misty mountain hop
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.
He only took one film home these days, Brown watched and rewound, taking great care to take a walk outside before pressing play again. He sincerely intended to explore other neighborhoods, but never really succeeded, his feet always turning the extra right that led straight back home. On one of these walks by Seward Park, it must have been late November, Brown spotted Jackson. The dark gaunt man was standing on the corner, impatiently waiting for the lights to change. He hardly seemed to stray from the four blocks Brown roamed home from work. Throughout the day he sat on stoops and benches with a kind of daring backwards slump, staring through the fabric of reality, into his, a world where all the nighttime shop windows were his personal fish tanks and the shiny things within could be reeled in with a well-aimed throw of his illusory fishing rod.
The lights changed to the blaring white they substituted here for green. Brown looked down as if to tell his sneakers to find their own way home when his eyes found the crate at the very tip of the street corner. The afternoon crowds vined around him; too busy holding nose-obsessed children’s hands to spot the red milk crate’s contents. Videos, labels ripped off, it must have been twenty tapes or so, as heavy as two shopping bags. When he came home, he sat at his table and carefully wiped off the tapes with a paper towel, choosing the cleanest. At first the film seemed just like any other, but soon irregularities appeared, speech seemed clipped, the story made no sense: the weepy pregnant teen wandering into a main street shootout, spaceship hallways morphing into hospital corridors, the fat kid looking for treasure, finding only dust. Brown started to take notes. He would catalogue these films. Find their sources, trace connections, meet their maker. Brown had found his calling.
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