Except it hadn’t been. Pete knew every video store in the county, from the big chains to the tiny place staffed by film students up by the university to the little porno shop downtown that sometimes sold classic Italian horror flicks and bootleg Asian movies. He’d never even heard of this place, and he walked this way at least twice a week. Pete believed in movies like other people believed in God, and he couldn’t understand how he’d overlooked a store just three blocks from his own apartment. He pushed open the door, and a bell rang. The shop was small, just three aisles of DVDs and a wall of VHS tapes, fluorescent lights and ancient, blue industrial carpet, and there were no customers. The clerk said, “Let me know if you need any help,” and he nodded, barely noticing her beyond the fact that she was female, somewhere south of thirty, and had short pale hair that stuck up like the fluff on a baby chick.
Pete headed toward the classics section. He was a cinematic omnivore, but you could judge a video store by the quality of its classics shelf the same way you could judge a civilization by the state of its prisons. He looked along the row of familiar titles—and stopped at a DVD turned face-out, with a foil “New Release” sticker on the front.
Pete picked it up with trembling hands. The box purported to be the director’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles.
“Is this a joke?” he said, holding up the box, almost angry.
“What?” the clerk said.
He approached her, brandishing the box, and he could tell by her arched eyebrows and guarded posture that she thought he was going to be a problem. “Sorry,” he said. “This says it’s the director’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, with the missing footage restored.”
“Yeah,” she said, brightening. “That came out a few weeks ago. You didn’t know? Before, you could only get the original theatrical version, the one the studio butchered—”
“But the missing footage,” he interrupted, “it was lost, destroyed, and the only record of the last fifty minutes was the continuity notes from the production.”
She frowned. “Well, yeah, the footage was lost, and everyone assumed it was destroyed, but they found the film last year in the back corner of some warehouse.”
How had this news passed Pete by? The forums he visited online should have been buzzing with this, a film buff’s wet dream. “How did they find the footage?”
“It’s an interesting story, actually. Welles talks about it on the commentary track. I mean, it’s a little scattered, but the guy’s in his nineties, what do you expect? He—”
“You’re mistaken,” Pete said. “Unless Welles is speaking from beyond the grave. He died in the 1980s.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, then smiled falsely. Pete could practically hear her repeating mental customer service mantras: the customer is always right, even when he’s wrong. “Sure, whatever you say. Do you want to rent the DVD?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I don’t have an account here.”
“You local? We just need a phone number and ID, and some proof of address.”
“I think I’ve got my last pay stub,” Pete said, rooting through his wallet and passing over his papers. She gave him a form to fill out, then typed his information into her computer. While she worked he said, “Look, I don’t mean to be a jerk, it’s just—I’d know. I know a lot about movies.”
“You don’t have to believe me,” she said, tapping the DVD case with her finger. “Total’s $3.18.”
He took out his wallet again, but though it bulged with unsorted receipts and scraps of paper with notes to himself, there was no cash. “Take a credit card?”
She grimaced. “There’s a five-buck minimum on credit card purchases, sorry—house rules.”
“I’ll get a couple of other movies,” he said.
She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was almost 10:00.
“I know you’re about to close, I’ll hurry,” he said.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
He went to the Sci-Fi shelf—and had another shock. I, Robot was there, but not the forgettable action movie with Will Smith—this was older, and the credits said “written by Harlan Ellison.” But Ellison’s adaptation of the Isaac Asimov book had never been produced, though it had been published in book form. “Must be some bootleg student production,” he muttered, and he didn’t recognize the name of the production company. But—but—it said “winner of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.” That had to be a student director’s little joke, straight-facedly absurd box copy, as if this were a film from some alternate reality. Worth watching, certainly, though again, he couldn’t imagine how he’d never heard of this. Maybe it had been done by someone local. He took it to the counter and offered his credit card.
She looked at the card dubiously. “Visa? Sorry, we only take Weber and FosterCard.”
Pete stared at her, and took back the card she held out to him. “This is a major credit card,” he said, speaking slowly, as if to a child. “I’ve never even heard of—”
Shrugging, she looked at the clock again, more pointedly this time. “Sorry, I don’t make the rules.”
He had to see these movies. In matters of film—new film! strange film!—Pete had little patience, though in other areas of his life he was easygoing to a fault. But movies mattered. “Please, I live right around the corner, just let me go grab some cash and come back, ten minutes, please?”
Her lips were set in a hard line. He gestured at The Magnificent Ambersons. “I just want to see it, as it was meant to be seen. You’re into movies, right? You understand.”
Her expression softened. “Okay. Ten minutes, but that’s it. I want to get home, too.”
Pete thanked her profusely and all but ran out of the store. He did run when he got outside, three mostly uphill blocks to his apartment in a stucco duplex, fumbling the keys and cursing, finally getting into his sock drawer where he kept a slim roll of emergency cash. He raced back to Impossible Dreams, breathing so hard he could feel every exhalation burning through his body, a stitch of pain in his side. Pete hadn’t run, really run, since gym class in high school, a decade earlier.
He reached the bakery, and the gift shop, but there was no door to Impossible Dreams Video between them—there was no between at all. The stores stood side by side, without even an alleyway dividing them.
Pete put his hand against the brick wall. He tried to convince himself he was on the wrong block, that he’d gotten turned around while running, but he knew it wasn’t true. He walked back home, slowly, and when he got to his apartment, he went into his living room, with its floor-to-ceiling metal shelves of tapes and DVDs. He took a disc down and loaded it into his high-end, region-free player, then took his remote in hand and turned on the vast plasma flat-screen TV. The surround-sound speakers hummed to life, and Pete sank into the exquisitely contoured leather chair in the center of the room. Pete owned a rusty four-door Honda with 200,000 miles on the engine, he lived mostly on cheap macaroni and cheese, and he saved money on toilet paper by stealing rolls from the bathrooms in the university’s Admissions Office, where he worked. He lived simply in almost every way, so that he could live extravagantly in the world of film.
He pressed play. Pete owned the entire Twilight Zone television series on DVD, and now the narrator’s eminently reasonable voice spoke from the speakers, introducing the tale of a man who finds a dusty little magic shop, full of wonders.