Television Husbands Never Breathe True 

     I almost always desire to begin the unraveling of a story that led me to whatever end, through a linear progression of "once" and "I began" or "before." Usually what happens is, I fail to call upon wit or simple cleverness and contrive a sharp break into whatever I am trying to communicate. In the end I sound feigned, contrived, and insincere, which seems worse than simply beginning with a "once" or an "I began." In all honesty it is. 

     So…Once I saw an image in a magazine on a newsstand in Mexico City that had the picture of a woman lying in bed with a mannequin which had the head of a television. The television had a snap image of a Spanish looking man with pursed lips to form the slants and shades of a sudden kiss. The kind of kiss that children give each other; the kind of kiss that calls to mind a sort of naïve ambivalence to the potential for perversion. It was a strange picture that served as a frame to tell the story of a woman named Soledad (Spanish for "lonely"), who could not find herself a husband or boyfriend. All of this implied a sad future of lonely nights wondering about all the fanciful and intensely unsatisfying questions that begin with "What if?" Instead of creating this dreadful confrontation with the terms of a future of loneliness, Soledad decided to do what the advertisement of the story would hope she would do…subscribe to Telefutura! However, Soledad could not handle the ambivalence that existed like thick unseen black matter between the foot of her bed and the dresser against the wall. So she built a bridge between the mundane dissonance of the machine and the mysterious cellular symphony of her body…and made a husband. 

     Each night Soledad would take out her dentures that reminded her of the Chiclet the young boy would hawk in the plaza, comb the jojoba oil through her thick mexica black hair, and crawl into bed with a husband with a television for a mind. Sometimes his mind would stay black and necessitate a jab or a shake to get the neurons firing. Other times she would marvel at the majestic ways he always came up with something new. Some nights she would get frustrated with the fake crying of the telenovelas, or the strange clowns that reminded her of the perversion her Uncle Poncho would include in the final act of her birthday parties which only she and the clown shared. Such dark twists in the corridors of her memories would leave her sullen with her husband asking the most random of questions, "Que compraste, hoy?" or "Que onda, guey?" When this became an annoyance, Soledad would opt for the easy way out that so many wives wedded to the flesh dreamed about…she would unplug his head. 

     Many years went by, and many models replaced the original Panasonic 13" color television that shone in only sepia tones. On Sundays when the newspaper advertisements arrived with the Sunday La Reforma newspaper, Soledad would scan the printed amalgamated colors of the electronics. Deep down she knew that her jefe was only a machine built on the concept of illusion, however that became more unbearable as the decades of the twentieth-first century lapsed and lapsed with the inclusion of a 2 or a 3 or a 9 here and there. When the power went out one night near her apartment two blocks up from the Zocalo, Soledad was reminded of the frailty of her union with the machine. He lay there in bed all day long. First, in the morning he would jab out diatribes about some gypsy-like elixirs containing perfumed herbs from the Amazon basin down below the altiplano. By midday, he was playing games with clowns that always reminded her of Poncho. By the evening he would be plotting, contriving, and de-masculinizing himself through crying…it would disgust her to see her macho machine of a man cry, so she would walk. 

     And the walks were long and desolate. In the second greatest city in the world, Soledad would walk alone. There was a Tuesday evening when the police were called on her. The complainants stated that there was a woman sobbing endlessly on the park bench across the street from their first-floor apartment building. Their young son had seen her first and run out to offer her a luchador action figure. It made him happy, why not this sobbing old woman? She accepted it and remarked into his ancient black eyes that gleamed cosmic blue under the Mexican moon, "Mijo, he could never give me one with eyes like yours." Confused, the young Samaritan ran away to startle the mother lodged between a red door and the yellow warmth that exuded its wake. Eye to eye, mother to mother--deferred, a mother denied--came a moment of understanding, of pity, of distant love that called upon that dissonance her husband had the first night she met him. In the end, under the starless sky of Mexico City, she did not smile, nor say a word, just sobbed and sobbed while her husband flickered away. 

     A victim of a power bill dreadfully left unpaid.