Two Truths and a Lie

by Sarah Pinsker

  Marco pressed play again. The girl took the train from Denny and smiled. In the foreground, Uncle Bob started telling a story. Stella had forgotten the storytelling, too. That was the whole show: children doing their thing, and Uncle Bob telling completely unrelated stories. He paid little attention to the kids, though they sometimes stopped playing to listen to him.

  The story was weird. Something about a boy buried alive in a hillside—“planted,” in his words—who took over the entire hillside, like a weed, and spread for miles around.

  Stella shook her head. “That’s fucked up. If I had a kid I wouldn’t let them watch this. Nightmare city.”

  Marco gave her a look. “I thought you said you had a kid?”

  “I mean if I’d had a kid back when this was on.” She was usually more careful with the lying game. Why had she said she had a son, anyway? She’d be found out the second Marco ran into her parents.

  It was a dumb game, really. She didn’t even remember when she’d started playing it. College, maybe. The first chance she’d had to reinvent herself, so why not do it wholesale? The rules were simple: Never lie about something anyone could verify independently; never lose track of the lies; keep them consistent and believable. That was why in college she’d claimed she’d made the varsity volleyball team in high school, but injured her knee so spectacularly in practice she’d never been able to play any sport again, and she’d once flashed an AP physics class, and she’d auditioned for the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament but been cut when she accidentally said “fuck” to Alex Trebek. Then she just had to live up to her reputation as someone who’d lived so much by eighteen that she could coast on her former cool.

  Uncle Bob’s story was still going. “They dug me out of the hillside on my thirteenth birthday. It’s good to divide rhizomes to give them room to grow.”

  “Did he say ‘me’?”

  “A lot of his stories went like that, Stella. They started out like fairy tales, but somewhere in the middle he shifted into first person. I don’t know if he had a bad writer or what.”

  “And did he say ‘rhizome’? Who says ‘rhizome’ to seven-year-olds?” Stella hit the stop button. “Okay. Back to work. I remember now. That’s plenty.”

  Marco frowned. “We can keep working, but I’d like to keep this on in the background now that we’ve found it. It’s nice to see Denny. That Denny, especially.”

  That Denny: Denny frozen in time, before he got weird.

  Stella started on the boxes in the back, leaving the stuff near the television to Marco. Snippets of story drifted her way, about the boy’s family, but much, much older than when they’d buried him. His brothers were fathers now, their children the nieces and nephews of the teenager they’d dug from the hillside. Then the oddly upbeat theme song twice in a row—that episode’s end and another’s beginning.

  “Marco?” she asked. “How long did this run?”

  “I dunno. A few years, at least.”

  “Did you ever go on it? Like Denny?”

  “No. I … hmm. I guess by the time I’d have been old enough, Denny had started acting strange, and my parents liked putting us into activities we could both do at the same time.”

  They kept working. The next Uncle Bob story that drifted her way centered on a child who got lost. Stella kept waiting for it to turn into a familiar children’s story, but it didn’t. Just a kid who got lost and when she found her way home she realized she’d arrived back without her body, and her parents didn’t even notice the difference.

  “Enough,” Stella said from across the room. “That was enough to give me nightmares, and I’m an adult. Fuck. Watch more after I leave if you want.”

  “Okay. Time to call it quits, anyway. You’ve been here like nine hours.”

  She didn’t argue. She waited until they got out the front door to peel off the mask and gloves.

  “It was good to hang out with you,” she said.

  “You, too. Look me up if you ever get to Boston.”

  She couldn’t tell him to do the same with Chicago, so she said, “Will do.” She realized she’d never asked what he did for a living, but it seemed like an awkward time. It wasn’t until after she’d walked away that she realized he’d said goodbye as if she wasn’t returning the next day. She definitely wasn’t, especially if he kept binging that creepy show.

  When she returned to her parents’ house she made a beeline for the shower. After twenty minutes’ scrubbing, she still couldn’t shake the smell. She dumped the clothes in the garbage instead of the laundry and took the bag to the outside bin, where it could stink as much as it needed to stink.

  Her parents were sitting on the screened porch out front, as they often did once the evenings got warm enough, both with glasses of iced tea on the wrought iron table between them as if it were already summer. Her mother had a magazine open on her lap—she still subscribed to all her scientific journals, though she’d retired years before—and her father was solving a math puzzle on his tablet, which Stella could tell by his intense concentration.

  “That bad?” Her mother lifted an eyebrow at her as she returned from the garbage.

  “That bad.”

  She went into the house and poured herself a glass to match her parents’. Something was roasting in the oven, and the kitchen was hot and smelled like onions and butter. She closed her eyes and pressed the glass against her forehead, letting the oven and the ice battle over her body temperature, then returned to sit on the much cooler porch, picking the empty chair with the better view of the dormant garden.

  “Grab the cushion from the other chair if you’re going to sit in that one,” her father said.

  She did as he suggested. “I don’t see why you don’t have cushions for both chairs. What if you have a couple over? Do they have to fight over who gets the comfortable seat versus who gets the view?”

  He shrugged. “Nobody’s complained.”

  They generally operated on a complaint system. Maybe that was where she’d gotten the habit of lies and exaggeration: She’d realized early that only extremes elicited a response.

  “How did dinner look?” he asked.

  “I didn’t check. It smelled great, if that counts for anything.”

  He grunted, the sound both a denial and the effort of getting up, and went inside. Stella debated taking his chair, but it wasn’t worth the scene. A wasp hovered near the screen and she watched it for a moment, glad it was on the other side.

  “Hey, Ma, do you remember The Uncle Bob Show?”

  “Of course.” She closed her magazine and hummed something that sounded half like Uncle Bob’s theme song and half like The Partridge Family theme. Stella hadn’t noticed the similarity between the two tunes; it was a ridiculously cheery theme song for such a dark show.

  “Who was that guy? Why did they give him a kids’ show?”

  “The public television station had funding trouble and dumped all the shows they had to pay for—we had to get cable for you to watch Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. They had all these gaps to fill in their schedule, so anybody with a low budget idea could get on. That one lasted longer than most—four or five years, I think.”

  “And nobody said, ‘That’s some seriously weird shit?’”

  “Oh, we all did, but someone at the station argued there were plenty of peace-and-love shows around, and some people like to be scared, and it’s not like it was full of violence or sex, and just because a show had kids in it didn’t mean it was a kids’ show.”

  “They expected adults to watch? That’s even weirder. What time was it on?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember. Saturday night? Saturday morning?”

  Huh. Maybe he was more like those old monster movie hosts. “That’s deeply strange, even for the eighties. And who was the guy playing Uncle Bob? I tried looking it up on IMDB, but there’s no page. Not on Wikipedia either. Our entire world is fueled by nostalgia, but there’s nothing on this show. Where’s the online fan club, the commun
ity of collectors? Anything.”

  Her mother frowned, clearly still stuck on trying to dredge up a name. She shook her head. “Definitely Bob, a real Bob, but I can’t remember his last name. He must’ve lived somewhere nearby, because I ran into him at the drugstore and the hardware store a few times while the show was on the air.”

  Stella tried to picture that strange man in a drugstore, looming behind her in line, telling her stories about the time he picked up photos from a vacation but when he looked at them, he was screaming in every photo. If he were telling that story on the show, he’d end it with, “and then you got home from the drugstore with your photos, but when you looked at them, you were screaming in every photo too.” Great. Now she’d creeped herself out without his help.

  “How did I not have nightmares?”

  “We talked about that possibility—all the mothers—but you weren’t disturbed. None of you kids ever complained. It was a nice break, to chat with the other moms while you all played in such a contained space.”

  There was a vast difference between “never complained” and “weren’t disturbed” that Stella would have liked to unpack, but she fixated on a different detail. “Contained space—you mean while we watched TV, right?”

  “No, dear. The studio. It looked much larger on television, but the cameras formed this nice ring around three sides, and you all understood you weren’t supposed to leave during that half hour except for a bathroom emergency. You all played and we sat around and had coffee. It was the only time in my week when I didn’t feel like I was supposed to be doing something else.”

  It took Stella a few seconds to realize the buzzing noise in her head wasn’t the wasp on the screen. “What are you talking about? I was on the show?”

  “Nearly every kid in town was on it at some point. Everyone except Marco, because his brother was acting up by the time you two were old enough, and Celeste pulled Denny and enrolled both boys in karate instead.”

  “But me? Ma, I don’t remember that at all.” The idea that she didn’t know something about herself that others knew bothered her more than she could express. “You aren’t making this up?”

  “Why would I lie? I’m sure there are other things you don’t remember. Getting lice in third grade?”

  “You shaved my head. Of course I remember. The whole class got it, but I was the only one whose mother shaved her head.”

  “I didn’t have time to comb through it, honey. Something more benign? Playing at Tamar Siegel’s house?”

  “Who’s Tamar Siegel?”

  “See? The Siegels moved to town for a year when you were in second grade. They had a jungle gym that you loved. You didn’t think much of the kid, but you liked her yard and her dog. We got on well with her parents; I was sad when they left.”

  Stella flashed on a tall backyard slide and a golden retriever barking at her when she climbed the ladder and left it below. A memory she’d never have dredged up unprompted. Nothing special about it: a person whose face she couldn’t recall, a backyard slide, an experience supplanted by other experiences. Generic kid, generic fun. A placeholder memory.

  “Okay, I get that there are things that didn’t stick with me, and things that I think I remember once you remind me, but it doesn’t explain why I don’t remember a blacked-out TV studio or giant cameras or a creepy host. You forget the things that don’t stand out, sure, but this seems, I don’t know, formative.”

  Her mother shrugged. “You’re making a big deal of nothing.”

  “Nothing? Did you listen to his stories?”

  “Fairy tales.” “Now I know you didn’t listen. He was telling horror stories to seven-year-olds.”

  “Fairy tales are horror stories, and like I said, you didn’t complain. You mostly played with the toys.”

  “What about the kids at home watching? The stories were the focus if you weren’t in the studio.” “If they were as bad as you say, hopefully parents paid attention and watched with their children and whatever else the experts these days say comprises good parenting. You’re looking through a prism of now, baby. Have you ever seen early Sesame Street? I remember a sketch where a puppet with no facial features goes to a human for ‘little girl eyes.’ You and your friends watched shows, and if they scared you, you turned them off. You played outside. You cut your Halloween candy in half to make sure there were no razor blades inside. If you want to tell me I’m a terrible parent for putting you on that show with your friends, feel free, but since it took you thirty-five years to bring this up, I’m going to assume it didn’t wreck your life.”

  Her father rang the dinner gong inside the house, a custom her parents found charming and Stella had always considered overkill in a family as small as theirs. She and her mother stood. Their glasses were still mostly full, the melting ice having replaced what they’d sipped.

  She continued thinking over dinner, while she related everything she and Marco had unearthed to her mildly curious parents, and after, while scrubbing the casserole dish. What her mother said was true: She hadn’t been driven to therapy by the show. She didn’t remember any nightmares. It just felt strange to be missing something so completely, not to mention the questions that arose about what else she could be missing if she could be missing that. It was an unpleasant feeling.

  After dinner, while her parents watched some reality show, she pulled out a photo album from the early eighties. Her family hadn’t been much for photographic documentation, so there was just the one, chronological and well labeled, commemorating Stella at the old school playground before they pulled it out and replaced it with safer equipment, at a zoo, at the Independence Day parade. It was true, she didn’t recall those particular moments, but she believed she’d been there. The Uncle Bob Show felt different. The first time she’d uttered the show’s name, she’d thought she’d made it up.

  She texted Marco: “Did Denny have all the Uncle Bob episodes on tape or only the ones he was in? Thanks!” She added a smiley face then erased it before she hit send. It felt falsely cheery instead of appreciative. His brother had just died.

  She settled on the couch beside her parents. While they watched TV, she surfed the web looking for information about The Uncle Bob Show, but found nothing. In the era of kittens with Twitter accounts and sandwiches with their own Instagrams and fandoms for every conceivable property, it seemed impossible for something to be so utterly missing.

  Not that it deserved a fandom; she just figured everything had one. Where were the ironic logo T-shirts? Where was the episode wiki explaining what happened in every Uncle Bob story? Where were the “Whatever happened to?” articles? The tell-alls by the kids or the director or the camera operator? The easy answer was that it was such a terrible show, or such a small show, that nobody cared. She didn’t care either; she just needed to know. Not the same thing.

  The next morning, she drove out to the public television station on the south end of town. She’d passed it so many times, but until now she wouldn’t have said she’d ever been inside. Nothing about the interior rang a bell either, though it looked like it had been redone fairly recently, with an airy design that managed to say both modern and trapped in time.

  “Can I help you?” The receptionist’s trifocals reflected her computer’s spreadsheet back at Stella. A phone log by her right hand was covered with sketched faces; the sketches were excellent. Grace Hernandez, according to her name plaque.

  Stella smiled. “I probably should have called, but I wondered if you have archives of shows produced here a long time ago? My mother wants a video of a show I was on as a kid and I didn’t want her to have to come over here for nothing.”

  Even while she said it, she wondered why she had to lie. Wouldn’t it have been just as easy to say she wanted to see it herself? She’d noticed an older receptionist and decided to play on her sympathies, but there was no reason to assume her own story wasn’t compelling.

  “Normally we’d have you fill out a request form, but it’s a slow day.
I can see if someone is here to help you.” Grace picked up a phone and called one number, then disconnected and tried another. Someone answered, because she repeated Stella’s story, then turned back to her. “He’ll be out in a sec.”

  She gestured to a glass-and-wood waiting area, and Stella sat. A flat screen overhead played what Stella assumed was their station, on mute, and a few issues of a public media trade magazine called Current were piled neatly on the low table.

  A small man—a little person? Was that the right term?—came around the corner into reception. He was probably around her age, but she would have remembered him if he’d gone to school with her.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Jeff Stills. Grace says you’re looking for a show?”

  “Yes, my mother—”

  “Grace said. Let’s see what we can do.”

  He handed her a laminated guest pass on a lanyard and waited while she put it on, then led her through a security door and down a long, low-ceilinged corridor, punctuated by framed stills from various shows. No Uncle Bob. “Have you been here before?”

  “When I was a kid.”

  “Hmm. I’ll bet it looks pretty different. This whole back area was redone around 2005, after the roof damage. Then the lobby about five years ago.”

  She hadn’t had any twinges of familiarity, but at least that explained some of it. She’d forgotten about the blizzard that wrecked the roof; she’d been long gone by then.

  “Hopefully whatever you’re looking for wasn’t among the stuff that got damaged by the storm. What are you looking for?”

  “The Uncle Bob Show. Do you know it?”

  “Only by name. I’ve seen the tapes on the shelf, but in the ten years I’ve been here, nobody has ever asked for a clip. Any good?”

  “No.” Stella didn’t hesitate. “It’s like those late-night horror hosts, Vampira or Elvira or whatever, except they forgot to run a movie and instead let the host blather on.”

  They came to a nondescript door. The low-ceilinged hallway had led her to expect low-ceilinged rooms, but the space they entered was more of a warehouse. A long desk cluttered with computers and various machinery occupied the front, and then the space opened into row upon row of metal shelving units. The aisles were wide enough to accommodate rolling ladders.