The first monitor came off a curb. A flat panel with a crack in one corner, the kind of crack that spreads a rainbow when the light hits it wrong. I carried it up under one arm and set it on the desk that used to hold the tax folders. It worked. That was the whole test. It worked, and I left it running, and I did not turn it off that night.
Now there are eleven. They sit in a grid that is not quite a grid, screwed to a length of shelving board and propped with paperback books where the board runs out. The cables pool on the floor behind them like something that came in under the door. I have stopped trying to hide the cables. They are part of the weight of it now.
Each screen runs its own episode. I did not sync them and I would not know how. So the wall is never showing one thing. It is showing eleven hours at once, all of them the same men in the same office, oil money and shoulder pads, a decanter that is never empty and never poured. On the left panel a man is young. Four screens over, the same man has gone gray at the temple and harder around the mouth. The years run sideways across the board instead of forward. Nobody on the wall is aging at the same speed.
I built it for the sound, mostly. Or not the sound exactly. The condition the sound makes.
Years back, the reruns played while I made dinner. I would come in from work and put them on and not watch them. They ran behind me while I stood at the stove. Onions going soft in the pan, the smell taking over the room, and behind me a room full of people arguing about money I would never have. The argument never resolved and I never needed it to. It was another room talking. It was the noise a house makes when it is occupied. I cooked inside that noise for years without once sitting down to face it.
Then the kitchen changed, and the evenings changed, and the noise went out of the house. For a while I did not notice it was gone. You do not notice a background leaving. You notice, later, that a room has gone too quiet to cook in.
So this is not a shrine and it is not a collection. I want to be plain about that. I am not watching Dallas. I have not followed a plot in years and I could not tell you who shot whom. The wall is not for looking at. It is for standing in front of the stove with my back to it while it runs, so the room fills up again with the sound of other people’s trouble, and the onions go soft, and the evening has the right amount of company in it.
The monitors do not care about this. They are just glass and heat. They warm the wall behind them by a degree or two, enough that the paint up there has gone slightly darker than the paint down by the baseboard. They hum at different pitches depending on their age. The old panel from the curb ticks when it has been on a long while, a small dry click, like a thumbnail against a tooth. I have learned the sound of each one the way you learn which stair creaks.
The desk is still under there, somewhere. The tax folders are still in the drawer. I do not use the desk for the desk anymore. It holds the bottom row of monitors and a coil of extension cord and the flat black remote that controls nothing on the wall, because none of the panels take the same remote. I keep the remote anyway. It is the shape my hand expects to find there.
People who come in do not know what they are looking at. They stand in the doorway and their eyes go across the grid trying to find the one screen they are supposed to watch, the way you look for the front of a crowd. There is no front. That is the part they cannot settle into. Every screen is the same weight as every other screen. The eye keeps sliding, looking for the moment the room is built around, and the room is not built around a moment. It is built around a temperature.
Some nights I turn the sound off entirely and just let them run. The men argue in silence, eleven silent arguments, mouths working, the decanter lifting and setting down. It is worse with the sound off. The wall goes honest about what it is. A lot of light and no evening in it. So I turn the sound back up, and go find something to cook, even if I am not hungry, even if it is just onions and nothing to put them in.
The board is not full. There is bare drywall showing between the panels, pale rectangles where the next monitors will go if I find the next monitors. I have a rough idea of how many it would take to cover the wall corner to corner. I have not let myself do the multiplication all the way out.
Behind the desk, low, where the cables gather, one of them has come loose from the strip. It is not plugged into anything. I have not traced which panel it belongs to, and every screen is still lit, so I have left it lying there, waiting to find out what it turned off.