by Aimee Bender
On this particular evening at home, some certain viewers would get down on their hands and knees and kiss the screen, while outside in the streets, beyond the glowing windows of so many homes, the sky overhead sat wide and ready, a white so bright it appeared reflective.
2.
This evening’s episode, like most others, begins with several quirky concurrent plotlines, each meant to build in gentle tension that would be resolved by the half-hour’s end:
(1) Phoebe introduces a new song she’s recently written about ass itch, worded without any direct reference to the shameful cavity itself. Despite the remotely unpleasant subject matter, the song is cute and clever and oddly catchy in a way that many viewers will have trouble dislodging from their minds which, were the airwaves not about to be reduced to static by some inexplicable sonic interference, causing the demise of all worldwide broadcast stations, the show’s producers and the song’s nameless writer could have made a fortune in royalties and iTunes downloads.
(2) A problem between Joey and the noisy neighbors on the other side of his bedroom wall quickly spins into a war of retaliation, seeing who can bother the other the most. Though at first he is confident and joyous, brandishing the loud trombone he played in high school, Joey quickly finds himself at a disadvantage when he realizes his neighbors are college students who stay up all night and own quite a collection of Swedish black metal that leaves him sleepless and wrecked and desperate, all quite to the amusement of the other characters and the crowd at home.
(3) In her frustration after being treated rudely by a convenience store clerk while buying tampons, Monica throws a banana against the wall of her apartment. The banana inadvertently knocks over an antique lamp Ross had salvaged from a local garage sale, which he’d planned to sell on eBay in hopes of raising extra money for a nose job operation. Via flashback we learn that for years he’s been obsessed with the shape of his nose, for which he blames his inability to maintain a healthy relationship with Rachel. Though he declines to allow his sister to pay him for the loss, he excuses himself politely and goes to sit in the closet in his bedroom and buries his face in an itchy sweater and bangs his head against the wall.
It’s not until the second scene after the first commercial break, though, that Rachel’s baby begins coughing.
The croup is nominal at first—perhaps the baby has swallowed a gnat or has tummy trouble. Rachel props the small child on her shoulder and pats her back with authentic-seeming motherly care and poise. She continues to deliver her lines uninterrupted, though the next time we see the baby, her cough has redoubled. She hacks with her whole newborn body, making such noise that there are several lengthy moments where the actors have no choice but to stop and wait to deliver their lines or else repeat them loud enough to be heard. The baby’s face is small and weird, not at all the gorgeous little girl we’d grown accustomed to, made to seem like something that could have come from Jennifer Aniston’s stunning loins. This child looks malformed or sick or sad. The actors look at one other uneasily. Something is wrong. This is not correct. Shouldn’t the director or even the baby’s actual mother have stopped the taping of the program and fixed the child, or at least replaced her? Shouldn’t somebody do something?
Often during the scenes not including the baby, she can be heard hacking from off-screen. The actors appear flustered. Lines are fumbled, muttered, dubbed. No one seems quite sure what to do.
The next time we see Rachel she carries the baby low in her arms. She seems repulsed or confused or frightened, no longer fully ensconced by the immersive demands of her acting duties. It seems almost as if she’s been caught inside the program—as if she has no choice but to go on.
After a long blank stare of no clear distinction, with weird light coming in through the back window, we cut to a commercial for all-beef franks.
3.
From here on, the plotline begins to veer slightly—
During a performance of her ass itch song at Central Perk, Phoebe is interrupted by booing and catcalls. The audience doesn’t like the song. They are angry, tired, overhauled. They are sick of being fed garbage, they shout. The scene culminates in a rather violent coffee-flinging riot in which Phoebe’s acoustic guitar is ripped from her hands and smashed on the coffee counter and she runs bleeding from the venue.
Simultaneously, after the third day of the neighbor noise, which has now turned into a nonstop onslaught of Cradle of Filth’s Midian, Joey looks sickly and moth-eaten. His hair is falling out of his head. His muscle sheen is slumping. He has bright sacks under his eyes and refuses to laugh or smile. He mumbles his lines in a half-assed monotone.
Though Ross reconstructs the antique lamp and lists it with a high and quickly met reserve price well more than four times what he’d paid, he begins to get threatening messages from anonymous users that at first seem playful and even funny, yet soon begin to take on a more violent and disturbing edge. One message uses words banned from public broadcast and includes an explicit description of what the author would like to do to Ross’s mother’s vulva, and yet there is no editing or censored bleeping as he reads the extended lines. The regretful language is therefore broadcast into the ears of the viewing young. The station will be fined several hundred thousand dollars.
At some point, Ross looks directly into the camera as if searching for someone behind the lens. His cracking eye whites reflect a kind of tremor sheen.
The other Friends also find themselves subjected to unfortunate events. Monica suddenly develops a rash over her chin and neck that makes her sort of stutter and, despite the laugh track, looks more disgusting than funny; Rachel begins to find her normal speaking voice subverted to lower and lower tones. Suddenly she sounds much older and like a heavy smoker; Chandler witnesses a car accident in which two are killed. He finds his new pink polo shirt covered in an old lady’s blood as he tries to salvage her from the burning wreckage, only to see she is already dead, as are the Chihuahua and young granddaughter in the backseat.
The normally sunny and peaceful skies programmed to overlook the televised makeshift setting—except in the event that the story called for snow or heavy rain as a punctuation mark to some joke or amusing turn—now take on the color of a rotten eggplant, scratched and bubbled, the light through the windows of the soundstage dwellings now going limp and dim, as if someone had set a cake lid over the encased fake skylight; as if there’s something unknown overhead.
The Friends all return, then, to the girls’ apartment to find each other ruined or wrecked or awful. The baby is now brutally whooping and her skin has begun to flush. Her face and arms are now a subtle off-color, her eyes strained and agonized and squealing. She seems covered in fuzz. Rachel has laid her on the sofa and stands several feet away, wringing her hands, her hair a mess. No one can think of what to do to help. At this point the cast and the audience have become aware that something is very wrong with this episode—that whatever kind-hearted plight or windfall the team of well-paid writers had concocted has somehow been subverted and wrongly altered and they are breaching territory unrehearsed. There is broken dialogue. There is sweating. The actors stand looking into the soundstage wings and into the cameras, as if expecting those on the sidelines to come in and interrupt and fix this obvious run-over error, though no one does and the broadcast continues, and when the requisite amount of exposition leading up to the next commercial break has passed, the cameras continue rolling and the scene goes on unbroken.
4.
Rachel begins to gag. Ross pats her back, yet he’s still too distracted by his own turmoil to really put in too much effort. The baby squirms and sputters. Rachel throws up blood. Monica throws up crackers she put in her purse at Central Perk and snuck into the bathroom to eat in guiltless private. Chandler throws up booze. There is throw up everywhere. The other Friends hesitate. They hold each other’s hands. Something is beating at the walls. The wallpaper is coming off in long strips. Whole sections of wall crumble, revealing the bare soundstage co
ncrete. The canned laughter is going haywire. The actors seem to have forgotten about the baby now lying facedown on the bright blue loveseat. Joey is standing off from the others, talking to himself, his neck visibly pulsing. Rachel begins writhing on the floor. Her body levitates from the carpet. Her cleavage gleams in the flickering studio lights. Her makeup runs in sweat. Her nipples are hard. Chandler can’t resist reaching out and tweaking them through her fashionable sweater. Monica throws up again, though this time it is mostly clear. She moves to sit down on the floor and cradles her head. All the glass in the apartment shatters. The ceiling cracks and puckers, allowing some appendage from a piece of a futon or desk or crib. There is screaming above and below and outside in the street. Phoebe, already sobbing, finds a nit burrowed in her hair. She finds another. She finds another. She begins to roll on the floor, clawing at her face and crowing something that sounds like gibberish but could be an impassioned call for help. Ross tries to shout for everyone to just calm down a second but his voice is overrun by the laugh track and the plod of horrendous thunder. It is clear through the apartment’s shattered windows that the sky has turned another color. Although it is not raining yet, and won’t again for months, something gathers there above. Something embedded overhead and brooding.
In the viewers’ homes, father or mothers or children go to the windows to compare their sky to the one on Friends. They find the same strange, puckered vortex, the crudded bruise made on their horizon. They go, then, to check the locks. They sit again together in front of the TV, slightly closer together or further apart, depending on the constitution of their family’s internal crisis system.
Critters begin filtering through a crack in the ceiling. Soon, nits and gnats and moths and salamanders and many-legged things no one can name are crawling all over the apartment. The walls are cracking, spraying shattered paint flecks that make abrasions on the Friends’ skin. The sink is overflowing. The water is gathering in the floor. There’s a smell like something burned forever. The baby’s body is already becoming mush. Several others are unconscious. Ross ducks and covers. The carpet begins to smoke. All the cameras have been abandoned. Only Joey is left standing.
He is in the center of the room. His hair is wet with something dripping from the ceiling. His skin is taut and pasty. His eyes are bright. He twitches.
Joey moves toward the camera.
With his small mouth, Joey speaks.
5.
“Are you watching? Have you been here? Is this the room that you remember? Where we laughed and gassed and flirted? Where we’ve been for all these years? Shit. Motherfucker. Your children are already getting old. Your skin as thick as clay mud. Let’s go. Let’s have a chicken sandwich. Eat while you can, is what I’m saying. Chew the rubble. Suck the fat. Is that your Timmy on the floor beside you? His small eyes wide and full of curse? He’s going to die. Your little Timmy. He’s going to perish from something dumb. The Book says all first babies busted. Like sexy Jenny’s here. [Joey turns to pick up the suffocated infant from the sofa and wield it before the camera by its feet.] You will watch your young boy die. Feed him antiseptic, vitamins, and chicken soup. Kiss him on the face. By month’s end he will be zero. [He throws the baby on the floor.] His ghoul will clog your pretty home. Evenings of screech, of squawk, and rattle. Prepare yourselves. Turn the TV loud. Hide the windows. Clench the gun. Every home will fill thick with the souls of those it once covered over. The walls will move in smaller. The ceilings will come down. You’ve had all these years to pay attention. You’ve had time for spinach salads and Sunday football and summer beer. You’ve prayed for air conditioning. You’ve fixed your eyes to the small screen. Bastard. Bitch shit dicksucker. God is tired. Think of all the doors you’ve never opened. Of the photographs you’ve allowed to filch your image. Think of nothing. Think of shit. I can see you from here, you know. I’ve sniffed you. I am the Alpha and Omega. I am the Fonz. I’ve been inside your bed. Think of drought, then think of water. Years absorbing. Endless rain. The phonebooks fattened, roof beams buckled. Your brother underground grown rot with wet. And after the rain, the infestation. The moth eggs in your ear holes. The growth of hair. You won’t see that. You won’t listen. There is something in your eyes.”
6.
The screen went blank then. The hall lights sputtered and went out. In the distance outside the windows billboards sat like large blockades against further dark. The families sat around the cold screen with the light’s short remainder buzzing in their skull. They sat on the cushions full of bugs and old sweat and did not move or blink or gurgle. They did not speak or look at one another, though in the dark they felt for one another’s hand. Even the youngest child’s skin felt cracked now. Even the air seemed sopping wet. They went on sitting, looking straight ahead with veins bulging in their arms, while outside the sky shrunk and the night fried and the bugs hummed and the stars pinched for traction to hold in place.
CARDIOLOGY
RYAN BOUDINOT
Years ago there was a town not far from here where nobody had their own heart. They shared one gigantic heart located in a former water purification plant near the center of town. When enlivened by physical activity, the heart beat more rapidly, sending its blood to the neighborhoods, rattling silverware on restaurant tables, shaking portraits off walls, tickling bare feet on cobblestones with its vibrations.
The townspeople were connected to the heart by a vast system of valves and pipes distributed throughout the town. The streets boasted five or six blood hydrants for every one fire hydrant. Every home came equipped with as many blood outlets as electrical outlets. Nobody could travel very far beyond the reach of these outlets and hydrants, as they were tethered to them by sturdy surgical tubing that came in a variety of fashion colors. These tubes snaked through alleys and parks, under doors, up ladders, and down stairwells. One never left the house without at least 20 feet of tubing and a portable placenta which they kept in purses, also in fashion colors. Children walking to school became adept at quickly refilling their placentas from one hydrant to the next. Some kids even developed elaborate games around the tube transferal process, choosing sides, cruelly leaving “captured” children tethered to hydrants with little hope of rescue. There was an etiquette to removing the tubes from one’s chest and replacing them with a new pair. To travel without a pair of clamps with which to momentarily cease the flow of blood while switching to new tubes was considered a faux pas. To drip blood on a table cloth or a friend’s shoes was also bad form, but tolerated. Everyone carried a travel-size packet of absorbent wipes and was an expert at removing blood stains from carpet.
The blood moved slower at the edges of town, where the senior citizens lived. One widower named Ike lived in a one bedroom place with a garden full of untended perennials that his wife had planted before she died five years previous. Every Sunday, Ike’s grandson Magnus visited to make him dinner and watch a video together. While they ate, Ike would tell Magnus stories about when he worked in the vast, subterranean plant where they maintained the heart. Ike had belonged to the department that monitored the left ventricle.
“We stuffed our ears with cotton down there cause of the thudding, but my hearing still went to hell,” Ike said, “Night shifts were the worst. We’d get a sudden increase of flow on account of everyone making love. I was there during the murmurs of ’03, the Great Aneurysm of ’08. The very life of this community was in our hands. I just thank God we never had to use the paddles to get that ticker started again.”
One Sunday night after a dinner of macaroni and cheese, salad, and bread, with coffee ice cream for dessert, Magnus set up the video, “Beverly Hills Cop,” and sat beside his grandfather on the sofa. The tubes snaked out from between the buttons of their shirts, one tube delivering blood to their bodies, the other one sending it into the wall and back to the center of town. The slow flow always made Magnus feel sleepy at his grandfather’s house, and it took some effort to stay awake during the video. During the part of the film whe
re Eddie Murphy stuffs bananas into the tail pipe of a car, Magnus suddenly heard a loud hissing. Ike’s vein tube had come loose from his chest and was squirting bright red blood all over the lampshade and a paint-by-numbers portrait of Jesus that hung on the wall. It wasn’t the first time Ike’s tubes had come loose, and Magnus knew what to do. He quickly clamped the tubes, opened his grandfather’s stained shirt, and located the two hair-ringed orifices in his chest. After reinserting the tubes and making sure they were secure, Magnus wiped down the mess with bleach on a rag.
