Chapter 26
“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” Dez demands.
“Today’s the midterm.”
“I know. I worked all night to finish my O’Rourke film. What does it have to do with Mo?”
“After the midterm,” Rafe says, “all the assignments in your Lenses get turned over to our Distribution Department. And everything else gets erased. Cleared out for the next assignments.”
“You never told me that.”
“I assumed you’d have finished it by now.” Rafe puts his hands up. “I don’t make the rules, but if you want your brother to see Lazarus, it has to be today. I can slip away now and make sure he gets it.”
“It’s not finished,” Dez says.
“Then finish it. I can wait a few minutes. But that’s it.”
“A few minutes? No.” Dez laughs bitterly. “That’s not enough time.”
Rafe puts a hand on her shoulder. She looks up at him, and, God, it would be so nice to forget all this, to drag him to her bed and take off every single article of his clothing, to tumble into his skin.
“Dez,” he says, “you’ve made something beautiful to inspire your brother. He’d want to see it.”
“Why can’t we just save it somewhere?” she asks. “I can finish in the next few days. I know I can. But I haven’t slept and—”
Rafe shakes his head. “It’s now or never.”
Dez is so tired. And what he’s saying, this sudden urgency, doesn’t make sense.
“Then it’s never,” she says, “because I’m not showing Mo this film until it’s ready.”
Rafe’s jaw clenches. He looks unsettled, maybe even scared.
“Wait here,” he finally says.
He jogs toward the entrance of the Vault, disappears behind the circular doorway, then returns a few moments later pushing what looks like a small bar cart. As he gets closer, Dez eyes two crystal cordial glasses and a small decanter of what looks like red wine rattling on the top shelf.
“We don’t have time for me to finish Mo’s film, but we do have time to drink?” Dez says.
“No one gets more time,” Rafe says. “But you can have slower time.”
“Did you say ‘slower time’?”
“This is called a Soma, courtesy of Ereshkigal herself.”
“Eri made it?” Dez asks.
He nods. “She doesn’t make them often, but I thought you might need one today.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a five-thousand-year-old drink invented by Sumerian priestesses. It buys you time. Timelessness, really. A timeless moment to finish your timeless film.”
Dez is used to time flying in the Vault, hours disappearing in what feels like only moments. It happened right before Rafe showed up when Dez was in Asher’s Lifeline. Now he’s saying this drink has the opposite effect.
“Is this a joke?”
“It’s real, Dez.” As he pours the decanter, splitting the wine-red liquid between the two glasses, the scent of thyme and ripe berries fills the air. He puts a glass in her hand.
“A drink can’t actually slow time,” she says.
“Willie Nelson and I beg to differ,” Rafe says. “Expand your Lens.”
Dez closes them both in the space she’s gotten comfortable inhabiting with him, though it’s never stopped feeling charged, as if their bodies are always about to touch, and they’d both be powerless to stop what happened after that.
“We’ll need a chaser, too,” Rafe says, and slides back the bar cart to reveal two small espresso cups and a carafe.
He pours steaming, rich coffee into each of the cups.
“First we drink the Soma,” he says, gesturing at the crystal glass in Dez’s hand.
“Then we work on your film. As long as you want. As long as it takes. When we’re finished, these shots of espresso will still be as hot as they are right now. ”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know this is hard to believe,” Rafe says. “But I promise—”
“Care to make it interesting?” Dez says.
He smiles. “If the first sip of espresso doesn’t burn your tongue … I’ll be at your service for the entire night. Whatever you want from me, you can have.”
Dez swallows, contemplating the possibilities, feeling heat rush between her legs.
“And if the espresso is still hot,” she says, a little breathless. “Do I need to be at your service?”
“No,” he says, “but I get to choose your dress.”
“My dress?”
“For the gala tonight. After all the first-years finish their assignments, there’s a big party.”
“Fine,” she says. “You’re on.”
“I know.” He smiles as both of them lift their cordial glass of Soma.
“To Moses,” Rafe says.
“To Mo.”
Dez takes a sip. It’s delicious. Like blackberries fresh from the bush.
Cool on her tongue but with warming notes of thyme, ginger, clove—and then a bracing bitter kick at the end.
She drinks it all before she realizes what she’s doing, and when she sets down the glass, she feels as if she’s just chugged a beer.
“How do you feel?” Rafe asks, watching her eyes.
“Strange,” she says. “But also …” She touches her heart. “Clear.”
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” Rafe says.
Facing her screen, Dez opens her work in progress. She stares at the poster-sized thumbnail of the opening image, and she sees it differently. Like she’s had a month away and is looking at it now with fresh eyes.
She thinks about the scene she’s been chasing for weeks.
How Rafe and Yael have made her question whether it was ever even real.
Whether her father did lift Mo up on his shoulders and Mo’s face did light with the triumph of being loved.
Or whether Dez grafted a memory that never really was out of her longing and pain.
Like making a cloud by repressing her tears.
“Clouds,” she says, more to herself than to Rafe. She thinks of Mo in the soccer field scene. It hadn’t felt like he needed their father then. He’d taken comfort in the shoulders of the clouds.
“What about clouds?” Rafe says.
“You asked me once to find the film’s conceit. I think that’s part of what I’ve been missing. The opening image, the closing image—running throughout the film. Clouds. They’re already in most of Mo’s scenes.”
She feels Rafe’s eyes on her. “What does it mean?”
“I’ve been so focused on Mo’s pain, wanting to fix it.
Or to make it smaller for him, to dwarf it with beauty.
That’s why I thought I needed that scene with our dad.
Because Mo’s wound feels so deep, so big.
But there is something bigger. He’s been watching the sky for meaning all along.
If I shift more focus to the clouds, it could give the film the wider scale it’s been missing. ”
“I’ve heard it said,” Rafe says, “that sometimes, angels are visible in clouds.”
Dez looks at him.
“Maybe Mo knows that,” he says.
Dez likes the idea. Inspired, her mind works rapid-fire.
In so many scenes in Mo’s Lifeline, clouds become a character.
She revisits that early clip of Mo on the soccer field, staring up at the clouds like they held answers.
He often seems to get lost in them, or found.
Now Dez sees how to reveal more of her brother through the clouds.
She pulls up a scene from Mo’s first day of school, a great white cumulus billowing behind a flagpole.
Now a mackerel sky above their house on the last day either of them saw their dad.
Now storm clouds stretching over Mo when he stole an action figure from a friend’s house, pocketing it and running home.
She augments the clouds’ colors, amplifies their kaleidoscopic resonance throughout the film.
She cycles through her brother’s life, its brilliance. She is both aware and not aware of time, feeling herself truly outside of it, in the vasty realm of art. When she reaches the final scene, Dez pauses to watch it.
She’s in the clip, sitting next to Mo on the hood of her car, parked by the train tracks the day she took him to get his tattoo. He wears a bandage on his wrist.
It’s from sometime in September. They’re watching the sunset, pink stratus clouds high in the sky.
A hint of smoke in the air. Dez remembers how she felt that day, only a week after she’d filmed Glimpse and met Asher.
She was still holding out hope that he’d call, or that she’d work up the courage to reach out herself.
But the hope was already twisting, dimming, turning bitter in her heart.
Strange now to watch this scene and not see that pain in her eyes, to see the scene instead from Mo’s perspective, and he hadn’t noticed at all.
She looks pretty, and a little bossy, reminding him to keep the tattoo clean.
“It’s for you,” Mo says in the clip, and Dez remembers having this conversation, how she hadn’t understood it then, hadn’t taken him seriously.
“Your tattoo?”
He nods. “I’m going to miss you.”
“When?”
“When you go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” She felt annoyed, because she wanted to leave and didn’t know how. Now she feels like she might weep.
“Now I’ll still have you with me,” he says, and pats his wrist. He leans back against the windshield, watching the clouds pull apart like taffy.
Dez snaps herself from the reverie.
“I’ll just use the clouds for the ending.” Her voice sounds stiff. “The film doesn’t need the rest of the scene.”
“It does,” Rafe says.
“It’s too much about me. Especially for the end.”
“Go back a moment,” Rafe suggests. “Zoom in on your face, right after he tells you about the tattoo.”
Dez does.
“Closer,” Rafe suggests.
She zooms in closer until she can see the clouds, the setting sun, reflecting in her eyes. It’s so peaceful it takes her breath away.
“You look happy,” Rafe says.
And she does.
“Keep it,” Rafe says.
And she does. She keeps the full length of the conversation in the film. She ends the film zoomed in on the clouds in her eyes, so that closing image mirrors the opening image’s clouds at dawn. Like you could start the film over on a loop once you reached its end, an Ouroboros.
When she realizes this, that the whole story is a cycle, a circle, Dez understands she’s finished her brother’s film.