03/24/2021
It could not have happened in even her wildest dreams. Her imagination was not nearly powerful enough. Yet, there he was: his face appearing as a flash amidst a flurry of images. Miranda Washington, in the dark, channel-surfing on mute, had only caught the slightest glimpse, but she knew. That face was Richard’s. There was no mistaking it. In the ten years since she had last seen it, wrinkles had proliferated around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, and his hair had gone dull and gray. She lingered for a moment on the weather channel where she had ended up in her manic button-pushing.

She turned off the TV. She got up. She checked the wires behind the set. Everything was plugged into the wall. She looked back at the couch. She picked up the remote control. She examined it all over. She sat back down. Her right index finger hovered over the power button, and she pressed it.

Tomorrow would be mild. A chill would come in overnight and coat the ground with frost. After that, the temperature would rise, slowly, until it reached fifty-five degrees. What jacket would she wear? She liked this weather channel. It played relaxing music. Its name was “The Weather Channel.” Miranda thought that was fitting. She wondered if the one she had flicked by a few minutes ago was “The Father You Thought Was Either Living In Remote Siberia Or Dead Channel.” Ha ha. She laughed out loud at that. Miranda thought that was fitting.

Then she thought that maybe she was, in fact, dreaming, and it was alright to flip back to that channel because in a little bit, she would wake up in her bed, and she’d start laughing. Ha ha! Now that she was thinking about it, her living room did look like her living room, but it also didn’t look like her living room, and that’s something that usually happens in dreams. Plus, the remote control she held in her hand felt like it weighed a ton. Based on Miranda’s experience holding hundreds of different remote controls, not one of them had ever felt like it weighed a ton.

Without judgement and without fear, she pressed the down arrow several times until she landed, once again, on that face. It appeared for the briefest moment before the camera switched to, yes, Charlie Rose (Charlie Rose!). Now she was all but certain it was a dream. She turned the volume up, way up, and these words, spoken in Charlie Rose’s baritone, North Carolinian lilt, came blasting from the speakers:

“… author and newly-appointed Professor of Fiction at Syracuse University. He has written three collections of short stories; his debut collection, Arcadia, earned him a spot on the Pulitzer shortlist when he was just twenty-six-years-old. His first book in sixteen years is the novel The Golden State. It won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award earlier this year and is now a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction; the novel tells the story of a writer who leaves his family in New England to travel to the West Coast in search of a freer and more meaningful life. It was a New York Times bestseller and The New Yorker magazine has said of the book and of Washington ‘visceral and relentless…. Washington has awakened like a beast after a long hibernation,’ and I am very pleased to have him here at this table for the first time. Welcome.”

Miranda could not have said it better herself. If Charlie Rose was actually good at anything, it was his ability to sum up an individual’s entire life in the span of 60 seconds. Let’s say for a second that Miranda were the one being interviewed. What would Charlie have said? Perhaps this:

“Miranda Washington is here. She is a seventh-year Ph.D. candidate at Boston University’s Graduate department of English, which means that she holds the truly unfortunate distinction of being the only remaining member of her cohort. She has also used up all of her allocated funding, which means that she works as an usher at the Agganis Area. This is made all the worse due to the fact that she is a severe agoraphobe. Miranda has not yet determined what her dissertation, purportedly on the life of Philip Sydney, is actually about, which causes her great stress regarding her future prospects as an English professor. Last night, she stayed up until 4 AM worrying about a tanking academic job market and crying over the fact that she did not pursue law, medicine, or, frankly, anything that was not a doctorate in English. She has become more jealous and bitter with each passing year, and frankly, I am very confused as to why she is here at this table. Feel free to change the channel.”