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By Root 1048 0

recreation room near the observation deck was furnished with a low couch, and if the room was empty I sat down when the workday ended and enjoyed the shows. They were edited now, the contamination sucked out of them. I could watch without fear. Oh, mercy. The cleanser at Forsythe had swept through these shows and smeared over the faces of the actors with his blurring tool. I pictured a man waving a wet, foaming broom, spewing a clear lather over people’s heads, since feature recognition was generating too much toxicity in our volunteers. But even with their smoothed-over faces you could still see the young people tear around the artificial interiors of the TV studios, and in place of the dialogue these children hurled at each other, and the voice-overs that must have once straitjacketed the action, the technicians had looped in a sonorous, low-toned music, which sometimes made it seem that the little blond-headed children spoke a language not of words but of some intricate beeping songbook, a sonar for animals.

I relaxed with a bowl of clear soup, settled deep into the cushions, and for those hours I could almost feel like I was home with my family enjoying a night of television. Each evening over soup the television children—their faces swept into drain-like puckers of flesh—performed the archetypal behaviors. They danced, drove cars, dug a terrific, wet hole in a yard, accompanied an artificial wolf on a perilous adventure, or stood in place and probably said funny things to each other. They gathered in their smart outfits, the crisp white shirts and ties, holding stubby, flesh-colored canes, sometimes raising them as weapons, cocking their heads at each other. This kind of thing sometimes amounted to an entire episode of a comedy, a milling crowd of young people doing things with their faces and heads.

I soon tired of this style of entertainment. It began to stand in for the memories I had of home, and I did not want those disturbed. Instead of Esther at the state fair holding a barbecued turkey leg that she could neither eat nor surrender to me, since she was so proud to be in possession of such a gigantic animal part, I now pictured a television actor licking an ice-cream cone so roughly that the ice cream plopped on the ground, whereupon a legless elf riding in a low cart zoomed in, scooped up the half-melted ball of ice cream, and raced away. Even the elf’s face was muddied at the features, spackled smooth. Instead of the laugh track one presumed would accompany such an accident, droning notes would pour out, a blizzard of dissonance. I lacked the discipline to refuse these images as they appeared to me alone in my bed, hours later. I allowed them to hijack my mental space and hardly fought them off. It was easier to let them play on, endlessly, and such was the material that frequently sent me into spells of anxious, restless sleep.

But in bed at night, rarely, these television images expired and a mental vacancy settled. Suddenly there was nothing to think of, nothing to see, nothing to feel, as if the reception had failed. There was room for me to will my own thought, my own memory, and I would hurriedly try to call up something unique about Esther.

A vacuumed space would appear at first, a howling little hole, but if I strained and brought all of my resources to bear on the matter, I could piece together a fractured puzzle, a child’s drawing she had made of herself, a photo collage scissored apart and glued back with the prismatics of a ransom note. It was always shards. If I managed to conjure what mattered to me, what she genuinely looked like, I could only ever picture Esther with that awful blurred face of the television children, the sharp green speckling of her eyes wiped in streaks, the flushed color of her lips leaking upward from her mouth through her cheeks and forehead, a swirl of colors clouding her face. If I was lucky enough to picture her face, it smudged in my mind, as if, even in the past, even when I knew her, she wore a stocking over her head and I never once saw my daughter’s face for what