The Last Days of Video

by Jeremy Hawkins

  But at some point—five years ago? more?—he had stopped maintaining the ledgers. That would have been around 2002, which was the first year that DVD rentals had outpaced VHS rentals, and was, in many ways, the peak year of the video store industry. Even from Waring’s naturally pessimistic point of view, business could not have been better. Everyone in the world had purchased a DVD player. And everyone in West Appleton rented from his store. He was bringing in twenty or thirty copies of the biggest mainstream titles: The Fast and the Furious, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, A Beautiful Mind. Sure, there were hints of what was to come. Netflix was open for business, those bastards. And the damn studios were offering DVDs for ridiculously low sell-through prices—twenty dollars, sometimes less—instead of the traditionally high prices of VHS tapes—fifty dollars, eighty dollars, more—which had of course helped cut down Waring’s bottom line, but which was also drawing customers away to Walmart and Target to buy DVDs. Oh, and lest we forget about the Internet, where he’d heard there was more free porn available than a night at the Playboy Mansion . . .

  But still, business in 2002 had been churning along nicely. Waring, with Alaura’s help, had built an incredible library of movies, and he’d grown the store from sixteen hundred square feet to over five thousand square feet, and he’d even made enough money to buy the entire building.

  Maybe that’s why he’d checked out. Because it had all been too good to be true.

  Waring removed the ledgers one by one from the deep drawer. There were ten of them. All completely blank. He stacked them on his desk.

  Then he saw his mother looking up at him. In the drawer, under where the ledgers had been, was a framed photograph of her. That headshot from her youth as an actress. He’d misplaced the photograph years ago. He lifted the picture, its heavy silver frame, and set it on his desk. The woman looking back at him was young, beautiful. Twenty-two years old. A dead ringer for Gene Tierney. But unlike Tierney, it was somehow obvious that the woman in this headshot was hoping, begging, desperate for stardom, and that this desperation would lead to her downfall. She was moments away from being cast in a role that would never come, and years away from going to her final reward, those last years during which she would complain endlessly about all the movies she should have starred in, and she would pull Waring out of school, several times a week, and take him to the movies. Always the movies.

  “There’s your reason, Jeff,” Waring whispered.

  He laid the picture face down.

  From his MicroFridge he grabbed another lukewarm beer, snapped it open.

  But he didn’t drink.

  Not right away.

  Instead, he opened one of the blank red ledgers, sought out a pen, then picked up the phone to call his bank.

  It was time to figure out where Star Video stood.

  THE WRATH OF THOM

  Alaura stood before her forty Reality Center classmates, who were all holding hands and sitting together in a tight bunch, like kindergarteners listening to their teacher read Curious George. It was Alaura’s first full day of the Basic Experience, and ten days since beginning her retaliatory “leave of absence” from Star Video. On stage to her left, and seated behind a shiny music stand, was the cofounder of the Reality Center, Thom Trachtenberg.

  The man looked a bit like Ricardo Montalban as Khan in Star Trek II—all chest and feathery hair.

  Alaura felt weak. The air was too warm. She had skipped breakfast, and they had not taken a lunch break. And she had no idea what time it was; watches were not allowed. She had been standing for at least an hour, answering Thom’s pointed, personal, often rude questions and revealing more about herself to these strangers than she had to anyone in years—though she supposed that was the point of Reality.

  “Why won’t you be honest?” Thom asked for the fifth time.

  “I am,” she replied again, rolling her tired shoulders, shaking out her hands.

  “No. You are sabotaging your life.”

  “I told you, I’m trying to live a good life.”

  He raked her with an eye, and his voice rose: “Trying? See, you’re wrong about fucking everything!”

  She had adapted to his cursing, and to his bursts of saliva, but not to his constant incredulity. Was it possible for anyone to be wrong about everything? She had spoken of her past drug problems, of watching too many movies, of her various religious wanderings, of her job, of Waring, and of her stupidity at recently falling for Pierce.

  But did those things sum up her life completely?

  “You are the architect of your own future,” Thom proclaimed. “So why do you work in a video store?”

  “I told you, I . . . I . . .”

  “I . . . I . . .” he said in mock imitation, then he paused for a centering breath. “Answer without thinking, Alaura. Why do you work in a video store?”

  “I . . . I like movies.”

  “And?”

  “I like helping people. West Appleton is a nice town. People know me.”

  “You believe people know you?”

  “I . . . I guess so.”

  “Shit,” he snarled, scowling at her. “We’re trying to help you, Alaura, yet you resist. Are you saying that you crave popularity, that you crave approval, that you crave people telling you how sweet and interesting and unique you are? The hip, tough girl with tattoos . . . all of which makes me think that this video store is just a safe ego zone.”

  Alaura fired Thom a look of warning. But he was now consulting his notes with disgust. He was going too far, and none of the hand holders seemed interested in defending her. Instead, her classmates murmured like bewildered yet hopeful congregants, and she considered, for the fifth or sixth time, simply walking out. They had told her they would refund her money at any point, but she wondered if that was true, if there was some loophole in the lengthy contract she had signed.

  Thom said, “Basil, the young man who conducted your entrance probe last week, told me that you hate your life.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t remember saying ‘hate.’”

  “That’s what Basil reported.”

  “Thanks a ton, Basil.”

  “So,” Thom said, “why do you stand for the video store?”

  “Stand for?” she asked. “I’m sorry, you’re moving kind of fast, and I don’t really understand all the terminology—”

  “It means,” Thom said, gritting his teeth and looking over the class. “It means that you stand for it. That you believe in the video store so deeply that it defines who you are. I, for example, stand for the Reality Center because of the good work we do helping people realize their full potential. I also stand for the universal right of all people to exist. Do you understand?”

  She did not. “Yes,” she said.

  “We have all agreed that our full potential is simply an innate characteristic of our being. And we have all agreed that the modern, interconnected world offers us two distinct paths: one toward solitude and loneliness, and the other toward communion and evolution. You say you hate your life, Alaura, and you work in a video store. Why do you stand for the video store?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve thought about quitting, but . . . Star Video is a part of me.”

  “Mmm,” Thom said, sounding not unlike Waring. “And if you had an infected appendix, which is certainly a part of you, would you hesitate to have it removed?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “She doesn’t know!” he said, smiling with satisfaction. “You’re one big mass of ‘I don’t know.’”

  I will not lose my cool, Alaura thought, and as quickly as she thought it, she began speaking—calm, even, like reading a grocery list: “Fine. I enjoy working there. I love it, actually. It might not be the best job, but it’s mine. I’m good at it. Star Video is a cool place. It’s a gathering place for film nuts. I mean, not like it used to be. There aren’t as many regulars. But still. The store is culturally important, I really
believe that. I believe in movies. I don’t believe they’re just about escape. Though I kind of see what you’re getting at there.” She pulled her left arm across her chest with her right hand, trying to stretch out her back. “There’s a chance Star Video might have to close soon,” she continued, “and I don’t know what I’ll do if that happens. It would be a disaster, for me, for West Appleton. I’m good at managing employees, and I’m good at dealing with my boss, who’s totally insane. I know a lot about movies. Not as much as my boss, but I know a lot. I might not be a millionaire, but I’m secure.” She knew she might be lying, or at least half-lying, and that her country accent was emerging like blood at the edge of a Band-Aid. “I got a place I can call home while I sort out the rest of my life. I’m a very spiritual person, you see. I studied religion in school. You could say I’m on a spiritual quest, have been since I was a child.”

  “Continue,” Thom said.

  His voice was now smooth, laced with wind.

  “My mother left when I was young. I never knew her. We weren’t churchgoing. My dad and I. He was a good man. Is a good man. Always working. I started watching movies when I was seven or eight.” Keep talking. “We lived in a trailer by a river. Didn’t always have a television. Every step, the whole trailer rattled. I would go to town and sneak into movies. There was only one theater. In retrospect, the movies were terrible. Six-month-old releases, never anything R-rated except a few action flicks. But I loved it, loved the dream, the lights going down, the movie coming up.” I haven’t been to an actual movie theater in how long? “My dad’s good to me. I should call him more often. I should visit. I shouldn’t be disconnected, like you say. I grew up close to here, like, thirty minutes from Appleton, in a podunk town, Sprinks, you’ve never heard of it. I loved the movies, even back then. My first boyfriend, he was a movie nut, too. I loved watching movies with him, at his house, on his big TV. His family was rich. But then he left, and my daddy encouraged me to leave, too, to get out of Sprinks, to go to college. I got into Appleton University. I’m done paying off my student loans. Anyway, as I kid, we didn’t go to church, but on Sundays, I’d walk around town and peek in church windows. Listen to what they had to say. Since then, I’ve tried everything. But religions can let you down. Movies never do.”

  Silence.

  She looked at her classmates—several of them had tears running down their faces.

  Why were they crying? In sympathy? In pity? And what was the difference between sympathy and pity? Alaura couldn’t decide.

  Then, strangely, the foreign sensation that the tattoos on her right arm were horrible scars.

  “You’re a very smart woman,” Thom said, away from the microphone, in a whisper meant only for her. “We can all see how intelligent you are.”

  Alaura frowned, but she stared at this new, polite incarnation of Thom.

  His chest hair beckoned her. His crisp white shirt glowed.

  “But your brain is merely a mechanism,” he said, louder, for everyone. “It is not who we are. It is not our animus.”

  “Okay?” Alaura said, again confused.

  “Your brain is telling you that if you just think hard enough, work long enough, probe deep enough, then you will at some point discover some thing that will give you permanent bliss. But this is a lie our brains tell us, the Lie of Completion.”

  That made sense.

  “For example,” Thom continued, “you’ve mentioned your problems with men.”

  Her brief comfort deflated. She had complained about Pierce and about her many other ill-fated relationships, though now she wished she hadn’t.

  “It is clear that you want a man in your life,” Thom said. “But it seems to me, and I don’t think I’m wrong, that you expect once you meet this mythical man that all matters will be settled. But that is not progress, Alaura. That is not true communion. Instead, you’re like the struggling writer who thinks, if I get my novel published, then everything will be okay. You’re like the executive who thinks, if I make vice president, then I can finally relax. You’re like—”

  “I get the point,” she said flatly.

  Thom reared back, suddenly enraged, his righteous homily exhausted. “You get the point? You get nothing! You hide behind your tough fucking image and your tattoos, as if they make you special, when in fact you are a deep dark hole into which you shovel alcohol and men and movies, hoping to fill yourself, hoping to avoid who you really are.”

  “I thought I was a being of light,” Alaura said, lapsing now into full bitch mode.

  “Why are you being defensive?”

  “Because you’re being aggressive.”

  “What are you scared of?”

  “I’m not scared, I’m annoyed.”

  Thom’s mouth dropped open like he had never heard anything so appalling.

  “I have to pee,” she said.

  “Not until we’re done.”

  “We’ve been doing this for an hour.”

  “And you still can’t be honest.”

  “I am being honest,” she said.

  “What are you scared of?”

  “Honest. Scared. Words and words.”

  “What are you scared of?”

  “I have to pee.”

  “What are you scared—”

  She walked from the stage, stomped through a field of gasps, broke several links in the bunched, hand-holding circle.

  At the exit of the conference room, a young man stepped in front of her. He was young, maybe twenty-one, and pudgy.

  “You can’t leave,” he said, his voice blurry and dumb. “The rules.”

  She hissed nonsense syllables at him. He backed away.

  In the bathroom, on the toilet, Alaura watched an aimless bug wander the tile floor: a pen point upon white tundra. Her heart rate slowed. She unclenched her teeth. She focused on her breath—a blue crystal beneath her nose—but still she felt on the verge of screaming.

  She had been the first to stand before the class. She knew she was being made an example of. The others would have it easier. But this was only the beginning. If she returned to the conference room, she’d have to resume the stage. She’d have to face Thom again.

  Yes, Thom was an arrogant prick. His holier-than-thou shtick was insulting. His hair, basically a mullet, was ridiculous. But the Lie of Completion? That was golden stuff. The appendix thing, too. He had some good things to say. She should not have lashed out.

  But of course, that was probably his angle: to push her, soldier-like, to a breaking point.

  If so, if Thom really wanted total honesty from her, then why not tell him her deeper, darker secrets? Why not tell him, for example, about Jeff, young Jeff, whom she had briefly, briefly considered seducing despite (and maybe, weirdly, because of) his age and his innocence and his fervent, puppy-like devotion to her? His attention felt nice—she couldn’t lie to herself about that; it felt good to be idolized. Jeff had a religious bent like her, and like her, he had been raised by a single parent in a nothing town. Jeff clearly needed help breaking out of his shell. He needed a real-world, freshman-year, mind-blowing experience. The kind of experience Alaura wouldn’t necessarily, in a moment of weakness or generosity, be averse to providing.

  Sometimes sex makes me feel better, and Jeff would probably appreciate me breaking off a piece, she might say to Thom. And she bet Thom would get a real kick out of her sick attraction to an eighteen-year-old kid.

  That was honesty, right? Her base impulses? Her incredible narcissism?

  What do you think of that, Thom?

  But why was she reacting this way? Why was she so angry? Thom was just asking her questions. Was it merely her own answers that were pissing her off? True, Thom’s methods were annoying. She’d been around the philosophical guru block—his tactics were as tired as his wardrobe and his feathered mane.

  But the core of his message, though she hated to admit it, was undeniable:

  You are the architect of your own future.

  Which
, if true, meant she was a shitty architect. Fuck. It was true. There was no other way to look at it. She’d settled for a life of drinking and men and movies in a tiny college town. She blocked herself off from the world. She’d wasted her twenties. She’d waited passively for something better to come along, someone better to come along, to fix everything, to complete her. The Lie of Completion. She’d known that Star Video was a dead end for years. But she’d been too asleep to translate that knowledge into action.

  And now, she had morphed into an awful cliché: the aging sassy tattooed sexpot. If she was her life’s architect, then the structure she’d designed was a slumping, decaying deathtrap, unsuitable for human habitation.

  Like the building that housed Star Video.

  And like Star Video, she had no idea how to fix things.

  When she returned to the conference room, her classmates cheered. They whistled and hurrahed. They hugged her all in turn. She did not understand their reaction, but still she made her way to the front of the room, receiving their genuine affection, bolstered by their compassion. Going to the bathroom, breaking the rules in this way, was seen as a great triumph. They were proud of her. Which was stupid, Alaura thought.

  But it was better than nothing.

  She resumed her position on the stage. Her classmates gathered in a tight cluster at her feet.

  Thom, upon high, smiled.

  “Now will you tell us the truth?” he asked.

  IT’S A MISERABLE LIFE

  Having watched twelve or so science fiction and anime movies in the last week (not including what he watched in the store) and two trippy movies that morning alone (Dead Leaves had been a particularly twisted choice: gratuitous violence, thought-scrambling techno score, seizure-inducing artwork), Jeff felt profoundly off-kilter, shrouded in a purple fog. Nothing seemed quite right—even sunlight appeared chemical and fake. In this state of mind, he found himself on Ape U’s leafy, bustling campus. He was sitting in Warlock Hall, a creaky early-twentieth-century building retrofitted with silver air-conditioning ducts snaking along every hallway, giving the place a space-station vibe. The office where he sat had one small round window, like a porthole, and it looked over a grassy quad, where girls were eating lunch and boys were trying, most of them unsuccessfully, to talk to the girls. On the desk in front of Jeff lay the beeper and notebook he had kept with him for the past two weeks (he had almost made it without Waring finding out about the beeper), and across from him sat the graduate student—a dark, barrel-chested Russian named Dorofey—who had run the experiment. Vaguely threatening, Dorofey seemed both focused on and annoyed by the interview he was conducting, Jeff thought, like Agent Smith in The Matrix.