Ambient 06 - Going, Going, Gone

she’d told me; she said that the only time taking calls got tricky was when more than four came in at the same time. She didn’t tell me how she put them on hold.
    When I hauled myself off the couch I could tell that it was nearly dawn. Murky aquarium light seeped through the front room’s bamboo shades. While Eulie carried on I wandered down the hall until I found the bathroom. The toilet told me where to aim – I could imagine that might be useful at times – and flushed itself, after I was finished; while I wouldn’t have minded taking a shower, I didn’t see anything inside the stall that looked like faucets, and it was only too easy to picture myself getting steamed like a lobster without even blinking. There were postcards stuck onto the wall of the bathroom – photos of Italy, and of a painting by Modigliani, and a picture of kittens playing with yarn. Curious, I pulled back the corner of one to take a look at the postmark, but there wasn’t any.
    Eulie was in the kitchen, standing by the window and running her fingers over one of her boxes when I came back out. »Blixamixa wooblegone,« she was saying, something like that; she’d returned to what I gathered must have been her native tongue, that impenetrable blend occasionally enlivened by recognizable words – »badger,« or »work,« or »shit.« She stood by the kitchen window, running her fingers over one of the little boxes. She pointed to a round chrome ball with a black handle and stuck a small white package marked Kaftast in my hand. There was a cup nearby, and I made the necessary connections. Emptied the package into the cup, poured the hot water in after it. Nothing like good strong coffee, I thought; Nature’s best amphetamine and brain clearer. I read the ingredients but wished I hadn’t – one was soy powder, and nicotinamide another, and there was something just after the ingredient »coffee enhancement« called Manipulated Fiberic. The stuff looked like coffee, smelled like coffee, even tasted like coffee – kind of – but it had a distinctly noticeable aftertaste, though it was hard to say exactly what – vitamins, pork, lime Jell-O; couldn’t really tell.
    »Walter,« Eulie said to me, »televise if desired.«
    I nodded, but before I went into the living room I took a peek out the window, looking up. The sky was overcast again, nothing but thick grey clouds except for where the white line ran; it was wider now, more of a hawser rope than a thread. As impossible to see where it began or ended as a rainbow. I glanced over at Eulie; she shook her head, and kept talking.
    When I touched the TV screen it came on. Picking up the switcher I started running through the channels; it didn’t take that long, as about three-quarters of them appeared to be on the blink – at least they were showing nothing but a screen as grey as the sky, a burble of movement sometimes breaking up the stillness of the image. The stations that were on did seem to be keeping their eye on the sky. I turned on the volume and listened, but can’t say I was much enlightened. The places that showed up, besides New York, were identified as London, Moscow, Shanghai, so forth, but every place looked so much alike that for all I could tell they just kept using the same backdrop to save money. In between the travelogues, on top of them sometimes, men and women would be coming on to blow hot and cold, and sounding no more understandable than Eulie did when she consulted with her own experts. I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone understood them. The only thing I could be sure of was that they were all talking about the thing in the sky; every minute or so, there’d be another shot of it, and it always looked the same. Struck me as very odd that no matter where they were supposed to be broadcasting from, it was cloudy. The line seemed wider over some places – Rio, for one; Calcutta, for another – than it did where we were. Or maybe it had simply widened just in the time I’d spent watching. As said, once you park yourself in front of one of these things it’s just about impossible to drag yourself away; but one by one, over the course of just a few minutes, all the stations took on that full-tilt grey tone, and went off the air. I heard Eulie saying a recognizable word, over and over again, in the kitchen.
    »Hello? Hello?« A long pause. » Hello?«
    »I’m here,« I piped up. She walked back into the living room, past me, and over to the front door.