We were told to wear our school colours and bring “good attitudes,” which is what the vice principal said whenever a pep rally had to be dressed as something nobler. The banner over the gym doors read CHOOSE LIFE in thick vinyl letters, and beneath it a line of freshmen filed past me with their transparent backpacks and bright, compliant faces. I was the kid with the camera, a Nikon with a loose strap, purchased by the yearbook fund and signed out under my name as if responsibility could be inked. I also had the VHS camcorder, a boxy thing with a battery like a brick, because I’d talked myself into being the kind of person who documented what everyone else remembered wrong.

It was late-90s everything: the hiss of the speakers before they settled into a voice, the overhead lights turning everyone the colour of school milk, the bleachers unrolled like wooden ribs. “Welcome our special guests,” the PA crackled, and four men in matching black T-shirts processed onto the gym floor as if the native religion of our town had always involved men whose necks were wider than their forearms. Strong Men Against Drugs, the shirts said, a little white fist printed where a heart might be.

The leader had a microphone clipped to his face, a crescent of metal like a second jaw. “We are here to show you what clean living can do,” he boomed. He lifted a phone book the size of a fat baby and the crowd went Ooooh in one, like a single animal breathing in. He tore it. Not politely. Not with the little trick of folding and worrying a seam. He tore it from the spine with a noise I can still feel in my teeth, a sound like the gym itself had been turned into paper. He bent a steel bar until the bar remembered it was only made of the idea of strength. He splayed his fingers and popped a hot-water bottle, made a sudden red sun in the gym air.

I moved in a half-circle and shot, the way I’d taught myself: action, faces, crowd, reaction. I got the phone book hanging in two sad halves and a freshman covering her mouth as if she might sneeze, the strongman’s tendon ropes gathering at his wrists, the math teacher clapping too hard because he wanted to be a good sport. All this power arranged in little rectangles of time. Every so often I lifted the camcorder and rolled, just enough tape to get the movement, not enough to burn the battery. I’d learned that if you tried to capture everything, the everything became a paste in your head. You had to leave parts of the day wild if you wanted them to come back clean.

Behind the men, someone had hung a poster with steps: SAY NO, WALK AWAY, TELL AN ADULT, PRAY. In the fourth square a hand with cartoon fingernails floated up under a sun with rays, the crude theology of a school assembly: God is a circle, and He’s on our side. The men were not good at jokes but they had something better, which is spectacle. They were priests of a certain blunt liturgy. Don’t do drugs. Do this instead: lift, tear, bend, break. The world will clap for you. Be stronger than it.

He looked like he could bend the town if he got both hands around it.

I have, in a shoebox, proof of the things I think I remember. The box smells like cardboard in the rain. If I open it I’ll find the pictures from that day. But I don’t need them to get back there. In the mind’s auditorium, the light never warms. The phone book keeps tearing; the halves never hit the floor.

After, the vice principal asked me to get a few posed shots, a line of boys shoulder-to-shoulder with their arms crossed, the PE teacher with her whistle half-hidden in a smile, the Strong Men flanked by children like a king’s hunting party. I did what I was told, but I also tilted the camera a little, made the lines into diagonals. If you bend the frame, people look like they’re moving even if they’re standing still. It felt like truth, which is probably why I liked it.

When we got home, I spread the receipts across the counter like a gambler’s hand. The house smelled like coffee grounds and the lemon-sugar that lived permanently in our mop. My mother came in and dropped her purse where purses go when work is done, anywhere, so long as it’s out of hand. She had the rare look she got when she wasn’t thinking about work at all: a smoothness that made her seem younger and less armoured.

“How was school?” she said, then saw the stack of prints and the thick black VHS tape like a slice of night. She picked at a photo as if it might call her back. “Oh,” she said. “Those guys.”

“You’ve heard of them?”

“Not them,” she said, and angled the picture in the kitchen light. “Him.”

Third from the left. The one with the bar a smile across his knees. I could see his veins like a road atlas beneath his skin.

“He works with you?” I said.

“Not with,” she said. “At. Different department. Not exactly a desk job.” She was HR at a place that manufactured the quiet parts of the world, brackets and housings and little metal somethings that vanished into machines. I’d always thought of her office like a tide pool: complicated if you looked but still compared to the roar outside. “We have an open case on him,” she said, soft. “He’s out on comp.”

She turned the photo back to me. The strongman’s face was soft in that rectangle, a strange gentleness around the eyes, a looseness in the jaw, the halo every flashbulb gives to a person who is shedding heat. I felt embarrassed for him suddenly, like we were looking at him with his guard down. “Comp as in…comp?” I said, foolish. I never knew what I could ask and what was the kind of confidential information that made my mother’s mouth go tight.

“Disability,” she said. “Back injury.” She hesitated, and there was the smallest seam in her voice. “Can barely move, according to the paperwork.”

“He’s bending a bar,” I said.

“Looks that way,” she said. “Make me a couple copies?”

She paid for my film when I couldn’t float it until the yearbook account reimbursed. She paid for the digitizing because I wanted to “learn editing,” which meant sitting at the family computer and teaching myself to cut sentences into jump-cuts. So I took the prints to the lab on Main and told them I needed duplicates, then took the VHS tape to the man who owned the store next door and said I needed it transferred to a file my mother could email. He looked at the tape’s label as if it might say something besides the date and the scribble of my initials, then set it on a shelf among others like it, weddings, christenings, football games, a drawer labelled PETS. The world’s second life.

At dinner my mother didn’t bring it up and neither did I. She’d spooned our plates with pasta that tasted like good days. The news murmured in the other room because the house liked to pretend there were more people in it. We talked about the cat and my art teacher, who had confessed a quiet love for Bauhaus as if it were a vice, a clean devotion to lines that made my mother nod approval. Outside it got dark in the way our town got dark: the sky did its thing and the streetlights clicked and the river kept moving.

Later, while she washed the dishes and I stood drying them in the efficient little ballet we did when we were not hurt at each other, she said, “It’s strange.”

“What is?”

“Evidence,” she said. “How it wants to be ordinary. How it shows up like a photo you aren’t sure you took.”

She had seen stranger things than a man telling a story with his body and telling a different one on his forms. She’d shown me once, when I was smaller and still believed in the big noises adults make, a stack of sick notes all in the same handwriting, signed from different doctors. She had an eye for patterns that did not expect to be seen. I have that too now; it’s one of the curses we share. We point the camera and the camera points back.

That night I watched the tape alone. I had the house to myself because my mother went to choir on Thursdays and I liked to pretend that the choir was a real thing, robes, scores, a diligent agnosticism that sang anyway, rather than a handful of women with good voices and long days. I slid the cassette into the plastic mouth of the VCR and brought the blanket to the couch like a child staging a fort. The camcorder’s shaky mouth opened. There we were: our gym, our banner, our earnestness. The strongmen assembled.

I was looking for the bar bend and the book tear. I got the spiel about how his mother had raised him on scripture and tuna fish, how drugs had been offered and refused, how a man who said he loved you might hand you poison with a smile. Then there was the thing I wanted: the bar like an unmade promise, the hands around it like the solution to a puzzle. He bent and the bar went with him. He smiled. He was good at it, this weird sacrament. Strength made visible. The crowd turned into teeth.

Then the tape stuttered.

At the time I blamed the heads in the VCR, their old habit of fuzzing the corners of the world. Now I am not so sure, because I had cleaned it the week before with a kit that involved alcohol and a ritual that made me feel like I knew what I was doing. The tape shivered a little then rolled again. The frame jumped and landed and something in the progress of that day shifted, as if two very near timelines had scraped against one another and swapped a detail or two. I set a finger on the fast forward and watched the little white numbers climb like a thin mountain. The screen twitched again, then righted itself.

In the third viewing, he looked up.

Not at the audience, which is what performers do. Not at the rafters, which is what men with microphones do when they sense the light will bless them for it. He looked directly at the lens. At me. His hand never stopped bending the bar. He didn’t wink or make a face. He just looked as if something had caught his attention, and that something had my eye behind it.

I rewound and tried again. He didn’t do it the second time or the third. He did it for half a second in the fifth. A look like a coin flipped in the air and caught. I froze the frame. A soft square of him. The face that I’d thought of as all jaw and principle softened further by the pause. In that still he looked tired. Not a word we associate with strong. Tired like the men who came into my mother’s office asking whether a thing could be called a misunderstanding if it happened over and over.

I left the tape in the machine. I didn’t tell her.

Over the next week, something leaked. Sometimes you hear it like a drip in a wall. Sometimes you don’t hear anything but the wallpaper buckles between breakfast and lunch. The lab called to say the copies were ready. I took two sets to my mother, who slid them into a manila envelope the way you put a letter into a mailbox when you’re not sure who will read it. She placed the envelope with a few others in her bag. Evidence wants to huddle with its own kind.

That night, she said her boss had asked for a meeting the next day. “Could be nothing,” she said. “Could be everything.” She pressed her thumbnail into her palm and released it, a habit that left small tender moons. “I don’t like the word fraud.”

“What word do you like?” I said gently.

“I like mistake,” she said. “I like fixable. I like a person who will come in and tell me about his back and how he went to church to be wholesome in front of children and then did a trick, because tricks are what they are, and maybe he wanted to feel something clean.” She sighed. “I like the words that don’t belong in my file.”

In the middle of the night I woke to a papery sound from the kitchen, so soft I might have dreamed it. When I got to the doorway the light above the sink was on, and the manila envelope sat fat on the table with a corner of print peeking out, proof that someone had looked. My mother was not there. The house had moved one inch away from itself, the way it does when two stories begin to overlap and slight misalignments show up, frame to doorway, truth to truth. I picked at the corner and looked at the photo on top. The gym, the bent bar. The strongman’s shirt had a wrinkle I didn’t remember. His mouth was a little more open. The vinyl banner sagged a little more. In the bleachers, a girl I didn’t think I’d captured was covering her face with both hands, as if she’d seen something she ought not.

I slid the picture back into its paper and went to bed. In the morning, a pencil mark had been made beside the date on the envelope. Evidence had been ticked. I made coffee like an apology for being a body in a house with another body in it. My mother drank half a cup standing at the sink and said, “I may be late.”

“Should I?” I gestured uselessly at the place where a teenager invites himself into an adult’s day and gets told, politely, no.

“Go to school,” she said. “Learn something nobody will ask you to prove.”

In the weeks that followed, the man did not come back to work. That part is simple. The company did whatever companies do when the story in the file doesn’t match the story in the gym. There was a whisper from my mother, only that, a whisper, that an investigator had watched a man load gym equipment into a van and later groan his way into a chair at a clinic. I asked if they’d press charges and she said, “We’re not that kind of story.” I asked if they’d cut him off and she said, “We’re exactly that kind.”

The school year went on. I took pictures of the chess club holding their trophies like chalices, the track team with legs like sprung wire, the principal shaking a hand with both her hands as if she could add hers together and make sincerity. I dated a girl who wore a ring on a chain and then, later, didn’t date her. I learned to edit better. I made the pep rally into a one-minute piece for the end-of-year video with cuts so quick you could feel the crowd lean forward and then laugh. In that cut, the strongman always looked at the camera for a fraction of a breath. I left it there, like a secret under a stamp. Nobody noticed; they cheered anyway.

Every so often I’d see him in town, or I’d see someone with his shape and decide after a half second of heart-bang that it wasn’t him. Then one day after graduation, I saw him for real, and he looked back long enough to make it a fact.

I was at the hardware store buying a box of screws because once you move out of your mother’s house you have to make your own holes and fill them afterward. He was in the aisle with the duct tape, looking at his own hands as if he’d found them on a shelf by mistake. He’d grown a beard that made his face look honest, which is a cheap trick. He wore a plain shirt and the shape of a person who had been watched and measured. When I came even with him, he raised his eyebrows, the universal sign for I know you from somewhere and I am not sure if it was heaven or court.

“Hey,” I said, because I was not brave enough to say his name.

“Hey,” he said, because he was not brave enough to know mine.

We stood in the aisle with the tapes and the glues and the fasteners that promise repair. There are aisles like that in every town: quiet second churches where people come to talk to the gods of stick and hold. He looked at my box of screws. I looked at his roll of tape. Without meaning to, I said, “You were good at it.”

“At what?” he said, and his mouth quirked. He didn’t mean harm; it was simply a defense, a reflex in the body of a man who had learned that questions are small knives.

“The show,” I said. “The thing with the bar. The phone book.”

He made a small shape with his hands, a ghost of the bar between them. He could have said what all of them say: there’s a trick to it. Because there is. You use the spine, you use heat, you use your stance. You coerce the paper into believing it is many little doors rather than one wall. He didn’t. He said, “I liked the sound it made.”

We stood listening to the sounds this aisle made, the plastic speech of shrink wrap, the quiet breath of the store’s air, the one song that all these places play. “My mother…” I began, then stopped because I didn’t have a conclusion that didn’t end in judgement. The courtroom lives in the mouth. It wants out.

“She did her job,” he said gently. “She has to have a back too.” He smiled, oddly shy. “I was on a team,” he added, as if that might be relevant. “I’m not now.”

In the stories the school told us, there was always a pivot: the offer refused, the lesson learned. He had been the pivot in our gym. He was not, here. He was only a man buying tape.

When I got home I told my mother I’d seen him. She put a dish on the counter like it needed saving. “He came in,” she said, instead of any of the other things she could say. “Not to talk about it. For a reference.”

“And did you?”

“I wrote a letter that said something true,” she said. “I wrote that he shows up on time. I wrote that he has a presence in a room. I did not write that presence can be a kind of theft.” She closed her eyes, which always made me want to smooth her hair. “He thanked me. He called me ma’am, which in men like him means hello and goodbye and forgive me.”

I have left towns and I have returned to them and I have learned that memory is sometimes a cut and sometimes a dissolve. It pleases me to think I am in charge of the edit, but often the edit is in charge of me. When I tell this story to myself, and I do; we repeat the ones that hold us by the throat, it gets a little different depending on the day. In one version, my mother makes a righteous noise and the company saves itself. In another, she helps a man learn to name the parts of his life. In a third, the phone book keeps tearing forever. We trap him in strength and we leave him there.

That fall I left for a city where nobody knew what my town smelled like after rain. I learned to make films that told the truth only as a hobby, which is one kind of mercy. In a museum I watched a video installation on loop for twenty minutes: a man bending a line that wasn’t there, his hands moving in the air, sound of paper drowning out a voiceover I couldn’t quite hear. On the wall the artist wrote about labour and bodies and performance and what a crowd will do to a man who needs it. I stayed until the guard looked at me the way a person looks when they want to make sure you are not isinglass, going to fall straight through the floor.

On visits home I’d pass the gym sometimes and imagine the steel rings under the floor shifting as they took our collective weight. If you stood under the balcony during a basketball game you could hear a low moan, as if old wood had a voice. I liked to think the banner was in a closet somewhere, vinyl with a crease. I liked to think that somewhere a bar straightened itself back out, given time.

Once I dreamed the gym without walls. The bleachers were a cliff. The floor was a frozen river. He stood in the middle with a book the size of a bed and tore it, and inside the pages little houses shook, and a woman in an office closed her eyes, and a boy with a camera lifted it, and the lens was an eyelid, and the tape spooled and spooled,

In the dream, when he looked at the camera he knew my name.

There is a line somewhere between fraud and faith: a man says he cannot lift and then lifts to show us that he is good. A school says don’t and gives you a show that makes you want to say yes. A mother says she will be late and comes home early, because the meeting ended with everyone nodding as if a knot had come out of a rope. None of this is a miracle. All of it is.

I keep the photos in a shoebox but sometimes I take one out and pin it to a corkboard in my head. In the frame, the bar is still unbent, is bent, is straightening. The crowd is a single face. The poster says PRAY. I do, a little, for all of us, him on his aisle, my mother in her tide pool, me with my camera held like a promise I am in no position to keep. I pray for the quiet click of a decision well made. I pray for the sound of paper when it tears, because once you’ve heard it you know the difference between that and a body breaking.

In one last version of the tape I keep only for myself, he leans into the bar and looks at me with an expression I cannot name. It is tired and kind and a little wry, as if he understands that we are both on someone’s clock. He bends the bar until it is a crescent, until it is a door handle, until it is a horizon, and then he holds it up over his head and the whole gym lifts with it, the banner, the bleachers, the bright milk light, the little cartoon hand raised to the sun. He is stronger than it. For a second, so am I. Then the tape runs out, the screen goes blue, and the VCR spits the cassette like a tongue.

Evidence, my mother says, years later, on a porch, with iced tea the colour of amber and a summer full of cicadas grinding their teeth, isn’t what convinces you. “It’s what lets you admit you’ve been convinced.” She touches my wrist. “We keep things because we know we’ll doubt ourselves later.”

I nod, and we sit with the leaves making their slow applause. Somewhere a gym smells like varnish. Somewhere a man opens his hands and finds they are still there. Somewhere a photo develops in the dark and the image swims up out of the bath and blinks at the light, and in that second, before you fix it, it could be anything at all.