Chapters (41)
I didn’t see Yusuf a lot, leaving me to dive into work, clocking ten-, eleven-hour days at the Footage Farm. Figueiredo’s world and the ant farm of his Envisioner facility became a drama that me and the other footage techs glued ourselves to. The well-oiled machine of his staff seemed to implode around him, with green-coated researchers splintering into bickering groups that clammed up when he marched into a room. We weren’t sure if this footage was from before or after the riot. We tried to string the footage into chronological order, sketching out possible storylines and main character relationships on the whiteboard. Placing bets on who was going to flip a table or punch Figueiredo in the face first. Someone started a dead pool. All this sounds grosser than it actually was, because they were characters to us more than people, but saying it out loud now is pretty weird.
I never made bets. I became the person I hated—the one stuck at his desk taking everything too seriously, all could you guys please keep it down because some of us are here to work. Irritated at everyone and everything because I was tangled in my own head. Watching the footage of Figueiredo’s facility was a dream that I could almost remember if I scoured my brain. In his endless journaling with his portable recording device, I could almost feel through the choppy music of his language and understand what he was saying. He became an itch in my brain that I couldn’t scratch that followed me everywhere.
Figueiredo took Tiago to an observatory one night and filmed his husband peering down into a telescope. Tiago waved him over and I could read the annoyance in his eyes like subtitles in a grainy, old-fashioned foreign film. This was your idea, now put the camera down and come over here. Figueiredo joined him, bent down, and pointed his camera into the eyepiece of the telescope. In the footage, a planet that looked like Jupiter but with swirling green clouds spun against the blackness.
Figueiredo’s eyes seemed to swirl with the same storm clouds in the next bit of footage that I watched—him at his desk again—when I was alone the next night. The fern trees outside his office window were covered in snow, with the gray light through the window highlighting the differences in our faces. The pinkish scar across his nose, the lines around his sharp wolf eyes.
“You must’ve found the machine by now,” he said, his voice a tired whisper. “If you ever will.”