Lee was driving entirely too fast down the mountain, careening around switchbacks and grounding out the car’s chassis repeatedly on the washboard of the gravel road, but Abel only looked through the windshield as if it were a framed scene rocking and panning before him. He leaned to one side or the other when they fishtailed in curves, and bounced a little when they hit potholes, but otherwise he sat perfectly still.

He held the camera away from his body, touching it only with the tips of his fingers. In the lower edge of his peripheral vision, he was aware of its presence like some beaked bird come to roost in his lap, and it began to take on a sort of dumb but potent personality. As the car bounced and jolted, he wasn’t sure he could really feel the surface of the matte black machine with his fingertips, or tell exactly where the camera ended and he began along the whole creaking apparatus of joints and knuckles, skin and tendons and flesh, that kept the device centered in the air above his lap.

Jeromy lay muttering like a madman across the back seat, his head in Kate’s lap. She alternately stroked his hair from his forehead and held his hands in her own. Her whispered reassurances to him rose in a sustained wavering susurra, broken by the sharp crack of gravel against the underside of the car.

“Thirsty,” Jeromy choked, and then he asked Kate for a soft drink, quite calmly, as if they were on a picnic, and had brought a cooler full of drinks along with bologna sandwiches and bags of chips.

More than anything else, Abel was just surprised he hadn’t seen this all coming. He must have, at some point, just dismissed it as ludicrous, melodramatic, the kind of hack plot it offends him to even imagine.

Shortly after moving into Abel’s apartment, Lee had invited him along for dinner at his brother Jeromy’s in the Belgrade trailer courts—a place Jeromy and Kate called “Below-grade, land of shitty beer and cheap rent.” This was more or less when Abel first realized that Lee was in love with his brother’s wife.

“Yeah,” Lee said on the way home. He was drunk, his manner warm and beery, and he made too-large gestures with his arms in Abel’s small car. “She’s just like that. She is,” he said, apropos of nothing.

Abel, feeling a trifle removed and aphasic due to Jeromy’s excellent after-dinner pot, watched the texture of the asphalt in the headlights and wondered how all this arose. Abel had a brother too, an older one. When he and his own brother were in grade school, they would get into terrible fights over nothing, falling on the ground and punching. Abel would always hit as hard as he could, really throwing his body into it, because his brother was bigger, and it never occurred to him to do otherwise. His brother would hold back though, Abel thought now, because he didn’t really want to hurt him. Or maybe he did, but not so badly. Or not in that way.

Lee said simply, “She’s helping me with my writing. With character insight, just shit like that. But I feel like I know her, you know?” He paused. “I find her very interesting,” he said seriously. “She has levels.”

Abel didn’t ask what that meant, and Lee went on. It’s not that, physically, Kate was drop-dead gorgeous, he explained, then listed: her nose was a little crooked; her teeth were not a very close shade to white; her eyes would sometimes seem to cross as she looked at something off away behind you, or maybe she meant to look through you—it was disconcerting, he said. But, there was a way that all of her features worked together when she smiled or scowled or rolled her eyes, something elusive, an effect that only worked in motion. It was a kind of “peripheral beauty,” Lee called it, then said, “Maybe you wouldn’t know what I mean by that.”

Abel wondered then whether she reminded Lee of someone else, someone for whom he could no longer summon an image to match a voice, the feel of a fingertip, a singular skin-smell. This, Abel could understand. He had been preoccupied himself then with the nagging asymmetry of a relationship not so much ended as deleted, rewritten without warning.

“It’s just,” Lee said, and then stopped, exhaling loudly through his nose. “She doesn’t belong in that trailer park,” he said with a sudden fierceness.

When Abel asked, “What about your brother?” Lee shut up and glared at the square of black out his window, at the mountains, fields, and fences scrolling by, unlit and each indistinguishable from the other. Abel did not repeat his question.

*     *     *     *     *

Abel met Jane in a photography course he was auditing. He had interrupted the professor’s lecture on Riefenstahl, raising his hand with a question. “Is there a reason these are all so . . . posed?” he asked. “I mean, just so, I don’t know, aware of themselves as pictures. I mean, did she want us to be thinking about her—that is, the photographer—so much, as much as the pictures themselves?”

The professor pinched the bridge of his nose as if tired. “Differing interpretations of her aesthetics and intent are,” he said, “the source of some debate. To put it mildly. For now, though, let’s just stick to technique. Shall we?”

After the class was over, someone behind him in the hall said, “I thought it was an interesting question.” He didn’t stop walking, not out of shyness or rudeness, but just because, pushing thirty and close to a decade older than the rest of the class, he could tell most of the students didn’t know what to make of him. He just assumed that he was more likely being discussed than addressed.

When Jane repeated herself and tugged at his pack, though, he turned. Embarrassed now that she’d caught his attention, she stood her ground nevertheless and flashed a nervous smile. “Just, I’m curious, why’d you ask it?”

“Oh,” Abel said. Her hair, in a loose ponytail, looked matte black in the overhead light, shineless but soft. She was wearing very loose jeans and a very tight top. The almost blue-white skin exposed below her neck, a patch the color of skim milk and the size of his palm, made him feel like he’d been looking into a fluorescent light for too long. “I just thought,” he said, “I don’t know—how do you look at those pictures, and not think of her setting them up?”

“Yes,” she said, “Absolutely, you’re right,” like he’d vindicated some point she’d been trying to make all along. An awkward silence followed, until she asked if he knew what he was doing for the next assignment: a scene from nature. “The prof’s a masochist,” she said, “I mean, he’s gotta expect, he’ll get twenty crappy landscapes. Mountain grandeur, all that shit. Right?”

Abel admitted the tiny lake he was thinking of, up in the Bridgers, adding, “But it does have great light, in the afternoon. I could show you it,” he said, “if you want.”

The next day, driving up to the lake, she talked almost non-stop about the limitations of deconstructionism and the death of postmodern theory; while he didn’t keep up one hundred percent, when he did and made a comment—or better yet, disagreed—her eyes lit up like he’d given her a Christmas present.

At the lake, she shot up her film on fish beneath reflections, shadows cast by dry needles, and panoramas obscured by pine cones at the end of a branch. He snapped a couple quick pictures of her framing shots—just for fun, but she was marvelously photogenic. Such contrasts! Hair black as his own but such white skin: she was made for monochrome.

The next week, when she complained of the stress and lack of privacy in the big house she shared with four other women—all grad students, all embroiled in papers or dissertations—he’d confessed that his new apartment was roomier than he needed. Technically, this was true.

Once, before he had known her long, Jane had spontaneously raised her hand before him, palm down, fingers splayed as if modeling a ring or manicure. They were in the Gallatin Forest on a late afternoon, surrounded by saffron light and pines. “Look,” she said: a mosquito was mid-bite on the back of her hand, its legs arched up like capital As in old calligraphy, its proboscis sunk deep.

His first impulse was to kill it, brush it off of her, but she stopped him. “No,” she said, “Do you think you can get a picture of it?”

He put down his pack and reached in for his camera, but by the time he got the macro lens screwed on and was trying to focus in, he only saw the mosquito unglamorously disengage and lurch more than fly away, heavy with blood.

Jane looked disappointed, so he consoled her, saying, “I’m sure you’ll get bit by a lot more mosquitoes.”

“I know,” she said, the melancholy tone in her voice seeming to add, “but I wanted that one.”

Abel blinked, but then she must have heard it the same way, because she laughed once self-consciously, then so did he, and then they were both laughing. But he remembered a hint of regret here too, because it would have made a fascinating picture.

In his pre-dawn shifts at the bakery, he kept compulsively going over every aspect of the relationship, always coming back to the small black seed, the infinitesimal crack that had always been there, leading inevitably to the final fissure. After half an hour of pounding and kneading batches of dough, he realized he was giving himself a splitting headache, furrowing his brow fiercely in his concentration. He ran a floury finger between his eyebrows, pressing, willing the tiny muscles to relax, knowing it would just leave one more white smudge on his face.

He admitted: True, he had felt closest to Jane when interposing the camera between them. But those were the times she loved him the most. Always, when her face filled his viewscreen, he thought he had never seen her so exuberant, so sublime, so intoxicated with love for him.

He sliced dough into fist-sized balls, beginning what would be poppy rolls, and each stroke pulsed the dull aching blade that had settled in a vertical line behind and above the bridge of his nose. Gritting his teeth, he then set about pressing poppy seeds into the rolls, the black flecks sticking to his fingers and disappearing into the white fleshy dough.

Lee took to visiting the trailer park more frequently, but he seemed embarrassed every time he asked to borrow Abel’s keys, as if inwardly cringing.

Abel remembers one particular night, as Lee stood by the door, leaning against the wall and pulling on first one shoe, then the other. “Wanna come?” he offered.

Abel declined, as always. But that night Lee had something he couldn’t see, and when he turned, he switched hands with it. Abel craned his neck a little to one side, and Lee shifted his posture a corresponding amount, holding whatever it was behind his leg. “What have you got?”

Lee looked curiously at Abel, as if not understanding the question. “This?” he said. He turned his wrist to reveal an egg-shaped object, mostly green but fading through orange to a deep pink at the big end. He held it close to his body. “Nothing,” he said. “Just a mango.”

“A mango,” Abel repeated.

“Yes.” Abel had noticed the mango on the kitchen windowsill; he had not found it remarkable that Lee would put it there to ripen, as it was hard and green then. “Kate misses them,” Lee stated, “I guess her parents had a tree. One mango tree, in their peach orchard. She just mentioned, how she can’t find them here.”

“That’s very considerate of you,” Abel said.

Lee didn’t answer, just frowned at the mango for a moment, pressing it lightly with his fingers. Then he walked out the door.

*     *     *     *     *

He should have told Lee that he empathized, that he understood that inability to do anything but watch as something, someone, becomes with every moment less possible.

Instead he watched Lee go, then swirled his drink once to circulate the ice cubes, which dinged against the thin glass like windchimes. A stripe of bluish light fell from Lee’s door, left slightly ajar, inscribing a hard, bright line across the shadows in the hallway. Bored, and a little curious, Abel got up and nudged the door with one knuckle. It opened. The room was dark except for the square of static light from Lee’s word processor.

It smelled like pistachios, old laundry, and sweaty sheets in Lee’s room. The first words at the top of the screen were the end of a sentence, apparently stage directions: “and unloads it.” There were only two characters present, a man and a woman, referred to as HE and SHE. Context indicated some remote scene, the desert perhaps; they were camping. The man was asleep, his face pressed against the stones, effectively written out.

There were no spoken lines yet, only description, and direction for the female character. SHE got up and left the man. She heard an unknown animal call and paused. Her hands were cut and bruised, and she poured out some water from a canteen to wash them. This was when she noticed the empty socket in her wedding ring, her missing diamond. In the last sentence on the page, she was patting the ground around her, looking for it.

The last time Abel and Jane went to that lake—he hadn’t known it would be the last time—they had taken a picnic basket. He’d snagged two round loaves from the bakery and picked up some sharp cheese and a bottle of cold cheap Riesling at the grocery. The whole scene was unspeakably romantic, pine trees and slabs of granite lit in pink and orange by the lowering sun, tiny fish finning in the clearest water he’d ever seen.

She sat down on a rock by the water, letting the gold bands of reflected light ripple up over her face and shoulders. Abel tore one of the loaves in half and unfolded his pocketknife for the cheese. Mesmerized, she moved her hand in the gold and blue light. “Like stained glass,” she mused.

“I went to church once,” Abel said, and she murmured something back, absently. “This girl I was trying to date in, like, junior high wanted me to.” He said, “Yeah. And I just sat, you know, moving my hands in the light. I tried to show her how it felt, stained glass over your skin, but she thought I just wanted to hold hands or something, and she got all mad I wasn’t listening to the sermon.” He wasn’t sure now how to explain to Jane, just as he couldn’t explain to the girl in seventh grade, how that light falling on him was like a whispered message from God. “She said I was going to hell,” he said, smiling, “just, sadly, like she really believed it, but wasn’t surprised.”

Jane said nothing. She turned her hand again in the light, but he could see her gaze was further away, fixed on nothing. Abel recalled how, when he saw the girl in homeroom a week later wearing a boy’s class ring, all wrapped with blue thread to fit her finger, this had seemed entirely natural and acceptable.

Jane closed her fingers and then opened them again, and he watched the stripes this made of light and shadow. “You’re not gonna believe this,” she said, still not looking at him. “But, I got an e-mail. This morning, actually. About—about an interview.” Her lips trembled slightly after she spoke; he recognized her effort to conceal this, and looked away.

“Congratulations,” he said. Her dissertation nearly complete, she had been mailing out halfhearted resumes at her advisor’s encouragement. For practice, if nothing else, she’d said. Just for the experience of doing it. But she didn’t expect anyone to really take her seriously until she’d taught part-time a few years, published a little more widely; he’d offered vague encouragement here, but inwardly figured her assessment was realistic.

“It’s full-time, a lecturer position,” she said fast. “They re-opened a search, their candidate dropped out at the last minute. It starts next month. And, if they actually offered me it—” She turned her hands palm up, apologetically.

“Oh,” he said again. “Of course.” When he’d mentioned, in previous conversations, that he could, probably, dig living in L.A., or at least some larger city, her response had been noncommittal. Now he felt seconds racing by, each one of them a missed opportunity for him to casually bring the subject back up. He knew how much she wanted for herself, more than she ever directly confessed: a visiting appointment or two, publication in the good journals, then respectable tenure. Probably a modicum of fame. But while he saw all of this as eventually probable, it was like she never really considered the possibility, like such a drastic shift of her lifestyle was incomprehensible. But he knew better. He knew that it was all the logical next step for her, and also knew, privately, that he was the one incapable of this transition, he was the one not portable through customs into this foreign lifestyle. He had known all along that, at some point, she would have a hard choice to make, but he understood now that her decision was already made.

He picked up a round warm rock and thought about it for a moment, its shape and weight in his hand. Then he threw it in the lake. After the sound of the splash subsided and the ripples dissipated against the shore, he thought about the space the rock had occupied in his hand, and the stone-sized absence that only existed now in his mind, and the small shape of not-water he had put in the bottom of the lake.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Nothing.” After a long time that was less than a minute, he burst, bitterly, “Why didn’t we bring the camera? I wish we’d brought the camera.”

“OK,” she said carefully, “Why?” Like she agreed, but wanted to know why he thought so.

Incoherent, he gestured dumbly around them, at soft pine needles and silver water trembling like mercury and the lines of light on rocks. “How am I supposed to remember all this?” he demanded.

Her brow creased and she looked away, like she’d known he’d say this wrong thing.

When Lee came back that night, he stood in front of the door a moment before closing it. He pulled Abel’s keys from his pocket, looked at them, put them back, then pulled them out again. His expression was of utter disbelief, like he had just looked down to discover his body had been cut in half at the hip.

“Lee?” he said.

And it was like this broke a plug, cleared some jam: Lee’s shoulders sagged, and the words fell out of him in a torrent. “They’re moving, at the end of this month, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing at all, but she doesn’t know that, and—” He looked at Abel and paused, his face shifting like the ground above a deep earthquake. “Would you believe?” he asked. “He says he’s tired of dealing, he wants to move to B.C., grow his own pot! He wants to take her off to some tiny cabin, in the middle of nowhere—and, and, I mean, what makes me crazy is, she trusts him, she believes this is not a stupid idea. I can’t tell her—” Here he stopped and held up his open hands, then dropped them.

“Oh,” Abel said as eloquently as he could manage. “Wow.” He wanted at that moment to say something trite but relevant, that it was all for the best, or that the only thing for Lee to do was let go. But then, he was hardly qualified to offer this type of advice.

“Yeah.” Lee shook his head tragically, then looked up, his gaze fevered but fixed. “Listen,” he said, imploring, “There’s this thing I’d like to try. Before she—I mean, they both—go. And, and, I need your help on it.”

If the next words out of Lee’s mouth had been anything else at all, Abel would have firmly declined, sensing the badness of the idea in his bones.

What Lee said was, “I’d like to use your camera. The sixteen millimeter.”

“What for?”

Coming in, it was gorgeous. Abel focused on a pale elbow first, then drifted sideways and centered on Jeromy’s forehead, the dark brushstrokes, the black hairs of his eyebrow. He couldn’t help imagining how it would look: he loved monochrome, black and white and the heart-smashing opacities of all the grays in between.

Everything, through the camera, was beautiful. Sometimes he could see it so vividly it made his teeth hurt, how the world was full of these scenes, of people living lives and other people and objects just billowing around behind them, like leaves on the road after a car speeds past. For just a few seconds more, he moved the old sixteen over Jeromy and Kate.

The overcast sky diffused light ideally. They were in an empty field, a good mile off the paved road, with mountains distantly rimming the shot all around. It was like they were adrift in an inland sea, only, instead of water, the waves were billowing grass.

Kate and Jeromy seemed tired, unsettled now. But Abel knew how, on the actual film, they would be romanticized, made beautiful, because tiredness and stress and any kind of pain look different in black and white. They had no idea what was about to be done to them, but that didn’t matter.

Lee’s idea, the scene they were shooting, was from a story his brother had told him about smuggling drugs back from Mexico. Lee had made it about a fictitious couple though, instead of one person, and had added the complication of a broken ankle.

“It doesn’t look like this there,” Jeromy told Lee. “It’s desert. Not like here at all.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know,” Lee said, visibly irritated. “We’re improvising. Anyway,” he continued, “I want an undercurrent of paranoia, of real distrust. Like, your characters think they know each other, but do they? Given, you can’t keep the pack full of drugs with you—you could get busted with them. What, you’re thinking, if she doesn’t want to come back for you?”

“Yeah,” Abel said. “Like Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Or, or, The English Patient.” No one acknowledged him, and he pulled back to a small smile and raised his eyes to the sky.

Kate’s face this close was a series of curves and planes, reflected highlights and shadows, texture and exposure, until Abel pulled back to get an angle of her leaning over Jeromy’s leg, distraught.

“The important part,” Lee said to Jeromy, “is that you can’t go on, you can’t walk any further, and you don’t want her to leave you. Kate, you’re trying to convince him to let you go, to let you take everything with you, and you’ll come back with help. Got it?”

Abel went back in for close-ups and moved the camera over both of them like a caress. He thought of Jane, and when she gave him his videocamera.

It was for his birthday, and he was so thrilled he couldn’t let it out of his hands. That night in their room, she had stood still for him, naked, and he had videotaped her from so close he could smell the green-grass smell of her skin. He catalogued every surface of her like this, breathing shallowly and his heart in his throat.

She said, “You know what this is, what Deleuze and Guattari would say you’re doing to me. Or Sontag,” she whispered, “or Kristeva.” She had shelves of books about the postmodern gaze. Immediately after, they had sex, and it was good, but weirdly anticlimactic. As soon as he came, she said, “Are you done?” and wiggled out from under him.

In no time she had the videocam out again. “Now,” she said, “it’s my turn. Come here.” And he stood up, and let her rake it over him, but it was torture, like a maddening itch: he had to see what she was getting, he felt confused, compromised. He stood still, but after just a few minutes she flipped the camera closed, and said, “You’re no fun.” He’d been standing, petrified, staring straight ahead.

Later, he watched the tape when she was at class, wondering if the camera had picked up his nervousness, and in a way it had: he looked like wood, like a statue, except for a slight pulse and trembling around his Adam’s apple. The cassette wasn’t labeled, and he taped it over with blank screen, unable to explain what bothered him about it.

*     *     *     *     *

Kate turned quickly, disappearing from his frame, and asked Lee, “What’s their relationship like? I mean, how long have they been together? Does she love him?”

“Hmm.” Lee looked distant. “I’d like to know that too. Why don’t we do a couple takes? Just . . . play it how it feels.”

“You’re sure this’ll be safe, though,” Lee said. “Because, you always hear about the guy who blows his brains out with the, uh, the wadding-stuff from a blank.”

Jeromy had borrowed the gun; Lee would have been glad to use a cap gun, or a water pistol painted black, but Jeromy had steadfastly refused such an indignity. Abel had overheard the brothers’ phone conversation on the subject, after which Lee shook his head and complained, “It’s like a manhood thing for him. There’s no reasoning involved.” Abel had a premonition then of how it would all end; later, he would be shocked at the accuracy of his vision, down to the look in Jeromy’s eyes, the dull way the light fell down the wet front of his shirt. But of course he was no psychic. The details, he would tell himself later, were added after the fact, the modest embellishments of the mind, and the rough events themselves, the accidental shooting—well, that all felt too predictable, so obvious he would have felt stupid saying it, because such bluntness, such simple inevitable antecedent, does not happen in real life.

Now Jeromy popped out the clip and handed it to Lee. “Theater blanks,” he said importantly, “with the wax plugs taken out. All pop, and no projectile.”

“Hmm,” Lee mused, grudgingly impressed. He held the clip up and squinted at the row of noseless rounds. “Wouldn’t hurt a fly, huh?” Lee asked.

“Well,” Jeromy said, “Definitely, scare the hell out of a fly.” He turned to Kate. “Try to keep it away from my face, OK sweetie?”

Lee explained the scenario: Jeromy cannot go on on his injured leg, but he refuses to let Kate take either the gun or the drugs—a freezer bag filled with five bucks’ worth of oregano—with her. She knows that if he is found here, caught with either of those things, he will go to prison. Lee moved around the two of them, positioning the final scene, Jeromy on the ground, Kate standing over him, both tugging at the gun.

Kate said, “I’m not going to fire it though. I don’t even like pointing it.”

“But they’re blanks!” Jeromy burst.

“No,” Kate said, shaking her head, then, “No,” again. “I’ll be scared. What if I drop it?”

“I want you to be scared,” Lee said.

“You won’t drop it,” Jeromy said, and got up. He put his arms around her tenderly, raising her hands with his own. “Hold it like this,” he said, “in two hands. Now, here.” He released the safety. “That means you’re live,” he murmured, and made a quick kissing sound into her hair, then lay back down in his previous position. “I’ll be trying to take it away from you, remember,” he told her, “and I’ll keep it pointed down. Cover the trigger, then when I jerk, let it fire.”

When Abel signaled he was ready, Lee whispered, “Get Kate’s reaction this first time—she’s never fired a gun before.”

Abel rolled film, and Jeromy was instantly terrifying, really getting into the desperate, crazed role. He lunged at Kate, collapsing on his bad leg, then pulled himself up. He raved, clawing at her legs as she stutter-stepped backwards.

The gun shook in Kate’s hands.

“Give me it,” Jeromy growled, and in a surprisingly fast move, caught her wrist with one hand, and the barrel of the gun with his other. He tugged and half-stood, pulling her almost exactly into the tableau Lee had posed them in earlier.

The explosion was huge so close, and although Kate screamed and stumbled back, her hands spread empty before her, Abel’s first thought was that it had to be melodrama on her part, because this small pistol would not kick that forcefully. But the whole bottom half of Jeromy’s shirt was black with blood and he grimaced like he’d been punched.

After the concussion of the shot wrapped around his head in a perceptible moving sheet of air, Abel, in disbelief, found himself lowering the camera. After all the times he had fantasized about recording a tragedy, this was not how he had thought it would be at all.

By now, they had reached paved road. Lee fed the car more gas through a banked turn, cheating severely into the left lane and pressing them all down with the centrifugal force, and although the suspension groaned and the tires chirped on the asphalt, it was all smooth, almost serene, as they exited the curve to glide down another stretch of straightaway.

They were well below the shadow of the mountain now, and above them, rows of peaks that still caught the sun shone out brightly against the sky. The granite faces caught and held the sunlight like healthy living skin, the small cracks in the rock like the fine hairs on the back of a hand.

He thought of the mosquito he’d been too slow to shoot, how its legs twitched like eyelashes above Jane’s knuckle. But, for that missed opportunity, there was another time too, a shot he actually got: one morning he had chronicled the journey in close-up of a black ant up her outstretched arm. They were eating a late breakfast, coffee and danishes he had brought back from the bakery, when she arose and went to the window, laying her arm down on the sill wrist up, like donating blood. “Look at it,” she breathed, and he reached for the videocamera: the light was a perfect gold the color of ripe kernels of corn, so fresh he could almost taste sweetness bursting in the back of his mouth.

Haltingly, the ant made its way up from her wrist, antennae moving in opposing spirals. It navigated the relief map of shallow ridges that were her tendons and the blue or gray-green soft swellings of her veins, making short forays around fine hairs lit with fire so they each glowed like the filament of some intensely heated bulb. The ant steadily ascended toward her elbow, and Abel felt his heart in his throat as he watched the amazing contrast of the so-black legs against the opaque fact of her white white skin, and their motion doubled in shadow resembling hands stitching the most delicate of embroideries. He glanced up, and she was as entranced as he, lips parted, breathing hardly at all.

After maybe three or four minutes, though, Jane abruptly brushed the ant from her bicep and out the window. Abel stood and closed the camera, understanding that they had witnessed a thing. They did not speak a word before leaving, he to restock on microwavables at the grocery and get his brakes checked, and she on some equally mundane mission he can’t recall now; he went about his errands that day in a haze.

But now he wondered if they had really witnessed anything together, or if he had just been the medium, a necessary link. He looked at her, recorded her. As an act of love, it was the most intimate thing he could offer. But he had to admit, this could have been performed by anyone. The checker at the supermarket you never make eye contact with. He suddenly understood, in a way he could not have before, that nothing in their symbiosis had, specifically, required him. He’d been a fool: the choice he had thought would at least be hard for her had been nothing. Like the shooting he had just witnessed, it was inevitable, so easy for all concerned as to never have been a choice at all.

In the back seat, Kate said, “You’re going to be OK, going to be OK,” in a high pinched voice, over and over, like repeating it would make it true.

“I know what happened,” Lee said then dully, his voice thick as if he’d been fed rat poison and just shown the can. He stared out the windshield blankly, and Abel hoped for a moment that he would not ram them all into a boulder, then maybe for another moment that he would. “I know what happened,” he repeated, “the chamber—none of us thought to— No one checked the chamber.” He swallowed with an audible click.

“Chamber?” Kate asked. “Chamber, what chamber? What are you talking about?” Her tone was as if mildly irritated, impatient with run-of-the-mill nonsense. But Abel got the sense this was only because she did not know how else to speak right now. Then she resumed her reassurances, murmuring them like a mantra, or a prayer.

It didn’t make any difference, anyway. Abel knew what had really happened. But, admittedly, he saw how natural it was, how necessary the delusion: surely even the ant on Jane’s arm must have imagined itself the center of its own story.

And it was useless to dwell on the distinction of who had used whom. After all, one can count the ways the blood needs the mosquito too. He let the camera down to his lap and raised both palms just to see up close their pink minutely wrinkled skin, his perfectly rounded fingertips. He flexed his fingers lightly, admiring the workings of them.