a twelve-year-old Stevie and Timmy, and interminable scenes of plastic models being jerked along on fishing line.
I expected it to be worse than I remembered. But it was worse even than that.
I started watching with the idea that I would capture the interesting or well-done bits and edit them into something coherent. But the videos were almost unwatchable. Often the screen was so dark I couldn’t tell what was happening, and most of the time I couldn’t remember what we’d intended. I was the only person on the planet who could possibly appreciate the NovaWeapon Chronicles, and I was fast-forwarding through hours of it.
The stream of images from next door, however, never stopped flowing, and those never bored me. Even when I was working, I kept a window open on my desktop that I could maximize whenever something caught my eye: Mrs. Spero mopping the kitchen, barefoot. Mr. Spero slipping into the basement and back in less than a minute, like a magic trick. I’d never been that interested in webcams, or reality shows, but this was riveting.
I could follow them from room to room, with a few exceptions. I hadn’t put cameras outside, or in the garage. And I hadn’t put any in the master bedroom or bathroom. I didn’t want to be able to see the Spero’s naked, or having sex, because I knew I’d watch. Still, it was a small house. I’d like to say that I shut down the window the first time I saw Mrs. Spero walk from the bathroom to the bedroom with a towel around her waist. I never even reached for the mouse.
I found the televised William even more fascinating than the audio-only version. When he slept, he abandoned himself totally: jaw slack, arms thrown to the side. When he cried, he threw his entire body into it. I admired his focus. Sometimes when he was crawling toward a certain toy, or reaching toward the airplanes that dangled above his bed, I could see him thinking.
I was surprised that when he cried in the middle of the night, it was mostly Mr. Spero who got up to hold him. He picked up William without a word, and walked around the house like a sleepwalker, letting the boy cry himself out. After work, he threw William around like he had on the patio that day. He rarely changed diapers or bathed the child, but he did get on the floor and play with him.
Had he been like this with Stevie, at first? Before Stevie crossed him for the first time, at the wrong time? Perhaps he liked his children better when they were small and helpless and compliant.
I waited for that moment when Mr. or Mrs. Spero would look up at the ceiling, squint at the discolored plaster, and go get the stepladder. But no one looked at the ceilings except William. Sometimes he’d be on his back, staring straight up at the camera, and I’d pretend that he knew. That some baby instinct told him I was up there, looking down on him. I’d wave at the screen. Hiya, Will. What are you thinking about, down there?
We walked out to the quarry, Stevie lugging the camera and a gym bag. The starfighter was set up on the field on the other side of the pit. It was twenty-two feet tall, sitting nose up like the shuttle before launch. The body was primer gray, with the red and black Counter-Revolutionary StarForce logos on each stubby wing. The foil rims around the thrusters glinted like hammered metal.
Holy cow, I said. You really did it.
It was only when we moved around the side that I could see that the back was unfinished. The cylindrical body was hollow, the two ends held together with crosshatched strips of unpainted wood.
The back doesn’t matter, he said. We’ll only film it from the front.
On the grass behind the ship were paint cans and stacks of cloth and empty milk jugs. One huge cardboard box overflowed with crumpled brown plastic containers. Stevie had been out here a lot.
I helped him lift his dad’s extension ladder out of the grass, and we propped it up against the side of the ship. The structure shuddered and swayed.
I climbed up, excited despite myself. Stevie had managed to make a curved clear hatch out of two sheets of Plexiglas. It fastened to a wooden crossbar with big hinges, so you could swing it open and closed. There was a little platform in there, with a metal folding chair on its back, so Stevie could sit with his face to the sky. The flight stick was a black broom handle, the instrument panel a slab of wood with painted-on controls labeled in the alien alphabet we’d made up in eighth grade.
A car battery sat next to the chair, close to where Stevie’s head would be. The red and black clamps of jumper cables lay next to the battery, unattached. The cable disappeared through a hole in the platform.
What’s the battery for?
Special effects, he said.
Even with work and hours spent watching William, I skimmed through the dozens of taped chapters in a week. I promised myself I’d take more time with the Super-8 footage.
The films required more of a ritual. Before viewing each reel I spooled through it by hand, reconnecting the sections where the splices had broken. Stevie had sometimes used real splicing tape, but more often he’d used Scotch tape that had yellowed and split. The Bell and Howell projector was touchy. I learned how to thread the film with a loop of slack to stop it from stuttering. I learned how to replace the lamps, ordered over the Internet from a warehouse in Oregon.
The filmed chapters were much better than the tapes. Shorter, for one. The film cost money to develop, so we couldn’t let things just run on and on. And Stevie had edited down even the short scenes. His technique matured from reel to reel: he paid attention to time of day and the location of props, he showed exterior shots before jumping to the interior, and he cut cleanly between characters. Scenes had rhythm.
And I realized that Stevie was right: Video was a cold medium. It’s too specific: all harsh colors and wind noise and tinny dialogue. Better to reduce to shades of gray and silence, and develop slowly in darkness. I don’t know where the warmth comes from. Maybe something in the act of projection: the lamp blasting each frame onto the screen, suffusing it with light, reconstituting each tree and person and building in photons.
I took my time. I watched only one reel a night, though I allowed myself to watch it multiple times. After all, there was no reason to hurry. There was no final reel. Once there’d been a Super-8 cassette, undeveloped, pulled from the wreckage of the camera. Maybe it still existed. Maybe the police still had it, or the Spero’s, hidden in some niche I hadn’t found. Or maybe they’d burned it, and no one would ever see it.
It didn’t matter. I knew how the story ended.
Perhaps that was part of the attraction of my little cameras. Channel William, his ongoing saga broadcast live to my PC, was never in re-runs. Some nights I slept on the futon in the office, so I could check on him just by opening my eyes. I’d long since stopped feeling like a voyeur. I felt like I was in the house with them, intangible and invisible. The family ghost.
I climbed down the ladder, shaking my head at how much work he’d put in. The whole structure swayed with my weight.
Is that thing going to hold you? I asked.
It doesn’t have to stay up long, he said. This is the last scene I need to film.
How can this be the last scene? What about ejecting into space, the whole space suit thing? How can you have him ejecting before you even launch?
Don’t be a fucking retard, he said, in the same snotty tone I’d used. This is the last scene I need to
You mean your basement.
He rolled his eyes.
So what did you make the space suit out of? I asked.
There is no space suit.
And when he ejects, what? Suffocates? Explodes in the vacuum?
Stevie didn’t answer.
Really? Rocket Boy dies?
What do you care? he said finally.
I started laughing. Come on, five years of the NovaWeapon chronicles and they just shoot him out of the sky and he
Obi-wan died, he said, and came back in the sequels.
Only as a ghost. Ghosts don’t count.
