Universal Harvester(4)
“Downtown?”
“No, out by I-35. All kinds of new stuff going up over there,” he said; Steve Heldt didn’t think Ames really had any more room to expand, but they kept building stuff just in case. “Big contract, anyway.”
Jeremy cleared the table; there wasn’t much to it, just throwing away some trash. He leaned over his shoulder and said “Beast?” while opening the refrigerator; this was shorthand for beer in the Heldt house. Steve held himself to one beer after dinner; how he’d settled on Milwaukee’s Best was lost to history, but the alliance was permanent. Years ago, Mom had brought a six-pack of Stroh’s home once when it was all she saw on the shelf at Fareway. It sat in the refrigerator for a solid year.
He tossed the can to his dad underhand and they both headed to the living room: it was the pattern during winter. In summer, they had a lot of fun together grilling out back, but neither man had really ever taken to the kitchen. They didn’t feel at home in there. It still felt like it belonged to Mom.
They watched Proof of Life that night, the one Jeremy’d grabbed without looking. They both enjoyed it. There was comfort and ease in watching movies together; Jeremy considered himself a little more high-minded than his dad, but they both disappeared into the screen’s glow at about the same time, and they stayed lost once they got there. The room filled with light. It was a space they could share, something to be grateful for without having to think too much about it.
Dad went to bed immediately afterward—“See you tomorrow,” he said, like a coworker leaving early—but Jeremy stayed up to give She’s All That a look. He knew tapes to break down over time, but when it happened people didn’t usually elaborate on it. The tape’s chewed up about halfway through, they’d say. You can see something’s going to happen about a minute before and then the machine spits it out, they’d say. It makes a squiggly noise.
This was different. Twice now people’d brought in tapes, different ones, and said there was something on the actual tape that didn’t belong. Something they’d watched through and come out on the other side of. They seemed confused trying to describe it; either they hadn’t wanted to go into detail, or they didn’t know how. “There’s another movie that was on this tape,” was how Lindsey’d put it. “They must have recorded over the old one.”
She’s All That wasn’t something Jeremy would have otherwise watched on his own. It was boring. He felt restless on the couch, picking stray threads from cushions, following a plot that didn’t interest him, debating whether to reheat the remaining Potato Olés. Fifteen minutes in he realized he could have checked Stephanie Parsons’s copy of Targets instead, and he felt annoyed with himself; he thought about just heading off to bed. But then, in the middle of a scene where a crying woman was typing something onto a computer terminal, the television screen blinked dark for a half second; and then it went light again, and Jeremy sat up straight, and found himself watching a black-and-white scene, shot by a single camera, mounted or held by a very steady hand. At first, he had to turn the volume up to hear whether there was even any sound at all: there was, but not much. A little wind across the camera’s microphone, the audible rise and fall of a person breathing. There was a timecode in the corner scrolling along. The date read 00/00/0000. There didn’t seem to be much else to see, but then the breathing sound quickened and movements began breaking roughly through the dark.
The scene lasted about four minutes. Then the screen twitched again, and She’s All That roared back into the room from the silence, while Jeremy, now wide awake and fully focused, stared at the action as if waiting for somebody to break character and maybe explain to the camera what everybody’d just seen.
But he knew that wasn’t actually going to happen. Somebody had transferred a scene onto She’s All That. Weren’t tapes somehow protected against people copying stuff onto them? But there had to be some way of getting around it. He watched on without listening, waiting for a third blink that might put the first two into clearer context, but nothing came. After twenty minutes he thought about rewinding. He decided instead to fast forward without pushing STOP. The action developed wordlessly now, but all in color, all the right movie.
He hit REWIND once the end credits started to roll, and he watched the black-and-white scene again, and then a third time; finally he went back to his bedroom and tried to sleep, with limited success.
*
The quiet of the snow out in the yard early the next day: it was probably the best thing about winter, these mornings with their open stillnesses. Jeremy had slept badly and was up before the sun, thinking about watching She’s All That again, wondering whether he should show it to his dad. But he decided to forget it. Someone had taped something personal onto a movie they’d rented: that wasn’t supposed to be possible, but maybe it was; who’d ever tried, but who cared?
The road out to the Lincoln Highway didn’t get plowed until mid-afternoon. Jeremy had to call in late. He got to work around two. Sarah Jane was on her stool by the computer, doing a crossword puzzle.
“I should have called you and told you to stay home,” she said. “Nobody’s coming in till they finish plowing side streets.”
He stood at the door kicking the remaining snow off his shoes. “It’s all right,” he said.
“You feel like working the same shift tomorrow?” she asked him as he was getting settled. “I don’t want to make Ezra drive home over these roads after dark.” Ezra lived with his mother and father south of Ames on a property as old as any in the area; he had to drive over half a mile of gravel road to get to the highway, in a car that was barely up to the task. His father had offered to help him out with a down payment on something sturdier, but Ezra, though only nineteen, felt a deep aversion to debt, and a deeper one to casting any tool aside that had any use left in it. Farm kids are like this, I’ve found. They don’t like throwing useful things away.