The son burned through the channels. The son saw ads for ground beef and cow milk and respirators. He saw men throw balls at one another. He could not find the woman in the hall. He’d forgotten even what she looked like—her shape—though she was always in his mind. In his bedroom in the mirror or in the air above his bed sometimes he felt he could feel her just beside him. He would move around his bedroom with his eyes closed, feeling for her with hands. She was there.
In absence of the hall film, the son became distracted with another. A movie made many years before the son was born. The son had seen this one before—when he was sick a certain channel had played it back-to-back for near a week—every time it seemed most new. The son couldn’t tell what the film was about. There was a family living in a house. There was a father, a mother, and a son. The family all looked tired. Nothing ever really happened. The father drove places and got lost and walked around the house. The mother mostly cleaned and worried. The son would stand and sit and stand. Other scenes showed the family together, going places, though these were rendered in black-and-white, and seemed of a different grade of film from all the others. Yes, this film was different than the other times the son had seen it.
This time there was something wrong inside the picture. The heads of the main actors and actresses were blurred, though they had not been so the other times the son watched the film, he thought. Also, in this version, the family all kept falling down. In scenes where they’d be walking, doing things the son remembered having seen them do in scenes before, suddenly their legs would fail and they would go down, or otherwise the house around them lurched. The characters did not make reference to this happening—they went on with the scene around the blips. Sometimes the camera fell as well. Sometimes there’d be whole rooms of people falling—all of their heads blurred—actors. A scene would take place in a mall, then suddenly all the people walking and shopping and eating fast food would just hit the ground, and then they’d get right back up and keep doing what they were doing. Sometimes the people could briefly be heard talking loud, but in a language that didn’t make sense. The sky over the people would turn purple or turn reflective or begin raining ants or caterpillars out of large holes. No matter what happened no one in the movie acted any different. The son knew the film had not gone this way before. It had not lasted so many hours. The film went on and on.
The son had almost fallen asleep watching the movie before he recognized himself—saw himself right there in the movie, in a window in the background of the screen. His face, unlike the others, was not blurred. In the window the son looked frightened. The son’s hair was flattened, of a bright white. The son could not tell what the window was a part of—the shot was too close up. Several other characters with the blurred faces blocked long sections of the shot. The son felt he recognized certain bodies, the black holes of blurred mouths moving on pale heads.
In the window the son was saying something. The son couldn’t hear him through the glass and other conversation, though he could tell by the son’s lips that the son was repeating the same thing over and over. The son’s lips were cracked and kind of swollen, the same lips the son used each day to eat and drink and speak and sometimes kiss another’s skin. Then the camera moved and the son was no longer in the picture and the blurry heads inside the film went on—scenes and scenes there never-ending, and in some scenes other scenes there played in the background on little screens—and in the background of those scenes, screens too—and in those and those and those, so on.
Upstairs in the son’s closet, the sealed black package rolled over on its side.