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 and over. I watch them so much sometimes I confuse what I’ve seen in them and what I imagine may have happened. Film and memory get mixed up, in a slow dissolve.”
“Sounds like a concept for an experimental film.”
“Forget it, somebody’s probably already done it. But yes, sometimes I strip off the masking tapes marking the dates of the films. Then I can imagine that the boy with the plastic gun is me.”
“And you do that because . . . ?”
“Well, I can imagine the years before I existed. I’ve always wondered what it was like not to exist. Like I browse used bookstores and look at those postcards from the 1950s. And I feel wonder mixed with dread or panic—because, you know, I’m looking back at a time when I was nothing, when I was just, you know, part of the void or something.”
“A kind of ontological experience.”
“Yeah.”
“And have we learned anything from this story?”
“Maybe. By some inexplicable equation, some karmic tit-for-tat, I can see that my life must have snuffed out the other.”
“That’s depressing. And illogical.”
“I know.”
She pulls me down to the sofa and unbuttons my shirt. “I don’t want you thinking like that.”
“Sure.”
She clamps her teeth gently on my nipple. I get hard immediately. The last reel is over, and I’ve paused the projector so that the image of the young boy is staring straight at me, his paper hat falling over his eyes, his plastic gun pointed at my heart.
Janya has unzipped me and then she pulls her skirt and panties down and hops over and straddles me. She deftly slips my cock in and when she wiggles her hips around, the sensation makes me groan with pleasure.
“Oh, fuck, Janya, I like that.”
I accidentally knock my elbow against the projector, which makes a weird flapping noise. I reach out to pause it, but Janya grabs my hand and slips it inside her blouse and makes me squeeze her breast. She gives a soft moan.
The projector sputters—in my haste to pause I must have set it to slo-mo. Janya has her back to the image projected on the wall. As I suckle her nipple I can see the boy’s close-up behind her. I can see his eyes from under the brim of the hat as he slowly lifts his head. I have an eerie sensation that he’s staring straight at me, his lips curling into a knowing, fiendish smile.
the little toil of love
—because this time of day the crows leave them alone. Nothing else is moving, except these two dogs. Been watching them trying to get it on for the last half hour, me & the guy with the Uzi & Eddie the rapist. The bitch finally gives in. The male’s got his dick locked inside her now. They’re like conjoined, spastic twins. Eddie bets a peso it’s going to take another 30 minutes before the male can pull out. The head of a dog’s dick pops open like an umbrella when it’s fucking, he says. Once he’s in, it’s even harder to get out. We’re supposed to be picking vegetables some guy planted last summer. Then the guy was shot in the back of the head & he’s been fertilizing them since. The eggplants & bitter melons are scrawny but the tomatoes are ripe & about to burst. It’s November. The air is cool. It’s one of those days when you feel so doped out you don’t even want to move.
Now Eddie’s dropped his spade & starts heckling the dogs. The guy with the Uzi’s getting bored. The lieutenant bellows a stream of curses from inside the barracks. He’s been taking a siesta to sleep off a hangover. Even he is in no mood to keep order around here.
The guy with the Uzi gets up, a machete dangling from his hand. The dogs are in too much heat to notice him approaching. The male’s tongue is hanging out, a thick red flap. He’s drooling all over the bitch’s back, yellow spume dribbling on tufts of mangy brown fur. The guy with the Uzi yanks the male by the scruff. With one swift stroke he cuts its dick from the bitch. There’s a long, ear-splitting squeal. The dogs scamper apart. Jets of blood spurt from the male’s mutilated dick. He doesn’t know what’s happened to him. He runs amok, howling
