E-LEC-TRIC

By Alex Rost

It starts with a frantic call.
“His eyes are open, but he’s not moving,” she says.
“How’s his breathing?”
I hear rustling. A brief pause.
“Regular, I guess,” she says. “I threw water on him and he didn’t even flinch.”
“Like he didn’t notice he got wet?”
“Yeah, like he didn’t fucking blink, even.”
“What’d he take.”
“Ketamine. Been drinking all day. I don’t know what else.”
She’s crying now.
“How much ketamine?”
“I don’t know. A lot, probably. What should I do? Should I call 911?”
“No.” I tell her that whatever she does, “Don’t call 911 unless he stops breathing,” and that I’m on my way.
I get there, and he’s fucked.
Slack jawed.
He stares at me, confused, like he has no idea who I am.
Vacant eyes, emptied of everything but mild horror.
“He’s a little better now,” she says.
“He was worse than this?”
“He’s walking at least. A little.”
He staggers in circles around the tiny apartment. Through each room, then back again. He stops in the shadows of the small hall. He’s looking in my direction, but not at me.
“I don’t know,” I say.
I perform a simple ‘follow the finger’ eye test. He turns his whole head to follow, his eyes fixed, but only to one side. He doesn’t follow the finger back.
“It’s okay,” she says to him, to me, to herself. “It’s okay.”
I lead him to the couch and try to turn on the TV but nothing happens. I ask her, “Am I doing something wrong?” but she doesn’t know. After a minute I find the TV is unplugged, that everything in the house has been unplugged, and when I lean down to the electrical socket, he gets off the couch and heads for the front door and tries to open it but can’t figure out the locks. I gently guide him to the couch once more.
I turn on the TV, press play on the VCR.
It’s a western, mid-movie.
The volume is at maximum.
A level that could bring an angry neighbor.
Or a cop.
She jumps, covers her ears. I can’t hear her squeal, but I see she does.
There’s only a single button on the TV – no volume control – and I push it, blacken the screen.
I ask about a remote and she assures me it’s around here somewhere.
He doesn’t move when I dig through the couch around him.
“Found it,” she says coming from the kitchen. She fiddles with it then says, “Oh wait, this is the one for the other TV.”
“Where is it?” I say, and she points to the TV in the corner, half hidden by dirty clothes.
I crouch in front of him and say, “What do you think? How about a movie?” but his empty expression gives no opinion.
I tell her that it all looks like a wait and see type of situation, and know that I’m in for long night before I swap the TVs out.
The remote doesn’t work. I open the back – no batteries.
No hope for batteries.
“What’s he doing?” she says.
He’s still staring off into space, but every couple seconds he opens his eyes real wide.
Bulges them.
I emulate the action and feel the strain behind my eyeballs.
“I don’t know,” I say.
I hit the button on the TV and the western movie plays again.
This time, the TV is on mute.
There are buttons on this TV, and I see the volume bar go up and down when I hit the proper button, but it stays muted.
I push more buttons, find the settings menu.
It’s set to Mandarin.
Symbols, every one strange.
I push the buttons for a while, then give up and watch the movie without sound.
She puts on unobtrusive music and we smoke weed, passing the pipe back and forth over his prone body while talking about how strange this is, how neither of us have ever seen this deep a K-hole, how it’d be a long time before we take ketamine again. She tells me about the time she did a lot of ketamine and hit her head and died for a moment. I ask for clarity but instead she rambles for several minutes about death and I don’t really listen. Eventually she falls asleep.
The movie ends and I put in another one.
When I sit back down he is looking at me – actually looking at me – for the first time.
“Hey,” I say.
“When did you get here?”
“A while ago. We were worried.”
His neck swivels to his sleeping girlfriend and back to me.
“Ben Franklin,” he says.
“What about him?”
He points at the TV, previews playing silently.
“Hipaa laws,” he says.
“Like, privacy?”
He nods his head.
“E-lec-tric,” he says.
I leave in the morning.
Two weeks later, I get a frantic phone call.
And almost the exact same scenario repeats itself.
Except this time, there are batteries in the remote.

Alex runs a commercial printing press outside of Buffalo NY.