I turned on the TV and VCR and pushed the first tape in. As it began to play, the images that had been floating around in my head the past few days filled the screen, accompanied by the tape’s dull moans of both pleasure and pain.

I tried to watch other parts of the screen this time, forcing myself to look away from that which most drew attention to itself in each frame. Nothing. I did this with all the tapes, and still nothing.

I sat there staring at the TV screen, now playing the late news. The anchorperson was saying that Molly’s car accident was believed to be suicide. She went on to say how distraught she had been over the death of her husband, an inmate incarcerated at PCI.

I wasn’t really listening to her, though. I was still trying to think of what I had missed. I was sure it was on one of the tapes.

What had it been?

And then it hit me like a tire iron across the face. I jumped up and ran toward my bedroom, bumping into the walls of the narrow hallway as I went. I retrieved the other tape—the eight-millimeter one—from the drawer in my bedside table and ran back into the living room, where the light was better.

We had started a video recording production service at my church in Atlanta. Having a limited budget to begin with, we used Hi8 tapes and equipment and did most of the work ourselves.

I learned a lot about video production during that time. One of the things I learned was that it is best to fast forward a new tape all the way to the end and then rewind it to the beginning before starting to record on it. This caused all of the loose magnetic particles on the tape to drop off so there’d be fewer fade-outs during recording and playback.

Of course, most people didn’t practice this technique.

On the tapes that hadn’t been fast-forwarded to the end and then rewound to the beginning before being used for recording, it was obvious how much of the tape had been recorded on. This was because once the tape had been rewound, the part that had been used was not level with the part that hadn’t on the spool. This was because the tape that had been used was looser and uneven, whereas the tape that was unused was still wound tight and smooth.