Universal Harvester(54)
The trip back to the house felt shorter than the walk out had been. He went back up to where the computer was. The questions he wanted to answer and the ones he meant to leave alone had coalesced into two distinct groups. Even on his mom’s antique connection he thought he could get it all settled by evening.
*
The old computer tower buzzed and whirred as James fed his scant supply of useful search terms into the browser: the address of his parents’ new house; the names by which people had either identified themselves or one another on the tapes; a few names and dates he’d harvested from a property deed among Dad’s business papers in the filing cabinet. Current owner, prior residence, date of birth: it was enough.
“Oh, seriously?” he said when he saw a Tripod page as the top result. It was like looking through a telescope into a lost age. “People still use Tripod?”
The page was headlined THEY WERE OUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS, and was a place people had gone, in desperation, to put their grief. It boasted all the trappings of the initial expansion of the Internet from college campuses and computer laboratories to the wider world: site design from a template supplied by the host, clip art, and several uncorrected spelling errors in the single paragraph atop the frame. The Michael Christopher Gathering Also Known As Michael’s Friends Has Brainwashed Our Childrern And Our Families. This Is Our Story, it began, and continued:
Most of Us Have Spent Many Years Seraching For Those We Have Lost. Now We Can Use the World Wide Web to Share Our Story. Please Use These Pages To Learn About Who Michael Christopher Is And Ask In Your Heart If You Can Help.
James read the text dutifully, but his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the faces underneath it, arranged like portraits in a high school yearbook. He felt the nausea he’d fought back in the basement two days ago return: all this trauma felt private, raw, something to be protected from outsiders. He disliked feeling like a voyeur.
If You Have Seen Any of the People On This Page, Please Sign Our Guestbook. You Can Also Reach Us By Email. Every Little Bit Helps, We Can Be Reached At [email protected].
He had to click through seven faces and read their stories—of children or parents gone missing, notes left behind, whole lifetimes coming to consist only of loose ends—before he got to Irene Sample.
This is my wife, Irene, the mother of our only daughter, Lisa. Lisa is thirty now. She was Five when Irene was taken from us. Although we are apart now I know we both still miss her every day. I am an old man now but there will always be a place in my home for you, Irene. Lisa lives in Nevada now. She has an apartment there. She would love to See you.
Her hair was in a modest bun; her smile was gentle, unforced. The picture was in black and white and had been taken at a photo studio in a Montgomery Ward. It had so little in common with the world in which James lived most of his life that looking at it made him feel dizzy.
Their grief wasn’t his to bear, he knew. But it was inside him all the same, like a secret entrusted to a messenger. He dimmed the monitor to black and closed his eyes; the residual gleam ebbed against his eyelids for the better part of a minute. He felt very tired. He did not return to the site to read the guestbook again, where Jeremy Heldt—in a note read eight times in total, according to a helpful counter at the bottom right corner of the post—shared his small part of the story with no one in particular.
Just wanted to stop by here to say I am sorry for all you have had to go through. I know what it is like to lose your mother. Hope someday you can get the answers you need.
Abby came in; James opened his eyes. “Did you write to him yet?” she said.
“I’m getting to it,” he said, reaching for the dial quaintly housed in the right underside of the monitor.
*
They ate dinner all together that night; Emily made a big pasta bake and heated up some dinner rolls. To the parents, this gathering felt miraculous: it was fifteen hundred miles from Collins to West Covina; they hadn’t reckoned the other distances collapsed at the table, from Portland and Santa Fe, from the outside silo to the upstairs room. The weird shock of the videotapes James had recovered from the Oldsmobile loaned a sense of common purpose to their reunion now, something easier to approach than the things they’d all been both thinking of and trying not to think about just yesterday morning: advancing age, graduation, their various places in the world.
“So tell me about Nevada,” Ed said to his son. He intoned the long initial a in Nevada with relish: it takes outsiders forever to get over it.
“I met the dude’s dad,” said James. “Steve. He says his son is fine and lives in Des Moines and he used to work at a video store.”
“And?”
“That’s pretty much it,” said James, looking around the table. “Abby thinks we should just drop it from there.”
“Do you think that?” Ed asked, turning.
“Kind of,” said Abby. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” Ed said, and his children both steeled themselves: Dad was about to try to shepherd them toward a conclusion. The opening gambit of Dad’s conclusion schtick was always a barrage of questions. “What if these had been just somebody’s regular home movies?”
“Dad, I know where you’re going with this, but please with the what-ifs,” said James. Ed looked back at him with wonder, trying to suppress his delight: he didn’t want to condescend; there’s a complex but palpable joy in seeing your children outgrow you. “There are three things we can do, OK? One, we can watch all the tapes and keep finding people if they say their names and check up on them. No, right?”