I go back to bed and try to sleep. I’m dead tired, but sleep isn’t coming. I shut my eyes and I see them. The TV People carrying the TV set, the TV People moving the clock out of the way, the TV People transferring magazines to the table, the TV People plugging the power cable into the wall socket, the TV People checking the screen, the TV People opening the door and silently exiting. They’ve stayed on in my head. They’re in there walking around. I get back out of bed, go to the kitchen, and pour a double brandy into a coffee cup. I down the brandy and head over to the sofa for another session with Márquez. I open the pages, yet somehow the words won’t sink in. The writing is opaque.

Very well, then, I throw García Márquez aside and pick up Elle. Reading Elle from time to time can’t hurt anyone. But there isn’t anything in Elle that catches my fancy. New hairstyles and elegant white silk blouses and eateries that serve good beef stew and what to wear to the opera, articles like that. Do I care? I throw Elle aside. Which leaves me the television on the sideboard to look at.

I end up staying awake until dawn, not doing a thing. At six o’clock, I make myself some coffee. I don’t have anything else to do, so I go ahead and fix ham sandwiches before the wife gets up.

“You’re up awful early,” she says drowsily.

“Mmm,” I mumble.

After a nearly wordless breakfast, we leave home together and go our separate ways to our respective offices. The wife works at a small publishing house. Edits a natural-food and lifestyle magazine. “Shiitake Mushrooms Prevent Gout,” “The Future of Organic Farming,” you know the kind of magazine. Never sells very well, but hardly costs anything to produce; kept afloat by a handful of zealots. Me, I work in the advertising department of an electrical-appliance manufacturer. I dream up ads for toasters and washing machines and microwave ovens.

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