From a Trail Cam Pointed at Our House

By Thomas C. Mavroudis

My son Toby likes to watch elevator videos on the internet. I don’t know how it came about. His mom must have discovered it. I never asked. He can easily sit for an hour staring at the tablet screen, video after video of elevators. He would watch endlessly if we let him. I can’t stand it. I want to spend time with him, so I watch the videos with him. It’s what we do before bedtime instead of reading a story. He only lets his mom read to him. When he talks—it’s rarely more than three words at a time—he only talks to his mom. They say this is an improvement. They say if he can speak three words at a time, he will speak more one day.

To me, it seems like I do not exist to Toby. Unless I help him onto the tablet and his elevator videos. I tried to connect with him once. I tried to be the sort of father that shows his child something new by cueing up a video of an escalator, and he lost it. He hit himself in the face with the tablet; he smacked me on the side of the head. He threw the thing across his room, knocking down the shelf displaying his collection of puzzle cubes, which made him even more upset. He howled until his mom could wrap him up in his weighted blanket, and he settled down. I wanted to run away, but instead I sat on the back patio and cried until I got too cold.

We live in a neighborhood with a greenway separating us from another neighborhood by a hundred yards or so. Not much “green,” the sloping space is predominantly prairie grasses with copses of hawthorns, patches of rabbitbrush and sagebrush, and a few stand-alone cottonwoods and piñons. Rabbits are prevalent across the development, but they tend to prefer the safety of our yards. There is a prairie dog town in the greenway. Hawks and eagles hunt them, as well as the very rare fox or coyote. Neighbors have seen deer before, but I never have. It’s funny because we don’t live in what I would call the suburbs, although there is the semblance of it. We are surrounded by city, as this land used to be the airport until they built the new one way out in the middle of true nowhere plains. After all that asphalt and concrete was removed, it didn’t take long for the land to reclaim itself. Sure, new concrete and asphalt were laid down, but wilderness was an integral part of the redevelopment plan. So, the fact that deer and other wildlife have likewise found their way into the open space is a sort of magic all its own. Perhaps they were always here, adapting to the endless roar of jet engines.

I sit on the back patio, watching the greenway, daydreaming about stepping over the fence and wandering off into the wilderness. But like I said, the wilderness is a fabrication, just like my daydream. When Toby was a baby, his mom and I would sit out on the patio and imagine all the ways our lives were going to be. They say—they say, now—that Toby can still have some of the lives we imagined for him. It’s difficult for me to realize that happening, but I have to believe it. I have to have faith. His mom does not sit with me on the patio anymore. She is often very tired. Toby does not like the back patio. Too much open space for him. I sit out there and wish I smoked cigarettes. I wish I liked the taste of alcohol or could at least tolerate it. Our back patio seems like that sort of place since it’s not much of a space for celebration.

One night at bedtime, Toby motions for me to sit and watch elevator videos with him. It’s tough to keep the tears within my eyelids. His mom’s smile makes it even tougher. I’m afraid of doing something that will set him off, so I do my best to be normal. He is fast asleep in under ten minutes, one of his hands actually touching me. I pray. I thank God for every little improvement, for every tiny bit of growth.

To some degree, I am anxious to leave, to move, to disturb my son. I watch the next elevator video that plays. For the first time, I really watch it. This one is of a glass elevator, an old one somewhere in California. I admit, it’s pretty cool. I click on another glass elevator video, but I apparently am not so easily hooked as Toby, after all.

Before I close the tablet, I see a recommended for you video titled “Ultimate Night Vison Trail Cam Compilation.” The screen shot is of a coyote with a grin. I click it. The 50+ minute video is true to its title, no wasted empty frames, beginning with the aforementioned coyote. The animal runs past the camera. It is a few feet away. Then it slinks in from the left side into view, very close. It’s panting. It walks away from the camera and sits. It cranes its neck back and gawks at the night sky. It looks back over its shoulder, turns and walks directly to the camera, its mouth arching into a smile.

Next is a murder of crows (seven or eight of them) in the distance bouncing around what I think could be a prairie dog mound. I didn’t know crows were active at night. Then there is an elk stumbling across the camera in the late winter, strips of its shedding antlers hanging like wet streamers at a rained-out birthday picnic.

The next scene is disturbing. Luckily, it’s the very end of what I assume was much longer footage. A black bear finishes chewing off one of its back paws from a bear trap. This is followed by only the shadow of something. I can’t tell what the shadow is—there is just a moving patch of dark. It’s swirling, actually. This cuts to the legs of a pachyderm troop passing from right to left. It’s amazing.

The subsequent scene seems out of place, but I guess it really isn’t. A small procession of what I would describe as gothic teenagers walks across a field. There are seven of them. They are led by a girl with a large brimmed hat. Something catches my eye, but I don’t know what it is until the next shot. Quite simply, it is a meteor falling from the sky, but it must have been close because it illuminates the foreground. And that’s when I notice the prairie dog mound. I rewind to the teenagers, and there is the same landmark. I rewind further to the elephants, and there is the mound again. I don’t go all the way to the beginning because the bear and elk could not possibly be from the same trail cam, even though the crows absolutely are.

Toby shudders then. He groans and rolls on his side. I forgot he was there. I forgot where I was. My mouth is very dry. I continue the video.

Some bats fly back and forth snatching their dinner from a cloud of large, flitting bugs. I try not to notice the prairie dog mound. But the next clip is of the prairie dog mound. One of the creatures goes in and out of the hole with something in its little animal hands. It’s bones. The tiny bones of its forbearers. It scatters them at the foot of the mound with disrespect.

Next is a form slowly shambling from left to right in the same path as the teenagers. The figure is too blurry to discern more than that it’s a person. After, what I think at first is a coyote strolls past the camera with a gory haunch in its maw. The meat vaguely looks like a human thigh. And the beast is not a coyote. It’s canine for sure, but what exactly, I have no idea.

The next clip is of some explosion. It reminds me of those atomic bomb testing videos. The prairie dog mound ripples. In the brief flash, there is a crowd of dark figures. People and animals. It looks like a scene from a prehistoric cave painting. This is impossible, and I think it’s ridiculous for the creator to have included this farce in their compilation. It makes me question everything I’ve seen so far, and I almost shut it down with the disillusionment.

I blush at the next few seconds, which is of the leader of the gothic teenagers under a full moon, naked except for her hat, leaping across the camera as though she were in a Dionysian parade. It is only in trying not to look at the girl that I finally recognize a pine in the far-left background. And if I look really hard, I see my house behind the tree. This trail cam, somehow, is set up on the opposite side of the greenway from me. I should close the app, shut it all down. I should delete the history. Really, I should make it impossible for Toby ever to watch videos on the internet again. I am unable to do any of that.

There is still a little under twenty minutes to the video. I let it roll.

Next is a snake staring down a rabbit. It’s a rattlesnake, and although I shouldn’t be completely surprised there are venomous snakes a stone’s throw from our back patio, what I am surprised by is the rabbit taking the snake in its teeth just below the snake’s head and tearing through it like an expert. What I’m shocked by is the rabbit looking at the camera and smiling.

Then there is a shot of a small, dilapidated barn. Where it came from, I can’t explain. To the right is the prairie dog mound. In the left-hand corner is my house. There is no door on the barn, just a gaping frame. Something moves in the darkness inside. I watch the teenagers, dressed in their black, their faces painted with lipstick and eyeliner, hop up into the barn and disappear. Shadow, or something else, elongates from the opening, writhing like the tentacles of an octopus.

In the next scene, the barn is gone; the space is open as it would be if I looked out at it right now from Toby’s window. Coyotes come into view. The difference is, they walk on their hind legs. Clasped in their claws are rabbits, prairie dogs, birds of prey, cats, dogs, some human limbs. After this is the diamond pattern of a reptile rolling past like the cars of a train, a gigantic serpent that fills the entire view. Then there is a meteor smashing into the field, a burst of fire smoldering in the newly made crater. The burning rock splits and a horde of beetles scrambles out and away from the fresh glass and embers. A colossal set of grotesque hooves strides before the camera, shaking it like CCT footage of an earthquake.

Toby shivers. He rolls over towards me, his arm across my chest. The video is not finished, but I am. What else is there to see? I don’t need to go any further with it.

I slip carefully off Toby’s bed and make for the door. I dare to kiss him. It’s the first time I’ve kissed my son’s cheek in so long I can’t remember. He sighs contentedly, or maybe it’s just the way he breathes when he sleeps, and I’ve forgotten.

Maybe I’ve forgotten more than I should have.