Jane sat in front of
the television, as she was wont to do, of late.
Her father was worried about her, but knew that there was nothing that
he could do to help her. With her mother
gone, the only healer of her broken heart would be time. He paused a moment to wistfully think, too
bad there is no healer for her body.
Jane had formerly
been a cheerful, inquisitive child. She
liked playing school with her friends, as if she didn’t get enough of it during
the day when she was actually at school.
She was always doing something with her mind, be it reading or writing
or playing make-believe. She didn’t like
TV. It was too passive for her.
Her father sighed,
thinking about the period right before they took her to the doctor. She had been sick, on and off for a couple of
weeks, but she had retained her joi de vivre that had
so characterized her.
When he and her
mother had told her that she was sick, Jane took it with aplomb. She asked many questions about the disease
that was eating her up from the inside, and asked to be taken to the library so
she could find out more about it on her own.
Jane’s research
informed her that, as of yet, there was no cure for the disease which devoured
her tiny body; she found that she would live with it for the rest of her life.
Jane could no longer
go outside to play. The sun was too
harsh and caused sores to erupt on her cheeks and arms. Sometimes, even without the sun to wreak
havoc, her skin would show blooms and her limbs would hurt. Jane became reclusive. Her skin was an embarrassment to her and like
a plant, without proper light, she began to wither.
Jane started
watching television more. Her father
couldn’t blame her. Her mother cried at
night over the change that had come over their little girl. Eventually, her mother left.
Jane’s father took
Jane on his lap the day her mother left.
He tried to explain that it had nothing to do with her (even though it
did), and that she shouldn’t feel guilty (which she shouldn’t). Jane acknowledged the truth of his words, but
he could see the disbelief in her eyes.
Jane’s father went
to work everyday, and in the fall, instead of enrolling her in school again, he
hired a nanny and she was home-schooled.
While he wasn’t sure it was the right decision, it seemed to be the one
that pleased Jane most.
Jane’s nanny grew
very close to her. Along with being
experienced with children, she had completed training to be a home health care
aide. She was able to take care of
Jane’s health problems as well as knowing when they were too great for her to
deal with and a doctor was needed.
Jane was getting
older, and she had begun closing people out of her life. She had frequent trips to the hospital, and
it seemed that a little less of her was released each time her father picked
her up. She hadn’t grown close with her
nanny and her father was pushed further away.
While quite bright,
Jane was an apathetic student. She
completed the work perfectly, but without the enthusiasm of her youth. After the work was done, she’d hurry back to
her TV and stare blindly at it.
When Jane was
thirteen, her father decided she needed to get out. The sores that occasionally erupted were not
bad enough to make her a hermit. She
needed social interaction. He was afraid
his daughter was going to become anti-social.
He was afraid she might already be a little woogy
in the noggin.
“Jane, how about we
go get some pizza?” he’d ask her. She
just shook her head and asked him to bring her back some if he did go out.
“Would you like to
see a movie, Jane?” Again her head would
shake, never veering away from the television.
Her father asked her
doctor. Her doctor asked another doctor
who specialized in problems that weren’t related to the body so much as the
brain. The other doctor asked to see Jane.
Jane and her father
went to the doctor’s office, much against her wishes. They walked up to the door, Jane draped head
to toe with clothes minimizing the sun exposure, her father practically
dragging her by the elbow.
“There’s nothing
wrong, Daddy,” she cried. “Why do I need
a shrink.”
Her father shook his
head but said nothing. He didn’t want to
further distance himself from her by revealing that he thought her sickness had
gotten to her brain and eaten at it the way it ate at her skin.
The psychiatrist
spoke with them separately, starting with Jane.
He then pulled her father into his office after asking Jane to wait in
the outer room.
“Well,” the
psychiatrist began, “I’m not sure how to tell you this.”
“Is my daughter
nuts?” Jane’s father asked.
The psychiatrist
shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He
was wearing a suit that no longer fit and his chair apparently didn’t,
either. “Nuts isn’t
exactly a term we use in my profession,” he managed to say.
Jane’s father buried
his face in his hands. “What’s wrong
with her?” he cried from between his digits.
“Have you noticed
her watching static?” the psychiatrist questioned. “On the television.”
Jane’s father
thought about it, realizing that more often than not, she had been. He hadn’t noticed what she’d been watching,
mostly because he had grown an extreme distaste fro television contrary to his
daughter’s love for it. He nodded.
The psychiatrist
nodded back. “She is of the opinion that
she is watching herself in other places where she’d never gotten sick and her
mother had stayed, and that it’s helping her to not get more ill.”
“How can it help her
not get sicker?”
The psychiatrist
shook his head. “Who knows why crazy
people think the things they do?” Jane’s
father looked up. “I mean, er, mentally ill.”
When Jane and her
father went home, he unplugged the television and set it outside for the
garbage truck to pick up in the morning.
Jane cried and begged him not to, but he wouldn’t be reasoned with.
“You can’t do this
to me!” she screamed. “I need the
TV. You don’t understand what you’re
doing.”
Her father nodded at
her. “I know exactly what I’m doing,” he
told her. “I’m proving to you that you
won’t get sick from not watching the TV.
It’s all in your mind.”
Jane’s eyes narrowed
at him. “Sicker,” she told him. “I’m already sick.” She walked to her room and slammed the door.
Garbage day was
several days away. Jane kept hoping her
father would reconsider and bring the TV back inside. As the days wound on, she realized this
wouldn’t happen.
The evening before
the garbage was due to be picked up, well after Jane had gone to bed, her
father got up to get a glass of water.
Looking out through
the kitchen window above the sink, he saw his little girl sitting in front of
the blank screen of the un-charged television.
Her thin, adolescent limbs formed sharp angles at the knees and elbows
and showed through the nightgown she was wearing. Jane’s father watched her sitting there for a
moment, before choking back a sob and going to bed.
The television gone,
Jane still refused to go out. She spent
her days doing homework and sitting in front of the space the television had
formerly occupied. Her father didn’t say
anything, because to do so, he knew, would end in him railing at her.
He walked past her
open bedroom door one day. She was
sitting at the vanity he had bought her when she turned thirteen. She had never before used it. She was staring at her reflection. On her cheek was a round, red pustule. On her forehead was another. She was gently touching them, and tears were
silently flowing down her cheeks. She
felt her father watching her and turned around, meeting his gaze. He continued on his way.
Jane continued to
sit in front of the empty space. She now
did all of her homework there, since there was no reason she shouldn’t; the
television not being there as a convenient distraction. Her eyes grew lackluster, and she stopped
speaking much.
One evening when
Jane’s father came home, the nanny came up to him. He was still wearing his gray suit and
carrying his briefcase when she announced that not only is Jane’s schoolwork
suffering, but she’s getting more sores and complaining of pains in her
abdomen.
Jane’s father took
her to the hospital that night. She was
admitted. While he was filling out the
paperwork, they asked him whether he wanted to rent a television.
“No television,” he
answered.
Jane’s condition
began deteriorating rapidly. “Onslaught
of teenage hormones,” the doctors decided was the catalyst for the sudden appearance
of symptoms.
Jane sat in the room
saying nothing. Her father sat with her,
holding her hand. She didn’t look at him
with accusation in her eyes, which he had feared. She looked at him with what he could only
identify as pity. She didn’t ask for a
television, as he thought she would. She
only sat silently.
Her condition didn’t
improve, and the doctors were unable to stabilize it. Jane’s father watched her deteriorate before
his eyes. Her skin was a patchwork of
red splotches and she was constantly being hooked up to new machines.
Jane’s father
ordered a television to her room. Jane
refused to turn it on. When he turned it
on for her, Jane’s eyes found a spot on a wall to focus on.
“Look, Janey,” her father said in a tear-strained voice. “Please look.
What show do you want to watch?”
Jane just turned her face away, slow raindrops sliding down the planes
of her disfigured face.
Her father tried to
find static to turn on, but the room was wired for cable and showed only a
black screen for channels that weren’t programmed.
Jane’s father was
frantic. He took her home against the
doctor’s orders. He fired the nanny and
got a full-time nurse to watch over his daughter. He bought many televisions and tuned them to
static and surrounded her with them so she would be surrounded by their
healing, snowy light.
Jane closed her eyes
and covered her ears until they were turned off.
“What is it about
the static that was keeping you well?” he begged of his daughter. “Why don’t you want it, now?”
Jane stayed silent.
Jane’s father had to
return to work. He was running out of
money and had to pay for the expensive machines that kept his daughters organs
working inside her small body.
One afternoon, while
Jane’s father was absentmindedly putting numbers from one column into another,
the phone on his desk rang. He
jumped. A sense of foreboding filled
him. This is it, he told himself.
Speeding
home through the traffic of
Finally, Jane’s
father rushed up the stairs to her room.
“She asked for you,”
the nurse told him. The new nurse was
older than the nanny. He was vaguely
glad that he’d hired her on. She seemed
to know how to handle the dying and those who loved them.
Jane’s father sat
down in the chair beside Jane’s bed.
“I’m here, darling,”
he croaked out.
Jane’s thin,
red-splotched arm came out from under the blanket and took the oxygen mask off
of her face. When she spoke, her voice
was a whisper.
“I stopped watching
because even though I could watch it, I could never have it. For a while, watching it was enough to keep
me somewhat happy. Happy
enough to fend off my disease.
But it wasn’t real. It wasn’t
mine. It was the other Jane’s. When you pulled me away from the TV, I guess
I got enough distance that I could finally see that. Thank you, Daddy. Thank you for letting me see
the truth.”
Weeks went by, and
Jane’s father kept replaying the words in his mind. He grew thin from lack of food. He grew hairy and his eyes were a constant
shade of red from the tears that flowed like a river down his face.
People came by to
see him, to give him sympathy, but he was inconsolable.
“I killed my baby
girl,” he’d tell them.
“No,” he heard
several times, “the disease did.”
Jane’s father failed
to show up for work for several days.
His boss came by to check on him.
His boss knew how hard the death of a child could be on someone; he’d
taken a seminar on sensitivity and they’d informed him of it.
The door went
unanswered, but it was also unlocked.
Jane’s father was
lying on the floor. His bones showed
through his skin. His flesh seemed
withered.
“This man hasn’t let
food or drink touch his lips in far too long,” his
boss said quietly.
His boss reached
down to pick Jane’s father up, but pulled his hand back in normal, human
revulsion at the touch of dead flesh.
His boss went over
to the phone to call an ambulance, and stopped to turn off the television on
the way.