Past Indiscretions

by Jack Bantry

  I hold the tape in front of me and my stomach grumbles, it’s only ten steps to the sink and another five to the microwave, it wouldn’t take me long to make the noodles but I’m too intrigued by whatever this is.

  The tape’s back in and playing. It’s a different scene now. I must have paused on a cut. It’s a close up of a blonde and she’s looking directly at the camera, there’s very little headroom and neck and shoulders but no breasts in the shot. It’s a composition that tells me a little bit about the production before she even says anything.

  “Accept him. Know that he can give you the best,” she says, her lips not matching up, even though she looks like she’s speaking English. Bad ADR is my first guess, as she’s speaking with a severity not matched by her expression, giving a bravura performance in the recording booth but not on set.

  There’s a tracking waver that hides a cut and now we’ve got an exterior, filmed out the window of a car. Finally something to date it: as we pass parked cars and suburban houses. I’m no gear head, but I’ve seen enough movies—and enough wood panelling—to guess that we’re somewhere in the eighties, early to mid. The houses in the background look like they could be Berlin or Cherry Hill, somewhere local, then I catch a license plate: Jersey.

  The camera stops on a kid riding his bike, a teenager, and the car matches speed so we can stay on him.

  Oh yes, please. Is this our protagonist? Are we going to have some quality low-budget child acting? Maybe the kid will go all James Dean, start punching a wall during a dramatic monologue.

  Then a rose appears over his shoulder, a squib so good that it looks real, even has a second squib exit wound, and the kid goes flying over his handlebars. He skids to a stop, helmet wedging under the bumper of a parked car as the camera keeps moving, pulls away.

  There’s some insane child endangerment in this stunt. So naturally I rewind to watch it again. The colours warp as the kid gets back on his bike and the hole in his shirt knits itself back together but when I hit play it’s the blonde woman again.

  Only the shot is different, zoomed further out than it was before. I think. I’m nearly certain.

  She’s nude, but still looking at the camera. She’s got a great body with long Jazzercise tan lines, panties and bathing suits covering different areas back then than they do now.

  The woman’s so gorgeous it’s almost enough to distract me from the fact that she shouldn’t be on the screen now, that I rewound, not fast-forwarded. Almost. I hit the pause button on the VCR and then use the remote to scan through the inputs, only after I’m finished realizing that that makes no sense, could not possibly fix the problem with playback, the mystery of the magic shifting tape.

  Whatever. Maybe the tape is fucked up, or my player is on its last legs. Whichever the case I should be recording this. I should plug in my laptop and begin capturing the tape as I play the whole thing from the beginning.

  Part of what’s great about the VHS format is that it’s fleeting by nature. A fresh tape, played for the first time, will look pristine compared to that same tape after several plays. Not only that, the degrading of quality is not a constant factor, tapes get wear less like tire treads and more like leather jackets, broken-in in some places more than others.

  Which is why if you ever rented Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Basic Instinct Sharon Stone’s crotch usually had more static lines crawling over it than any other part of the tape. That’s because a thirteen year old me had gotten a hold of it, paused, rewound and slo-mo’d over that snatch until the VCR heads had worn the tape thin, wicked all the data off it.

  Every tape, if you’re paying attention, turns you into an anthropologist. Or archaeologist. Both. I guess.

  “He would love you if he knew you but you’re just so small, so he is indifferent,” the woman says, the audio ghosted with a tiny bit of feedback. It’s gibberish delivered badly. Whoever had written it thought he was cryptic, brooding, a South Jersey Jodorowsky, but there’s a bad camera bump before the next cut that rats him out as the amateur he is.

  And we’re back at the shot that began the tape, the three figures with the bad prosthetic eyes on their foreheads. Between this and the naked woman’s testament there hasn’t been a single frame of the kid on the bicycle, like the tape has swallowed that footage up.

  I get a bad feeling at the back of my throat, can visualize the tape when I try to eject it, the brown-black filament unspooling as I pull and the VCR eats it.

  It’s playing okay now and there’s still time for me to hook up the laptop and record some of it, save it digitally for generations to come, but I’m too into the movie to take my eyes off it.

  The cleric in the middle raises his hands, an antiquated powerdrill appearing at the bottom of the frame. The three sets of lips are moving in unison, some kind of chant, but there’s no noise but the drone of the soundtrack. The music is synth so bad that it’s turned some kind of corner and become genius, experimental in its atonality.

  The drill has a cord that is slithering somewhere off screen, the man revs it and I can hear the tool over the score, even though their voices are still not coming through, maybe the music is meant to be their chant. Maybe this shit is deeper than it looks, maybe it’s not meant to be approached like a motion picture at all but instead an art piece, an instillation. Should I be watching it with headphones?

  From the left side of the screen, the woman turns her back towards the camera and unfixes her cloak to reveal the familiar body of the woman who was just preaching. Even without seeing her fact I can tell it’s her from the hair and tan lines.

  There’s a cut and we’re close up to the drill bit now, spinning. We’ve jumped the hundred and eighty degree line. Someone didn’t go to film school. Shocker.

  The drill presses forward and the woman’s face appears on the opposite side of the frame, her third eye bulging out of her skull.

  It’s a shot I’ve seen before, many times before, popularized by Fulci. Yup. As predicted the drill finds paydirt in the girl’s third eye, the gore looking fake as hell as the rubber prosthetic is torn off in a pop of fake blood and spirit gum.

  But then the drill retracts, the fake eye still skewered on it, and the camera dips to the woman’s smiling face. She’s wearing red lipstick and her teeth are off-white as she parts them. No matter how beautiful you were, you still had nicotine stains before laser whitening treatment was invented.

  Then the unexpected happens and that smile is pierced by the drill, the edge of the woman’s lips still curled up like she’s enjoying it, but the drill bit tears through her two front teeth, displacing them in a cloud of blood and enamel shards.

  It’s so real I have to look away, puke into an old plastic noodle cup. In that moment I’m thankful that I don’t clean up after myself, otherwise I would have coated my couch and my tapes in vomit.

  Then it’s over and we’re back to the close up of the woman, with all her teeth, looking into the camera repeating what she’s said before or something close enough to it that I can’t tell the difference.

  Before I even think about it, the fact that the VCR could wind up breaking the tape, I hit rewind and see if I can watch the drill sequence again, whether I can spot a cut and see if they switched out her face with a dummy.

  It’s not there anymore and we begin with a fresh scene, even though I’m sure I’ve gone backwards.

  ***

  I continue like this long enough, rewinding over atrocities and seemingly deleting them from the tape because they never show up again, that I must have fallen asleep.

  When I wake there is no light peeking through the blinds.

  I think that can’t be right, that even if the tape was recorded in long play mode, there would only be four hours of footage but I’ve been watching it longer. My back is pressed against the couch. I’m not even sitting on it now, but on the floor.

  It can’t still be playing.

  But I know that possible and happening are two different things now. I’ve
been shown so much over the past day.

  ***

  It’s not the violence. I hate that, it’s too close to real. It’s not the snappy dialogue. I find that pretentious and overindulgent. But for some reason I still haven’t gotten up to get myself something to eat.

  I can smell piss but I don’t look down. Either because I’m indifferent or ashamed, not because I’m afraid.

  A man is stapling up signs to a post, looking for a missing dog. He’s old enough to be someone’s dad, has rings around his eyes like he’s been doing this for days now. He’s called over to the car by an unheard voice and something terrible happens to him when he gets there.

  Rewind.

  Lecture.

  There’s a woman taking her clothes off, she’s talking to whoever’s behind the camera, acting bashful like this is the first time she’s done something like this. For money. Then the preacher woman joins her and begins applying body paint to the new woman’s body, tiny stars over her nipples, a triangle around her bellybutton. Then something terrible happens to her.

  Rewind.

  Lecture.

  I try taking a sip out of a nearby noodle bowl but the taste is awful so I spit it back out.

  The tape goes on and I’m terrified to take it out of the machine or attempt to record it.

  I might miss something.

  ***

  I’m getting weak now. There’s nothing left in me to throw up and it’s an effort just to depress the rewind and play buttons. My arm aches from holding my fingers over the VCR controls.

  It’s fifteen steps there and back to make noodles. I would be able to keep an eye on the screen the whole time.

  But I can’t stop myself. I can’t make myself stand up, my eyes now so close to the screen that I can count the individual dots of light.

  It’s so bad it’s good.

  Ricochet

  by

  J. F. Gonzalez

  “You ever want to just pick up and move somewhere else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Nick leaned back in his chair, fingers resting in the home position on his computer keyboard. It was two-thirty in the afternoon on a Thursday, and the workday had slowed to a crawl. He and Ken Atkins were the only people in the department today. Jay was meeting with a client, and their boss, Mark, was down in Georgia on a business trip. On days like this when the work was slow, there wasn’t much to do except cruise the Internet and make idle chatter.

  “You know,” Nick said. “Just make plans to skip town without telling anybody and then do it.”

  “Good luck,” Ken said.

  Nick smiled. The term “good luck” was used by Ken, Jay, and Nick as a catch-all phrase for “good luck in your job search”. It was an inside joke the three of them shared.

  “It’s not like that,” Nick said. “It’s more in the line of what you mentioned to me when we were talking about that woman in Arizona.”

  “Oh,” Ken said, his voice dropping. “That.”

  “Yeah.”

  Eight months after Ken started working for Logan Advertising, a woman served him with child support papers in his home state of Arizona for a child he never fathered. Ken said he’d never even met the woman. “I had just gotten married,” he’d told Nick on a day that was similar to this – slow workday, no web campaigns to put to bed. “I’m not the kind of guy that screws around like that on his wife. I know a lot of guys say that and they behave otherwise, but I’m serious. I don’t know who this chick is!”

  The woman, who Nick later learned was named Rebecca Armstrong, maintained her claim that she’d had a torrid one-night stand with Ken, which resulted in an unintended pregnancy. Religious beliefs forbade her to terminate the pregnancy, so she’d bore the child, a daughter, and raised her as a single mother. Once Rebecca was on her feet financially, she’d sought the services of an attorney who began the process of tracking Ken down. “She claims to remember my name from our alleged night together,” Ken had told him. “And yeah, she has the physical description of me right, but…” He’d shaken his head. “There’s no way this could have happened. I take my marriage vows seriously. If Tina finds out about this, she's gonna freak.”

  Nick could sympathize. If this had happened to him, his own wife, Karen, would not only have freaked out, she would've gone nuclear. Wives were programmed that way – go on the warpath at the first hint their man has committed some kind of transgression and ask questions later, after their husbands were bludgeoned and bleeding.

  Well, that was Karen's MO. Nick didn't really like to think about that.

  During the six-month process that followed Ken’s initial discovery of learning Rebecca Armstrong was suing him for child support, he’d been forced to hire his own attorney. He had to submit to a paternity test. Rebecca had listed Ken as the child’s father on the birth certificate. The DNA test came back in Ken’s favor – he wasn’t the child’s biological father (“And there’s no way it could’ve happened!” Ken had exclaimed when he told Nick on one of their afternoon discussions. “Tina and I had already moved out of Arizona when the child was conceived.”). However, Arizona law didn’t look at it that way – if he was named as the child’s father in the birth certificate, he was legally and financially responsible. The court found in favor of Rebecca, who Ken began referring to as “that bitch who’s getting half my paycheck.” Because Ken couldn’t afford the back and current child support, and because he wanted to avoid a jail sentence for failure to pay, he’d had no choice but to sell some liquid assets and take on a second job. His appeal was currently in legal limbo.

  Nick and Ken had many a talk about the situation during company downtime – Ken was the agency's web programmer, Nick was the company’s web designer. At one point during the height of Ken’s struggle with the Arizona legal system, he’d said, “I wish I could just disappear. Just quietly get the things I care about most and go someplace where nobody will find me.” That was one of many things Ken said during this tumultuous time. He'd also said he'd wanted to make Rebecca Armstrong disappear, that he wished she no longer existed so he wouldn't be in this mess. All understandable for a guy being financially raped for a transgression he didn't commit.

  Nick looked at his computer screen. The web browser was set to Google’s home page. He had just typed a search term in the text box: I want to move to California, but had not hit the Search button yet. It had been over a year since Ken had brought up the subject of That Woman to Nick. If anything, Ken had seemed to chill out about the situation in the last few months and accept it. He certainly seemed more calm, less stressed in the past few months. “I feel like you did back then. In fact, I just typed 'I want to move to California' in Google, but haven’t searched on the term yet.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmmm.” Nick could hear Ken on the other side of the cubicle wall that separated their workspace. It sounded like Ken was searching through something on his computer. “That bad, huh?”

  “Yeah, it’s getting there.”

  “That sucks.”

  Nick and Ken had participated in a lot of quid pro quo during down time. Ken had told Nick about his problems with Rebecca Armstrong. Naturally, Nick told Ken about Karen.

  Nick touched the left side of his face near his temple, gingerly inspecting the area with his fingers. He winced. It still hurt. He was surprised Ken or one of his other co-workers hadn’t noticed. They had noticed an earlier injury, when Karen had punched him in the face, resulting in a bloody nose and two black eyes. He’d told them he’d gotten up in the middle of the night and, disoriented due to the house being dark, walked into a wall. “Just admit it,” Bob Keene, their Senior Copywriter, had said in that joking tone of his, “your wife beat the shit out of you last night. Right?” Nick had grinned, trying to laugh along with the joke, but deep down he’d felt the shame of his situation being so goddamn obvious. Yes, Karen had hit him. She’d hit him last night too. When Karen thought he was being unreasonab
le, she hit him. It didn’t take much for him to be unreasonable in her eyes, and it happened once a month on average.

  He’d kept the physical abuse he'd suffered from Karen a secret for years and had not told anybody, not even his closest friends outside of work until one afternoon when Ken had just finished unburdening about Rebecca. The time had seemed right, so Nick revealed everything. Ken had been agast. “I knew wives-beating-on-husbands spousal abuse existed, but you sure never hear much about it. You really need to do something, man. See a counselor, go to the police—“

  Nick had stopped him. “That’ll just make it worse.”

  “Oh,” Ken said. That afternoon, the two men had left work early, met at a bar and drank several beers during further commiseration.

  “You know, it wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Ken said from his side of the cube. “You’ve got to do something. Your son never wants to come home because of his mother, you never want to go home because of her, and you’re running yourself ragged. I can tell, Nick. How much sleep do you get every night?”

  “Three or four hours.”

  “See what I mean? Just do it.”

  Nick sighed. “Maybe I should. Problem is, I don’t have the money to file for divorce. Karen will go apeshit.”

  There was a musical chiming sound from Nick’s computer. “Don’t tell anybody I sent this to you,” Ken said. “And when you have the URL committed to memory, delete the email from your system. If you use this site at work, clear it from your browser history and cache after every use.”

  “What is it?” Nick asked. He opened the email and saw that it contained a website URL. www.youranswers.com.

  “Check it out.”

  Nick clicked on the link and a new browser window opened. A white screen came up with a text box centered in the middle. There were no words on the screen indicating he was at a website called Your Answers, or youranswers.com. He glanced at the top of the browser screen and saw that whoever created the site hadn’t even bothered to name the index file correctly. It was simply labeled Untitled.