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“Here,” she said, sliding a large red-and-black envelope across the desktop. “Maybe this’ll cheer you up.”
“What is it? A new, condensed version of your dissertation? Not your resignation, I hope?”
“Neither,” she laughed. “It’s a Netflix DVD. The Revenant.”
“You own this?”
She gave me a puzzled look. “What century do you live in? No, I don’t own it. It’s Netflix.” She saw the blank look on my face. “Oh, good grief. Netflix. It’s like . . . son of Blockbuster and FedEx. By way of Match.com.”
“Huh?”
She shook her head. “Never mind. Forget all that. Let me start over. Netflix is an online movie service. You pay a monthly fee, you order movies off the website, and they show up in your mailbox the next day.”
“How can they do it so fast?”
“The wonders of technology. You do know what a DVD is, right?” I scowled. “And you have the means to play a DVD?”
“Depends on the format,” I said. “Is it a clay tablet, or carved in stone?”
“Point taken,” she said, turning and waving good-bye on her way out. “Enjoy.”
I opened the envelope and slid out the silvery disk. Unlike the DVDs I had at home—Shakespeare in Love and The Princess Bride and a handful of others Kathleen had bought years before for herself or for “us” (she claimed) or for the grandkids—this was not encased in hard plastic. Instead, it was simply tucked into a slippery Tyvek sleeve. Was that enough to protect it from the abuses of the U.S. Postal Service? It didn’t appear broken or scratched, so perhaps so. Was the disk itself just like the highly packaged ones in my living room, or was this some new format that my aging DVD player wouldn’t be able to handle? I had no idea.
I heard a rustle in the outer office. “Peggy? Are you still here?”
“Just leaving,” she said, appearing in the doorway, one arm through the sleeve of her jacket.
“Do you know about Netflix?”
“I do,” she said. “And the automobile, and the aeroplane, and Mr. Bell’s telephone.”
“You’re as bad as Miranda,” I grumbled.
“Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment,” she beamed.
“Do you belong, or subscribe, or whatever?”
“Doesn’t everybody?” She raised her eyebrows. “I mean, everybody under ninety-five?”
“Ha ha. So this is just a regular old DVD, right? I can play it in the antique DVD player I have at home?”
“Sure. Or you can play it in your computer, if you’d rather.”
“My home computer?”
“Your home computer. Your work computer. Any computer with a DVD drive.”
I looked at the monitor sitting on my desk. “I can watch movies on this?”
“I wouldn’t make a habit of it—you’re always behind on your paperwork as it is—but yes, of course,” she said. “Just pop it in the drive, and the DVD player should boot up automatically.”
“Are you sure?” Instead of answering, she simply gestured at the machine, a try-it-and-see look in her eyes.
Bending beneath the desk, I touched a button on the computer’s housing, and a thin tray slid open. Placing the disk in the tray’s circular recess, I nudged the drawer gently and it slid shut. A moment later, I heard the disk spooling up and saw the computer monitor go black, then bright green, with white words:
THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR APPROPRIATE AUDIENCES BY THE MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.
“Amazing,” I said.
“What’s the movie?”
“The Revenant. Fun with bears and Indians, apparently.”
“So I hear,” she said. “Shall I go put some popcorn in the microwave?”
I laughed. “Yeah, sure,” I said, leaning down to eject the disk.
“Don’t start without me,” she said. “I’ll be back in three minutes.”
I looked up, surprised, my finger poised above the eject button. “Sorry, what?”
“I said don’t start without me. The popcorn takes three minutes. I’ll grab some Cokes, too.”
“Oh.” This was a wrinkle. I hadn’t planned to watch the movie here; I’d planned to watch it at home, in my comfortable recliner. In my comfortable, empty house. Alone. Oh, what the hell, I thought. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll pause it when the FBI copyright warning comes up. Wouldn’t want you to miss that.”
“I’ve seen some movies where that was the most exciting scene,” she deadpanned as she headed toward the hallway to fetch the refreshments.
“LOOKS LIKE A RAIN FOREST,” PEGGY REMARKED AS the film’s opening scene began, the camera tracking hunters sloshing through swampy woodlands, gloomy b
eneath towering conifers. “I thought you said the Arikara lived in the Great Plains.”
“They did,” I said. “At least, the ones I dug up did. South Dakota and North Dakota. This looks more like Montana. Or Oregon.”
Soon, the shot widened to show us that the sloshing hunters were white men, one of them a bearded, filthy, but recognizable Leonardo DiCaprio. “Maybe the hunters are lost,” Peggy offered. “Or maybe they track their prey all the way to the Plains.”
“Shh,” I said.
A few minutes later, the Arikara made their entrance, which they announced by shooting an arrow through the back of a running white man—a running white man who was, for some reason, buck naked. Peggy started and gasped when the arrow plowed into him and emerged halfway from his chest, just before he fell. An instant later, an Indian war party on horseback, whooping and unleashing a hail of bullets and arrows, galloped down a slope and surrounded the band of white trappers, unleashing swift, brutal death. “I thought you said the Arikara were farmers,” Peggy said. “And sedentary.”
“They were,” I said. “At least, the ones I dug up.”
“I thought you said they didn’t have horses or guns.”
“Artistic license,” I said. “Now shh.”
Miraculously, DiCaprio—or, rather, ace wilderness scout Hugh Glass, whom DiCaprio was portraying—managed to survive the slaughter, along with a dozen other men, including Glass’s half-Pawnee son. Racing to their boat, hauling heavy bundles of animal pelts, they pushed off and beat a hasty retreat downriver, the Indians continuing to lob arrows at the boat until it was out of range.
But we were only ten minutes into a three-hour movie, so clearly the trappers weren’t out of the woods yet. Knowing the Indians would surely race downstream to ambush them, Glass persuaded them to ditch the boat and head overland instead, angling toward the nearest fort. The battered group made camp, and Glass went hunting alone, seeking food for the group. That’s when his troubles began, for Glass had the misfortune to come between a mother grizzly and her two cubs. Distracted by the cubs, Glass didn’t see the mother charging until it was too late to get off a shot.
