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 and hold its lovely 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 it out of him, because of what is in her eyes, the high focus with which she is fixed on the 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,” she says, “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 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, and takes a long drag of the cigarette.
Small speculations jump up 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, to watch 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 alive, his eyes moving, his feet planted steady as a billy goat’s on the slant.
Crane flicks the butt over the side. He turns, watching it fall, and—
“Stop,” says Aysa, and then, to me, “Do you see?”
“See what?”
She 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 hits me all over again: The strangeness of it. The ghost in the room.
And it’s funny, because 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 planer 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, sucking on the cigarette, flicking it, watching it fall. Crouching, and—
“Stop,” commands Paige, and the image stands still, hung between frames, Crane’s eyes half open, his body half up and half down, his last puff of smoke half dissipated in the air around him, again caught in the instant before the instant that will undo him.
“So what I’m wondering,” says Aysa, leaning back, “is what’s he even doing there.”
“What do you mean? On the roof?”
“As high as he is. Isn’t he higher than he ought to be?”
“What?”
“Well, the job is down here. Here. See? The job is closer to the eaves. They’re peeling off the tiles here to prepare the roof over the master bedroom for a second story.”
“So what’s he doing way up there?”
“That’s the question. There’s no reason.”
Speculations try themselves out in me. He’s confused. He’s mistaken. No. Nothing. No good.
Paige says “Go” and we watch the man die another time: watch him toss his arms out, watch his legs trip each other, watch him lurch over the side like a drunken sailor. There is something cruel in this, in playing and replaying it like we are making the puppet of his body dance down to its destruction, watching it happen again and again. A kind of retrospective torture of the dead man.
Something catches my eye: a smear—a kind of stain—high up on the screen. “Freeze,” I say.
“Laszlo?”
“There.”
“What?”
“Look.”
Paige blinks, leans closer. I point to the screen.
She nods, three times, quickly. “Yes. I see it. Or—is that—”
“No.” I rub at the screen with a corner of my coat, because it almost looks as if a bug has landed on it, but no, it’s there. A shadow. A shape. The misshapen darkness is not in the room with us, it’s in the image of the earlier reality.
Now we’re both leaning in, squinting. It’s hard to see. It’s nearly impossible. The shadow is the shadow of something off-frame, just outside the capture’s view, the kind of mottled wavering shadow that is refracted back by a pane of glass.
“It’s a skylight,” says Aysa, and I feel a hot sting of envy. I wanted to say it first.
This is why Mose Crane was crouching. This is what he was trying to see. Why he was there. A way to look in. A way to get in.
The room grows dim at the corners, the dimness like dread, and it’s pulling at me, I feel it pulling. I see the candle inside the darkness, the tiny glow at the center of a vast room: speculation coming at me in earnest. I’m already feeling it, in my throat and my chest, and I can’t do more. Not yet. Not now.
I keep my eyes open. Stand up, shake it off. I turn off the screen, leave Mose Crane frozen in his fall.
“Very fine work on this, Ms. Paige.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Laszlo!” She looks at me, spreads her arms, laughing off my overprotection. “I’m fine! Are you fine?”
I’m not, not really. My throat is racked; my eyes are burning. I am feeling the familiar toll of our labors. Our gift that does not come free. The discernment of falsehood, the pull of speculation. My chest is tight, wrung, but I’ll just need a breath of air, that’s all, I need the cigarette I’m already digging out of my pocket, tugging from its pack. I’ll be fine. It’s Aysa I’m worried about, Aysa the unaffected, scrawling notes in her Day Book, no sign of any strain or symptom.
I’m worried about her because she’s like Charlie, who didn’t feel a thing until it was too late, and he felt it all at once.
And maybe it is like Charlie, maybe she doesn’t feel it and so she doesn’t understand, but let her see it in me. Let me be a map of the dangers.
“All right, little sister,” I tell her. “Grab your coat. We gotta go talk to that judge.”