Don’t Do That, Please – Lake Markham
February 25, 2025
Caveman sat around the bar that night so he wouldn’t sit around at home instead. It was always going to be the one thing or the other.
“Hey, Caveman,” the bartender said when he came in. The bartender pulled an amber-colored beer from the tap and put it on the bar in front of him. The old man beside Caveman grumbled something morosely to himself, and Caveman slid the bartender fifteen dollars in two bills. Then he said nothing. He had come here tonight on very important business—he was a superhero whose power was to be bored until he died.
Caveman lifted up his mask and leaned in close over the bar: “They’re in here right now,” the bartender whispered to him. The bartender picked up the fifteen dollars and he threw it in the tip jar, then nodded toward the dining room and said, “Three o’ clock.” Caveman peered through the bar, past the high tops, and into the smoky room, where he saw the two philosophers huddled discreetly around a table. Now there were a couple of heroes. To conceal their identities, they wore their capes around outside the Academy, often speaking quietly about something far beyond Caveman’s comprehension. When he’d still been a distinguished member of their illustrious Programme, the second philosopher had liked Caveman alright, but the first would give him feedback indicating that he just couldn’t stand him:
“You think you’ve got it all figured out,” the first philosopher would smirk. “But really your whole existence has become a problem for you.” The first philosopher would hand back Caveman’s critical essay, written in the Victorian style about the sphere of the model ship, and then he would tell him, “That’s because you’re wrong.”
Caveman kept looking at the philosophers. Studying their movements. He took out his binoculars to see what they were up to. When he peered down the reflective prisms and into the magnified image, the first philosopher turned in his chair and smirked back at him. The first philosopher had developed consciousness.
“Hey, Caveman,” the second philosopher said.
When Caveman got home that night, the whole place smelled like marijuana. His roommate Ray had gotten stoned again, and then he’d fallen asleep in the living room playing a video game. It looked like Red Dead Redemption. Caveman drifted through the apartment, stopping in the living room only to turn the Xbox off, then lay quietly on his bed with the door to the bedroom shut. He watched the ceiling fan spin above him and he released a deep sigh. Caveman wished that the fan would chop him up in the same way he often imagined it chopping up his dreams, which he knew was itself a dream, though maybe the only one that reality would never erode.
That was on a Monday. On Tuesday, Caveman tried to quit the Taco Bell team.
“Are you sure?” he wanted his manager Bevin to ask him. Caveman could see it all play out in front of him:
“No,” he would say to Bevin. Then he’d list his stipulations. “I want to wear my superhero uniform to work for one thing,” he would stipulate. “Just like all the other heroes.” Caveman would point at the little black Lone Ranger mask that was tied around his face. “This thing’s not cutting it,” he would say. Bevin would nod that he had understood.
“That,” Caveman went on, “and I want to go fly-fishing upstate with you and Dennis.”
There was a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise attached to the Taco Bell, and Dennis was the general manager of that fine establishment. Bevin looked across the dining room and over at Dennis. Dennis was a vegetarian, was in excellent shape, and from time to time would take off of work to compete in a triathlon that he knew he was going to lose. Dennis would do it anyway. Once a month, Dennis and Bevin would pack up their bags and head north, then spend all weekend fly-fishing in those calm, frigid waters. They would always return with a cooler full of salmon, of rainbow trout, of grayling, and carve out the next three weeks to cook them up in remarkable ways.
“This was the first—and last—catch of the day,” Dennis always said. He’d show a photo of himself holding up a steelhead the size of an air duct. Bevin always laughed at that.
“These are my demands,” Caveman stipulated.
“I didn’t know you felt this way,” he imagined Bevin saying. And Caveman would understand—from mass media, he knew that managers, corporate leaders, and CEOs were often out of touch, but that didn’t always mean that they were evil or malicious.
“We can talk about the superhero uniform,” Bevin would tell him. “As for the trip, we’re planning to go up again in two weeks. I’ll have to ask Dennis, but I can’t imagine he’d say no. Dennis thinks you’re alright,” Bevin would say. “You know that?”
But when Caveman blinked his eyes, he returned to the real world. And in the real world, Bevin was just about to speak:
“Do you want to put in your two weeks,” Bevin said, “or are you just quitting?”
Caveman was quiet. Then he said, “I hadn’t thought about it.”
Caveman stood behind the window of the drive-through, where he took an order for a soft taco and a chalupa:
“No sour cream on the taco,” said a voice through the machine.
“No sour cream,” Caveman said into the microphone.
A blue Prius pulled up outside the window, and both of the philosophers were sitting inside. The first philosopher had commandeered the vehicle. He turned to look at Caveman and smirked at him, then took the paper bag as Caveman held it out. The first philosopher prodded around in it like it was a cadaver.
“Hey, Caveman,” the second philosopher said.
Still sitting in the drive-through, the philosophers began to speak quietly among themselves. Caveman realized they were probably peer-reviewing each other right there. The contents of their minds were mingling to create a single, formless concept, one that rejected the notion of time and space altogether—it was a thought without the capacity to smirk, which Caveman would never himself be able to deny the existence of.
“No sour cream,” he said without recourse to the concept. Whatever they’d created, whatever it was they’d thought, Caveman had no access to any of it. The first philosopher threw the bag in the back seat as he drove away. The vanity plate on the Prius just said PUBLSHD.
Caveman took a smoke break behind the Taco Bell, where he kicked over a tower of blue milk crates. He put the crates back together so he’d have somewhere to sit, and it was there that he began to reflect on the passage of time. Caveman had experienced so little of it in its duration, and that from within the limits of his own brief life. All the energy he’d expended to gain knowledge of its inner secrets, and yet time had managed to measure him without a single thought: Caveman was twenty-three years old.
That afternoon, Caveman took an order for a triple-bean burrito. He took an order for a soft taco with no lettuce, and a cheesy double-beef burrito with no cheese and no beef. Caveman imagined Zeus torturing the Titans this way in an alternate history, before the Olympians decided that it was simply too cruel.
“Do you hear me?” Zeus would wail at the Titans. Zeus would wail, “I said no cheese.”
“You’re being dramatic again,” Bevin called from his office.
A green Prius appeared at the drive-through window, and in it beside the second philosopher was the first philosopher’s wife, a Toyota dealer.
“Renewable energy,” she said to Caveman.
“Hey, Caveman,” the second philosopher said.
Caveman saw a sudden glint of movement at the edges of his vision, and he looked around the dining room that had only just been empty. He found the first philosopher in there, standing in the corner, where he’d been annotating the margins of an article while Caveman’s back was turned. The first philosopher had taken off his cape and then he’d made himself at home, draping the cape over the window where it darkened the room like a curtain.
Caveman put the order out the drive-through to the first philosopher’s wife, which was when he noticed all the unopened tacos, burritos, and chalupas inside the Prius. Caveman wanted Zeus to throttle him in the kitchen of the Taco Bell.
“I’m just quitting,” he said to Bevin after that.
That night while lying sleeplessly in bed, Caveman’s mind began to wander. He wanted to wander with it. Caveman was going to get out of Big City—he thought of someplace that only he could go.
“The Golden State,” he said to himself between the covers, beneath the darkness, inside the weight of silent night. “That must be California.”
On Wednesday, Caveman brought his American Tourister to the bank. He would be withdrawing everything from inside his savings account, and without a word would fashion it all back together inside the suitcase. By the time anyone noticed, it would be much too late—it would be bright and early, Caveman would be on a Greyhound bus, and that Greyhound bus would be headed for sunny California.
“How would you like your money?” the teller asked him.
“Yes, please,” Caveman joked, then said, “Twenties. Well, tens are better.” Caveman filled the suitcase with the cash as the teller handed it over. It was two or three years’ worth of savings, and Caveman had imagined that there’d be more of it than this, but he was just going to have to learn how to make it work somehow. All that time, he was realizing now, was worth just a couple of inches at the bottom of an American Tourister.
“Look at what it’s done to my life,” Caveman said to the teller, talking about time, pointing at the money.
Caveman bought himself a Greyhound ticket. That deleted some of the money. He put his suitcase into the cargo deck and he climbed the steps to find a seat. Maybe he would buy some trail mix once he got to California. Maybe he would happen upon some almonds. He would definitely be taking pictures of celebrities—George Lopez, Tai Lopez, Jennifer Lopez—and he would sell the pictures, becoming something of a celebrity himself:
“I’m a superhero,” he’d declare in a press conference. He’d declare this only once he’d secured his fame and fortune. Caveman would soon come to worry about his friends’ and family’s privacy, but then he would remember that he was all alone in this world and he had no one to bother.
The Greyhound passed through the great state of Pennsylvania. The Greyhound went through Chicago, Des Moines, Omaha, and even Boulder. Caveman fell into a slumber so deep that he found himself unconscious for nearly two days. When he opened his eyes he had reached the West Coast. He was mesmerized at the orange glow of the Pacific morning sun, kissing at the upper limbs of redwood roaring past him out the window. He saw colors that neared the extremities of his vision. He knew then that he had reached the Golden State.
The first thing Caveman did was eat an avocado.
“It tastes the same,” he told the street vendor.
By Sunday, he was running out of money. He had started to feel like his chickens had ‘come home to roost.’ Then the chickens had found a car, they’d driven back home, and they’d left Caveman all alone in the Golden State. The chickens were probably all the way in Big City by now, talking about what a fool he’d been to cross the country like that. They were probably already working at the Taco Bell. They were probably getting published.
The philosophers got published. Caveman downloaded the email.
“Maybe I should ask for my old job back,” he said as he scanned it. He went into a McDonald’s to order an egg and cheese McMuffin, but they gave him a breakfast burrito, which was just another kind of taco.
Caveman slept on the bus for another long stretch of two days. There was no golden sunrise, there was no Pacific Coast, there was only darkness and nothing waiting for him and Caveman had become it. When he got back to Big City he took a cab home, and the whole place smelled like marijuana again. Ray had fallen asleep playing Red Dead Redemption. Caveman lay on the floor beside him and then he slept some more, and then he got up to flip through a lifestyle magazine on the counter.
MEET AMERICA’S NEW FAVORITE STREAMERS, one of the headlines said. Caveman tore the page out and put it up on the refrigerator.
“I want to move back in,” he said to Ray once he’d woken up.
“I already subleased your room,” Ray told him. Ray wiped the sleep from his eyes. Then he lit a bong and inhaled from it for several seconds. Caveman listened to the sound of the rippling water and thought about California. Ray held his breath and released a cloud of dark smoke. “Sorry, Caveman,” was all he could say.
Caveman took the magazine page from the refrigerator and he stuck it in his pocket. It was his now. He opened his laptop and searched through Craigslist for a room, which was how he learned a man named Mark was selling nut butters throughout Big City.
ill meet u at the tbell parken lot, Mark texted Caveman.
Sounds good, Caveman texted him.
you can see some of the butters that way, Mark texted back. and you can see the dogs if you want too man.
The deep purple minivan turned into the parking lot, and Caveman noticed the driver’s side slumped down beneath the frame. Mark brought the minivan to a stop in front of Caveman and cracked the rear sliding door. The back rows of seats had been taken out, there were two dogs back there instead, and Mark looked as solemn as the day he was born as Caveman peered in at him through the crack in the door.
“Jump in,” Mark wheezed. Mark was a heavy man. “Out of the rain.”
Caveman stepped into the minivan. He had to hunch over to remain standing. A large puddle began to form around his feet, and only then did Caveman realize that he was soaking wet. Mark turned around in the driver’s seat before clambering over it, and then he sat down on the carpeted floor in the rear half of the vehicle. He grabbed a Border Collie by the collar.
“This is Jess,” Mark said about the dog. He pointed at a Chihuahua. “Becky’s the ankle-biter.” Caveman watched as the Chihuahua went on jumping all around him. Then Caveman said, “Becky.”
“I make these premium nut butters by hand,” Mark was saying. “Just me and my wife Lisa.” Mark lifted a couple of 64-ounce growlers full of what looked like peanut butter, but in several different gradations of a greasy beige hue. “The pistachio is thirty-three dollars. The almond is twenty-eight.” Mark shuffled his large body around to pick up another growler. “We have walnut butter for thirty,” he said, “this week, anyway. You never know. It’s a free market in this country, and that means nobody knows a thing.”
“I’ll take the walnut butter,” Caveman said to Mark. Mark nodded at him and then he took out a big spoon.
i Talked to lisa, Mark texted Caveman in the morning. she wants to go on a double date. do you think you could bring somebody
Caveman told Mark that he probably could.
Will you go on a double date with Mark, Lisa, and me, Caveman texted Katie later on that night. He’s a real chill dude I met on Craigslist.
Caveman put the phone down and went to eat the walnut butter. He came back and saw that the message hadn’t been delivered. Caveman realized that Katie must still have his number blocked.
Let’s go to the club instead, Caveman texted Mark.
Mark and Lisa danced together at the club, but Caveman sat alone at a table in the corner. He was too drunk to notice anything at all. His bowtie was undone and it hung around his neck. He’d had a couple of gin martinis before he’d switched to beer several hours ago, and now it was all catching up to him, making him want to take off the mask.
Caveman went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. His secret identity had cost him much of who he was: slowly, over time, in trying to stave off his boredom, he had found himself governed by some force of cosmic irony. This was more than his gift, it would be his undoing—he was Caveman, and the proof was in the mirror.
“I don’t understand why they charge overdraft fees,” Caveman was telling Bevin at the Taco Bell the next morning. “It’s not like you can afford the fees if you can’t afford a night out or whatever.”
“There is a way the world works,” Bevin said, giving Caveman his old uniform back.
Caveman took an order for three tacos, a Pepsi, and a cheesy bean burrito. A little while later he took an order for a CrunchWrap Supreme. A red Prius came up to the drive-through, and the philosophers were sitting in it, looking at Caveman. Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies” was playing in the car. “More Than a Feeling” by Boston was playing in the Taco Bell.
“We’re published again,” the first philosopher smirked at Caveman. He waved the large golden rings on his fingers around. The first philosopher took the CrunchWrap Supreme and then he put it in the floor.
“Hey, Caveman,” the second philosopher said. Caveman looked at the unopened chalupas on the dashboard, the bean burritos pouring from the glovebox, a pile of taquitos in a milk crate in the back. An unopened quesadilla dangled from the rear-view mirror. There was a hard taco pushed into the vent like an air freshener.
Caveman went outside for a smoke break before quitting his job again. He took the bus to his new apartment immediately after, then climbed down the steps and out onto the sidewalk. It had cost him $500 to rent a room for the month, and he would be using that time to look for a new job. Caveman was tired of using his powers. He was tired of being bored. Maybe, if he was lucky, it would all work out this time.
Across the street, Caveman looked at the new apartment. It was a studio unit built on top of a small house. Caveman would be in there soon. He would have the key. He would walk into the apartment and then he’d turn on the light.
Caveman stepped off the sidewalk to cross the street in front of the bus.
“Don’t do that, please,” the driver told him out the window.