The Insensible Bond is Your Vision

“The insensible bond connecting your images which are furthest apart and most different is your vision.”
—Robert Bresson

Kate called to wish me happy new year. That’s something I do remember. That’s still vivid. My roommates were out celebrating. I was standing in my kitchen, watching the color from the fireworks splash on the vinyl floor. Kate’s voice would dominate my year. It said: I won our bet, and you owe me twenty dollars. What bet? That I wouldn’t call John for the rest of the year. We laughed. I sent her the money, and what else did she say to me, how are you, any resolutions, are you at a party, how’s the house hunt, and really, how are you, it’s okay if you’re not alright, you can always talk to me, and by the way your Christmas present is in the mail, I’ll go ahead and tell you it’s Diary of a Country Priest by George Bernanos, you know, like the film. I know how drawn you are to the spiritual, she said, the natural. Her voice kept breaking up, the word spiritual minced by static, so I put her on speaker. What film? I asked. Film always comes up with Kate. The Bresson film, she said. She was surprised to hear I’d never seen any of his work: “A dozen films and they’re all practically perfect.” I’ve always been sensitive about Kate finding me uncultured. I said nothing. I rubbed my eyes. Kate filled the silence with a slow, amorphous, aborted thought: “Gary Indiana says . . . well, it’s something on Pickpocket, purity, proximity to life. It’s one of my favorite essays. But you should see the films before you read it. In fact, you ought to just watch them all in order: the transition to color will be captivating.”

She hung up. So began the year: a slow, amorphous, aborted year, a year where nothing happened to me except vague unstructured sadnesses, a failed attempt at building a life. My God, where’s everybody now? Strangers, silence. That year people gathered around me like dead leaves in a river bend, suspended in the current until dislodged by some animal or change in current. That’s what the year was like: blocked flow. Everyone I watched those movies with is gone. As if my emotional life—and what other life did I have?—were some kind of train station, everybody hurrying through. I can hardly remember the seasons, much less the dates. Sometimes months passed between viewings. I know mostly watched them at night, but in my memory a few are softened by the sweet fuzz of daylight instead of hardened by darkness. I can only really remember the people I watched them with, the fact they all left me, why? I have to figure out if any of it is salvageable. Carter used to say that time only moves faster as we get older, but I can’t let it go by so invisibly: I have to find a way to watch time with lightningeyes, remember things that happened, so I can hold on to anyone that might be left. 

I watched the first film, Angels of Sin, alone. Outside my bedroom window I remember a holy darkness, a blue-black-gray feeling, drained color, January’s dead wind. Kate’s suggestion was fresh in my head, so it must have been only a few days into the year, when time still feels so fresh you’re not sure how you plan to sketch it all out yet. I always start the new year feeling like I could completely renew myself before the long bloodscratch of a mismanaged life. Angels of Sin was a thriller. It starred a convicted woman and a nun who believes she can be saved. The only scenes I can remember are a long one of judgement in some holy court and the two women bent over each other in the woods, their faces close up among the black and white branches as one whispers to the other: “It won’t be in this world.” I loved that sense of its heartache, the idea that things could be somehow different from how they are, our circumstances and relationships, that we’re living the wrong life . . . I fell asleep in the same bed I watched it in, without turning off my projector. I don’t think anybody else was home.

I must have seen Les Dames du Bois de Boulonge a few days later, with Graham. Graham and I had dated for six years and continued to live together the year after our split. We watched the movie politely, though I can barely recall the plot beyond a woman enacting revenge by tricking her lover into marrying a prostitute. But something in the film’s score caught me: a repeated, recontextualized melody that fell endlessly down like a Shepard tone . . . the sound of a downward spiral . . . I remember noticing the depth of sadness I felt in both films. I liked it. I’ve always believed in tragedy: that art is for commiseration. But I kept thinking how hard it was to act naturally around Graham unless Mallory, our third roommate, was around. When the three of us were together, we were all old friends, but without her, Graham and I were nervous and hypersensitive to each other’s movements on opposite ends of the couch. We didn’t look at each other. At the end we engaged in the formal analysis that had constituted so much of our relationship: I said my point about the music, he made some reference to “the social novel” and called the film a “fun romantic intrigue.” Where were his eyes looking when he said romantic intrigue? I should remember, because this one we watched in the day, though that rowhouse was so dark and lightless and cramped, shadows everywhere, one of the many discomforts that eventually drove me out of it. “It was like watching theater,” I remember Graham saying, precisely because I later found out that Bresson’s project was to move cinema away from theater, that he wanted his actors to be “painter’s models,” presented flatly with their hollowed-out souls. I wondered if whatever playlike quality Graham had noticed was something Bresson himself observed and tried to move away from, like a painter who swears off red after critics exalt the use of the color in her work. Then Graham smiled stiffly and got up from the couch. His absence shifted the cushions. In college, we had watched every single Almodóvar film together, lying shoulder to shoulder in rented study rooms, a hot laptop balanced between our thighs. Now look at the distance between us, I thought.

People say Diary of a Country Priest is the real start of Bresson’s filmography. It was the story Kate had seen in me. I was excited for it. By the time I watched it spring was thinking of arriving so the night was warm enough to keep my windows open, though the horrible blackness like pools of nightwater still loomed outside my enormous bay windows, it was a scary black night flecked by pink and baby green buds . . . this time it was me, Graham, and our friend Cassandra. We watched it sitting on my bed sideways, pillows pushed up against the wall, projector hurling light across my bedroom. Cassandra studies film, so we watched it seriously, except for one moment when I went downstairs to make us all popcorn. I came back up with two big orange bowls and heard them talking and laughing, but when I opened the door they hushed, like some secret had passed between them . . . so that’s how it is, I remember thinking . . . gingerly I set the bowls down between us, cut the lights, hit play. Country Priest was the first Bresson film that drilled hard into my spirit. By the dying priest’s final lines of two-pronged acceptance and defeat—“what does it matter, all is grace”—I was crying. When the film ended, I jumped up and gave a passionate speech about sacrifice, the torment of dedicating your life to something and being forced to leave it unfinished, how the rejected shadow of a love haunted the priest the whole movie, how he’d made the wrong choice, I went further, I mentioned Ribeyro, the writer, how in his diaries he’d lamented all the blue days of beauty and connection he’d sacrificed and for what? To write fiction. Graham and Cassandra didn’t seem to get it.

I seemed much more affected by it than either of them. Graham was looking at me with a remove I found almost offensive. When we were in love, he would have indulged me in those kinds of raptures. I felt sweaty. The heat and uncomfortable brightness from the projector, the blankets all tangled up and too messy on the bed and floor . . . Cassandra said something about how Claude Laydu, the lead actor, had been condemned to a career of playing tortured priests, then Graham and Cassandra started talking about that, the actor, they didn’t want talk about Country Priest, as though it were more important for its impact on film history than for its power as a piece of art. As they spoke I found myself growing farther and farther away from them, as if my bedroom were lengthening its lens, wood floors stretching and warping, they were ten, twenty, thirty feet away from me. I felt dizzy. Something about the dynamic upset me. At the same time, I didn’t want either of them to leave. I needed to make them understand. 

I forget what point she was making, but Cassandra said the word parasocial, everybody loved that word that year, and I don’t think she meant it this way but I almost took it as a dig, and I stood there thinking about that, how I was filling up my nights with characters, living ones as well as giant two-dimensional people made of light and sound and movement, and then the void-feeling afterward of the room emptied of company, both the people you watched a movie with and the people on your wall who blip back into shadow when the projector powers down. Maybe you call somebody, take a walk, get a drink, but then what? Your friends aren’t always on call. They’re not dolls. They’re people too. I wring them like rags! Besides, no matter how much I tried to be around people, my loneliness was never satiated. I was always hungry. I needed to learn to enjoy my own company, didn’t I? And take pleasure in my own reactions to things without forcing them onto other people. It’s strange now to remember the moment Graham and I laughed at that film’s same joke, how Cassandra didn’t laugh. How she moved closer to Graham on the bed. When I started dating Carter I remember thinking: you don’t even know that you kind of love Graham too. You think you hate him. And Cassandra’s falling in love with me, even though she’s beginning to see me as her enemy. Of course, my other thought was that maybe I should start watching movies with people who understood better, people who would cry with me over Country Priest instead of going on and on about Claude Laydu. Paths untaken, work unfinished, people destroyed . . . I went to sleep with my heart aching, dreaming of martyrdom, dreaming about the something in my life that felt so dormant and anesthetized that even living in sad fictions was a respite, it was almost an addiction the way I was attracted to those tragic stories . . . I had a dream I was diagnosed with stomach cancer, like the priest in the film.

Time passed. The weather warmed. I moved out. I sought new company. When I remember A Man Escaped I remember its bells before anything else, how they clanged at the inmate’s moment of freedom, mirroring the bells of grace in Country Priest, since for me they were like wedding bells because I was in love. I looked at everything with the newsparkling feeling, it was spring spring spring, windows wide open, bug nets, butterflies, I was watching the film on my projector at my new house in the afternoon on a huge pale green couch pale as beansprouts with the cool air and the flowers and the new wood floors and yes in my heart the germ of new love. My new house was an old communal art house just ten blocks away with no lease and rent so cheap it was almost unheard of. I shared it with two others. It was the kind of place people stayed for a few months or a whole decade and where I would live in my year of sad waiting, and waiting for what? Just waiting and in love, in love with Carter, a sensitive, complicated person who really belonged in the woods and knew all our city’s secret hiking trails. Our first weeks together were shaped by cloudy spring hikes and afternoons by sunglittering streams lounging in the mud, candlelit conversations on his high wood patio . . . that night we snuggled up on one end of the couch while at the other end sat my two new housemates, Alex, a cellist, and Monica, a dancer.

It felt great to have shuffled the deck. My life was full of new people, people who were entering instead of exiting my life, who I didn’t have years of ambivalent history with, whose distance from me seemed fresh and full of possibility rather than the result of a long death. It felt like one of those periods where your life collapses in on itself and something new blooms all at once, difficultly but for the better, which made the truth of what was really happening even worse. Carter was a restless movie watcher. He stood up, turned on lamps, left the room, made a cup of tea and then another without asking me to hit pause, and I wasn’t sure if he even cared. Was he watching it or just sitting on the couch with me, waiting for it to be over? Hadn’t anyone ever taught this guy how to watch a damn movie? Monica had her feet up out on the coffee table, her long brown hair twirled up in a clip. She was watching but kind of on her phone. Alex was bundled up like a mouse, sitting under a blanket with his arms around his knees. He seemed bored. Neither seemed to notice or care what Carter was doing. Well, was I even really watching the film? Maybe I actually liked watching Carter’s long limbs move between the living room and the kitchen. I found him beautiful. The day before I’d told him I knew I was in love. He’d paused. Said he wasn’t sure yet. Already we were misunderstanding each other. I didn’t know that real love grows slowly and imperceptibly like plants do. Like people say it does. Me, I liked to move the world along. 

Most of what I actually remember from A Man Escaped is its voiceover monologue, similar to the voiceover in Country Priest. I don’t think I liked them at the time, but I missed them in the later films. I often felt like my own moral compass had gone silent, that I couldn’t hear any voice directing my life from within. I was just letting things happen to me. When the film was over, I said something about the terse prison communication, forced intimacy between the cellmates, expressionlessness . . . Monica was enthusiastic like me, she talked a lot, while Alex spoke less but offered fine, precise points. Carter just nodded along. He said he liked it but not much more. He seemed uncomfortable. What was I supposed to do with that? You expect so much out of the people you love it becomes difficult to just enjoy their company . . . later that night I thought about calling Graham to tell him about A Man Escaped. But it seemed wrong. Was it? Carter knew we hung out. Why feel guilty? What if Graham was with Cassandra and he didn’t pick up? But when Carter fell asleep with me that night I forgot all that and was happy. I loved how he buried his head in the crook of my shoulder, loved running my fingers through his coarse black hair that curled out his skull like wrought iron.

But the next film with him was difficult too. Our relationship was already souring. What did we fight about? Everything and nothing, what’s it matter now? Whenever I felt him grow distant, I’d ask if we shouldn’t just end things, he said he hated how much I put our relationship on the precipice when things got tough, how I wasn’t able to face what was really bothering me, how instead I threw bombs, grenades, Molotov cocktails. How I made him beg to stay in my world. How I lit things on fire. We were always able to reach an uneasy peace. After fighting one night we settled in to watch Pickpocket with Carter’s sister, Beth. Sometimes Beth felt easier to get along with than Carter. She was a lot like him, but a woman, with whom I didn’t share a frantic and confusing love. I could feel Carter grow more and more anxious as Beth and I talked about the movie after it ended, almost like he was jealous. When Carter was in the bathroom, I remember Beth turning to me on the couch, looking into my eyes with seriousness and care, and asking: “Are you okay?” Why ask that? She said Carter mentioned I was coming off a tough year. I didn’t know what to say. Carter came back. I didn’t mention it to him. Maybe that’s what made me watch The Trial of Joan of Arc the way I did, in my old house with my old roommates, the three of us making the kinds of jokes we’d made together since we were teenagers. Things were easy with Mallory and Graham. It wasn’t tough like my new relationship, already full of eggshells. It was as though I’d suddenly become afraid of the new life opening up and wanted to step back into the past, just for a moment, do something regressive and comforting, like sleeping at your parent’s place as an adult. I think we all got drinks afterward. If we did, I didn’t tell Carter.

A much more vivid memory: watching Au hasard Balthazar. By the time I saw it summer was dawning. My problems with Carter had washed away my memories of spring. It was like a pot of infinite water boiling over, flooding, scalding everything in the house, my God, that’s what it felt like, like we were submerged in flaming water, the blurring of all visual substance into one wet opaque watery mass. We were in some strange ritual of pain, I had no idea why things were the way they were or why I felt so strongly that I had to hold on . . . a historic theater was showing Balthazar as a matinee, so I went to see it with some friends during a time when Carter and I were “taking space,” and when every hour I managed to pass without ruminating on our relationship was a triumph. All these friends were writers in some capacity, including one with whom I’d begun and abandoned a romance before Carter. His name was Sam. All our friends were watching us out of the corners of their eyes as we made our way to our row, and Sam and I shared the silent understanding that we would not be sitting next to each other. It often felt like I knew almost everybody in our small city, so I scanned the ocean of red velvet seats as I sat down, waving to a face or two in the near-darkness. My group started chatting, some left to get Raisinets or cups of coffee, and Sam and I were left to make stonegrindingly awkward small talk across the empty gulf of seats. I was anxious and upset, but my heart was pounding and I felt alive, too, as if feeling the tension with this guy was some kind of revenge against Graham and Carter both. After all, I loved being in love but hated how it limited my freedom . . . I knew some erratic and impulsive action could fuck everything up for me, the kind of action I was given to . . . I like to know I can ruin things if I want, even though I’m passive until the moment of destruction . . . I’m like a sniper . . . and besides, my friends had wanted Sam and me to be together. None of them even knew Carter. Sam asked what I was reading. I froze. Always embarrassing to admit you’re reading nothing, that your emotional life has become your hobby, what am I reading, not Walser or Céline like you, I’m reading the sad expressions on my boyfriend’s face across the room, I’m trying to read intentions over here, I have no time for books. I said I was reading some Creeley. “You always say you’re reading some Creeley,” Sam said. The lights dimmed. We quieted. Previews. I thought about the abjuration of sunlight. All the blocked sunlight shining on the bricks of the theater, trying to shine on us while we stayed safe and hidden in the cold cavernous darkness.

Balthazar was still shot in black and white, but somehow my memory adds color. When I close my eyes and imagine the film I can still see its powderblues, meadowgreens, and haycolors, how the sports car, so out of place in the countryside, burns an ugly red. The watery close-up of Balthazar’s brown donkey eye, beleaguered witness to the evil around him . . . every time I saw that eye I almost cried. Something excited me about the pastoral shots of lullaby-innocent flowers juxtaposed with the cruelty of humanity, the girl as its agent and receiver, the electrifying shot of her screaming naked in the corner as she’s tormented by the boys, next to Balthazar’s soft look of love it was like blasphemy, scandalous, desecrating, the image so explicit whereas all the violence in Bresson’s preceding films had been elided . . . something in the summer and its dark life, things come alive and buzz around but also die from too much heat . . . and me I felt alive, I was energized by the evil feeling of seeing Sam, I could change everything about my life if I wanted to, I was still a free person in the world, and again the barbarism of that final image! I scrambled out of my seat the moment the credits ran. I needed to drink up all that blocked sunlight. In the dark I could sense my friends looking at me oddly. They liked to bask in the radiance of a film’s final moments. Stumbling into the daylight, I had my first real moment of awareness that the year was almost half over and what had happened? A new romance I was already unsure about, awkward interactions with people I had abandoned, a few films watched . . . there was some part of me that knew I wasn’t moving forward, just sideways, like I had halfheartedly changed everything just because I was a little bored. I was still standing there thinking as my friends trickled out of the theater. We all talked. The June sun sparkled. June: the precipice of the year, breezes and brightness all around, hard to parse time on either side of it. I said goodbye. I wouldn’t see my friends again for months. I was about to dive so deeply into my own misery that by the time I got back in touch with them their lives had all changed. I heard later, over coffee with one of them, that many had disliked how I treated Sam: like he was a toy, disposable, not like a person, not like a man who loves. Now when I see any of those friends for dinner or a movie or a drink, they don’t say goodbye with “See you soon.” They say: “Take care of yourself.” 

I remember almost nothing of Mouchette. I was too distracted. The only evidence I have of watching it all is a single image I have saved on my phone, Mouchette in her pigtails, pouting, captioned Hope! Hope is dead, and a corresponding note from the same date: This (physical) prison I don’t even see it. It’s the idea. A line from the movie? My thought? I can’t recall. I spent the whole film miserable because the day before I had planned to watch it with Carter, but when I got to his house he said he wanted to watch something else, something a little less serious, everything with you is so serious, he’d said, sometimes I just want to relax, how come we never relax together? So we put on one of his movies and ordered sweet potato sushi and threw pillows on his futon and lit a candle, but he kept getting up, smoking cigarettes, making tea, turning on lights, whereas I needed to surrender, needed to submit myself to a narrative, I couldn’t be half with him and half with a film, I couldn’t be in this particular film at all, why couldn’t he understand? I needed things to overtake me. I needed not to think. And now we’re both bored, I thought angrily, instead of just one of us. I saw Mouchette alone the next night, mostly thinking about Carter, brooding over our incompatibility.

Watching A Gentle Woman, on the other hand, was like one of those instances you feel you’re drowning and manage to surface and you gulp down buckets and buckets of air, clearthinking air, after seeing nothing but the wavering blue mass suddenly there’s air and the comprehensible cloudscape above you like an ecstatic flash of clarity before the confusion of the waves. It seemed to so cleanly and precisely to articulate a problem in my life that it was like the light from my projector had spilled out of my house and illuminated the whole world, and the contours of what was happening to me. I watched it the day after Carter said he wasn’t sure if he loved me. He said he regretted starting something serious, but it wasn’t that he wanted to break up, more like he found himself with something overwhelming and unplanned and sure, good, something he didn’t necessarily want to lose, so he wasn’t sure what to do, and what was I supposed to say to that? I’d asked crying. He didn’t know. Neither of us knew. So instead of watching it with him I watched it with Jud, a friend from graduate school who’d taken Alex’s room after Alex moved in with his girlfriend. During the pandemic Jud and I had movie nights every Thursday at my apartment in our sad icebrick frozen hell of a town which still had its tiny beauties: for instance, he’d walk through the glittering mud dust and snow at twilight over the cobblestone bridge with its warm yellow streetlamps, past the abandoned factories, up to my second-story duplex cradled by leafless trees, and when I powered up my projector the light ignited my little wood living room and probably poured out smoldering on the snow outside too . . . and now that we lived together on the east coast, maybe that same light was sliding off the summer leaves . . . it was late summer, August, and we watched the film in our tank tops with the fans blasting because we had no AC, their hums mixing with the projector whirr and the thunder of crickets and cicadas outside.

I went into A Gentle Woman remembering Kate’s prediction that the transition to color would be captivating, but like Balthazar the saturation inverts in my memory: I have to struggle to remember its somber blues and turquoises because for me A Gentle Woman was a black steel dagger. The simplicity of its premise: two people who might have loved each other but found their loves misaligned, mistimed, incommunicable. The woman’s love for animal bones, the man’s clumsy attempt to connect with her long after she’s already given up on him. How we chase loves long annihilated! The mirror to my life! I checked my phone. Nothing from Carter. It had been days. The credits rolled. When Jud noticed my tears, glancing at me in what little light reflected off the wall, he seemed a little put off—he’s never done well with strong emotion—and we talked about the film for just a minute before he went off to bed. He would have rather watched something by Solondz, Korine, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I sat in the darkness. The light was still burning on the wall. Now it was a living room instead of a bedroom, a parlor of imagined company. I was eager for the next film I must have thought one of them would fix whatever was wrong with me, hold some kind of key. I had no idea that from here on out, like summer into autumn, the films only got bleaker as their colors grew more vibrant. Whatever note of grace or salvation the early films possessed would vanish. (Bresson in his notebook: How to reckon that you will end up on a wall, my films will cover things like a surface? Well, I could answer, at least for me: the light will mutate on that surface, come alive, jump out, devour you.)

I watched Four Nights of a Dreamer on my laptop in bed the next morning, before getting up to make coffee. But the film’s depiction of a lone artist betrayed and abandoned by his lover did nothing for me. My problem with Carter was that we both felt so strongly but constantly upset each other, and neither of us were willing to let go, bound by some spell of pain. I didn’t understand what kept dragging me into the undertow of the relationship, watching my heart shred itself, doing nothing to protect it. I couldn’t even say that Carter shredded it: it was like I scraped it against his hard stone surface. He grew more distant and I grew more and more frantic, desperate for some kind of mind merging, desperate to tether my consciousness to a person to save myself from stillness. When Four Nights ended my eyes ached from staring unblinking at the screen.

Then I put off watching Lancelot du Loc for a long time. September came. October. Carter and I quietly stopped saying we loved each other. I was thinking about that as I watched the blood and bodies strewn in grass at the end of Lancelot. Another morning movie, buried in bed. I felt unaffected by it but oddly satisfied, like eating a nutritious but not particularly tasty meal. When the film was over it was almost noon. I was sweating under the covers. There were crumbs and dirt and gravel in my sheets. Time grated along. I didn’t get up for another hour. I was spending more and more time each day nursing some strange despair. Somehow I knew leaving Carter wouldn’t end it, though I fantasized about leaving him all the time. Some part of me knew that whatever was wrong wasn’t that simple.

After Halloween it seemed things might shift. I threw The Devil, Probably up on the projector and sat down to watch it with Jud. I texted Carter to let him know we were going to watch one and that he was welcome to drop by. I didn’t expect him to come, but he did, using his own key to open the door and slip in through the shadows. The film had already started so he silently took his place beside me on the couch, wrapping his big hand up in mine and smiling, I could see in the halflight, in his plain, friendly way. He’d brought a big orange squash Beth had grown in her garden and set it on the coffee table in front of us. Then the three of us endured the scenes of environmental catastrophe that open the film. We watched leftist groups flounder. We watched a baby seal get clubbed. At some point Jud started leaning forward on the couch, his hands clasped, watching with the same contemplative intensity I must have displayed during A Gentle Woman or Au hasard Balthazar. Even Carter was looking at the film with quiet attention. When he felt me looking at him he squeezed my hand. Things had been feeling the past few days like they were about to finally break apart between us, and as with everything else, I was so passive, all I could do was watch, like the films, wait for it to end, wait for the plot point, the shattering, my heart afraid. But he had squeezed my hand. The light on the wall went on miming the destruction of the world. The sewage we all wade around in while suffering our private horrors.

During the suicide at the end of the film, I remember noticing how unaffected I was, whereas the year before the suicide subplot in Last Tango in Paris had been too much for me, too close to my mother’s own recent attempt for me to go on watching. Not even a year and that wound was already closing. Is that what a year’s for? The closing of a wound? And the slow red rend of a new one, like a piece of meat butterflied. Carter put his other hand on mine so that both of his were on me. I smiled in the dark to show him I was okay. Thinking he could probably see the light on my face. But only if he was looking. The film ended. I felt neutral. I had nothing to say about it. But Jud was on the verge of tears. Whenever he’s about to cry, his face scrunches up like a rat. He spoke in his gruff way about his affinity to the protagonist, and something about that made me sad, Jud was always seeing himself in the most jaded worldforgotten characters in all the movies we watched . . . he said he related to the guy just like I said I’d related to Petra von Kant, which we’d seen a few months prior, and I didn’t reply because I didn’t want Carter to ask about it, since that movie was how I was already thinking of my year, waiting in bed, writhing, waiting in bed, despairing, watching something fail, crying, holding on to someone who you doesn’t don’t understand loves you, doing the very exact things you know will push them away, despising them for not loving you, trying to force them, and time moving so slowly, and like Petra said, when you’re in love you’re constantly giving up points, and why was I feeling all this while the object of my anxiety was sitting beside me, smiling and patiently holding my hand, what was so wrong, why was I frowning at Jud, why was I hating him a little, why was I hating Carter as he held my hand, hating Carter as he smiled at me in the dark and brought orange squash to my house and sat beside me and held my hand? His thumb on my thumb. He was sitting next to me holding my hand. From somewhere beyond me came the thought that my life was not my own. Why was I doing just what Kate told me to do? Why was I hating Kate too? Why did I just obey?

Then I felt Carter turn to Jud on the couch. He made a slow, thoughtful comment about how the last shot of the film was framed. He seemed moved, like Jud. He’d watched it empathetically, like I’d wanted. I listened to them bond. Jud was happy too. He and I almost never agreed on the quality of the films we watched together: finally he had an ally. After a while he said goodnight to me and Carter and went upstairs. We decided to take a night walk through the neighborhood. I felt like I was floating as we stepped off my porch, floating out from beneath the shadow of the mimosa tree overhanging the stairs. As we walked we chatted and looked at the red and brown leaves dimmed by midnight just like we’d looked at the full moon and garden tulips one night when falling in love, listened to the frogs in the pond at a rented cabin, seen the glittering light on the water halo his favorite river island, found the hiveless swarm of bees in the woods one of our first walks together, untethered like some wandering mystic sphere, watched them spill out over the grass and flowers like a liquid . . . but then at the end of the street we spotted some other nightwalkers. They were too far away to make out. We got closer. It was Cassandra and Graham. They were walking hand in hand just like me and Carter. Everybody was a little embarrassed. I looked at Graham. Months ago, he’d told me he was avoiding my street. Well, maybe it’s good, I thought, maybe he doesn’t need to anymore. I don’t remember the moonlight small talk. I remember Cassandra sizing Carter up, Graham avoiding Carter’s eyes, Carter looking back and forth between me and everybody else’s shoes, making the lightly pained expression he did whenever he felt uncomfortable or out of place. And as we parted ways and walked on I must have lost my floating step, must have seemed a little sad. I didn’t mention Cassandra, I couldn’t, but I talked about how Graham and Mallory turned the third bedroom into a studio, how easy it had been for them to replace me with a room full of equipment, a Shimpo wheel, Mallory’s gigantic oak easel. Those must have been the minutes Carter’s grip loosened in my hand, the faraway look cemented in his eyes, his gaze started dragging on the pavement, and he finished our walk together more or less alone.

It wasn’t long before I left him. A few quick scenes of pain, some violent words I can barely remember. I told him I had to free myself. Free myself from what? Before leaving his apartment I took a long look at him. He was crying on his couch with his head in his hands. I wondered if he was really suffering as much I was, or if he wasn’t secretly relieved. The next day was a dense dark dream. By four I was calling him, trying to take it all back, but he’d had enough. Then came the weeks, all the usual lingering questions, how are you, where are you now, do you ever think of me, did you care? Did you turn me into something so monstrous or have I always been like this? I used to think our most solitary moments were our truest selves, but now I’m not so sure. Now it was me avoiding houses. Carter’s, Beth’s, Graham’s. I only walked through the parts of the neighborhood that still felt safe, none of the main roads, just its veiled side streets and overgrown alleys.

A wintry night. My house again. Monica’s Christmas lights snaked lazily around the living room baseboard, dull red and blue and green glows. I tried to pay good attention to l’Argent—it was the last one, after all, and if anything was going to come together about watching them it was going to happen tonight—but all I could think about was how the house felt full of Carter, how he’d built my bookshelves and my garden bed and my fire pit, how I would have to move again . . . nobody wanted to talk about the movie when it ended. Jud went upstairs. I went to bed alone again, which was somehow intolerable, not that falling asleep in someone’s arms ever filled the void. I got under the covers. I was thinking about the last line of the film, the one thing I really remembered from it, the last line of dialogue in Bresson’s entire filmography: “I have just killed my whole family.” Delivered emotionlessly, a hundred faceless people looking on. “I have just killed my whole family.” The concluding statement of a lifetime of work. I turned off my lamp. I was wired. My heart was in my throat. I have just killed my whole family. I closed my eyes. As I tried to sleep I imagined taking yet another walk, one where I don’t avoid any houses, where I wander the matrix of ten flowery blocks everybody lives on. I pass my old house. Graham and Cassandra are snuggled up in bed together, they’ve lit a candle on the sill, their love is slow and patient as love should be. Cassandra pulls down a blind with one finger and shoots me looks of pity out the bedroom window. Mallory’s easel takes up the space where my bed used to be, she paints every night, she’s grateful for the space and silence. Carter and Beth cook dinner, light fires, sing folk songs together in the ice-cold night. Beth falls in love. Carter moves away. The writers comfort Sam. They read Kafka stories out loud in someone’s living room, making pour over coffees one cup at a time. Who else? I could always call Kate again. We hadn’t spoken in months. Instead I opened my eyes and felt around for my phone in the darkness. I looked at photos and videos of Carter and I together, photos and videos of my mother, photos of Graham and Mallory and I from when we had all lived together. Photos of my writer friends in the used bookstore or at the Korean bar we liked to go to after readings. Then I looked at photos and videos of people I didn’t know. Back then I could never go more than an hour without some brush with humanity to keep me company. But even though it often felt like I knew hundreds and hundreds of people, they all flattened out in my heart like image and light.