“Orange polyester pants,” she said triumphantly.
“Are you spending Mom and Dad’s retirement studying fashion design?”
“It’s weird, at Reed we have these courses in this subject they’re tentatively calling ‘history.’ Deeply experimental.”
James watched, again, the woman with the macramé purse, who paused to talk to the people scavenging in the garbage: the camera’s station, no nearer than across the street, was too far off to pick up any dialogue. Traffic obscured the view from time to time.
“You’re right,” he said after a minute. A green car rolled slowly into the frame from the right, accelerating suddenly. “Jesus, that’s a Gremlin. Those things are legendary.” More cars passed: big Fords like boats, several Honda hatchbacks in quick succession.
“They’re all scenes of basically the same stuff happening over a long period of time,” Abby said when they’d been sitting in silence for a while.
James didn’t know what to say. He was curious. Curiosity had always felt, to him, like something you ought to be ashamed of, an accusing finger pointing out that there’s something you don’t know yet.
“There’s no label on the tape?” he said finally, cross-legged on the floor in front of the television down in the cellar.
“It just says Street Number Five on the container,” said Abby, sliding the TDK-branded cardboard shell from the top of the VCR and handing it over even though she’d already told him all there was to know about it.
*
“Half of this is going to be porn,” said James; Abby was arranging the tapes into tidy stacks on the floor. Some were missing; all nine of the Street series were present and accounted for in all their excruciating tedium, but others, judging from their titles, were from the middle of a sequence. Driveway 5–7. Church Services 3.
“You hope,” said Abby.
“I hope I get to watch porn with you, Abs?” he said, eyebrows up. “Am I hearing this right? I just want to make sure I understand what it is you imagine I’m thinking.”
She emulated the universally recognizable voice of the stupid older brother, laying it on thick: “‘I just watched ninety minutes of people at a bus stop. I bet the next tape’s porn.’”
James laughed; she was right. “It’d be better than if it’s all bus stops,” he said.
She tallied her win on a scorecard in her head and let him off the hook. “These nine are Street,” she said. “There’s also Field, three of those but they’re numbered one, three, and four. Then two with a bunch of two-letter combos in a row but no numbers, MN IA NE SD on the one and then MO IA SD on the other.”
“Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota.”
“Wow, they’re really working you hard out there at St. John’s,” she said.
“We get to write our own majors, I picked State Abbreviations. Very forward-looking place,” said James.
“You’re really funny now!” she said without insult: he’d always tried, but now he talked like a grown-up instead of a teenager who hopes people laugh at his jokes.
“Thanks,” he said, looking around to change the subject. She’d finished stacking the contents of the first box, fifteen tapes: the nine Streets, the three Fields, the two with the state abbreviations, and one marked Shed #4.
“Just the one Shed,” said Abby, picking it up, turning it over in case there was something else written on it somewhere: some initials in ballpoint, a date. Nothing.
“Maybe the others are in that other box,” James suggested.
She fed it to the VCR, whose gears turned loudly as the tape slid in. It worked fine, but it was an old machine.
The action began immediately.
*
The unedited Shed #4 is hard to watch. It’s long; shot with a Samsung SCF34 onto a Fuji 120 Super VHS Pro tape, it is a single continuous take. From the opening shot of the unoccupied outbuilding, its chair ready to receive, right down to the lingering view of the field at night after the fleeing woman hits the vanishing point, there’s no break in the play: everything happens in real time. They bring her in; they attach her to the chair; they begin asking her questions, footage that was never transferred to copies of Against All Odds or Pale Rider or Fresh Horses and so remained unseen until James and Abby retrieved the tape from the trunk of the Oldsmobile. She rises to her feet, as we’ve seen, standing on one leg as though bidden; and then, as Steve and Jeremy and Shauna can attest, she breaks for the driveway. She’s pursued by a two-man skeleton crew: whoever’s holding the camera, and Lisa Sample, whose familiar body we see briefly in the frame when the action goes off-script.
“Sorry,” says the cameraman, whose name has not been preserved.
“God damn it,” says Lisa, knocking the camera from his hands.
*
When the tape ran out the machine began rewinding automatically. The blue screen showed frost-white chunky numbers scrolling backwards, too fast for the eye to follow.