Every day we can’t wait for The Show to come on. We rush through our days, come home, eat a hasty meal, sometimes with our little tin tables in front of the wall screen, salivating for The Show to come on. No matter how bad our days have been our smiles pop, our hearts fill when we see Bobby’s smile and Angela’s poofy hair, and little Max tripping on the dog in the doorway, and our laughter escapes us with no effort of our own. When we see that little Chip the cocker spaniel is okay, we together breathe a sigh of relief, and everything is okay in our world for that moment, that instant. We have our Show, and we know everything will be okay.
No matter what’s going on in the world around us, the bombings, the murders, the car crashes, the hunger of people around us, the loud-mouthed politicians screaming their awful hateful words, as long as we have The Show, we’re okay. That’s how it is.
I shuffle through my papers at work every day, moving them from one bin to the other, placing the company stamp on them along the way, thinking about The Show. My mind focused on it, despite the tedium of the stamp and the eyes of the Big Boss every twenty minutes passing by telling me to “Keep it up,” “Good job,” or whatever comes out of his round oversized head. Thinking all the time about The Show, as I chew my tasteless chicken salad sandwich and sip on insipid cold coffee, then the bell rings and I’m back to work, stamping and sorting piles of papers. It’s just what we do, what we have to do.
And it’s the same for 0379667. She does the same thing at her job, but with blocks and cubes. “Work” they call it, but it means nothing to us, just gets us enough of the electronic credits to keep us in shelter, clothed, and with food. While the bombs explode as we make our way back in our transit vehicles, keenly awaiting the lights and colors of the screen, and Bobby’s laugh and smile, Angela’s silly laughter. Closing our eyes to return to our cave and the return to safety.
One night 0379667 says “0024142, we have to go to the doctor for your appointment, to check your heart,” but I’m sad, I don’t want to break away from The Show, don’t want to miss some of the things happening to my friends on the screen. But we do, we have to go, and I’m depressed, but I know we have to go. When we go there the doctor says, after running some tests and looking at some charts, that they’ll have to operate on me with their lasers to fix my problem. And all I can think of is How many episodes of The Show will I miss as a result? And that’s the truth. It’s what I think.
And a thought comes to me, too, at that moment. What if 0379667 and I are the characters in someone else’s Show, and they’re giving us names like Tony and Theresa, and making it through their tedious workdays just to rush home to watch us on their big screens and getting huge smiles on their faces when they see us chewing our salads, farting and sighing and laughing at our big screens when The Show comes on? What if that’s the case? Wouldn’t that be wild?
Mitchell Waldman’s fiction and poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is the author of two short story collections (Petty Offenses and Crimes of the Heart and Brothers, Fathers, and Other Strangers) and the novel A Face in the Moon. Mitchell also serves as Fiction Editor for Blue Lake Review. He lives in Rochester, NY, with his partner, the poet and journalist Diana May-Waldman (author of the poetry book A Woman’s Song). For more information on Mitchell and Diana’s writings, check out their website at mitchwaldman.homestead.com
Idle Ink 