He tossed the can to his dad underhand and they both headed to the living room: it was the pattern during winter. In summer, they had a lot of fun together grilling out back, but neither man had really ever taken to the kitchen. They didn’t feel at home in there. It still felt like it belonged to Mom.
They watched Proof of Life that night, the one Jeremy’d grabbed without looking. They both enjoyed it. There was comfort and ease in watching movies together; Jeremy considered himself a little more high-minded than his dad, but they both disappeared into the screen’s glow at about the same time, and they stayed lost once they got there. The room filled with light. It was a space they could share, something to be grateful for without having to think too much about it.
Dad went to bed immediately afterward—“See you tomorrow,” he said, like a coworker leaving early—but Jeremy stayed up to give She’s All That a look. He knew tapes to break down over time, but when it happened people didn’t usually elaborate on it. The tape’s chewed up about halfway through, they’d say. You can see something’s going to happen about a minute before and then the machine spits it out, they’d say. It makes a squiggly noise.
This was different. Twice now people’d brought in tapes, different ones, and said there was something on the actual tape that didn’t belong. Something they’d watched through and come out on the other side of. They seemed confused trying to describe it; either they hadn’t wanted to go into detail, or they didn’t know how. “There’s another movie that was on this tape,” was how Lindsey’d put it. “They must have recorded over the old one.”
She’s All That wasn’t something Jeremy would have otherwise watched on his own. It was boring. He felt restless on the couch, picking stray threads from cushions, following a plot that didn’t interest him, debating whether to reheat the remaining Potato Olés. Fifteen minutes in he realized he could have checked Stephanie Parsons’s copy of Targets instead, and he felt annoyed with himself; he thought about just heading off to bed. But then, in the middle of a scene where a crying woman was typing something onto a computer terminal, the television screen blinked dark for a half second; and then it went light again, and Jeremy sat up straight, and found himself watching a black-and-white scene, shot by a single camera, mounted or held by a very steady hand. At first, he had to turn the volume up to hear whether there was even any sound at all: there was, but not much. A little wind across the camera’s microphone, the audible rise and fall of a person breathing. There was a timecode in the corner scrolling along. The date read 00/00/0000. There didn’t seem to be much else to see, but then the breathing sound quickened and movements began breaking roughly through the dark.
The scene lasted about four minutes. Then the screen twitched again, and She’s All That roared back into the room from the silence, while Jeremy, now wide awake and fully focused, stared at the action as if waiting for somebody to break character and maybe explain to the camera what everybody’d just seen.
But he knew that wasn’t actually going to happen. Somebody had transferred a scene onto She’s All That. Weren’t tapes somehow protected against people copying stuff onto them? But there had to be some way of getting around it. He watched on without listening, waiting for a third blink that might put the first two into clearer context, but nothing came. After twenty minutes he thought about rewinding. He decided instead to fast forward without pushing STOP. The action developed wordlessly now, but all in color, all the right movie.
He hit REWIND once the end credits started to roll, and he watched the black-and-white scene again, and then a third time; finally he went back to his bedroom and tried to sleep, with limited success.
* * *
The quiet of the snow out in the yard early the next day: it was probably the best thing about winter, these mornings with their open stillnesses. Jeremy had slept badly and was up before the sun, thinking about watching She’s All That again, wondering whether he should show it to his dad. But he decided to forget it. Someone had taped something personal onto a movie they’d rented: that wasn’t supposed to be possible, but maybe it was; who’d ever tried, but who cared?
The road out to the Lincoln Highway didn’t get plowed until mid-afternoon. Jeremy had to call in late. He got to work around two. Sarah Jane was on her stool by the computer, doing a crossword puzzle.
“I should have called you and told you to stay home,” she said. “Nobody’s coming in till they finish plowing side streets.”
He stood at the door kicking the remaining snow off his shoes. “It’s all right,” he said.
“You feel like working the same shift tomorrow?” she asked him as he was getting settled. “I don’t want to make Ezra drive home over these roads after dark.” Ezra lived with his mother and father south of Ames on a property as old as any in the area; he had to drive over half a mile of gravel road to get to the highway, in a car that was barely up to the task. His father had offered to help him out with a down payment on something sturdier, but Ezra, though only nineteen, felt a deep aversion to debt, and a deeper one to casting any tool aside that had any use left in it. Farm kids are like this, I’ve found. They don’t like throwing useful things away.
“No problem,” Jeremy said. It was how he’d been raised.
“Pizza?” She gestured toward a Casey’s box on the counter.
“Sure,” said Jeremy. He knew he should eat better, but he didn’t ever get around to trying. He pulled up a stool and set his backpack down, and he looked up at the screen; Sarah Jane was watching the news, which was all about the weather, which roads were open and which ones weren’t, how long it was going to take to drive from Des Moines to Urbandale or Ankeny to Clive.
“Hey, a customer complained about this one so I took it home,” he said after a while, wiping his hand on his jeans. “Somebody taped over onto it.”
“Somebody what?”
“Taped over it. It’s got some scene in a barn with these people in it. Kinda freaked me out.”
She reached over for the tape and looked at it as if it might reveal something right then and there. “Don’t these have erase tabs?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeremy. “I didn’t think you could tape over ’em, anyway.”
“Well, I’ll have a look,” said Sarah Jane, and she got up and went off to the break room, which wasn’t big enough for anybody to really take breaks in and so served as a coat closet. Jeremy thought for a second to suggest that they look at it in the store, but then considered that he didn’t really want to see it again, and that it wasn’t his problem any further than to report it to his boss.
There was a pretty decent rush of customers toward four o’clock: people who’d made it into work but expected to be home all the weekend. They were stocking up on things to watch. The Kids and Family section was nearly empty by 5:30, and then the stampede died down. Sarah Jane went home and said Jeremy could close early if he wanted, but he stuck it out until 9:00. He didn’t mind an empty store. Better to drive home when there were fewer people on the roads.
4
Targets is a film by Peter Bogdanovich. Released in 1968, it tracks two lives about to intersect: Byron Orlok, an aging film icon in the twilight of his career, played by Boris Karloff, and Bobby Thompson, a young soldier recently home from Vietnam, played by Tim O’Kelly, who also played Danno in the pilot episode of Hawaii Five-O.
Karloff was eighty years old when he landed the role of Byron Orlok. Contracted to shoot for two days, he liked the script so well that when an additional three days were needed to complete his scenes, he worked without pay. His performance represents a victory of human will over stubborn flesh; suffering from emphysema and rheumatoid arthritis, wearing braces on his legs, able to walk or stand only with the help of a cane, Karloff acts his way through these obstacles of ill health and old age. Orlok, like the actor, is a surviving remnant of a bygone age; the monsters he played when he was younger and stronger have given way to the ongoing shocks of the late twentieth century, to atrocities of
war and the isolation of modern life. There are new monsters now.
In Targets, the monster is Bobby, who, without any identifiable provocation, kills half his family and a deliveryman after breakfast one morning, then gets into his car and takes to the road. Climbing an oil tank by an abandoned amusement park, from a perch overlooking the freeway, he eats lunch, drinks a Coca-Cola, and then snipes, emotionless, at the speeding cars below; located and then pursued by police, he flees, seeking cover at a drive-in theater.
The film’s climax follows. From a hiding place inside the drive-in’s screen, he takes aim at patrons in their cars. He hits one man in a phone booth; he gets another at the concession stand. Outraged filmgoers, some armed, storm down the asphalt. In attendance for the premiere of The Terror, his swan song, Orlok exits his limousine, and, in the half-darkness of the projection booth, encounters Bobby. A struggle follows; the older man disarms the younger with his cane. As the police lead the shooter away in handcuffs, he wonders aloud how high his kill tally will run, and if he’ll be on the evening news.
The VHS copy of Targets in the racks at Video Hut features two scenes not present on the original print. The first of these is brief, and profoundly empty: it’s a stationary view of a chair that sits in the corner of an outbuilding somewhere, maybe a barn or toolshed. Without any external cues it’s hard to say. There’s a workbench partially visible at the left of the frame, or a sawhorse; this view holds for two silent minutes, fairly steady. Halfway through, there’s a momentary jerk, like a sweaty thumb slipping from the camera’s housing, but other than this there is no action to describe. The chair, the corner of something; behind the chair, a wall, corrugated aluminum or tin. There’s sound, but nobody makes any noise. Microphone hiss serves to indicate that the air was still and quiet within the walls where the scene was shot.
The second scene is longer. It again features the chair in the outbuilding, but there’s a person sitting in it now. She, or he, wears a canvas bag for a hood; some yellow vinyl-coated polypropylene rope attaches the bag to her head at the neck. Clad in a billowing T-shirt and jeans, the chair lady could be anybody: there’s no way of placing her in any external context. You might think, when you first see her, that she’s bound to her chair; the hood and the rope suggest captivity, confinement, restraint. Her hands are behind her. But then she rises to her feet, or he to his, it makes no difference and it’s impossible to tell, and raises both arms from behind her back up and over her head, hands held like claws, fingers splayed and pointed downward as one poised to descend onto the keys of a piano or shoot lightning bolts at the ground. Slowly, she lifts her left foot; her right knee quivers, and half-buckles, but she holds the pose.
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 accou
nt got credited for the rental, she forgot all about it. Stephanie was different, so he had to follow through.
“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.
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