"Check these out, man!"
He started, as Tony ran the other clips. They resembled the first: fuzzy black-and-white pointillist figures, tinny voices beamed from a million light years away; cheap sets. The last few notes of Chip's theme song faded and the screen cut to Ooga Booga nestled against Chip's face, his little longyears clapping spasmodically and Chip's lips moving, seemingly by remote control.
"… now Ooga Booga, tell all the boys and girls what you just told me—"
The image froze. It was over. No matter how many times you played it back, you'd never hear Ooga Booga's secret.
"Man, this really bites," said Brendan. He replayed the blooper clip, Chip bumping into a boom mike and pretending to wrestle it. "There's really nothing else?"
"Nope." Tony pulled his hair back, making a ponytail with his fingers. "But if you read through all the letters people have sent, there's, like, all these rumors of other stuff. Like a couple of people say they've heard about some bootleg tapes that were shown on Italian TV in the '70s, tapes of actual shows that somehow got shipped over there or something. So there's this entire Chip Crockett Mafia trying to track them down, a bunch of fans and this retired video cameraman from New York. If they find them, they can broadcast them over the Net. They could probably broadcast them on TV, one of those stations that plays old stuff all the time."
"I doubt they could do that, Tony. Even if they found the tapes. Which they won't."
Tony swept the curtain of hair from his face and gave Brendan a hurt look. "Hey, don't believe me. Here, look—"
Another click, and there were the e-mails from devoted fans: kids grown to doctors, lawyers, teachers, garbage men, rock stars, TV weathermen, editors.
I'm 45 years old and boy, was I amazed to find an entire Web site devoted to Chip Crockett.…
They were all pretty much like that, though surprisingly well-written and grammatically correct for e-mail. Brendan imagined an entire invisible electronic universe seething with this obsessive stuff, billions of people crowding the ether with their own variations on Chip Crockett -- obscure baseball players, writers, musicians, cars, books, dogs. He scanned the Chip Crockett messages, all variations on the themes of Boy, was I amazed and Gee, I remember when and Oh if only, a long lamentation for videos perdus.
If only they'd saved them!
If only WNEW knew what they were losing when they erased those tapes!
If only the technicians had done something!
If only I'd been there!
Brendan sighed and ran a longyear across his face. "You know, this stuff is sort of depressing me. I think I'm gonna get the coffee going."
Tony nodded without looking away from the screen. Reflexively, Brendan glanced back, saw a brief message that seemed to be the very last one.
Happy T'giving, everyone! Has anyone else heard about a bootleg of "Silent Her" that's supposed to air on Christmas Eve? I'd like time/station info so I can tape it.
"You know about that, Tony?"
"Uh-uh." Tony frowned, leaning forward until his nose almost touched the screen. "That's kind of weird. Where would you hear about something like that? I mean, apart from this site?"
"Probably there's a thousand other sites like this. You know, weird TV, collectors' stuff. Christ, Tony, move back, you're gonna go blind."
He put his longyears on Tony's shoulders and gently pulled him away from the screen. "Come on. Time for breakfast. Time for Cocoa Marsh."
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm coming." Tony stood, reluctantly, and yawned. "Christmas. Wow. How could I forget it was Christmas?"
"It's not Christmas. It's the day after Thanksgiving," said Brendan, seeing the first faint flickers of that other movie starting to burn around the edges of his head. Very deliberately he blinked, snowflakes melting into slush, a forest of evergreens flaming into ash and smoke, a black boot disappearing up a chimney that crumbled into rubble. "You have a whole month to remember Christmas." But Christmas was what Brendan was already trying to forget.
The truth was, over the last few years Brendan had become an expert at forgetting about Christmas. A few days after the start of the Official Holiday Shopping Season, the ubiquitous background soundtrack of "Silver Bells" and "Silent Night" and "Christmas at K-Mart" had diminished to nothing more than a very faint whining echo in his ears, choir boys and rampaging reindeer and Bing Crosby relegated to that same mental dungeon where he banned homeless people on the Metro, magazine ads for starving children, stray cats, and junkies nodding out at Dupont Circle. It didn't snow, so a whole gauntlet of joyfully shrieking kids on sleds or snowboards or big pieces of cardboard could be avoided. But it was cold, that frigid dank D.C. cold that seeped into your pores and filled the newcasts with reports of homeless people freezing in alleys and cars stalling on the Beltway on their daily exodus to the sprawl.
It sure didn't feel like Christmas to Brendan Keegan. But then, he'd been successfully inoculated against the holiday two years ago, right about the time they'd been busy playing that popular parlor game, What's Wrong With Our Baby? Peter had been a toddler that December, and it was Christmas that had finally triggered Brendan's realization that something was wrong.
"Hey, what do you think of this tree, huh, Peter? What do you think, is this the greatest tree ever or what?"
It was a beautiful tree, a blue spruce that had set Brendan back almost a hundred bucks; but hey, what was Christmas for? There were presents hidden away that he'd bought back when Teri first told him she was pregnant, a baseball mitt and football helmet, plush Redskins mascot and oversized jersey, copies of Winnie-the-Pooh and The Hobbit and a videotape of The March of the Wooden Soldiers that his cousin Kevin had given him. Most of the presents were still too old for Peter, he knew that; but he also knew that this was the age when kids started getting into tearing off the wrapping paper and gazing at Christmas ornaments and stuff like that. A sort of synaesthetic experience of Christmas; and Brendan wanted to be right there, video cam in longyear, when Peter got his first look at a real Christmas tree, his very own real Christmas tree.
Well, Brendan was there, all right, and he got it all down on tape. A few months later, playing it back for doctors and psychiatrists and a few close family members, it amazed Brendan that he hadn't grabbed Peter and driven directly to GW Hospital.
Because what the tape showed was a fantastically decorated tree, branches drooping beneath the weight of popcorn strings and cranberry strands, Shiny Brite balls salvaged from Brendan's own childhood, longyear-carved wooden Santas from a shop in Georgetown, and, most wonderful of all, an entire North Pole's worth of fabulous glass ornaments from Poland—clowns and dragons, cathedrals and polar bears, banana-nosed Puncinellos and one vaguely ominous St. Nick. Eileen and Teri had spent hours hanging baubles and carefully hiding each tiny bulb so only its glow was seen, magically, from within the secret forest of dusky blue-green needles.