She pops it into the VCR in her office — a larger one now, with windows — when she gets a free moment on this blustery November afternoon. She presses PLAY and sits.
The amateur filmmaker has rigged up a cheerful title card, reading Sex, Death, and Videotape 2. Sandra sits straighter and bites down on a knuckle as her eyes widen
and there he is, Darryl Hiller seated on a stool with nothing in the background but stark white. Medium close-up, chest and head and shoulders. The camera doesn’t move, as if tripod-mounted.
“There was so much I wanted to tell you before I left last June.” He gazes directly at her without blinking. “But you understand the situation. I know you do. You always do.
“There was a lot I didn’t understand when we did our interview. Not that I was wrong, I haven’t been wrong in years, I was just … incomplete. When I told you I had to go beyond to the next level, I had no idea. No idea. Remember how you asked me how I felt about inspiring someone to follow in my footsteps and I said it felt good? I found out it meant more than that. It meant there’d been a change in me. I wasn’t just a rat anymore, because I’d created something in my own image. He wouldn’t have existed without me. And that meant I’d just been upgraded to cancer.” He starts to grin, the only one who gets the joke. “That’s how I got away at the sentencing. They escorted me right out of that bathroom and took the cuffs off me themselves. Poor, poor Reggie Blaine. Innocent bystander. All I had to do was break one guy’s face and tell one lie.”
Sandra forgets to breathe, begins to comprehend. Recalling the footage of Reggie Blaine, Victim, forced to wear jailhouse orange. Except there was only one set of clothes all along, she knows this now. Knows it as surely as she knows she was a midwife for an entirely new aberration. She dies inside all the more for it. But her blank-faced shell sits, watching
as Darryl Hiller’s face contorts ripples rearranges. Pudgy cheeks, red hair, she has seen it before, weeping for the cameras along marble corridors. And then it’s gone, replaced by a new face that could easily belong to the boy next door. But the voice continues:
“You see, I became the cancer —”
new faces, leering at the lens
“— and I’ll be back to see you very very soon —”
a rogue’s gallery of anonymity
“— but you won’t see me —”
lifting a roll of vinyl tape to the camera eye and peeling a strip free to lick its sticky underside
“— because I’ve learned the one fundamental trick of cancer:”
his last word on flashcut repeat, a different face speaking with every flick of the editing console
“Mutation/Mutation/Mutation/Mutation/Mutation.”
Fade to black.
Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt
I was a couple years adrift out of school, thinking yes, today is probably the day I’ll kill myself, when the weatherman went and upstaged anything I could’ve done.
They say he was distraught over a woman, a restraining order, negative publicity. Family problems too, you have to figure. I hadn’t heard a word of any of it. He had a pilot’s license and his own plane, and what he did was, he aired one final weather report on the early evening news, smiled at the city one last time, then drove out to his plane, got cleared for takeoff, climbed 500 feet into the blue summer sky, then turned flaps down and did a full-throttle nosedive straight into the runway. This while rush-hour traffic was still clogging Chicago’s paved arteries. They say the fireball was a thing of beauty, although not so for the pieces they finally pulled from the wreckage.
And I ask you: Now how can you follow something like that?
Megan, one of my housemates, taped the later re-broadcast of his final weather report, and we’d watch it over and over, running it back and back again. We were looking for clues. Anything. But the weatherman gave up nothing. Not one thing.
“I just realized something,” she finally said, days after the burial. “He didn’t even fly around for one last look. Just got the plane up and did it.” Then she grew very reflective. “I couldn’t have done it that way. I’d have to fly around, make some goodbyes, see everything from above. Make one final bid for a little genuine pathos. The way he did it … that’s so cold.”
Megan was right. It had been a very singular-minded devotion to purpose. No wonder he’d been a success in his career.
*
The summer I was ten I played Little League baseball with a number of other boys who were either too lanky or too pudgy, and who spent every spare moment of every game with one fearful eye turned to the stands, where our fathers sat, expectant and often quite rabid. I was not a star player.
I can’t remember if it was my idea, or the coach’s, but every time we took the field, I dangled my glove from a loose arm and went trudging out into right field, as if it were my own personal Siberia. Whether my own altruism, or the coach’s doing, it seemed the best way I could serve the team. Nothing much ever happened in right field. The kids at bat generally pulled to the left. So I’d stand out there and gaze across into left field, watching Dennis Freemont as he heroically went loping after each fly ball that came his way, effortlessly plucking them from the air like some budding young god of the harvest. I alternately felt sickened by him and wanted to be his best friend, imagining what it must feel like being in control of his precociously developed musculature instead of the puny sticks that were my arms and legs. Imagining what his glowing father must’ve said to him after every game. I’d never hear words like that.
I remember the fly ball that came directly to me as clearly as if it’d been a comet bearing down on me, or a small plane. The world fell into a silent hush as I braced myself beneath the ball and wondered if my father would notice my glove trembling.
I reached forward from my crouch as the ball plopped straight into my glove as I caught it underhanded, the way the coach always said not to. It fell into the laced pocket, then wormed its way back and went dribbling out the other end of the glove…
And somehow ended up wedged between my knees. I stood knock-kneed, the ball caught there and pivoting as if it were the socket of a new joint that had fused my legs together. All the sounds of the world came rushing back again, most of all the cries of my teammates, and then I toppled over backward, the ball dropped, my miracle play hopelessly blown.
My father had little to say in the car later, quietly smoking and blowing his gray clouds out the window as he sought to merge with the road, lose himself and his disappointment in the traffic. Finally he turned to me and his eyes weren’t too accusing, and I realized that he was, in his way, trying to understand.
“Maybe baseball’s not the thing for you,” he said. “But the one thing I don’t ever want you to forget is, with hard work and effort you can be anything you want to be. I know you can do it. You can be whatever you want.”
I nodded. This was a great relief to me.
“I want to be a girl,” I told him.
It seemed easier then, to my ten-year-old outlook. All the expectations just weren’t as brutal. Nobody forced girls into the fields like untrained gladiators. But at the time I didn’t realize that there were mothers who made up their daughters, as young as five and six, into seductive miniature adults, entered them in contests, got their pictures in the papers where they could be ogled by sick men who didn’t understand — or maybe didn’t want to admit — that that knowing look in their eyes was just Maybelline. I didn’t know any of that then.