Page 84 of White Lights
“Please stay,” she says. “At least until the break. Just one more week. I need you.” Dez bumps his shoulder back, and they stay like that as she pours her egg mixture over Simon’s potatoes and lowers the heat on the burner.
Not quite a hug, but the closest they’ve come to it.
“Don’t tell anyone else what you told me,” Simon says. “They’re already stockpiling reasons to kick you out.”
A week later, on October 31st, Dez skips the Halloween party at Villains to work on her O’Rourke film. She won’t rest until she meets the deadline. She leaves Simon getting dressed as a sexy devil and Yael getting dressed as a sexy unicorn, and she slips down to the Vault.
It’s empty. Every other first-year must already have finished their assignment. Every other first-year must be headed up the mountain, scantily costumed, to the bar. Dez doesn’t mind missing out. She embraces the solitude, actually. She opens her Lens.
A week ago, Dr. Ezekiel fixed the crack in Dez’s platform, but yesterday it came back again, and she hasn’t told Rafe yet. It seems to grow each time Dez gets immersed in her work. She edges away from it. She tries to focus on what she needs to do today.
The film opens in Egypt, where a young Lexa rides a stroller through pyramids, pushed by her father in a pith helmet. She comes of age on the campus of the Connecticut prep school where her parents teach. She writes and stars in a play where she plays Sylvia Plath. She gets Lyme disease. International fame arrives. She’s fired from a prestigious job. She marries a comedian woodworker who prepares all her meals. She learns to fly and crashes her private plane off the coast of Patagonia.
Dez works all night, through the next morning, and into the afternoon. She suppresses her anxiety that she’s missing something from the poet’s life, that she’ll leave out something essential and not do O’Rourke justice. She focuses on the scenes she does have access to, and sometime deep into the afternoon, she settles on the closing scene.
It features O’Rourke as a young girl, caught outside in a harrowing blizzard, a moment Dez knows inspired her first collection of poems.
By the time Dez adds the opening credits—The Storm, the life and work of Lexa O’Rourke, a film by Desdemona Rae, written by Paul Rowan Wilkes—she feels catatonic but relieved. It isn’t the best work she can do. Still, it’s solid. It satisfies the requirements, which is often all an audience desires.
She wants to share the rush of accomplishment with someone, to celebrate completing her first assignment just in time to meet the deadline, to not flunk out of the program. But she knows everyone else will still be sleeping off their Halloween hangovers, and hardly impressed that she finally finished something most of them completed well before the deadline.
She wants to tell someone who’d care. And she can’t think of a single person.
The high she’s used to after finishing a project crashes quickly. Dez hasn’t felt this lonely since the night she left her brother in the hospital to come to Acheron.
Her body aches with exhaustion. Her eyes blur, stinging like she’s about to cry.
Now the sensation travels backward, behind her eyes and into her skull. Hot, like something is cooking inside of her. She clutches her temples. The pain increases. What’s happening?
She remembers feeling like this once before. The very first time she used her Lens.
Her vision blurs, the screen fills with static, and then—
The spinning axis of light brightens the edges of her Lens. At first, she assumes it’s Mo, the only Lifeline besides O’Rourke’s she’s seen in her Lens. And yet there’s something different, something unfamiliar about the images, even from afar.
It makes her wonder: Has she found it? Has she accessed the missing piece of her brother’s life?
No, she realizes, looking closer. This is someone else’s Lifeline.
“Oh my God,” she whispers.
Teenaged Asher Ibrahim comes into view.
The Lifeline spins with scenes of Asher as a child, as a baby, as a man. Dez’s eyes widen, and she stares at sunlight on his shoulders. At Asher dancing in a darkened club. A bad fall on his skateboard, a broken collarbone. A funeral where he sits numbly in the front row. A heated kiss in the back seat of a car.
Goose bumps rise on Dez’s skin. She thought she’d never see Asher again. But here he is, a thousand versions of him spinning before her in the Vault, glorious and gorgeous, awkward and strange.
How did she access Asher’s Lifeline? In the month since she’s been at Acheron, she’s only ever seen the Lifelines of her brother and O’Rourke. But she remembers what happened the first day she’d used her Lens, how Rafe said her emotions overrode the system, let her access her brother’s Lifeline when she was only supposed to see O’Rourke’s.
Dez had been too overwhelmed that day to really register what she’d done, but now she remembers how Rafe had seemed excited, even impressed by it. He said he’d never seen it happen before.
Dez is far past wondering about how the Vault works, its secret restrictions and unsettling archive. Her muscles surge with excitement as she watches Asher’s life spread out before her. She reaches toward the spinning scenes and selects one at random.
She’ll only stay a little while.
Asher stands on a stage in an auditorium wearing a bone-colored suit. The scene looks recent. His hair and tan are the same as they were when Dez met him, but he’s also somehow different from theman she filmed in Ventura. A large screen behind him readsDr. Asher Ibrahim, Eden Labs, on the Fountain of Youth.
“Doctor?” Dez whispers, spellbound.
