Chapter 38
FOR WEEKS AFTER THAT NIGHT, the bartender’s words ring in Dez’s mind.
Dives always have the best atmosphere …
She replays the evening over and over again. The series of strange revelations that had all made a kind of sense … until Dez asked Eri where Acheron keeps the missing scenes. The answer had been on the tip of Eri’s tongue when Jet came back into the bar.
Then Dez had gone in search of the river. And Yael had stopped her …
What would she have found there?
Dez longs to figure out what’s really going on. Is there some connection between the bar, the river, and the missing scenes?
But even if Dez could investigate the river, diving in and feeling for something below the surface, what would it get her? Even if she found the missing scene from Asher’s timeline, it wouldn’t solve Dez’s main problem:
Four months into her time at Acheron, she’s completed only twenty-nine films out of fifteen hundred.
So why can’t she let this go?
She needs to focus on her work, on the people who are dying, not on what’s missing from Asher’s Lifeline.
Hearing from Jet that he and the other angels are picking up her slack spurred her on.
The work isn’t getting easier, but Dez is getting more capable, confident.
Tonight, for the first time, she’s about to complete four films in a day.
Her subject is a young woman, only thirty-six years old.
Her name is Salwa and her life has been marked by chaos.
As she combs through Salwa’s Lifeline, one stark atrocity after the next, the woman’s life is sometimes too much for her to bear.
Bombs rain on Salwa’s neighborhood, on her family’s home.
Her youngest child dies of polio at four.
Her husband leaves one morning to find food and never makes it home.
Dez has learned how to cross-check actual memories in her subjects’ points of view with footage of them compiled in the cloud.
She’s watched iPhone videos filmed by Salwa’s husband and children and it’s illuminating to see how Salwa shines differently to them than she sees herself.
Through her family members’ gazes, she was a beacon of calm and peace.
In her own memories, so often, Salwa roils with fear, anxiety, regret.
Dez doesn’t generally have time to grieve her subjects—she hasn’t cried for anyone since Mo—but she can’t help tearing up for Salwa as she struggles to make meaning of so difficult a life. And then, deep in the Lifeline, she finds it.
A wild poppy.
Red and imperfect, its petals crushed and bruised in the glass vase on the kitchen table. When Salwa inhales, Dez can smell the petals.
Every film has its conceit, its central metaphor. Mo’s was clouds. Iris’s, the sea. Salwa’s, Dez determines, is this poppy. She scrolls back through the Lifeline to see how it got in the vase.
She finds scenes of Salwa’s husband, back before they were married, working as a florist on Allymoun Street.
Was this how they met? Did Salwa come in for roses and leave with poppies on the recommendation of the man she would marry?
Dez can see it all so clearly in her mind, how a single red poppy turned into an entire world—a family, a lifetime of memories, love—but she can’t find the scene in the Vault.
She combs back through Salwa’s Lifeline, scanning a flower.
And they’re everywhere. But none is like the single red poppy in the vase.
Most mornings, Salwa walked her kids to school. They always passed banks of poppies on the path. Dez finds an otherwise uneventful sunny day and centers a scene around the family walking by the poppies. She saturates the flowers’ golden hue to help them pull more focus.
She finds wild poppies from a windy morning at the beach.
She jump-cuts to a birthday card from Salwa’s mother, featuring a photograph of pale purple petals.
She zooms in on the scrap of paper Salwa always keeps in her pocket, the one she pulls out at night once her family is asleep.
Dez isn’t surprised to discover it’s a faded sketch of a poppy.
She traces back in the Lifeline and finds the day her oldest daughter made it, a year before the war began.
The drawing was thick and pristine. Dez puts in Salwa’s film the moment the girl presented the card to her mom.
She wants the scene of the great red poppy but senses she won’t find it.
It feels like a gaping hole, but she can’t look for it forever.
She has to finish Salwa’s film. She chooses the closing image carefully, the last thing Salwa will see before she dies.
Dez decides on the faded, crumpled drawing of the flower, which the woman looks at every night.
Including this night, when in real time on the other side of the world, Dez knows, without knowing the details, that the war will send Salwa’s soul into the White Light.
She watches her film once after she completes it. There isn’t time for more. Then Dez wipes her eyes and lights the match, lets it burn almost to the tips of her fingers before she blows it out, sending Salwa’s film to Distribution.
Dez has never known the kind of love Salwa shared with her husband. And with the path she’s on at Acheron, it’s hard to imagine she ever will.
Do angels fall in love? Have soulmates? Can they marry and have children?
If Rafe were here, he’d tell her she’s thinking too small, like a mortal. But to Dez, these questions loom so large it hurts.
The closest she has ever come to love was the day she spent with Asher. How when he smiled when they first met, it felt familiar. Not like they’d known each other before, but like they would know each other after. It was a feeling without beginning or end, comprised only of the moment.
And she’ll never see him again. Their only meeting seems to have vanished from Asher’s future film.
So he won’t even take it with him when he goes.
Which is almost like it never happened. Like Dez and Asher never shared that day together.
Never said goodbye in the parking lot using just the pulses of their fingers.
She cannot help herself. She calls on Asher’s Lifeline, brings it up to the front of her screen. Heart in her throat, she scrolls to a scene of him walking alone on the beach the day after they met.
He’s barefoot, jeans rolled up at the ankles, a gray sweater loose on his chest. She sees the ocean, the whole world through his eyes, but she longs to know how he feels. How he felt that day, and every day, after he met Dez. In the era she spent struggling not to think about him.
Dez thinks of the countless, mundane scenes in Salwa’s Lifeline between Salwa and her husband.
A frivolous envy simmers in her. She shouldn’t be jealous of a dying woman with a tragic life, but it feels unfair that she cares this much about Asher and there are zero scenes of her in Asher’s Lifeline.
She thinks of how she studied scenes other people had filmed of Salwa to compare it to Salwa’s own memories …
Rafe told Dez once she has no Lifeline in the Vault—that filmmakers are exempt from death while they’re at Acheron. But she also knows there’s footage of her elsewhere in the Vault.
In a different portion of her Lens, Dez overrides the system to pull up her friend Silas’s Lifeline, her heart smarting at how much she misses him suddenly, at how long it’s been since they’ve spoken.
He must be worried about her, and she wishes she could tell him she’s okay.
Even if it’s a lie. She moves through Silas’s Lifeline slowly, the bittersweet sight of their old friendship twisting her heart.
She finds a scene where she’s walking toward Silas in the parking lot of the Dairy Barn, a royal-blue sweatshirt on over her work uniform, a jail-break glint in her eyes.
She doesn’t remember what they were doing that night, but she does remember how she’d felt to be leaving work, to be meeting up with her friend.
Somehow more alive than usual. This is the way she’d want to be seen by someone she liked.
This is the way she’d want to be seen by Asher.
Without thinking, she uses her finger to trace the outline of herself in the parking lot.
Dez has no idea if this will work, but she feels the footage of herself pulling away from the background of the scene, from the hot Death Valley night.
She holds her breath and drags the cropped clip across Silas’s Lifeline.
Then past it.
Then on to Asher’s.
Gently, the way you’d set a paper boat upon a pond, Dez sets the moving clip of herself onto Asher’s beach.
The clip wobbles, then seems as if it’s about to click into place on Asher’s Lifeline. But before it does, Dez is thrown hard against the floor. Disoriented, she tries to stand, but the platform is unstable, rocking as if in an earthquake.
“Desdemona?”
The voice comes from within the Lens, within Asher’s Lifeline. Everything about the scene on the beach is just the same as it was a moment before …
Only now Dez has entered the frame. And she is walking toward him.
Inside the Vault, she gasps.
Did she just change Asher’s Lifeline?
She’ll undo it. She’ll put herself back where she belongs. She’ll do it in just a moment. After she sees what happens next.
Asher sees her.
He remembers her. He knows her. And when he says her name again, he sounds happy. Surprised, but mostly happy.
“Desdemona Rae?”
She watches through his eyes, his point of view, as she walks toward him, glowing like a flare.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” he says, and opens his arms.