Blippers

It’s true. Sometimes we catch weird stuff on film. It’s bound to happen anytime anyone shoots a lot of footage. Light changes, insects fly through the frame, a stray finger dangles in front of the camera. We’ve all seen it. I remember when I was a kid, my grandma had a Polaroid camera—instant film. Remember those things? It was nearly unheard of at the time. Us grandkids thought it was like something out of a sci-fi movie. We were mesmerized waiting for the images to manifest on the black square, framed in a white border. So, anytime Grandma nodded off in her recliner, we would tiptoe to the hall closet, grab the camera and head outside. We used to play this game we called “blippers.” We would hold the camera, spin around as fast as we could, and at the same time snap a picture. We caught some cool, artsy looking stuff and we caught some weird stuff. One time it appeared my sister’s leg was bent sideways and stretching across the room. Then the dog’s paw was duplicated 3 times over a patio chair surrounded by bright streaks of light. Rainbows coming out of foreheads and oily looking eggplant shapes. We loved seeing what we could create. Sometimes we would catch something we called Dr. White. It was this very specific kind of film distortion that we’d periodically catch that looked sort of like a man. Well, maybe half-spider, too. He had long, long legs and arms on a short little stump of a body. Never any color but bright white—glowing white. We called him Dr. White because if we’d catch an angle that showed both of his “arms” it looked like he was carrying a doctor’s bag. If you caught a photo of Dr. White, you “won” the game. Winning meant being able to lift a strawberry candy from Grandma’s purse. There wasn’t enough of those to take without her noticing so only one of us got to claim the grand prize. Once someone won, we would then take the photos down to the stream at the back of my grandparent’s property. Our small, pale hands would gently slip them into the stream to float away like strange boats. Unlike candy, Grandma could never remember how many boxes of film she had on hand, so we knew we wouldn’t get caught as long as we destroyed the evidence. It was part of the experience, like making a sand mandala, we knew it all would be scattered and lost.

So now, in a way, that’s what I do for a living. My name is Sam Farrows. I work for Google as a street view driver and we catch our fair share of weird things. That’s probably my favorite part of the job to be honest—always reminds me of blippers. And would you believe that to this days I still catch Dr. White on my footage? Must be a pretty common film error that makes that kind of shape. Anyway, you might be wondering, who catches the strange images on film? Well, sometimes we do, and if so we go back and shoot again before it’s uploaded. But most often, it will be the public when they are using our maps. People will be looking up an address, or showing a significant other the street they grew up on. Zooming in, zooming in. 

“See, there’s our roof, yep that’s the house! There is our neighbor’s old Buick, I can’t believe they still have that thing. Wait...what the actual...is that a dolphin in the driveway?” 

It might be, but it’s probably not. It’s probably a blipper. 

And if I am the one that shot the footage, then I am the one sent out to investigate what might have caused it, and then reshoot the area for Google Maps. Used to be this wasn’t any big deal. Back when I started, we’d see a blipper, squint our eyes at the image, and then just shrug. But that all changed in 2014. It was February when someone reported seeing a strange shape on Google Maps and it turned out to be the dead body of a missing woman. Now we go out and check each and every blipper. And as it happens, I had just recently received an email explaining that there was an anomaly on some of my latest footage that will need to be checked out.

Should be an easy one, although it’s been something of a head-scratcher to be honest. When looking over the footage my driving camera caught last week, there appeared to be an extra house at the end of a dead-end road. Not large at all from what we can tell, but definitely something picked up. Probably “tiny-house” squatters or an RV full of meth heads who thought the empty field at the end of a residential area would be prime real estate for setting up and and simultaneously lowering the value of the surrounding properties. Most likely the “house” won’t even be there when I go back to take a look.

Well, curiosity got the better of me and I decide I’m going to drive by the area on the way home from work. It’s only 20 minutes out of my way. I will swing through a drive-thru and get my dinner on the way, catch up a little more on my audiobook. It’s not like anyone but Calvin, my gremlin of a rescue cat, is waiting for me at home anyway. When I was married to Mackenzie, I used to imagine sometimes that my bachelor friends had the better time of it, you know, a married man’s daydreams of doing things like buying a motorcyle (too dangerous) or not coming straight home from work (we need to get the mulch down). But that’s not what it’s like. It’s nothing glamorous. Lonely, mostly, and no one to help with all the million and one little things that are just better with a partner. No one to bounce crazy middle-of-the-night ideas off of. The silence can be almost too much sometimes, louder than anything I’ve ever heard. She’s been gone almost three years now, breast cancer, and I don’t think I will ever stop reaching for her in the middle of the night. She is always on my mind when I am sent back to check on a blipper. Toward the end of her life, we knew she was going, and I just couldn’t stop snapping pictures of her. It’s like seeing her on film reassured me. See? She’s still here. Still breathing. Solid enough to photograph. I took so many photos of her that my phone could no longer download new apps. And that last week the camera roll was full of blippers. If we were kids outback at my grandmother’s, I would have won the candy everyday. Dr. White was in damn near every one of her last photos, wrapping his long limbs around her frail body. 

I wind my way through the neighborhood and by the time I pull up to the street, it’s almost full dark. I swing a left, head toward the dead end where the house was picked up. I point my headlights into the field. I can’t see anything except knee-high grass and a few scattered trees. I attempt to respond to a couple text messages I received on the way over, when my audiobook starts skipping like crazy and then shuts off. My radio turns on and starts to emits this high-pitched screech. I slam my hand down on the power button and the car is silent again. I just put a new system in this car and I was getting worked up thinking it might already be broken. Fuming, I put my car in reverse and made ready to turn around and head home. As I am turning, my headlights bounce off of something chrome. Well, there she is… Farther back from the road then what it looked like from the photos I saw at the office, but definitely a small structure of some kind. I shine my headlights and see what appears to be aluminum siding. Probably an RV then. No doubt full of junkies and likely no electricity or running water either. That would definitely explain the lack of lights. I think I should probably call the police in the morning to meet me out here when I reshoot. I will need them to help get the people off the field before I can film the area again. I head on back home and I’m almost halfway to my house when the radio cuts in. It’s so loud I literally jump and send my car halfway into the gravel on the side of the road. I quickly correct the wheel and turn down the volume. My audiobook picks up right where I had been. Electronics can be funny. 

That night, I toss and turn all night. Really strange dreams. I’m a child again with my grandma’s camera, only I have my current adult job and am on my bike to photograph the roads. Dr. White is showing up on the all the footage I’m taking. His small blinding body and those oversized limbs shift and stretch across the images of roads. I hit something with my bike and am thrown off, but I don’t land. There is a ringing in my ears that sharpens into pressure. It feels like my eardrums will burst and then it feels like they do and suddenly the noise is gone. Not just from my ears, but everywhere. All noise is gone. I’m cradled in long, pale arms and I’m floating. Suspended over the city , we then climb higher into nothingness. Dark and freezing, I become aware that I am wet. The fluid sensation seems to be coming from my ears, and running down my skin. As I try to wipe it off my body, I realize that I am naked too. I start to panic and squirm when I hear my dead wife’s voice, muffled like she is talking through a mouthful of food. I hold still to try to make what what she is saying.

“Dr. White will get you through the middle, Sam.” Her voice becomes thick, deepens and slows. 

“The Mijjjjidddllleee,” she says. 

I float and my thoughts are fuzzy. I realize I can hear someone screaming. I cannot move. It sounds like they are terrified and my heart starts to pound. I thrash through my covers, and fall off my bed. I find I am the one screaming and its woken me up. I am covered in sweat and shivering. I must have a fever. I am exhausted, but too uneasy to sleep. I put on my robe and head to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. I grab the remote and sink down my recliner to wait for it to brew. I need some distractions to shake the dread my dream left hovering in my skull. But the tv will not turn on. Probably the remote batteries. Too exhausted to change them out, I sit and wait in the deafening silence. 

I call the non-emergency number for the sheriff’s office and ask to have someone meet me at the address I give. They sound a little annoyed to have to come out, but they know the law as well as I do and can’t really say no to my request. The officer sent beats me to the dead end of the street and is sitting in his car when I pull up. 

He rolls down the window. 

“Well? Where’d you say this meth hive is?” 

I glance around and walk the edge of the field, squinting behind my sunglasses. 

“It’s...uh…well, it was ...well, it looks like I am sorry to have brought you out here. Seems they left in the night.” I feel my face heating up, my cheeks reddening. 

“Yep,” the officer says, not even attempting to hide the annoyance in his tone. “Listen, I need to go. My radio is coming in and out and I’m not allowed to take calls without a functioning radio. So, I’m going to have to leave you to it.” 

“Yeah, thanks for coming out, man.”

As much as I am embarrassed for having called the police officer out for nothing, I am feeling pleased that I don’t have to wait while people are removed from the property. Theres a lot of ways something like that can go and usually none of them are great. But this morning, the trees stir in a breeze and the field is empty. Whatever showed up on camera, and was here last night, is not here now. I can reshoot the area and be back at the office before lunch. 

I am turning to get my camera out of my trunk to mount for the reshoot, when I catch something out of the corner of my eye blowing around the field. It is a shape I recognize well, and I start walking toward it without even thinking about it. The field is covered in morning dew and the legs of my khaki pants start to dampen as they brush against the tall grass. As I get closer I realize there are many small shapes fluttering around, dozens of black squares bordered in a white frame. Polaroids. They lead me to an oval of short grass. I feel it crunching under my shoes and realize that it has been completely scorched and burnt almost down to the soil. The taller grass surrounding the oval helps to corral the photographs as they flutter in the breeze. I start collecting them as quickly as I can and by the time I have most of them my hands are shaking. Some are images I haven’t seen since watching them float away in the stream behind my grandmother’s house. The dog paw over the lawn chair. My sister’s arm. And then photos of my wife’s face from just before she died, grinning at me. A photo of me. Or at least the bottom half of my naked legs dangling high above city lights. Dr. White’s arms and legs are there too, encircling me, in bright streaks of light. I find the blippers, old and new, rising on the wind in the empty field.