You are a video camera on a man’s shoulder. You spend most of your days in the equipment room at Channel Six News, but tonight you are hoisted shoulder-high before the stage at a local nightclub. It is February, 2003. You are capturing images, stills of color and shape at a rate of twenty-four frames per second. Almost fifteen hundred photographs per minute, creating a retrievable reality, as the air is still and goes in and out of lungs at that atom-thin edge between now and the future.

What you see now, unfeeling, is a hair-metal band that sold millions of records in the late 1980s. These are older men now; it is early 2003. You see beers and pale arms lifted straight up, and the people attached to those beers and pale arms are jumpy, excited, and happy.

Almost two decades ago, those musicians, now in the flesh, leather jackets and electric guitars, being photographed twenty-four times per second, went into recording studios and played drums and sang about partying and young women and yearning and longing and general anti-authority themes. The sounds they created were impressed on long reels of magnetic tapes, which were copied onto etched vinyls and smaller tape reels within plastic cassettes and later on thin discs of polycarbonate holographic plastic. These physical products were put on trucks delivered to stores that people drove to. They were taken home and played on speakers which filled rooms, or on devices that isolated people in personal soundscapes with headphones.

This too is a recording. This too is a now that will be available later. A song is an artifice – it is composed, controlled, all that is spoken is sang, words in an order to tell a story, or an impression of a story that goes best with the selected chords, verse chorus verse, often rhyming. A song is a kingdom of creation. Live performance is a religious ritual.

You are pointed at the stage when the fireworks go off. Five men making noise before four hundred men and women gathered in the building, and the band is flanked by flumes of white sparkles that shoot upward as a fountain of heat and light. You record sound as well. Excited sounds, buzzy guitars, shouting, woos and yeahs and hell yeahs bounce all around you, passing by your microphone, synching with the video, which is not the real world but a succession of instants.

The fountains of light and heat are outsized for the venue. They reach up, they are reaching too high. Not much time has passed at all. The fireworks lick at the ceiling which is packed solidly with acoustic foam. This is just physics now, all predestination. The foam, whose purpose is to dampen and control the extremes of soundwaves, ignites instantly. There are now solid bars from stage to ceiling, white fireworks branching out to the orange and yellow of flames, spreading like roots in the ceiling. Not much time has passed at all. Smoke, cloudy white for a few seconds before turning black, billows downward, riding the currents created by heat differentials in the invisible air.

The cameraman, on whose shoulder you sit, his left hand gripping your handle in place, has taken notice. Others have noticed too, but not everyone. Some still dance and jump. Some are still trying to get a drink at the bar. As you begin to move backwards, away from the stage, more and more people fall into your outward lens. A quarter of these people are doomed. You are recording their last moments. What do you see?

As you begin to travel backwards, towards the exit, you remain pointed at the stage, pointed at the big room. You see the room become a hallway, walls narrowing. You are in a river of people and you remain recording, pointed back towards the source of the panic. You see the faces of everyone in the hallway. Some are blank, some crack in the hysteria of fear, some merely convey a minor annoyance. It is February and it is cold outside.

Not much time has passed at all. You exit the building as the horror grows. You are not damaged; the cameraman has survived. You were supposed to supply footage for a story – a big band coming to your small town. The news here is mainly the weather and high school sports. Your images are largely unimportant, trivial.

You don’t stop. You’ve made it out, but your view swings back to the doors you just exited. Then you see it. A crush of bodies, a pile of fallen people, all still conscious, has formed at the passage out. It’s physics, predestination. The people near the exit moved slowly relative to those closer to the fire. Those at the back who felt the painful heat and poison air pushed hard against those in front of them, those in stood in the way of salvation, with such force that they fell forward like dominos. Those at the doors fell forward and those just behind fell on top of them, and those behind them continued to push. The friction of human bodies in their recreational clothing, jackets, boots, band tee shirts, hair-ties, were not easily overcome.

Those who were saved tried to pull some free from the crushing pile. Screams of panic turned to screams of torture, of pain and helplessness. A man jumped out of a glass window. His body tumbled down onto the snow, broken shards of translucent hardness fell into the snow and disappeared. Dark smoke poured out and up from the new opening.

People made it out to the parking lot and vomited and cried. They turned back towards the building with their own eyes, recording into their own memories, the building becoming something else with fire, a hell. In a few minutes the building would be embers. Your recording light stays on and pointed at the spectacle. Not much time has passed at all.

– Matt Gulley

Author’s Note: Second person to an inanimate object, this story is based on the tragic Station Nightclub fire in 2003.