I: Reese

When I was in seventh grade, I knew a kid named Reese who showed me something in his basement that I have not been able to explain to this day.

Reese was—to put it nicely—a little odd. It was probably due to his home life. His dad was gone and his mom was (looking back) definitely an alcoholic. I remember that she used to sit in bed all day, in their little ranch house on the edge of town, watching TV and drinking from a glass filled to the brim with ice cubes and vodka, eating barely anything. The house itself smelled terrible all the time.

I know all this because I was Reese’s only friend.

To be clear: I wasn’t the most popular kid myself, so it’s not like I had a ton of options where friends were concerned. But I was social enough and (if you don’t mind me saying) attractive enough that girls weren’t totally disgusted by me, and most of the guys at school either tolerated me or left me alone. I was, more or less, content with that.

Reese, on the other hand, was an island. He could barely speak due to a terrible stutter. He was lanky and awkward. And (I feel guilty saying it, but here it is) he smelled bad—just like his house. He was bullied constantly.

The thing is, Reese and I shared a common interest. Ever since I was young, I’ve been obsessed with video cameras. My dad was a TV weatherman for KMBC Kansas City, which probably had something to do with it. His life revolved around a camera, and my fascination with them goes back as far as I can remember. Reese loved them too. Bear in mind, this was the early 2000s, so we’re not talking 4K iPhones here. We’re talking handheld camcorders that recorded in 720x480, if that. Reese had one—a little Sony model, if I remember, that recorded to miniDV—that he would bring to school. He would sneak it out of his backpack and film people at recess, at lunch, even during class. One morning, waiting in the cafeteria for school to start, I noticed Reese shooting some of our classmates as they ate breakfast, keeping his camera half-hidden under a table. When I saw what he was doing, I pulled him aside.

He went white, practically shaking with fear, when he realized he’d been caught. I could feel the shame and embarrassment pouring out of him. He couldn’t say a word.

I told him I didn’t care that he was filming people, but that if certain guys in our class caught him, they would probably beat the shit out of him. Or, god forbid, if any of the more popular girls saw what he was doing, his reputation at school would be ruined.

As soon as he understood I wasn’t threatening to expose him, he softened a little.

“I actually like filming stuff, too,” I said.

He almost melted with relief. I told him: Maybe I could come over after school and we could play around with the camera. Walk around the neighborhood, see what we could film together. And thus, that day, I became Reese’s only friend.

That first hangout was more than a little disturbing. My family was relatively well off; I had never seen a house like Reese’s before, except maybe in the movies. It was tiny, cluttered, dirty. And of course, as I mentioned, the smell. Reese’s mom scared me at first—her unwashed hair, her puffy, red face, that look of utter deadness in her eyes. And the lack of a father around the home, the emptiness where he should have been, was an imbalance I had never felt before. Reese opened my eyes to what families less fortunate than mine went through.

We filmed a lot that day. We walked up and down Reese’s blighted street, filming the chain-link fences and boarded-up houses. We got shots of municipal gutters the city never bothered to clean, choked with leaves. We filmed telephone wires and broken mailboxes and a rusted swing set. As the sun started to go down, Reese told me to follow his lead, and we got a little bolder.

We snuck into a few backyards, crept right up to the windows of neighbors’ houses, and filmed inside. We recorded people cooking in their kitchens. Men watching TV and drinking beer. Even, in one house, a woman getting out of the shower. But at that point I made Reese turn off the camera. There were some lines I wasn’t willing to cross.

This went on for several months. I never asked Reese what he did with the tapes. I assumed he just collected them on a shelf somewhere, which is what I would have done. That was really the core of my fascination with film in the first place—the idea that you could preserve a moment in time, exactly as it happened, and keep it in physical form. I guess I figured Reese had a similar attraction to the medium. So I never asked what he did with all the footage.

Until, one night, he showed me.

II: Mr. Nowhere

I was sleeping over at Reese’s house, which had become a regular occurrence. We were hanging out in his bedroom, as we had done so many times before, uploading the footage we had captured that day onto an ancient computer Reese had built himself from parts picked up at the used electronics store in town. While Reese worked, I absentmindedly opened the bottom drawer of his desk.

Inside, stacked in piles, were dozens of manila envelopes—all sealed, stamped, and postmarked to the same place:

Mr. N
P.O. Box 119
Evergreen, KS 66102

I lifted one of the envelopes out to look at it. There was a strange, off-center weight to it. I knew immediately what was inside: a DVD in a jewel case. I could feel it right through the paper.

When Reese looked over and saw what I had discovered, he freaked out. He snatched the envelope from me and slammed the drawer shut. He went white and shook with fear again—the same look I had seen when I caught him filming people in the cafeteria.

I told him to relax. “It’s me,” I said. “Whatever this is, I’m sure it’s cool. Just explain it.”

Eventually, he calmed down. I asked again what the envelopes were for. He studied me for a long time, as though trying to decide if he could trust me. I will never forget the look in his eye—a dark mixture of excitement and shame—as he finally said, “Follow me.”

He took me down to the basement. By this point, it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Reese’s mom had long since passed out in her bed, her glass of vodka nearby. The whole house was dark and perfectly quiet.

There was an old rabbit-ears TV in one corner of the basement—the kind that got grainy local channels and not much else. Reese looked at a clock on the wall. It was 2:48.

“Twelve minutes,” he said.

He knelt in front of the TV and focused all his attention on the dark little screen. He didn’t even turn it on. For twelve minutes he sat like that—perfectly still. I didn’t say a word. At that point, he was starting to freak me out a little, but I didn’t want to break his concentration. Whatever was happening was, obviously, extremely important to him.

When 3 a.m. hit, Reese flipped on the TV.

At first, the stations all seemed to be static. Reese turned an old-fashioned dial to change the channels, moving upward through the numbers with extreme care, like he was trying to crack a safe. He barely blinked. In the darkness, his eyes glowed white.

Channel 2...

Then 3…

Then 4… 5… 6…

Until, finally, he arrived at channel 17.

The static snapped away and was replaced by an image—still very grainy—that I have struggled to describe ever since.

It was one of those low-budget, public-access channels where anyone can book time on the air to film their show. But rather than the tiny soundstage you usually see on those programs, this set looked like a cavernous black-box theater, impossible to fit inside any local TV studio. It was so vast I could barely make out the edges of the room, which were shrouded in black curtains. The floor was covered, wall to wall, in black carpet. The space was lit by a single, dim light, somewhere far overhead.

In the middle of this wide, dark space was a hole in the ground. A perfect square opening that descended into darkness. The camera was motionless, clearly on a tripod, focused intently on this hole. All was silent.

I watched Reese stare without blinking at the screen for several minutes—a look of eager anticipation, almost glee, on his face. I didn’t make a sound; it seemed that, if I did, I would interrupt some kind of dream state Reese had entered. He was like a little kid, cross-legged on the floor, his eyes glued to a screen that had a power over him he didn’t need, or want, to understand.

Then, with a flicker, something happened in the TV. A face emerged slowly from the hole in the floor, floating upward. At first I thought it was someone in a mask. Then I realized—the mask-like features were the face. It was a middle-aged man. His skin was ghostly white, almost glowing. He was severely balding; the little bit of hair he had was slicked back with shiny gel. He was rail-thin. His high, sharp cheekbones cast twin shadows down his face, and his long, sinewy neck looked like it had been stretched to an impossible length. He wore a rumpled black tuxedo with a poorly knotted bow tie. And most unnatural of all: His face was twisted into a grotesque grin. Even today, it’s that grin that I remember most. He never stopped smiling.

He climbed out of the hole (there was some kind of ladder in the space beneath the floor) and moved slowly toward the camera until his face filled the frame. He looked out through the TV, and Reese looked back at him, a connection separated by only a thin layer of glass, as though he were right there in the basement with us.

Then, still smiling, he spoke. “Welcome, boys and girls! I’m Mr. Nowhere. And this is my Happy Place.”

I watched Reese. He was mouthing the words silently. He knew this program by heart.

There was a sudden, blaring sound from the TV, like all the instruments in an orchestra playing different notes at the same time. I jumped. Reese didn’t so much as flinch. Then, just as abruptly, the noise ceased.

“Now,” Mr. Nowhere said, “let’s bring out my family!”

He stepped back, keeping his eyes fixed on the camera, until he stood next to the hole again.

“Come out now!” he cried. He was suddenly vibrating with uncontrollable excitement. A tear slipped down his cheek. Through it all, he smiled. “Come out and join the show!”

One by one, people emerged from the hole, climbing out slowly. They were all different ages—kids, teenagers, adults. They seemed to have nothing in common, save for this: All of them, every single one, wore the same blank expression—emotionless, dead-eyed, like they’d been tranquilized and sedated. They filed out methodically, as though they’d done it thousands of times before. Once they were out of the hole, they organized themselves into rows, sitting cross-legged on the black carpet, just as Reese was doing in front of the TV. They all faced the same direction, staring intently at one of the room’s curtained walls. Waiting for something.

Through all this, Reese remained glued to the screen, completely enthralled. I could tell that he had watched this program, whatever it was, every night for weeks, months, maybe even years. At one point I made the mistake of breaking the silence.

“Who are they?” I said.

But this only seemed to intensify Reese’s concentration. “Watch,” he whispered.

When the room was full, Mr. Nowhere finally spoke again. Since the moment he appeared, he hadn’t broken eye contact with the camera. “And now,” he said, “let’s meet tonight’s special friend!”

The curtains pulled back on the wall everyone was facing, revealing a white screen. A bright light flickered on. An image appeared, projected from somewhere overhead. In that moment, I understood what this room was. It was a theater.

Mr. Nowhere’s audience watched, rapt, as a film played. It was a home movie, shot on a handheld camcorder, just like the ones Reese and I had been making for months.

This one showed a woman in her twenties working at a dry cleaners. She was clearly unaware she was being filmed. The camera operator seemed to be hiding somewhere in the racks of clothes behind her, filming her as she worked at the counter, ringing up customers when they wandered in, leaning against a wall and reading a magazine when the place was empty.

The film went on for a long time. When the reel finally cut, the room went dark again, and Mr. Nowhere’s voice rose from the back of the audience.

“Clap,” he said.

The whole room broke into applause at once.

“Stop,” he said. And they did.

“What a wonderful show,” Mr. Nowhere said. “I just love watching people when they don’t know they’re being watched. Don’t you? Come out now! Come out and join our family!”

A door—which I hadn’t noticed before—opened at the far end of the room. The whole audience turned to look, except for Mr. Nowhere. Even now, he kept his gaze fixed on the camera, staring right into Reese’s (and my) eyes.

A figure walked from the open door to the center of the room. When she crossed into the dim light shining from above, I saw who she was. It was the woman from the video. She moved slowly. Her eyes were lifeless and empty, like all the others.

“Welcome!” Mr. Nowhere cried, tears streaming down his face. “Welcome to our family!”

Then the horrible noise blared from the TV once more, the curtains in front of the screen swished closed, and the audience started to rise, filing toward the hole in the floor again, descending one at a time, just as they had come.

The newcomer, this woman, was the last to disappear into the darkness. Finally, still looking at the camera, Mr. Nowhere moved toward the hole himself. He sank down until just his face was visible, glowing white in the black room.

“Until tomorrow night, boys and girls,” he said.

And then he was gone.

III: Louisa

For days afterward, I tried to make sense of what I had seen. Reese wouldn’t explain what the show was, or how he had found it. When I asked him, he just looked at me and grinned. I knew he was mailing our tapes—the tapes we had made together—to this program, whatever it was. And I knew he was waiting for something.

“Every night, he picks one. Just one.” That was all I could get Reese to tell me about Mr. Nowhere’s Happy Place, but it was enough to figure out Reese’s plan. He wanted to get one of his recordings on the show. What that truly meant, I still had no idea.

A few weeks after that sleepover, a new student appeared in our class. She had moved to town from Washington, D.C. Her parents were connected somehow to the military, and they relocated a lot. Her name was Louisa, and from the first moment I saw her, I was infatuated.

Try talking sense to a smitten, hormonal twelve-year-old boy, I dare you. Suffice it to say, as soon as Louisa entered my consciousness, my attention for school, for friends, for everything that wasn’t her evaporated quickly. I focused most of my efforts on getting her to notice me. And, once she did, I spent the next two weeks gathering my courage to ask her to the seventh-grade dance. To my utter shock, she said yes. I “picked her up” in my mom’s minivan (my mom driving), and that night, I had my first kiss. On the fifty-yard line of the football field behind our school, lying in the grass, I asked her to be my girlfriend. She looked at me with her dark eyes and said, “Duh.”

After that, I stopped hanging out with Reese as much. He hadn’t gone to the dance, of course. No one kissed him on the fifty-yard line of the football field. He had no other friends. Looking back, I think it must have scared the shit out of him, watching me pull away so suddenly. Before Louisa, he had started referring to me (jokingly, I thought) as his brother. Now I see it more clearly. To Reese, he wasn’t just losing a friend when I went girl crazy that year; he was losing the only family he had. In his fear and loneliness, he retaliated in the only way he knew how. He started bringing his camera back to school—and filming Louisa.

At first it was intermittent, tentative. A shot here and there. A few seconds at a time. Very quickly, however, it escalated. Within a week, he was shooting her constantly. I’d catch Reese’s camera lens peeking out of his backpack, pointed at Louisa—at lunch, in class, waiting for the bus. There was hunger in his eyes, even greed, as he watched her. Like he couldn’t get enough. I worried he might be sneaking over to her house at night, filming her through her window as she slept.

When it became clear he wasn’t going to stop, I confronted him about it. I pulled him aside and told him, in no uncertain terms, that if he didn’t cut it out, our friendship was over.

He laughed in my face. “W…w…what…f..f…f…friendship?” he said.

I yelled at him. Threatened him. But he just smiled. There was nothing I could do to hurt him.

One morning, Louisa didn’t show up for school. We chatted every night on AIM, and there was no way she wouldn’t have told me if she was going to miss a day. We were, by that point, inseparable. When she wasn’t in homeroom, or first period, I started to worry. Then lunch came, and I saw Reese.

His eyes were glassy and red, as though he hadn’t slept for days. And he was—how do I put it? Humming. His whole body. That’s the best I can describe it. The energy coming off him was that same mixture of nerves and shame and excitement I had seen when he first showed me the Happy Place. I knew right then: Something was wrong.

Twenty-four hours later, the whole town was looking for Louisa. Her parents had woken up that morning to discover that their daughter was no longer in her bed. None of her things were missing. Her backpack was there, hung over the bedpost where she’d left it. Her shoes and coat were there. Even the depression on her pillow, where her head had rested, was still visible. It was like she had vanished into thin air.

I panicked, like everyone else did. I racked my brain for days, trying to remember if she had said something, anything that might have indicated where she went. But the more I thought about it, the more I was certain her disappearance had to do with one person. I could see it in his eyes when I passed him in the hallway at school. And once I was certain about that, I started to take the other idea more seriously. The crazy idea. The impossible idea. Somehow, out of all the tapes Reese must have made of Louisa and mailed in, one had been selected.

Mr. Nowhere had chosen her.

IV. Family

I stormed over to Reese’s house to confront him about it. I hadn’t been over there in a long time—I had forgotten about the smell. In Reese’s bedroom, where we had created so many tapes of our own, I shoved my former friend against the wall.

“Where is she! What the fuck did you do with her!”

Reese just smiled. That same, oily, snakelike smile.

I punched him as hard as I could in the face. His nose gushed blood. But still—that grin. “Don’t you see?” he said. “She’s part of his family now. She can’t come back.”

The police, of course, didn’t believe me. They didn’t even bother to take down a statement. My parents were useless. I even walked across town to Louisa’s house, to explain to her parents what had happened. They screamed at me, ran me off. They thought I was making a joke out of what had happened to their daughter.

Then, one day, I had an idea. I pulled out my dad’s road atlas and looked up Evergreen. It was only three hours away. I could get there. I could go to the post office, find P.O. Box 119, the address where Reese had sent all his tapes. If the show happened each night, the tapes must be collected daily. I could watch the P.O. box from open to close. Someone would come. I could follow them. I could find the studio—wherever Mr. Nowhere broadcast his show from. I could get inside. Descend through the hole in the floor. I could find Louisa. She must be down there, with all the others. I could save her.

Looking back, it’s almost unbelievable that I managed to hitchhike two hundred miles as a thirteen-year-old (my birthday had come and gone; I was a teenager now), but I did. On a Friday evening, I told my parents I was sleeping at a friend’s and then spending the next day there. I slept in the woods behind our house, in the dry bed of a creek, and at four-thirty in the morning I walked out of town, to the highway, and caught a ride.

It was a group of college kids who picked me up. They were all stoned out of their minds, headed back to Wichita State after a weekend in Kansas City. They thought it was hilarious—a thirteen-year-old kid hitchhiking. They took me all the way there.

I made it to the Evergreen post office half an hour before it opened. I sat there all day. I didn’t take my eyes off the building for nine hours straight. People came in and out, but not a single one opened a box. Ten minutes before closing, I went in myself. There it was: 119. I tried to open it, but of course it was locked. I asked the man behind the counter if he could tell me who rented it. He told me to get lost.

I had no way to get home. Hitchhiking wasn’t going to work the other way, I realized. Finally I was forced to call my parents from the telephone at a drug store. My dad drove out to get me. I was grounded for six months. It didn’t matter. I had failed. Louisa was trapped with Mr. Nowhere, everyone thought she was dead, I had no way to convince them of what I knew, and I could do nothing—absolutely nothing—to bring her back.

Reese’s mom killed herself in the spring. She swallowed a bottle of Ambien and washed it down with half a handle of vodka, and by the time Reese found her in the morning, she was gone. I never saw Reese again after that. Social Services placed him with a foster family in another school district. I heard a rumor, years later, that he had killed himself too, but the stories varied so wildly I didn’t put stock in any of them. All anyone knew was that he had disappeared. Same as Louisa. Some said he drowned himself in the quarry outside of town, but they dragged it and found nothing. Some said he shot himself in a field somewhere, and the turkey vultures carried all his bones away. No one knew what happened for sure.

No one, that is, except for me. When I heard about Reese’s disappearance, I wasn’t even surprised. I knew exactly where he had gone. He must have sat in his room, day after day, pointing that camera at himself. Mailing in his tapes. And then, one night…

Writing all this down (for the first time, by the way), I can’t pretend to psychoanalyze myself. All I know, looking back, is that my life took a turn after Louisa and Reese were gone. I’d been a bright kid—not headed for Harvard, by any means, but headed for something. My childhood was free of the clichéd traumas: emotional neglect, impossible standards. I had all the cards in my hand.

In the end, I didn’t even graduate from high school. I got into booze, then drugs. I left home at seventeen. The darkness in me—it had nowhere to go. The therapist my parents forced on me assessed my story about Mr. Nowhere as “maladjusted psychic projection.” A symbol, a metaphor. Something that didn’t happen. The secret knowledge of what I had seen—it ate at me. And finally it swallowed me whole.

I didn’t end up dead in a gutter or anything like that (obviously). I got clean eventually, though it took ten years, all told. I never married. No kids. My parents both died young, and one night, years after they were gone, I found myself alone in a motel in Washington State, on a job with the contractor I worked for, installing cable line.

I was lying on the crusty motel bed, flipping through channels late at night, and suddenly—there it was. The Happy Place.

I sat up like I’d been electrocuted. My nerves buzzed. Blood rushed to my head. Of course, I had searched for it many times over the years, scanning channels at three in the morning, on TVs all over the country. But I had given up long ago. I thought it was gone forever.

Now, like a bolt from the blue, for the first time in decades, it was back.

The show was just getting started. Mr. Nowhere climbed out of the hole, followed by all the members of his family. I noticed almost at once: The room seemed to have grown. Instead of hundreds of people, it now held thousands.

It was just as I remembered. “Welcome, boys and girls! I’m Mr. Nowhere, and this is my Happy Place.” His gaunt, pale face was just the same. He hadn’t aged a day. “And now, let’s meet tonight’s special friend!”

The curtains parted, and the film showed a boy. No more than seven years old. When the show concluded, he appeared from the side door, just as I’d seen before.

I was glued to the screen as Mr. Nowhere’s family started climbing back into the hole. I found myself, suddenly, on the motel floor—kneeling in front of the TV, almost pressing my eyes to the glass. (An image flashed in my mind, then, of Reese twenty years before, on the floor of his mom’s basement, watching like his life depended on it.)

I saw hundreds of people disappear into the hole, one after the other. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the screen, not even for a second. Toward the end of the procession, I finally caught what I was looking for. My breath stopped in my throat. A chill ran down my spine.

It was them. Louisa and Reese.

They were both older—aged twenty years—but I still recognized them. I put my hand on the glass of the TV and cried out. I felt something on my face, and realized it was streaked with tears. I said Louisa’s name aloud, but of course she couldn’t hear me.

After a moment, it was her turn to descend. I was now so close to her that she was barely more than a cloud of pixels. She disappeared into the darkness, and a moment later, it was Reese’s turn. As he climbed into the hole, I thought I saw something flicker across his face. Yes—I’m sure I saw it. In those last moments, before he was swallowed up by the blackness, he smiled. I knew, then, what I had known for decades without putting words to it. Reese hadn’t been taken. He didn’t meet a tragic end, as everyone thought.

Reese, at long last, was home.

V. Waiting

That was two years ago now. I went back to that motel many times and stayed up all night, searching for the Happy Place. But I could never find it again.

It’s easier to record videos now—smartphones and all that. But I still have to get them onto an old computer in order to burn them to DVDs that can be sealed into manila envelopes.

The folks at the post office know me very well by now. It’s almost like a running joke. Every day at four p.m., I mail one envelope. Once, the woman behind the counter asked what was in them.

“Home movies,” I said. “Of me.”

Maybe if I can get inside, I can still save her. I can find a way out. At the very least, I owe it to her to try. As I said, it’s been two years. I still haven’t been chosen.

But I will press on. And maybe one night, when the black curtains pull back, it will be me up there on the screen. A door will open. Mr. Nowhere will smile.

And I will step inside.