Free 334 by Thomas M. Disch

since Lucey didn’t like TV)
    Chapel did not watch just anything. He saved himself for the programs he felt really strongly about. As the first of these did not come on till 10:30, he spent the intervening hour or two dusting, sanding, waxing, polishing, and generally being good to the floor, just as for nineteen years he had scoured the concrete of his cell every morning and evening. He worked with the mindless and blessed dutifulness of a priest reading his office. Afterwards, calmed, he would roll back the gleaming floorboards from his bed and lie back with conscious worthiness, ready to receive. His body seemed to disappear. Once the box was on, Chapel became another person. At 10:30 he became Eric Laver, the idealistic young lawyer, with his idealistic young notions of right and wrong, which no amount of painful experience, including two disastrous marriages (and the possibility now of a third) ever seemed to dispel. Though lately, since he’d taken on the Forrest case … This was The Whole Truth.
    At 11:30 Chapel would have his bowel movement during an intermission of news, sports, and weather.
    Then: As The World Turns, which, being more epic in scope, offered its audience different identities on different days. Today, as Bill Harper, Chapel was worried about Moira, his fourteen-year-old problem stepdaughter, who only last Wednesday during a stormy encounter at breakfast had announced to him that she was a lesbian. As if this wasn’t enough, his wife, when he told her what Moira had told him, insisted that many years ago she had loved another woman. Who that other woman might have been he feared he already knew.
    It was not the stories that engaged him so, it was the faces of the actors, their voices, their gestures, the smooth, wide-open, whole-bodied way they moved. So long as they themselves seemed stirred by their imaginary problems, Chapel was satisfied. What he needed was the spectacle of authentic emotion—eyes that cried, chests that heaved, lips that kissed or frowned or tightened with anxiety, voices tremulous with concern.
    He would sit on the mattress, propped on cushions, four feet back from the screen, breathing quick, shallow breaths, wholly given over to the flickerings and noises of the machine, which were, more than any of his own actions, his life, the central fact of his consciousness, the single source of any happiness Chapel knew or could remember.
    A TV had taught Chapel to read. It had taught him to laugh. It had instructed the very muscles of his face how to express pain, fear, anger, and joy. From it he had learned the words to use in all the confusing circumstances of his other, external life. And though he never read, or laughed, or frowned, or spoke, or walked, or did anything as well as his avatars on the screen, yet they’d seen him through well enough, after all, or he would not have been here now, renewing himself at the source.
    What he sought here, and what he found, was much more than art. Which he had sampled during prime evening hours and for which he had little use. It was the experience of returning, after the exertions of the day, to a face he could recognize and love, his own or someone else’s. Or if not love, then some feeling as strong. To know, with certainty, that he would feel these same feelings tomorrow, and the next day. In other ages religion had performed this service, telling people the story of their lives, and after a certain lapse of time telling it to them again.
    Once a show that Chapel followed on CBS had pulled down such disastrous ratings for six months running that it had been canceled. A pagan forcibly converted to a new religion would have felt the same loss and longing (until the new god has been taught to inhabit the forms abandoned by the god who died) that Chapel felt then, looking at the strange faces inhabiting the screen of his Yamaha for an hour every afternoon. It was as though he’d looked into a mirror and failed to find his reflection.