The day that E—the photographer—met my mother, a strange silence descended.
It was the weekend, and E had come by our place to bring D an old film projector. But as much as they tried, they couldn’t get it to work.
And so, to show that E hadn’t made the trip in vain, D invited him to stay for lunch.
That was when my mother came in. She’d been pruning the magnolia in the garden.
When D introduced them, E and my mother looked at each other with familiarity. With sadness, too.
“We know each other,” said my mother.
“We had a friend in common at university,” added E.
From then on, everything was strange. Lunch was served, but E didn’t talk about photographs or ghosts, and my mother, who always seemed to be on another planet, this time appeared to be striving to reach another galaxy.
I, accustomed to salvaging uncomfortable situations—there wasn’t a huge difference between a hardware store counter and our family table—intuited that the only thing bringing us together in that moment, and therefore the thing that could save us, was the film we’d seen on television the day before. My mother and I had watched it, and D, who had arrived just as the film was ending, said he’d seen it too. E had seen many films, so I was confident he knew it too.
I started talking about The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Five minutes later we were all talking about The Bridge on the River Kwai.
D and E started talking about World War II and the Chinese (in my head at the time, the Japanese and the Chinese lived in one country), and we still had time to whistle the film’s theme song.
That’s what I was doing when, looking at the bowl of asparagus soup, I had an epiphany, the first in my life.
Steam was rising from the bowl, and it transformed into a ghost the size of my thumb. That first ghost was followed by a second, a third, a fourth ghost.
This procession of ghosts from the afterlife sprouted from the soup and moved above the table, trying to communicate with the beforelife. But they didn’t manage to. Poor things.
When I mentioned my strange vision after coming out of my trance, my mother burst into tears and E said it was time to go.
D, who couldn’t find any conceivable analogy in the Kramp catalogue to help him comprehend what was happening, told E no problem but to please leave him the film projector.
My mother shut herself in her room for the rest of the afternoon, and D and I stayed in the dining room.
“If we fix the projector, what should we watch?” I asked.
“A pirate film.”
“Okay,” I said, feigning an exaggerated enthusiasm and hugging D, an atypical expression of affection that neither of us was accustomed to.
Epiphanies were almost always followed by insight, as I would confirm over the years, and that day I realized the following:
D was alone.
I was alone.
Life was a lonely place.
And this fact belonged to the category of “Things that Were Simply the Way They Were.”
So I left D tinkering with the projector and went to my room to read my comics.