the year i got the reel-to-reel was the year that everything died: the man in the storm that spring, her father in the hospice that autumn, all those people from the plague that haunted every screen in the house in between them. it got to be too much. that’s when i got the reel-to-reel.
the machine could only tell you what it had heard before in dusty little whispers, but you had to shove a piece of tinfoil between the battery and the pickup to get it to remember anything. when you did that, whatever was on its mind would come spooling out ghost-like, the only power behind its voice from an old motor, as if it shouldn’t have been happening at all.
“can you please shut it off?” she used to say to me.
“hang on,” i would tell her. “it’s just about to get to the good part.”
“just shut it off,” she would say. “please just shut it off.” it wasn’t until it was too late that i realized it reminded her of her dead father, speaking to her now from well beyond the other side.
i never found out what her father really sounded like. all i knew was that his name was willie.
whether it was willie or not, i still couldn’t stand the movie. the real ghost is the one you let go on living: the woman there has gotten lost, without a clue as to what it was she used to recognize, and the man inside just yawns into his telephone about his dreams and his freud, the frames shown side-by-side like that, split-screen from the beginning to the end. or at least until the 45-minute mark.
anyway, it got to be too much. it reminded me of the godamned reel-to-reel.
“nixon wins in a landslide,” is all i remember that thing ever telling me.