Miss Kellerman was acting. She was not an actual mermaid (he had already known this), but he had also mistakenly credited her with scholarship in Greek mythology just because she had appeared in a photoplay dramatizing an alleged classic event. Further: just because he had seen her face reflecting emotions, it did not mean she actually felt them. All the perceptions were in the mind of the beholder, who, besieged by the movement of celluloid illuminated in a darkened room, was searching to complete an emotional circuit, a child searching for a breast.

Or she felt them.

Meeting Annette Kellerman would not illuminate him, for he would bring his own unmet needs. In other words, it was impossible to ever finally rescue his idea, to marry it, and to live happily ever after with it.

It took him long nights at the library to think of the oxymoronic name of the medium itself, the moving picture, and he asked himself: what if the motion was essential, meaning the pursuit was eternal? His way would always be blocked by unshaven rascals in striped shirts and black domino masks, carrying blackjacks and speaking in rude slang, and the life of an idea was always one best lived screaming its lungs out at the railroad tracks, the sawmill, the limestone rapids, eternal peril. This, perhaps, was the lesson of the moving picture, the satisfaction of eternally unspooling mystery.

He decided Annette Kellerman was genuinely sweet and did not live in Hollywood, but must visit from a seaside town, where she no doubt lived with a suitable chaperone.

Kellerman actually did lead a clean life, that of an athlete, an early convert to the cult of the temple of the body. She had caused scandal by wearing the first one-piece bathing suit at Ocean Beach in Boston. That she was now bathing in nothing at all, on film, which millions of people could see, was horrifying to clergy and state censors. They wrote letters to editors: Miss Kellerman was nude! William Fox, her new producer, was unable to argue the point, for he had noticed that motion pictures featuring nude women tended to draw large audiences. He had planned to show nude women in as many features as he possibly could. In fact, Kellerman’s new movie, A Daughter of the Gods, had over two hundred “mermaids” in it, a coded suggestion as to what span of flesh would be shown. More editorials appeared, condemning movies as cesspools where wholesome narrative went to die.

Fox told Annette Kellerman they were in trouble, not just their million-dollar production, but the entire film industry. How could they fight the argument that film was essentially a corrupt venture? Especially when they believed it?