Dead Air

Marcus sat in the cable van at 2:47 AM, the antenna sagging like a broken question mark. Fourth service call of the night.

He'd become a zombie somewhere around year seven at the company—not the flesh-eating kind, but the worse sort: the one that shows up, does the job, and cannot remember afterward why any of it mattered. His daughter had stopped asking about his day three years ago. Probably because she'd stopped seeing anything behind his eyes worth asking about.

Mrs. Gable's television flickered with muted news—another crisis somewhere, another market dip, another nothing that would matter by morning. But here in her living room, the silence felt thick, like being underwater.

"You're not even watching," she said.

He hadn't heard her approach. She was maybe forty, silk robe loose at the collar, whiskey glass in one hand, his cap in the other.

She held up his faded Tigers hat. "This yours?"

"Yeah." He touched his head, surprised. "Haven't noticed it was gone."

"Haven't noticed you were gone either, probably." She set the glass on a coaster, placed the hat on her head. It swallowed her. "My husband used to wear one like this. Back when he was still someone I recognized."

"Where is he?"

"Sleeping. Same house, different lives." She gestured to the television. "You fixed the cable. That's something. We can both pretend to care what's happening in the world again."

Marcus should have left. Should have taken the ticket, gone to the truck, driven to the next apartment where someone else needed their connection restored. Instead he stood there, a zombie suddenly aware of his own rotting.

"You want to know the real problem?" she asked. "It's not the cable. It's that we forgot how to be disconnected."

She took off the hat, placed it on his head. Her fingers lingered.

"Go home, Marcus. Before you forget where that is."

He drove until dawn, the hat on the passenger seat like a small, strange heart, and somewhere in the gray light between sleep and waking, he remembered what his daughter's laughter sounded like.