Underworld

thinking of the girl. At some level the girl has to be present here, watching what you're watching, unprepared-the girl is seeing this cold and you have to marvel at the fact that she keeps the tape rolling.

It shows something awful and unaccompanied. You want your wife to see it because it is real this time, not fancy movie violence-the realness beneath the layers of cosmetic perception. Hurry up, Janet, here it comes. He dies so fast. There is no accompaniment of any kind. It is very stripped. You want to tell her it is realer than real but then she will ask what that means.

The way the camera reacts to the gunshot-a startle reaction that brings pity and terror into the frame, the girl's own shock, the girl's identification with the victim.

You don't see the blood, which is probably trickling behind his ear and down the back of his neck. The way his head is twisted away from the door, the twist of the head gives you only a partial profile and it's the wrong side, it's not the side where he was hit.

And maybe you're being a little aggressive here, practically forcing your wife to watch. Why? What are you telling her? Are you making a little statement? Like I'm going to ruin your day out of ordinary spite. Or a big statement? Like this is the risk of existing. Either way you're rubbing her face in this tape and you don't know why.

It shows the car drifting toward the guardrail and then there's a jostling sense of two other lanes and part of another car, a split-second blur, and the tape ends here, either because the girl stopped shooting or because some central authority, the police or the district attorney or the TV station, decided there was nothing else you had to see.

This is either the tenth or eleventh homicide committed by the Texas Highway Killer. The number is uncertain because the police believe that one of the shootings may have been a copycat crime.

And there is something about videotape, isn't there, and this particular kind of serial crime? This is a crime designed for random taping and immediate playing. You sit there and wonder if this kind of crime became more possible when the means of taping an event and playing it immediately, without a neutral interval, a balancing space and time, became widely available. Taping-and-playing intensifies and compresses the event. It dangles a need to do it again. You sit there thinking that the serial murder has found its medium, or vice versa-an act of shadow technology, of compressed time and repeated images, stark and glary and unremarkable.

It shows very little in the end. It is a famous murder because it is on tape and because the murderer has done it many times and because the crime was recorded by a child. So the child is involved, the Video Kid as she is sometimes called because they have to call her something. The tape is famous and so is she. She is famous in the modern manner of people whose names are strategically withheld. They are famous without names or faces, spirits living apart from their bodies, the victims and witnesses, the underage criminals, out there somewhere at the edges of perception.

Seeing someone at the moment he dies, dying unexpectedly. This is reason alone to stay fixed to the screen. It is instructional, watching a man shot dead as he drives along on a sunny day It demonstrates an elemental truth, that every breath you take has two possible endings. And that's another thing. There's a joke locked away here, a note of cruel slapstick that you are willing to appreciate even if it makes you feel a little guilty. Maybe the victim's a chump, a sort of silent-movie dupe, classically unlucky. He had it coming in a sense, for letting himself be caught on camera. Because once the tape starts rolling it can only end one way. This is what the context requires.

You don't want Janet to give you any crap about it's on all the time, they show it a thousand times a day. They show it because it exists, because they have to show it, because this is why they're out there, to provide our entertainment.

The more you watch the tape, the deader and colder and more relentless it becomes. The tape sucks the air right out of your chest but you watch it every time.

Marian Shay drove up to Prescott on business, allowing herself one cigarette for the two-hour trip, which she managed not to smoke until she was ten miles from town, where the mobile homes began to gather and the fast food blazed, and she felt good about this, controlled and disciplined and clean deep through.

There was something going on in the courthouse square. She parked a block away and walked back down to the square and it was one of those days in the high pines when the sun and sweet breeze get into your underwear. There were cars arrayed on a closed-off street, four rows of vintage machines extending two city blocks along the edge of the plaza, and loudspeakers on the lawn did dance-party rock-and-roll.

She had fifteen minutes to spare and walked among the cars, many with hoods raised for the pleasure of connoisseurs. It was early, not yet eleven, and only a dozen people wandered about. She saw a red-haired man who looked faintly familiar and watched him bend under a hood and then stand back to appraise a customized Buick with a black lacquer chassis.

He stood donnishly posed with jutted elbow and cupped hand and she realized after a moment that he worked with Nick at Waste Containment and that his name, which took another moment, was Brian Classic, which rhymes with classic, which describes these cars.

He saw her and showed a beam of recognition. Then he did a little dance from half a block away, the slowest of clinging fox-trots from out of the fifties.

About two hours later they met for lunch in the dining room of an old hotel just up the street. The room was close and warm and she held the glass of ice water up against her face.

He said, 'You are here?'

'For a job interview. There's a small design firm here that renovates old structures. They want to open a Phoenix office. I would be it.'

'How did it go?'

'All right, I think.'

'You've done this kind of work?'

'Not exactly. Before the kids I helped manage a small real estate operation. Since the kids I've done part-time things now and then.'

'Your own office. This is a fantasy of mine. To come wandering in just before lunch. Like a private detective. Hungover, a faceful of stubble. Riffle through the mail. Throw it down.'

'Do you get stubble?' she said.

'Yes, eventually. Why do you ask?'

'I don't know. I thought maybe the smoother and fairer the complexion.'

'We do shave,' he said.

'I don't think my office will resemble a private detective's.'

'You want light and air.'

'Great thick proposals in strong binders.'

'You want scale models, with trees.'

'Maybe.'

'And little bland people on the sidewalk.'

'Multiracially bland.'

'Brava. Want a drink?'

'Why not?' she said.

Brian ordered drinks from an old fellow who probably doubled as hall porter.

She said, 'And you are here?'

'For the cars. I read about the show last night and felt a sort of schoolboy itch.'

'Couldn't even wait for the weekend.'

'Crowded. I deserve a day off anyway.'

'You had to wait around for lunch. I'm sorry. I thought you had a business appointment.'

'I'm not finished with the cars. They're worth a second look. And what could be nicer than sitting here waiting for someone to bring our drinks and fix the air conditioner and do something about the stuffing in the banquettes?'

'Is that what smells?' she said.

She smoked of course. Once she ordered the drink she knew the facade would crumble. It took very little to bring it down. She would smoke all she had and then find more. He made her laugh a few times and was funny