Universal Harvester(48)
“We get to write our own majors, I picked State Abbreviations. Very forward-looking place,” said James.
“You’re really funny now!” she said without insult: he’d always tried, but now he talked like a grown-up instead of a teenager who hopes people laugh at his jokes.
“Thanks,” he said, looking around to change the subject. She’d finished stacking the contents of the first box, fifteen tapes: the nine Streets, the three Fields, the two with the state abbreviations, and one marked Shed #4.
“Just the one Shed,” said Abby, picking it up, turning it over in case there was something else written on it somewhere: some initials in ballpoint, a date. Nothing.
“Maybe the others are in that other box,” James suggested.
She fed it to the VCR, whose gears turned loudly as the tape slid in. It worked fine, but it was an old machine.
The action began immediately.
*
The unedited Shed #4 is hard to watch. It’s long; shot with a Samsung SCF34 onto a Fuji 120 Super VHS Pro tape, it is a single continuous take. From the opening shot of the unoccupied outbuilding, its chair ready to receive, right down to the lingering view of the field at night after the fleeing woman hits the vanishing point, there’s no break in the play: everything happens in real time. They bring her in; they attach her to the chair; they begin asking her questions, footage that was never transferred to copies of Against All Odds or Pale Rider or Fresh Horses and so remained unseen until James and Abby retrieved the tape from the trunk of the Oldsmobile. She rises to her feet, as we’ve seen, standing on one leg as though bidden; and then, as Steve and Jeremy and Shauna can attest, she breaks for the driveway. She’s pursued by a two-man skeleton crew: whoever’s holding the camera, and Lisa Sample, whose familiar body we see briefly in the frame when the action goes off-script.
“Sorry,” says the cameraman, whose name has not been preserved.
“God damn it,” says Lisa, knocking the camera from his hands.
*
When the tape ran out the machine began rewinding automatically. The blue screen showed frost-white chunky numbers scrolling backwards, too fast for the eye to follow.
“What the fuck,” said James, watching the counter: it was comforting. “What the fuck.”
“Can you stop saying ‘what the fuck’?” said Abby; she was standing over her stacks of tapes, regarding them as a farmer might consider a nest of snakes.
“Go tell Mom and Dad about this,” James said.
“Leave Mom and Dad alone.”
“It was on their property, they should know about it.”
“It’s somebody’s AV project from the stupid state university,” she said. She was angry; it had been impossible to look away from the television the whole time, but she’d come away feeling dirty. The sensation registered in her shoulders and upper arms, an unwelcome burden beginning to establish its weight.
“It’s a fucking home movie,” James said, snatching up a tape from the as-yet unsorted box: Interviews #3. “The worst AV student in the world knows better than to shoot trash like that. There’s no titles, no edits, no nothing. There’s just—”
The tape finished rewinding and auto-ejected, and James deftly made the switch; he hit PLAY, and the screen blurred into focus, a young man’s face in close-up, head lowered as if in expectation of some reprimand, waiting for something.
“Just nothing.”
Abby looked at her brother, down there doing his best to put on an air of authority, and then she looked back over to the tapes, adding up the numbers. A hundred and twenty minutes, two hundred and forty minutes, four hundred. Six hours in three tapes, twelve hours in six, twenty-four hours in twelve.
“Years,” she said. “It would take years.”
The door from the kitchen creaked open and light flooded down the steps. The kids had been in the basement for what seemed like forever.
“Whatcha watchin’?” Emily Pratt asked with a big smile when she got to the bottom of the stairs. It was great to have the kids around after being without them for so long out there on the road. It’s hard to describe, this feeling of seeing your kids spending time together like adults, meeting up again after being out there in the world like free agents: there’s something giddy and unreal about it. I knew that boy when he was afraid of strangers. I knew them both before they knew how to talk.
4
“I don’t see anything,” Stephanie says, scrutinizing the city scene before her.
“Just there,” Lisa says. “By the garbage.”
The woman near the trash bin seems oblivious to the other people at the bus stop. She leans over the hole and plunges her arm in, fishing around down there, her forehead pressing into the rim. She retrieves half of something wrapped in butcher paper, maybe a sandwich or some cheese, and drops it into a tote bag that hangs from her left shoulder. You can see her breath in the air: it’s winter somewhere.
“Oh,” says Stephanie.
“There’s more,” says Lisa, holding down the VOLUME button on the remote, the green bars on the screen increasing their numbers in response. City sounds from the speaker on the cabinet: trucks, sirens, horns.
“I want to go home,” Stephanie says.
“A lot of people want to go home,” says Lisa, her anger like a musket flashing in the dark.