The TV People exit and leave me alone. My sense of reality comes back to me. These hands are once again my hands. It’s only then I notice that the dusk has been swallowed by darkness. I turn on the light. Then I close my eyes. Yes, that’s a TV set sitting there. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking away the minutes. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS.

CURIOUSLY, THE WIFE makes no mention of the appearance of the television set in the apartment. No reaction at all. Zero. It’s as if she doesn’t even see it. Creepy. Because, as I said before, she’s extremely fussy about the order and arrangement of furniture and other things. If someone dares to move anything in the apartment, even by a hair, she’ll jump on it in an instant. That’s her ascendancy. She knits her brows, then gets things back the way they were.

Not me. If an issue of Home Ideas gets put under an An-An, or a ballpoint pen finds its way into the pencil stand, you don’t see me go to pieces. I don’t even notice. This is her problem; I’d wear myself out living like her. Sometimes she flies into a rage. She tells me she can’t abide my carelessness. Yes, I say, and sometimes I can’t stand carelessness about universal gravitation and π and E = mc2, either. I mean it. But when I say things like this, she clams up, taking them as a personal insult. I never mean it that way; I just say what I feel.

That night, when she comes home, first thing she does is look around the apartment. I’ve readied a full explanation—how the TV People came and mixed everything up. It’ll be difficult to convince her, but I intend to tell her the whole truth.

She doesn’t say a thing, just gives the place the once-over. There’s a TV on the sideboard, the magazines are out of order on the table, the mantel clock is on the floor, and the wife doesn’t even comment. There’s nothing for me to explain.

“You get your own supper okay?” she asks me, undressing.

“No, I didn’t eat,” I tell her.

“Why not?”

“I wasn’t really hungry,” I say.

The wife pauses, half-undressed, and thinks this over. She gives me a long look. Should she press the subject or not? The clock breaks up the protracted, ponderous silence. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. I pretend not to hear; I won’t let it in my ears. But the sound is simply too heavy, too loud to shut out. She, too, seems to be listening to it. Then she shakes her head and says, “Shall I whip up something quick?”

“Well, maybe,” I say. I don’t really feel much like eating, but I won’t turn down the offer.