Cable to Nowhere

Marcus stared at the coaxial cable dangling from his wall like a dead snake. Three weeks since his divorce, and he still hadn't called the cable company. The TV stayed dark, but he found himself watching the blank screen more often than he ever watched the news.

"You're eating spinach again," his sister had said yesterday, eyeing his lunch with that mix of pity and disgust she'd perfected since their mother's funeral. "It looks like depression."

It wasn't depression. It was efficiency. Spinach kept. Spinach didn't require cooking. Spinach was the opposite of Julia, who had required constant attention, validation, and three different kinds of cheese just to feel alive.

The bull market had ended the same day his marriage did. Marcus, senior analyst at Sterling & Chase, had shorted a tech stock the morning Julia moved out. The position had collapsed by noon. His boss, a man whose face Marcus had described as "half-chewed gum" in a moment of liquid courage at the Christmas party, called him into his office.

"You've got the instinct of a bull in a china shop," Whitfield had said, swirling his scotch. "But not in a good way."

Now Marcus sat in his empty apartment, contemplating the spinach wilting in his fridge, and wondered when exactly he'd become the kind of man who shorted stocks on instinct and lost.

Then he saw her again—the redhead from the 42nd Street stop. The woman with the fox-like smile and the eyes that seemed to know things she shouldn't. She'd been in his train car every morning for three years, always reading, never making eye contact, until the morning Julia left. That morning, she'd looked at him really looked, as if she could see the fresh cracks in his foundation.

Tonight, she sat across from him on the subway. No book. Just watching him with that unsettling, knowing smile.

"Cable's out," she said, as if continuing a conversation.

Marcus blinked. "What?"

"Your apartment. The cable. It's been out for weeks. I can see it in the way you watch people now. Like you're trying to find the signal."

She slid across the seat, close enough that he could smell rain and expensive perfume. "My name's Sylvia. I work in risk assessment. I've been assessing you for three years, Marcus. You're about to make a very bad investment."

"I already did," he said bitterly. "Lost my marriage and half my portfolio in the same month."

"No," Sylvia said, her voice dropping. "You're about to invest in hope again. And that's always the riskiest position."

The train lurched. Her hand brushed his—electric, terrifying. "Come home with me. I make excellent spinach. And I promise not to tell you anything you're not ready to hear."

Marcus looked at the cable still dangling from his wall that morning, the dead snake waiting to be reconnected. He looked at Sylvia's fox eyes, clever and cruel and maybe, just maybe, exactly what he needed.

"I'm not a bull anymore," he said quietly.

"Good," she replied. "I never liked the bullish type anyway. Too predictable."

The next morning, Marcus finally called the cable company. He didn't need it reconnected. Some signals, he'd learned, came through perfectly clear without any cable at all.