“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.
“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 …
No. This is Sarah Jane Shepherd at Video Hut in Nevada. Something’s wrong with …
No. Hi, I got a tape from you that’s had something else taped onto it and I think you should know about it. Maybe. Transfer the responsibility. But they, in turn, bought their tapes from somebody else, and that’s what they’d probably say: Everything arrives at the Northern Video warehouse sealed. All we do is pick and pack. This is probably one of your customers.
This is probably one of your customers. Video Hut did decent business, but was small. People who worked in Ames rented from Hollywood Video now. The customer base was shrinking. Stores like Sarah Jane’s were on their way out: they’d served small towns since the dawn of the VCR boom, but they couldn’t compete with volume. Count up the membership cards in the box on the counter by the computer terminal, throw out the ones that belonged to people who hadn’t rented in over a year, and you’d know exactly how big the pool of possible suspects was.
So she took She’s All That home with her that night, along with Targets—Jeremy’d called it “the other one, the old one”—and, from the comfort and safety of her recliner, fast-forwarded to the hard parts. Just like Stephanie Parsons, she took notes; but her own notes were very direct, item-by-item accounts of anything visible in the frame during the scenes in question, with no guesses or question marks. After running the She’s All That scene twice, she reviewed her work while the movie played on. Working efficiently while a movie played was second nature to her by now, more comfortable than silence.
She was making a check mark by a line that said “cheap card-table chair, something from a garage sale” when the end credits started. “Kiss Me” jangled along underneath while they rolled, warm and sentimental. Then, about halfway through, the song stopped, and the credits cut out, and the living room filled with light.
* * *
She left for Collins early the next morning, meaning to verify her suspicions and be back in time to open the store. She’d taken several Polaroids of the image on the screen during the end credits’ most harrowing moment; a snapshot of a paused screen wasn’t much, but you could still see the face clearly enough, the spatter drooling down its chin onto the dirt of the driveway. You could see the field off to the right. And you could see, finally, in the background, behind the woman apparently crawling away from it and toward the road, the unmistakable outline of a farmhouse; and you’d know, if you’d grown up anywhere nearby, exactly which house it was.
A woman in a faded floral-print dress, yellow daisies and blue cornflowers, answered the door. “Good morning,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
Sarah Jane looked at her, trying not to stare too hard. “Sarah Jane Shepherd,” she said; manners still came first. “My folks owned a farmhouse a little closer to town when I was a kid. I grew up over there.”
“Well, good to meet you, Sarah Jane Shepherd,” said the woman in the floral-print dress. “I’m Lisa. I came here about five years ago, I guess. I was up in Charles City before.”
“Lisa—”
“Sample.” She regarded Sarah Jane and extended her hand. “My folks were from Pottawattamie County.”
“Near Grinnell?”
“No, that’s Poweshiek.” Sarah Jane nodded. “Pottawattamie’s way over western Iowa. Almost Nebraska.”
“Right, sure. Well—I was wondering if I could have a look at your outbuilding,” said Sarah Jane, releasing Lisa’s hand and gesturing across the driveway; she didn’t see any point in putting it off. On the drive over she’d practiced a few reasons, and now she made her choice. “My dad wants to build himself a toolshed before summer.” Her father had been dead for several years. It was a gamble.
Lisa came out through the screen door. Her feet were bare; there was some dirt underneath her toenails, enough to see it without needing a closer look. She looked to be in her early thirties, but her manner seemed older: she walked languidly, and spoke slowly, her voice deeper than the one Sarah Jane might have imagined coming from that young face.
“Sure—it’s not much,” she said, starting down the porch toward the building in question and beckoning Sarah Jane to follow her. “It was already on the property when I got here. I think it might be original with the house.”
Inside the shed, its single overhead lightbulb too bright for the small space, Sarah Jane focused hard on her breathing, pretending to look into the corners she hadn’t already seen on the tape. She paced the perimeter slowly, looking up to the ceiling and trying to think of questions. She hadn’t thought far enough ahead.
“They don’t make ’em like this anymore,” she said after a while, pleased with herself.
“I guess not,” said Lisa Sample. “Mainly people buy them premade now. No real reason to build one, I guess.”
Sarah Jane thought very briefly about her life, about how little ever happened, and then she retrieved the printout of the paused frame from her purse. She didn’t really believe she was about to show it to a total stranger, but she didn’t see any other way to go about it.
“Listen,” she said. “I saw a strange movie and I recognized the places in it from having grown up out this way. Look over here”—she jabbed at the right side of the page—“that’s your house, right?”
Lisa leaned in to get a better look, then looked over at Sarah Jane. “I guess,” she said. “Looks more or less like it. Pretty blurry.”
“But this”—pointing now at the woman in the picture, her eyes a flash of panic in the grid—“this isn’t you?”
Lisa laughed. “No, no,” she said. She kept her eyes on the printout. “This must be from sometime before I got here.”
The dot matrix wasn’t great: if you didn’t know what you were supposed to be looking at, you might have had trouble defining the features of the person pictured, the face in the grain. But Sarah Jane had watched the sequence several times, concentrating hard. She’d traced the contours with her eyes and she knew what she was seeing now. She was sure of it.
They stood together there, in the place Sarah Jane knew beyond question was the set of the spliced-in scenes from the tapes, and nobody said anything for a minute.
“Huh,” said Sarah Jane. “Well, I’m sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no bother,” Lisa Sample said, reaching for the light switch as she headed back out toward the yard. “Can I get you a cup of coffee? There’s coffee inside.”
There is a variation on this story so pervasive that it’s sometimes thought of not as a variation but as the central thread. In it, Sarah Jane returns to Video Hut a little after five, and describes for Jeremy much of what she saw in Collins. But she leaves out several important details: that the house in question is directly across the road from Bob Pietsch’s place; that she stood waiting at the farmhouse’s front door for several minutes before knocking on it; that the woman who answered was named Lisa, and that they’d spent much of the afternoon together in her living room. The story Sarah Jane brings home from Collins is deliberately incomplete, but she presents it with an air of totality, as if there were no more to say.
Jeremy’s disappointed, but what can he do? He is out of ideas. Maybe the scenes on the tapes dry up, and in subsequent years he regards the entire episode as a momentary fancy, something he dreame
d up because he was young and bored. This is the nail over which this particular variation’s tires inevitably drive: Jeremy was young, but not so young. His mother’s accident had taken care of that. And while his classmates from school had itched always for action, hitting the highway for Minneapolis or Chicago every weekend as soon as they could drive, he had stayed home. When he imagined himself all grown up, he saw himself in Nevada, maybe owning a store, or managing a business in Des Moines. If he thought of the future at all, it looked like the present. And so the young, bored Jeremy of the Nothing Happened variation rings false, and I put more stock in the one I see this afternoon, standing behind the counter eating a sandwich, reading through the classified ads in The Des Moines Register: the Jeremy who’s there when Sarah Jane gets back from Collins, throwing herself wildly through the door of Video Hut as though seeking shelter, her eyes wide, her face darting deerlike first to the right, now to the left, the story she brings so fresh with the terror of its insult that she takes over an hour to tell it, like a person who’s saying things out loud to make sure she won’t forget them: a person testing the things in her mind against the hard surfaces of the world before venturing to claim that yes, they’re true and real, and have form, and shape, and weight, and meaning.
7
“The hood—it was right there on the chair—not the chair, a real chair, an old one, big wooden one—right there, right there in the hallway.”
“I—”
“She asked me in”—here extending her hand, water, anything, Jeremy looking around, finally grabbing the thirty-two-ounce Coke he’d brought back from Dairy Queen with lunch and handing it to her—“and the house looked normal, she’s normal, but all the things, they’re right there—” and here, putting her palm to her face, testing it with her fingers. She had a scratch on her cheek, a roundish abraded blotch.
Universal Harvester Page 3
