Universal Harvester(6)

She stands that way for several minutes. When her balance wavers, she rights it, through some unmeasurable calibration of tendon and muscle; her effort, her focus, is palpable. You can hear the sound of her feet on the straw when she shifts, a corrective stutter. You can also hear the sleeve of someone’s jacket brushing against the camera’s built-in microphone. If you happen to have the volume up high enough, you can even hear the sound when the hand emerges from behind the lens and juts into the frame. There. Skkitch.

It holds a paintbrush. The camera advances, presumably held by the painter’s other hand: in close-up now, the head inside the canvas bag breathes audibly, steady, a little labored. The hand starts painting something on the canvas hood: it paints where the eyes would be, but makes them exaggerated, grotesque, unlifelike. A caricature. It daubs mindlessly once or twice on the left cheek, leaving an incoherent blotch. Toward the forehead it begins lines that might become letters—there’s an angle, possibly the initial strokes of an N, or an M, or an A. V, maybe. Then the frame shakes, and the door to the outbuilding, ajar and opening onto a yard, comes into view for a second before the camera jolts back into the building.

It stops before it gets back to the risen figure. There’s nothing in the frame now but the wall, which then wheels, upended, and we’re either looking at the ceiling or the floor.

Somebody says: “Wait. I didn’t—”

Then Targets resumes, right in the middle of the action by the freeway, Bobby sniping blankly away, heading down to the destiny from which no one can rescue him, unless you want to rewind and watch the outbuilding scene again, which you might, maybe twice even, in case you missed something, maybe a fingernail, or a boot, or an errant swatch of hair.

*

It was several weeks before Jeremy watched Targets, as it turned out. Sarah Jane hadn’t said anything to him about She’s All That, because while she’d remembered to take it home, she hadn’t gotten around to watching it. She didn’t mind being in her forties as much as she’d expected to: but she needed to write things down now in order to remember them, and she resented that. Twenty years ago she’d been so attentive to detail; nothing got past her. When, after a few days, she spotted the tape looking neglected underneath a few stray pieces of unopened junk mail, she scowled. She’d returned it to the racks in the store without mentioning it to Jeremy.

Jeremy still bristled when he remembered Targets, meanwhile, but he’d managed to prevent any actual questions from coalescing around his vague unease. She’s All That was a dud: nobody was renting it. So his radar’d stayed clear long enough for the memory to recede painlessly into the past, where unanswered questions starved quietly to death.

Except then one day Stephanie Parsons came in, wearing a jade-green jacket and looking like a substitute teacher. To Jeremy she looked great; he was beginning to remember his high school days fondly.

“Did you ever have a look at that copy of Targets?” she asked at the counter.

“Oh, hey,” said Jeremy. “I am real sorry. I think I—”

“Did Sarah Jane?”

“I guess,” said Jeremy. “I told her about it. She took it home.”

Stephanie looked at him: when Jeremy met her gaze he anticipated anger, but there was more in there. He could see her making calculations.

“I’d really like for one of you to have a look at it,” she said after a moment. “It keeps bothering me.”

“Yeah, OK,” he said. “I’ll check it out tonight.”

She looked behind her toward the small space of the store, which was empty. “Can we look at it in here?”

“We’re only supposed to play certain stuff when the store’s open,” he said.

Stephanie scratched an itch on her cheek. “Can we just look at it in here?”

It wasn’t like he was going to get fired, and it didn’t matter anyway. Nobody was going to start coming in for at least another hour and a half. He located the tape and loaded it into the in-store VCR, and he let it run.

They stood there watching, heads tilted back, looking up. It wasn’t really dark in the store and it wasn’t especially light. It was sort of gray. This was on a Tuesday morning in March, when some of the trees were in bud, and the stray black clumps of snow that still lay on the ground looked sticky.

*

“Everything OK, big man?” Steve asked Jeremy at dinner. They were having fried chicken; it was Dad’s signature dish and something of a tradition. The smell of hot oil in the kitchen, the sound of sizzling chicken skin, meant good things in the Heldt house. A tax rebate. A project moving forward. A hurdle jumped.

“Yeah, just some weird stuff at work.”

“Weird?”

“Somebody recording over some tapes.”

“Recording—?”

“Putting other stuff on them, weird stuff.”

“Like, dirty movies?”

Jeremy winced a little; he didn’t like to be reminded that his father was probably very lonely.

“No, just weird stuff. I brought one of them home.” He tapped Targets, sitting atop a stack of three tapes beside his plate on the kitchen table. It would have been nice to leave it in the same locked drawer in his mind where he’d put She’s All That. Lindsey Redinius thought her copy of She’s All That was defective: after her account got credited for the rental, she forgot all about it. Stephanie was different, so he had to follow through.