The how dare you have something that we don’t hurricane winds whipped around us. An invisible guillotine hung in the air.

I was too busy poring over footage from Figueiredo’s universe and trying to find an hour or two at night when the Theater was empty and I could work with the machine alone. Then, creeping to Yusuf’s bedside long after he’d been asleep. Trying to work up the courage to tell him I was losing myself and couldn’t explain how or why. That this world was starting to feel less real, less solid, even after what he told me in the car on the way back from Beatty.

When I’m around you, things feel more solid, he’d said. Fixed.

Instead I told him, “We’re getting out of here,” and I wouldn’t tell him to where.

*   *   *

Sometimes you need an intermission. A swelling of the score from the theater speakers and then the red velvet curtain plummets down from the ceiling and covers the screen. The manager flicks on the house lights that dazzle the eyes of the audience and everyone stands up, all huh? and fumbles from the movie-fog back to real life. I worked an intermission into one of my early docs as a palette cleanser—an hour into a deep-dive into a gay bar in Ukraine that was raided by the police—a five-minute break when I wanted the audience to get up and dance. Cue the retro-jingle. Let’s all go to the lobby and buy ourselves a Coke.

Yusuf and me were silhouettes in the observatory, alone except for an employee who lingered on the fringe of the circular room, knowing to give us space. This section of Commonwealth University in Treaty City was closed to visitors, and we were only able to creep in because I’d called and maybe hinted that this was Official Envisioner Business. The lie was completely worth it just to see the outline of Yusuf peeking down the telescope in the room lit by dim red bulbs.

I guess I should thank Figueiredo for the inspiration from that date video of him and Tiago. I even brought Scarlett with me. I looked at Yusuf through the viewfinder of my camera because looking with my own eyes sent a dull ache through my chest.

“Would you put that thing down and come over here,” he said. “This was your idea, anyway.”

It was only fair, somehow, that Yusuf would say the exact same thing that I knew Tiago had in his exact position. All of us were hitting marks in the same play, over and over again.