moved into a home. She didn’t know what happened to their dogs. We talked about the new people on the street, and the few changes in town.
“So, where are you working?” she asked.
“Right here. In the house. I’ll be telecommuting.”
“Oh. Right at home. Working on a computer, I guess?”
“I analyze quality control data for a parts manufacturer.” Nine times out of ten, this is as far as I have to go to explain my job.
“Well, that sounds…” She searched for a word. “You were always a smart one, Tim.” She glanced at the monitor, then back at her house. “I better get back.”
“Can I listen?”
She looked blank for a moment, then smiled. “Sure.”
I held the monitor to my ear. The baby seemed to be sound asleep, each deep breath loud and fuzzed by static.
“I can hear the ocean,” I said, and she laughed. I looked at the back of the device and noted the brand name. “This thing’s amazing. You can hear everything.”
“Almost too much. Every little breath.”
“I bet. Well, tell Mr. Spero that I’ll be here all the time,” I said. “If he ever needs anything.”
Stevie made bigger and bigger models out of painted plywood and pieces from other models. He blew them apart with M-80s that could rip open a mailbox. I wouldn’t give him my dad’s video camera anymore, but he stole a Super-8 camera and a projector from the school A-V room and switched to film. He couldn’t do sound anymore, but he didn’t mind. Video is a cold medium, he told me.
One night the summer after freshman year, we were coming back through the yards at 3 AM. Stevie had the camera, and I was pulling a wagon full of props and models. We came around the corner of the house and saw Mr. Spero. He was sitting in a lawn chair under Stevie’s window, a plastic tumbler in his hand. I dropped the wagon handle, but before I could take off he told me to stand there, and I was too afraid to move. He made Stevie drop his pants, right there in front of me. Told him to put his hands against the side of the house. Stevie was already crying. Mr. Spero stood up, unlooped his belt, and folded it in half. He held it by the buckle, and slapped it against Stevie’s thighs. The boy yelped, and started bawling.
I’ll give you something to cry about, Mr. Spero said.
Sometime during the beating I ran to the back door of my house, not even bothering to sneak, and ran into my bedroom. My mom tried to get me to tell her what was going on, and I blubbered something about Stevie and his dad.
A few minutes later, Mr. Spero was at our front door. My dad went to the door barefoot in his robe, and then he called me in to the living room.
Did you sneak out? he asked me.
I nodded.
Don’t do it again, he said.
And that was it.
I stood there for a moment, stunned, and then ran out of the room. But I didn’t go far. I ducked into the bathroom and put my ear to the wall above the sink. Mr. Spero kept talking, in a low, spiteful voice. My dad didn’t say much.
When Mr. Spero finally left I heard Dad say to Mom, That man’s the southbound end of a northbound horse. I was fourteen, and thought that was the wittiest thing my father had ever said.
And then I started wondering. How long had Mr. Spero been sitting there in the dark, waiting for us?
The baby monitor Mrs. Spero used broadcast at 43 kilohertz. I bought a scanner in Des Moines and tuned in to Radio William. I listened to him whenever he was on. The format was pretty regular: he cried, he breathed, he jabbered in his private language. I learned to differentiate the various cries, from hunger to anger. He had a special kind of yelp when he wanted to be picked up after his nap. Mrs. Spero would come to retrieve him, speaking to him in her calm way, and when she leaned into his crib it was like she was speaking into my ear. At night I would lie in bed and try to time my breaths to his, but he was too fast, like a rabbit.
Mr. Spero was a background noise, a distant rumbling that occasionally resolved into words. I listened for any change of tone, waiting for the flat contempt he’d used with Stevie. That first week I watched him leave for work in the morning, and come home in the afternoon. He looked the same: pale skin and thin lips, hair combed back on his forehead in a mini-pompadour. Only the hair color had changed, from sandy brown to white.
I unpacked, and shopped on the Internet. Most of the sites encouraged homeowners to be paranoid: about their babysitters, their housecleaners, or anyone coming within twenty feet of their front door. I was amazed at the range of equipment available. I put together a complete package for less than two thousand dollars: cameras, digital switcher, software, antennas, cables, everything.
UPS delivered it in pieces over the next couple of weeks. I played with my new toys, and I listened to Radio William.
All Stevie’s movies—our movies—were part of a long saga called The NovaWeapon Chronicles. The plot was impossible to explain, even to ourselves, and changed depending on whatever special effects were available. We shot parts of the story over and over when we changed our minds or got better models. There were large gaps in the story that we never filled in.
Most of the “chapters” had to do with Rocket Boy, played by Stevie in black snow pants and a mesh shirt. Rocket Boy was the only kid our age (twelve, fourteen, sixteen) who could pilot his own starfighter in the Counter- Revolutionary StarForce, which we’d called the “Rebel Alliance” until some kids said we just copied from Star Wars. In the later chapters Rocket Boy became the strong silent type; once we’d switched to film we couldn’t record dialogue anymore. Stevie would act out Rocket Boy working on his warp engines, or at the controls reacting to unseen laser shots, or gazing meaningfully into the distance. I appeared in various roles, from Flight Commander to Alien Overlord. My younger brother was drafted into playing ensigns, lackey aliens, and especially corpses. Stevie said Hitchcock used Bosco for the shower scene in Psycho, but we found out that Karo Syrup was cheaper, and looked just as good. On black and white film, Karo looked more realistic than real blood.
For the action shots, Stevie’s stunt double was a G.I. Joe with life-like hair and Kung Fu grip. We dressed up the action figure (never a doll), inserted him into scale models, and then punished him in various ways. One day during summer vacation—this was the year before Stevie died, in 1991—we threw the Joe off the side of the quarry about fifty times. It was ninety-degrees and ninety-percent humidity, and I was losing interest in the Chronicles. But there was nothing else to do, and Stevie swore it was a critical scene that he needed me to film. Rocket Boy’s starfighter had been hit, and his escape pod had burned up in reentry (or something), and Rocket Boy was supposed to parachute the rest of the way down. So Stevie stood at the top of the cliff with a handkerchief bunched around Joe, and I was at the bottom of the pit with the Super-8 shooting up into the sun. There was no wind down there and no shade and sweat was pouring off me.
And the fucking handkerchief would not come open. Joe just crashed into the rocks, over and over. And every time he hit, Stevie yelled down, Did you get it? Did you get it? Like there was anything to get.
After two hours Joe’s face was looking like he’d been in a knife fight. I climbed out of the hole with the camera hanging from a strap around my neck, yelling that it was his turn to sit in the pit and broil.
Stevie was pulling on his shirt. His pale skin had turned bright pink, but before he tugged down the shirt I saw a dark stripe on his chest.
What the hell is that? I said.
This? He lifted his shirt. A long, thin welt, like a snake wending its way from his collarbone to his navel. That’s nothing.
What did he use on you?
Stevie shrugged. One of my cables.
Holy shit, I said. That had to kill.
He shrugged. Not really. Pain’s just a signal from the equipment. Like a telephone ring. It only has to hurt if you decide it should hurt.
