Hurling himself into the armchair, Travis bends back to make the old velor throne lean precariously back on its feet. The feeling of it almost tipping over makes him feel light for a moment and then the chair comes back to the floor with a disturbing “Thang” resonating from the springs.

He laughs, but sensing wetness, looks down at his hand. He has spilled his juice. “Damn it!” he says to his hand or the glass. “Look what you went and did!” He sets a bag of pretzels beside him in the chair and sets the glass on the floor, getting up to jog lightly into the kitchen for a paper towel or two. When he pulls on the roll over the sink, it wobbles and spins and four paper towels unwrap themselves, but do not rip at the perforation. Travis looks at the roll blankly for a moment and shrugs, defeated. Turning and walking out of the kitchen, a line of paper towels unravels behind him and settles to the floor. He wipes off the glass and looks at the paper towel trail leading back into the kitchen. He can’t care if he tried. He tells himself that he will care later. This, also, seems doubtful.

With the glass still on the floor, Travis thrusts himself harder into the old blue armchair. It leans back, keeping its balance for just a moment, until he kicks his legs out swing-total-commit and it falls backwards to the floor. He hollers a “Woo hoo!” as it swoops back. When the chair lands with a thud, he feels the sensation in his spine and laughs. Then he shifts around and kicks like a beetle on its back. “Help me!” He sits still, his posture perfect but rolled back ninety degrees. Kicking again, he cries with futility “Somebody help me!” No one answers and disappointedly, he rolls off the chair to pick it back up.

Digging the remote out of the seat cushion, Travis sits back down, opens the pretzels and begins clicking through the television channels, announcing their content to the room as he goes. “News, soap opera, news, commercial.” He moves through the channels as quickly as he can, sounding all the while like an old elevator operator. “Game show, cooking show, music videos,” and then he stops. There is a moment of recognition in his face as he watches the image of two policemen approaching a car. From their tight, dated uniforms and the hues of the film, Travis is sure of what he is looking at. His mouth opens a little at the baked look of the highway in California and the circa 1980 vehicles that litter it. True to form, one of the officers casually removes his sunglasses. “Yes!” Travis shouts like a roulette winner. “Chips!” He sinks down into the chair lazily. As Travis takes a pretzel out of the bag, the policeman makes an oh-so-casual joke about the speed that the attractive female driver had attained. “Ahhh. Eric Estraaaaada,” Travis cooes. “You’re the maaaan.” His eyes wander back to the trail of paper towels strewn across the floor. The scene is the epitome of drudgery, and he relishes it—mind-numbing drudgery. As he looks around he spies an empty space where once one of Nick’s paintings would have stared at him in horror. “Shut up,” he says to no one and turns the television up.

Travis roams from bad sitcom to to cheesy romance movie to game show for three hours. At one point in time, all the television channels conspire to show nothing but commercials for three or four minutes, and Travis is forced to give up his undisputed throne over the empire of mindlessness. He completes the cycle of channels, from two to fifty-two, because he has to—has to be absolutely sure that there is no amount of obscure, barely entertaining material he could be missing. And then, finally, he shuts the television off.

The room has darkened, the light low in the late afternoon, the blinds closed. Travis looks around blankly, as though he had just been placed there. He sits still and listens to the quiet. The refrigerator had ceased, the air conditioners on both sides of the apartment are off. Everything is quiet. Sitting up in the chair, he crosses his legs underneath him, closes his eyes and lets the silence leak into his head, lets his thoughts evaporate into it. He waits, breathing, knowing that the moment a certain part of his brain recognizes the silence, the music will come. The silence will end abruptly, stabbed by a rhythm or a note. But it doesn’t come.

When he opens his eyes after a minute, they are focused on the top of the television set and a letter from Nick that he’d been saving to read for just such an occasion. “Letter for me! Letter for me!” Travis shouts. He stands up and lifts the envelope off the television. The address is scrawled in Nick’s familiar scratchy handwriting. There is no denying the resemblance between Nick’s handwriting and his art. Over the years, in fact, Travis had watched as Nick’s handwriting had become more and more like his art, almost as though the bent, twisted images in Nick’s head were struggling to get out in any shape or form they could. The letters in the address look like bare winter twigs laid down to resemble an alphabet. The “T” in “Mr. Travis Fleeting” could have been two straight lines, but instead there is an wintry cross of ink tributaries, bent and warped. On the back of the envelope is scribbled “You’re fat!”

Lounging on the big couch, Travis reads the letter twice. It is two and a half pages, and rather than fold it, Nick had simply crumpled the paper and jammed it into an envelope, smashing it flat with a blunt instrument, no doubt. The writing crawls across the wrinkled paper. The letter says that Nick is doing well in Pittsburgh and that Travis is fat. Nick rather liked one particular bar that he and Jim had been to several times. Travis is “stoopid”. It looks promising that Nick would get to show his work in the gallery. The curator does seem impressed. And Travis is fat. For the most part, Nick is having a good time. And for the most part, Travis is fat, stupid and lazy. The last few sentences make Travis wince and then smile:

“I saw a chick in a bar the other night that would make an excellent specimen of a girlfriend for you. She even had a lazy eye! You can’t beat that! Looking forward to getting a beer with you when I get back.”

Read the whole thread: Carousel Cowboy

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