On television the external tank exploded in slow motion, plumes of burning hydrogen spiraling into a cold Florida sky. The shot changed to stunned engineers in Mission Control staring at blank computer screens. A radio voice said, “We have no data.” This was a new detail, and Franklin leaned forward.

“Franklin,” Marion spoke sharply. “I have to get back to work. This thing is blowing out all the spots for the rest of the day, and that means we’ll be up to our ass in make-goods.”

Marion was the station’s traffic manager. She and her office organized the playback of commercials, assembling the list into a daily log. It was hard, exacting work, and to Franklin it represented the height of twentieth-century idiocy. When they were still together she would cry on Sunday nights at the prospect of the coming week, and on Friday mornings she arrived two hours early at her desk, usually skipping lunch as well, as the weekend’s log closing approached, and the sales staff badgered her for last-minute changes in the Sunday football games.

Then, when she was finished, when the log was finally buttoned up and the commercials set to air in the proper order, the circus started all over again the next day. The expired logs prompted invoices to advertisers, but then they were boxed up and sent to mold in the basement, to be shredded after two years.

And the commercials? They passed from a two-thousand-foot broadcast tower into viewers’ wretched homes and then launched themselves into space, where they added to the cacophony of meaningless noise already up there.

“You kill yourself,” he’d said to her once, “and over what? Over something that, as soon as you’re done with it, might as well be toilet paper.”

“That toilet paper pays the bills, Maharishi,” she had replied. “Grow up.”

Now Marion said, “Franklin, you know why I didn’t ask for the fish in the settlement.”