False Memory

Furious with herself for being so shamefully timid, shaking more with anger and frustration than with fear, sick of being a helpless victim, after having been anything but a victim for most of her life, she wished fervently that she could overcome her agoraphobia and go outside, storm across the beach, kick through the sand to the crest of each dune, and either confront her tormentor or prove to herself that he was not out there. But she didn’t have the courage to stalk the stalker, wasn’t able to do anything but hide and wait.

She couldn’t even hope for deliverance, because her hope, which had long sustained her, had recently shrunk until, if given physical substance, it would not be visible through either a magnifying glass or the most powerful microscope.

Magnifying glass.

As she dropped the cord of the window shade, Susan picked up a new idea, turned it around in her mind, and liked the shape of it. Housebound by agoraphobia, she couldn’t stalk her stalker, but maybe she could watch him while he watched her.

In the bedroom closet, above the hanging clothes, on the top shelf, was a vinyl carrying case containing a pair of high-power binoculars. In better days, when she had not been unnerved by the very sight of the sunlit world in all its vastness, she had enjoyed watching sailboat regattas staged along the coast and larger ships bound for South America or San Francisco.

With a two-step folding stool borrowed from the kitchen, she hurried to the bedroom. The binoculars were where she expected to find them.

Stored on the same shelf, among other stuff, was an item that she had forgotten. A video camera.

The camcorder had been one of Eric’s short-lived enthusiasms. Long before he moved out, he had lost interest in taping and editing home movies.

An electrifying possibility short-circuited Susan’s plan to survey the dunes for a concealed observer.

Leaving the binoculars untouched, she lifted down the hard-plastic case containing the video camera and associated gear. She opened it on the bed.

In addition to the camcorder, the case contained a spare battery pack, two blank tapes, and an instruction book.

She had never used the camera. Eric had done all the taping. Now she read the instruction book with keen interest.

As usual when pursuing a new hobby, Eric had not been saris-fled with ordinary tools. He insisted on owning the best, state-of-the-art equipment, cutting-edge gadgetry. This hand held video camera was compact but nevertheless provided the finest available lenses, near flawless image and sound recording, and whisper-quiet operation that would not register through the microphone.

Instead of accepting only twenty- or thirty-minute tapes, it could accommodate a two-hour cassette. It also featured an extended-recording mode, using fewer inches of tape per minute, which allowed three hours of recording on a two-hour tape, though the resultant image was said to be ten percent less clear than that produced at standard speed.

The camcorder was so energy efficient and the rechargeable battery pack was so powerful that two to three hours of operation could be expected, depending on how much you used the image monitor and the various other power-draining features.

According to the built-in gauge, the installed battery pack was dead. Susan tested the spare pack, which held a partial charge.

Not certain that the dead pack could be revived, she used the charging cord to plug the livelier battery into a bathroom outlet, to bring it up to full readiness.

The glass of Merlot was on an end table in the living room. She raised it as if making a silent toast, and this time she drank not for solace but in celebration.

For the first time in months, she genuinely felt that she was in control of her life. While she knew that she was taking just a single small step to resolve only one of the many grievous problems that plagued her, knew that she was far from truly being in control, Susan didn’t temper her excitement. At least she was doing something, at long last, and she desperately needed to be lifted by this rush of optimism.

In the kitchen, as she cleaned up the preparations for chicken marsala and took a pepperoni pizza from the freezer, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of the camcorder weeks or months ago. Indeed, she began to realize that she had been surprisingly passive, considering the horror and abuse she’d endured.