Dead Channels

The coaxial cable lay coiled on the floor like a dead snake. Sarah had taken the modem when she left, along with the good coffee maker and the dog, leaving me with a cable box that blinked 12:00 like some relic from the 1980s. I'd been staring at it for three days.

Three days since she'd said the words that hollowed me out: "I need more from this. I need you to be present."

I wasn't present. I was something worse — a man sleepwalking through his own life, a zombie in business casual, consuming hours in front of screens I couldn't remember watching. Each morning I swallowed the same vitamin C tablet with tap water, some desperate ritual leftover from my father who died of a heart attack at fifty-two. The vitamins hadn't saved him. They wouldn't save me.

The baseball sat on my desk, a paperweight I'd picked up at a Fenway Park game with my dad before the cancer took him. The leather was cracked now, the stitching loose. I'd thrown it with my son last weekend — the last time I'd seen him before Sarah's sister picked him up for "a few days" that were stretching into weeks.

"It's all in the wrist," I'd told him, demonstrating the grip my father taught me thirty years ago. My son had nodded, already scrolling on his phone. He was twelve, same age I was when the lessons started. The transmission had stopped with me.

Now the apartment was silent except for the refrigerator's hum. I found myself scrolling through apps on my phone, another kind of cable tethering me to nothing at all. Sarah's Instagram showed her at a coffee shop, laughing with someone whose face I couldn't see. The caption read: "Starting over."

I picked up the baseball and threw it against the wall. It bounced back, caught awkwardly, stinging my palm. Physical sensation. Something real.

The vitamin bottle sat on the counter. I took two, dry, without water. Something to do.

Outside, the world continued. People walked dogs, bought groceries, fell in love, fell apart. I was one man in a box, watching a blank screen, waiting for something to happen.

But nothing would. I had to make it happen.

I grabbed my keys instead.