The rules regarding what I watched during an episode were strict. Art of any kind was forbidden, as were old movies, musicals, documentaries, love stories, and anything that gave significant screen time to children or animals. No, I watched action movies, watched them for the explosions, the moments when the whole screen was a consuming, raging fire, and for the fight scenes, in which bad men were eventually overcome with maximum force. The fights were like beautiful dances, rising toward climax, the body count swelling as Vin, or The Rock, Jason or Bruce, snapped and stabbed and choked, punching and ripping and slamming and gouging bad men toward unconsciousness or death, their faces flushed and contorted with the effort of it. The violence always justified. A wife murdered. A child held hostage. But the women and children merely ciphers, excuses for the violence unleashed. All the while on the second screen, I’d be clicking through the news, where there was neither climax nor heroes, only rolling horror leavened by celebrity thighs and sponsored lifestyle features about juicing.

Sometimes, the episodes rolled over from one day into the next, could gobble up a whole weekend, during which I’d become more and more agitated, feeling the presence of the mirrors in the house, even while I lay cocooned in bed with the curtains closed. I would want to stop, but at the crucial moment, I would either click or not click so the next episode or film would begin; I’d rarely remember falling asleep but, waking up next to the laptop’s greedy eye, I knew if I so much as tapped a key, there would be another fourteen, sixteen hours of explosions and murders ahead while I ferried something or other to my mouth, waiting for it to end, implicated by all of it—the violence, the news, the shopping—moving further and further beyond rational thought, brain scrambled, as though computing that by staying there, via my avatar on the screen, I could defeat the bad men, overcome the terrible threat from the safety of my sticky crumb-infested bed, out of sight, tunneled into the sheets like an animal.

There was no pleasure in it, only a bone-deep, inarticulate panic, matched by the unwillingness or inability to end the whole episode because it would have meant, once the devices were all turned off, once the flat was quiet around me, that I would have been alone with my own thoughts.