Piles of VHS Tapes

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here. I lay curled up on a thick green leather couch. After twisting and stretching for about ten minutes, I take a deep breath and relish in the comfort of those soft yet firm sofa cushions that have molded to the shape of my body during the night, I guess.

I wake up in that strange room, but feel not the slightest bit anxious - which is quite a strange feeling for a neurotic. The room is desperately quiet. The dark blue light of a winter morning cracks through a narrow-gaped window on the top corner of one of the four walls. As I wait for my eyes to adjust to the ill-lit environment, I realise the couch is in fact not green but yellow, tinted by the cold window light. I check my pockets for my phone. The checking is instinctual rather than nervous; I am more worried about the time than the mystery of my awakening in an estranged room. Of course, no phone. I peek my head out of the top of the couch back to scan the room for a sink to wash off my face. I have developed a habit of wetting my face first thing in the morning. That morning ritual is the only way to make my awoken state official, and without it I stayed in an off-colored limbo between dream and daytime. Of course, no sink. “I guess I’ll stay groggy today,” I think to myself. I would usually say it out loud, since I also have a habit of talking to myself, but realising the harsh state of cottonmouth I am in coupled with the missing sink (mouth-watering is a part of the ritual), I advise myself against it. And I don’t want to interrupt the silence in the room either. 

My initial scan of the unfamiliar room had not revealed its oddities to me. I bounce up, deciding it is time to leave the comfort of the now clearly yellow couch. I start to observe my curious environment, this time with a different kind of eyes: the first eyes were targeted, looking for a sink and only a sink. The eyes I use now are more detail-oriented. I start with myself: I feel different from how I usually feel, maybe due to the fact that I have not yet been wet and am therefore still stuck in my self-proclaimed limbo state. Or maybe it’s due to the light-baring window, which I wouldn’t mind basking under forever. In any case, I have no back pain, no morning jitters or shakes, no discomfort, which is odd since I have evidently slept on a couch, and under normal circumstances that would have not boded well for my ticks. I feel so calm, it's almost alarming. And by ‘I’ I mean my body, a body that likes to play enemy any other morning, but who is happily sedated in this room, under the dark blue light. 

The room, mirroring my body, is peaceful too. The light emanating from the half-window (that narrow opening cornering the ceiling cannot be called a fully fledged window), submerges the room into an underwater-like world, to which the acute silence contributes. ‘Under’ is the correct term; I guess I am in a basement of some kind, given the placement of the half-window. But that's as far as I’ll be guessing. The room’s mystery seems more appealing than its reality for now, and I have a strange feeling that the more I know about my new acquaintance, the more I question its dimness and silence, the more the feeling of peace over my body is going to erode. I look around the room, just a quick turn of the head, and while a thousand questions about what I see with my detail-oriented eyes flood into my head, I decide to strike a deal with the room to keep the peace. I will not ask any questions, or care for guessing, and in exchange it will allow me to stay in its softness, and my body will stay soft too. 

Not questioning, I look around the room once more with my new eyes. The bits of wall I can see are a dirty blue, which I guess means the walls are a dirty white. But there isn’t much wall to look at; the room is filled to the brim with libraries and shelves and piles of VHS tapes. I finally get up and stroll around the piles and libraries, looking up and down and left and right at the thick cases, squinting to discern the titles under the pale light, my eyes as dry as they were when I woke up. Horror movies, I guess. An educated guess given the titles I manage to read. Bad Dream on Elk Street, Friday the 31st, Hallow’s Eve, the entire collection of the Chainsaw Series, Nosferatwo… Some cases I am not able to read, even after squinting. But those illegible titles, graphed in bloody fonts and scratch marks, lend themselves to the continuation of the horror saga the room seems to like. 

I keep walking around the room at a museum pace, stepping on the old unyielding hardwood floor, each step more silent than the last. Any creak or pop would have been a bad sign, the room’s way of telling me to halt my march. But each step instead feels like a go-ahead, an invitation from the room to keep browsing and to take my time. And so I do, taking my time to read every assortment of twenty to twenty five horror and slasher cases, until I reach the last corner of the room, the one with the door. I had seen the door in my first scan, and had ever since then seen it out of the corner of my eye during my museum visit, but never dared to address it until I was facing it. It’s a wide door, with oldish French-country moldings adorning its periphery and a round blue metallic knob. It’s not a bathroom door, I can always tell bathroom doors from other doors, so no sink. Face to face with the door, and facing a new dilemma, I turn around and blow a deep breath into the room. We are now about to start an actual conversation. The first peace treaty does not count as a conversation, since a conversation entails more than one sentence or agreement, and the following stepping and squinting comments were no more than small talk. I am now going to propose another talking point: opening the door would mean questioning the room. That is: What is behind the door? Is it an exit? or an extension to the room? all questions, which would qualify as a breach of our initial treaty. I could just guess what is behind the door, no question asked, but as I said I am done with guessing too. Or I could simply open it with a blank mind. As I give these options to the room, the light grows slightly dimmer, a faded turn-off that one wouldn’t normally catch on to. But as I start to speak the room’s language, I catch the dim change and understand. Best to keep the door closed for now. 

I pace back towards the couch in the middle of the room. A weird placement now that I think about it, not questioning but noticing. With each step I take, the half-window brightens, until it is back to the serene blue lighting in which I woke up, as if my feet are dimmers treading on the room’s geography. I sit back down on the concave cushions.

Laid out in front of me, which I bizarrely hadn't noticed before, because of the lack of water no doubt and my limbo state, is a projector. “You were hiding that from me, weren't you,” I glance at the room, maintaining the silent quality of our conversation, which I have grown so fond of. I know what the projector is for, no questions needed. No guessing either, since the answer is so obvious. I get up again to scour for a movie. Looking for the perfect movie is too much of a hassle, especially since I am unfamiliar with most of them; I am not the biggest fan of horror. I choose to pick one at random: opting for pile over shelving, since the precocity of the towers are more in tune with the genre, and I want to start getting in the mood, I count to the fourth pile clockwise from the door, and take out the fourth case from the bottom. I like the number four, and I guess the room likes fours too. Four walls, four corners, four panels created by the moldings on the door, four cushions on the sofa, four legs under it too. Four seems appropriate. It’s the Shimmering. Good enough, I think, and so did the room. I turn the projector towards the door, its wideness finally making sense. It’s the only blue-white surface big enough for a projection, since all the other walls are covered by the mountains of VHS tape cases. I turn the sofa to face the door as well; I’m not going to watch the movie with my back turned to it, and the cushions look more comfortable than sitting on the solid leather back.

I’ve never been good with technology, so the prospect of figuring out how to use a projector I am unfamiliar with seems daunting. I started examining it, and the daunt quickly dissipated. It is not too big, with a VHS tape-shaped gap at the back and a power button on top. There’s an adjustable wedge on the bottom easy enough to pull out to adjust the angle of the projection. I haven’t seen a table on my museum tour, or any furniture for that matter apart from the library shelves and sofa, so I set it on the floor, in the exact spot where I found it. And now to guess what way I have to insert the VHS tape. The comedic effect of a grown-up figuring out how to insert a VHS tape in its hole is not lost on me; it’s one of those things you never get right on the first try, I think. I find myself amused, or rather pleased, to stand corrected: based on pure intuition, I grab the tape and jam it in, first try. 

I press the power button. The projector awakens almost instantaneously and starts playing The Shimmering, lighting up the door with a new array of colors. Now the room has two windows, in so far as windows are producers of light. The high, narrow blue light half-window and the multi-colored, moving projector half-window. So one window, if we are doing the math. I find this slightly disconcerting; I had come to know the room as a half-windowed entity, and would like to keep it as it was. I turn to look at the blue light half-window. It has three piles of tapes under it, piles thirteen, fourteen and fifteen if you start counting clockwise from the door, each of a different size, creating a pseudo-staircase up to the light. I pick up some tapes from the closest pile, climb the makeshift staircase and, while maintaining an upwards arm-length distance from the window as to not see what is on the other side, since seeing the outside would answer some unasked questions about the room, and the room would not be so pleased by that and neither would I, I piling the tapes again against the windowsill until the half-window is no longer in sight. Good, now we’re back to half a window. I slug back to the couch and sit down, not caring that I missed the first minutes of The Shimmering. It takes about ten more minutes for me to realise that the movie is dubbed in Spanish, a slow type of dubbing that lags a few seconds behind the characters' lips, starting conversations late and dragging them far past the next scene. No matter, I’m not intending on paying that much attention anyway. And for a fan of comedy rather than horror, this seems to make up for the room’s viewing options. Add to that the way the door’s moldings and knob distort the characters' faces and you’re in for a clown-fest. The comedic effect of the Spanish dubbing comes to a speedy halt, as the crackling off-voices seem to get louder by the minute. Louder and louder, and I realise I can no longer hear the room. I stretch out my hand towards the projector and slide it across its sides until I feel a thin dial encrusted on its left surface. I roll it until the movie is mute. Now less funny, but more enjoyable, I lift my head up and look at the ceiling for a few seconds to apologise, and I start hearing the silent room again.   

As the movie plays and slight laughs tickle my dry lips, I slowly fall back into the lying position I woke up in, my body hugging the curves it engraved during the night, my mind lulled by the slow Spanish and the moving colors of the room’s new half-window. I watch dust specks dance in the projector’s light and swiftly disappear when they exit the halo. In the three hours I have been in this room, the ten minutes for stretching, the twenty minutes for exploring and the two and half hours it takes for the Spanish The Shimmering to reach its final credits, I found a new haven. This room full of unasked questions, who speaks to me in total silence, who shares its healing light, who makes my body feel at peace, as peaceful as I have been in a long time. This room that wants me not only to stay in but to enjoy the limbo of morning, the one I always rush to get rid of.