Watchlist

by Bryan Hurt

  The host, reaching over, begins cracking walnuts again, one nut at a time.

  From the start we recognized the host, of course. We have all lived in this state longer than expected—some of us born here—and so we all know the public television show, the ebullient host interviewing this person and that, exploring the magnificent wonders of California. The first clip, marked #2, we thought mailed mistakenly: it shows the host washing his hands in an anonymous white bathroom. The clip is shot through a stall in the bathroom. It is barely twenty seconds long. We watched it and wondered what it meant, ignored it, laughed.

  Two days and the second clip, #3, arrived: the host in a Ralphs grocery store, considering maple syrups, seemingly unaware of the camera, again the clip short, a minute at most.

  Then the third, the fourth, and so on. Sometimes two, even three, four in a week.

  We don’t yet know what they mean.

  After each ends, we go outside and it is cool, even in summer, the ocean breeze only half warmed by the breath of millions between us and the seas; we sip the harder drinks we’ve moved on to, the gins and scotches, or those of us still driving home our simple glasses of tap water. The kids sigh in sleep through screen windows. We stand barefoot in grass. Something like stars resound above the city skies. Wonderings about the host. Does he know? Is he part of it all? The more modern of us imagine that the clips have been found by an enterprising PBS intern, a film student with a taste for the avant-garde, amused by the potential in these odd and casual outtakes.

  This is our early innocent theory, when all the clips seem that way, innocent.

  “What if he doesn’t know?” Don says. He always worries. “What if it’s a threat?”

  We laugh Don off—certainly the clips are a prank by someone’s distant cousin at the public television station. A joke with us. It’s all simple fun, and one of these early nights, when we’re drunk, enjoying ourselves, someone brightens and suggests, “Let’s call him! See what he knows!” We applaud the concept. Quick research is done and we find an extension at the television station attributed to the host. Maybe he’s in! It is decided we’ll use a pay phone—Don insists, no cell phones, no home numbers. We think this very hip, very noir. Cynthia, our only smoker, recalls once using a pay phone at a nearby convenience mart. Being a water drinker, I’m sent as driver.

  We don’t speak on the drive, not at first, those balmy winds blowing through my window.

  I have the air-conditioning on but she doesn’t seem to care.

  Finally I ask if she’s lived in California long, if she’s from Los Angeles.

  “No one’s from here, everyone knows that.” She seems bored. Smokes without asking.

  I ask if she’s excited about making the call.

  She shrugs.

  I stay in the car while she puts in quarters, dials the number. She speaks into the phone. I lean forward to eavesdrop. She cups the mouthpiece and turns away. Her face, first smiling, shifts to alarm—and I, so late in the night, so excited, imagine that she’s paled in fear. I step from the car, worried, but she’s hanging up, saying into the phone, “Good-bye,” almost breathlessly.

  She looks at me steadily. “Wrong number,” she says. She tells everyone else the same.

  I’m too nervous to contradict her story, to describe the faces she made.

  We all go home disheartened. All week I worry, what has happened, what it means.

  Late Thursday the call comes. Another clip. We must gather.

  We sit with unusual anxiety, sundown, curtained windows, breath held. We lean forward as the lights dim.

  This clip doesn’t show the host. It’s me. I’m in my car, staring anxiously from a window.

  A female voice-over says, He doesn’t know what to do with all his learning, is paralyzed by education, by the choices before him. Does he go to her? Does he sit quietly? Does he—?

  I gape, confused, worried. What will happen next? What will happen to me?

  Then I realize everyone in the living room is watching me, holding in laughs, exploding.

  It’s a pretty good prank, I agree, but it upsets me all the same.

  That’s the night, you’ll remember, we go home early and I refuse to speak to you.

  SOME OF US think clip #27 has been unjustly overlooked. It is the briefest of all, a photograph of the host pinned to corkboard. The camera trembles as it zooms in. In the photograph he wears a tuxedo and holds a microphone, addressing an audience we cannot see. One arm swings wide in storytelling grandeur. The voice-over tells us, At gatherings he says, “How about ol’ Marlon Brando? Cracking those walnuts? Ever seen anything so amazing?”

  No one has seen anything so amazing.

  He feels overjoyed by this.

  AND THEN SOMETIMES you call, which must cost you effort, pride. I appreciate that, I do.

  “We haven’t seen you,” you say. “They miss you.”

  Sometimes the patience in your voice irritates me.

  “I haven’t been by,” I agree. “You’re very perceptive. You should be a private detective.”

  “You’ve been drinking.” You always sound more tired than angry.

  “I don’t have to be drunk to be angry,” I say.

  “Are you ever going to explain it all to me?” Now your voice is sad.

  “I saw her in Whole Foods today,” you say. Sadder.

  Maybe I should explain it all, the her, the they, the you, the me. But does any of it matter anymore? All that remains from these stupid pronouns is your voice and its many shades, sad, angry, distant, forlorn, calm, pensive, brusque, bitter, small, and hurt. And hurt.

  #9 CONFIRMS OUR unspoken suspicions. No more can we pretend it’s all simply a prank.

  The clip begins with the host inside a ranch-style home—certainly in the foothills, we agree, above Pasadena, we can tell by the plant life, the yard, the architecture, the curve of earth, sun. The host sits at a kitchen island. Newspaper spread before him. The wet-suited coffee mug.

  This time the camera is outside the house, looking in.

  Inside, a phone rings very lightly, muted. The host picks it up, we hear and read his lips as he gives a (muted) booming “Hello.” Hello! cries the voice-over.

  We see the host’s lips repeat, “Hello!” We see his mouth form the words, “Who’s this?”

  The host! says the voice.

  In his kitchen, the host frowns, pushes a button, sets the phone down. He looks annoyed.

  The phone rings again. He checks the number, sets it back down. Now he is worried.

  After a moment, though, he answers it.

  Hello? whispers the voice-over. Hello? Hello? Hello?

  And we can see, quite clearly, the speaker’s breath against the kitchen window.

  THEN WE STAND out on the porch, itchy, it is summer, allergies, invisible pollens swell the air.

  “We having fun yet?” Cynthia says to no one, to everyone, lit cigarette wanding the air.

  #15 IS ONE of the longest and most unsettling clips. It begins with a black screen and that ever-present voice-over: The host has always felt restless, he is a jittery man, he understands that all his life he’s been waiting for a grand moment. That most people bore him is the great irony of his work. All he wants is what all of us want, a shift, an opportunity to prove himself.

  The screen lights up, is blurry, comes slowly into focus. The host and his cameraman sit in a booth in a diner. Plates of half-eaten eggs and toast. A jar of dark syrup that looks black. Glasses of either milk or orange juice. The two men eat without speaking.

  The voice-over explains, Today they film an Indian and his old oak tree.

  “They don’t smile!” the host says suddenly. “They totally creep me out, cameraman!”

  The host quietly distrusts Indians, explains the voice-over.

  The cameraman looks worried. “You can’t say that!” he whispers. “People will hear!”

  The host waves at the
empty diner. “Hello, everyone! I’m racist!”

  The camera pulls away from the men and zooms in on the front door. After a moment a shadow appears. The door opens. (Did the camera know this would happen? It seems so.) A man in brown uniform walks to the table. “Sir?” he says to the host. He holds out a sealed envelope. The host takes the envelope, and tosses it aside. The man walks away.

  The cameraman watches this all but says nothing.

  The host pokes at the liquid yolk with a crust but does not eat.

  The clip goes dark—but after a moment it is light again, we’ve moved outdoors, time has passed. The host and another man stand beneath what the camera reveals to be a remarkable oak tree, a canopy almost fifty yards in diameter and so thick with branches that it is nearly pitch-black beneath. “Remarkable!” exclaims the host. “What significance has this for your people?”

  The Native American is wearing jeans, an ironed polo shirt. His hair is combed neatly.

  The voice-over says, The host can see that this man before him has crazy eyes.

  The Native American talks a little about how his people were persecuted and some even hanged here beneath this sacred ancestral tree, and the host mumbles sadly. The Native American says, “There will be a turning point, of this we are certain. A day of reckoning in this land. There is too much history of violence. Old angers are bone-deep. All the blood has not yet bled.”

  The voice-over says, The host is worried. Does this madman think this will make an actual episode? Does he care? This is a wasted trip, the host thinks. But let the man keep talking.

  The Native American calms down and speaks more about the tree, the host asking questions, smiling. Their voices are muted as the voice-over says, Think about his words, host. A day of reckoning. Interesting, isn’t it? After all your hands are strong, you’d be fine, if the world tilted crazy couldn’t you lead us into alpine valleys where we will thrive in the climates as once we were meant to in peace and harmony? Couldn’t you be the one to save us all?

  In the clip the two men walk away from the tree. The camera-man follows.

  The image lingers on the tree. Slowly it zooms to the base of the oak.

  We see a torn envelope—one we all agree is the same delivered in the diner.

  Beside it, a sheet of paper. The camera zooms in and we read in block letters,

  I NEED YOUR HELP. I WILL CALL WITH INSTRUCTIONS.

  WE SIT ON the porch in the cool air. Was the man in the delivery uniform part of the plot?

  Every time we watch the clip his face is lowered, obscured by the bill of a cap.

  How could the host, the cameraman, not know they were being watched?

  How could they not see a second camera filming their every step?

  Why the talk of destruction? Of blood?

  It’s a treasure hunt. We’re Hansels and Gretels picking crumbs off the forest floor.

  That’s what Cynthia says, softly, before she leaves.

  She means it lightly but her words don’t reassure.

  YOU SEEM DISTRACTED. Somewhere else.

  Where am I? I’m on a cell phone. You don’t know where I am.

  You say that as if you’re angry, like you need to win a fight. You hurt me, remember?

  No, that’s not it at all. You think I did the damage but it’s always the other way around. Don’t you know that when a person is angry it’s only because they were hurt first? Who in this world gets angry without being hurt first? No one. No one. Certainly not me. I’m not crazy.

  You don’t make sense anymore.

  Nothing does and it never did. Who thinks it should? Who came up with such a theory?

  Certainly not a person with open eyes. Living in this world. Not him. Not her.

  #24 BEGINS IN a darkened house, a camera stepping through fluttering curtains and an open sliding door. The footsteps of the invisible cameraman are barely audible, a faint shuffling on wood floors. The camera enters a room and there’s a lump shape in a bed.

  A digital clock says it’s 3:00 a.m.

  The phone rings, the camera pulls back.

  A hand reaches from the bed, hits a button. The host speaks softly to the phone. “Hello?”

  The voice-over says, Go to Silver Lake, swim to the fountain, find the next clue.

  And then, as always, darkness.

  Our theory is that clip #8 follows #24, at least chronologically. #8 is a long and quiet night sequence, filmed from a car we cannot see. We are following taillights—presumably the host’s—and that is the only visual. The voice-over speaks softly. Los Angeles at night, the 110 freeway, always puts the host in a pensive mood. This is the hidden freeway, curving through hills, past homes where men once raised cows, planted corn and squash, didn’t care about the gleam of Dodger Stadium, Chavez Ravine, a canyon named for a hacendado from the nineteenth century, an old husband of a daughter of a son-in-law of a conquistador who killed Indians with muskets and put plow to land and lived by that one word all men in this land once lived by: build. The host knows this, reflects on this now, during his late-night drive. He knows that the landowners died, that the land was parceled, the ranch house fell into disrepair, was razed, the land scooped up by speculators, Broad and Bren, Kaufmann and Argyros, Emmerson, Roski, great place for a ballpark! The history as it always is in this state—vanished. Gone. Amazing.

  Amazing. Amazing. The word is his now. Several years ago he interviewed an etymologist who explained the word’s origin. It was unsurprising, after all—maze, labyrinth, to be confused, confounded, caught in a world of unseen connections . . . but still there is a logic to mazes, isn’t there? The spool of thread in the first labyrinth, Ariadne, spider’s web. Amazed.

  Night brings back memory, how he was taunted once as a child back home in Tennessee squalid Tennessee where to dream to delight to awe was not correct. Smoky Mountains sunset, sad, evocative. He had an old Pentax Q10 rigged to a fencepost as tripod and took time-elapsed photos of dying light. He showed the pictures at school. Isn’t it amazing? he whispered.

  The teacher and the older kids beat him after class. He has admitted this to no one.

  The voice quiets but the taillights keep moving, pulling farther away, until the clip’s end.

  “WHAT IT IS IS a meditation on the nature of television, of film,” Don suggests one night. We’ve all had too much to drink. Now we’re frustrated—this week’s clip, #62, is blank. Nothing. Angrily we blame the creators of this absurd virtual chase that never leaves our living rooms. We assign petty motives. “Bored rich kids,” we agree. “Avant-garde assholes,” we say.

  But Don has a larger and more complex point; he’s an academic. “Isn’t television after all the great medium of our time? Our country? This state? We live fifteen minutes from Hollywood. We are the image, not the thing itself. We are the gaze and the object. Why trust these clips as real? They are film! Two-dimensional!” Don spills his drink and swears loudly. He’s under pressure. Up for tenure in the fall, struggling to complete his book, to find a publisher. Normally we cut him off but tonight we let him ramble. “What do we know about the host? He is like us—like us, he loves television. He remembers moments—moon landing, Watergate, Ali-Frazier, Munich, those transcendent moments offered only by television. Television is one-way immersion without obligation. You sit, you flip a button, you look away, you read the paper, you look up, you mute, you change channel, take piss, heat pizza, wander house, push-up, sit-up, phone call, text. The Internet? You can’t wander from it, it’s too needy. Only television is so accommodating!”

  He’s almost shouting. “It wouldn’t work on the Internet! This is film, this is community! Here we are in other worlds—real ones, real people! The world used to be parks! Then it was benches! Then it was sofas at home!” He stares at us, desperate. “I’ve seen gaming chairs in Target, speakers built in and wires for kids to sit in for hours!” He looks madly. “Quick! I need to write!” Someone passes him a pen and napkin, he
grasps them, begins jotting furiously.

  We pity and loathe Don. I hold Cynthia’s elbow as we walk to our cars. She smiles sadly.

  “Now calm down, that was an ocean of gin you drank, cowboy.”

  She blows me an air kiss, is gone.

  IN AUGUST I take to night-driving, Mulholland, very quick, very romantic, clichéd, stupid.

  YOU KNOW HOW it goes, of course—the strange things that matter don’t go on forever.

  First we get a call: there is a new clip, yes, but we will not be watching it.

  Why? The police have been contacted. The host has been notified. Much grave concern.

  We move harried through the week. Worried at each police car, flinching at each phone ring. Don dutifully sends panicked emails at the top of each hour. The police call some of us in, those who’ve hosted screenings. One, at the police station, being led to an interrogation room, sees the host. “Of course I’m concerned!” the host is yelling at a detective. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  Enraged, he looks at our passing friend. The host’s face is red, wild, incensed.

  A few of us meet in a bar Friday night, sitters for the kids, those with kids. Cynthia can’t make it. I tell you as much later. You don’t believe me. Another goddamn fight. Over drinks we murmur, booth-cramped. What we know—thanks, police—the clips aren’t old. They’re made each week. The host has recognized several—he knew where he was, what he was doing. The detectives want answers but the consensus is they don’t suspect us. As if that reassures us.

  “Why should they suspect us?” we protest. “We’re not suspect!”

  We drink our drinks and agree that police are fools. Someone else is the guilty party.

  Or maybe we just can’t bear suspecting each other—your cruel theory all along.

  YOU TELL ME they like monkeys so Saturday, monkeys. Of course a gorilla escapes its cage.

  Really. I need to piss so I leave them in the cotton candy line. Too much water in me, it’s too hot in this city, this state. Thirty-five million people roasting three months a year. Madness.