Cable to Nowhere

The coaxial cable lay coiled like a dead snake on her kitchen floor. Sarah had ordered the disconnection three weeks ago—another severance in a year of them. First the marriage, then the job, now the sixty-dollar monthly reminder that she used to believe in something called the American Dream.

'You're making a mistake,' Mark had told her over the phone. 'Baseball season's starting.' Mark, who hadn't watched a game since college, who suddenly cared about her television package because he'd run out of other ways to pretend they were still something.

The cable guy—his name tag read JAVIER—stood in her doorway, his shoulders slumped with the particular exhaustion of men who spent their days disappearing into other people's homes, fixing problems that would just recur. He knelt by the wall socket, his movements practiced and gentle, like he was performing surgery instead of removing her access to three hundred channels of escapism.

'Strange thing,' he said, his voice thick with an accent she couldn't quite place. 'My friend, he worked this route before me. Said there was this woman, cried when he installed internet after her husband left. Said she kept asking if the cables would work long-distance.' He looked up at her, his eyes ancient. 'Like the wires could reach someone who wasn't coming back.'

Sarah's throat tightened. 'Your friend wouldn't have been named Ben, would he?'

Javier paused, wire strippers hovering. 'Yeah. Benji. How'd you know?'

'Ben was my friend,' she said. 'Died two years ago.' The words came out rusty, unused. She hadn't said them aloud in months.

Javier set down his tools. 'He talked about you. The crying woman.' He smiled sadly. 'He said some connections don't need cable.'

Outside, the neighborhood kids played baseball in the street—methaphorical crack of bat, distant joy, everything she'd ordered and then canceled. Sarah knelt beside Javier and watched him work, understanding finally that she wasn't cutting herself off from anything. She was just admitting what she'd known all along: some wires reach nowhere, and that's the only thing that makes them real.