Two Truths and a Lie

by Sarah Pinsker

  “We’ve been working on digitizing, but we have fifty years of material in here, and some stuff has priority.”

  “Is that what you do? Digitize?”

  “Nah. We have interns for that. I catalogue new material as it comes in, and find stuff for people when they need clips. Mostly staff, but sometimes for networks, local news, researchers, that kind of thing.”

  “Sounds fun,” Stella said. “How did you get into the field?”

  “I majored in history, but never committed enough to any one topic for academic research. Ended up at library school, and eventually moved here. It is fun! I get a little bit of everything. Like today: a mystery show.”

  “Total mystery.”

  She followed him down the main aisle, then several aisles over, almost to the back wall. He pointed at some boxes above her head.

  “Wow,” she said. “Do you know where everything is without looking it up?”

  “Well, it’s alphabetical, so yeah, but also they’re next to Underground, which I get a lot of requests for. Do you know what year you need?”

  “1982? My mother couldn’t remember exactly, but that’s the year I turned seven.”

  Jeff disappeared and returned pushing a squeaking ladder along its track. He climbed up for the “Uncle Bob Show 1982” box. It looked like there were five years’ worth, 1980 to 1985. She followed him back toward the door, where he pointed her to an office chair.

  “We have strict protocols for handling media that hasn’t been backed up yet. If you tell me which tapes you want to watch, I’ll queue them up for you.”

  “Hmm. Well, my birthday is in July, so let’s pick one in the last quarter of the year first, to see if I’m in there.” “You don’t know if you are?”

  She didn’t want to admit she didn’t remember. “I just don’t know when.”

  He handed her a pair of padded headphones and rummaged in the box. She’d been expecting VHS tapes, but these looked like something else—Betamax, she guessed.

  The show’s format was such that she didn’t have to watch much to figure out if she was in it or not. The title card came on, then the episode’s children rushed in. She didn’t see herself. She wondered again if this was a joke on her mother’s part.

  “Wait—what was the date on this one?”

  Jeff studied the label on the box. “October ninth.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s my mother’s birthday. There’s no way she stood around in a television studio that day. Maybe the next week?”

  He ejected the tape and put it back in its box and put in another, but that one obviously had some kind of damage, all static.

  “Third time’s the charm,” he said, going for the next tape. He seemed to believe it himself, because he dragged another chair over and plugged in a second pair of headphones. “Do you mind?”

  She shook her head and rolled her chair slightly to the right to give him a better angle. The title card appeared.

  “It’s a good thing nobody knows about this show or they’d have been sued over this theme song,” he said.

  Stella didn’t answer. She was busy watching the children. She recognized the first few kids: Lee Pool first, a blond beanpole; poor Dan Heller; Addie Chapel, whose mother had been everyone’s pediatrician.

  And then there she was, little Stella Gardiner, one of the last through the door. She wasn’t used to competing for toys, so maybe she didn’t know she needed to get in early, or maybe they were assigned an order behind the scenes. She’d thought seeing herself on screen would jog her memory, give her the studio or the stories or the backstage snacks, but she still had no recollection. She pointed at herself on the monitor for Jeff’s benefit, to show they’d found her. He gave her a thumbs-up.

  Little Stella seemed to know where she was going, even if she wasn’t first to get there. Lee Pool already had the T. rex, but she wouldn’t have cared. She’d liked the big dinosaurs, the bigger the better. She emerged from the toy pit with a matched pair. Brontosaurus, apatosaurus, whatever they called them these days. She could never wrap her head around something that large having existed. So yeah, the dinosaurs made sense—it was her, even if she still didn’t remember it.

  She carried the two dinosaurs toward the set’s edge, where she collected some wooden trees and sat down. She was an only child, used to playing alone, and this clearly wasn’t her first time in this space.

  The camera lost her. The focus, of course, was on Uncle Bob. She had been watching herself and missed his entrance. He sat in his chair, children playing around him. Dan Heller zoomed around the set like a satellite in orbit, a model airplane in hand.

  “Once upon a time there was a little boy who wanted to go fast.” Uncle Bob started a story without waiting for anyone to pay attention.

  “He liked everything fast. Cars, motorcycles, boats, airplanes. Bicycles were okay, but not the same thrill. When he rode in his father’s car, he pretended they were racing the cars beside them. Sometimes they won, but mostly somebody quit the race. His father was not a fast driver. The little boy knew that if he drove, he’d win all the races. He wouldn’t stop when he won, either. He’d keep going.

  “He liked the sound of motors. He liked the way they rumbled deep enough to rattle his teeth in his head, and his bones beneath his skin; he liked the way they shut all the thinking out. He liked the smell of gasoline and the way it burned his nostrils. His family’s neighbors had motorcycles they rode on weekends, and if he played in the front yard they’d sometimes let him sit on one with them before they roared away, leaving too much quiet behind. When they drove off, he tried to recreate the sound, making as much noise as possible until his father told him to be quiet, then to shut up, then ‘For goodness sake, what does a man have to do to get some peace and quiet around here on a Saturday morning?’” Dan paused his orbit and turned to face the storyteller. Two other kids had stopped to pay attention as well; Stella and the others continued playing on the periphery.

  “The boy got his learner’s permit on the very first day he was allowed. He skipped school for it rather than wait another second. He had saved his paper route money for driving lessons and a used motorbike. As soon as he had his full license, he did what he had always wanted to do: He drove as fast as he could down the highway, past all the cars, and then he kept driving forever. The end.”

  Uncle Bob shifted back in his chair as he finished. Dan watched him for a little longer, then launched himself again, circling the scattered toys and children faster than before.

  Jeff sat back as well. “What kind of story was that?”

  Stella frowned. “A deeply messed up one. That kid with the airplane—Dan Heller— drove off the interstate the summer after junior year. He was racing someone in the middle of the night and missed a curve.”

  “Oof. Quite the coincidence.”

  “Yeah…”

  Uncle Bob started telling another story, this one about a vole living in a hole on a grassy hillside that started a conversation with the child sleeping in the hole next door.

  “Do you want to watch the whole episode? Is this the one you need?”

  “I think I need to look at a couple more?” She didn’t know what she was looking for. “Sorry for putting you out. I don’t mean to take up so much time.”

  “It’s fine! This is interesting. The show is terrible, from any standpoint. The story was terrible, the production is terrible. I can’t even decide if this whole shtick is campy bad or bad bad. Leaning toward the latter.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything redeeming,” Stella said, her mind still on Dan Heller. Did his parents remember this story? “Can we look at the next one? October 30th?"

  “Coming up.” Jeff appeared to have forgotten she’d said she was looking for something specific, and she didn’t remind him, since she still couldn’t think of an appropriate detail.

  Little Stella was second through the door this time, behind Tina, whose last name she didn’t remember. She paused and looked out pas
t a camera, probably looking for her mother, then kept moving when she realized more kids were coming through behind her. Head for the toys. Claim what’s yours. Brontosaurus and T. rex and a blue whale. Whales were almost as cool as dinosaurs.

  Tina had claimed a triceratops and looked like she wanted the brontosaurus. They sat down on the edge of the toy pit to negotiate. Uncle Bob watched them play, which gave Stella the eeriest feeling of being watched, even though she still felt like the kid on the screen wasn’t her.

  “So what was it like?” Jeff asked, but Stella didn’t answer. Uncle Bob had started a story. He looked straight into the camera. This time it felt like he was truly looking straight at her. This was the one. She knew it.

  “Once upon a time, there was a little girl who didn’t know who she was. Many children don’t know who they will be, and that’s not unusual, but what was unusual in this case was that the girl was willing to trade who she was for who she could be, so she began to do just that. Little by little, she replaced herself with parts of other people she liked better. Parts of stories she wanted to live. Nobody lied like this girl. She believed her own stories so completely, she forgot which ones were true and which were false.

  “If you’ve ever heard of a cuckoo bird, they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, so those birds are forced to raise them for their own. This girl was her own cuckoo, laying stories in her own head, and the heads of those around her, until even she couldn’t remember which ones were true, or if there was anything left of her.”

  Uncle Bob went silent, watching the children play. After a minute, he started telling another story about the boy in the hill, and how happy he was whenever he had friends over to visit. That story ended, and a graphic appeared on the screen with an address for fan mail. Stella pulled a pen from her purse and wrote it down as the theme music played out.

  “Are you sending him a letter?” The archivist had dropped his headphones and was watching her.

  She shrugged. “Just curious.”

  “Is this the one, then?” “The one?”

  He frowned. “You said you wanted a copy for your mother.”

  “Yes! That would be lovely. This is the one she mentioned.”

  He pulled a DVD off a bulk spindle and rewound the tape. “You didn’t say what it was like. Was he weird off camera too?”

  “Yes,” she said, though she didn’t remember. “But he kept to himself. Just stayed in his dressing room until it was time to go on.”

  Jeff didn’t reply, and something subtle changed about the way he interacted with her. What if there hadn’t been a dressing room? He might know. When had she gotten so sloppy with her stories? Maybe it was because she was distracted. Her mother had told the truth: She’d been on a creepy TV show of which she had no memory. And what was it? Performance art? Storytelling? Fairy tales or horror? All of the above? She thanked Jeff and left.

  * * *

  She had just walked into her parents’ house when Marco called. “Can you come back? There’s something I need to show you.”

  She headed out to Denny’s house. She paused on the step, realizing she was in nicer clothes this time. Hopefully she wouldn’t be there long.

  “Hey,” she said when Marco answered the door. Even though she braced for the odor, it hit her hard.

  He waved her in, talking as he navigated the narrow path he’d cleared up the stairs. “I thought I’d work on Denny’s bedroom today, and, well…”

  He held out an arm in the universal gesture of “go ahead,” so she entered. The room had precarious ceiling-high stacks on every surface, including the floor and bed, piles everywhere except a path to an open walk-in closet. She stepped forward.

  “What is that?”

  “The word I came up with was ‘shrine,’ but I don’t think that’s right.”

  It was the sparest space in the house. She’d expected a dowel crammed end to end with clothes, straining under the weight, but the closet was empty except for—“shrine” was indeed the wrong word. This wasn’t worship.

  The most eye-catching piece, the thing she saw first, was a hand-painted Uncle Bob doll propped in the back corner. It looked like it had been someone else first—Vincent Price, maybe. Next to it stood a bobblehead and an action figure, both mutated from other characters, and one made of clay and plant matter, seemingly from scratch. Beside those, a black leather notebook, a pile of VHS tapes, and a single DVD. Tacked to the wall behind them, portraits of Uncle Bob in paint, in colored pencil, macaroni, photo collage, in, oh god, was that cat hair? And beside those, stills from the show printed on copier paper: Uncle Bob telling a story; Uncle Bob staring straight into the camera, an assortment of children. Her own still was toward the bottom right. Marco wasn’t in any of them.

  “That’s the thing that guts me.”

  Stella turned, expecting to see Marco pointing to the art or the dolls, but she’d been too busy looking at those to notice the filthy pillow and blanket in the opposite corner. “He slept here?”

  “It’s the only place he could have.” Marco’s voice was strangled, like he was trying not to cry.

  She didn’t know what to say to make him feel better about his brother having lived liked this. She picked up the notebook and paged through it. Each page had a name block-printed on top, then a dense scrawl in black, then, in a different pen, something else. Not impossible to read, but difficult, writing crammed into every available inch, no space between words even. She remembered this notebook; it was the one teenage Denny always had on him.

  “Take it,” Marco said. “Take whatever you want. I can’t do this anymore. I’m going home.”

  She took the notebook and the DVD, and squeezed Marco’s arm, unsure whether he would want or accept a hug.

  Her parents were out when she got back to their house, so she slipped the DVD into their machine. It didn’t work. She took it upstairs and tried it in her mother’s old desktop computer instead. The computer made a sound like a jet plane taking off, and opened a menu with one episode listed: March 13, 1980.

  It started the same way all the other episodes had started. The kids, Uncle Bob. Denny was in this one; Stella had an easier time spotting him now that she knew who to look for. He went for the train set again, laying out wooden tracks alongside a kid Stella didn’t recognize.

  Uncle Bob started a story. “Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew very big very quickly. He felt like a giant when he stood next to his classmates. People stopped him in hallways and told him he was going to the wrong grade’s room. His mother complained that she had to buy him new clothes constantly, and even though she did it with affection, he was too young to realize she didn’t blame him. He felt terrible about it. Tried to hide that his shoes squeezed his toes or his pants were too short again.

  “His parents’ friends said, ‘Somebody’s going to be quite an athlete,’ but he didn’t feel like an athlete. More than that, he felt like he had grown so fast his head had been pushed out of his body, so he was constantly watching it from someplace just above. Messages he sent to his arms and legs took ages to get there. Everything felt small and breakable in his hands, so that when his best friend’s dog had puppies he refused to hold them, though he loved when they climbed all over him.

  “The boy had a little brother. His brother was everything he wasn’t. Small, lithe, fearless. His mother told him to protect his brother, and he took that responsibility seriously. That was something that didn’t take finesse. He could do that.

  “Both boys got older, but their roles didn’t change. The older brother watched his younger brother. When the smaller boy was bullied, his brother pummeled the bullies. When the younger brother made the high school varsity basketball team as a point guard his freshman year, his older brother made the team as center, even though he hated sports.

  “Time passed. The older brother realized something strange. Every time he thought he had something of his own, it turned out it was his brother’s. He blinked one day and lost two entire y
ears. How was he the older brother, the one who got new clothes, who reached new grades first, and yet still always following? Even his own story had spun out to describe him in relation to his sibling.

  “And then, one day, the boy realized he had nothing at all. He was his brother’s giant shadow. He was a forward echo, a void. Nothing was his. All he could do was watch the world try to catch up with him, but he was always looking backward at it. All he could do—”

  “No,” said Denny.

  Stella had forgotten the kids were there, even though they were on camera the entire time. Denny had stood and walked over to where Uncle Bob was telling the story. With Uncle Bob sitting, Denny was tall enough to look him in the eye.

  For the first time, Uncle Bob turned away from the camera. He assessed Denny with an unsettling smile.

  “No,” Denny said again.

  Now Uncle Bob glanced around as if he was no longer amused, as if someone needed to pull this child off his set. It wasn’t a tantrum, though. Denny wasn’t misbehaving, unless interrupting a story violated the rules.

  Uncle Bob turned back to him. “How would you tell it?”

  Denny looked less sure now.

  “I didn’t think so,” said the host. “But maybe that’s enough of that story. Unless you want to tell me how you think it ends?” Denny shook his head.

  “But you know?”

  Denny didn’t move.

  “Maybe that’s enough. We’ll see. In any case, I have other stories to tell. We haven’t checked in on my hill today.”

  Uncle Bob began to catch his audience up on the continuing adventure of the boy who’d been dug out of the hillside. The other children kept playing, and Denny? Denny looked straight into the camera, then walked off the set. He never came back. Stella didn’t have any proof, but she was pretty sure this must have been the last episode Denny took part in. He looked like a kid who was done. His expression was remarkably similar to the one she’d just seen on Marco’s face.