“What the fuck,” said James, watching the counter: it was comforting. “What the fuck.”
“Can you stop saying ‘what the fuck’?” said Abby; she was standing over her stacks of tapes, regarding them as a farmer might consider a nest of snakes.
“Go tell Mom and Dad about this,” James said.
“Leave Mom and Dad alone.”
“It was on their property, they should know about it.”
“It’s somebody’s AV project from the stupid state university,” she said. She was angry; it had been impossible to look away from the television the whole time, but she’d come away feeling dirty. The sensation registered in her shoulders and upper arms, an unwelcome burden beginning to establish its weight.
“It’s a fucking home movie,” James said, snatching up a tape from the as-yet unsorted box: Interviews #3. “The worst AV student in the world knows better than to shoot trash like that. There’s no titles, no edits, no nothing. There’s just—”
The tape finished rewinding and auto-ejected, and James deftly made the switch; he hit PLAY, and the screen blurred into focus, a young man’s face in close-up, head lowered as if in expectation of some reprimand, waiting for something.
“Just nothing.”
Abby looked at her brother, down there doing his best to put on an air of authority, and then she looked back over to the tapes, adding up the numbers. A hundred and twenty minutes, two hundred and forty minutes, four hundred. Six hours in three tapes, twelve hours in six, twenty-four hours in twelve.
“Years,” she said. “It would take years.”
The door from the kitchen creaked open and light flooded down the steps. The kids had been in the basement for what seemed like forever.
“Whatcha watchin’?” Emily Pratt asked with a big smile when she got to the bottom of the stairs. It was great to have the kids around after being without them for so long out there on the road. It’s hard to describe, this feeling of seeing your kids spending time together like adults, meeting up again after being out there in the world like free agents: there’s something giddy and unreal about it. I knew that boy when he was afraid of strangers. I knew them both before they knew how to talk.
4
“I don’t see anything,” Stephanie says, scrutinizing the city scene before her.
“Just there,” Lisa says. “By the garbage.”
The woman near the trash bin seems oblivious to the other people at the bus stop. She leans over the hole and plunges her arm in, fishing around down there, her forehead pressing into the rim. She retrieves half of something wrapped in butcher paper, maybe a sandwich or some cheese, and drops it into a tote bag that hangs from her left shoulder. You can see her breath in the air: it’s winter somewhere.
“Oh,” says Stephanie.
“There’s more,” says Lisa, holding down the VOLUME button on the remote, the green bars on the screen increasing their numbers in response. City sounds from the speaker on the cabinet: trucks, sirens, horns.
“I want to go home,” Stephanie says.
“A lot of people want to go home,” says Lisa, her anger like a musket flashing in the dark.
“What are you doing?” demands Jeremy from his chair. Lisa cocks her head to one side, regarding him with what looks like pity or scorn.
“I’m trying to find my mother,” she says, locating her inner balance again, the center from which she tries hard not to stray.
*
“Jeremy Heldt,” he says. The light is hot on his face.
“Your full name.”
“Jeremy James Heldt.”
“Ever ‘JJ’?”
“No, just Jeremy.”
“Simple Jeremy.”
“That’s right,” he says.
“Why are you here?”
“Like I told you. After I saw the place earlier—”
“You were here earlier.”
“Well, you know I was, you were here too.”
“Please tell the camera that you came here earlier today.”
If you rented one of the two copies of A Civil Action that stood, for several years, on the shelves of Movies & More in Tama, you may already have seen and heard Jeremy’s response. It was edited into one of the scenes toward the end of the movie, after the class action suit gets dismissed. Unlike Lisa’s earlier work, this edit feels natural; there’s no way to make real sense of it in the context of the movie, but you might imagine some mix-up further up the line—something gone wrong in mastering, maybe, a documentary scene cut in by accident. Removed from the greater context of the interview within which they were made, Jeremy’s remarks seem cryptic, and it’s hard to account for the severity of his tone.
“I was here earlier today,” he says. There’s a silence, and a possible edit. “I came out here earlier to say I’m starting a new job and it’s full-time. On the way here I saw Ezra in the road and I pulled over. I didn’t know he was coming out here. I helped clean up the road and I drank a glass of water and then I went home, and I called Stephanie after I woke up because when I saw the driveway of your house, I recognized it.”
Lisa’s voice, offscreen, sounds suddenly warm now; it’s hard to account for it. “How did you recognize my driveway?” she says.
“From the movies,” says Jeremy.