I couldn’t tell you when the video store became a black hole. It was gradual, for sure, like the death of a star. It was only meant to be a temporary job — something to take my mind off things while I sorted myself out. The flashbacks would dissolve as soon as the LED sign marking ‘Horizon Videos Pte Ltd’ came into view. Modest in size and patchworked with show posters, it was ultimately muted amongst the mosaic of age-faded shops in the 70’s-built mall.
I’d gravitate toward it, as I always had with my grandfather. The Lost Boys, we’d call ourselves — one bent with age, one small and shaking – seeking refuge among tapes ready for rent or sale.
Our visits had elongated as I started Secondary school, my grandfather taking longer to squint at the shelves, tugging titles gingerly with tremorous hands. I savoured the humdrum of this holy routine, and dawdled under the soothing drone of familiar Tony Leung flicks on the LCD TV. My grandfather knew I needed the reprieve — he was patient with my sensitive temperament where my parents were not. And the nice uncle in charge, Mr. Krishnan, would never rush us.
The Horizon’s main collection would gradually transform to DVDs, like a metamorphosing wave swept through most of the shelves. It didn’t dispose of its VHS collection, of course, but most moved into the backroom. The customers and staff too would flow, growing and waning over my school years, ballooning and deflating like a lung. But it would always remain the same serene store, and I was a
creature of habit — returning to my favourites, rewinding again and again.
I did have a life outside the store – a bright one, in fact, or so my academic advisors would claim. I did well at A-levels and continued doing so in uni – a reputable one my parents boasted about to relatives over Lunar New Year steamboat. I was almost done with my coursework, on track to starting my thesis work on Hawking radiation, when the rupture occurred.
My parents would call it a nervous breakdown – they’d always brace for them on trips to the supermarket and concerts, grumble at having to coddle me through panic attacks on their hard-earned holidays. They understood my episodes as ‘motion sickness’, or, a ‘childish fear of crowd and noise’. A fear I couldn’t grow out of sooner. I’d try to explain the untethering sensations as ‘disorientation’. My subsidized (and therefore limited-time) therapist would pen it in my case notes as ‘agoraphobia-related panic attacks, triggered by sensory processing disorder’.
Whatever its name, the anxiety built unbearably to a burst; and the debris of my person fell into the Horizon.
My refuge and my rehab, going from customer to staff was a shoo-in. I was already familiar with its collection and all the store’s curmudgeonly tech. My gratitude towards Mr. Krishnan for giving me the job was politely acknowledged, but gently brushed off. I would eventually come to sense what he did: that although it was his name on my employment contract, there was an unexplainably acute sense that, rather than Mr. Krishnan himself having hired me, it was the store that chose me — opening a vacuum in the shape of me, swallowing me in. Like a tape feeding neatly into a VCR’s open slot.
My time there dilated as I rode the dull waves of cleaning, cataloguing, cashiering – and of course, rewatching my favourite films in the lull between sparse customers, taking pleasure in rewinding the reels of familiar tape.
My grandfather had passed by then. The movies opened passage to our golden afternoons, marathoning cartoon classics, cult-hit creature features, cutthroat Wu Xia flicks – the old films haphazard homilies to reliable, ageless joy. Everyone understood that his death crushed me, but they could not understand the ‘static’ that filled my head: episodes of grief and dread that made the world blurry in poor-signal snow, inaudible in buzzing tones, like watching TV with an antenna out of shape.
The store dampened the static, made things bearable. I’d never felt more calm in years. It planted in me the mistaken belief that I was healing, and ready to begin my life again.
Returning to uni after my extended leave of absence was fine, the first few weeks. As for what triggered the second disconnection…the bumpy bus ride, maybe, or poor sleep? Perhaps the cross-firing cacophony in the lecture hall, packed with moving bodies, the bewildering glare of LED screens? Or the Professor’s mic peaking as she paused her lesson, on Quantum Entanglement, to give us a piercing warning that the deadlines were non-negotiable, just like in the ‘real world’.
Starting low, then rising: sharp, piercing, raw. The static crept in again from the corners of my eyes. My ears flooded with torrential hissing, my stomach with the writhe of electrified tape.
I bolted.
They would grant me another semester of absence, then expel me with deepest regrets when another could not be accommodated. Maladaptive and broken, too dysfunctional for the world, where else could I shelter, but my static shrine of nostalgia?
My parents weren’t happy – I could not expect them to be. I did pay them back for the tuition fees they’d forked out, but they wouldn’t accept less than my return to the right course of life: finishing my degree, earning a comfortable salary, marrying a decent young man, moving out…
At least I didn’t disappoint them on that last expectation.
As our family dinners dwindled, so did my friendships. The few friends I had, while sweetly sympathetic, grew uneasy as my ‘mental health break’ prolonged. Over a smattering of karaoke sessions and prata suppers, I’d see their smiles fade as I replied honestly to their chirpy queries: “How’re you doing, babe? Still working at that video store?” Their patience for their dysfunctional peer chipped away by actual adult concerns, mortgage and taxes, jaded by inoculation to corporate 9-5, till the common ground beneath us crumbled.
I did try to leave the Horizon. Really, I did. I’d always been diligent, and that’s how I was in my search for degree programmes to transfer to. I conducted a meticulous cross-comparison of private and public institutions’, their tuition fees, the focus of their curricula, and the time commitments required. My heart would sink when I’d land on a promising programme that I couldn’t afford, or ones that needed referrals I was too ashamed to ask for. The thought of bothering my old professors for favors, after I’d let them down like that, made my limbs numb with crackling static. That twisting agony grew inside me, an electric dread of losing time – only neutralized by rewatching the likes of Matilda or Kiki’s Delivery Service. Movie misfits with potential, overcoming the odds. Neat rhythms I could follow through, to endings unvarying.
As my pursuit for further studies faltered, I didn’t lose faith just yet. Between my shifts as Horizon Video’s store assistant, I applied to other roles: data entry clerk, school lab tech, junior research engineer… Job titles I could speak of at the dinner table without needing to be sheepish, or discounting as a placeholder for a ‘real’ job to come. I would score a few interviews, and prepare myself well. But — and I know how this sounds – one way or another, the videos, the past, would bind me back.
Phone recruiters dropped the line when their ‘hello, hello?’s were met with frozen silence, as I struggled to speak around film reels that squeezed my lungs airless. HR staff emailed that my resume attachments were corrupt, filled their screens with SMPTE color bars that glitched them out and crashed. Intimidating interviews rendered me mute, when hiring managers opened their mouths to outpours of roaring static.
Is this what falling into a black hole is? Shutting my laptop on job portals, lumbering to the TV? Hypnotized by the VCR slot yawning open, closing in: abyss drawing my fingers, leading me into its gravity? A promise to compress me to uniform reels, drawing me thin as the drum unwound me; writing over my wrongs as it spun me to straightness…
And you know how I’d feel? Cataclysmically calm…
While time stretched leisurely inside the dingy store, the world barrelled on in a white-hot flash outside, with all its hostile edges. Before I knew it, I’d been serving Horizon Video for over a decade. The day-to-day was nice, predictably peaceful and numbing: a world shrunken down to my flat, and the bus, and the same old store. Known entry points and exits; fixed opening and closing times.
My peace had come muffled, accepted, by tampering my brief impulses to venture out and achieve escape velocity. Every launch attempt sucked me back, with seeping tendrils of terrified tape: slithering up my gullet when I went on dates, mummifying my fingers when I tried a baking class, petrifying me at parties in roaring, static grief. My only sedative: when enshrined in the store, in unchanging picture shows.
But things did change a little. Mr. Krishnan, the boss, a man I’d known since I was little, disappeared one day – and I can hardly tell you how. Despite our history and common sentiments, we were mutually solitary bodies. We roved around the store with respectful remoteness, a silent understanding that we were but coincidentally proximate satellites, bending round the videos’ gravity. Unlike me, he moved through revolutions with enviable surety. But, just like me, he was painfully withdrawn; gravely so after losing his partner in the 90’s.
At some point, Mr. Krishnan moved into the backroom, where most of our old VHS catalogue lay. It didn’t surprise me, somehow, when I walked in to the sight of him on a mattress, eyes fixed on a Mitsubishi LCD. On screen, Susan Sarandon rode free towards her doom in Thelma & Louise – his second favourite American flick, after Parting Glances. He was unflinching – did not see me. I apologized and gave him space, ignored the tape winding up his wrists, eclipsing his kada.
Yes, I really can’t tell you how it happened – one day, he was just gone. The memory is fuzzy… I was his only staff by then. And so, I think I must’ve opened the store as always: took stock, sold units, locked up. The next day was likely the same; what else could I have done? And after many and much of such similar days, I’d become the store’s keeper. Or perhaps, its sole satellite.
Sometimes, I wonder if Mr. Krishnan came here like I did: irresistibly pulled into the sphere of sentimentality, entangled in its inexorable ellipse. Slow-flowing into the shape vacated by his boss, while his predecessor spun into a singular collapse. Another lifetime in a long line stored neatly on our shelves…
I wonder if he found his partner again. And…hold on… why do I think this? I think he’d said his name was Chun – maybe… A dozen-odd tapes, or more. When I braced myself to clean the backroom… a VHS tape labelled “Chun”. Dated 1991.
What was on it…? No, I couldn’t play the tape. The reel was… oh god, it was….tawny? Tacky. Too sticky to rewind. And… I think… a newer tape? Newer, but tarnished, and gross. God, so grimey the label was coated. Ouch, sorry, the static… but… ow, the new tape… odd that it was dated… this year?
But that’s not important, I don’t think – not enough, anyway, for the headache it brings me to remember.
It’s closing time, soon… I think I’ll wind down, watch something classic. Maybe The Lost Boys… I love the end of that one. The grandpa busting in, to save the day? Always has me in stitches, makes me feel held. Pulls me in from unknown space… till the horizon’s too far to haunt me.