Chapter 7
The Footage
It was fourteen minutes and twenty seconds long.
He had not known that. In the small bright room with the Price lawyer and the young technician, he had seen only the last part, the run, the fence, the shots. He had not seen the beginning. He had not seen himself get out of the car.
He watched it now with the door of Records locked and his headphones on and a sticky note over the little window, so that nobody could look in. He sat close to the screen. He had pushed his chair back, and then pulled it forward again, and now he sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped against his mouth, like a man at a hospital bed.
The picture came up crooked.
It showed the inside of a police car at night. A dashboard. A pair of hands on a steering wheel, big, familiar, with a gold ring on the left. A voice, calm and dry, said, Dock Street. Two blocks. You see anybody?
Not yet, said Mike.
It was strange to hear. He knew those words. He had said them, and heard them, and thought them a thousand times. But they were the words of a man who did not know what was coming, and he could hear the not-knowing in them. He sounded bored. He sounded like a man who would be home by midnight. Possible armed subject, he said, probably nothing, and Mike said, it's always nothing, and Tom laughed.
He was laughing in the car.
He watched his own hands on the wheel, easy and loose. He watched them steer the car down a long dark street, past a bar and a shuttered pharmacy and a row of dumpsters, toward the mouth of a tunnel, where a bulb in a cage swung in the wind.
There, said Mike. Left side.
A figure.
It was a small gray shape on the sidewalk, near the tunnel, with its back to them. A hooded shape, with a thin straight back, and one arm raised, as if reaching toward the wall. Tom's hand went to the switch. The blue light came on, and washed across the brick, and the figure turned.
For two seconds, the camera had its face.
It was a good picture. It was the only one in the whole fourteen minutes. The boy stood in the swinging light, with the hood pushed back, and a spray can in his right hand, held low against his thigh with the nozzle pointing at the ground. He was looking straight into the lens. His mouth was a little open. His eyes were wide and dark and very clear.
He was not holding the can like a weapon.
He was holding it like a boy who has been caught with a can.
Police, said Tom's voice, from the car. Stay right there.
The boy ran.
Tom pressed the pause key.
The picture froze on a blur: a blue flash on wet brick, a gray sleeve, a long white streak of motion. He sat there for a while with his finger on the key. His heart was going steadily. He felt nothing in particular. He felt the way you feel when you finally look at a bruise: a small flat interest, as though it belonged to someone else.
He ran because I turned on the lights.
That's all.
A kid with a can, and a police car.
He pushed the key. The picture moved.
The chase lasted three minutes and forty seconds.
It was hard to watch. It was bad footage, dark and shaking, with long smears of light and sudden swerves, and the sound of his own breath roaring in the microphone. There were three alleys. There was a low wall that he jumped, and a trash can that he knocked over, and a second where he slipped on wet leaves and the picture whirled to the sky. Over it all ran the voices: the flat rattle of the radio, the siren, Mike's boots, his own shouting.
Police! Stop! Police!
It was all as he remembered. That was the astonishing thing. Every turn, every sound. The chase fell into place around the picture exactly as it did in his head. The orange sodium light. The dog barking. The smell of wet bricks. He found himself nodding, a little, at each landmark, as one nods when a guide at a museum says the right thing.
This is true, he thought. This is the way it was.
I did not make it up.
The picture tilted. It swung to the left and showed a chain-link fence, rusted at the top, and a gray figure flinging itself at the mesh. It fell back. It tried again. A shoe flew off, and spun in the air, and landed upside down.
Show me your hands!
The camera lurched.
It was the moment he had watched before. The knock. In the original frame he had seen, he now realized, only the part after it had steadied: the ground, the boots, a bare foot. But there was something before that. A half-second, perhaps less. A swing of the picture upward, a jolt, as the camera on his chest was knocked by his own arm. He had always thought it was just noise.
He pushed the key.
Pause.
He rolled the picture back, one frame at a time, with the small arrow key. The image slid backward in jerks. A wet sleeve. A glare of light. A smeared white fence post.
He let go.
He stared at what he had stopped on.
It was a single frame, at the very top of the swing, when the camera had tilted up and sideways and caught, for one thirtieth of a second, a view that nobody had been looking at. It was blurred. It was dim. It was tilted at forty-five degrees.
But it was a boy.
He was standing with his back to the fence, flat against the wire. His head was turned. His face was a pale smudge with two dark holes for eyes, and a mouth open on a word. His left hand was up, beside his chest, with the palm turned outward, the fingers spread. His right hand was up beside his chest too. It was holding a cylinder. It held it by the middle, loosely, between finger and thumb, with the cap end tipped toward the sky.
It was not pointed at anyone.
It was held out.
It was held out the way you hold out something to a person who has asked for it: with the arm bent, the elbow in, the wrist turned, a little away from the body, as if to say, here.
Tom did not breathe.
He moved the arrow. One frame forward. The picture blurred. The hand was in the same place, the fingers a little looser. One more. The cylinder tilted. The boy's mouth had changed shape. It was a different word, or the end of the same.
One more, and the picture dropped.
He looked at it for a very long time.
He was aware, in a slow numb way, of his own breathing. In and out. The little rasp at the top. He was aware of the radiator ticking behind him, and of the thin cold daylight coming through the blind. He was aware of a sentence that had begun to form in his head, in plain gray letters, like something being typed.
He wasn't aiming.
He had both hands up.
He was giving it to me.
"No," said Tom.
He said it aloud. It rang in the little room.
"No. That's. It's a frame. It's one frame." He rubbed his eyes. "It's a blur. It's a blur in the dark. You can't. It could be anything. A frame doesn't show what he did next."
It shows what he did before.
"It doesn't show the second."
The second.
"It wasn't a second. It was, it was a."
He stopped.
He had never once, in all his rehearsals, in all the nights and the car rides and the shower, thought about what lay between the swing of the picture and the shots. He had thought of it as one piece. The hand came up. I fired. One motion. The way he had said it to Bell. I don't remember deciding.
Now, with the key under his finger, he saw that it was not one piece at all. It had a beginning, a middle, an end. The boy had stopped. He had turned. He had lifted his hands. He had said something. And then. And then what?
He ran the picture forward at normal speed.
Drop it!
His own shout, enormous. A grunt. A gasp. And a thing he had not seen before, in the corner of the frame, a pale blur that might have been the boy's right hand, going down. Lowering. A small sagging movement, like a man setting down a bag.
Drop it!
The hand was going down because he had told it to.
And then the shots.
He took the audio home.
He did it in the plainest way. He did not copy the file; he was too frightened to copy the file. He put the little recorder from the kitchen drawer against the speaker of the laptop and held it there, with his arm shaking, while the last twenty seconds of the footage played through. He did it six times, to be sure. He put the recorder in his pocket. He walked out of Records at five o'clock past Lorraine, who looked up from her crossword and said, "Good night, dear," and he said, "Good night," in a voice he did not recognize.
At home he locked the study door.
He had a laptop, an old one, with a free program on it that Emma used to make songs. It had a long waveform on the screen, a gray worm of sound with a thick fat lump in the middle where the shots were. He put on his headphones. He pressed play.
Drop it!
He heard himself.
Drop it!
Bang.
Bang.
A pause. A rushing. And then, before the first of Mike's shouts, in the dead little hole where the echo of the shots was fading, a tiny thread of sound.
He stopped the program.
He rolled it back. He found the place. He made a box round the little thread and clicked on the button that said Amplify, and pressed play again.
It was a voice.
There was no doubt of that now. It was very thin, and very high, and it was there. It rose and fell. It was not a scream. It was not a cry. It was low and quick, like a thing said under the breath to oneself, or to a friend, in a hurry. It was three sounds, close together. A short one, a long one, a short.
He played it again.
Ih. Zhuh. Pay.
He played it again.
He tried the filter that cut the high noise. He tried the one that took away the hum. The voice grew clearer, and also grew thinner, and strange, as a face grows strange in a photograph that has been enlarged too far. He moved the box a fraction. He slowed it by half. At that speed it was a long low wavering moan, and under it, quite plain, there was a breath.
The boy had taken a breath before he spoke.
I, thought Tom. It's, I, it's.
He pressed the key.
Ih. Zhuh. Pay.
It was an ugly, tinny, impossible sound. It could have been anything. He knew that. He knew it was exactly what the lab had said. Unintelligible. It was three small noises, in a row, in a gap between two gunshots. It was the kind of thing a mind could make into a hundred different words.
It could be "I'm just."
It could be "I don't."
It could be "I'm sorry."
It could be a thing that isn't a word at all.
He played it forty times.
He lost count. He sat at his father's desk with his hands over the headphones and played it until the shape of it was worn smooth, until it no longer sounded like anything, until it was only a dark little thread of noise that lived inside his skull. At half past nine Anna knocked, and he said, "In a minute." At ten she knocked again. At ten-thirty he heard her go up the stairs without a word.
At some time after eleven, he found that he had taken off the headphones.
He did not know when he had done it. They were lying on the desk, small and black, with the thin voice still leaking out of them, very faint, like a cricket. He sat in the quiet. The lamp hissed. The house made its night noises: a settling, a tick, a long soft sigh from the furnace.
Then, behind him, from the corner by the bookcase, a small metal sound.
Tink.
He did not turn.
Tink-tink.
He sat with his hands flat on the desk and looked at the dark screen. In it, faintly, he could see a reflection of the room: the lamp, the bookcase, the corner. There was something in the corner. It was a pale shape against the shelves, narrow and tall. It was sitting in his father's old armchair.
Don't look.
If you don't look it can't be.
The reflection did not move. It sat with its knees drawn up and its arms round them, as a boy sits on a stair. A pale face. A pair of dark eyes. The key at its throat, on a shoelace, swinging very slightly, striking against the zip of a gray sweatshirt.
Tink.
"What did you say?" said Tom.
His voice came out in a whisper.
"What did you say to me? In the alley. What was it?"
The reflection looked at him.
It did not speak. It did not do anything. It sat in the old chair under the lamp, and the key swung on its string, and the hum of the furnace went up and down. A long time went by. He heard his own pulse, and the little voice in the headphones, thin as a cricket, going round and round. Ih. Zhuh. Pay.
Then the boy lifted his right hand.
He held it open in the air. It was dark at the tips, as if the fingers had been dipped in black ink. He held it very still.
He turned it over.
There was a smear of paint across the palm. It was thick and wet, and it caught the lamp in a small bright shine. It was in the shape of a letter. A capital S, neat, with a little cross at the foot.
Tom made a sound.
He swung round in the chair.
The armchair was empty.
The corner was dark. There was only the old brown leather, creased where his father had sat, and a cushion, and the pale smudge of the lamp on the wall. The key sound had stopped. The room was quiet. On the carpet, in front of the chair, in a faint wet gleam, there was nothing at all.
He sat there.
His heart was hammering in his throat. His mouth tasted of copper. He turned back to the desk and looked at the screen, at the long gray worm of sound. It was only a program. It was only a recording.
It's the headphones. It's the dark. It's an old chair and a man who hasn't slept.
You heard "paint" because you've been thinking about paint.
He put his face in his hands.
Because you're afraid of what it said.
The phone rang at midnight.
It was the one on the desk. His own cell, lying face-down by the lamp, buzzing in small convulsive jerks like a trapped insect. He picked it up with a hand that would not stop trembling.
The screen said MIKE.
He stared at it. He had not heard from Mike since the day of the cake. Three weeks. Twenty-two days. He had called twice and left no message, and then, on a Saturday, a short one: Call me. There had been no answer.
He pressed the green button.
"Mike?"
Silence. Then a long, wet breath, and a clink, as of a glass set down on a counter.
"Mike. Are you all right?"
"Hey, Tom." The voice was thick. It was Mike's, but slowed, as if every word had been dragged through mud. "Hey. Hey, buddy. How's the. How's the family?"
"They're fine. Where are you?"
"Home. I'm home. I'm in my garage. I'm in the, sitting on a paint bucket." A short dry laugh. "How about that."
"Are you drunk?"
"A little. Medium. It's a medium kind of night." There was a scrape, a clatter. "I just wanted to, I wanted to say hi. I've been meaning to. It's been a long, I've been busy."
"I know."
"You know?"
"I know you've been avoiding me."
"I haven't been avoiding." The voice rose, then fell. "I just. I haven't had anything to say."
"Mike."
"What?"
"You asked me a question. In the car. After the interview. You asked if I heard anything." Tom closed his eyes. "I want to know why."
Nothing came down the line but breath.
"Mike."
"You're doing it," said Mike.
"Doing what?"
"I can hear it. In your voice." The words were low and strangled. "You've been. You went into the system. Didn't you? You pulled the file."
"How do you."
"Because I did too." A cracked laugh. "Eleven times. Every night for a month. I thought, I'll just look. I'll just see it once more, and then I'll know. And I sat there, and I, and it. And I never."
"What?"
"Don't do this, Tom."
"Mike, what did you hear?"
"Don't." The voice shook. "I'm asking you. As a friend. I'm asking you not to do this. It's finished. They cleared you. Ross says. It's all, it's done. Whatever you think you found, it's a mistake. It's the lab. It's noise. You'll tear yourself to pieces. You'll tear me to pieces."
"What did you hear?"
"I don't know."
"Mike."
"I don't know, I swear to God, I don't know, I couldn't tell, I told them I couldn't tell." He was sobbing now, hoarse and ugly, like a man trying to cough up a stone. "I told them. I told them. I told Bell. I said I couldn't make out any words. I put my hand on the Bible."
The line crackled.
Tom stood in the lamplight with the phone against his ear. The headphones lay beside him on the desk. Out of them, very small and far away, the thread of the voice went on going round.
"Stay where you are," he said. "Don't hang up. Don't do anything. Tell me where you live. I'm coming."
"No."
"I'm coming over."
"Tom, please. Please don't."
But Tom was already moving. He had the keys in his hand. He was already at the door. He turned off the lamp, and in the sudden dark, for a moment, he thought he heard the old leather of the armchair creak, as if someone had risen from it.
He did not look back.