First Thrills

Programwith a Happy Ending by Cynthia Robinson

The worst part about dying alone in front of your TV is that you can’t get to the remote control. Victor Secco learned this soon after he died in his Barcalounger. His TV was on. In fact, it was blaring. That’s what the headlines said: Mummified corpse found in front of blaring TV.

It’s hard to say when, exactly, Vic’s pharmacological catatonia crossed over into the big sleep. He was up to six or seven Ativans a day, and a couple of Ambiens at night, and then Marina would give him a Ritalin when she wanted him to transfer funds or sign checks. It was all kind of like being dead already. Only you watch a lot of TV.

The first couple of girls who came over-the girls from the service-they would say things like, “Let’s get you outside, Mr. Secco.” Or, “How about some fresh air, Victor?” He’d tell them, “Fuck you. Get out of the way of the TV.”

They didn’t get it. They thought Victor watched so much TV because of the stroke. They didn’t get it when he said he wanted a happy ending, either. They thought he was talking about the TV show. Like he gave shit whether or not Crystal got back together with Jack.

Marina got it, though. She was the third or fourth girl the service had sent over. He waited until she was giving him his sponge bath. Then he said he’d like a happy ending. She smiled, slack-jawed and lupine, and she put a towel over him down there and worked her fist up and down until he was very happy.

“You are bad boy, Victor,” she said in that crazy Russian accent. The accent made it better. He liked to pretend he was James Bond and she was a KGB operative trying to seduce government secrets out of him.

Sometimes he wished that had actually happened. If an operative had approached him when he was at TRW, he would have sold everything he could have copied onto a floppy disk. But no spies ever came forward. No windfall. No house in the Balearic Islands, no bank account in the Caymans.

Instead, Victor had to slog it out, stacking up commissions, one contract at a time. Ballistic-missile systems. Smart bombs. Nerve gas. You work like an asshole. Lots of overtime. Taking clients out for lunch, drinks, dinner, drinks.

And now, for what? So he could sit in front of the TV, goofed up on meds, with nothing to look forward to but his daily hand job.

Marina wasn’t supposed to come over every day. But she said it was obvious to her that Victor needed her there. The people at the agency didn’t understand. She said she’d work for him freelance. Off the books. Cash. She brought groceries, and meds, and she’d turn on the soft- porn station when he was ready for his happy ending. That made it go faster. And she started doing more things for him, extra things. Running his errands. Picking up around the house. Selling his car. Putting his golf clubs and stereo and the furniture he didn’t need onto eBay.

“You’re so alone, Victor,” she’d say.

He’d point the remote at the TV and change the channel.

One day he looked down at his watch.

“Hey, Marina,” he said. “What the fuck. This isn’t my Rolex. This is some Mickey Mouse watch.”

“Is yours, Vic,” she said.

“Look at the second hand,” Victor yelled. “The second hand of a Rolex sweeps. This is not a sweeping motion. This is ticking. It ticks. Like a fucking Timex! That’s not sweeping. This is some cheap shit from Bangkok.”

“Time for your meds, Vic.”

“Some piece of shit knockoff,” Victor said.

She popped a couple of Valiums in his mouth and tipped the Dixie Cup to his lips. Didn’t I just take my pills, Victor wondered.

“Drink your Ensure,” Marina said.

“It tastes funny,” Victor protested.

Marina stuck the bendy straw in Victor’s mouth and rubbed the crotch of his tracksuit until all the Ensure was gone.

“God damn it!” Victor said. “That shit tastes so bitter.”

“Your detective show is on, Victor,” she said, handling the remote control.

Victor loved that show. It was about a renegade cop who uses psychic powers to find murder victims. The cop’s powers led him to a 7-Eleven. He was convinced there was a corpse in the back of the standup freezer. Vic felt a touch of indigestion. They exhumed the body from behind the frozen Salisbury steaks. Vic felt prickling up and down his legs. It spread up his torso.

He heard a man’s voice. A Mexican accent. Where’s the Mexican? There’s no Mexican on this show.

Then he recognized the voice. It was Pedro, the pool guy. He was talking to Marina. They were in the room, behind him. Victor heard the glass patio door sliding shut. Giggling. Marina and Pedro. He was whispering. She shushed him.

Next, they were standing in front of him. Marina was biting a hangnail on her thumb. Pedro bent down and peered into Victor’s face.

“Why are his eyes open like that?” Pedro asked. He waved his hand in front of Victor’s face. “I think he’s dead.”

“Get the laptop,” Marina said. “And take those gold chains off of him. They could be worth something.”

Pedro went to turn the TV off. Marina stopped him. She said they should leave it on, loud, like normal, so it looks like he’s home, just watching TV.

“Should I turn off the AC?” Pedro asked.

“No,” Marina said. “Leave it on. Or else he’ll stink up the place and the neighbors will call police.”

They left.

Baretta came on the TV. In the old days, back when he and Joanne still lived in Laguna Beach, Victor would come home from work and watch Baretta. Or Kojak. Those two were his favorites. Although, he also liked Rock Hudson in McMillan & Wife. That was before McMillan was a fag. That reminded him: he used to watch Rockford, with that guy who was Maverick. And, speaking of fags, Victor liked Ironside because Raymond Burr was a cripple and could still solve crimes without getting up. Victor thought he’d heard that Ironside was a fag, too.

And he liked Cannon because the show always got personal-Cannon was always solving a crime for some dame who was a former girlfriend.

“He sure gets a lot of action for a fat guy,” Victor would call out to Joanne who was in the kitchen.

Plus, when it came time for Cannon to nail the perp, the crim would take off running and then they’d show Cannon start to run and cut right to Cannon grabbing the guy by the collar and tossing him on the ground. Every time that happened Victor would laugh and holler for Joanne to come in and see it.

“They never show the fat guy running,” Victor would bray.

But Joanne didn’t give a shit about Cannon. She wouldn’t even look at the show.

All Joanne ever did was complain. Not shrill, but plaintive. Like a martyr. Saint Joanne, our lady of neglected sorrows. Victor couldn’t even recall the sound of his ex-wife’s voice. It had been muffled, always coming from over his right shoulder. Joanne always stood in the blind spot of Vic’s recliner.

Joanne would pepper Victor with questions and demands. Did you get the car smogged? You need to talk to Ronny about his allowance. Look at what the girl did to my hair!

She never asked about Heidi. Victor wasn’t even sure if Joanne knew her name. She always referred to her as “your secretary.” “They call them ‘administrative assistants’ now,” Vic would tell her. “What-ever,” Joanne would say, “she’s curt with me on the phone.”

“What?” Victor would have to yell.

“Curt,” Joanne would yell back from the kitchen. “She’s rude and disrespectful when I call you at the office. Who does she think she is?”

When Joanne came home from work, she would always go straight to the kitchen. She’d take off her shoes and hang her blouse over the back of a kitchen chair. She’d cook dinner in her brassiere, and her skirt and her suntan pantyhose with the reinforced toe. Joanne would stand at the stove, stirring Ragu spaghetti sauce. The loose flesh at the back of her upper arms quivered. But her breasts stood high and firm in the cross bracing of her sturdy white brassiere.

Joanne stuck it out until Ronny went off to college.

One afternoon, while Victor was watching a sport-fishing program, Joanne entered the TV room. She was wearing her blouse, and carrying a suitcase. She said she was going to her sister’s, and there were potpies in the freezer. After a month, Joanne hadn’t come home. But Victor received a letter from her lawyer.

Victor continued to get mail after his death. Every morning, the postman slipped mail through the slot. It fell onto a pile drifting up against the door.

As a corpse, Victor received glossy brochures beckoning him to join other active seniors in their retirement communities. The retirees in the ads were always cutting up-spinning brodies in their golf carts or coasting on their bicycles with their feet kicked up in the air. And the active senior men were always with foxy active senior women who looked like forty-year-old models in gray wigs.

It was when he retired that Victor noticed Heidi started going out more. They’d only been married for a couple of years. But she was restless. She’d leave dinner for him, a plate covered in foil. He’d put it in the micro wave and eat on a TV tray. When she got home, she’d turn off the TV and go to bed. She’d leave him sleeping in the Barcalounger.

They didn’t start fighting until the move came up. Victor was ready to go to Palm Springs; he’d been looking forward to it for years. But Heidi said she was too young to go out there. “What about my career,” she said.

“You’re a fucking secretary,” Victor said, “what career?”

Heidi got herself a town house up in Newport Beach with the settlement money. And Victor noticed that Ronny stopped calling him around that time. He suspected something he didn’t even want to say out loud. Ronny and Heidi were the same age, and she did “confide” in him. That’s what she’d called it. Fuck them, he said to himself. And he moved out to Palm Springs on his own.

A couple of days after Marina and Pedro split, Victor felt a tugging sensation at his abdomen. The TV was playing that show about the renegade cop who solves crime with his obsessive-compulsive disorder. The OCD cop worked with another cop who had Asperger’s syndrome. He solved crimes with his overbearing nature. That autistic guy’s going to get his own spin-off, Victor thought.

The tugging at his abdomen got stronger. And to Victor’s surprise, a slender, glistening cord shimmied out from the elastic waistband of his tracksuit pants. It aspired up, toward the ceiling, pulling at his navel.

Then Victor was on the ceiling, looking down at himself sitting in the Barcalounger. He held his hand in front of him, and it shimmered silver and white, like a TV screen in the old days when the programming ended for the night.

He remembered how he’d often wake up in his chair and that static screen would be crackling. It made him feel kind of blue, kind of alone. Now the TV played twenty-four/seven, and Victor didn’t wake up.

He looked down at the silver cord, tracing its trajectory. It looked so fragile-it was crimped and looping and it glistened wet. But it was strong. The cord anchored into Victor’s navel and it tethered his silver, shimmering self-his self that was floating along the ceiling-to the brown, dry corpse in the Barcalounger below.

I am dead, Victor realized.

Vic sat dead in front of his TV watching more episodes of a psychic renegade cop. He also regularly saw a show about a gritty renegade cop. This guy had so much grit that he took on international terrorists-Towelheads, Victor identified them-all by himself. Gritty cop was always under the gun. For instance, he had just hours to locate a nuclear bomb no bigger than a burrito. Under this pressure, the gritty detective had to do the only thing that a real renegade can do. He tortured suspects with ordinary house hold items: duct tape, ballpoint pens, and, in one case, an electric nose hair trimmer.

The AC kept the ranch bungalow cool and dry. The Freon circulated, leeching the scant humidity out of the air, wicking the moisture out of Victor’s body.

His skin cured into beef jerky. His eyeballs clouded over with a bluish white film, and they popped out of his eye sockets and rested on his cheekbones. They burst and flattened, so they looked like two hatched reptile eggs, dried under the desert sun into empty leather sacks.

Marina’s face flashed onto the TV screen. It was an old police- file photo. Her blond hair looked very yellow, and her roots showed. She was pale and when it was frozen on film like that-when she wasn’t talking or licking her lips-her jaw looked very long and narrow. A photo of Pedro appeared beside her. He looked frightened and bewildered, childish. Greasy fucking Mexican, Victor noted. A bright sheen bounced off the tight curls of Pedro’s mushroom-cap hairdo.

Then a third photo appeared: a bald man with face like a boxer-broken nose, piggy little eyes, mean slash of a mouth. The newscaster said his name was Boris something or other. He was an “associate” of Marina’s. Boris, Victor snorted. That’s rich. How fucking cliché.

Boris was being sought by the authorities, the newscaster said. Live film of a desert scene rolled onto the screen: a black Lincoln, high-centered on the edge of an arroyo. The car doors were standing open. A couple of lumps were lying on the sand, covered in white tarps.

Dirt nap, Victor announced to himself.

Week after week, Vic floated dead, bobbing along the ceiling of his ranch style bungalow. Below him, his desiccated husk withered into the Naugahyde of the Barcalounger.

The TV blasted.

Program after program. Commercial after commercial. Season after season. Through live coverage, and summer reruns. Through hurricanes, murders, and high-altitude bombings. Through real cops, fake cops, fake real cops. Through make overs, liposuctions, and boob jobs. Through entertainment, infotainment, and docudramas. Through re-enactments, dramatizations, and purely fictional events. Through summer, then winter, and then through summer again. The television glowed blue and white, flickering over Victor’s lifeless face.

Marina had showed him how to set up his automatic payments. She’d been sure to leave enough money in the checking account to cover at least a year of utility bills. There were so many passwords, and clicks, and “I Agree” buttons-it was so easy to cash out the stocks and drain the 401K. And who had the money now? Maybe Boris.

It was two years before anyone came to the house. The visitor didn’t come to see Victor. He came to read the meter. He let himself in the side gate and walked around the back of the house.

The pool was drained dry and full of palm fronds. They’d blown down from the date palms over the course of two spring seasons when the winds are high and fierce. The dried palm fronds crinkled and rustled in the arid cement bowl of the pool. Tree rats harbored in the withered leaves, burrowing into the arboreal necropolis.

The meterman stepped back from the pool. Where there are rats, there are snakes.

He heard a television blasting. It was a game show. A crowd roared; Wheel of Fortune.

Some old person, he thought. Can’t hear.

He rang the back doorbell, then pounded on the door. He walked over to the glass sliding door, looked in the window through the gap in the vertical Levelors. He saw Victor-his profile sagging, his hair bristling, his leather hands were clamping black talons dimpling the armrests.

When the gurney wheeled out onto the driveway, the silver cord that attached Victor to the brown husk dissolved. He floated freely, into the cloudless sky, looking down at the streets in their tidy grids, the rows of palm trees lined up so neatly, so intentionally, and the swimming pools, blue and twinkling like merry gems.

As he floated higher, Victor realized, without alarm, that the shimmering silver pieces that suggested his form were drifting apart. The spaces between the silver became wider, and wider, until there was nothing but space. A brief thought flashed. Victor knew that he would, himself, be on television that evening. And he felt curiously happy, because he no longer cared.

CYNTHIA ROBINSON lives in San Francisco. She is the author of the Max Bravo series of black comedy mysteries. St. Martin’s Press is publishing The Dog Park Club in 2010 and The Barbary Galahad in 2011.