The Last Days of Video (17 page)

But it was better than nothing.

She resumed her position on the stage. Her classmates gathered in a tight cluster at her feet.

Thom, upon high, smiled.

“Now will you tell us the truth?” he asked.

IT'S A MISERABLE LIFE

Having watched twelve or
so science fiction and anime movies in the last week (not including what he watched in the store) and two trippy movies that morning alone (
Dead Leaves
had been a particularly twisted choice: gratuitous violence, thought-scrambling techno score, seizure-inducing artwork), Jeff felt profoundly off-kilter, shrouded in a purple fog. Nothing seemed quite right—even sunlight appeared chemical and fake. In this state of mind, he found himself on Ape U's leafy, bustling campus. He was sitting in Warlock Hall, a creaky early-twentieth-century building retrofitted with silver air-conditioning ducts snaking along every hallway, giving the place a space-station vibe. The office where he sat had one small round window, like a porthole, and it looked over a grassy quad, where girls were eating lunch and boys were trying, most of them unsuccessfully, to talk to the girls. On the desk in front of Jeff lay the beeper and notebook he had kept with him for the past two weeks (he had
al
most made it without Waring finding out about the beeper), and across from him sat the graduate student—a dark, barrel-chested Russian named Dorofey—who had run the experiment. Vaguely threatening,
Dorofey seemed both focused on and annoyed by the interview he was conducting, Jeff thought, like Agent Smith in
The Matrix.

But at least Jeff could feel good about this sweet new tee shirt he was wearing. Soft and thin, scoured green cotton, in places brushed almost to transparency, and on the front of it a simple graphic of Richard Pryor's face, the comedian's hair like a black globe about his head, his mouth wide open in laughter. Jeff had recently watched some Pryor stand-up for the first time, and it had blown his mind, so when he had come across the tee shirt at a boutique near the Open Eye Café, he had purchased it immediately, and without guilt, using twenty-five dollars from his second Star Video paycheck. Jeff looked down at the shirt now, at the inverted image of Pryor on his chest, and for a moment, he felt a bit more grounded in space-time.

“What this?” Dorofey said in a gruff, thickly accented voice.

Jeff leaned forward over the desk and looked at the page in the notebook where Dorofey now pointed.

“Oh,” Jeff said. “I made a note. I realized, uh, that I was making my happiness too high.”

“Too high?”

“I made a note that you should take away two from every rating before that day.”

“Take away?”

“I mean, you know, subtract?” Jeff explained, gesturing toward the notebook. “Too high. In there. Subtract two.”

Dorofey set down the notebook. “Mr. Meeker, I speak English very well. No need for speaking slowly so I understand.”

Jeff's face warmed over. “Sorry,” he said.

Dorofey squinted at the younger man. “Did something happen, Mr. Meeker, on September the tenth to prompt you to retroactively reduce your level of happiness?”

“Nothing happened,” he said.

“Then what's the problem?”

“Well, I'm not sure I should say,” Jeff said.

“Why not?”

“I don't want to hurt your feelings. Or mess up your experiment.”

“My feelings? Mr. Meeker, if there is problem, you should tell me.”

Jeff settled back in the square wooden chair, a chair reproduced identically, he had noticed, all over campus. “Well,” he began, “I guess I didn't understand the assignment, sir. I mean, what do you mean by happiness exactly? You never told us. You just gave us this slip of paper that said, ‘Write down how happy you are on a scale of one to ten whenever the beeper beeps.' I mean, I don't walk around all day feeling happy happy. I don't think anyone does. So maybe you meant, I don't know . . .”

“Contentment?” Dorofey suggested.

“Sure, contentment. That's what I was thinking. But I wasn't sure. Then, on Monday, I pinched my finger real bad at work while we were repairing some shelving that had fallen down. I work at Star Video, you know, in West Appleton? And right when I pinched my finger, the beeper beeped. I didn't know what to write. I mean, I was in pain, so I wasn't feeling too happy. Maybe contentment, but I don't know. You didn't say to write down the reasons we were feeling whatever, but I did anyway, on the next page. I wrote down, ‘Pinched my finger at work.'”

“I see that.”

“I thought maybe—”

“Mr. Meeker, please get to point.”

“Sorry. I just wanted to know what the goal of the experiment was, sir.”

Dorofey removed his gold-rimmed glasses, folded them shut, and with a discontented huff slid them into his shirt pocket. He muttered something in Russian, then said, “The purpose of the experiment is to study relative happiness. How happiness fluctuates throughout the day. You, for example. Your happiness seems quite high in evenings, but not so much during day. Overall range of five points.”

“Is that a lot?” Jeff asked, a little frightened by what the Russian's answer might be.

“Mr. Meeker, this is not a diagnostic tool. I am not telling you if you are happy or not.”

“Oh.”

“But your fluctuations do seem higher than other subjects I have interviewed.”

Jeff heard himself gasp. “What does
that
mean?”

“Mean?” Dorofey said. “I don't know what it means. It means you seem fairly unhappy in the mornings, and fairly happy at night. This is not uncommon. Most people work in morning, go home in evening, and their happiness fluctuates accordingly.”

Jeff felt a chill of fear. Was it possible that he was miserable and didn't even know it? “But, sir,” he said, “I work in the evenings.”

Dorofey nodded, squinted with momentary thoughtfulness. “So you like your job?”

“Yes, very much.”

“At the video store?”

“Yes,” Jeff said, taken aback by Dorofey's apparent disbelief. “I like working at the video store.”

“Is not boring?”

“Boring? No, sir! We watch movies and talk—”

Dorofey held up a hand, as if asking for a high-five. His voice lowering, he said, “Mr. Meeker, I don't care about video store.”

“Oh.”

“What do you do during day that make you so unhappy?”

“I don't know.”

Dorofey waited, stone-faced.

“I go to school,” Jeff said finally.

“So you don't enjoy school?”

Jeff shook his head, thought of the string of awful exam and essay grades he had received lately, despite all his studying. Then he said unsurely: “No, I enjoy school.”

Dorofey squinted. “Is a girlfriend?”

“A girlfriend?”

“If not school, usually young men are unhappy about girlfriend.”

Thinking at once of Alaura, Jeff quickly raised and lowered his shoulders to indicate that his problem was most definitely
not
a girlfriend.

Dorofey leaned back in his chair, crossed meaty fingers over a considerable belly. “Listen, Mr. Meeker. This baseline phase of the experiment in which you participated was designed simply to measure how much self-reported happiness fluctuates throughout a day. That is all.”

“Okay?”

“I'm sure you are familiar with famous lottery-wheelchair study?”

Jeff heard Waring's voice in his head say,
What do you think, buddy?

“Very simple,” Dorofey said. “Happiness research is relatively new, but my colleagues and I agree that human beings are not terribly smart at determining what makes us happy. In lottery-wheelchair study—a classic study referenced many places, including several Hollywood movies, I might add—in this study, researchers compared the happiness of people before and after they had won lottery or received major injury that put them in wheelchair. The result was that lottery winners were not any happier one year after winning lottery, nor were wheelchair folks more unhappy once they got used to their new condition. Happy people remained happy. Unhappy people, unhappy.”

Jeff's vision blurred as he struggled to follow the Russian's words.

“It complicated,” Dorofey continued. “Apparently, chronic back pain and long commuting time are better indicators for unhappiness than is blindness. And having one extra hour of sleep every night makes businessmen happier than doubling of their income. Do you see what I'm getting at?”

Jeff shook his head no.

“And if you want to, the phrase ‘hedge your bets' against unhappiness,”—Dorofey's eyes fell shut, and a chortling sound began to emerge from his throat that Jeff soon recognized as laughter—“then, then you should seriously . . . consider taking many naps . . . and against children. Naps make people happy. Children, on average, miserable.”

Dorofey's weird mirth subsided, and he sighed in what seemed to Jeff like an unconvincing display of embarrassment. Finally Dorofey said, “Mr. Meeker, I shouldn't say this, but you strike me as a nervous and potentially unhappy young man. If you want to be miserable, go ahead, I do not care. But if you want to be happy, maybe make some changes in your life. This is modern world, after all. There are options.”

“Options?” Jeff asked quickly.

“Many. Go out in world and do modern things. Post profile on online dating site. Get cute girlfriend. Use the Facebook or Meet-Together sites to find people with interests similar to yours. You're interested in film? Join film club. There are several I believe here at Appleton University. Or buy your own little camera and make your own little movies. I hear it very affordable these days. Then put your little movies on Internet. A documentary. Or a fun romance. Cast a girl and a boy and have them talk about things, have silly things happen. This formula always works. Who knows, you might get one million hits on YouTube, become famous.”

Bewildered, Jeff opened his mouth to ask the Russian another question, but Dorofey again held up a hand and said:

“Time to leave, Mr. Meeker. Bye-bye. I have fifty undergraduates to see, and they all want to know why they're so damned unhappy.”

Meanwhile, Alaura—though it
was a bit embarrassing to admit, even to herself—felt like a new woman. She had been a student at Reality for four days, and while she still believed that many aspects of “the
Experience” were absurd, corny, over-the-top, useless (in particular, the constant hand-holding), nonetheless “the Experience” had cracked open something inside her—what she could only refer to, in Reality jargon, as “access to her innate potential.” Karla was right—they just showed you. They pushed you and asked you endless swirling questions until all of your defenses had chipped away, leaving only your soft, frightened inside. Leaving only your future, ready to emerge. They showed you how your decision-making had formed your life—that you, and no one else, had formed your life—for Alaura, it was most definitely how she'd isolated herself with movies and drinking and unhealthy eating and smoking, her lack of ambition, her worry about appearing both tough and sweet to others, and her choosing to fall in love with shitty men . . .

That night, she strolled through West Appleton (when was the last time she'd actually
strolled
?) focusing on the contractions of her muscles, conscious of an energy stirring in her belly, and observing the goings-on of a Thursday in late September. It was eleven p.m. The LED streetlamps, powered by solar energy collected during the day, cast a bluish light over the nearly empty business district. The first day of autumn had passed only a few days before, and already some of the small retail shops had decorated their windows with fake pumpkins and fake brown, yellow, and orange leaves, though the trees wouldn't begin changing color for a month or more. A handsome street musician played a slow, sad electric guitar, sitting on his own amp at the corner of College and Weaver Streets, in front of Walk In The Clouds—one of West Appleton's many yoga studios. Alaura sidestepped a crocodile of cackling young women, a bachelorette party stumbling arm in arm from one bar to another. Of course the bars on College Street were full—the upscale places filled with blazers and sorority hair, preppy interlopers from Appleton, and the not-so-upscale places, Alaura's places, with their pretentious jukeboxes and craft beer on tap and a greater likelihood, on any given night, for physical violence.

All of it beautiful in its own human, sweetly pathetic way.

Alaura had asked Karla to drop her off downtown, not at her apartment—she and her gorgeous friend, like little girls, had chattered, giggled, actually held hands in Karla's Lincoln Navigator on the forty-five-minute drive back from the Reality Center. Alaura had never felt so close to Karla, never allowed herself to be so relaxed in Karla's presence. And this was only because, Alaura now knew, she had been so weak and frightened before Reality, so unaware of how she sabotaged her potential, like a skittish animal conditioned to fear all external stimuli. But now, with four full days of Reality under her belt, Alaura was “standing outside the ordinary” (Reality's term), a “powerful goddess” (Alaura's term—such melding of belief systems was not openly discouraged), fearful no more. So she walked the streets of West Appleton, wasting the hour before she absolutely
had
to be at Star Video, to train Jeff how to close the registers—one of the last tasks keeping her connected to the place—and she couldn't stop smiling.