by Byron Landry
1. On the Vastness of the Store
I have spent most of my life searching the store for the original tape. I wander the aisles, reading the spines. The shelves stretch on and on, bending around corners and disappearing behind bead curtains, and I follow them. It is possible that there was a time when I was not searching for the tape, but if so, I have long forgotten that time; if I say I have spent most of my life, it is almost a figure of speech: I am assuming, when I use this figure, that I can remember more of my life than I have forgotten.
Just how vast is the store? This is perhaps the oldest question. Among the clerks, there are several different schools of thought. The majority hold that the store is infinitely vast; some of the more learned argue instead that the question is absurd, since there is nothing outside the store, and hence even if it is finite in size, it is unbounded and hence cannot be measured. But the more conservative clerks espouse the belief that there is a world beyond the store, unobservable but real, and that, in time out of mind, all things inside the store—tapes, shelves, posters, even the clerks themselves—originated beyond. These hierophants, known as the Exitists, even claim to believe that there were once people who could move freely in and out of the store; they are thought to have carried tapes with them through a special gateway, taking videos out of the store and returning them completely unwound. I admit that I find this myth compelling, even beautiful, in that it gives the store a kind of purpose. But where did these customers enter and exit the store? I have observed neither entrance nor egress, nor have I even spoken to anyone who had. I have tried to imagine such a doorway out of the store, but I have failed; if I feel myself approaching it in a dream, I awaken, covered in sweat. And where have they gone, the customers? I have never seen anyone but the clerks, who all dress in black, as do I, though I am not a clerk.
2. The Structure of the Store
It would be easy to say that I am searching for a particular section of the store, the section where the object of my interminable search is likely to be located; but, as I will illuminate, there is little sense in this notion of a particular section. Today, I awaken beneath a shelf of tapes to the sound of audio from a nearby monitor; I cannot see the monitor, but if the sound of howling is any clue, it regards either hounds or hurricanes. As with most of the rooms in the store, this one is lit only by a flickering fluorescent bulb recessed amidst the ceiling tiles, and by the glow of the monitor; the result is not so much a faltering light as a trembling darkness. I stumble out of this room into the next, and the next, and the next. Some tenacious habit of thought drives me to seek out the unnamed section of the store where my tape is hidden, even though I understand, after deep study, that even if I found that section, I would never recognize it.
I know this now because I have come to understand the hidden structure of the store.
The store is divided into sections, each one with a unique name. No one knows how many such sections there are; there are certainly more than anyone could count, and although I have encountered, in my endless wanderings, what I thought to have been a section I had seen before, it is more likely that I was mistaken, because the names of the sections are constantly in flux. It is natural to believe that these names describe the content of the sections, and even many of the clerks still consider this to be a plausible theory; but I have determined that there is no such correlation. Why not? First, there exist sections with completely unsuggestive names, names which belie even the possibility of representation, such as “Good evening” or “Shouldst”; others are not even words, or only in some imagined and unhealthy language, invented for purposes of cruelty or self-destruction. Even when the names seem to point to some conceivable theme or subject matter, there is no guarantee of correlation. It is possible that one might, for example, find oneself in a section named “Fire,” and it is also possible that one of the videos in that section might contain footage of a fire; but it is equally likely that none of them might contain any such footage; and even if every single cassette in that section contained only footage of enormous fires burning continuously, this would be a mere coincidence, inevitable in the vastness of the store.
3. The Clerks
At the intersection of two darkened, grey-carpeted corridors, I encounter the clerks. There are three of them, huddled in their black uniforms, beneath a dim monitor whose image I cannot discern. They are muttering to one another in hushed but excited tones. I pretend to browse the shelves; my fingers run across the identical, translucent, milky plastic cases, as much for their soothing quality as to create the impression of preoccupation. In this way I creep closer to the clerks, and soon my ears are filthy with their words.
I listen for a period of time. (How long? A meaningless inquiry. There are no windows here—to where would they open?—and no clocks; even the digital displays on the tape players flash 00:00, which is, perhaps, quite accurate.) The black-clad figures whisper that a particularly learned clerk has made her way to a nearby section of the store; someone, I suspect, who might have some mystic insight into the location of the original tape. She is said to have a tattoo of a bird on her neck, and to be authoritative. I decide to seek her out.
I try to listen on for further details concerning the whereabouts of the authoritative clerk, but I can listen no more: the strange language of the clerks cloys at my mind. They are thin and pale against the black of their polo shirts, and their Adam’s apples shuttle up and down continuously; their voices never rise above a murmur, but that murmur is imbued with a nasal hum and a disaffected lisp. They speak like doyens about tapes that no one has ever seen, and claim total ignorance about tapes which are so ubiquitous that one cannot help but have seen them. They say strictly the opposite of what they intend to convey, in order never to be vulnerable to criticism, except when they desire to gain the upper hand in some debate by a surprising flourish of earnestness, which, however, is only a tone of voice, signifying nothing. In a moment of lucidity, I flee from the sound of the clerks’ feverish conspiring.
4. The Authoritative Clerk; the Spy
I peruse the corridors for the authoritative clerk. (Where do I peruse? I could write that I peruse the corridor with shelves on both sides that reach the ceiling, the very large room with only one shelf in its very center, the room beyond the beaded curtains next to the poster of a black circle in a black field, but each of these descriptions could apply to any number of places in the store, and, hence, would be vacuous.) I see a clerk standing next to a tape player and a rewinding machine. She is rewinding a tape in the rewinding machine and fast forwarding a tape on the tape player. When the tapes are at their ends, she exchanges the rewound tape for the fast-forwarded tape and repeats the process. She has a tattoo on her arm, but it is of an octopus. I ask her whether she has seen the authoritative clerk. That depends, she tells me, who wants to know. I tell her I am seeking a particular tape, the original. At first she is silent, and there is only the whirring of the rewinding machine. At length she discloses that she herself is the authoritative clerk, that she disseminates misleading rumors about the nature of her own tattoo in order to avoid plots, she is not inclined to help me, my task is anathema, etc. I press her for reasons, as if the clerks were reasonable. She replies that a tape like the one I seek could only be found near the exits to the store, to entertain the possibility of such a tape would be to fathom the exits, the exits cannot exist, even saying the word is to flirt with insanity, though perhaps in order to find the truth we must be willing to become intimate with madness.
I do not feel trust toward the authoritative clerk, though I share her skepticism regarding the exits, or any other portal through which the customers might have, in some distant or proximate aeon, imported the tapes. In general, it is absurd to imagine that someone, customer or deity, brought the tapes into the store at all. First of all, they (the tapes) are far too numerous. Even if we believe, with the intellectuals, that the store is finite in size (though unbounded), and hence that the number of cassettes is also finite, and even if we further assume, with the Exitists, that the store at one point had a boundary and a way of bypassing that boundary into some other non-store beyond (something the intellectuals would never allow), we are still left with inexhaustible conundra. For example (and this is not even the most dizzying), if the tapes were brought in through some portal, it would have , it stands to reason, required æons for all of the cassettes to pass through the portal. Some of the more esoteric Exitists would reply that in fact this is the case, but that the process is continuously ongoing, so that there is no contradiction: the Exit is far away from us, and it actually continues to distance itself further, because the store is forever expanding; as new cassettes enter the store, its boundaries escape us at a rate we can never overcome.
Hence you can imagine my sympathy and also my distrust of the authoritative clerk with the octopus tattoo. After lowering her eyes and muttering to herself incomprehensibly in what seems to be self-disagreement, she finally looks into my eyes with either mischief or passion. She says that she will help me, who knows why, it will in all likelihood be her and my undoing, if I insist on continuing my search for the original tape, which is doomed, I may know the tape by the markings on the spine of the case. I ask her what markings I should look for; she replies that I should not look for them at all.
I thank her for this information and depart swiftly, in part because I fear that if I linger, the authoritative clerk might complicate her testimony with further paradoxes. Exiting the corridor beyond the room where that clerk unwinds and rewinds in mutual perpetuity, I look over my shoulder to see the silhouette of a wiry and faceless figure whispering to the authoritative clerk. She raises her finger to point in my direction, and I flee the finger. I am certain that I am being pursued, and that now my pursuers (some obscure and murderous cell amongst the clerks no doubt) now know of my purpose.
5. The Markings
I take a series of sharp turns down dark corridors where the fluorescent lights hum and flash but never glow. As soon as I am convinced that no one is watching, I sit down on a metal step stool between two shelves, to gather what I am so conceited as to call my thoughts. What am I to make of the paradox of the authoritative clerk, who tells me that the original tape has a unique marking, but that I should not look for it?
There are markings on the spines of most of the tapes, but these exist, I am convinced, only to further harry the curious. For years, I believed that there was some coherent system underlying the strange series of letters, numbers and inscrutable ciphers scrawled with black marker by a wild hand on the sides of each of the cassette cases; after all, why would the codes exist if not to impose some order on the ever-surging chaos of the store? But so far as I can discern, there is no pattern, or else the pattern is so abstruse, so subtle and withdrawing, that no mortal mind could ever possibly discover it. Of course the clerks disagree. They maintain, almost shamelessly, that there is a meaning to the codes, albeit a completely mystical one, which is inconceivable to the uninitiated; that if someone were to reveal to me the hidden significance of the hieroglyphs, it would not enlighten me, only shatter what is left of my mind.
I commence to despair. With no distinguishing mark, no outer sign of the original tape’s identity, I have no hope of searching it out: even if, against the laws of probability and fate, I were to stumble across the original tape, I would never know it, and go to my death without ever repeating the encounter. Perhaps this is what the authoritative clerk was trying to tell me: that if I gave up this unending and unsung errand, I would save my trouble and perhaps my life.
I stare listlessly at the tapes on the shelves ahead of me. The numbers and letters on their translucent plastic spines seem intricately illegible, each character a miniature blueprint of the store itself. I wish I could annihilate each number and letter, each marker scribble on each spine throughout all the store.
Then it occurs to me: I have seen it. I have seen, somewhere in this endless procession of glyphs, a relief, a blankness. The image appears before me as in a dream: the broad shelf, the dense-packed tapes, spines dark with codes; and amongst them, directly in the center of the shelf, a single rectangle of milky white. There is a tape with no markings, and it is this tape I must discover.
I am so struck by this realization that I say it out loud. “There is a tape with no markings,” I say aloud, “and it is this tape I must discover.” I instantly clap my hand over my mouth and glance about for any eavesdroppers. At the corner of a turn in the shelves, I see a dark-clad figure; observing my observation, the figure (who is almost certainly the one who inquired after me with the authoritative clerk) shrinks back around the corner; in a moment, I hear the tell-tale rustling of a bead curtain, and he is gone.
Now I am being followed, by some radical and even bloodthirsty element amongst the clerks, who know that I seek the original tape. At first I am afraid: it does not seem beyond the clerks to put me to death for my belief in the original tape. But at the same time, does not the seriousness of their concern lend legitimacy to my otherwise fruitless quest? Of course, this speculation assumes that the clerks know something I don’t, and nothing could be less certain.
6. The Theory of the Original
I have observed evidence that might imply, to the sufficiently apostate, a genealogy of the tapes. Imagine the following: you are wandering the store (what else could anyone ever imagine doing?), and you find that you are too exhausted to go on; you despise the tapes, have spent your entire life watching them, have sworn that you would sooner leap down a stairwell to your death than watch even a single second of any of them; but of course the tapes are all there is—are, in a sense, greater than you, and get their way in the end. You sit on an overstuffed, scratchy gray armchair, reach out for a cassette without even looking (you cannot bear to look), seize the first case that brushes against your extended fingertips, open it, and insert the tape inside into the player in front of you. You hit play. The ceiling-mounted, cuboid, black monitor before and above you hums and crackles; slowly a series of images fade into view.
There, completely subject to the tape, you observe the following: two clerks are standing in an aisle of shelves; they begin to caress one another; they tear off one another’s nondescript black golf shirts and black denim trousers. They begin to fornicate there, amidst the tapes. You wish that you could stop seeing this, but you cannot even succeed in wishing because of the violent hypnosis of the tape; you cannot even wish that you could wish. In your feeble struggle to develop the willpower to want to look away, your eyes unfocus just long enough to observe, through your peripheral vision, the following: in the lower left corner of the screen, where the image should contain the lower half of a shelf of tapes, there is what appears to be a kind of dark stain; watching more closely, you see that something is moving inside the stain; it seems to be (but who could know for certain?) a human eye, blinking rapidly, darting its black iris nervously, first this way, then that. The eye seems to see you; it seems, in its way, to cry out. Then the stain disappears, and all that remains on the screen are the two clerks, sitting naked against the shelves and smoking, which is forbidden.
What could possibly explain such a phenomenon? Let us leave aside for now the providence of the fornicating clerks, which might be evidence that the tapes are recorded from the security cameras throughout the store, but which might just as easily be the result of dramatization (which seems more likely, since the clerks seem in my experience to be completely disinterested in sex, or anything other than the tapes). The real question is: What is this stain, and what is this eye? No one could possibly know for certain. It is, of course, possible that the stain and the eye are part of the same footage as the two clerks: either the entity (I dare not say person) who created the tape also created the stain and the eye, or (but this is madness) there actually was a stain and an eye recorded there, hovering in space, just beyond the copulating clerks, dark and flitting, amidst the shelves. I cannot pretend to dismiss this possibility. But what if the stain was not a stain at all? What if the eye was not merely an eye, but a person, cruelly effaced and imprisoned within other images? In other words, what if the footage you see in the tape has been copied over some other, darker footage, but incompletely, so that all that remains of the now-superseded and all-but-lost previous footage is that stain, with its hideous eye? If so, then we would know (know?) that the tapes were copies, and that something older came before, a hypothesis that we must be prepared to entertain, even if it destroys us.
7. With Respect to Odors
If I had inexhaustible space, I would tell the reader about the smell of the store: how the red, brown and gray carpet releases, beneath every footfall, a musk of mold and dust, with a vanishing hint of sweat. The tapes have their own aroma: the withered aroma of aging plastic and ashy magnetic film…
8. The Stairs
Instead I will take the briefest moment to enlighten you with respect to the stairs. I have said that the store continues, whether without end or simply beyond all possible experience, it is impossible to know. But this continuation is not merely horizontal. There are many stories to the store, many catwalks and corridors, stacked high upon one another; sometimes one follows a single corridor for days without a turn or widening, whilst other times one dares to gaze over the iron handrailing of a catwalk and encounters the vertiginous abyss, a bottomless chasm criss-crossed by other catwalks and bristling with shelves. I once dropped a cassette over the side of a catwalk, and watched it fall, noiselessly, into oblivion.
There are many, many levels to the store, many ways in which its shelves intricate themselves, but there is only one way to pass between these levels: the stairs. The stairs are all of one type: a spiral staircase of cast iron, punishingly narrow, that rings like a vortical bell under one’s feet and seems to sway, sickeningly, under the slightest weight.
I manage to stumble into the lower chirality of one of these iron staircases and half-collapse against its cool metal banister. After a few dozen panicked, shallow breaths, my vision clears, and I find my eyes following the curve of the stair upward, where it seems to narrow and vanish hypnotically. I have the sudden sensation that I have stared up through this staircase already, already nodded under the somnolent influence of its gyration. I am drawing nearer to my master, the tape. I ascend the stairs painfully, using my whole body to lever myself onto each stair. The iron shivers beneath me, and I grip the banister until it hurts my hands.
What is it like? It is not like anything: this is all I know.
Finally emerging from the vortex of the staircase after an infinite period of time, I arrive in a long corridor. At the end of the corridor is a dark beaded opening, like a dim rectangle floating in the center of a epileptic field.
7. The Shelf of Absolute Truth
Beyond the beads, I encounter the largest room I have ever seen in the store: as far as the eye can see, the shelves stand arrayed, row after row, seeming to gather on the horizon, through the trick of perspective, into a distant off-white point. In this continuity of reproductions, who could find a disruption of originality?
I walk quickly through the rows of shelves. Each shelf is seemingly identical, and soon I am engulfed by the numerousness of the shelves, the impossibility of their differentiation or analysis. Then, just as I am beginning to greet despair, even welcome it, I am suddenly struck by the certainty that I have arrived. This shelf is the shelf. Straight, white, plain, yet perfect in its plainness, this is the central shelf. In fact, I am certain at this moment that I stand in the precise center of the store, even though I have no concept of its dimensions and have every reason to believe that it has no boundaries or even any structure. Somewhere in the shelf before me, which on its surface appears to be identical to every other shelf, there lies the original tape.
I plunge my hands deep into the secret zones behind the surface of the tapes, the zones beneath their forbidding spines. I pull tapes from the shelf at hazard, but discover only further, deeper layers of tapes behind these initial tapes, and upon penetrating further (I should say “violating”), I discover even further layers of tapes. In my frenzy for tapes, I have somehow overlooked and only now become conscious of an impossible fact: all of the tapes are labeled. It is under this mass of enciphered, gnomic, rune-covered tapes that I bury myself, immuring and immured.
Soon I cannot breathe. I cry out; my arms flail around me, which only deepens the volume of plastic that threatens to suffocate me. I am so deep in the tapes that I must sweep my arms before me and kick my legs to try to reach their surface; I wish there were some easier way to describe this. It is there, in the homogeneous and cascading body of tapes, that I discover that tape which no one must ever play.
I have discovered the original tape.
How do I know it? I know it by its spinelessness, its emptiness of ciphers. I seize the translucent white clamshell (why do we call it this?) from the translucent white heap, and hold it aloft, as light in my hand as if I had the strength of a dozen clerks. Already I feel the authenticity of its footage seeping through my fingers, inoculating me against illusion with its original wisdom.
9. The Struggle for the Tape; Death
It is then that I see the long shadow across the wall, flickering in the fluorescents; the shadow grows shorter and shorter, but I do not need to turn my head: I know who has followed me here. You are too late, I say, I already possess the tape of all tapes. (Laughter.) You have no idea what you possess, he says, you believe it to be the original, but if there were an original you would never find it, it would be hidden away in some remote shelf behind thousands of bead curtains that you could never hope to penetrate, the tapes are beyond you, each of them is beyond you, even the most tawdry and commonplace tape has always been wasted on you, you even debase them with your disgusting eyes, your complete lack of discernment is like an infected boil with which no object of aesthetic interest can come into contact and escape undiseased, etc., etc.
Be that as it may, I say, not that I have the slightest concern for your insults (since we both know that if in fact I were so ignorant as to deserve banishment from the store, you would not have followed me for a period of time I cannot possibly measure, with the sole purpose, it would seem, of learning the object of my quest) (and furthermore I have never had an infected boil and hence your imagery has fallen completely flat), but even if it were true what you say and I were the basest philistine, there remains the simple fact that I have found the tape, whether or not it is what I think it is, and now there is nothing you can do about it.
Here the clerk pans into view from behind a tall pile of tapes. His face is shrouded by a black hooded sweatshirt, worn by only the surliest of the clerks; his hands emerge, almost translucent in their pallor, and reach out for the tape in my hand at an impossibly slow rate.
We struggle over the tape. It is a struggle in earnest, but actually it is quite humiliating for both of us: the store is a vast and mysterious place, but it is not physically demanding, and it becomes clear that neither of us are possessed of great athletic acumen: our thin fingers struggle for purchase against the slick plastic; he attempts to push me away but only succeeds in tumbling the both of us onto the pile of tapes, where I try to choke him but only manage to yank on the hood of his sweatshirt, which is greasy; he claws at my face; out of fear, I crawl behind a shelf of tapes; my chest is heaving from the exertion, which has been almost vanishingly brief.
When I say that I push the shelf over onto my rival, I wish to emphasize that this is not a cowardly act: first of all, this is clearly a battle to the death, where one must do what one must to survive, beyond morality and the thin line between good and evil; also, the shelves are much heavier than they look, so that upsetting one is, in its own way, a heroic act. The shelf is, as I mentioned previously, overloaded with tapes, and the descending heft of the thing must have utterly destroyed him. I decide it would be undignified to confirm this: he was a worthy adversary, and I should not degrade his death by gawking.
Rid of the interloper, I find myself alone with the infinite: the tapes, the shelves full of the tapes, the rooms full of the shelves, the corridors bristling with rooms, the store which is one great tangle of corridors, angled in a thousand glowing and inscrutable lines, like the circuits on the inside of the tape players (yes, I have seen them). What purpose do these circuits serve? What logic could they express, and what prime mover could have given life to that logic, charged it with current and light? I hold in my hand the milky and opalescent clamshell case: the tape from which all tapes have been copied, the alpha and the Betamax. Over my head I hold the case of the first video, which floats in my hands, lighter than words.
Byron Landry’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Tin House fiction blog, Conjunctions, Epoch, and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle.