Willy felt everyone watch as he twisted the radio dial from station to station.
‘Hell,’ he said at last, ‘both your television and radio are broken.’
‘No,’ said Antonelli, simply.
Willy lay back down in the chair and closed his eyes.
Antonelli leaned forward, breathing hard.
‘Listen,’ he said.
‘Imagine four weeks ago, a late Saturday morning, women and children staring at clowns and magicians on TV. In beauty shops, women staring at TV fashions. In the barber-shop and hardware stores, men staring at baseball or trout fishing. Everybody everywhere in the civilized world staring. No sound, no motion, except on the little black and white screens.
‘And then, in the middle of all that staring …’
Antonelli paused to lift up one corner of the broiling cloth.
‘Sunspots on the sun,’ he said.
Willy stiffened.
‘Biggest damn sunspots in the history of mortal man,’ said Antonelli. ‘Whole damn world flooded with electricity. Wiped evry TV scren clear as a whistle, leaving nothing, and, after that, more nothing.’
His voice was remote as the voice of a man describing an Arctic landscape. He lathered Willy’s face not looking at what he was doing. Willy peered across the barber-shop, at the soft snow falling down and down that humming screen in an eternal winter. He could almost hear the rabbit-thumping of all the hearts in the shop.
Antonelli continued his funeral oration.
‘It took us all that first day to realize what had happened. Two hours after that first sunspot storm hit, every TV repairman in the United States was on the road. Everyone figured it was just their own set. With the radios conked out too it was only that night when newsboys, like in the old days, ran headlines through the streets that we got the shock about the sun-spots maybe going on – for the rest of our lives!’
The customers murmured.
Antonelli’s hand, holding the razor, shook. He had to wait.
‘All that blankness, that empty stuff falling down, falling down inside our television sets, oh, I tell you, it gave everyone the willies. It was like a good friend who talks to you in your front room and suddenly shuts up and lies there, pale, and you know he’s dead and you begin to turn cold yourself.
‘That first night, there was a run on the town’s movie houses. Films weren’t much, but it was like the Oddfellows’ Ball downtown till midnight. Drug-store fizzed up two hundred vanilla, three hundred chocolate sodas that first night of the Calamity. But you can’t buy movies and sodas every night. What then? Phone your in-laws for canasta or parchesi?’
‘Might as well,’ observed Willy, ‘blow your brains out.’
‘Sure, but people had to get out of their haunted houses. Walking through their parlours was like whistling past a graveyard. All that silence –’
Willy sat up a little. ‘Speaking of silence –’
‘On the third night,’ said Antonelli, quickly, ‘we were all still in shock. We were saved from outright lunacy by one woman. Somewhere in this town this woman strolled out of the house, and came back a minute later. In one hand she held a paintbrush. And in the other …’
‘A bucket of paint,’ said Willy.
Everyone smiled, seeing how well he understood.
‘If those psychologists ever strike off gold medals, they should pin one on that woman and every woman like her in every little town who saved our world from coming to an end. Those women who instinctively wandered in at twilight, and brought us the miracle cure …’
Willy imagined it. There were the glaring fathers and the
scowling sons slumped by their dead TV sets waiting for the damn things to shout Ball One, or Strike Two! And then they looked up from their wake and there in the twilight saw the fair women of great purpose and dignity standing and waiting with brushes and paint. And a glorious light kindled their cheeks and eyes …’
‘Lord, it spread like wildfire!’ said Antonelli. ‘House to house, city to city. Jigsaw-puzzle craze, 1932; yo-yo craze, 1928, were nothing compared with the Everybody Do Everything Craze that blew this town to smithereens and glued it back again. Men everywhere slapped paint on anything that stood still ten seconds; men everywhere climbed steeples, straddled fences, fell off roofs and ladders by the hundreds. Women painted cupboards, closets; kids painted Tinkertoys, wagons, kites. If they hadn’t kept busy, you could have built a wall around this town and renamed it Babbling Brook. All towns, everywhere, the same, where people had forgotten how to waggle their jaws, make their own talk. I tell you, men were moving in mindless circles, dazed, until their wives shoved a brush in their hand and pointed them towards the nearest unpainted wall!’
‘Looks like you finished the job,’ said Willy.