Run Rabbit

The Tube: Part II

Good afternoon!

If you’re brand new to Kindling, this is Sleep Tight, the section of my newsletter where I share original short fiction. If you missed last week, you may not have read the origin of this story.

So here it is again.

The Tube came out of a weird, obsessive thought I had about TV glass. The question? What if it contained worlds and timelines? And what if some of it got inside of you, and those worlds played out in your head until it drove you crazy? What if it forced you to be a prophet?

I know I told you this story was two parts, but I lied. It’s a little too long to split down the middle, so three it is. Forgive me dear readers.

Last week, on The Tube:

We left our narrator, David, in the strange house of Jamie Lewis. Right away we see he’s not like other kids. His dad is an inventor. In place of family photos, the walls are lined with pictures of him with men in lab coats and his various machines. The one that catches David’s eye? A television, or what looks like one, something Jamie calls “The Tube.”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

---

I could see why he was excited to show me. The walls of his little bedroom were lined with wooden shelves. On top of them were painted model vehicles and stacks of books. On a desk in the corner were a pile of what looked like magazines. 

“This is what I wanted to show you.”

Jamie was standing in front of the desk, his palms planted firmly on the tabletop, his body facing me. There was something curious about his smile, and for a second I thought I realized what he was up to. Only a few months earlier before school was out, Michael Cline had waved me over to the last seat on the bus. He was a couple of years older than me, a loner who I had never heard utter more than a grunt. I didn’t want to sit next to him, but he was bigger and I was scared to say no. 

He had unzipped his backpack and pulled out a magazine, a girl naked and clutching her breasts smiling at me from the cover. I had never seen an image like it. My stomach knotted with total fear, but something deeper and pulsing drove me on. When he shook it at me, I took it in my own hands and flipped through the pages. 

I stepped toward Jamie. 

“Is it something—you know. Something we could get in trouble for?”

“No!” He laughed, and reached for one of the magazines. 

On the cover, in place of a naked girl, was a skeleton. The lines of the bones were almost dripping as if covered with some other-worldly goop. The creature still had eyeballs and hair. And above it in large stylized block lettering: TALES FROM THE CRYPT.

“What is it?” I asked, a mixture of boredom and disgust seeping through my tone.

Jamie scoffed at me.

“What is it? What is it?”

“That’s what I said.”

“It’s only one of the best comic books ever made! Here look at this.”

His eyes lit up, his adoration unrestrained as he carefully peeled back the cover to show me the insides. The drawings were good. I could tell that. But I didn’t want to look at them. They were made up of the twisted fantasies that came to me in the dark. I had relegated those thoughts to the mid-sleep nightmares that flashed in my bedroom as I awoke sweating from them, imprinting the dream world on the real one. 

When I glanced back over at him, he looked like a deflated balloon. All the tight anticipation he held in his muscles when we entered the house was gone. I had blown it after all.

“It’s pretty neat I guess.”

He wasn’t buying it. 

“Come on. Let’s go watch some TV.”

I followed this new figure, shoulders slumped and head lowered, into the living room. It was the television set from the picture alright, but the colors were less vibrant in real life. The yellow in the picture was a dull grey green, almost olive. The glass has smudge marks on it. The screen didn’t pop out the way it had appeared in the glinting light of the flash. It looked like a regular old TV.

“So this is The Tube?”

Jamie shrugged his shoulders.

“Told you it wasn’t anything to get excited about.”

“What’s different about his one?”

“My dad says the resolution is better.”

My nose crinkled and he must have seen that I was struggling over the word.

“The pictures look clearer. The colors are more vibrant.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding my head. Most kids in my neighborhood had color television, but I knew it wasn’t common.

We sat there for a while while the weather lady blabbed on. Jamie was quiet. I didn’t know him well, but I got the feeling he was upset. Maybe even seething. My eyes darted around the room. Aside from the vibrant colors, the living room was arranged in the usual setup. A couch. A buffet against the wall. Some pictures above it. A plant on the side. Something felt different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. 

I listened to the rest of the house, searching for sounds of adults somewhere. His mother in the kitchen. His father tinkering in the garage. But there was nothing. 

“Are we alone?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Where are your parents.”

“Out.”

He emphasized the T so hard that I decided to leave it at that. The news broke for a commercial. In that brief moment of silence, my stomach growled. I tried to tighten my abs, to hold the sound in with my muscles somehow, but it came out all on its own. It was a desperate groaning sound, similar to a dog begging at the dinner table. 

Jamie looked at me, and despite my embarrassment, my eyes met his. We stared like that for a minute, looking at each other, motionless. And then his face broke apart into peels of laughter. His eyes were bright again in between the squints required to let the sound out. I laughed too, unable to contain myself at the sound of his genuine, guttural giggling. 

The news came back on, but we didn’t notice. We were rolling around on the ground, unable to stop ourselves for what felt like hours, but was only minutes. By the time we quieted down, the anchor was signing off. 

“This is Kirk Johnson, and that was the nightly news. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You hungry?” Jamie broke in as soon as he finished.

“I guess so,” I said and smiled at him.

We had to make the popcorn fast or we would miss it. It was the best show he had ever seen. 

“I could tell you didn’t like those comic books, but seeing it on screen will be different.”

“The comic books are on the screen?”

He looked at me sideways and grinned a little. 

“Not on your TV. But on The Tube we get a lot of shows other people don’t.”

---

 We walked into the living room and sat down in the same place as before. The screen was inches away, close enough so we could change the channel easily and turn up the volume at will. Jamie leaned over the bowl of popcorn in his lap.

“It’s starting. I’ve got to get it on the right channel.”

At my house we vacillated between a few channels. There were the big ones. ABC or CBS or NBC. Most of the others were snow, besides the local news station. Occasionally you could tune in and hear something, almost see it even. But we weren’t close enough to any big cities to get the signal. 

Jamie’s TV was different. With each click of the knob, a new clear channel would come into view. So many faces and people, all of them talking and acting out this or that. Once I asked him to stop. He sighed but listened. On the screen was Dr. King. He was standing on a balcony of some building. The color of the light blue doors came through beautifully on the television. 

“I’ve never seen anything so blue.”

Jamie was smiling when I said that, and to my surprise so was I. 

He turned it up so we could hear what was being said, but instead of words, a shot rang out, loud and deafening. I covered my ears, and when I looked over, Jamie was covering his too. King was down, the men around him pointing to where the shot had come from. He wasn’t moving. One man was crouched just behind his head, looking down at his face. 

Later I wondered if his eyes were open, if the man had been able to watch his soul leave his body, the mysterious light that is life, draining out of him. Jamie’s hands were still pushed against his ears hard. His mouth was open. 

“Wow,” he muttered and then pulled his hands away. “Amazing.”

“Did that really happen?” I asked, still in shock at having watched a man die on screen. 

“No way. These aren’t news channels. Must be an actor or something.”

I relaxed my shoulders, the realization that what I had seen had all been a farce leaving me pleasantly entertained in place of the anxiety I had just felt. It reminded me of the feeling I had leaving the theaters after watching The Birds. Stepping out into sunlight, realizing that the danger was contained to that theater. Two dimensional and incapable of causing me harm.

It would take years for me to start putting the pieces of that night together. And by then, my life had already been turned upside down by what happened. I came home from work late on the night the news of Dr. King’s assassination broke. I can still remember the images, the blue of the doors, him laying on that balcony as one man, the same man from The Tube, crouched and looked down at his eyes as the breath went out of him.

---

Jamie was right. On screen was different. Better than any comic book or magazine. Like nothing I had ever seen before. After the episode, we sat staring straight ahead as the screen blackened, a single pinhole of light lingering before it blinked out. 

“So, what did you think.”

“I loved it.”

“Were you scared?”

It felt like a trick question. I watched him before I answered. You weren’t supposed to answer yes to that. Not to scared or sad or lonely. But Jamie wanted me to be scared. I could see it in his waiting expression, and I wanted to tell the truth.

“Was I? I still am. Probably won’t be able to sleep tonight.” 

I smiled and he smiled bigger.

“I know. Me too.”

We both chuckled.

“So, what do you wanna do now?”

He glanced around the room like he was looking for something. I looked too. There weren’t any toys in here. No kid stuff at all. There was a bookshelf, end tables on either side of the couch, a hutch with blue fine china in it. Then Jamie’s eyes landed.

He lunged towards the couch and swooped up one of the pillows that sat neatly in each corner. 

“What—,” I started to ask him, but before the words left my mouth, he was pummeling me with it.

“Pillow fight!” He screamed it, a battle cry in the empty house.

I made a run for the couch, grabbed the other pillow before he could get to it, then dove to the ground. I was army crawling around the other side when he caught me. I tried to push myself up but it was too late. All I could do was hold the pillow as a shield to defend myself.

He pivoted his leg to try and get a better angle on me. That was his fatal mistake. The momentary relief gave me just enough time to get my legs up, and once I was in a squatting position I pushed towards him like a wrestler. His belly was exposed, the pillow raised over his head. I wrapped my arms around him and made to tackle him, pushing blindly until we both went crashing into something big and hard.

I heard something shatter. Jamie cried out, his body breaking my fall awkwardly over a piece of furniture. When I pushed up I heard the air go out of him, and looked around to see shining shards of broken glass everywhere. Jamie was moaning, his back bent awkwardly over The Tube. Fear struck the very center of my heart when I heard the sound of the garage door opening.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t—“

“Go!” He yelled, and leapt up at the sound of a car pulling in, the garage door closing behind. 

“I can talk to my parents. Maybe they can pay—“

“Just go! He can’t know I let you watch it!”

“Wait, but I thought they knew I was here.”

Jamie was up and limping toward me. 

“David, listen to me. We will both be dead if he finds us in here. Let me handle it!”

I didn’t understand, but I knew that Jamie meant what he said. I turned just as the door to the garage opened and ran. I burst through the front door with only my socks on. The wet of the grass seeped through them as my legs pumped harder and harder. I always hated that sloshy feeling, the cloth wet against my skin, but tonight it didn’t matter. I didn’t stop until I reached home.