by Andrea Bartz
Figure out what really went on. My damn brain was no use, a recorder with damaged tapes: 2009 was on the early end of the accidental police state we all live in today, where whipping out your camera to document everything is the norm. I remembered a story I’d fact-checked about Big Brother–type surveillance in which a filmmaker had mused that there’s so much more amazing material for documentaries today, because there are cameras absolutely everywhere.
Something clicked: my camcorder. My silly-looking Flip cam, a strange little thing with only a single function, a box with a big red record button that made videos we’d watched almost exclusively on its tiny screen—I’d carried it around in my massive vintage purse at almost all times. We used it rarely and randomly, and I’d been so bad about connecting the gadget to my computer that all the videos lived on the camcorder. There likely wouldn’t be many; I had a habit of deleting videos after a single viewing, especially when the clip showed me embarrassingly drunk. But maybe something had survived, some clue we’d overlooked that would bristle with meaning now.
I could picture my Flip cam, could almost feel its shiny plastic coating in my fingers, its shape readying my palm for the iPhone that would soon doom it. Had I tossed it during one of my moves? I began pulling things out of the hall closet, snapping open bags and boxes and piling them on the floor. Nothing. I moved on to the cabinets around the TV, yanking out board games and old magazines and outdated electronics and other things I knew an adult shouldn’t still own. Then I pulled every dusty storage bin out from under my bed, flinging through old scarves and purses I couldn’t bear to give away, travel-size toiletries, expired pills, a sad cornucopia of detritus tucked into the pockets of my life. Then I flicked off the light and fell asleep, fully dressed and with my home in shambles, Facebook open on my laptop, fogging up the apartment with old, invisible air.
* * *
I dreamed about the camcorder, a creepy dream where Edie was still alive but somehow trapped inside its plastic walls, speaking to me through the little screen. Half awake, I grabbed my phone and murmured the storyline into its voice memo app, sure it was urgent, that my sleeping mind was onto something. When I played it back in the morning, my own voice sounded spooky and halting, the narrative meaningless. “She was inside but also behind,” it intoned, between long pauses and thick swallowing noises. “She said ‘four corners’ and…and I was outside in the fields and I knew them from other dreams.” I deleted the file midway through listening.
As I clattered around, making coffee, something echoed in my mind: inside but also behind. It repeated itself, a loop in a DJ’s mix, until I froze and felt the idea blossoming.
I dropped the spoon, black grounds scattering, and hurried into the living room. My bookshelf hulked along the wall, as long as an elephant and unusually deep. I yanked away books on shelf after shelf, revealing the random stuff I’d stashed behind them, in the dusty space along the cabinet’s back. And there it was, inside and behind the third row, sandwiched between a laptop charger and an obsolete Kindle. My Flip cam.
I carried it into the kitchen, then discovered it had an outdated jack, something I couldn’t connect to my laptop. I set it on my counter and texted Tessa to ask if she could borrow an adapter from work. When she hadn’t answered an hour later, I pulled on clothes and tromped to the dollar store at the end of my block. Nothing inside costs a dollar, but that place is like the goddamn Room of Requirement: ant trap, sunscreen, dish tub, lawn ornament, whatever you need, it’s there in a section you’ve never noticed before.
Tessa texted as I was cracking open my laptop to try the new cord.
“I should be able to borrow that. What for?”
“Thanks, but no need, I already got the connector. I found my old Flip cam.”
“From back then?”
“Right. Update: I’m not so sure it was a suicide now.”
It showed she was typing for a while, so I waited for something long, realizing with a spritz of embarrassment that she was probably going to chide me for writing something that legally loaded in a text.
Instead: “How come?”
I called her, but she rejected it.
“Still in the office,” she texted. “Trying really hard to finish something.”
On a Saturday? “No worries—let’s talk later.”
I wanted to pull the videos onto my laptop, but my machine wouldn’t recognize the old files, the systems a decade apart; still, the cord managed to siphon over some power and after a few seconds an outdated graphic appeared on the camcorder’s screen: FLIP VIDEO.
Navigation was a mess; I couldn’t view all the videos at once and discovered that I had to browse to the right or left to view them. The first was from March 2009, us waving and cracking up in the car, Alex behind the wheel, Edie navigating, Kevin inexplicably speaking in a bad French accent while Sarah and I howled with laughter. Another from later that month: a mess at first, loud EDM and green shapes fizzing in crazy circles, until I picked out our silhouettes and realized it was Edie on the dance floor in the back of a bar.
I skipped forward, forward, forward, hitting the last video just eleven skips later; so there were only twelve on here, a small batch. One, from May, began with Edie smiling into the camera like an anchorwoman, fuzzy in a streetlamp’s sallow glow.
“Edie, tell us what just happened,” my voice prompted from behind the camera.
“Well, we just had a bit of a run-in with the law,” she replied.
A male voice murmured something off-screen and I prompted him to repeat it: “She just saved our asses, that’s what happened.” It was Alex, sounding stressed.
I panned to him and he sucked on a cigarette. “What happened was we were pregaming in McCarren and Kevin had a whole six-pack sitting next to him like a fucking idiot,” he said, turning to his left to shoot a glare. “Then a cop car pulls up with its lights flashing and they take all our licenses and tell us that drinking in the street would be a—what was it?”
“An eighty-dollar fine for drinking in the street, but it’s three hundred twenty if you’re in a public park,” Edie supplied, to general agreement.
“Then what?” I said. My voice sounded nasal.
Alex blew a plume of smoke. “Then Edie gets up and walks over to the cop car—”
“—even though they told us not to move.” Sarah’s voice, off-camera. Something sat up in me like a cat. So spooky, hearing the same voice I’d just heard over dinner, but younger, frothier.
“Right, even though they told us not to move,” Alex continued, “and she’s over there talking to them for like five minutes, and then they come back and say we’re really lucky we’re over twenty-one and they’ve already hit their ticket quota for the night, and they watched us dump our beer and then off they went.”
“Edie, what’d you say to them?” I panned back to her.
She shrugged, still smiling. “I just said we were all dumb, unemployed kids who should’ve known better, but that we’d never do it again,” she said. “And then I told them my roommate had called 911 last week after a man followed her into the building and forced himself on her in the foyer, and he matched the description of the serial rapist who’s been running around Williamsburg, and the cops who came to take her statement were so nice, and the work the policemen do is so important.”
“It isn’t true, for the record,” Sarah called, still off-screen. “About the rapist being in our building.”
“But there is a serial rapist in Williamsburg, that’s true,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe the cops should worry about that,” Alex muttered.
“…and then I cried,” Edie finished sweetly, with a shrug. Someone said something, then repeated, “Do it.” So the camera zoomed in to Edie’s head, her face, then just her eyes, shakily, and Edie looked hard into it until fat, pretty tears broke free.
The video ended
and I Xed out of it, alarmed by Edie’s intense stare. I hit next: There was a Fourth of July barbecue with a shitty band performing on a rooftop; a mass of skinny humans in lamé bathing suits and bright eighties patterns and so much exposed, tender skin. Edie had climbed onto the brick ledge along the edge of the roof, standing up so she could see the stage. Fearless. Watching it now made my ribs contract. In the video, I screamed, “Get down from there, you moron!” and Edie just turned and waved.
Then there was a little video from mid-August, just a few days before Edie died, thirty seconds of the four of us—no Edie—playing Jenga in a bar’s leafy backyard. The game’s pieces had dares Sharpied onto them by previous players, and Sarah pulled one that instructed her to post a photo of herself wearing the Jenga box as a hat. She was reluctant and Kevin spazzed around, hyping her up, squishing his big grin into her photo.
That was it. Nothing new about August 21.
Perhaps there was a recently deleted folder. I held down the center button to try to call up a new menu and…
Black. I pressed the forward and back buttons and still just black. I hit play and the screen said “No new videos.” I’d deleted them all. Fuck.
Fighting down panic, I texted Tessa and Damien for help, then Googled “how to recover deleted Flip cam videos.” Incredibly, there were how-tos, dozens of them. I had to convince my computer to play nice with the camera, and then I had to download a sketchy-seeming program called Recuva (“pronounced re-cuh-va!” according to the cheerful Southern dad in the YouTube tutorial), but a half-hour later I had an ugly-looking folder just bursting with old videos.
The new file names were meaningless, but I counted forty-three of them. An uncensored batch of video files, up from a dozen—now we were getting somewhere. I checked the file creation dates and saw, with a pulse down my arms, that one was from August 21, 2009.
I dragged it into my iMovie player and turned up the volume. The video jerked around in the dark for a while; there was music, tinny guitars. Tones of black and gray, the indistinct din of people hanging out. The time stamp read 10:48. When had Sarah found Edie? Shortly after that, wasn’t it, around 11:15, 11:30? The video was long, twenty-three minutes. What was I recording? Finally, 2009 me found something to focus on: I’d turned the lens to the New York City skyline and stopped wobbling long enough for it to focus. We were up on Calhoun’s roof; it had a great view of Manhattan.
Sarah’s voice rang out from my computer’s speakers. “Alex, can you hand me another beer?”
“This is our second-to-last Tecate, people.” It was Alex, off-screen as I’d struggled to zoom in on the Empire State Building. I realized why the cityscape looked odd: no One World Trade Center yet.
“What are you doing, Linds?” he called out. “Come back here.”
I’d responded with a single giggle, whipping the lens around to face them. I could feel it now, the bubble of pleasure that he wanted me there. A place in the circle.
Figures formed in the dark: Sarah and Alex lounging on the cement roof, facing the same way like sunbathers at the beach; dutifully, they waved. I hit pause and mapped my friends out like pieces on a chessboard: Kevin had already left for the big show with his band. I remembered him being on the roof earlier in the night; a headliner might not go on until midnight, but he’d want to watch the openers. And Edie. As far as I knew, at that moment Edie had been alone in SAKE. Pawing with interest at Kevin’s vintage gun, sadness swelling around her like purply smoke. If the story I’d heard was wrong—if Sarah and Kevin were right, and Edie hadn’t been alone in the final moments of her life—then this recording could be everything. An unchanging record of who was where, when.
I hit play: I’d wobbled over to the group and caught a span of the sky as I sat. Someone must have grabbed the camera from me—Alex, I could tell when he hooted, “Say something for posterity, Linds.” He was aiming at me, and suddenly I was staring into my own eyes. Old me looked surprised, squinted hard, and for a moment I had the eerie feeling that we were looking at each other, that she could see me. Then she—I—laughed and shrieked, “Give me my camera, you fucktard!” Christ, no wonder I’d deleted this mess.
The lens made another pass around the roof, a drunken version of the slow pans you take at tourist destinations. There were fuzzy orange orbs here and there, unfocused—probably other groups hanging around on the rooftop, kicking off a balmy Friday night by drinking in the dark. Someone else wandered up and I jerked the camera in surprise. Male voices said hey and asked if we had a light; everyone chattered, the staccato of cross talk.
“You guys seen…?” one said right near the Flip cam, loud enough that the microphone picked it up but not clear enough to make out the name. Jim? Jen? Jan? Then the guys wandered away and I caught their backs, cigarettes glowing between their fingers. One of them was wearing ironic light-up sneakers that glittered in the night.
“Where’s Edie?” I asked as Alex fiddled with the iPod attached to a speaker. I panned to Sarah, who was smoking serenely.
“She’s a fucking bitch,” I heard myself add matter-of-factly. It was loud but not angry—the know-it-all tone of a little kid sharing a dirty fact.
“I know, I’m glad she’s not here,” Alex said back.
Sarah murmured something inscrutable, then repeated it to Alex’s “Huh?”: “You’re on tape!” she said again, pointing at the lens.
“I don’t fucking care.” His voice rose to a bellow. “I want that bitch out of my apartment!”
I whooped in agreement, so loud next to the Flip cam’s mic, then shouted, “I want to push her off this building!”
“I want to slit her throat!” Alex hollered back. He grabbed the camera and leaned in close, steadying it on his face. He giggled. “I’m just fucking with you. It’s cool.”
He let go and suddenly the view swooped down to my feet and stayed there for a second, then went black as the tinny sound blared on. As the seconds ticked by, understanding dawned: I’d thought I’d turned the camera off and had instead left it recording, in a purse or pocket or something. We were only three and a half minutes in.
As nausea curled inside me, I jumped ahead in few-minute chunks, confirming by the blackness and slivers of butt-dial din that this was it—nothing but accidental recording. A little gurgle of female voices around the eight-minute mark, too muffled to decode. But in the last twenty-eight seconds, the sound died down and then—color again. I rewound the video and leaned forward. In the darkness, I heard the metallic clank of me clomping down stairs. Then I saw the bright yellow of Calhoun Lofts’ hallways, and I must have been walking, bobbing a bit as I lifted the camera waist-high and burbled, “Oh, whoops.”
Then the lens swept up one more time, long enough for two symbols on a door to come into focus: 4G. SAKE. Edie’s apartment.
A little lean forward and my hand on the knob, the click of the door opening.
My voice, surprised, an inaudible warble. Projected like it was meant for someone—a greeting, not to myself.
A quick flash of the hardwood floor inside. And then, with a jumble of fingers, I’d turned the camera off.
Chapter 4
GREG
I had just bought a little tub of Greek yogurt and was thinking inane thoughts about how it always comes in a wider container than regular yogurt and why is a man eating yogurt sort of fey and effeminate, anyway? I sat down at the counter along the window and peeled back the top and noticed four peaks in the white, vaguely creepy remnants of the electric udder employed in the factory, when She walked in.
She had freckled skin and a halo of soft red curls. A sunbeam struck her, movie perfect, as if she traveled with her own light source, a perpetual spotlight. She slid her eyes around the little deli, pausing on me, holding my stare for just a moment before sauntering up to the register.
I put my eyes on my book and read nothing as she ordered a strawberry c
hicken salad. Then she scraped back a stool at the other end of the counter. Only a few seats away. Jesus, that air. She felt me looking at her and glanced over just enough, just as I feared I’d never get a glimpse of the eyes again, as she ate and read a book of her own, a near-smile on her lips.
I knew I should say something, something polite and unimposing and easy to back away from should she not, you know, want strangers bothering her during lunch. Which, of course, she probably did not. The man with the yogurt leering and blathering and treating the place like a despicable Murray Hill hookup bar.
So, frozen by the stupid stalemate I’d created for myself, I continued to study a page of the Murakami novel in front of me. And right as I was working up the nerve to get up and say hello, she checked the time on her phone, snapped her book into her purse, and headed for the exit.
As she yanked the glass door open, she glanced back—at me, definitely right at me—and I grinned, a full-toothed hapless grin that was the closest thing to communication I could toss toward her exiting body. She smiled—just long enough to make sure I saw it—and was gone.
When I got home from work that night, I opened my laptop, embarrassed for myself, and went to Craigslist’s Missed Connections section, that graveyard of hypothetical relationships for introverts and pussies everywhere. The words This is fucking dumb cobbled themselves into a mantra, complete with a monomaniac theme song, as I scanned the day’s sad pleas.
Location: Café Green on 57th St.
Subject: To the guy at the other end of the counter…
Body: …Thanks for the smile. It made my day.
My chest and dick distended in unison. This was her, this was fucking her. This was insane. I clicked respond. I stared at the cursor and realized I had no idea what to say. I couldn’t even remember what she looked like, just an impression of glinting eyes and a ludicrous certainty that this woman was interesting, full of captivating ideas, opinions, and stories.
