One day the man wakes up and finds that he does not feel like going to work. He is not sick, exactly; he just doesn’t feel like going to work. He calls the office and makes an excuse, then he pours himself a bowl of cereal and sits down in front of the television.
The man doesn’t usually have time to watch television, so it takes him a while to find a show he’s interested in, but when he eventually does find one he sits rapt, his cereal forgotten, for a very, very, very long time. The show seems to last much longer than a normal show. In fact, it lasts all day. It is five o’clock before the main character finally leaves his job and heads home, prompting the credits to roll.
The man sets his bowl of cereal aside and stares at the floor for a while.
My God, he thinks.
He gets up, goes into the bathroom, and takes a shower. As he washes, he thinks about the show he has just seen. He is shampooing his hair when suddenly he realizes: the show was about him. Not kind of about him, not metaphorically about him, but actually about him.
That’s why the main character looked so familiar, he thinks, dunking his head under the water.
But how could it have taken me so long to recognize my own self? he wonders. And how did they manage to find an actor who looks so exactly like me?
The man stays home from work again the next day, claiming to have the flu. The show is on again—his show. Yep, there he is, arriving at work. He is wearing the suit he bought last week at Macy’s. There he is, waving at the security guard he always waves at in the morning. Now he’s walking down the hallway toward his office, now he’s moving inside—there’s his desk, his chair, his in-box and his out-box, his stapler and his letter opener. It’s amazing; the man can hardly believe it. Onscreen, he sits down at his desk, looks at the clock, and begins to work.
The man does the same thing at work every day; it is not very exciting. But somehow watching himself do it from inside his apartment, through the TV, is absolutely fascinating. The man is mesmerized by all the little unconscious movements his onscreen self makes. He seems to chew on his lip a lot.
Maybe that’s why my lips are always chapped, he thinks, running a finger over them. He will have to watch that in the future.
At lunchtime, the man onscreen leaves the building and goes down the block to a little sandwich shop. It is Thursday, so the old guy who owns the place is in. He and the man have a conversation about the state of the world while the man eats his sandwich (roast beef, same as always) and drinks his coffee (black, same as always). Then the man returns to the office and works for the rest of the day. At five o’clock he finishes up and heads out the door, and once again the credits roll.
This time the man on the couch studies the credits carefully. Yep, there’s his name, listed as both the main character and the actor.
So it really is me, the man thinks in relief. It has been bothering him to think that an actor could so perfectly play him. It made him feel foolish to be so predictable, so reproducible. This way is much better. He feels proud of his role in the whole affair.
The next day, the man goes to work. He apologizes for having been absent for the past couple of days, but no one seems to care very much. This does not surprise him, but still it seems a little sad. The man sits at his desk and does his work. It is not much fun. It has never been much fun, he reflects, but now it seems particularly burdensome. He spends most of the time trying not to chew on his lip, with little success. At lunch, he goes down to the sandwich shop. It is Friday, so the old guy who owns the place is not in. The man sits alone at a table in the corner and remembers the conversation that his onscreen self had with the old guy the day before. He smiles to himself about some of the witty and observant things the two of them said.
Something nice happens in the afternoon. The man discovers that, because his onscreen self did his work so well in the past couple of days, he is now done for the week. The man can hardly believe it. He almost never finishes his full workload. Usually, he has to stay late on Friday night, or even come in on Saturday or Sunday—or both—to get it all done. He sits at his desk, marvelling at the knowledge that he can go home early, and then he does. He waves goodbye to the security guard on his way out. He drives home, feeling the wind in his hair and the sun on his face.
At home, the man turns on the TV and is surprised to find that his show is on. There he is, wearing the same clothes he is wearing right now—but he is still at work. He is sitting behind his desk, hunched over a legal pad, writing something.
How can this be? the man thinks. All the work is finished! He squints at the TV, trying to see what, exactly, his other self is working on. It is hard to tell. He seems to be writing up a list of some kind.
The man notices that the man behind the desk is no longer chewing on his lip.
That night, the program does not end at five. The man in the office keeps right on working until almost nine-thirty. At home, the man has pulled a straight-backed chair up to the TV, and tries to figure out what’s happening, what his other self is doing. He cannot figure it out. When the man finally finishes working on his list—or whatever it is—he slides it into his briefcase and leaves work for the day. Again. At home, the man sits with his eyes glued to the front door, waiting for himself to walk in. He has lots of questions. He wants to know what this list is all about. Ten, eleven, eleven-thirty, midnight. The door does not open.
Suddenly it occurs to the man that he can just open the briefcase and take out the list and read it. After all, it is his briefcase. He gets up and goes into the bedroom. Now, where did he put that briefcase? He can’t remember. Where does he usually put it? He can’t remember that, either. In fact, he can’t remember ever owning a briefcase at all.
In the morning, the man awakens confused. He sits on the edge of the bed. He feels as if he were forgetting something, but he can’t think what it could possibly be.
The man gets to the couch early, so he won’t miss anything. But it turns out he’s already late. There he is, in his office, behind his desk, with his feet up, reading a book. The book is lying open in his lap, so the man cannot tell what it is. It is very thick, though. There are other books stacked neatly on the desk. The man squints to make out the titles. Some of them seem to be about business management, but one is about calculus, and there are others about art and history, and one narrow volume looks like a collection of poetry. The man smiles when he sees that. What on earth is going on?
When nine o’clock rolls around, the man behind the desk closes the book he’s reading (is it the dictionary?) and gets down to work. He works quickly and with an air of extreme concentration. At home, the man on the couch, though filled with admiration for his other, better self, feels a twinge of jealousy, and even, strangely, something like fear.
At lunch, the man onscreen does not go to the shop on the corner. Instead, he fixes his tie and heads down the corridor in the direction of his boss’s office. The man on the couch cannot believe what he’s seeing. He watches as he knocks firmly on the boss’s door and then goes inside, closing the door behind him. When he emerges, fifteen minutes later, he is smiling. He stops and calls back to the person inside, something in the way of an affirmation, and then heads off down the hall, a spring in his step. With the remainder of his lunch hour, he eats a sandwich he has brought to work in a brown paper bag, and drinks a bottle of water.
The man at home does not know what’s happening. He has never purposely gone to speak to his boss. In fact, he can’t imagine ever wanting to do such a thing. Still, he admires his onscreen self for doing it. Perhaps something good will come of it—maybe a raise. The man goes into the kitchen and grabs a bag of cookies from the cupboard. But when he returns to the living room he finds that his onscreen self has left for the day. His office is clean, his out-box is full, his pile of books has disappeared.
He begins to get antsy. Where has he gone? There is no way to know. What did he say to his boss? What was on the list? And what are all the books for? The man is beginning to feel nauseated, thinking about it all. He is making himself sick. He has to think about something else. Perhaps there is something else on TV.
The man changes the channel. There is a cartoon about a coyote, a commercial for an exercise machine, someone talking about the weather, and, oh, wait, what’s this? There’s the man again. He’s in his car now, driving down a street that the man on the couch finds unfamiliar. He stops outside a building, an office building, and goes inside. He speaks to a receptionist, and is then ushered into a conference room.
In the room are a number of men, all of whom look very serious. The man on the couch is frightened. But his other self looks perfectly at home. He places his briefcase carefully on the table, unlocks it with a pair of decisive clicks, and opens it up. Inside is a stack of papers. He begins to hand them out and, as he does so, begins to speak. He speaks about things the man on the couch doesn’t understand. Stocks and bonds and financial matters, things like that. The man on the couch furrows his brow, trying to follow it all. He can’t, but he is relieved to see that the men in the room seem to be following it quite well, and, what’s more, seem to be happy with what they’re hearing.
At the end of the meeting, the men rise, smiling, and congratulate the man on what he has said and done. Cigars are passed around, and the man takes one and sees himself smoking it with a practiced air, despite the fact that he has never smoked a cigar in his life, and would never want to, since they’re disgusting. Still, he has to admit, it is quite enjoyable.
When the man leaves the meeting, however, the show does not follow him. It stays in the conference room with the other men, and after a while—despite the fact that these other men are beginning to seem vaguely familiar—the man on the couch starts to tire of their banter. He figures he’s probably returned to the office by now, so he changes the channel again, and then again.
He is almost back to his original station when suddenly he recognizes himself on a show about doctors. He is in surgery, raising his hands in the air as a nurse slips a pair of latex gloves over them. He almost didn’t recognize himself, thanks to the mask that covers half his face, but there’s no doubt about it, it’s him—after all, if a man can’t recognize himself, what can he recognize? This is his first day as a surgeon. Apparently, the man has been going to night school. The man on the couch is impressed. He didn’t know you could go to night school to become a surgeon, and yet it turns out that he has actually been doing it this whole time! He marvels at himself as he cuts open some poor man’s chest and begins to operate on his malfunctioning heart. He hopes the operation will go well, and it does. The nurses congratulate him as he sews the man back together. Later on, they all go out drinking, and the man makes love to one of the nurses—the most attractive one—in the bathroom of the club. It is the best sex the man has had in years.
On another station, the man finds himself foiling a gang of jewel thieves. He has infiltrated the gang, thanks to some ingenious plastic surgery and a number of carefully constructed lies. He waits until the last possible moment, and then he springs the trap. Everyone is arrested and found guilty, and after the trial the man is singled out for bravery and is given a medal, and a monument is erected to him in a park downtown. Lovers sit on a bench beside the monument and feel safe. It is sad, though, because the man’s father died in a botched robbery, and, while what the man has done makes him feel that he has finally evened out the situation, he knows that nothing he can do will ever bring his father back from the dead. Still, perhaps his work has prevented other innocent fathers from being killed.
Meanwhile, on another station, the man is a scientist who has invented a way to bring people back from the dead. He uses it to bring back his wife, who died a few years ago, but then he learns that she didn’t love him, after all, and that it is better not to mess with bringing people back from the dead. He is a better man for learning this, but he can’t help feeling sorry for himself, as he misses his wife and the love that he thought she had for him. On another station, the man has become the head of a warlike country and is threatening to unleash Armageddon on the world if his barbarous demands are not met. The man becomes afraid of himself and changes the channel. Now he is murdering a small boy in a field with a rusty knife, and he feels absolutely terrible. Whatever happened to night school and poetry books? The man is confused. He is proud of himself and everything he has accomplished, very proud indeed—he always knew he had it in him. But at the same time he is scared of what he sees. There are things about himself that he doesn’t want to know, things he does that he doesn’t want to think about. He wishes there were some way he could choose what he does and does not do. But it is beyond his control. He runs rampant across the world, helping and killing and saving and selling, buying and raping and stealing and feeling and making love and running away and laughing and crying and dying and being born and dying and being born and dying and being born and dying and being born.
Eventually the man comes to see that he has a mind, and that his mind is like a fist, wrapped tightly around a single thought. He cannot open the fist to look at the thought, for fear that it will fly away, but he knows that it is very important and that he must hang on to it, no matter the cost. He stares at the fist and hopes that it is very strong. He feels like a man who has fallen asleep at the wheel and has awakened to find his car lurching off a cliff. He has applied the brake, he has swung the wheel to the side, he has offered up a silent prayer, but it is too soon to see whether he has done these things in time. He can only wait for the next moment to come, and hope as hard as he can.
Finally, the next moment comes. The man opens his fist and realizes that the thing in his hand is not a thought but the end of an electrical cord. He looks down and finds that the electrical cord leads to the television—now a dark, silent box lying on the floor at his feet. The man feels a rush of triumph. He has come out on top, he has won. He grins to himself as he contemplates his next move. He decides that the best thing to do is to take the TV down to the trash and get rid of it. And this is exactly what he does.
But in the stairwell, on the way back from the trash, the man passes himself carrying the television down to the trash. He stops to congratulate himself on his wisdom and strength, but his other self averts his eyes, hoping not to be noticed. The man begins to take offense and is about to say something when both of them are elbowed aside by the man, who is carrying his TV back up from the trash. The man hurries after himself, yelling, No, no, I don’t want that anymore!
But he doesn’t listen. As they enter the apartment, the man on the couch looks up from the TV in irritation. Why can’t everyone leave him alone? The room is packed with versions of the man running here and there, talking to himself about this and that, making plans on the phone and staring out the window and falling in love and falling out of love and finding himself loved and unloved and hated and feared and liked and disliked and ignored and unknown and known. He is fired, promoted, rehired and refired, has found a new place to live and is moving out, is moving in and repainting, is in the other room dying and in the kitchen being born. There is too much going on. The man walks out the door and down the hall and into the next apartment. Mommy, Mommy, his children scream, what’s for breakfast? The man makes French toast and waffles and ham and eggs and pancakes and cereal and Pop-Tarts and brownies and hot dogs and hamburgers and baked Alaska and a birthday cake in the shape of a castle and pours glasses of milk and orange juice and coffee and Tang and Kool-Aid and water and puts ice in all of the glasses. He takes the kids down to the bus stop seven hundred times, and he drives the bus to school. Drunk, sober, hungover, on acid, pot, cocaine, uppers and downers, or nothing at all—it doesn’t matter in the least—he gets in an accident every foot of the way, or he doesn’t. At school, he gets in a fight on the playground and is sent to the office, or doesn’t and isn’t, or does and isn’t, or doesn’t and is. He gives himself a good lecture, maybe, winks at the secretary he has or has not been banging for the past two weeks, or four weeks, or ten weeks, or no weeks, then hurries slowly to the women’s room, realizing that it is or is not his time of the month, mops none or half or all of the gym and goes out back to have a smoke or stare at the sky or remember the time he accidentally ate a spider or became President or something else or nothing else or everything else. He flies to the next town over and perches in all the trees, then falls to the ground in several different countries and is blown away by the wind, which hammers endlessly in all the ears he has—more than he is capable of counting.
Sometimes the man cries himself to sleep at night, but usually he just changes the channel. He has not been able to find his way to the office; he doesn’t know where they put it. He rings and rings, but the nurse no longer answers his calls. One night, he discovers that his lips are horribly chapped. This strikes him as the worst thing that has ever happened, and for a moment he sobs uncontrollably. Then, once more, he opens the fist. ♦
