“She sounds like a smart cookie, this partner of yours.”
“Well.” I raise my palms in a helpless gesture, I am what I am. “I’ll cure her of that in a hurry.”
Silvie laughs, and I do too, and it is the old laughter we are sharing: laughter of the green glider, laughter of the late-night last glass of wine. Laughter under the low-hanging moon.
“I can’t promise anything,” she says now, and I say “I know,” and she says “I will work as fast as I can, but,” and I say “I know” again, and then “Thank you,” when what I should really be saying is “I forgive you,” because I think it would be true.
She smiles and puts her hand on my hand and squeezes, and I carry it out—that moment of tenderness I carry up four flights of stairs and back out into the lobby, where I doff my pinhole and suffer myself to be wanded again. Whatever is the state of my mind, it reconciles sufficiently with how it was on my way in.
“Okay, sir.” The Librarian holsters her wand with a polite half smile. “You have a pleasant day.”
13.
Ms. Paige is back at my desk, right at home, hunched forward with her sleeves rolled up and her eyes keen on the screen, as Arlo would say, her vision clear and true, and as I slump into the office she moves no muscle other than to say “Oh good, you’re back” and point with one finger toward a cup of coffee she got me. I lift it like a holy chalice, hold its miraculous heat between my hands, taking what pleasure I can from the warmth burning through its paper sides.
“How did it go?”
“Fine. You got the rooftop stretch?”
“I did,” says Paige, and I don’t even ask about Woody, about how she wheedled this new stretch free of him, because of what is in her eyes, the high focus with which she is fixed on screen, fixed on Crane—Crane on the high pitch of the roof, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Blue sky morning. “Sit. I’ve got something that I think you ought to see.”
And then she waits, impatiently, for me to arrange my bulk beside her. It occurs to me I might be done training Ms. Paige.
I take a look at the frozen cut. Woody’s office was able to knit together stretches from six or seven captures to build a nice clean multi-view, what the pros call a tapestry: Crane from all angles up on the Sampson roof. Views from below him, pointing upward from the eaves; from the telephone poles along the driveway; from the hoods of the trucks parked along in the driveway.
Aysa looks to make sure I’m looking and then she says “Play” and the screen jumps to life.
Crane is alone on the roof. He is smoking, holding a hand-rolled cigarette in his left hand. A roofing tool, an oblong metal plane with a wood handle, is in his right hand.
The sky is blue behind him.
He stands and stretches, surefooted on the pitch of the roof, and takes a long drag of the cigarette.
Specs return in little flecks and flares, my mind overlaying the image on the screen with dancing stars of possibility: Crane the pervert—Crane the thief—Crane the helpless dupe of fate…
I blink them away, focus on the image as the image is. It’s unsettling to see the man alive, watching him move and breathe and take drags of the butt and be a person. For all this time he has been, in my mind, “the dead roofer.” The entirety of his identity was bound up in the fact that he was no longer living, and now here he is on the roof, his eyes moving, feet planted steady as a billy goat’s on the slant.
Crane flicks the butt over the side. He turns, watching it fall over the side, and—
“Stop,” says Aysa, and then, to me, “Do you see?”
“See what?”
Ms. Paige is leaned very close to the screen, bent forward to take in every granulated detail. She herself is a capture, pulsing with interest, collecting all reality around her.
And it’s funny, because though she looks not a damn thing like my brother—Charlie was a big, tough, fit white man, heavily muscled and brimming with macho confidence, and Aysa is black and a female and five three in her heavy Speculator’s boots—but her face, the set of her face, the birdlike avidity of her eyes right now—it’s like Charlie’s there, like he is here, living in her, present underneath.
“Here,” she tells me, “look.”
Crane returns to his work, bending with his wood-handled planar tool, and then—there, 6:11:19 exactly, as he crouches to return to his labors—Crane’s foot snags on a lip of tile, and he shifts his weight—and now Aysa says “Slow” and the frames click by at a revelatory crawl, each giving way to the next—
One foot slips out from under his tensed weight—one leg comes kicking out from behind the other—
—his face registers the sliding confusion of weightlessness as his ass slams into the roof—
—trying to right himself, he catches his heel on the gutter, which tears free, further jumbles the order of his limbs. He tips forward—over—
—down—
It is a hard thing to watch, that tumbling moment, the instant of unloosing. His eyes in that moment, wide with realization. It’s private. There is nothing as intimate as terror.
Paige says “Back ten,” and the section backs up. Crane, again, standing and stretching; Crane, again, drags on the cigarette, flicking it, watching it fall. Crouching, and—
“Stop,” commands Paige, and the image stands still, hung between frames, Crane’s eyes
