Our footfalls were slow drips through the white lab rat maze, with my skin glowing brighter than the salt-white lights overhead. We didn’t need to talk. I was too tongue-tied anyway. Whenever I went up to guys in bars before, I always opened with who I figured they wanted me to be, but with Yusuf I didn’t know who that was yet. He walked me back to my house—he lived alone three houses down, he said—and we both toed the painted green pavement by the folding metal stoop.

From here, everything was a fuzzy dopamine hit in my head. Something about this place could use a bar and Yusuf was midway through a sentence about how he gets dinner every night around six when I gambled. Leaning in to stop him mid-word with my lips on his, with the dice-toss rattling around, unsure, until I felt the heat of his hand on my arm. The brush of stubble, the slight parting of his lips, the hand that moved from my arm to my lower back, shrinking the space between us. Under the moth-flecked funnel from the floodlights, I wanted to freeze-frame that moment and just live there forever. Hang it in the gallery inside my head in case whatever we were building here crumbled. Like it usually did. When we found out why each of us was still alone.

*   *   *

Days smeared together for the next couple of weeks—weirdly normal given the completely batshit situation we were in. I spent my days in the Footage Farm watching hours of Figueiredo and his staff and scribbling reports. It was the most stable job I ever had. My dad would’ve been so proud.

As much as I watched Figueiredo, his eyes watched me. Like he knew I was there, eavesdropping on his life. He had to have been mugging for whoever he thought would eventually watch all this footage. I never saw him drink anything but water, never saw him goof off with his staff. I watched him scrawling calculations on the whiteboard in his office and he literally didn’t look away—not to scratch his nose, not at a bird fluttering at the window—for three hours straight. I have to nail my ass to my chair when I’m supposed to be editing a doc and I don’t feel like it, and instead I lie in bed and pick my fingernails for an hour. Because he never gushed to his staff about their work, I watched how some twenty-second room-temperature speech to them sent rapt looks across their faces like the clouds had just split open and angels were singing their names. When once, after some party where I’d been in full jester mode cracking people up with the story of the Miss Malaise pageant I’d organized while in rehab, Narek had plowed into me. Something like, you give so much of yourself away to strangers that it becomes meaningless.