First Tape
by Trevor Almy
Part 1 appears
in this issue.
conclusion
He remembered having trouble distinguishing what he actually remembered from what he remembered only because of the recordings. It didn’t take long for the two to get mixed in his mind. He’d remember an event happening one way only to watch the tape and see it being different.
At first, this happened on anniversaries of events when The Mother had instituted Viewing Parties. The events were not necessarily significant ones, either. They observed the usual ones of course — birthdays and holidays — but then extended those anniversaries to vacations, to when he first learned to tie his shoe, to when he lost his third tooth, to when he was chased by a dog. He learned the fluidity of memory when he recalled the dog as being a pitbull and then it turned out to be a hound.
Or he remembered his bike as being blue but, in the video, it was red. With the bike, it had happened on the fifth anniversary. He remembered not only the original experience as the bike being blue but also every other viewing. Or had it been the opposite? Had he only remembered the original experience as being with a blue bike and in actuality the other viewings were of a red bike and he had forgotten? How was he to know? He would have gone to the garage and checked but, by that time, he had outgrown the bike, and it had been given to Goodwill.
Eventually, the false memories started happening earlier and earlier, and that was when the panic set in. He opened a cereal box and the toy was a dreidel, but by nighttime he watched a recording of him opening a Yo-Yo. Or there was the time that he ate pancakes for breakfast, but the viewing showed him eating oatmeal. Or, the most terrifying, was when his friend Ken had come over and they had built pillow forts on a rainy day but, by that night, the camera had changed that to footage of him with Tim building Legos. What was this camera but a hijacker of his childhood memories? That night he had said to The Mother, “This is wrong.” And she had said, for the first of many times, “The camera does not lie.”
* * *
He worked his way up to management in six years’ time. Somehow, the pacing of those six years seemed fast; without the camera to monitor him, it seemed instead to travel with the rapidity of those viewing sessions. Under his leadership, the store resisted change and continued on with the dummy camera through all the years.
Eventually, six more years reeled on, and kids were snapping pictures with their phones. Once, when there was an uptick in shrinkage likely owing to employee theft, a regional manager had suggested that Bernie get some actual surveillance cameras installed. But when the security salesman came and walked the floor, Bernie had not really been listening, not taking into account the value and peace of mind that cameras would provide, because he already knew what his answer would be, had to be: No. Peace of mind was not what he associated with cameras.
* * *
He ate the hashbrowns by dabbing them in globs of ketchup, and the waitress had at this point turned on the television. He tried to block out the noise, to drown out the talking heads with louder and louder chewing. The waitress turned the volume up. A news story was playing about a convenience store shooting.
“Can we turn this off?” He put down his fork. “Please.”
The day he had left, The Mother had threatened him, had made one last attempt to get him to stay.
“If you leave,” she had said, “I have the tapes.”
“I’ve seen the tapes,” he said. “What would I want with those?”
“Not all of them,” she had said and left her recliner and opened the cassette drawer. She thumbed through VHS recordings, past Christmases, past spend-the-nights, past vacations, until she came to one that he had never seen before, that almost looked lodged in a back, secret compartment.
“The first tape,” she said and handed it to him. He stood there cradling it, debating whether or not to crush it in his hands.
* * *
After six more years, he was promoted to regional manager. He visited all the stores in the district and did the budgets, did all the hiring and firing of store managers, networked with vendors. His store was the lone holdout in terms of not being fully equipped with CVC cameras. When he received the call, he was on a drive out to one of his more remote stores. “Shooting,” was what the new store manager had said and could he please come.
When he pulled into the lot, he had already been formulating his defense. A camera wouldn’t have helped, he’d say. It’s usually hard to make out details in those anyway. He saw the yellow tape and two squad cars and an ambulance.
“One DB,” he heard an officer say. “Mr. Grimmel?” the police officer said. “Bernie Grimmel?”
He nodded and the officer escorted him inside. “Someone was shot?” he heard himself say, but was he really saying it or thinking it?
“A fatal shooting. No witnesses.”
“But my manager, Brad.”
Brad emerged from a crouch behind a corner. “Sorry, boss. Smoke break. Slow night.”
“And none of the clerks?”
Brad looked down.
“All taking a smoke break at once?”
“The security footage should be coming back now,” the officer said.
“Security footage? Oh, but that camera doesn’t work.”
“Yes, it does,” Brad said, and they were squeezing into a back office where there was a security TV and footage being played. Had Brad taken it upon himself to install a camera without him knowing? Had that camera always worked all these years and Bernie not known it? Had his original manager been lying to him? Or, even worse, maybe it was a joke he had not gotten? Had that security TV always been there, or had it been added by Brad? Surely, he would have seen it, would have noticed it. But he would have noticed a red bicycle too, right?
The footage played and he saw a customer, the John Doe, enter the store. The camera angle only revealed his back, though, as he began to walk toward the first aisle. And then, two minutes or so later, the culprit had lumbered in, raised his sidepiece and fired six shots, felling the John Doe. Turning to the camera, the face imprinted and caught in high resolution was his own. Brad and the officer turned to him.
“This cannot be,” he said.
“That’s you in the video,” Brad said, “unless you have a twin.”
“But the time, it doesn’t work,” Bernie said.
“The camera doesn’t lie,” the officer said. And even then, across all that space and time, Bernie was sure this was The Mother’s doing, that this was some prank of hers. Perhaps this was on the first tape she had blackmailed him with, and now, after all these years, this was her getting back at him. He thought all these things as he sprinted for his car.
* * *
He was not sure how he had escaped the cops or even if he had. Perhaps he was sitting back in some interrogation room now, and everything was some tape he was viewing. The escape was all static. As he sat at the diner now, the news story played, but it made no mention of a suspect, gave no description of himself, flashed no cartoon sketch of his portrait. Had he imagined it all? Had that been a detail that he had remembered incorrectly like all those details those many years ago? What was certain about memory after all?
The only thing he could be certain of was his need to get to Albuquerque to see The Mother. She would sort all this out. And despite his attempts to resist, he imagined that director, after being absent all those years returning to that scissors chair and calling, “Action.”
* * *
When he arrived back at The Mother’s, he was overwhelmed by how much had stayed the same. It was like a museum of another time: his skateboard, unrusted remained in the same corner of the garage where had left it, the playset in the backyard looked unweathered and unmarked by time. He went to the door and found it ajar, and he nudged his way in.
He went to his bedroom: it was a snapshot of his life at sixteen, the same heavy-metal posters on the wall, the same clothes scattered on the floor, the bed unmade. He checked the kitchen, The Mother’s room, the sunroom, all preserved as he remembered on the day he had left. The Mother, however, was nowhere. Maybe she’s gone out, he thought. Maybe she’s dead. He walked into the living room.
There, on the stack of old phone books was the 1987 Polaroid camcorder. Was it recording him now? The red light was not on, but he had read where the red record light would burn out on those earlier models but they would still be recording. Maybe the red light had burnt out on this one years ago. Or maybe the red light would come on in a moment, and then he would be recorded.
He looked down at the coffee table and saw the VHS tape where he had left it, where he had set it down those eighteen years ago instead of breaking it to pieces. He picked it up. Turning it over in his hands, he read the white label, “First Tape.” He inserted it into the VCR, and his finger hovered over the “Play” button. Then the red light of the camera came on.
Copyright © 2018 by Trevor Almy
