Universal Harvester(8)

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“How can you not be curious?” said Stephanie, irritated. She thumbed past a few more pages of printouts and stopped on a shot of the hooded woman. “This is somebody from around here.”

Jeremy looked at it: the hood, the corner of the worktable, the pose.

“I guess maybe,” he said. It felt good conceding her point, accepting as a possibility that there was a knowable explanation for the lonesome transferred scenes on the two tapes. Some way of understanding.

“Good,” she said. “Here’s what I’ve got.” She turned the page again. There were new columns now: lists of people who lived on streets without names, rural routes or numbered highways. The whole county.

Jeremy averted his eyes, like he’d been exposed through no fault of his own to something obscene. “No,” he said. “I’m not going out to Hubbard to knock on people’s doors and look for a corncrib. No.”

“Collins.”

“Whatever.”

“So why did you even meet with me?” she said. “If you don’t care, why are we even talking?”

He got up to leave. “I only want to know because I can’t help it,” he said. “But I don’t want to know anybody involved. I don’t want to go to anybody’s house and ask them questions.”

She rose to follow him out. “We could just drive out there and look around.”

“No,” he said, opening the passenger door for her reflexively and shutting it after she got in, finishing his thought out loud as he walked around to the driver’s side: “Be serious.”

*

Back at the store Sarah Jane had locked the front door. Jeremy knocked, confused. It was the middle of the day.

“Somebody else complained about She’s All That,” she said after letting him in, “so I watched it.” It was still playing on the in-store screen.

“I thought you already took it home.”

“I did. But I didn’t—I didn’t watch it.”

“Oh. Jeez,” said Jeremy.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I told you it freaked me out. I’m real sorry.”

“No, it’s OK,” said Sarah Jane. “But what—” She reached for the remote and rewound to the spot.

It was the outbuilding. The door was open. When the camera jumped, Jeremy saw, clearly, because he was looking for it, the worktable. But that wasn’t the focus of the scene, of course. The action in this one was under a tarp in the middle of the room. You couldn’t say how many people were under it: maybe two, possibly three. Possibly only the one, the hooded figure from the chair. That was how Jeremy’d come to think of it, for his own sake: some idea of continuity made it easier.

But in fact you have to make a lot of assumptions to connect those earlier scenes to this one at any level deeper than their shared location. The figure or figures under the tarp buck and thrash, sometimes with a rolling movement, sometimes in violent jerks. You can hear breathing, and a sound that registers instantly as fingernails on canvas. With less than a minute left to go, the action steps up: a work boot at the end of a denim-clad leg enters the frame and prods a few times at the tarp, seeking a point of contact. A grasping hand shoots out from underneath, a flash of color; then the boot kicks the tarp three times, very deliberately. The kicks land with great thudding force. Someone underneath the tarp cries out incoherently, a frightened, choked stream of burbling vowels. Closer to the camera’s mic, a man laughs and clears his throat.

Meanwhile, under the oilcloth, whoever’s there is regrouping. Is it rising to its feet, singularly or collectively? Rolling over? Undergoing some sort of change in mass? No one can say. It’s too dark to see much. Then She’s All That blinks back, bright as day.

“Jeremy, what is this?” Sarah Jane said.

“I told you it freaked me out,” said Jeremy.

“I can’t have this in my store.”

“Should we tell somebody?” He meant the police. It was the only idea he had.

“I guess maybe,” said Sarah Jane, and she ejected the tape and put it back into its sleeve and headed back to the break room.

“We could just return it as defective,” Jeremy said after her.

“Or that,” she said over her shoulder, though in point of fact she neither called the police nor returned the tape to Northern Video, her distributor, for a replacement. Phone records and computer logs obtained from the Nevada Police Department show no calls or e-mails from Jeremy Heldt, Stephanie Parsons, or Sarah Jane Shepherd during this period. The Ames Police Department’s records document several phone calls from Collins years later, of course, but by then new people were involved—strangers; variables from the cloudy distant future. The one thing you can never plan for, Mom used to say. Unexpected guests.





6

She wanted to throw it into the trash; she felt sick. It was disturbing to think that just last month, this thing had been sitting on her coffee table at home for several days, like a snake in a houseplant. It was hard to know where to start asking questions—who, what, why, where: the zeros in the timecode represented a whole separate set of when questions, off in their own universe of uncertainty. She looked the tape up in the system, thinking maybe she’d contact the distributor: This is Sarah Jane Shepherd at Video Hut in Nevada. I think one of your suppliers …