When I was little, I’d often wonder what existed in that space just between the bright colorful world of the cartoons on the screen, and the commercial breaks that separated them.
My eyes fixed to the TV, I would sometimes glimpse a single frame of nothing during the transition. It wasn’t static, and it wasn’t signal. It was simply the liminal space between “we’ll be right back” and the sugary cereal jingle that came on a split second later.
That frame or two of pitch black on my television had a character not unlike the bottom of a well, or maybe a starless night sky. For some reason I thought there must be people there in that space too. Voices, and faces. Just like the rest of the content usually on the screen. It’s almost as if I could sense a presence.
I thought it was sad, that these faces and voices were never seen or heard because their window to us was so small. So brief, that it didn’t matter if they tried to be seen. No one would notice.
I would imagine some television studio trying to press the commercials and the shows as close as they could, to not let any blank space come through.. I figured it must’ve been there for them to do that in the first place.
And If I could step into that space, right outside of the frame would be a crowd. Activity. Like turning the corner at the end of a hallway, and realizing that there’s another hallway, just as long. Or a doorway in your house that you must’ve passed a thousand times but have never seen before.
I went back and checked once. After digging through a few cardboard boxes in my basement I found one full of some old blank VHS cassettes. I’d forgotten how wild the sleeves for these things were. I pull one out. On it, the words “FUJIFILM HQ-120” and “superior image and sound quality” are emblazoned on an extravagantly designed background full of bright geometric shapes and color coordinated stripes. On the cassette, a peeling label that said “Channel 38: 8:30-8:53” In permanent marker.
The sound quality is not superior and the image quality is not much better. Glitchy static and warped lines dance on the screen of my old TV for a moment before the recording starts. Video begins to play just as a theme song ends. Must’ve forgotten to set the recording timer correctly. The tail end of some spoken words fade away, but I can’t make what was said. It’s vaguely familiar, though I can’t remember the name of the show. Several different anthropomorphic animals beating up thugs in an alley by a train station while the names of the producers fade in and out at the bottom. One of the thugs picks up an oil drum that’s been lit on fire and the show fades to black before I can see what will be done with it. A moment later, a commercial comes on for mail-order art supplies.
I pause.
It takes a couple tries of rewinding, playing and pausing before I’m able to isolate the frame I’m hoping is there. I do miss the gratifying tactility inherent to vhs players. Feeling the click of the button then the whirr of the moving parts as they physically work to execute your command. The spooling and unspooling of magnetic tape across the drum.
On the screen now, a single frame of deep black void, just like I remembered. But as it flickers, suspended in time, a thought occurs to me. The channels I’d watched were designed to push consumerism on me once they had my full attention. Enticing me with a world in which I could fill with my imagination, then, sleight of hand to capitalize on a mind invested. Maybe during that transitory frame I had simply felt the bottom fall out on that world and saw the echos of my own mind radiating out into blank non-conceptual space.
That’s certainly a more believable explanation than what’s on the screen before me..
There’s no light. No color. But I can feel my awareness being pulled through the screen. And I sense an expanse on the other side of the glass.
Horror Vacui - nature abhors a vacuum. My mind begins to coat the walls of this expanse. A blank world for my imagination to fill. And if I close my eyes, it doesn’t feel like I’m in my basement anymore. It’s more like an auditorium.
I open my eyes but it doesn’t make a difference at first. I turn around to see a rounded rectangle window. The only source of light. A disembodied TV screen. I try to make out what’s on but the exposure is way too high.
Suddenly, with a heavy click, the image collapses into a line and then into a single dot. I hear the hum of vacuum tubes as they die down and fizzle out.
I blink. The afterimage of the screen is suspended in middle distance before me like a ghost. As it fades I realize what it is I saw.
An empty basement.