We had noticed the screens from the street. One showed an action film with the colour turned too warm. Another displayed a game menu. The third carried the blue-grey snow of a missing signal. Inside, the room was narrow and crowded with old electronics stacked in careful, unstable arrangements. VHS tapes. Game controllers. Portable televisions. Cameras large enough to injure a shoulder.
The owner emerged from behind a curtain holding a cable that looked medically significant. He repaired things, he explained, though fewer people brought them in now. Most of what surrounded us had been collected from homes, offices, hotels, and shops as they upgraded to something flatter and less interesting. He turned on a camcorder and showed us footage from a local festival recorded decades earlier. Children ran through the same street outside. Buildings had different signs. Several people in the video still came by the shop. Nothing was labelled. There were no captions, accession numbers, or climate-controlled cases.
But every object had a story, and he knew all of them. We stayed for nearly two hours. Before leaving, we asked whether he had ever thought about opening a museum. He looked around the room. Then he looked at us. “What do you think this is?”
