Channel Surfing

“Thinking . . . that everything that’s hard and everything that’s cold will stay hard and cold forever and everything that’s soft and everything that’s warm is only soft and warm for the time being.”

—Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

She is watching television—late, comfortable, trying to push overwhelming disturbing thoughts away. She does this on many nights, but especially this night—a devastating earthquake in Haiti, the images so horrific she cannot watch anymore, though the not watching fills her with the old familiar guilt—a guilt she does not exactly wish to escape—for all that she has, all the evidence of her middle-class American privilege. Not to mention her private blessings—the list of them all rolls out in her mind—sons, granddaughter, her husband, lying beside her, his body warm and still strong in his late sixties, ready to enclose her if she moves toward him in a certain way, this very room itself—clean, comforting, the lovely quilt and many pillows into which, under which, she nestles, feeling his arm against hers now, the soft light; not the dark holes, narrow and full of blinding dust and rock they are still pulling people out of daily. This evening, a woman who might have died like so many others is instead suddenly rescued, as millions watch on television. The numbers mount by the day—fifty thousand? a hundred thousand? it’s inconceivable—nearly, but not completely, because she can conceive of it all too clearly, as usual drawn and dragged into other people’s sorrows like a trapped bird. At this moment, for instance, she is the woman who might have died in there, mouth parched to cracking, terrified and struggling to breathe under the mountain of stone, if her husband had not insisted to the workers, She is alive! and kept digging with his naked hands until he heard, and we heard—for it was all being televised in real time!—her voice. I love you, she shouted to her husband, never forget—all said in Creole, but the reporter translated, and then the husband saw, as we saw, her face, and eventually he got the rescuers to pull her out. Her hair was a large cloud of dust around her wide, smiling eyes. Did you think you would survive? The reporter shouts this at her as he shoves his mic into her face. And she, from the stretcher—Why not? She shouts back at him and returns to her loud song—because she had emerged, and is still singing! Singing and praising God. And then she is next to her husband in a large car, seat belted, and they drive away, as if she has been gone on a short holiday instead of been three days underground.

She reaches over to turn off the brighter light in her room, leaving a lovely dim shimmer from a glass shade made of pink and gold. She has had her share of ordinary sorrows—who can escape them after more than sixty years of life?—imperfect love, broken friendships, the list of rejections, terrible and long, any artist endures; and a few extraordinary ones too—she survived breast cancer only a few years before, but of course it always threatens—she had her childhood traumas too, and in recent years witnessed the slow dying of beloved friends. And now, watching television amid pillows, soft light, a down quilt and a silky hundred-percent-cotton sheet surrounding her body, a warm and loving husband next to her, she cannot watch any more. She will channel surf if nothing else. She switches around, her fingers knowing the buttons on the remote as well as they know the keyboard of her computer, hoping to find something dull enough, yet interesting enough, to lull her into sleep.

A group of young opera singers are competing for a coveted prize—a position at the New York Metropolitan Opera. A documentary¹ has been made about the eleven finalists, the long process of competition—six tenors, five sopranos, one black man among them, three enormously obese women, two slender...