Y2K Bones

cw: murder, gun violence, sexual abuse

Tanner Knight, 68, is watching Tanner Knight, 4, shoot his uncle on VHS with orange foam bullets. Though it’s only pretend, both four-year-old Tanner and sixty-eight-year-old Tanner want the same thing.

Their uncle dead.

“Oh,” groans his uncle on screen in pretend-pain. “Oh,” he groans again, louder now, his bones popping as he gets down on the brown carpet covered in fragrant green Christmas tree needles.

Tanner reloads his weapon, complements of Santa, then points it at his uncle’s purple-spotted head of milk-white hair. Before Tanner can shoot, the VHS screen turns blue, like when you wake up from a bad dream, right before you die.

“Wanna see another?” Tanner asks his son Max, who is sitting next to him cross-legged on the couch. Max stares at the blue screen in a daze, like it’s a pool of water he’d rather drown in than watch another grainy VCR from his father’s youth.

“Sure,” says Max, distant as usual, and Tanner worries that Max is only watching the tapes to appease him. He’s eleven now, just old enough to have lost those first few drops, maybe pints, of childlike bluntness, like he’s bleeding out his innocence, losing that innate ability kids have to scream no! Bad! Stupid! I don’t like that, and I don’t like you!

Tanner doesn’t think Max likes him like he used to. While he doesn’t think Max would say this out loud, he seems to make it clear with downcast eyes, loud silences, and tightly crossed arms and legs, like a human knot Tanner doesn’t know how to untangle.

It’s tablet baby versus VHS baby. MemoraStream baby versus Blockbuster baby. Tanner shows Max the VCRs in hopes of proving to him that the two of them are not so different, after all. That Tanner was once a boy, too, who broke rules and ate too many chips. Who, once upon a time, had a milk mustache instead of a salt-and-pepper one. That he didn’t come out of the womb already a leather-skinned man hacking up phlegm.

“I don’t think I’ve shown you this one,” says Tanner excitedly, hopeful this will be the one that shines him in a new light. It’s labeled Tanner’s 10th Birthday 2003 in his late mother’s loopy handwriting. He force feeds the tape when the VHS spits it back out. Then it hums and the grainy image of ten-year-old Tanner jumping with Moon Shoes inside his childhood bedroom comes to life.

“I was always getting in trouble,” Tanner says, sitting on the carpet, fast-forwarding to the good parts to keep Max from getting bored. “I think I say something funny in this one,” says Tanner searching, possibly for something that doesn’t exist.

Tanner looks over for Max’s reaction, but Max is gone.

The door to the only bedroom in Tanner’s apartment clicks shut, and Tanner pauses the tape. The only sounds now are the warm hum of the VHS and Max talking to his mom on speakerphone behind the closed door.

Tanner doesn’t know what’s gotten into Max lately. Maybe it was Tanner and Daisy’s divorce last winter. Maybe Daisy, out of anger, painted Tanner in a negative light after everything that had happened between them. It wasn’t always like this. Max used to fall asleep on Tanner’s shoulder and tell him everything and anything about his little life. That’s why Tanner hoped the VCRs would change Max’s mind about him. According to Daisy, Tanner was a bottom feeder who couldn’t provide for his family. According to the VCRs though, Tanner was a hyperactive boy who felt too deeply. Who grew up on dial-up and fell in love late in life. An idealist with frosted tips and Moon Shoes. As a kid, Tanner was so idealistic that, the first time he put on his Moon Shoes, he went outside and tried to jump to the actual moon, the way he’d seen in commercials.

Shoot for the moon, everyone always says. Because, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

But even though Tanner had aimed for the moon, had tried so desperately to climb the hierarchy of life as an adult, he missed. He missed so badly he didn’t even land among the stars. Instead, he found himself on a whole other planet, one so close yet so far from the son he would give the Earth, the Moon, and the stars to.

Tanner eavesdrops on Max. It’s one of the only perks of being a dad with a small apartment. Jaxon, Daisy’s new boyfriend of barely a month, takes the phone from Daisy to say hi to Max.

Jaxon is about thirty years younger than Tanner and about ten times richer. Maybe that’s why Max spends more time with Jaxon than he does with his own father. Because, to Max it seems, reams of cash are thicker than blood. With the amount of cash Jaxon has, he can afford to entertain the boy with much more than dusty VCRs. For Max’s birthday next month, he’s offered to take him to someplace outside the confines of Tanner’s squalid one-bedroom apartment, which creaks and cracks like Tanner’s Y2K bones.

When Max eventually comes back out, Tanner powers off the VHS. He turns on MemoraStream instead and feels accomplished when it gets Max’s attention.

[♪ Schubert's Ave Maria ♪]

[distorted whispers]

Sunlight filters through the stained glass of the church. HARPER, 28, the BRIDE, appears in her gown, breathing shallowly.

BRIDE

- You're a good man. But you're not my man.

[audible gasps from pews]

[♪ foreboding synth ♪]

“Wait,” says Max, bored again, sitting on the opposite end of the couch, far away from his father. “We’ve seen this one already.”

⸺

In his dream, Jaxon is shooting Tanner. Not the other way around. But before Jaxon can shoot, Tanner wakes up, opening his eyes to the blue-hued prison cell he barely gets any sleep in.

The night Tanner searched his son’s phone and found Jaxon’s text messages grooming his son, he swallowed his heartbeat. He knew what was happening. Tanner recognized his uncle’s same sick tactics he'd used against him as a child in Jaxon's messages to his son. He'd suspected it as soon as Jaxon came into the picture a few weeks ago. He felt it deep in his bones. The shiny gifts Jaxon always gave Tanner, which seemed even shinier to Max when he played with them against the backdrop of his dad's dismal apartment. The us-against-the-world sentiments, designed to isolate Max from his father. The revoltingly explicit questions no adult should ask a child, which, as soon as Tanner read, made him want to break the phone screen.

Instead, Tanner broke Jaxon’s face. It's an act of rage Max still doesn’t understand since, one, Max is eleven, and two, Jaxon didn’t live to act on what he’d been planning against Max. From Max’s perspective, his dad didn’t protect him ⸺ he just killed his best friend.

“Someone’s here to see you,” the prison warden tells Tanner later that morning. Tanner hopes it’s Max, but it never is.

Unlike Max, the person who’s come to visit him seems happy to see him. Almost too happy. The man, who he’s never met, wears a business suit so fitted it makes Tanner self-conscious in his loose orange jumpsuit. The man is shiny, in a corporate way, and the fluorescent light strips overhead glean off his wrinkle-free forehead like he buffs it every morning.

“Hi Tanner,” says the shiny stranger with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. He reaches to shake Tanner’s hand but then realizes Tanner’s wrists are bound.

“Can we . . . take those off him?” the shiny man asks the prison guards. He winks at Tanner when the guards agree to unchain him, like he’s done him a solid.

Tanner follows the man to the empty pod. He offers Tanner a soda and tells him he’s Scott Something. Tanner blanks out on his last name when he mentions he's VP of MemoraStream.

“Have you heard of us?” he asks, making Tanner hyper-aware of the pain in his creaky, old joints.

Tanner fidgets in his seat, self-conscious. “Yeah. Of course I have.”

“And would you be willing to share your memories with us?”

“My lawyer doesn’t want me t–.”

The shiny man puts his soda down. “Yeah, I know what you’re gonna say,” he says mid-swallow. “But before you go on, I just want to put it out there that nothing you share with MemoraStream can be used against you in a court of law. You could confess, I don’t know, that you shot the guy in the face instead of the leg.”

“But I did shoot him in the face.”

“Okay, then let’s say that you shot him in the face five times instead of just four. You get the picture. The point is, that couldn’t be used against you, or get you stuck here for longer than you already are. Look it.” He slides a paper across the table. “It says so right here.”

Tanner skims through the paperwork. Memory transfer. Terms of agreement. Strictly for entertainment purposes.

The shiny man explains the process as Tanner reads to himself under his breath. All Tanner would have to do is let them stick some wires to his head and sit in a chair for a few hours a day – a chair much more comfortable than the one he’s sitting in now – and think. Think about his memories, think about all the people he’s ever met, think about anything and everything he’s ever known. Those memories would then be converted into episodes, sorted by season and pieced together into a cohesive storyline that gripped viewers by the heart. With recent advances in their technology, MemoraStream could now generate subtitles in five different languages and a soundtrack that captures the emotion of the donor’s brain waves.

“MemoraStream has too much rom-com,” complains the shiny man. “Too many people selling us memories of their wedding day, their first kiss. People want something darker. That’s why MemoraStream wants to expand our true crime genre. Your memories are worth gold. Not to mention everyone loves you.”

The shiny man spits when he talks and a droplet lands on the paperwork and smudges the ink. He points to a specific sentence with his pen. “See here. Your son agreed to upload his memories. With his memories plus yours, the show can get multiple character angles. His mom signed the consent forms a while back.”

Tanner rubs his eyes from reading the fine print

“No pressure,” says the shiny man. He leaves the paperwork with Tanner, reminds him of the financial compensation involved, and tells him to sleep on it, as if he gets any sleep.

Tanner drinks his soda as the shiny man’s shoes echo on the way out, but right before he vanishes completely, he stops in the doorway. “Also,” he says pointing at Tanner with his pen, which is just as shiny as him. “By the way, I already watched the whole series on Max's memories.”

“And thanks to you,” says the shiny man with a smile that now reaches his eyes, “there weren’t any bad episodes.”

⸺

That night, Tanner flips through the paperwork for the hundredth time. He squints with whatever light filters through the bars of his cell, like he’s a kid again under his blankets reading R.L Stine with a flashlight.

If he agrees to convert his memories into episodes, he’ll retain the originals but lose control over which ones he shares. Any memories or intrusive thoughts he has while hooked up to the machine would belong to MemoraStream, and they could release them as they pleased.

But the more Tanner fantasizes about receiving the finances to put new shoes on Max, to give him the childhood Tanner only dreamed of, the less he cares about the humiliation of broadcasting the depths of his memory to the world.

The next week, Tanner finds himself in the comfortable chair the shiny man promised, hooked up to a tangle of red and yellow wires. He feels like a human VHS player.

The MemoraStream technician, a curly-haired woman named Ruby, gives Tanner prompts to trigger his memories. The prompts make Tanner think of the stress balls you have to squeeze when you donate blood to make it come out faster. Ruby flips through a cards with pictures on them, like she’s telling him a bedtime story.

A cloud.

A kiss.

A lollipop.

With each memory, a relevant memory appears on the screen. The screen he’s connected to buffers, then generates a dramatization of each memory.

As the months go by, Tanner spends what feels like the entirety of his remaining sentence in that comfy MemoraStream chair, uploading his memories, watching them buffer, and then, like magic, convert into 4K episodes on screen, complete with subtitles and the soundtrack of his life.

The night MemoraStream releases Tanner's storyline, he can't watch them. Not because he's not mentally ready for them but because the prison doesn’t offer MemoraStream. His only entertainment are books, cable, and reruns of black-and-white shows even Tanner is too young to remember.

It’s not until two years later when Tanner gets out of prison and back to the one-bedroom apartment he subleased during his sentence that streams his show for the first time.

Season 11, Episode 4: Y2K Bones.

FADE IN:

INT - SQUALID ONE-BEDROOM APARTMENT

TANNER, 68, is watching TANNER, 4, shoot his uncle on VHS with orange foam bullets.

The tape cuts out and MAX, 11, stares at the blue screen.

TANNER

-Wanna see another?

[♪ upbeat pop ♪]

“Wait,” says Max, thirteen now, half-asleep on his father’s shoulder. “We’ve seen this one already.”