“Soundproof, too,” he says, rapping lightly on the wall of screen behind him.
It’s like he’s reading her dirty mind. But last night had ended so embarrassingly, Dez won’t let herself get drawn deeper into humiliation. Not now when she’s finally about to start making films.
“I’m used to my refurbished Canon Rebel and Adobe Premiere,” Dez says. “I don’t know how to—”
“Something tells me you’ll be a quick study,” Rafe says. “This Lens is yours for the duration of the term. Self-contained, and entirely customized, designed to be as intuitive for each filmmaker as possible. It has highly sensitive retina tracking to help you control the screen.”
“Meaning, I control it with my eyes?”
“Exactly,” he says. “Every morning when you come to the Vault, you come here. You expand the Lens as you just did.”
“Will the snake always—”
“No, that was just a welcome meme,” Rafe says. “The serpent symbolizes knowledge and transformation. And this Lens will transform you.” He looks at her, gauging something she can’t discern. “You’ll work alongside the other first-years, but you won’t perceive them, andthey won’t perceive you. Only you can access this particular Lens, this particular technology.”
There’s so much Dez still doesn’t understand, but knowing this device ishersdoes give her a small, sweet sense of ownership. She shared her former workspace—her mom’s garage—with a car, two petty cats, the always running washing machine, and Mo’s second-hand BowFlex. She has never had nice equipment. She’s never had a space to work entirely her own.
“As your mentor for the first term,” Rafe says, “I’m granted oversight of your early films.”
“Do the last-years have their own Lenses somewhere else?”
“In another wing,” he says. “I know the space feels tight at first, but soon you’ll hardly notice it. Stretch your arms all the way out. Turn your body around.”
Dez does, mirroring Rafe’s motions, and discovers she can turn in any direction without touching the screen, or Rafe.
“You’ll want to keep your feet rooted on this platform,” he explains, pointing beneath them where a raised square tile about five feet wide subtly glows. At its edges, on all four sides, there’s a space of about one foot between the platform and the base of the dome where the tile looks different, black instead of white, and dotted with golden flecks that remind Dez of stars.
“Inside the lens,” Rafe continues, “you never need to walk. When you find something interesting, something you want to use, simply focus and it will come to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Keep saying that and it will become your motto,” Rafe says. “All Lenses run on a kind of software calleddur. In Sumerian, it meanstotality.”
“Did you saydur?”
“It’s a funny name, until you use it.”
“What’s with all the Sumerian?” Dez asks.
“Sumer is the foundation of all civilization,” Rafe says. “Some people think the biblical matriarchs—Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca—were actually Sumerian priestesses.”
“It makes sense that they were more than wives and mothers,” Dez says, “but what does it have to do with film studies?”
“Film is relatively new,” Rafe says, “but it lives inside traditions that are extremely old. The more you know about where this stuff comes from, the better your work will be. And thedurgives us access tototality, toeverything, the full scope of the human experience.” He taps the screen. “It’s all in here.”
“Like … every movie ever made?” Dez says.
“Think bigger,” he says. “Can you?”
“Where’s the camera? Where do we shoot?”
“You don’t shoot as a Visionary. You cull.”
Cull? No.
“I thought we were here to make movies,” Dez says.
Rafe shakes his head. “As a first-year, you’ll find more than enough material within the collective conscious. You are aware that every story’s already been told? The trick is in how you rearrange the story. Look.” He points at the screen, which suddenly floods with a still image, a life-sized black and white photograph of an elegant, elderly woman staring into space with a furrowed brow.
