The dirty laundry on the doorstep. The gunnysack full of Indian clothes.
I began feverishly to search the media for photographs of the fire scene, iPhone videos, everything, wherever I could find them, whatever had been shot professionally or posted by the public at large. The rubbernecking crowd behind the safety barriers. Faces seen through smoke and water. Nothing. Nothing again. And then something.
Two South Asian men in a photograph, watching the fire burn, one of them a dwarf. It was impossible to see the feet of his companion but I guessed that they would be unusually big.
Time passes. Big men dwindle, small men grow. This man shrinks into old age, those men’s reach grows longer. They can stretch out their arms and touch places and people they couldn’t reach before. There are companies here to lend assistance to companies there, to facilitate journeys, to execute strategies. Clowns become kings, old crowns lie in the gutter. Things change. It is the way of the world.
The news reports the next day were unanimous. The crooked landlord charged with manslaughter in the second degree. A tragedy. And a wonder that the young boy survived. Case closed.
And another story, not of interest to the American media, which I found by chance on my computer. The death in a distant country of a once-feared South Asian mafia don. Mr. Zamzama Alankar, formerly the godfather of the powerful Z-Company crime family, had gone to stand before the last judgment seat. An unconfirmed report.
There is a dawn mist on the river and crossing the harbor a Chinese junk with her brown sails set fair and the sun low and silver and the sunlight skipping over the water like a stone. At the glass-topped table in the glass corner where two windows met we sit with glass tears in our eyes not knowing where to look or how to see. Below us running through the whiteness a woman with wild red hair and a tiara on her head like a queen escaping a kidnap and running for her life. Suchitra and I sit facing each other and the steam rising from the coffee cups and the smoke from her cigarette make three wandering columns in the air.
Imagine a cube of air, maybe twelve inches by twelve inches by twelve, moving through the vast open spaces of the world. This or something like it I once heard the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg say. The cube is what the camera sees and the way the cube moves is the meaning of it. That is what it is to make a film, to move that cube through the world and see what it captures, what it makes beautiful, and what it makes sense of. That is the art of the cinema.
See us facing each other, both in profile, in wide-screen format and desaturated color. See the camera move between us, to the midpoint between us, and then turn on its axis, in full circles, slowly, many times, so that our faces slide by one by one and in between our faces the river of the city and the fog slowly lifting and the light rising on the day. In her hand a sheet of paper. This is the subject. This is the meaning of the scene.
Scenes that did not make the final cut of this text: me at the police station trying to find out what happened to Little Vespa, who is he with, where was he taken, who is caring for him. Me wandering disconsolately down Fourth Street, kicking at a pebble, my hands jammed deep into my pockets, my head down. And finally, me in a lawyer’s office in Midtown while he reads me a document, then hands the document to me, and I nod, I’ll let you know, and leave. Too much exposition. The scene that matters is this one, the two of us and the piece of paper in the day’s first light.
I never thought he’d do it, I say. And if he did, she would have challenged it, saying he was no longer of sound mind.
The mother.
Yes. The mother, his wife. But now there are no next of kin. There’s just this document. If some harm should befall us both, I appoint as the boy’s guardian Mr. René Unterlinden.
You know what you are asking, she says.
Yes.
First she persuaded him to accept another man’s child as his own. Now you want me to accept the same child, another woman’s child, as mine. And you know that children were not a part of my plan.
Down below us the runner with the red hair and the tiara has paused. She stands, hands on hips, breathing deeply, her head tilted up. As if she too is waiting for an answer. But of course she doesn’t see Suchitra and me and knows nothing. We’re up on the twenty-first floor.
Will you think about it, I say as the camera moves past my face.
She closes her eyes and the camera stops, and waits, and goes in closer. Then she opens her eyes and there are only her eyes, filling the screen.
I think we can do this, she says.
Then a jump-cut. Now a different pair of eyes fills the screen. Very slowly the camera pulls back to reveal that they are the eyes of Little Vespa. He stares at the camera without any expression at all. On the soundtrack we hear the lawyer’s voice-over. The estate is being examined by lawyers from both countries and there are many irregularities. But in the end it is a very large estate and there are no other heirs and he is only four years old.
Now there are the three of us, Little Vespa, Suchitra and myself, in an unspecified room, a room in the Brooklyn home of the foster family to whom he was brought for temporary safekeeping. The camera moves to the midpoint of the triangle and begins, very slowly, to rotate upon its axis, so that each of our faces passes by in turn. All our faces are expressionless. The camera begins to turn faster, then faster still. Our faces blur into one another and then the camera is spinning so fast that all the faces disappear and there is only the blur, the speed lines, the motion. The people—the man, the woman, the child—are secondary. There is only the whirling movement of life.