My eyes kept clinging to the screen. Please, I thought. Please let someone save him.
Once my father downed the vodka he heaved himself out of the Jacuzzi and lurched toward a towel lying on a chaise longue. After drying off he removed the bathing suit and draped it over the chaise. He wrapped the towel around himself and then moved unsteadily into the house, leaving a trail of wet, fading footprints on the concrete patio.
The camera paused and then raced around the corner and did something I was praying it would not.
It went into the house.
It moved through the kitchen. And then down a hallway.
It stopped suddenly when it caught sight of my father dragging himself up the stairs to the second floor.
And when my father turned and kept climbing, his back to the camera, the camera started creeping up the stairs behind him.
My hands were clamped over my ears, and I kept kicking the floor of my office involuntarily.
The camera stopped when it reached the second-story landing. It watched as my father entered the bathroom, a large marble space steeped in light.
I was now crying wildly, pounding my knee as I watched, helplessly transfixed. “What is happening?” I kept moaning.
The camera then crossed the hallway and stopped again. It had a vague and maddening patience.
My father stared at his frail visage in a giant mirror.
And then the camera slowly began moving toward him.
I was aware that it was about to reveal itself to him, and my entire body shuddered with dread.
It was now closer to him than it had ever been. It was directly outside the bathroom door.
And then I noticed something that had been nagging gently at whatever part of myself wasn’t preoccupied with the shock of the video.
At the bottom of the screen, on the right, in digital numbers: 2:38 a.m.
My eyes instinctively darted to the other side of the screen. 08/10/92.
This was the night my father died.
Only the sounds of his sobbing brought me out of the stunned darkness that had instantly covered everything. This was a new dimension now.
Shaking, I refocused on the screen, unable to turn away.
My father gripped the bathroom counter, still sobbing. I wanted to avert my eyes when I saw an empty vodka bottle lying next to the sink.
From somewhere in the house, “The Sunny Side of the Street” began playing again.
The camera kept floating closer. It was now in the bathroom.
It was closing in on my father indifferently.
I stifled a scream when I saw that there was no reflection of the camera or who was behind it in any of the mirrors that walled the bathroom.
And then my father stopped sobbing.
He looked over his shoulder.
And then he straightened up and turned around to fully face the camera.
He stared into its lens.
The camera was an invitation to die.
My father was now looking directly at me.
He smiled sadly. There was no fear.
He said one word.
“Robby.”
And as the camera rushed toward him, he said it again.
The video collapsed into darkness.
The anticlimax of not seeing what happened to my father at the moment of his death forced me to rewind the video to a crucial point that I believed could help me understand what I had just seen and suddenly my movements were calm and purposeful and I was able to concentrate solely on what I needed to do.
Because I did not think there was a camera.
Even now I can’t explain the logic of this, but I did not believe there was a camera in my father’s house that night in August of 1992.
(There had been “certain irregularities,” according to the coroner’s report.)
I found the image of my father standing in the kitchen, with the camera watching him through the window.
And I located immediately what I thought was the answer.
A small, flesh-colored image in the corner of the video, in the lower right-hand quadrant of the screen. It was the reflection of a face in window glass.
It moved in and out of focus even though the image of my father remained steady.
There was no camera videotaping this.
I was seeing something through the eyes of a person.
I enlarged the image.
I pressed Pause and enlarged the image again.
The face became clearer without the overall image being distorted.
I enlarged the image once more and then stopped because I didn’t have to anymore.
At first I thought the face reflected in the window was mine.
For one moment the video showed me that I had been there that night.
But the face wasn’t mine.
His eyes were black, and the face belonged to Clayton.