A man is sitting in a room, watching TV. The speakers on the TV vibrate to make this sound: “Police have found evidence that a Canadian cult, recently disbanded, has been intentionally inbreeding for over 50 years.” Hazy gray shadows that look like lumbering cavemen interfere subtly with the news program. The man changes to the next channel. The shadows were actually cavemen, on the most popular show in America. For one hour, the whole nation tunes in, watching a tribe of actors in very good cavemen suits, speechless, with only a soaring orchestral score to accompany their fast-paced triumphs and failures. Because of an educational guise, the show features graphic sex and brutal violence. Viewers are aroused by animalistic plumes of pubic hair and the piercing of flesh with crude stone tools. They become attached to characters. They feel joy when a water hole is won from competitors, and sadness when a mother dies in childbirth. The show signaled the end of reality television. The man leaves it on this station. He is thinking about driving on the freeway. It is a formless thought with no direction. He is trying to remember a song he was listening to. He can’t remember his mood without it. It seems very important.
He gets up from his easy chair, and looks back at it for a second. Even in this dim light, it looks old. He remembers buying it, when it looked new, but he cannot recall how it went from new to old. The TV is making him nervous, but he sits back down anyway, crossing one leg underneath him to feel more alert and in control.
The man changes the channel again, and finds an old program from the 70s. A station wagon pulls up to a gas station, and he tries to imagine what it was like when station wagons were the newest thing, state of the art. He can’t even imagine that colors were bright back then, instead of leeched and muddy as they appear on the program. He turns back to the brighter, more vivid cavemen show and kicks his leg back out, slouching. He is not willing to admit that he is preparing to fall asleep.
Now he is pulling off the freeway to go to a mall. The music in his car is an echoey vibraphone. It makes the road and cars seem like children’s toys, as he curves around the layers of a cloverleaf. He wants to invent a children’s toy, or a kitchen gadget. Having an infomercial would be hilarious. His chuckle is a short exhale, an audible hmph. Immediately after doing it, he wonders who it was for. He should be looking for a new job but no one is really keeping tabs on his job search. He can pick up an application at a store in the mall, so he can say he was looking.
After weaving through islands of perennially uninspired landscaping, he chooses a distant parking spot. He scorns the people who fight for close spaces. As he walks across the lot, he sees that the sky is a beautiful even gray, that makes the light seem like it comes out of the ground itself. “I bet they don’t even notice,” he thinks smugly about the close-parkers. He enters the mall. After weaving through diagonal sections of ladies underwear, soft shades pink, blue, and nude, brightly lit; he is in the mall’s atrium. He can smell the chlorine of the fountains. The fountains make the mall feel central and alive. He tries to draw an analogy between malls and the ancient Roman marketplace. It doesn’t work very well. He knows nothing about ancient Rome. The smell of chlorine fades away as cinnamon bun takes over, then impossibly flavorful coffee, then berry soaps. Now he is front of the electronics store. He tries not to dwell on the attractive blaring of televisions, radios, computers games and salespeople. He thinks the detail is below him. He is here to buy a new TV, one without hazy caveman shadows. While standing in front of a wall of flat TVs, a sales woman comes up to him, asking if he needs help with anything. He murmurs, “No thanks, I’m fine,” and they both stand together for a second, watching a news program on ten screens. He glances down at her breasts but instead becomes engrossed in the thick weave of her red uniform shirt. The news program says, “a bizarre link has been established between the Canadian inbreeding cult and Monday’s rash of seizures in children. Apparently, the seizures were caused by flashing lights aired on a popular children’s show- which stars a prominent member of the group now under investigation. He is reported missing.” A clip from the show pops up, showing a man dressed in a foam wizard hat. He is saying, “Make everyday a sunny day!”
“Pretty bizarre, isn’t it?” says the retail woman, breaking the customer service façade slightly. He murmurs stupidly again, glancing down at her breasts and noticing that her name tag says Sharon. A few more seconds pass, then she turns around and leaves. He no longer wants the new TV. There is no way that he can afford it anyway. He will go out and buy a Mother’s day present, even though it is too late to mail it now. He listens briefly to the cacophony of the store.
Now he is passing the novelty store. On display in the front are thin plastic masks from the caveman show, a different mask for every character from this season’s tribe. He thinks to himself, “everything in our lives will converge if we force it to. People buy coincidences religiously.” He forgets about the Mother’s day present, and heads out of the mall with only an application to the electronics store in his hands. As he pushes through the second set of doors, he looks up to see a group of police officers waiting outside. They don’t look very confident or well organized. He remembers smoking pot in middle school, and stealing 7 CDs in college. Then he realizes the police are not there to arrest him, and gets the relief of waking up from a guilty dream. On the way to the car, while playing action movie sequences in his head about violent shootoffs, a familiar looking man rushes by him. From the freeway, he becomes convinced that there are plumes of smoke rising from the mall. He begins to wonder if his day was significant, if he should remember the details; Sharon, the cavemen masks. He will watch the news to look for the mall. He puts on his seatbelt as rain begins to spatter the windshield.
He immediately turns on the TV, back to the hazy news, hoping to see a blazing inferno, or himself on a security camera. Instead, it is the inbred wizard seizure story again. The unrelated scroll across the bottom of the screen reads, “Scientists in Australia discover: matter is light in the time direction.” A different clip is played, this time the wizard is talking about self esteem and air pressure. The man leans in towards the TV, unexpectedly gripped by what he sees: the man in the parking lot who rushed by him resembles the wizard to a tee. Not the same person, but too similar to be just a sibling. He thinks about the inbreeders, and wonders how many of them there are. He tries to remember at what point deja-vu began to make him feel close to death, instead of close to a revelation. He decides that it did not happen all at once.