Photo-Illustration: Kristin Kastein I was, like too many others, a film student living in New York when K introduced me to the work of Frank Takashi. Up until that point, for 18 of my 19 years, I’d lived a quiet, middle-class life in a middle-class suburb where my greatest hardship was this: that I could never point to some inciting source of my existential angst, some crack in my life from which all other cracks radiated. K showed me Takashi’s work, and she showed me the depth of my lack.
I was good enough to see the gap between myself and the best, and young enough, that first year, to think I could close the gap. If K’s genius could be attributed to her exotic childhood, to the rumored glamour of ambassador parents, then mine would come from hard work. I refused social invitations, which wasn’t hard because there were few. Alone in my apartment, I shot test reels on a new handheld Super 8. I logged more hours in the department than any other student.
I was good enough by that point to understand that no amount of effort would save me from myself; it would require outside intervention. And so when K dropped a note into my campus mailbox, inviting me to stay for three weeks at her family’s summer house upstate, I took it as a sign. I went. The glasses slid down K’s archless nose to settle, huge and bat-like, in the precise center of her small face. The effect was both eerie and correct. They wouldn’t sit that way on my face, which was longer, less symmetrical. I wondered if that was K’s intention: to invite comparison.
The summer house wasn’t the mansion I’d expected but converted barn, the adjoining fields green and white with tall, stalky weeds. K’s parents proved equally unremarkable: soft-spoken and creased. The beautiful, aloof aliens classmates had speculated of were nowhere to be found — no parents who could, in short, take ownership for K’s talent. Her father asked a forgettable question about my studies. His forehead glistened with sweat.
Once — it was about two o’clock on an afternoon oddly dark with encroaching storm — I did encounter K during the day. She was going down the stairs and I was going up and both of us moved aside, waiting for the other to pass. Politeness crackled in the air; later, the lightning storm would flatten the grasses, but I’d fail to capture the effect, though I’d waste half a reel of film. Black frame after black frame, with a few blown out to white.
“You surprised me,” K said. Nothing in her posture spoke of surprise. She kept her camera on long after the centipede disappeared, then looked up for several minutes. Blank sky above, though many hours later, as I left her room, I’d see in that space a sliver of moon. As if her gaze had pulled it. “Good timing. I want to show you something, since we’ve become friends.”
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