Chapter 7
VIRGIL KILGORE: There was a stretch there where I watched somebody I loved get taken apart by this business.
Her record didn't work. That's all it was.
That's the whole thing. It didn't work, and they let her go, and I sat in a room with her and watched her be a person who wasn't going to get to do the thing anymore.
(pause)
And I decided something. I decided I was not going to be that. I don't know if that's an ugly thing to say. It's true. I looked at what happened to my wife and I got hungry. That was the year I got hungry.
The engine ran. The heater came up warm on her shins. Somewhere behind the house a crow was going.
Amber undid the elastic on the accordion folder and opened it on the steering wheel.
Everything in it was clean. That was the first thing.
Every page in that folder was letter-size and printed and stapled where it needed stapling, and the whole of it had the particular smell of an office, and she thought about the shoebox of unlabeled Polaroids in box fifty-two and had to breathe once through her mouth.
The first section was schedules. Shooting days, locations, permissions.
The second section was clearances.
The third section had a cover sheet on it, and the cover sheet said:
KILGORE — LOCKED PICTURE APPROVAL — ARTIST Runtime: 118:04
She looked at the date.
June the twelfth.
She looked at it for a while. Her thumb was on the corner of the page and the corner of the page was doing a small thing under it. June the twelfth, and the premiere had been the thirteenth of October, and she did not have to do the arithmetic because the arithmetic did itself.
Four months.
At the bottom of the sheet, in the box marked NOTES, there were three lines, typed by somebody in an office from something he had said out loud.
1. Confirm master-use on "Tall Grass" (V.K. believes it is the '02 cut, not the '99).
2. 00:37:10 — session misdated. Card says 1993, was 1994. V.K. is certain.
3. Bowling Green section runs long. V.K. suggests trimming to move the film into the arena years sooner.
Underneath that, a signature. His. The big one, the one he does for the front of a shirt, with the K that swallows everything.
Amber sat in her truck in her own driveway with a piece of paper on the wheel.
He had watched it.
He had sat somewhere in June and watched a hundred and eighteen minutes and four seconds of it, and he had been paying attention — God, he had been paying such close attention.
He had caught a card that was off by a single year.
Off by one year, in a session from 1993, and he had been certain, and he had been right, because he is always right about that.
And he had watched the Bowling Green section and thought it ran long.
He had watched the part of his life where a woman walked forty steps across an empty room to get him, and the thought he had was that it was slow.
She turned the page.
There were two emails behind it.
The first was dated in March of the year before. From Julia Novak, to Lonnie Barlow's office, cc a line of addresses, and the third address on the cc line was Virgil's.
Lonnie — following up. I'd very much like to sit down with Amber.
I've now spent nine days in that barn and it's obvious to me that she is the spine of this whole story and I don't think the film works without her in it.
I don't need a lot — two hours, wherever she's comfortable, no crew if that helps. Please ask her. Julia
Below it, the reply. Same day. Four hours later.
Julia — Asked and answered. She's a private person and she's said no to this kind of thing before. Let's leave it. L.B.
The second exchange was from March of this year. Twelve days before the picture locked.
Lonnie — Last try, and then I'll drop it, I promise.
I'll come to her. I'll shoot it myself on one camera.
She doesn't have to talk about her own record if she doesn't want to — I'd take her on the tapes alone.
Right now I have a film about a man who came from nowhere and I know that isn't true and I can't fix it without her. Julia
Julia — I've put it to her again. Same answer. She'd rather the film be about him. Let's respect that. L.B.
cc: V. Kilgore
Amber read it three times.
I've put it to her again.
Nobody had put anything to her. Not once.
Not in March of last year, not in March of this year, not in any month of any year.
She had driven reels to town in a milk crate and made a corrected timeline on index cards in her own hand and no human being had ever asked her to sit in a chair and say one word.
She had believed it was scheduling.
She had sat in that theater and been embarrassed, in the specific private way of a woman who assumes she has been overlooked because she wasn't important enough to remember.
She turned the page again. There was nothing else. Insurance certificates. A delivery schedule.
She put it all back in the folder and did the elastic.
Then she sat with both hands on the wheel and looked at the barn through the windshield, and heard herself make a sound she had never made before, one short ugly noise like something coming out of a drain, and then she was completely quiet.
Because here is what she had actually understood, sitting there.
It was not the film.
It was the eighteenth of December. It was a man saying they wanted eight, he got them to twelve. It was six weeks of being carried around like a good cup of coffee.
He had known. He had known in June. He had known when she came home in November with a duffel bag and a pillow.
He had known on the counter in that kitchen.
He had known while he sat in his truck recording her a story about his father that he had not told her in fourteen years, and he had known every single time he said her name in the dark.
She had been happy for six weeks.
And there was no way — there was no way, not now, not ever, not on her deathbed — to go back through those six weeks and sort out which parts of them had been true.
That was the thing he had taken. Not the movie. The last six weeks of her life, permanently, retroactively, with no possibility of appeal.
She shut the engine off and got out and walked down to the barn instead.
She didn't turn the overhead on. She stood inside the door in the cold with the folder under her arm and let her eyes come around.
Two hundred and forty board tapes. Thirty-one linear feet of shelving she had put up herself with a borrowed drill in 2014.
The card file. The bench. The oven she baked tapes in, which is a countertop oven from a yard sale in Pegram with a piece of tape on the dial where 130 degrees is.
The Polaroids in the shoebox. The chair somebody would have put in front of the north window in the spring.
She had been twenty-seven when she started it. She had done it because somebody had to and because she was good at it and because she had needed, that year, very badly, to be good at something.
Fifteen years. Four thousand cards.
And a man had walked into a hotel room in June and watched all of it turned into a hundred and eighteen minutes, and the three things he had to say were about a clearance, a card that was off by a year, and the fact that Bowling Green was slow.
She stood there a while.
Then she said, out loud, to a building, "Well."
And went up to the house.
The house was warm and smelled like woodsmoke.
He was in the good room with the fire going and the television on low with the sound of a basketball game, in the chair, in his socks.
"Hey," he said, and looked up, and stopped.
He came out of that chair fast for a big man.
"What happened," he said. "Amber. What."
She held up the folder.
He looked at it. She watched him not know what it was for about a second, and then watched him know.
The color went out of his face in a way she had only seen once, in a hospital corridor in 2018.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay."
"Where'd you —"
"Box fifty-two," she said. "Under the ninety-sixes. Somebody put it in my barn."
"Amber, let me —"
"June the twelfth."
"Let me —"
"You watched it," she said, "in June."
He put his hands out, palms down, the way you'd calm a horse. "It's not — that's not a screening, honey, that's not what that is. They send a link. You get a link and you watch it on a laptop in a hotel and somebody calls you the next morning and you tell them what's wrong with it —"
"You told them what was wrong with it."
"I told them a card was off by a year —"
"You told them Bowling Green ran long."
He stopped.
"You watched Bowling Green," she said, "and you had a note about it, and the note was that it was slow."
"That's not —"
"Say the rest of it."
He didn't.
"You watched the sixty-four minutes," Amber said. "You watched yourself say it. You sat in a hotel room in June and you heard yourself say I looked at what happened to my wife and I got hungry and you had three notes and not one of them was that."
"I didn't hear it like that."
"No," she said. "I know. That's not the part."
She put the folder on the table by the door and took the two emails out of it and held them.
"March of last year," she said. "And March of this year. She asked twice."
He was shaking his head — not denying it, she understood; it was the other kind, the kind a man does at himself.
"Lonnie said she —"
"Lonnie said I've put it to her again. And you were copied. Both times. Your address is right here." She held it out. He didn't take it. "Virgil. Did you read them?"
He looked at the fire.
"Don't do that," she said. "Don't take a minute. Did you read them."
"Yes."
The word went into her like a nail.
"I read the second one," he said.
"And?"
"And I —" He put his hand over his mouth and took it away again. "I thought, she doesn't want to do it. That's what I thought. Amber, you turned down the magazine in 2019. You wouldn't do the thing for the label at Christmas. You have hated a camera for as long as I've known you —"
"I have hated your cameras."