pitched cackle he hates. Subtitles for the hearing impaired. She turns the volume down and keeps her eyes glued to the set. She is under the spell of the screen.

He walks past her and glances at the box. Faded film, brown and dull, flickering, showing people from the sixties in bell bottom pants and Afros. Sassoon blunt cuts swing past the camera. He doesn't look at his wife. She hopes he is on his way out. He hopes she is gone when he comes home.

There is nothing to indicate to either of them that she will be dead by midnight.

She watches hour after hour with the sound off. She can fill in the sound herself. She's been doing it for years, needing only the picture...an image of a longed for life.
 Zap! Zap! Zzzappp.

She listens for his heavy footfall on the porch, and  turns the sound up. It keeps him from talking to her. He talks anyway.

"Turn the thing down!" he shouts.

She pushes the volume higher and watches the trail of green daggers growing at the bottom of the screen.   "Turn it down!" He screams.

CLICK. More green slashes. She pushes the sound higher. CLICK. Click!
She hears him heating a can of soup, spilling the crackers. She sighs.
"He never cleans up his messes," she whispers.

She clicks to PBS.  An English drama. He glances into the room where she sits. A few more green lines on the bottom of the screen. The sound is at full tilt now.

He stirs the soup.

In his head he hears something odd. A snapping like electrical wires, loud like the snapping she makes with that device.  "Remote control," he whispers, and opens the kitchen drawer where she keeps a few tools.

He stands behind her. She knows he is there. He raises his arm above her head. The sound in his brain drones on, the clicking and zapping fusing together, a thousand times, over and over, the clicking in his brain...

He buries the hammer in her skull.

After he finishes his soup, he places a blanket over her dead body and unplugs the TV. He stands, for a moment listening to the stillness in the house, then ambles off to bed.
"He never cleans up his messes," He smiles at her words.

His sleep is sound this night. The silence embraces him, holds him.  This night there will be peace.  In the morning he will call the police.