“Harold, you’ve got to be at least sixty. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy wasn’t published until 1979.”
He continues staring at the ceiling.
“Yeah?”
“So if you wrote your master’s thesis--”
“Shaddup.”
#
When I came back to visit him two days later, Harold had escaped. The four men with guns, and his attacker on the bus, made me afraid he had been kidnapped, but I say he escaped because I can’t think he left under anything but his own volition. His gear, his bags and bedroll which I had salvaged off the bus and brought to him, was gone as well. If someone had taken him, or killed him in his sleep, they wouldn’t have taken the stuff, would they?
At any rate, he appears on the hospital papers as missing. The nurses searched frantically, then gave up as more cases arrived that needed attention. It was another bum gone back to the streets that had dumped him briefly on their hands. I tried to look for him on the number 13, but while he had been in the hospital the transportation system had undergone an extensive and long-anticipated reorganization. Routes were changed and numbers reassigned. The path followed by Harold’s bus had gone from being, in the early days of the system, one of the city’s arteries, to a nearly desolate fringe, and the route had been dropped. The bus numbers now range from 1-12 in what is part consolidation and part public relations, an acquiescence to superstition revived by fear and hallowed by feelings that a tragedy, however trivial to the masses, must be accorded the memorial of isolation.
Preservation
The sound of the clacking grew unbearable, so we turned the volume down.
“Mute it.”
We muted it.
“Turn it up; we might miss something.”
It’s a silent movie. We won’t miss anything.
The sound of clacking gradually fills the room as my brother reluctantly turns up the volume. I can tell he’s pressing hard on the button, jamming his thumb down in defiance or muted anger. He doesn’t like for anyone to tell him what to do with the remote. But my grandmother wants the volume up, so we turn it up.
We’re all sitting along the edges of the tiny living room, staring at the fuzzy black-and-white images as they hazily walk across the television screen. I can hear a siren outside, barely discernable and then gone entirely.
“Who’s that?” my brother asks, evidently past his momentary and barely-noticeable indignation over the remote.
“Uncle Arehl, and maybe his sister, Edna,” my grandmother says, leaning in closer. “I think it’s Edna,” she says, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing a disease, as if the verdict was somehow relevant to someone who has only the vaguest idea who Arehl’s sister is, or was. Uncle Arehl (I don’t know precisely whose uncle he is, or for what the two initials of his name once stood) saunters slowly across a dry, patchy lawn, and the camera follows him. For some reason I’m more interested in the lawn--if it can be called that--than in the people on it. The sun in the movie is blazing, and everyone filmed looks only briefly at the camera before averting their faces once again to look at the stubbly grass. The camera pans once again and I can see an incredibly rutted path leading from the porch to the fence at the edge of the yard, broken pieces of concrete amid deep tire tracks fossilized in sun-baked mud. The fence is low, wire like a chain-link, but lower, with metal stakes holding it up instead of tubes. It looks more like something with which one would contain chickens than mark a property. The scene changes to fuzz and whiteness, and now all I can see is what looks like the interior of a car.
“Sometimes the camera got turned on accidentally,” my grandmother explains. She doesn’t say this by way of apology, or even explanation; it’s almost as if she wants to make sure that we don’t make the stupid mistake of thinking this was filmed on purpose.
Now the television shows a scene of two girls playing in the sprinkler. I’m not one of those people who, when watching a home movie, always stare at the present-day subject, if present, panning back and forth between the child eagerly unwrapping their Christmas presents and the middle-aged adult sitting awkwardly as they watch themselves amidst the stares of their divided audience. Still, I looked back at my mom. She was asleep, her head flopped over to one side in the aging wingback. As long as she doesn’t snore, I think. Then grandma will get in a bad mood, and she’s take the tape out of the VCR. Not that it will do any good, because later we’ll just have to sit down and watch it again, quite possibly from the beginning, to ensure that we don’t miss anything.
There’s still no sound except the incessant clacking and an occasional squeal. The squeals, I know, are my cousins, though of what degree I’m not quite sure. Family boundaries, I’ve noticed, tend to blur even as the ties grow more defined. They have grown more defined in the past year, and I hardly know one relative from another. When I first had this thought, I felt smug for a couple of minutes, thinking I had found some great truth that would help me understand and quantify this new world around me. Then I was overtaken by apathy and abandoned that train of thought.
My grandmother, having seen this movie before, gets up to have a drink of water. My brother surreptitiously turns the volume down, just a few notches, leaving time for the green dashes at the bottom of the screen to disappear before my grandmother re-enters. With any luck she won’t notice.
“Jackie, you want anything to drink while I’m up?” The call comes from the kitchen. My mom wakes with a jerking but sufficiently silent start.
“No, Mama, I’m fine.”
“This new juice is really good. I’ve had it sitting for a couple of weeks now.”
“That’s okay, Mama. Come back in and watch with us.”
If we have to endure it, I think, so does she.
“It’s really good. I gave some to Bill last Tuesday--no, I think it might have been Thur--no, it was Tuesday, and he said it really helped him and his burns. Even if you don’t have burns, it’s really good for you.” But she’s not trying to convince my mom anymore; she’s coming padding back into the living room, tall glass of homemade tincture in hand. It’s just that she has to list all her reasons anyway. She’s probably rehearsed them, I think, and has to get them out, or they’ll be wasted. She doesn’t even want my mom to drink the juice anymore. I cast a very brief glance at the swirling liquid--too long, and an invitation might ensue, complete with all the arguments uttered not thirty seconds ago. But of course I probably didn’t hear them. Children never listen and pay attention--and besides, they aren’t supposed to eavesdrop on their parents’ and grandparents’ conversations.
Shots of buildings, taken from a moving car. A brief clip from an airplane. Somewhere that looks like the edge of civilization, where a thin man in jeans and a flannel shirt prances like Charlie Chaplin. Oddly enough, there are few “significant events” in these randomly ordered reels of film--no birthdays, no weddings, not even a vacation or picnic. Most of the shots consist of children playing; here they are in the sprinkler, here they are at the playground, here they’re chasing each other around steel barrels and piles of firewood (the detritus such as with all Southern yards were filled). My mind wanders to the piles of firewood on the slope out back. They used to run parallel to the house, but after the bomb my grandmother decided that they should all be positioned perpendicular to the dingy split-level. She had done most of the moving herself. Rovers, she explained, might hide behind the woodpiles if they were left parallel to the house. This made perfect sense. The neighborhood was infested with rovers (all neighborhoods were), and most of them had at least one eye on the fabulous wealth stored in my grandmother’s basement. Maybe they were after her juice.
The images continue to play across the screen. My brother has finally succeeded in turning the volume, by imperceptible degrees, down to a barely discernable hum. The tape is a copy of films my great-grandfather--my grandmother’s father--shot years ago. Ten y
ears ago, his death--and basement--yielded piles of eight-millimeter, most of it from the early forties. Five years ago my great-aunt bought a camcorder. Last summer she had the idea to rummage in the detritus retrieved from my great-grandparents’ house and re-spool the reels of ancient film. She managed to hook up the aging but still functional Bolex and projected the home movies on a wall of her kitchen, filming the wall with her camcorder. Hence the clacking and squeals in the background.
“I have to go to the bathroom.” my brother says.
“We’ll pause it for you until you get back.”
But it is my brother, not my grandmother, who pauses the tape, getting up with a lurch. He starts to drop the remote to the coffee table but passes it to my grandmother as he exits the room. I know that while he wouldn’t ask them to, he still wants the footage paused while he’s out of the room, and I know that when he comes back, my grandmother will actually rewind just a bit to ensure that there’s a bit of overlap, and nothing has been missed. I wonder how many other tapes were found in the dog kennel, and if we will have to watch them all as well.
“Okay, let’s go.” His shirt is untucked and he’s wiping his wet hands on his shorts.
“Jackie? You awake?” my grandmother asks.
“Yes, Mama,” my mother answers from the depths of the wingback, her face concealed from view, her eyes no doubt closed. That wingback is a lifesaver, I think, and wish for an obscuring piece of furniture for myself--a confessor’s booth would be ideal.
My grandmother and mother talk a bit more, getting some preliminaries out of the way before actually starting the tape again--there is to be a minimum of talking once it starts.
I have to give my great-grandfather credit. The camera obviously isn’t mounted to a tripod as it swings from subject to subject, but still moves with a practiced--or intuitive--sweep, and when it stands still it does so without noticeable shaking. Still more fascinating is my great-grandfather’s choice of subject matter: he focuses almost exclusively on children, mostly my great-aunt, who is my grandmother’s junior by nearly two decades. The bulk of the filming was evidently done after my grandmother, now sitting next to me and sipping her drink, was married at seventeen. My great-grandmother plays a relatively minor role in these clips, either from shyness or busyness with work. Or possibly disdain. When the camera does pause as it tracks across her face, she gazes at it briefly before looking down; the film is so degraded, and the glimpse so brief, that I cannot tell if it is an indulgent smirk or a grimace in the sun that tweaks the edges of her mouth.
The screen rapidly fades to white. For a full five minutes, all we can see are figures walking back and forth in the haze. I can’t even tell if they’re adults or children. The television abruptly darkens and we are treated to the sight of a cellophane blizzard. I can’t make anything out. Maybe a building passes, maybe not. The screen goes black and we see “Cine Kodak Eight--Model 20” for about half a minute.
Surely great-aunt Mattie--that was what we called her, Mattie--didn’t just leave the camcorder running through neglect. This was, I’m sure, a conscious--even conscientious--effort. She did it on purpose. Every second of those decrepit 8mm reels was going to be transferred to VHS, even by such a primitive method as filming the wall. And I know that when copies of this tape are made for other relatives, when the factories start back up and we can buy VCRs again, the wastelands of blank and inscrutable film will still be there. When someone finally buys a DVD burner and a converter kit and makes disc copies for everybody, they will again include the blank stretches like they are inspired--like this tape is God's last message to mankind, and if we don’t preserve it all, even the parts we cannot and never will understand, we’ll lose something forever.
Two hundred miles away, they have lost everything. I still cannot avoid the irony, that it was our refuse, the junk crammed in, that alone was spared. My grandmother does not understand how a Faraday cage works, nor do the neighbors understand the physics and chemistry behind their festering sores and blindness, but neither was necessary to send my grandmother into the basement at the right moment, storing on the spur of the moment various home videos in the metal box that once housed a pet poodle, now long gone.
“How much longer do we have?” my mother asks, hope in her voice.
My grandmother tells her not to worry; while the grid will shut down in a half hour, her generator will continue to power the television long past the 8:30 cutoff.
This tape was, and is more now so than ever before, a sort of denial of time, a way to stop the disintegration of the past. Minute by minute, the original reels become farther and farther gone, rotting to the point where they can’t even be loaded onto the projector without snapping. The day is coming when the celluloid will be nothing but dust, and the day is coming when retribution, awful and terrible and destructive, will be meted out around the world for what has happened to us and those people further within the blast radius, now long gone. But here, for a moment, we’ve frozen the slide into oblivion. We’ve preserved whatever’s left. And we can’t afford to miss anything.
The Thing with Feathers
Phillip set down the cup of coffee, gently, the tremor barely passing along his arm, making the porcelain rattle for only the briefest moment on the tabletop. He brushed some crumbs to the side and set the newspaper down beside the cup. He stood, crossing to the open window. He looked at the grey water of the river below, running past his apartment on the sixth floor. In the sky above the river, birds were wheeling in large and perfect arcs--sea gulls, he thought. He stared for a moment at the birds before shutting the window. Something inside him still refused this as anything definite. He remembered a scene from childhood, the call to come inside as the snow fell softly down. He had been staying with his grandparents as his grandfather slowly died. The newspaper does not lie. There is no equivocation in its black and white block letters.
He had asked as the screen door closed behind him: “Is he dead?” and the answer had been so definite, so sharp and inarguable, like the shutting of that door, that what had come next seemed almost impossible.
There is still a belief in isolated towns, towns close to the earth and real beyond anything, where religion is mixed with and touches everything. God still lives in isolated towns, and the dead, through religion or custom or habit, are never really gone. They had brought a healer, his grandmother and her daughters--they had called a woman from the church who would pray, “laying hands on the sick” to heal them.
A bird outside the glass of his window tapped quizzically at the pane and cocked its head. Phillip stood there, fixated by its delicate movements. He crossed back to the table and leaned heavily on it, causing it to shift, making its feet scud across the linoleum, causing the coffee to slosh in the cup. The memory grew in him, how prayers offered for the dead man had been whispered, cried, and shouted. What he could not remember is how it ended.
Even now, it seemed impossible to him that 20th-century Americans could believe in a bodily resurrection--what did they hope for, that the dead man, lately their husband and father, would sit up in bed and begin talking like a cancer-riddled fleshy skeleton? And how did they decide to quit--what consensus was reached wherein the dead was officially declared to be such? At what point--he paused to turn the newspaper face down on the table--at what point had they decided that, were a divine intervention to occur, it would have happened already?
He grew restless. The newspaper was three days old. What, he thought, do you think you’re doing? Are you going to rush in on them--stop them in their tracks? But he glanced at his watch anyway.
Had the others honestly stopped hoping when the undertakers came, with embalming fluid and fresh soap? Did they assume that an injection of formaldehyde and ethanol really placed a barrier between the soul and the body? With a start, he began to pace the kitchen as another grotesque thought intruded--his grandmother, years before her husband’s death, insisti
ng that she be embalmed rather than cremated or given a natural burial. Better to place herself beyond all hope, she said, than risk, however slimly, the possibility of awaking to flames and stifling ceramic, or the soft, blind folds of casket lining. Everyone knew stories of premature burial; everyone knew that comas could slow the heartbeat, slow breath and cool bodies, until you could hardly distinguish the living from the dead. He tried to imagine what it would feel like, the lethal injection in the basement of a former church, or converted home, or a restaurant where delivery vans had been replaced with hearses but the innocuous pictures on the wall had remained the same. At any rate--his mouth twisted--he had not given up the hope first expressed by others. If God could overcome death (reasons the faith of a child), a loss of blood and lymph and the slow fixation of cells could be no great obstacle.
He looked at his watch again, pretending he was rubbing his wrist. In the bookcase in the living room was his highschool yearbook, and he knew exactly where to turn.
When the diagnosis had come, they had not believed it. He had been too young to know what to believe. There had been a mistake--and when there was no mistake, they rejected it, saying that God would heal. It had taken six months for his grandfather to stop walking, another two before he was unable to feed himself. It had been a long, slow decline, long enough, he thinks now, for anyone to acclimate to reality. It was not as if, he thought, the changes had occurred in a bewildering rush; the railings, the carpets, the new bed, the new foods, the bedside stool, and the oxygen tanks had all arrived in turn and separately, like polite friends come to pay their last respects.