The Leftovers

and amazement in equal measure. Every so often—usually in response to physical violence, bodies being stretched, flattened, spun, distorted, dismembered, or propelled at high speed across improbable distances—hilarity got the better of him, and he had to launch himself off the couch and onto the floor, where he could pound on the rug until he managed to calm down.
    Nora was surprised by how much she enjoyed the show herself. She’d gotten used to the bland crap her kids insisted on watching— Dora and Curious George and the Big Red Dog—but SpongeBob was refreshingly clever, and even a bit edgy, a harbinger of better days down the road, when they’d all be liberated from the ghetto of children’s programming. Because she was such a fan, she was puzzled by her husband’s indifference. Doug sat with them in the living room, but rarely bothered to lift his eyes from his BlackBerry. That was the way he was those last few years, so absorbed in his work that he was rarely more than half there, a hologram of himself.
    “You should watch,” she told him. “It’s really pretty funny.”
    “No offense,” he said. “But SpongeBob’s a little retarded.”
    “He’s just sweet. He gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, even if they don’t deserve it.”
    “Maybe,” Doug conceded. “But retarded people do that, too.”
    She didn’t have much more luck with her friends, the mothers she went to yoga class with on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and occasionally out for drinks with at night, if their husbands were around to hold down the fort. These women didn’t share Doug’s Olympian disdain for childish things, but even they grew skeptical when she rhapsodized about her favorite cartoon invertebrate.
    “I can’t stand that show,” Ellen Demos said. “But the song at the beginning’s a real hoot.”
    “The squid is awful,” added Linda Wasserman. “He’s got that creepy phallic nose. I hate the way it just dangles there.”
    After October 14th, of course, Nora forgot about SpongeBob for a long, long time. She moved out of her house and spent several heavily medicated months at her sister’s, trying to come to grips with the nightmare that had replaced her life. In March, against the advice of her friends, family, and therapist, she returned home, telling herself that she needed some quiet time alone with her memories, a period of reflection in which she might be able to answer the question of whether it would be desirable, or even possible, to go on living.
    The first few weeks passed in a fog of misery and confusion. She slept at odd hours, drank too much wine to substitute for the Ambien and Xanax she’d sworn off, and spent entire days wandering through the cruelly empty house, opening closets and peering under beds, as if she half expected to find her husband and children hiding out, grinning like they’d just pulled off the best practical joke ever.
    “I hope you’re happy!” she imagined scolding them, pretending to be upset. “I was going out of my mind.”
    One evening, aimlessly flipping through the channels, she happened upon a familiar episode of SpongeBob, the one where it snows in Bikini Bottom. The effect on her was instantaneous and exhilarating: Her head was clear for the first time in ages. She felt okay, better than okay. It wasn’t just that she could sense her little boy in the room, sitting right beside her on the couch; at times it was almost as if she were Jeremy, as if she were watching the show through his eyes, experiencing a six-year-old’s wild pleasure, laughing so hard she almost lost her breath. When it was over, Nora cried for a long time, but it was a good cry, the kind that makes you stronger. Then she grabbed a notepad and wrote the following:
I just saw the episode of the snowball fight. Do you remember that one? You liked playing in the snow, but only if it wasn’t too cold or windy out. I remember the first time we went sledding on that old wooden toboggan, and you cried because you got snow on your face. It was a whole year before you let us take you again, but then you liked it better because instead of the toboggan we had snow tubes, which took a really long time to blow up. You would have enjoyed watching SpongeBob tonight, especially the part where he jams a funnel in his head and turns his face into a snowball machine gun. I’m sure you would have tried to imitate the sound he made while he was shooting them, and I bet you would have done it