The roar of the audience’s applause was replaced by the still silence of the near-empty rowhome. Jordan withdrew his hands from the television and looked around the room. The couch, Pop’s armchair, the desk—everything was here. The hulking machinery of the room where he’d just been was gone. The sun shone through the bottom two inches of window where the vinyl pull-down shades did not reach, letting Jordan know it was still early afternoon. He fished his cell phone from his pocket, expecting it to still be dead, but miraculously it was bright and awake, the battery indicator showing nearly a full charge. The screen flashed the time and Jordan froze. It was an hour later from when he popped the tape in, meaning he’d watched the whole thing straight through.

An hour-long hallucination? Jordan had never heard of such a thing. Then again, he’d never had cause to research it either.

Regardless of how it happened, something had caused his little slip from reality. He thought to check the weather to see if there had been a storm, however brief, while he was watching the video—maybe lightning had struck the house, passed through the TV into his body, and messed around with his brain, fried the wires a little—but knew from the daylight outside that no such thing had occurred.

So what, then?

He ejected the tape from the VCR and inspected it, not looking for anything particular, before putting it back down. Just a plain black tape with the thin white label on the front side. A relic time had made obsolete, as it had with so many other things.

He cautiously stuck out a finger to the glass-fronted TV and felt a tingle of static in the centimeter between it and his pointer. It hovered, hovered, before Jordan quickly touched it to the glass and pulled it away as if poking a sleeping Saint Bernard. Aside from the small static tingle, nothing happened. And why would it? His dizziness was gone, headache abating, and he felt like he had when he’d arrived at the house—more or less normal. Maybe he just needed some sleep. It hadn’t exactly been the most stress-free time of his life.

He looked down and saw the black plastic box with the faux-leather corners was back at his side. Each tape was the same—black, caseless—the only thing differentiating them being the neat cursive on each of the skinny white labels. Mary Tyler Moore ’73, read one. Saturday Night Live ’80, read another. Price Is Right ’92. All in the Family ’75. Jordan pulled out these and half a dozen others, forming a small mountain on the blue carpet.

He caught himself glancing at the Carol Burnett tape again.

Sure, his “episode” could’ve been brought on by stress but…

But what?

What if it was something else?

He picked a random tape from the pile—Super Password  ’86—and stuck it into the VCR.

If it happens again, you’ll know.

Know what? That he was crazy? That he was sane, but did have a tumor? What good news, exactly, would a repeat experience prove?

He sat in the same position in front of the television and watched the tape. Before long, he’d nearly finished the entire half-hour. Nothing happened. So tumor it was. He drummed his hands against the legs of his jeans and remembered when he’d watched the last tape, he’d put them on the TV itself.

What the hell? Jordan thought and shrugged. If you’re crazy, you’re crazy. Might as well play into it. He raised his palms and cupped them to the corners of the television set.

Watched. Waited.

Nothing.

This was stupid, and he knew it. The contestants on the stage continued their game, the rounds interspersed with witty remarks from the host. Jordan sighed and checked his watch again. Another minute or two had passed but it wasn’t the time that made him pause. Looking down beyond his beat-up Timex, he no longer saw the bright blue carpeting of his grandparents’ living room. It was instead replaced by an awful tan and black shag, the way he imagined cheetahs would look if God had created them with his eyes crossed.

He glanced up and a chill broke out across the back of his neck. There was a stage and a set and a studio audience, Burt Convy standing at the red and blue Password table between both teams (each “regular” contestant was paired with a celebrity teammate, though Jordan didn’t recognize either of them), keeping the game moving swiftly along while the announcer whispered the password to the at-home audience.

By now, a contestant named Kim had advanced to the final round—attempting to guess ten passwords for a chance to win an extra $5,000 (big money in 1986)—with the celebrity who looked like an older version of George Clooney.

Again, Jordan was above, looking at the audience below through dimmed studio lighting. Somewhere down there in the dark, he knew, Granny was sitting. He’d been plopped into another technical booth as he’d been when watching the Carol Burnett tape and didn’t even notice that, with these thoughts, he had begun to think of this experience as legitimate, real, not the brain tumor-induced hallucination he had initially feared. Not that this was any less scary.

There was only one man at the switchboard-looking terminal this time and, thankfully, Jordan had appeared behind him.

Appeared.

Was that what someone would’ve seen if they were watching? Did he just poof into the booth, or slowly fade in, bit by bit, pixel-like?

On stage, the final round concluded (poor Kim only ended up with $500 out of the possible $5,000) and Burt Convy was bidding the at-home audience farewell. “We’re out of time today, we’ll see ya tomorrow,” he said. “Please come back. Happy shopping. See ya then. Bye.” He waved as the taxi yellow credits began to slowly, slowly crawl up the screen. Before long the set lights dimmed and the final credit—informing the audience that the show was Videotaped at NBC Studios, Burbank, California—appeared. The show was ending—Jordan had come in on the tail-end—but he still had so many questions. Though there was one—one he had asked himself recently—to which he now had an answer.

A second later when the credits had finished, the screens in the tiny technical room faded to black, and he found himself back in his grandparents’ living room with a killer headache, clutching the corners of the television, Jordan Jones knew he wasn’t crazy.