“Yeah,” I tell her. “A very subtle way of comradeship.”
“I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it,” she says.
* * *
We sleep together every night and still hang out with the same bunch of people on weekends, pretending there’s nothing going on. We sit far apart. We hardly even talk to each other. The secrecy of our relationship makes it more exciting, like we’re playing a private game of coded gestures and hidden messages. This secrecy becomes the core of our relationship, a kind of mental Viagra. We keep fucking bareback, me barely able to pull out at the last minute. I ask her if she’s not scared.
“Of what? You protect yourself against those with whom you share nothing but mutual indifference.”
I can’t help an amused smile.
“That’s the closest I’ll ever get to saying I love you,” she says.
“Are you saying you love me?”
“Close.”
She says she wants a language only she and I can understand. Not French, not English, not even Thai, but a series of signs so simple no second-guessing is necessary. Text messaging, she says, is the ideal evolution of language—communication distilled to the level of basic necessity. She invents a private text message, a kind of private joke, to convey this: WSOWOB, we speak only with our bodies. This way the artificial boundaries of human interaction are blurred between us.
This gives me another idea. I suggest that we reveal ourselves completely to each other, that we reveal everything. “Everything, that is, that we wouldn’t normally share with anyone else,” I add. “Then our private barriers break down, and we make ourselves totally vulnerable to the other.”
“Is that what you want? To be vulnerable?”
“No, it’s what I fantasize. Kind of like a mental striptease.”
“Hmm. But in a striptease, it’s the stripper who actually has power over the spectator.”
“Good point. But that’s the challenge, to be able to resist the animalistic drive to dominate and subjugate. To be able to trust the other while one is weak.”
“So by revealing ourselves, we make the other weak?”
“Then the dynamics are redefined. We become a world of just us two. We are united more profoundly than any two people can be. Because trust subverts the urge for power.”
“Sounds like a theory that needs to be tested,” she says. “Under laboratory conditions.”
“Wanna give it a try?”
“Okay.”
“Tell me something.”
“Like what?”
“Something devilish.”
“Hmm. Since this is your idea, you go first.”
I tell her I would like to share the story of the lost boy. But in order to do that, she would have to come with me to my parents’ home.
“Okay,” she says. “So you want me to meet your parents.”
“No, my parents are dead. I want you to see the films they shot of the boy.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Show me.”
The next morning we are on the flight to La Napoule.
* * *
The brittle film flutters through the projector’s sprockets. It makes lapping sounds as it hits the framing aperture, like a dog drinking from a bowl.
His image magnified on the wall, the little boy looks just like any other two-year-old, a paper hat on his head, the crumpled brim falling over his eyes. He toddles toward the camera with a plastic pistol held aloft, like some undersized Belmondo staggering away from the cops.
There are about a dozen reels. Not a lot, strangely, considering my parents shot practically everything in their lives. Little Mathieu waddles across the frame, trips, falls, smears his face with cake—ordinary gestures from what could have been an ordinary life. There’s Annette coming into frame. Then it’s Sylvain, who’s just passed the camera shakily to her. Now Annette’s holding the camera at arm’s length to get them both inside the frame. The colors are washed out; everything’s a faded, purplish monochrome.
Now Sylvain’s taken the camera and has focused it on the little boy. The boy’s pointing the toy pistol at the camera. It must be his second birthday: two flickering candles on a cake trace ribbons of light across the moving frame.
Annette pulls the boy away: now he’s hitting the camera with his gun. She’s laughing loud. You can almost hear it even without the sound. She’s saying something else now. Take a shot of him as he blows the candles out. But the camera zooms in on her instead. She holds a hand against the lens and says, Go on, take a shot of him.
She glances toward the boy, then back at the camera to see if it’s been turned away. Her mouth says, Stop. But the camera is still focused on her, lingering for just a few more seconds. Her face is radiant. She looks incredibly young. The film’s so overexposed it seems there was much more light back then.
* * *
“Even now,” I tell Janya, “I find it hard to believe that this two-year-old disappeared one summer during a squall on the coast of the South China Sea, and was never found again.”
“How did that happen?” she asks.
“Nobody knows.”
“How could nobody know?”
“He fell in the water and disappeared.”
“That’s crazy. That’s impossible.”
“I know.”
“And what did your parents do?”
“Well, that’s the part of the story that’s been missing, and for the last twelve years I’ve been looking for it among these films.”
Truth to tell, I’ve always been afraid to ask the questions Janya is asking now. Film has this mythic quality we can’t resist. The image defies what we really are—transient and ephemeral. It’s like what physicists call relic light, those spectral traces of radiation emanated by objects that once existed. No other medium, in that sense, captures our indestructible material remains.
I guess Sylvain and Annette did all they could to cope with the loss. The image makes the object persistent, if not immortal—it makes its absence imperfect. But by hiding the reels and sealing them in an interoffice envelope, they declared that particular absence completed.
And this, I guess, is where I come in. I imagine my being here was meant to create some continuity, a bridge over the gulf of grief. As long as we kept on crossing and didn’t look down, time would appear uninterrupted. In other words, little Mathieu was never lost, he just morphed a bit. Grief was never required.
“Have you ever wanted to go there and find out?” Janya asks.
“It’s crossed my mind.”
“But you never gave it any serious thought.”
“Well, actually, it’s been kind of an obsession.”
“Aha.”
“I watch the films over