“Well then, I guess we better change our ways,” my dad said. “Otherwise we’re no better than Lieutenant Lazarus, are we?”
I told him no, I guess not.
“It’s funny, I kinda learned something from that stupid movie.”
“What happened to him?”
My dad put his warm hand on my cold neck. “We’ll find out tomorrow. Time for bed.” He ejected the tape and pushed me toward the basement door.
“Are you going out?”
My dad kissed the top of my head. “Good night, you ghoul.”
* * *
My brother wasn’t asleep when I slid into bed. He couldn’t, he said. He had Lazarus swimming laps in his brain.
“There was a spider,” he said. “When I came downstairs. Right on my pillow.”
“Did you kill it?”
I knew the answer was no. He hated bugs, so he wouldn’t come close to touching it, not even through a shoe. He would have waited until the spider walked away. He would have crawled into bed and shut his eyes, hoping for sleep. But every time the sheet bristled his leg, he would think it was a spider. That’s why he was still awake.
“Let’s watch the rest of the movie,” he said.
“We can’t. Dad’s gone.”
“We can. Dad’s gone.”
He rolled over and turned on the lamp. “Fine, you can stay down here with the spiders.”
He left me with the lamp, and I might have stayed down there if the biggest spider I’d ever seen hadn’t crawled across the ceiling, right above our bed. I didn’t bother closing my eyes, waiting for the spider to drop down a thread of web and land on my face. I ran upstairs to our empty living room, then up to my dad’s room. The light was on but my dad was gone. My brother was rummaging through the trash on his dresser.
“How do you know it’s in here?” I asked.
“Because it wasn’t by the TV. And because this is the only room we’re not allowed in.”
As I stood in the doorway, I was very aware that the last time I’d been here, my dad had yelled at me. To never come back. This, shortly after he moved in. The first weekend my brother and I visited, when the basement was stacked with boxes and there was no bed for boys to sleep in. Our dad had gone out that night to have a few beers, to get a few buddies off his back. It would only be an hour or two, he told us, and set out pillows and sheets on the couch and floor. He left alone and returned otherwise. The next morning I snuck in after a bath, searching for a comb, and surprised a blob of blankets moving in unison. The hallway threw light on the headboard and a woman sighed a soft, spent breath. My dad’s head emerged from the blob, his hair twisted and his face flushed. Get the hell out, he said. Don’t ever come back.
“C’mon,” I said. “It’s not here.”
“Maybe it’s hidden,” my brother said.
He opened a drawer, another, and combed through my dad’s T-shirts and underwear. Nothing. He looked under the bed, felt under the mattress.
“Why would he hide it like this?” I said.
“Because he doesn’t want it to hurt anyone,” my brother said. “Duh.”
I opened my mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say. It felt like we were talking about two different things, like my brother was after something other than the movie, though I couldn’t imagine what.
I watched him wander to the closet, stand before its closed doors like they were the entrance to a forbidden temple. He slowly slid one open. Nothing happened. There were no traps or poisonous darts. There were my dad’s uniforms. There were dress shirts and a tangle of ties, none of which I’d ever seen him wear. My brother pushed the shirts apart. He got on his knees and picked through a pile of shoes.
“Check up top,” I said. Above the hangers sat something shiny, though I couldn’t tell what.
“Help me get it,” my brother said. I shook my head. When my dad asked if I’d kept my promise, I wanted to answer him honestly.
My brother called me a baby, and removed the fan resting on a dining chair borrowed from downstairs. He dragged the chair to the closet, and in an instant was back on the floor, holding a metal box, the temple’s long-lost treasure.
“Don’t open it,” I said. “That looks private.”
“Not private,” my brother said. “Secret.”
The lid opened with a click, and I watched my brother’s face change from wonder to something else.
“Found it,” he said, and he held up a tape. I turned and ran downstairs, now that the search was over, just in case our dad returned. A moment later, my brother came downstairs, slowly.
“Hurry,” I said.
“Relax. You know Dad.”
He turned on the TV and put the tape in the VCR. A triangle appeared when he hit play, floating in a pool of blue. Then a person. No FBI warning. No rating or warning about the content to come.
“What is this?” I said.
“I don’t know,” my brother said. “It didn’t say.”
“What do you mean—”
A woman sat in a chair. Gagged but not blindfolded. Behind her a gray wall. A basement. Her wide eyes watched something off screen. Her face was something of shock and fear. Of begging and sorrow. Her body twisted, but was wrapped in rope. Her legs tied down, knotted together. All this and the hum of the room. No songs or effects. There was only what was real. A man appeared on screen, his back to the camera. Jeans and a T-shirt. Something in his hand. He took the gag out of the woman’s mouth and let her scream. Until her voice grew to nothing, until she realized it was pointless. The man disappeared from the screen.
“You know what to say,” he said, off camera. The woman didn’t say anything. She put her head down and shook with tears. The camera zoomed in on the woman’s face. She was young, not much older than a girl. The man backed the zoom out a bit, so we could see the woman’s entire head, the bubble of space around her. We saw her head thrash. We saw her eyes beg. But she didn’t speak, except to whisper please.
The screen went black, and I thought the movie was over. But it was just the man passing through the frame, standing in front of the woman before moving to the side, remembering that he wanted everyone to see. He put something to the woman’s head. A toy gun. A real gun. The woman screamed please, she loved him. She wouldn’t tell anyone. The man clicked off the safety and the woman shut her eyes impossibly tight.
“Go ahead,” the man said. “Tell them why.”
The woman put her head down. The man’s voice was gravelly, strangely calm. He grabbed her by her hair, slowly tilted her head back.
“It’s OK,” he said. “I’ve already forgiven you. But you need to tell them. They need to understand that you deserve this.”
The woman begged. Her brain wouldn’t let her say anything but please. The man’s hand combed her hair. He said it was OK. She didn’t have to talk if she didn’t want to.
The man put the gun to her head and, before I could shut my eyes, he fired.
* * *
The woman’s body slumped limp. For a moment, the man simply stood there, staring with awe at what he’d done. The movie did not cut away. The camera would not move. The man touched the woman’s shattered head. He rubbed the blood between his fingers, on his clothes. He removed the camera from its tripod and made us watch as he untied the woman and let her fall to the floor. The camera marveled at how lifeless something living could become. I felt sick. I tried to tell my brother to stop the tape, but the man started talking. He said things that didn’t make sense. I didn’t know this woman, he said, and zoomed in on her broken face, the dark pool it was drowned in. I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me. He said, Nobody knows anybody, and if you think you do, this is what you get. He grabbed her soaked hair and pushed the camera into her face. He zoomed in, tighter and tighter, closer and closer, until there was nothing but her big dead eye.