She texted Marco: “Did Denny have all the Uncle Bob episodes on tape or only the ones he was in? Thanks!” She added a smiley face then erased it before she hit send. It felt falsely cheery instead of appreciative. His brother had just died.
She settled on the couch beside her parents. While they watched TV, she surfed the web looking for information about The Uncle Bob Show, but found nothing. In the era of kittens with Twitter accounts and sandwiches with their own Instagrams and fandoms for every conceivable property, it seemed impossible for something to be so utterly missing.
Not that it deserved a fandom; she just figured everything had one. Where were the ironic logo T-shirts? Where was the episode wiki explaining what happened in every Uncle Bob story? Where were the “Whatever happened to?” articles? The tell-alls by the kids or the director or the camera operator? The easy answer was that it was such a terrible show, or such a small show, that nobody cared. She didn’t care either; she just needed to know. Not the same thing.
The next morning, she drove out to the public television station on the south end of town. She’d passed it so many times, but until now she wouldn’t have said she’d ever been inside. Nothing about the interior rang a bell either, though it looked like it had been redone fairly recently, with an airy design that managed to say both modern and trapped in time.
“Can I help you?” The receptionist’s trifocals reflected her computer’s spreadsheet back at Stella. A phone log by her right hand was covered with sketched faces; the sketches were excellent. Grace Hernandez, according to her name plaque.
Stella smiled. “I probably should have called, but I wondered if you have archives of shows produced here a long time ago? My mother wants a video of a show I was on as a kid and I didn’t want her to have to come over here for nothing.”
Even while she said it, she wondered why she had to lie. Wouldn’t it have been just as easy to say she wanted to see it herself? She’d noticed an older receptionist and decided to play on her sympathies, but there was no reason to assume her own story wasn’t compelling.
“Normally we’d have you fill out a request form, but it’s a slow day. I can see if someone is here to help you.” Grace picked up a phone and called one number, then disconnected and tried another. Someone answered, because she repeated Stella’s story, then turned back to her. “He’ll be out in a sec.”
She gestured to a glass-and-wood waiting area, and Stella sat. A flat screen overhead played what Stella assumed was their station, on mute, and a few issues of a public media trade magazine called Current were piled neatly on the low table.
A small man—a little person? Was that the right term?—came around the corner into reception. He was probably around her age, but she would have remembered him if he’d gone to school with her.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Jeff Stills. Grace says you’re looking for a show?”
“Yes, my mother—”
“Grace said. Let’s see what we can do.”
He handed her a laminated guest pass on a lanyard and waited while she put it on, then led her through a security door and down a long, low-ceilinged corridor, punctuated by framed stills from various shows. No Uncle Bob. “Have you been here before?”
“When I was a kid.”
“Hmm. I’ll bet it looks pretty different. This whole back area was redone around 2005, after the roof damage. Then the lobby about five years ago.”
She hadn’t had any twinges of familiarity, but at least that explained some of it. She’d forgotten about the blizzard that wrecked the roof; she’d been long gone by then.
“Hopefully whatever you’re looking for wasn’t among the stuff that got damaged by the storm. What are you looking for?”
“The Uncle Bob Show. Do you know it?”
“Only by name. I’ve seen the tapes on the shelf, but in the ten years I’ve been here, nobody has ever asked for a clip. Any good?”
“No.” Stella didn’t hesitate. “It’s like those late-night horror hosts, Vampira or Elvira or whatever, except they forgot to run a movie and instead let the host blather on.”
They came to a nondescript door. The low-ceilinged hallway had led her to expect low-ceilinged rooms, but the space they entered was more of a warehouse. A long desk cluttered with computers and various machinery occupied the front, and then the space opened into row upon row of metal shelving units. The aisles were wide enough to accommodate rolling ladders.
“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.