Tom didn’t usually watch television, but it was Friday, and he enjoyed the companionship. Rose, his housemate, was also watching. She, too, could ridicule their common hypnosis with common cynicism. After the movie in which the world was blinded by meteors and overrun by giant plants, even the movie about the hound of hell seemed a little funny: an innocence to facile against an evil whose sound effects were too ominous. But it was gripping; who’s to say such things don’t happen—Not Tom, who retreated to his bed alone. The cat had been put in the garage. In the distance, as always if you listen in the suburbs at night, a dog barked. What, Tom wondered, did it bark at? Did it bark at the wind? Wasn’t there anything in the wind for us, too, something for which words seem a little silly?
10 January 1981