Dez turns her face away. She doesn’t deny it.
“Do me a favor,” Rafe says, raising the halo in his hand high. “Stay out of here. Please. Until your pain isn’t so fresh. It isn’t safe for you.”
She says nothing, but she watches as the halos glide them up, studying Rafe’s technique.
She hates this place.
And someday, soon, she’ll be back.
Alone.
ZARLENGO ENTERS DEZ’S LENS WITHOUTwarning 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 madeGlimpse.
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.
