I am seven years old, maybe eight—it’s hard to tell from the only fuzzy images I still have of this night. All I know for sure is that I’m an anxious young kid lying awake in bed, that my eyes are squeezed shut and my head is pounding, and that this is where the “tapes” begin.
It is sometime back in the early 1970s, this particular night, and I am passing its long hours deep beneath my covers, trying to make sense of the pictures I keep looping through my mind. There’s a moving gray car, and a boy in the backseat leaning out the window, shouting something to me as I walk with my mother and sister down San Mateo Avenue. And then there’s a shot of me stopping cold in my tracks, ratcheting my neck a full ninety degrees as the mysterious voice whizzes by. Over and over again, I am replaying these sequences, along with a looped track of the boy’s “Heeeeyyyyyy” trailing off like a train whistle as the gray car disappears down the street.
I am doing all this because I have no other choice. Two days have come and gone since the scene with the passing car played out for real, and I have filled them with every possible effort to determine just who was trying to get my attention, and why. I have grilled my mother and sister, but neither even noticed the car or the voice on San Mateo Avenue. I have asked all my friends, hoping one of them might have been the boy in the backseat, but each has assured me he wasn’t. So now I’m left with no viable option but to try to re-create for myself the ten or so seconds that hold all my answers.
The pictures come without effort for me, probably because of all the practice I’ve had. The Vietnam War is playing nightly on TV sets everywhere, and at bedtime for months now I’ve taken to conjuring up and playing back the haunting black-and-white war footage my parents watch over dinner. Soldiers marching through swamps. Bombs dropping, sending everything on our tiny screen flying. I hate the vivid images and the what-if questions they always raise when I’m trying to fall asleep: What if I have to go to war? What if I have to kill another human being? What if I die—what happens to me then? Still, I’m certain that all kids must battle this problem, so I learn to work around the moving war pictures night after night.
The passing car images are different, though. They aren’t violent like the Vietnam ones. They don’t even scare me. But for some reason, they have even more power over me than the worst of the combat scenes. It’s just something about how they taunt me, promising me the answers I’m looking for, if only I will take the time to review them carefully enough.
I can’t see a reason not to, so I squeeze my eyes even tighter and I play back the whole scene yet again.
And again.
And again.
There are footsteps in the hallway now. Mom must be turning out lights and locking up our house for the night. This is my big chance.
“Mommy?”
The footsteps stop. I can tell my mother is standing in my doorway. “You’re supposed to be sleeping,” she whispers. “It’s nearly eleven o’clock.”
“I still can’t figure it out,” I mumble from beneath my covers.
“Figure what out?”
“The boy in the car.”
Mom says nothing, so I pull back the blanket from my head and look up at her. “San Mateo Avenue? The kid who yelled something?”
“Sweetheart, we’ve already gone over all this,” Mom says.
“I know.”
My mother stares at me for a second or two, then tilts her head a bit to the side. “You’ve run out of things to worry about again, haven’t you, sweetie?” It’s the standing joke in our house: Jeff gets worried when he has nothing to worry about.
“You don’t understand,” I throw back at her.
She shakes her head. “No, honey, I guess I don’t. Are you afraid that someone is going to hurt you?”
“No.”
“That someone was out to scare you?”
“No.”
“Then why can’t you just accept that someone you know was trying to say hi?”
“Because I neeeed to know who that was.”
“But why?”
She has me there. I don’t have an answer. I don’t know why. I look away in silence.
“Honey, I’m sure this isn’t what you want to hear,” she finally says, “but chances are you will never know.”
No! Don’t say that, I want to yell at my mother. Tell me anything about the boy and the car. But please, I’m begging you, don’t tell me that I’m never going to know.
“Okay,” I mutter instead and kiss my mother goodnight.
I wait for the last light in the house to go out and the footsteps to stop. I pull the covers back up. Then I squeeze my eyes shut once more and, in my head, I back up the passing car yet again.