Everything There Was

by Hanna Bervoets

  Natalie shook her head, put the lid on the box. And looked at me for the first time.

  “You all think so too, don’t you?” she said. “You think I’m a bad mother.”

  “No,” I said. “Not at all. No, I think you’re doing it exactly right.”

  I felt that I should keep talking. Not saying anything more would undermine what I had said so far. So I said, “You have to eat to be a mother. If you don’t eat, both of you are worse off.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m happy you say that.” Natalie sighed. “I really mean that.”

  To pull herself up off the mat she grabbed the corner of a table.

  “I’ve got such a headache,” she said as she was getting up. “You guys also don’t have any aspirin left, right?” I shook my head, thought: Natalie thinks I’m part of a “you guys.”

  * * *

  “Ta-dah!”

  We hadn’t heard them coming and now they were standing next to each other in the doorway. Kaspar holding two plastic bags; Leo holding a bundle of red candles like they a bouquet. Both of them were grinning. They way they stood there, smiling, wearing just the shirts they slept in, looking like they knew something we didn’t, it suddenly struck me how much they’d started to resemble each other. Both with sunken cheeks, both with dark beards that are hard to trim with scissors made to cut crêpe or origami paper.

  While Kaspar was emptying one bag on the table, I wondered how the morning had gone.

  Had Kaspar asked Leo along? Or had Leo offered his help himself? In any case, Leo had deviated from the routine for something Kaspar wanted. Maybe Kaspar had seen that as a welcome show of surrender. But I was also reminded of something Leo once said when I asked him why he always stayed so nice to everyone everywhere: “There’s power in humility, right?” Winking like the phrase was some well-worn quote. Although I never found out whose it was. Anyway, whether he’d thought of it himself or not, the phrase is wrong. There’s no power in humility. Humility only makes the powerful more powerful.

  Kaspar’s plastic bag was now empty: On the table were a bag of tea lights, two pens, a doll, and something that looked like a keychain but could also be a lighter.

  “Bunch of boy scouts,” Natalie said. She winked at me.

  Kaspar picked up the doll; a sort of clown I imagined would scare toddlers when it stared down at them from their little dressers at night. He pressed its belly, “Could someone turn off the lights for a sec?”

  A green orb floated through the classroom. The belly of the clown lit up, apparently.

  “Hmm,” said Kaspar, “still, a little disappointing.”

  “But look at this one!” That was Leo. He held the lighter or keychain next to his face. It had a light that illuminated his chin, “This we can use.”

  In the meantime I heard Kaspar softly chuckle. Full of anticipation, like a child who’s secretly changed the password on his father’s phone. Now I could also see why he was laughing: There was a red dot dancing across Natalie’s stomach. The pens from the bag, I thought. Laser pens.

  Now Leo began to laugh as well, the same way Kaspar did. My stomach also had a red dot now: It shot up my chest to my chin via my throat and back down again.

  “Cut it out, guys!” Natalie said. It didn’t sound like she meant it. I thought about women shouting that they don’t want to be pushed into the pool only to go and stand right at the edge.

  Kaspar kept circling the laser light: Across Natalie’s stomach, across her face. I looked down at my own body. The red dot that had traveled across my chest had already vanished.

  Leo was now rustling through the second bag; I heard him take something out. Something heavy that briefly bumped against the table. Something buzzed, something clicked, a plastic cap knocked against something: the sound of technology.

  And there was Natalie. In the bright light of something that seemed like a flashlight, but proved to be a camera. Lotteke’s camera.

  Lotteke had brought a digital Canon XL H1S. A relatively cheap, lightweight camera with a wide audio range, so you didn’t need a sound guy. The downside was the lens, which was very sensitive to light, quickly rendering shots under- or overexposed. That’s why Lotteke had bought a light to go with it: a sort of flash that was powered by the camera’s battery.

  After the bang I hadn’t thought about the thing for a second.

  “Was lying on a cabinet in the teachers’ lounge,” said Kaspar. “I already looked it over last week. Because of the battery. But I couldn’t do anything with it back then.”

  “What are you guys doing here in the dark?”

  Barry switched on the lights. Beside him was Yuri, a book pressed against his belly.

  “What’ve you got there?” Natalie asked.

  “I’m not telling!” Yuri yelled. He’d sunk his teeth into his anger and didn’t look like he was planning to let go.

  Barry pointed at the camera, “Jesus! Was that still here?” He took it over from Leo and started pressing buttons. I watched what he was doing over his shoulder. The screen lit up, Barry pressed play. “Jesus,” he said again. “Everything’s still on here!”

  * * *

  We didn’t need to watch it. From a rational point of view it would probably even be better if we didn’t watch it. With every minute of footage we lost one minute of light. Light that might later be more valuable than the images were now. But we wanted to see it. And, lacking rational arguments, we said things like: ”About time we got to do something different.” And: “Just to distract us for a bit.”

  There was one thing we didn’t say.

  I hope the bang is on there.

  I think we were all thinking that. But voicing a hope makes you vulnerable. Should it prove to be in vain, then that would mean defeat. I don’t think we felt like sharing our defeat with each other. And that’s why we remained silent about our true motives for watching.

  We placed the camera on the big desk in Natalie’s classroom and sat around it in a half circle. On child-sized chairs. It wasn’t comfortable, but this way we were all sitting low enough to see the camera’s little video screen. Again Barry pressed play.

  We saw a baby.

  The child was in a cradle, grabbing at the plastic clouds of a mobile. The clouds turned, the baby grabbed, the camera zoomed in on her eyes, the little pupils shooting back and forth frenetically. This must be the daughter of Lotteke’s next-door neighbors; we’d wanted to put this footage under the story of a genetics professor.

  Our editor-in-chief wanted as few talking heads as possible, and we were also “maxing out” on MRI images. He said, “If people see the same red brain sections light up every week, people will stop buying it after a while.” What people would stop buying I never asked. But I felt that our editor-in-chief was right: See the same thing often enough, you automatically start doubting it. Another problem with this episode was that the genetics professor was not a very pleasant speaker. He used too much jargon, stopped in the middle of sentences to start explaining something differently, and kept forgetting to integrate our question in his answer. We didn’t know whether the baby could compensate for his difficult story, and, according to Barry, it’d be a hell of an editing job at any rate.

  A hell of an editing job. Maxing out on MRI images. A genetics professor who spoke unpleasantly.

  It all seems so far away. Not only in terms of time, but especially in terms of place. My work now seems part of a whole different world. A world so different and remote that I’m starting to understand it less and less. And this afternoon, looking at the baby trying to grab the plastic celestial bodies on her mobile and starting to look ever more desperate as she kept missing because the stars and clouds and crescent moons were much too high up and spinning too, I thought: Maybe it doesn’t matter that I no longer get this. And briefly I wasn’t even sure I ever did.

  After the baby, the image went black for a moment. Silently we waited. Then Leo’s head appeared: The
listening footage that’d been shot in my classroom.

  “Let’s just fast-forward through this,” said Leo.

  We all agreed; even Kalim nodded along. Barry was already walking to the camera, but Kaspar said, “No.”

  “Why not?” asked Natalie.

  “It costs a lot of energy.”

  “I think letting it run costs just as much energy,” Leo said.

  “Is that true?” Kaspar asked Barry. Barry shrugged, “No idea really.”

  “You guys don’t even know?” Kaspar gestured. “It’s your camera.” And he laughed the laugh he often laughs when he wants to indicate that something doesn’t make him laugh.

  “Fine,” said Leo, “then let’s let it run.”

  We looked at Leo on the little screen. How he nodded, smiled, listened to something. Sometimes he said “hmm” or “ah,” or asked a brief question: “When did you discover you were good at math?” He sounded different from the way he normally sounds. He spoke slower, lower. This wasn’t Leo’s voice. It was the voice of Leo, the presenter. As calming as it is hypnotic. Maybe that’s what makes him so good: his ability to enthrall people with that voice.

  “Who are you talking to on there?” asked Yuri. He was sitting on the floor, his back against Leo’s legs.

  “No one,” Leo answered. “We shot part to paste it in our interview later, so that we could really focus on you during the real conversation.”

  Kaspar let out another laugh. “Ah,” he said. “So what we’re looking at here is some prime faking.”

  I saw Leo clamp his molars together, tightening his jaw. Only to immediately raise his eyebrows, smiling.

  “Yes,” Leo said, “I guess we are.”

  I wondered how much effort this had taken him. To ignore the routine. To look for candles. To summon up enthusiasm for a glowing doll. To smile about lasers lighting up stomachs.

  The Leo on the Canon screen raised his eyebrows one more time. Just like the Leo in the classroom had just done.

  And the screen went black again.

  “Is it over now?” asked Yuri.

  I nodded.

  I thought: It’s not on there. Of course it’s not on there. Lotteke wasn’t filming, we must have been drinking coffee; yes, during the bang Lotteke was fumbling with packets of sweetener she’d brought from home.

  “No, wait,” said Barry, “it’s not!”

  It was on there.

  Five takes, six minutes and four seconds. Not a lot happened in them. But the longer I think about it, the more I reckon I’ve seen.

  What I really wanted was to immediately watch the footage again. But the moment we finally turned off the camera the mood had turned. Natalie’s eyes were swollen, Kaspar’s face drawn. He rubbed the back of his head, fidgeted with his beard, said, “I’ll just go for a bit,” and left the classroom. Leaving behind the candles, lamps, and lights he had collected.

  I also quickly went to my classroom. In Melissa’s diary I described the final camera images as exactly as possible. In order not to forget them. To carry them with me when the battery runs out.

  Take 1

  Kaspar walks down the hallway. You only see his back. At the end of the hall Kaspar turns around. He walks back. For a moment he looks questioningly at someone (Lotteke?) behind the camera. He listens. Then he turns around again and walks towards the end of the hallway. This time without his hands in his pockets.

  Take 2

  Yuri walks down the hallway. You only see his back. At the end of the hall Yuri turns around, shouts something and runs back. On the way he trips. He falls on his hands. He gets back up immediately. He laughs.

  Take 3

  Yuri and Natalie walk down the hallway together. You only see their backs. Midway through, Natalie takes Yuri’s hand. Yuri pulls away. Natalie and Yuri now both turn around. They look questioningly in the direction of the camera.

  Take 4

  Yuri and Natalie walk down the hallway hand in hand. You only see their backs. At the end of the hall they both turn around and walk back together.

  Take 5

  Kaspar and Yuri walk down the hallway side by side. You only see their backs. Midway through, they both fall to the floor. Less than a second later, the camera also falls. You see the floor of the hallway. In the distance are Yuri and Kaspar. They are not getting up. On their elbows, they make their way towards something that is probably a table. Kaspar crawls underneath the table, out of frame. Yuri follows. Then you can only see his legs sticking out from under the table.

  The camera starts to tremble, the image shakes, a few gray lines running trough it. Yuri’s legs don’t seem to move. The camera stops trembling. Yuri still doesn’t move. He and Kaspar both apparently remain under the table. Briefly it looks as though the image is paused. But the time code at the top is still running. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. Four minutes and nothing happens. Then you see two legs, heels, feet: Someone running down the hallway. It’s Natalie. She crouches at the table, pulls Yuri out from underneath, and presses him against her. The camera is picked up. We see Lotteke’s sweater. The camera shuts off.

  I read it through a few times. Perhaps I hoped that would make it start to mean more.

  And it did.

  The more times I saw Natalie, Yuri, and Kaspar walking through the hallway, the better I understood why Natalie had said: “You guys also don’t have any aspirin left, right?” and Kaspar had yelled: “Don’t you guys understand your own camera?”

  Of course I’d long sensed there is an “us” and a “them.” We all sense that. But perhaps I haven’t correctly gauged what caused that.

  It’s not because Leo, Barry, and I worked for the TV company and Kaspar and Natalie didn’t. And also not because Barry, Leo, and I already knew each other before we were locked up here together for all this time. No, there’s something else that binds and divides us.

  There are victims: them.

  And there are perpetrators: us.

  Yes, whichever way you look at it: They’re here because of us. We’re the reason Natalie and Yuri aren’t with Erik. That Kaspar isn’t at home now, with his own DVD collection, phone charger, and supply closet full of granola bars that he doesn’t have to share with anybody else.

  We convinced them to come to a stale school building on their free Sunday.

  We expected them to talk to us for hours without accidentally staring into the camera.

  We forced them to walk up and down an empty hallway to shoot some B-roll.

  And the only thing they would receive in return was attention. Our attention and, eventually, the attention of three hundred thousand same-day viewers and another twenty thousand time-shifted viewers. But because of the bang Kaspar, Natalie, and Yuri didn’t get that attention. Probably they still feel they’re owed something. Maybe Leo agrees. Maybe that’s why he’s so painstakingly trying to dissolve this “them.”

  And maybe that’s why he did what he did during dinner tonight. Although I would’ve preferred he hadn’t.

  * * *

  Yuri didn’t want to sit next to his mother. He climbed onto a chair at the other end of the table. “Fine,” said Natalie. She picked up her mug, got up, and sat down next to him after all. With knife and fork she cut up his pasta: three tubes of penne becoming six and then twelve.

  “Stop it!” Yuri yelled. “You think I’m stupid? I can see that doesn’t make it more.” Yuri scooped up some pieces of pasta on his fork, “It’s just one bite! One bite!”

  I looked at Natalie, who was now staring at Yuri’s mug, defeated.

  “I’m still hungry!” Yuri yelled. Natalie looked at her own mug. I thought about our conversation this morning. Saw her hesitate as she speared a piece of pasta onto her fork. And in the end stuck it into her own mouth.

  Yuri’s fork clattered to the floor.

  “I’m not eating this. This is too gross and too little!”

  Natalie picked up the fork and put it on the table without looking at Yuri.

&
nbsp; And then it happened.

  Sometimes you see someone do something you immediately know is not a good idea. A toddler throwing a dog’s squeaky toy onto the highway. A wobbling girl who nods when a strange man offers her a sixth Bacardi and Coke. A man who feeds a hungry child after its mother has decided not to. But knowing it’s not a good idea doesn’t mean you can intervene.

  “Here,” said Leo. “ Take mine.” He pushed his mug over to Yuri. There were still two penne left. They were stuck together.

  Briefly Yuri looked surprised. Then he quickly started to eat; as if he was scared that someone would still take his extra penne away from him.

  I looked at Natalie. The way she looked at her chewing son. Squeezed her fork. Looked at Leo. And then, suddenly, at me.

  “Nice…” She didn’t just say my name. She spit it out as if it had gone bad. “Nice, Merel.”

  Then she got up and lifted Yuri off his chair. Willingly he put his arms around her neck: finished eating. Or in any case finished fighting.

  We heard the door of Natalie’s classroom slam shut, the bang echoed through the hallway.

  “Jesus,” Barry sighed, “what’s up with her?”

  I said, “Probably just a little tired,” but I remembered what happened this morning. One way or another Natalie’s anger was connected to our conversation. Did she think that I could have prevented Leo from doing what he did? Or that I had thought of it myself? The first would merely make me lax, but the second would make me a traitor.

  * * *

  “But still I think it’s an overblown reaction,” Barry said when we were lying on my mat. He turned onto his stomach to look at me.