Page 87 of White Lights
“Care to make it interesting?” Dez says.
He smiles. “If the first sip of espresso doesn’t burn your tongue … I’ll be at your service for the entire night. Whatever you want from me, you can have.”
Dez swallows, contemplating the possibilities, feeling heat rush between her legs.
“And if the espresso is still hot,” she says, a little breathless. “Do I need to be at your service?”
“No,” he says, “but I get to choose your dress.”
“My dress?”
“For the gala tonight. After all the first-years finish their assignments, there’s a big party.”
“Fine,” she says. “You’re on.”
“I know.” He smiles as both of them lift their cordial glass of Soma.
“To Moses,” Rafe says.
“To Mo.”
Dez takes a sip. It’s delicious. Like blackberries fresh from the bush. Cool on her tongue but with warming notes of thyme, ginger, clove—and then a bracing bitter kick at the end. She drinks it all before she realizes what she’s doing, and when she sets down the glass, she feels as if she’s just chugged a beer.
“How do you feel?” Rafe asks, watching her eyes.
“Strange,” she says. “But also …” She touches her heart. “Clear.”
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” Rafe says.
Facing her screen, Dez opens her work in progress. She stares at the poster-sized thumbnail of the opening image, and she sees it differently. Like she’s had a month away and is looking at it now with fresh eyes.
She thinks about the scene she’s been chasing for weeks. How Rafe and Yael have made her question whether it was ever even real. Whether her father did lift Mo up on his shoulders and Mo’s face did light with the triumph of being loved. Or whether Dez grafted a memory that never really was out of her longing and pain. Like making a cloud by repressing her tears.
“Clouds,” she says, more to herself than to Rafe. She thinks of Mo in the soccer field scene. It hadn’t felt like he needed their father then. He’d taken comfort in the shoulders of the clouds.
“What about clouds?” Rafe says.
“You asked me once to find the film’s conceit. I think that’s part of what I’ve been missing. The opening image, the closing image—running throughout the film. Clouds. They’re already in most of Mo’s scenes.”
She feels Rafe’s eyes on her. “What does it mean?”
“I’ve been so focused on Mo’s pain, wanting to fix it. Or to make itsmaller for him, to dwarf it with beauty. That’s why I thought I needed that scene with our dad. Because Mo’s wound feels so deep, so big. But there is something bigger. He’s been watching the sky for meaning all along. If I shift more focus to the clouds, it could give the film the wider scale it’s been missing.”
“I’ve heard it said,” Rafe says, “that sometimes, angels are visible in clouds.”
Dez looks at him.
“Maybe Mo knows that,” he says.
Dez likes the idea. Inspired, her mind works rapid-fire. In so many scenes in Mo’s Lifeline, clouds become a character. She revisits that early clip of Mo on the soccer field, staring up at the clouds like they held answers. He often seems to get lost in them, or found. Now Dez sees how to reveal more of her brother through the clouds. She pulls up a scene from Mo’s first day of school, a great white cumulus billowing behind a flagpole. Now a mackerel sky above their house on the last day either of them saw their dad. Now storm clouds stretching over Mo when he stole an action figure from a friend’s house, pocketing it and running home.
She augments the clouds’ colors, amplifies their kaleidoscopic resonance throughout the film.
She cycles through her brother’s life, its brilliance. She is both aware and not aware of time, feeling herself truly outside of it, in the vasty realm of art. When she reaches the final scene, Dez pauses to watch it.
She’s in the clip, sitting next to Mo on the hood of her car, parked by the train tracks the day she took him to get his tattoo. He wears a bandage on his wrist.
It’s from sometime in September. They’re watching the sunset, pink stratus clouds high in the sky. A hint of smoke in the air. Dez remembershow she felt that day, only a week after she’d filmedGlimpseand met Asher. She was still holding out hope that he’d call, or that she’d work up the courage to reach out herself. But the hope was already twisting, dimming, turning bitter in her heart. Strange now to watch this scene andnotsee that pain in her eyes, to see the scene instead from Mo’s perspective, and he hadn’t noticed at all. She looks pretty, and a little bossy, reminding him to keep the tattoo clean.
