Universal Harvester(17)
What if he just got out of the way? It would be strange. He’d get used to it. They’d both get used to it. Maybe it would be for the best.
He didn’t resolve anything just yet, but he registered the presence of some slow movement inside himself, a small change in the coordinates of his inner drift. He rolled over from his back onto his side. The last thing he saw before he fell asleep was the glint of a baseball trophy he’d gotten in fourth grade, still sitting on the same shelf where he’d put it all those years ago. His team had finished fourth overall. Everybody got a trophy. It was a statue of a player with a bat in his hands, waiting for the pitch.
10
It happened in a haze: one minute the car was carrying her through the dark down the road from Collins, stars and moon overhead, no light due for at least an hour, and the next she was riding back out, the car a little emptier but not palpably so, divested of its burden. She hardly ever drove into Nevada anymore: maybe to run payroll, or to show her face at the counter long enough to keep people from asking questions. Of the actual errand she could later recall only tangential details—her reflection in the glass door as she approached it in the glare of a streetlight; the extra minute she had to wait on the way back out for the early morning traffic to pass before she could turn left onto Lincoln Way.
It was sloppy, that huge pile of tapes all at once on the floor. How is something like that not a cry for help? Someone working with footage from a camera mounted on her rearview, monitoring her face as she drove, might have tried, in edit, to frame the scene like that—as Sarah Jane reaching out somehow, trying to get caught. This is a mood I can imagine if all this had taken place in South Carolina, maybe: all that salty air, high humidity, the coast giving way to broken shoreline. Or New Mexico, up in the mountains. The New Mexico Sarah Jane I can envision letting some anxiety bleed right through her expression, steering through the switchbacks on the way up to her cabin.
But the Iowa Sarah Jane, the real one, has no beads of sweat forming on her forehead. Her jaw doesn’t tremble and her hands don’t shake. The several rings she wears on her fingers click a little against the steering wheel, keeping time with a melody only she can hear, but she is otherwise indistinguishable from anyone else driving down the same road. She’d gone in early because Lisa Sample had knocked in the middle of the night and told her it was time. Time for what? Time to take the tapes back. Take them back? Yes, they’re finished, they should go back out on the shelves, I can only hold on to them for so long. All right, but all at once? Yes, I think so: who’ll know, besides you and me? They’ll only get out a little at a time: this with that smile, that hybrid of kindness and hunger she’d never seen anywhere else.
You’d expect, in the presence of any inner struggle, to see it reflected here, in the privacy of the highway, where no one is watching. But that after-midnight conversation, and any news it brought about the nature of Lisa’s work, has gone away to hide in the place where all the other moments they share end up: in a secret chamber of Sarah Jane’s heart, where the person she’d hoped to be by now has set up shop and is making do with available materials.
So think instead of animals that shed skins. It’s a metaphor with limited uses: there aren’t any animals in play here. Everybody’s a free agent. Still, picture the noble snake, having molted, slithering away, newly glistening. There’s the skin, in a big disorganized pile behind it. Is the snake asking you to notice that a snake was here earlier? No; the snake doesn’t care one way or the other. It has moved on. No, indeed, you can’t call a snake sloppy or careless or fault it for leaving tracks in its wake. Besides, who are you? Snakes have been here for millions of years.
*
There was a small mountain of tapes on the other side of the door when Jeremy opened the store the next morning. The overnight return didn’t normally get a lot of use; there was an extra heft to the door as he pushed it open. He deactivated the alarm first and then started moving tapes from the floor to the counter. It took a while.
The unexpected stack of returns threw off his routine; he forgot to put a tape into the player for in-store play. Instead he sat at the counter, processing returns in silence, pronouncing titles in his head as he checked them all back in: Tango & Cash, Varsity Blues, Primal Fear, She’s All That, Mortal Thoughts, Bloodsport, Targets, Nightbreed, Reindeer Games, The Sweet Hereafter, Trading Mom, Universal Soldier, Shadowlands. He was running an internal inventory of which ones he had and hadn’t seen when Stephanie came in. “Hi, stranger,” she said.
“Hello stranger yourself,” said Jeremy. Their meeting at Gregory’s was comfortably tucked away behind the last long freeze that preceded the spring thaw; it was May now. He was happy to see her.
“Keeping busy?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m kind of the acting manager these days. How’re you?”
“I’m looking at a job in San Francisco,” she said, trying casually to slide “San Francisco” onto the end of the phrase like you might say “Clive” or “Colo” or “Marshalltown.” “You think they have a Video Hut there?”
“Management opportunities at Blockbuster,” said Jeremy. Their smiles sparked off each other in the same instant. Stephanie thought about how bored she’d been all winter.
She grabbed a movie from the racks without really looking at it and put it on the counter. “I’m going,” she said.