The Last Days of Video

by Jeremy Hawkins

  “Uh . . . so you were at . . . uh . . .”

  “The Reality Center,” she said—and in the next breath, she launched into an impassioned monologue about her miraculous experience. Her voice brightened steadily as she spoke—she smiled, laughed, oozed gratitude at her great fortune in discovering “Reality.”

  But her fervor, well, it was just plain weird. Jeff had only witnessed such drowsy-eyed enthusiasm in church, or at tent revivals on his high school’s football field in Murphy, and for the first few minutes of Alaura’s speech, he suspected that she was acting. That this was all a big joke. Until it became clear that it wasn’t a joke. She pronounced his name with worrisome frequency. She drifted on tangents. And the odd, new age phrases. She was now “aligned with who I really am, Jeff,” an idea he could in no way comprehend. She was “ready to change my life, Jeff, to change our world.” She was finally “embracing interconnectedness and running away from solitude, Jeff.” She believed in “the magic of positive thinking, Jeff.” Reaching out and squeezing his arm, she said: “Look at how we’re interacting now, Jeff. Right now, Jeff, this is the most powerful conversation you and I have ever had.”

  Jeff looked down at her hand, which felt warm and damp on his skin.

  She removed it.

  He focused again on her pompadour, which seemed to defy the laws of physics, and he was unable to look at her beautiful face.

  Had she noticed his new Richard Pryor tee shirt? Did she like it?

  “Jeff?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Does it make you uncomfortable, me talking about Reality?”

  Jeff froze in fear—like that night when he had been unable to defend himself against the cyclists. Other versions of Christianity were one thing—but experiential learning? The Reality Center? All he could think to say was, “So you’re going back there?”

  She pondered, breathed deeply. “There are two more levels of the Experience: Intermediate and Advanced. I’ve signed up for both.”

  Jeff managed a nod. “Do you mind me asking how much they cost?”

  She told him the cost of each session.

  “Oh my . . .” he said, but he captured “God!” in his throat.

  “It’s an investment in me,” she assured him.

  “I guess so.”

  “Don’t worry, Jeff. If you’re not interested, I won’t talk your ear off about it anymore.”

  Jeff nodded, glad for this offer.

  A moment later, Alaura hopped up and sat on the counter, facing the store’s central television. Jeff had been watching Forbidden Planet. She pointed at the television and asked, “So you’re a sci-fi fan, Jeff?”

  “I guess so.”

  She smiled again, and with gentle fingertips, she adjusted the delicate fabric of her dress to drape more evenly over the curve of her hips. “Forbidden Planet is a classic,” she said softly. “Great sets. Great costumes, too.” Her eyebrows raised. “Jeff?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did you throw a brick through my ex-boyfriend’s window?”

  Jeff looked away—

  “If you did, I’m not mad at you,” she said.

  Jeff said nothing. He looked at the television, where a giant, howling cartoon monster was being shot with purple lasers.

  “And if you did,” she said, “it’s the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

  His stomach, pole-vaulting into his throat. Then he remembered, strangely, his quiz in Business Administration tomorrow; he needed to study.

  “I’ve decided not to borrow Waring’s Dodge anymore,” Alaura said. “Could you walk me home? Maybe we could watch a movie at my place. Do you have class tomorrow?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The Reality Center has this silly thing about movies,” she went on. “They say movies cut us off from human contact. I’m pretty sure I don’t agree. But still, if you and I watched a movie together, and we talked about it, that wouldn’t be cutting ourselves off, would it?”

  “I really don’t know, ma’am.”

  She smiled, and Jeff realized that she had been ignoring his repeated “ma’am” slip-ups.

  “Jeff,” she said, “I want you to walk me home.”

  Once she had taken him through the steps of closing Star Video and bequeathed him his own key to the store, they locked up the shop and set off into West Appleton. They walked slowly—it had rained at some point, and volcanic steam rolled off the streets. And to Jeff’s surprise, they did not speak as they walked. At first this worried him because he felt it was his responsibility to fill in the silence. But Alaura seemed content, smiled gently to herself, and he decided it was best not to bother her.

  Eventually she motioned for them to turn right onto Cape Fear Drive. Small, close-set houses lined both sides of the narrow street. No curb—weedy lawns ran directly onto pavement. Like Waring’s shabby neighborhood. She turned onto a driveway, and he thought they had arrived, but then they walked past the house, past a fenced-in yard where two yellow dogs trotted with them happily for a few yards. He realized that he was looking at her constantly, at her profile, at her lips that seemed so soft he would be frightened to kiss them too hard. Should he reach for her now, here in the dark forest, draw her toward him? Is that what she wanted? But she was so much older than him. Ten years, more. He didn’t want to ruin this opportunity by acting too soon.

  Two weeks ago—after overhearing Alaura leave a strained voicemail message for a friend about her boyfriend breaking up with her—Jeff had looked up Pierce’s address in the Star Video computer, Googled directions, and at three a.m., he had thrown a brick through the a-hole’s window. It was maybe the craziest thing Jeff had ever done—and he had virtually wiped it from his memory, until Alaura had brought it up.

  A small baseball field opened in front of them. The field was surrounded on three sides by kudzu-masked trees. Alaura led him onto the field. Strangely, she climbed the pitcher’s mound, set down her large purse on the dirt, kicked off her golden sandals. Her eyes were closed. Her body cavity expanded and deflated several times. He stood beside her, several painful feet away, and listened to the crickets, to the breeze in the branches, to the drizzle from earlier draining onto the forest floor. Looking at her again, he felt his manhood straining against the elastic band of his boxers, where he had been repeatedly tucking it whenever she wasn’t looking.

  But what was she doing, standing on this weedy field? Praying some Reality Center prayer?

  Then he noticed—her gaze had turned downward, and she was staring with a frown at his feet. He was wearing leather sandals with white socks underneath.

  What was wrong with his sandals?

  She left the pitcher’s mound—he was confused—but five minutes later, they entered her apartment, which was just around the corner from the baseball field. She directed him to sit on the couch. She walked into her small kitchen, and he marveled at the movie posters (L’Avventura, Amores Perros, Happiness—all movies he would now have to watch), hundreds of books, the organized clutter, the odd smell that he knew to be incense because his dormitory often reeked of it. This was exactly the sort of bohemian Fortress of Solitude he had imagined.

  From the kitchen, she asked if he wanted something to drink.

  “A beer?” he said.

  She brought him some fancy bottle with a purple label, which was like no beer Jeff had ever tasted. He loved it.

  “What do you want to watch?” she asked.

  “I mean, I have been watching a lot of sci-fi.”

  She grinned the mischievous grin he’d come to love, said: “We could get stoned and watch 2001?”

  But he only realized she was being sarcastic after he’d responded, “I’ve never seen it.”

  She found the movie on an orderly bookshelf holding at least three hundred DVDs. “I’m actually not smoking or drinking these days,” she said matter-of-factly as she started the DVD, “because of the Reality Center. But we can still watch it.”

&nbs
p; Jeff nodded.

  2001: A Space Odyssey’s overture began, and Alaura disappeared into her bedroom. She was gone for a long time, but when she returned, the orchestra was still playing, and no images had yet begun.

  Seeing her, Jeff felt a chill of aroused terror—she now wore tiny cotton shorts and a long tee shirt that, yes, he was sure, had on the front of it a graphic of a young Michael Jackson posing with E.T. He forced a chuckle, and she did a little curtsy for him. And for a moment he thought she might walk over and straddle him, right here, right now—so he prepared a hesitant objection, I’m not sure, are you sure, do you really want to do this, and he even considered confessing his virginity. Would that be the right thing to do? Would it keep her from expecting too much? Or would it scare her off?

  She sat next to him on the couch. She brought her feet up onto the cushion and nestled her head onto his shoulder. He realized how rigidly he was sitting, tried to relax—but found himself unable to free his arm to drape it over her body.

  He wanted to kiss her so badly.

  This is only a little break, laying my head on Jeff’s shoulder. A little break to think about what I really want. She was exhausted, after all, and in this state, could she really trust herself to know what she wanted? In the bedroom, after stepping out of her dress and before slipping on the tee shirt, she had caught a glimpse of herself naked in her huge oval mirror, and she had instinctively sucked in her belly, pushed out her tits, contorted her body into the mirage of her idealized self. But what the hell was she doing? This was wrong, to be ashamed. To fear what Jeff would think of her imperfect body. That was living through her perception of what others might/maybe/probably would think of her cellulitey legs. That wasn’t being true to herself. That wasn’t the new Alaura.

  No, there was no freaking way she could hook up with Jeff. Out on the baseball field, she had felt a slap of doubt—for a moment she had been lost in blissful meditation, a moist warm breeze dashing her face, images of Jeff holding her, his tall frame over her, how they would laugh afterward and become true friends, though definitely not long-term lovers . . . then she had looked down and seen his leather sandals, with the ridiculous white socks beneath, and she had remembered Pierce, who was handsomer than Jeff and sexier and smarter and who had worn the exact same fucking sandals the day he’d broken up with her, and a thought had slipped in: What if Jeff falls in love with me? If I sleep with him, will it end up hurting him later? But I want this. This is what I want. Isn’t it?

  They watched 2001 together. She’d never really understood the movie, though she wouldn’t admit that to anyone, because Kubrick was sacrosanct. As they watched, she muttered a few things to Jeff, a few trivia tidbits she’d picked up from Waring over the years, that the planets and moon aligned above the black monolith are apparently nowhere close to realistic proportions, and that Planet of the Apes, not 2001, had won a special Academy Award for makeup design that year, which was totally absurd, and that Arthur C. Clarke himself had theorized that the Academy must have thought Kubrick had employed actual simians instead of actors. Jeff listened and asked her questions, and she answered as best she could. He was a sponge for movie trivia, just like she had been long ago.

  She made it through the “Dawn of Man” sequence, when the story jumps ahead to the distant future of the year 2001 and Tchaikovsky plays lightly while spaceships spin around like Barney Wheat’s carousels, and she felt her eyelids getting heavy.

  She slipped easily into sleep, her head still pressed to Jeff’s shoulder.

  He decided to watch every second of 2001 and to get drunk on Alaura’s delicious beer—he dislodged himself from beneath her, covered her in a red-orange chenille blanket, and, having totally forgotten his important quiz the next day, he resumed watching the movie from the floor. As the film progressed, he found himself increasingly angry and horrified—angry because 2001 did not seem to play by any rules, horrified because he realized he would never again experience this amazing movie for the first time. By the end, after Hal 9000 had been deactivated and Dave-the-unemotional-astronaut had jettisoned into the trippy wormhole, and after some space-baby thing had floated toward Earth, Jeff realized that he had no idea if he should stay the night with Alaura. Had she invited him to stay? If so, why had she fallen asleep? If not, was it because of the sandals he had worn, which she had stared at with such puzzlement on the baseball field? So many questions. And this Reality Center stuff was crazy. Really crazy. Finally he remembered his quiz. It was three thirty a.m., and he still needed to study. But he was drunk. Looking at Alaura, at her angelic face knitted with sleep, he didn’t want to leave—he didn’t want to leave. Those soft lips bunched together. The heavy smell of her. Her warm body under the blanket—

  But if she found him next to her in the morning, she might think he was a creep.

  So he turned off the television, adjusted the blanket over her shoulders, and with terrified softness kissed her on the forehead.

  Ten minutes later, walking toward his dorm, he realized that he’d probably just missed out on one of the greatest opportunities of his life.

  IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN

  It was a Monday morning in early October when Waring finally comprehended the titanic forces working against him. He was drinking his red eye, reading a copy of the Appleton Herald that he’d found lying in the middle of his street, and ignoring an elderly customer who had been waiting outside for twenty minutes for Star Video to open. This in itself was not peculiar. What was peculiar was the article on C2, in the Local section, and the large advertisement on the adjacent page.

  The article—“Vote on Green Plaza Tonight”—was typical, in Waring’s view, of the trendy environmental mumbo-jumbo gushing from Ehle County in recent years. As one of the few liberal havens in an otherwise conservative state, Appleton/West Appleton had made a habit of trumpeting every miniscule improvement to environmental standards, and the article detailed a new environmentally friendly business plaza and arts complex that had been proposed in West Appleton. Green Plaza/ArtsCenter would be comprised of three buildings, the tallest of which would be six stories—four stories taller than the largest building currently located downtown. The bottom floors of the complex would be reserved for retail business, the top floors for apartments and offices and convention space.

  “Ridiculous,” Waring muttered to himself. The article boasted that Green Plaza/ArtsCenter would be built to some protocol from Japan and meet a triple bottom-line (sic) of environmental sensitivity, social equity, and economic viability.

  The elderly man knocked again on the front door, made a muffled cry.

  Waring studied the graphic. Green Plaza/ArtsCenter looked like a Frank Gehry abortion. Stacks, tiers, irregular angles, rumples, like a piece of paper that had been wadded up and flattened out and then folded into an origami pineapple. And there was a theme of V shapes that Waring could not understand—

  Then Waring saw it. On the left side of the graphic was a small building that resembled Mexica Orienta, the Mexican-Chinese restaurant just across the street from Star Video. On the right side was Satane Motors and the train tracks. Which placed Green Plaza/ArtsCenter directly . . .

  “What the fuck!” he yelled.

  Carrying his newspaper, Waring stormed to the front door. The elderly man who had been knocking wore a pained expression, as if standing for so long had caused him significant physical distress.

  “You were supposed to open a half hour ago,” the man grumbled when Waring opened the door.

  “Sorry,” Waring said. “Soundproof glass. Listen, do you know this place?”

  Waring held up the newspaper and pointed to a short paragraph at the end of the article, which read: “Board of Aldermen. West Appleton Town Council Room, Community Center. September 27, 7 p.m.”

  “The Community Center?” the old man said. “It’s right up the road. Do you know where the West Appleton polling station is?”

  “No,” Waring said impatiently.

  “I
think you can see it from here.”

  “Where is it, gramps?”

  “Across from Weaver Street Market? The building labeled ‘Community Center’?”

  “That big red building?” Waring said.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Right.”

  And Waring locked the door in the old man’s face.

  Waring had needed a week to organize his finances and a few days after that to digest the bad news. He had forgotten the names of various investments, had lost documents with account numbers. And over the years—without committing it to memory—he had apparently fired several of the people who had managed his investments. So, with nothing more than his name, his Social Security number, and a sense of annoyed determination, Waring had reconstructed the frame of his financial life.

  The result, organized as neatly as possible in one of his old red ledgers, was not pretty:

  1.Star Video’s earnings were down 10 percent in the last year.

  2.The shop was losing money every week and had been for some time.

  3.His business checking account was nearly empty, hovering at a ridiculously low three thousand dollars, which would barely cover next period’s payroll.

  4.One of his business credit lines was maxed out, and another was close. If something wasn’t done soon, the second credit line would not cover his upcoming payment to Guiding Glow, let alone all of the back payments to those Christian psychos.

  5.Total debt, both to Guiding Glow and to the credit card companies, was close to twenty thousand dollars, which was more or less the total of Waring’s remaining soft investments: an old retirement fund, a mutual fund, four thousand dollars in gold he’d inherited from his mother, a forgotten money market account, and a few ancient stocks that had remained level since the mid-1990s, despite the market’s recent performance.

  All of which left him with little choice.

  That afternoon, he placed a call he had been avoiding—to sell off his remaining investments and to pay down his debt.