Universal Harvester(7)

“OK,” said Steve. “We’ll have to check it out.” Jeremy nodded without looking up from his plate, and they moved on to talking about work starting at the Ames site. He chewed his food slowly and he asked lots of questions, technical things he knew his dad would answer. He wanted dinner to last awhile, because he was hoping to avoid having to check out Targets with Dad.

He didn’t really want to watch it again at all. He’d only taken it home that night out of a sense of duty. The three hours he’d spent pausing and restarting it with Stephanie Parsons in the store seemed like enough. Maybe the interruptions of the customers coming and going had made it a little easier to bear, or maybe the constant stopping and starting had made it worse, but in either case he was hoping to shield his father from it, because it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to bring home to your family. Underneath it on the table were Three Days of the Condor and The Fourth Protocol, intended as insurance against his father expressing any interest whatsoever in Targets.

They proved effective decoys. The Fourth Protocol was a little hard to follow, but had just enough action to make up for it. Steve Heldt said “Good night” when it was over, and Jeremy said, “See you in the morning”; but, while his father headed straight down the hall to his bedroom, Jeremy stayed where he was, on the couch in front of the television. Two hours later, he was still there, awake, staring straight ahead with his arms crossed, pausing and rewinding, trying to make out the contours of these figures so poorly lit that they kept vanishing wholly into shadow.





5

They were having lunch at Gregory’s Coffee House on South Duff, over in Ames. Stephanie’d brought along a notebook with a farm scene on the cover; the picture looked like it had been taken at least forty years ago. Its finish was bright and shiny, though; maybe it had been sitting in a rack at the Ben Franklin on Sixth Street for years, just waiting. Who knows. The lines on its pages were wide-ruled, faded blue. It could have belonged to a child.

“OK,” she said, flipping the cover open to a page covered with handwritten columns, each line headed by a manic asterisk. The column on the left said She at the top; the one on the right, Targets. “Here. The two scenes in Targets run for a total of nine minutes. The first one’s nothing and I can’t figure it out. The second scene you could almost think was somebody’s home sex tape, but the one in She’s All That is different but visibly in the same building, so I don’t know.”

“I don’t know,” Jeremy said. “It’s so dark.”

“It’s the same building.” She flipped two pages forward. “At the one-minute mark, when the victim bucks, she either hits the guy holding the camera or he jumps to the side, and you see the worktable.”

“Miss Parsons,” Jeremy said. Every time they met up he felt less inclined to call her by her first name. This was their third meeting since they’d watched Targets together in the store a few weeks ago; she’d rented both tapes twice in the intervening period. “I don’t know if that’s really … like, you keep saying ‘victim.’”

“What do you want? ‘Prisoner’?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down at her columns, at the question marks and exclamation points written in the margins. “I think if you think it’s anything we should call the police.”

“And tell them what?” She was right. The scene on She’s All That was very hard to watch, both because the image was so dark and because the sounds were so troubling: the kicks, the fingernails scraping denim. “They’ll say they’re sex tapes. Bondage stuff. People’s home movies.”

“Well, OK, you’re probably right.” She was. Jeremy’s dad knew the chief of police. He would not have understood why he’d been asked to look at something that made no sense on a rental tape nobody cared about. “But then we should just probably, you know, forget it.”

“Well, but no,” said Stephanie, flipping another page. It said “The Iowa Connection” at the top, underlined twice. From farther back in the notebook she produced a printout of something: it was in color, and blurry. “When the camera shakes past the open door in Targets, you see this out in the yard.”

Jeremy picked up the picture and looked at it. It was a corncrib, the old, short, squat kind you don’t see much anymore. He’d played in them when he was a kid, but that felt like another world. He set it down decisively and pushed it back across the table.

“That’s somewhere near here,” she said. “It looks just like a lot of places near here.”

“It looks like a lot of places anywhere,” Jeremy said.

“No, they don’t have corncribs everywhere.”

“OK,” Jeremy said. “But in Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota. Missouri. Anywhere.”

“It has to be here, though.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jeremy said, shaking his head a little. “It doesn’t have to be anywhere. Look, I don’t think I want to do this. I don’t like this kind of thing. It’s—”

He remembered lying in the dark in his room after watching Targets, unable to stop the scene he’d watched from replaying itself in his head. How it sped up and slowed down as his brain tried to find some context within which to situate it. The image seeking out and finding the internal circuits where it would be able to live forever. The figure under the canvas, rising. He remembered the feeling of worry, gnawing at him: real dread about the fate of the person who stood there, hooded, balancing on one foot.