Chapter 36
ZARLENGO ENTERS DEZ’S LENS WITHOUT warning the next day. She hates having anyone but Rafe inside her Lens. It’s too intimate, too close. She feels cold and claustrophobic under Zarlengo’s narrow gaze.
He’s here to review the work she’s begun on her current subject, a woman named Iris, who grew up on a farm during the Troubles in Belfast, Ireland.
“You’ve been working on this Life Review for how long?”
“Three days.”
Zarlengo turns to face her, crossing his arms over his chest and looking down so his black hat shadows his face.
“I wonder if your languor is connected to your emotional crisis, Ms. Rae. Perhaps your brother’s death in the midst of this process has proved too much.
Not to mention the potentially life-threatening rapport we’ve noticed between you and Mr. de la Cruz. ”
“That isn’t it,” Dez says.
“Is there some additional personal deficiency I should be aware of? We did not foresee you having so much difficulty.”
Dez pauses. She already knows Zarlengo won’t want to hear what she has to say. She knows how he’ll respond. But she’s not going to blame her lack of progress on her brother or on Rafe.
“I always feel like I’m reaching for a scene that isn’t there. Something elemental, that I can’t complete a film without.”
It’s the same feeling she had with Mo, about the hockey game scene when Mo got on their father’s shoulders. But by now, because of what everyone told her, Dez has convinced herself that her memory may have been warped. The scene was something she wanted to be real but maybe wasn’t.
She gets the same phantom itch with each of her assignments. Like something’s missing, something essential.
“The Vault has everything you need.”
“I know,” she makes herself say. “Everyone says that.”
“In fact, it exceeds what’s necessary. I’ve known filmmakers who could create a masterpiece from three small moments.”
Without waiting for a response, Zarlengo retracts her Lens to step outside, causing her screen to go black.
Alone, she sighs heavily and closes the Lens back around her. She needs to work. To focus on the souls that need her attention.
Her Lens fills again with images, with light.
The single Lifeline of scenes she’d once worked on for her brother’s film is now replaced by a vast gallery.
All this work that’s now expected of her in a single sitting, a single day.
All these human beings with their great full lives—are they waiting on Dez to die?
Like leaves on a tree, it’s overwhelming to imagine attending to each of them, but if Dez steps back and fathoms the whole, she sees the trunk of life connecting them. Patterns emerge, similarities and overlaps, lives pulsing with love and conflict, generosity, failure, and desire.
She draws Iris to the foreground. She sees the woman’s Lifeline fill the Lens, and Dez lets herself inside of it.
She sifts through scenes from childhood to old age, moments of warmth and wonder and sudden jolts of terror.
She tries to suppress her sense of something missing, invites herself to feel it all, the whole story, right in front of her.
She wants to see the shape of Iris’s time on earth like the narrative arc of a movie, until she knows her soul essentially.
She wants to feel she alone is qualified to usher Iris onward, toward the White Light.
This is how she used to feel when she made her films in Death Valley. Self-possessed and inspired. She hasn’t felt this way in a while. Maybe she’s never felt this way at Acheron. It’s a feeling she hasn’t had since … she thinks back … since she made Glimpse.
She thinks of Asher. Their one day together in Ventura.
She lets herself remember the details, so clear it’s as if a part of her never left.
She feels the rough wood of the pier, the sand between her sandaled toes, the weight of the camera on her shoulder, and the charismatic glimmer in Asher’s eyes.
She misses him. The idea of him anyway. How it had felt to be near him that day. She knows it’s impossible but she wants it, now, again.
Five minutes, she tells herself, and then she’ll get to work. Five minutes to reacquaint herself with the version of Dez who trusted her instincts, who had far fewer tools than she has here at Acheron, but still had everything she needed.
Five minutes with Asher.
Her mind holds Iris’s Lifeline at a distance; then she feels the heat in her temples as she beckons Asher’s to the foreground.
All at once, he’s there.
Dez holds her breath. The first scene she pulls up shows him looking several years younger, in a classroom, standing behind a podium.
He’s got a PowerPoint clicker in one hand, a laptop open in front of him.
He’s addressing a room of college students while an exhausted professor watches from the front row.
Asher says: “We see here how early detection increases not only quantity but also quality of life.”
Dez lets his words wash over her, the sound they make coming out of his mouth, the serious expression they bring to his face.
She takes in the details of the room, of Asher’s countenance and bearing, the sound of his breath and the wrinkles in his shirt and the shapes his hands make in the air as he talks.
She hangs on his words—cellular reprogramming, mitochondrial biogenesis, young blood transfusions. She wishes she knew this side of Asher. She wishes they’d stayed in touch. She regrets how her life has carried on without him, and his without her.
And she regrets the one night in November when she was given a choice to take Acheron’s Dream Expulsion, to go back to her old life, to not give up everything she knew before.
She gave up Asher that night. Now the only way she can see him is through this Lens.
Today she wants to see the day they met. It may torture her, but she needs to remember it was real, even if it can’t happen again. Her mind toggles through his fascinating life, trying not to get distracted by every single moment.
She pauses on one and can’t bring herself to swipe it away: Evening, an ordinary kitchen table. A plate with lasagna, peas, and a hunk of garlic bread. A hand uses a fork to spear a bite.
She knows that hand. Its strong shape and smooth fingernails. She’s felt it on her skin. And now she isn’t looking at recorded footage; she’s entered Asher’s actual memories, Asher’s POV.
She looks down at the black track pants he’s wearing. At his bare feet on the carpet under the chair. His body is smaller than the man she’d met. He’s younger, maybe fifteen.
Dez wants to see it all so badly that the ordinary scene feels illicit.
She notices other people seated with Asher at the table, two eight-year-old girls, probably sisters, and two adults who must be his parents.
His mother—the one who died from Alzheimer’s years after this moment.
Dez studies the whole family like she’s cramming for a test.
His mother is beautiful, barefaced and ponytailed, tired, but not the way Dez’s mom looks tired. Asher’s mom looks tired in the way you might be after you come home from rewarding work only to cook a nice meal for your healthy family.
She also looks like Asher, or Asher looks like her. Gold skin. Gold hair. The same subtle bow shape at the top of their lips.
His father is darker, with glasses and an intellectual expression. The girls have sunburned noses, Asher’s eyes. One of them is sneaking her peas to the dog, whose tail curves up around the edge of the table like a periscope hunting for food.
There’s an empty chair at the table. As Dez stares at it, a clear, bright yearning rises in her.
She wants to sit there. To fill the empty spot.
She wants to pet the dog, pass the peas, know the girls’ names, answer his parents’ questions, and glimpse his bedroom.
She wants to be far away from here, and most of all—
She wants him to look at her. Not through a camera lens, but into her actual eyes. Like he would if she were to walk into this house, this kitchen, into his life, right now.
Would he even want to see her, after she never returned his call?
How would she explain her life, her choices, these past few months?
She can’t answer that, so she keeps looking for the moment she and Asher intersected.
She searches beach scenes, bar scenes, half-pipe scenes, car scenes.
She is as thorough as she has ever been.
But Dez doesn’t find the afternoon they met.
Try as she might, she sees no sign of a girl in a black dress coming up to Asher with a camera on her shoulder.
She isn’t there.
It’s like she never was.