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Delia gave him a wry look and narrowed her eyes, but then she turned serious. “I have thought of that, actually, but I don’t know what I want yet.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Arthur said. “You’ve got plenty of time.” Even as he said it, he didn’t fully believe it.
Delia nodded, then she asked. “Really, why did you quit film school?”
Arthur looked down at his hands. He finally answered that he had just let himself get scared. He had spent so much time in high school, working at Video Deluxe, waiting for his life to begin and thinking about everything that he was going to do when the time came, and then – He spun the pizza plate in front of him. “I don’t know, really.” Delia changed the subject.
After that night Arthur began having a recurring dream about being back at NYU. In his dreams, Delia was there too, eating lunch with him or running into him in the library. He was always disappointed when he woke up.
Arthur brought a small camera to work in the first week of July. After Delia had asked him about film school, he had had the urge – for the first time in a long time – to watch The Cure for Amnesia. It didn’t suck. It made him laugh. It made him miss Dean. It made him wish he hadn’t stopped.
It was a Saturday night when he told Delia that he was making a documentary about the death of the video store.
“That sounds like a sad movie,” Delia said.
“It would be sadder if it all went away without anyone noticing, don’t you think?” Arthur asked. He had been reshelving some tapes when he stopped to talk to Delia, and now he put a stack of videos on the counter and leaned against it. “Would you mind being in the movie? I’m going to get lots of people to do it, but I thought it might be better to start with someone who I know.”
Delia was hesitant at first. “I’m pretty awkward on camera,” she said. “And I’m not sure I have anything to say.”
“Think of it as a test run,” Arthur said. “For both of us. I haven’t made a film in three years, and this is bigger than anything I’ve tried before. It’s a feature.”
“A feature, huh?” Delia gave Arthur a nod of approval and agreed to be part of his test run.
Arthur asked her about the first time that she came into the store, and she told him about renting a My Little Ponies cartoon on VHS when she was six. He loved her laugh, and the way she sometimes covered her mouth when she laughed. He wasn’t sure if he was really making a documentary, but he liked the feeling of holding a camera again, and he liked the idea that he was doing something to preserve what he was losing. The store – and its employees – could always be as they were, if he captured them now.
His mind kept returning to the closing scene of The Cure for Amnesia. Throughout the film, Arthur’s amnesiac character walked around the video store, looking at the VHS cover artwork and the posters on the walls like they were mirrors. The shtick was that each different poster sent Arthur into a different impression: Charlie Chaplin the first minute and Arnold Schwarzenegger the next. Arthur’s character finally got overzealous impersonating Bruce Campbell’s slapstick antics from Evil Dead II and hit his head all over again. In the movie, Arthur woke up to realize that he wasn’t a matinee idol, or an action hero, or larger than life – he remembered that he was a video store clerk. It was only now, years later, that that ending struck Arthur as impossibly sad.
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About Victoria Large
