For quite some time I had become known as a local eccentric; particularly one of the “media hoarder” variety, the kind of man of poor genetics and crude vocabularities who were nose-breathers and “ex-academics” and chain-smokers. Their tapes and books and posters and autographed headshots all yellowed and near-waxy from the accumulation of cigarette-matter and dust and god-forbid: mold.
One man, who I will call “Jack,” became obsessed with a very old book almost totally black with mold on every page and which shot out bizarrely-wooden plumes of God-knows-what species of fungi, with their corpsen exhalations sounding vaguely humanoid and decrepit in the way a very sick and very old man would sound in his final hours as his young son begged him to just take the pills and that he’d feel so much better…
I collect videotapes. Everyone does; following a near-kinetic format-war in which the VCD threatened to wipe out nearly every facet of the home entertainment industry, despite the fact that VCDs are still used in grey-market circles as proxies for dark-alley material, accessible only through transcoding between encrypted tape-signals and VCD video-signals; I personally do not ever keep a VCD if I’ve seen it and have no need for it otherwise. They’re bad news. Cops don’t mess with tape-guys because they actually like us and can see right through us, and they seem to all understand that most of us simply want to lurk throughout the unknown and flirt with the lurid. Some can probably relate, of course.
My brother is a cop. Not a fed, but a cop, and more like a fireman at that —- my brother John quite literally saved a kitten from a tree last week, and was featured in the local gazette. My brother John came into my office one day sweating and in a distinct kind of panic I had come to recognize during my brief fixation on epilepsy and medical tapes related to seizures and epileptic disorders; the panic to which I refer being the post-seizure – grand-mal – panic, of utter confusion and vulnerability and a brain-blasted feeling of physical exhaustion and dehydration and distant emotions from forgotten dreams emerging from the fugue of it all as they call out for people who are long dead or ask their children what their name is and if their parents are here. One man could not recognize his own face, and could not seem to wrap his head around what a “meer” could be and why it is being shoved in his face, why is this incredible but disturbing holographic image so important and what did this man do to deserve his sweating, paniced visage to be the mascot for this strange Thing?
I digress. My brother was panicked, and I noticed that his gun had fallen onto the floor as he walked in. I can’t quite remember what he said, it was all such blurry impressions of human speech and emotional affect that I was too busy in my own head trying to imagine what kind of drug he had been given or what kind of crime he had committed or what kind of image he had seen or anything, something.
“John, as your brother who loves you, can you do me a favor?”
He nodded and then frantically swatted sweat beads in futility as they started to plop onto his crotch area.
“I really need you to sit down and just, feel that new chair I got and let me know what’s up, because John, I’m being honest, you know how my ears and my brain are, I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
I didn’t know if this was the right thing to say, but he obliged nonetheless – and not before slamming an unlabeled tape on my desk, in a large plastic evidence bag.
“Watch it.”
I was stunned at how forceful and pointedly he demanded that I immedaitely watch that tape. Every part of my head screamed HELL NO but as brothers? We were in this together, and I simply had to watch it, regardless of his demeanor or insistence or the terrorized state in which he seemed to have found himself in upon watching it.
And so, I watched it. It started with webs of oozing fifth-sixth gen. Distortions and wobbles and such, rude little blasts of static ripping sounds and vague suggestions of humanoid figures slowly coalescing into actual people; an older man, another man and three teenaged girls at first. All of them in some kind of attic… Very wooden and creepy, but they all seemed nonchalant and generally OK.
“Y-you know, y-y-you know there’s not-n-not-n-n-n no-n………… There. Is. Not. Just—-”
“Five people, yeah. There’s at least six; the five in frame and a cameraperson.”
He took a deep breath, lit a cigarette, chugged an entire bottled water and belched maybe thirty times as the scene played out in a very eerie way.
First, there didn’t seem to be any sort of framerate and the lensing seemed… exotic, perhaps broken. The shutter angle seemed to be rotating steadily, causing bizarre jitters and several lightbulb-flickers to morph into violent pulses before locking back into place.
Second, there was no audible dialog, despite all five of them appearing to talk as they smoked filterless cigarettes and played poker on a table which was quite literally on it’s last legs and seemingly waterlogged or ruined. No voices could be heard, but there was music, and it was diegetic, which didn’t mean much considering what consumer-grade can do but – still – …
“John, how long is this tape?”
He froze. I slowly picked up his third cigarette he hadn’t even lit yet and took it for myself so I could simply just lock-in and watch this entire thing. I knew just from seeing the box it came in that it was one of the high-quality SP tapes that couldn’t shoot more than an hour (whereas the longest and lowest-quality tapes could go as far as nine).
The music stopped. Voices could now be heard. The camera is tossed aside rather clumsily, and much of the scene is now obscured by a pillow (which also drowns out the voices, although they are still very much audible and quite loud considering).
Man #1: You know, you girls are pretty smart.
Girl #1: Yeah. But how would you know. It’s not like you go to fuckin’ college with us.
Girl #2: I’m not smart. I’m a bitch. I make money moves, bitch-ass.
Man #2: Oh, shut up. Can you girls get rid of her? She’s just terrible… Like some little fat bitch you have to deal with at Burger King who doesn’t know what mayonnaise is and…
Girl #2: You a faggot, bruh, get this faggot-boy little-dick bitch—-
CUT TO:
The same room. The same people. But nothing else is the same. And there seems to be more people. But not quite different people. The same people. But impressions and spectral loops and ghosts of each person all mingling throughout the scene —- all walking with an extremely rigid and robotic stilted step —- and a camera obscura filling up the scene as a lens seems to detach from not just the camera itself but the scene altogether, which causes a cascade of lensing-events and repetitive-spectral motions to envelop and unfold like an undulating visual image-lung.
At this point, my brother was curled into a ball, using his thumbs to close his eyes and his index fingers for his ears.
What the tape cut to next is what I believe to be what spooked my brother into such a state, and as I type this right now I am overcome with emotions of terror and a feeling that I should not be watching this.
My brother fled the room as ten seconds of blackness gave way to the scene.
—-
To be continued.