Page 85 of White Lights
When Dez editedGlimpse, she studied Asher’s mannerisms for days. She labored over every second of her film. But there had always been a limit, a ceiling to what she could see. As intimately as she knows the six hours of footage she shot of Asher that day—there’s a lifetime of him that Dez has never seen before. That she never dreamed she would see. Until now.
She stares at his clear skin, at his hazel eyes, and the confident motions of his hands. He’s as attractive as he’d been to her that day, even though this version of him is entirely unexpected. Professional, commanding. In her mind, Dez had reduced his identity to his skating pastime, and this is all so … new.
“Thank you for coming,” Asher says as the applause in the room dies down.
Dez is stunned by how comfortable he looks in front of this crowd, as at ease as he was midair above a half-pipe. Why hadn’t she ever wondered what his job was, how he spent his days when he wasn’t at the skate park? Maybe because the man she’d met that day already seemed full to bursting with life. This surprising, intellectual glimpse of him is almost too much for Dez to bear. It’s like falling for him twice.
She remembers what he said to her that night in the bar:
I like everything I’ve seen about you so far, Desdemona Rae. What else you got?
She can see how easy it would be to fall into Asher’s life and not come out. To simply watch him, beautifully, live.
“I suspect the reason you’re all here today has nothing to do with my infamous geroscience puns,” Asher says. “Though I do often reflect that these conferences resemble meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Of course, here we’re metaboliholics. We love that sweet metabol-ahol—”
Scattered, polite laughter sounds in the auditorium. Dez finds herself smiling, too.
“No,” Asher says. “You’re here because of the lure of the Fountain of Youth.” He paces the stage, barely glancing at the notes in his hand. “At some point or another, we all hear its call. But I didn’t always want to study the Fountain of Youth. In fact, I snuck in through the back door. When I was young, I was a professional skater. My career was thriving. Then my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”
“Asher,” Dez says inside the Vault.
“The only way I could cope,” he continues, “was to study her illness, to look for ways to alleviate her pain, methods for increasing the time I had left with her. Eventually, I found myself at Eden Labs.” He pauses, gazes out into the crowd.
Dez holds her breath, sensing a shift.
“My mother died two weeks ago,” he says, more quietly. “I couldn’t save her life, but I can’t help wondering if the Fountain of Youth is real.” He holds out both his hands, as if he’s trying to touch something intangible. “What does immortality look like? What would it mean for life on earth?”
Dez wishes she were in the auditorium, so she could raise her hand, and he could see her, and they could have a conversation. But before Asher can speak again, the screen fills with static. And goes dark.
“Wait,” Dez says, willing the burning to come back to her brain, willing Asher to come back to her Lens. She gropes for the place his hands had just been. But they’re gone. She can’t control how she got him on her Lens in the first place, and she doesn’t know how to get him back. It feels like something inside her is breaking.
Her Lens retracts, and on the other side, Rafe stands with a worried look in his eyes.
“Rafe—”
“Did you finish?”
Dez struggles for composure. Does he have any idea what she just saw? No, of course not. And she can’t let on that it happened.
Obviously, he’s asking about the O’Rourke film. Her due date. He’s her mentor, here to make sure she completed the assignment.
“I just put the title card on,” she says, catching her breath. “Do you want to see it?”
“Not the O’Rourke,” Rafe says. “I’m talking about your brother’s film.”
She stares at him. “What about my brother’s film?”
“You asked me to get it to him when you finished it,” Rafe says, glancing around the empty Vault and dropping his voice. “I have a window of time where I can do that today. If I leave now. There won’t be another chance.”
“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” Dez demands.
“Today’s the midterm.”
“I know. I worked all night to finish my O’Rourke film. What does it have to do with Mo?”
“After the midterm,” Rafe says, “all the assignments in your Lenses get turned over to our Distribution Department. And everything else gets erased. Cleared out for the next assignments.”
“You never told me that.”
