The VHS Tape

The leak report came from the fourth floor — bathroom ceiling dripping yellow water, half the wall already stained. Zhou arrived at seven-thirty on his electric scooter, toolbox strapped to the back seat.

The tenant who opened the door was a kid in his early twenties with ash-grey hair, eyes glued to his phone. He didn't say anything, just jerked his chin toward the bathroom and went back to scrolling.

Zhou didn't mind. He had been doing building maintenance for fifteen years. He knew every pipe in this place by feel. He set up the ladder, pried open an aluminum ceiling panel with a screwdriver, and was met with the damp, musty smell of old drywall. His flashlight cut through the dark crawlspace, dust swirling in the beam.

The leak was coming from a loose joint on the fifth-floor drainpipe. An easy fix — just replace the gasket. Zhou reached in to loosen the pipe clamp, and his fingers brushed against something solid.

He pulled apart a wad of insulation and dragged out a plastic bag, wrapped in several tight layers. Inside was a rectangular box.

Still balanced on the ladder, he tore the bag open. Dust made him squint. It was a VHS tape. On the sleeve, in ballpoint pen: 1998.10.03 — At Home. The handwriting was quick but firm.

"Yours?" Zhou called out to the kid.

The kid finally glanced up. "What is it?"

"VHS tape."

"Damn, an antique." The kid laughed. "Throw it out."

Zhou didn't throw it out. He slipped it into his coat pocket and went back to fixing the pipe.

---

Zhou lived in the same building. Third floor, unit 301. His wife had divorced him five years ago. Their son went with her, only coming back for Chinese New Year. The two-bedroom apartment felt too big for one man. An old VCR sat under his TV stand, something he'd salvaged a decade ago from a family clearing out before demolition. It was hooked up to a CRT television he'd bought secondhand, and he almost never turned either of them on. They just sat there, collecting dust.

That evening, after dinner and dishes, Zhou sat on the sofa staring at nothing. He slipped his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out the tape.

1998. He would have been twenty-four that year, before he started working for the property company, still an apprentice at an auto repair shop. He couldn't remember much from that year. It was like looking at an old photo through frosted glass — the outline was there, but the details had all blurred.

He crouched down, slid the tape into the VCR. The machine clicked and began to whir.

---

Five seconds of static.

Then the picture snapped in. Handheld footage, the frame unsteady. A woman stood at the kitchen counter, chopping vegetables with her back to the camera, wearing a floral apron. A man's voice came from behind the lens: "Don't film me."

"Just for a second."

"No."

The camera panned to the living room. A small boy was sprawled on the floor, drawing, a lollipop in his mouth. The man called out: "Xiaojie. Look up."

The boy lifted his head and grinned. He was missing a front tooth.

Zhou hit pause.

He didn't recognize anyone in the frame — he hadn't moved into the building until years after 1998, and he'd never met the previous residents of this unit. But he recognized the living room.

That smoke-stained corner by the wall — he'd painted over it the week he moved in. The living room window faced west, and on summer afternoons the sun was blinding; eventually he installed a bamboo blind. In the footage, the blind wasn't there yet. The window frame was the dark green aluminum every builder used in the nineties, and on the sill sat a potted cactus.

This was his apartment. He had lived here for two decades.

And this man, this woman, this boy with the missing tooth — they had lived here before him.

Zhou stared at the frozen frame for a long time. The glow from the television flickered across his face. He pressed fast-forward.

---

The rest of the tape was scattered, improvisational. The man wandered through the apartment with the camera, documenting his home the way you might take inventory of something you already know you'll lose. The kitchen stove. The wardrobe in the bedroom. Laundry drying on the balcony. Nothing remarkable, nothing staged.

At one point, the man stood on the balcony and filmed the street below. A Xiali taxi idled at the curb. A street vendor stood by a steel drum, roasting sweet potatoes, smoke curling into the autumn air. A man in a white dress shirt rode past on a bicycle, a newspaper folded under his arm.

Zhou remembered that vendor. When he first moved into the building, the old man with the sweet potato cart was still there. A Henan accent, gruff but kind. Every night at ten he'd load his steel drum onto a tricycle and pedal away, the wheels creaking.

Then one year, without anyone really noticing, he stopped coming. Maybe he went back to his hometown. Maybe he got too old to pedal. The intersection was now a bubble tea shop with outdoor seating. On summer nights it was packed with teenagers gaming on their phones, and no one remembered that the air there once smelled of caramelized sweet potato over charcoal.

---

Forty-seven minutes in, the camera returned to the living room. The boy — Xiaojie — was doing homework at the coffee table. The woman sat beside him, knitting. The man set the camera down on the TV cabinet, walked into the frame, and settled next to the woman. He tilted his head, looking into the lens.

A family of three. The father, maybe thirty, had a long, thin face and a receding hairline. The mother's face was round, her eyes folding into crescents when she smiled. Xiaojie lay across the table, muttering to himself — probably reciting a lesson.

The man spoke to the camera: "Today is October 3rd, 1998. Saturday. Bought this camcorder. Just trying it out."

The woman jabbed him with a knitting needle. "Over two thousand yuan. You really went for it."

"For memories. So Xiaojie can watch when he's older."

Without looking up, Xiaojie said: "I want to watch it now."

The man and woman laughed at the same time, and the sound came slightly out of sync, a small echo caught between the lens and the room.

Then the tape ended. Snow filled the screen.

---

Zhou didn't turn off the television. He sat in the dark, listening to the VCR hum. Outside the living room window, a car passed, its high beams sweeping across the ceiling and vanishing.

He knew an old man named Sun who lived on the fifth floor — unit 503. Mr. Sun was a retired math teacher who had been in the building for thirty years. When Zhou first joined the property company, Mr. Sun had helped him fix a water heater, refused to take any money, and invited him to stay for dinner. The man was handy; he fixed everything in his apartment himself and almost never called maintenance.

Mr. Sun had a son. His name was Xiaojie.

Five years ago, Mr. Sun moved out. After his wife died, he lived alone. His legs got worse — going up and down the stairs meant gripping the railing and shuffling one step at a time. His son — the Xiaojie Zhou had just seen grinning at a camera in 1998 — came to pack his things and move him to a nursing home on the outskirts of the city. Zhou ran into them in the hallway that day. Xiaojie, a nylon duffel in one hand, steadying his father with the other. Mr. Sun turned and looked back at the stairwell before he left, the way you look at a friend you know you will never see again.

Zhou hadn't known, back then, that somewhere in this building was a Saturday afternoon from 1998, preserved on magnetic tape — a man with a brand-new camcorder, a woman with a knitting needle, a boy with a missing tooth.

---

Sunday was Zhou's day off. He rode his scooter to the outskirts.

The nursing home sat on a low hill, ginkgo trees in the courtyard just beginning to yellow at the edges. Mr. Sun was on the ground-floor veranda, in a rattan chair, a thin blanket draped over his knees. He was watching sparrows peck at the ground.

Zhou sat down beside him. He didn't mention the property company or the VHS tape. He just said he was in the area and thought he'd stop by.

"Remember me? Zhou Jianguo."

Mr. Sun turned and studied him for a long moment, his eyes uncertain, the way you look at someone you placed once but can't quite retrieve.

Then he nodded — slowly, just barely. Zhou couldn't tell if it was recognition or politeness.

Zhou pulled the VHS tape from his bag and placed it on the blanket over Mr. Sun's knees.

The old man looked down at the handwriting on the sleeve. His fingers stopped over the ballpoint ink and just stayed there, the veins standing out against the back of his hand. The hallway was quiet. The only sound was sparrows fluttering in the courtyard.

His lips moved, but nothing came out. His fingers began to tremble.

Zhou stood up. He patted Mr. Sun on the shoulder and turned to leave. He walked down the front steps, climbed onto his scooter, strapped on his helmet, turned the key. In the rearview mirror, he saw Mr. Sun still looking down, holding the tape in both hands the way you hold something fragile.

Zhou didn't look back again. He rode down the hill, retracing the path he'd come, through the intersection he'd come through.

The intersection was a bubble tea shop now. Closed on a Sunday morning. The sun fell on the white plastic chairs out front, bright enough to sting.

---

When he got home, Zhou pulled out his key and paused at the lock.

He thought about setting up a camera in the living room — pointed at the balcony, the kitchen, the window overlooking an intersection where no one sold roasted sweet potatoes anymore. Just to record something.

Then it struck him as absurd. He lived alone. Who would watch it?

Zhou turned the key, pushed the door open. The living room was still the living room. The bamboo blind cast thin, measured shadows across the floor. He took off his coat, hung it over the back of a chair, and poured himself a glass of water in the kitchen.

Halfway through the glass, he set it down, walked to the TV cabinet, and crouched in front of the old VCR. He wiped the dust off with his sleeve.

It still worked.

He stood up and looked out the window. A delivery driver on an electric scooter honked twice, startling a row of sparrows off the power lines.

Zhou reached for his keys on the windowsill. He thought he might ride over to the secondhand electronics market.

Maybe pick up a blank tape.