The Fugitivities, стр. 21

like that? Whatever the reason, Nate concluded that Jonah’s appearance was significant, a crosscurrent in the flow. It was instinctual; there was something about the young man that made him want to know more. He let Jonah talk (the brother loved to talk), and now he was going on about the situation he had left in Paris. And the things he was saying convinced Nate in the rightness of his thinking. Because the words spoken in his living room were taking him back, way back, across the ocean to that same city, to that place and time in his life that he could never entirely forget, but that he thought, at least he had once, that he’d left behind for good.

When Jonah spoke, the words rushed out of him and Nate struggled to keep pace as the young teacher bolted through sentences like hopscotch boxes, quick in his form, leaving a pattern in the air that was easy to see but hard to follow.

He told Nate about the work of a projectionist, the one who operates behind the scenes to bring the movie to light. There was always a moment before a screening when Jonah was alone. He would catch himself scheming, coming up with some fantastic occurrence that might indefinitely prolong his stay in the funk of the little booth. It was a space of half-lights, murky and warm. He enjoyed threading the film quickly and efficiently through its zigzag of sprockets and gates. If something went wrong, the film could get caught, a nightmare scenario that any projectionist worth their salt would prevent at all costs. Only when the picture was up could he feel his blood relax, and his mind begin to idle. In the booth he could see and not be seen. The eyes reached out across the dark where the stories rose and fell in the alphabet of variable light. A dry oven-like heat radiated from the lamphouse. The fractious chatter of rotors and film reels generated a gentle dharmic drone. The bulky frame of the mid-century projector loomed overhead like a mammoth lately fossilized; one of those vanished beasts that went down to drink of cool water at the Seine, whose bones came up when they dug out the tunnels of the Métro.

Jonah had taken the job fully aware of how it would look. Film was on its way out; the fact that it was dying gave it an old-world authenticity that made it all the more attractive. He had been aware from a very young age that everything cool was archaic, defunct, retro. If it had handles, bulbs, dials, all the better. It was a way of styling yourself as not entirely on board with the futurists, the programmer dorks who had grown up friendless and who had since secured their revenge by ascending to positions of unfathomable power and wealth. They still couldn’t dance, but it didn’t matter. They were remaking the entire world in their image. They wrote the code and the rest would have to follow it. Like them, Jonah had been born just early enough to see something of the previous world before it disappeared, enough to have a nostalgic attachment that was useful only insofar as it could be converted into quaint mementos of that lost world, notes of tasteful decay or bygoneness. Landing a gig as a projectionist seemed like the most successful thing he could have done, at least in that regard.

But the job wasn’t necessarily as easy as it looked. In the tiny Parisian movie houses, the projectors were cranky old machines, and one needed a nimble hand just to keep them going. The film came on platters like shellfish. He shucked them, holding the strips up like X-rays, pinching them carefully along the sides, looking for damage and dust, for splices or punctures along the soundtrack. There was an absorbed solemnity to the work. The ultimate test was in motion; he waited for the cue marks on the flying filmstrip, those bright cigar burns in the corner, enjoining the projector to bring two pieces of the story together. His heart rate slowed as the moment to change reels approached. He imagined a single frame on its Z-shaped voyage, around the big platter, up to the roller, then down to the film gate, where the intermittent sprocket held them, one by one, twenty-four times every second, each slice of light a still picture, like the frozen gestures of the saints projected daily by the sun through the oculi of the cathedrals.

One evening, he learned that his assignment was to project a documentary about an obscure jazz pianist. He had never heard of the film or the director or its subject; likely it had screened once at Deauville before getting dumped on them by one of those obscure cultural functionaries who followed the seasonal junkets across the globe. The titles scrolled, and the name of the subject appeared in a bold, modern font: Quiet Genius: The Life and Music of Phineas Newborn, Jr.

He checked his watch and called down to the office. They were ready. He set the action in motion. The film leader wound through the reel, sending a crazed scribble across the screen. With a soft pop, the picture came up.

Jonah squinted in the viewfinder and sharpened the focus. With a sudden self-conscious check, he realized he was looking into the grain of a black man’s skin, right about his neck. He looked up from the viewfinder at the face staring back over the shadowy rows. On the screen he took in the man’s smooth brown facial features, boyish, shy, an aristocratic demeanor and a faint trace of anxiety in the expressive eyes framed by a pair of thick, horn-rimmed glasses. A fine trace of sweat glistened on his brow. Phineas. The musician gazed down at his instrument, the flight of keys reflected in his lenses.

Just then the senior projectionist, a man named André, came in to check the feed on