“I think I see it,” he said. Karen noticed there was too much sweat on his forehead and not enough energy in the eyes below. His whole body was girding itself against some outcome.
“You can’t just see it right away,” she said. “It takes time. Live with it for a while.”
“It’s like the whole thing was a trap for me,” he said. She recoiled from the quality of his breath. And from the fact that she was close enough to smell it. “Being good at what I do weaponized this against me,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Karen said. “There are externalities to this technology.”
“Which is to say you fucked up.”
“Yes.”
“On purpose.”
Karen was silent. The Actor could no longer repress the cough that had been building since he first walked into the mauve room, seven Korean boys staring down at him from twice as many posters, and he raised his fist to his mouth. Karen moved away politely. He was also trying to repress the loose stool rumbling within him. For a second he thought he was back on a shoot in a foreign town, its tiny alleys thrumming with glazed pottery and fattened Europeans, where despite the ministrations of craft services he had eaten the wrong thing.
“I have to go,” he said. “I have to get out of here.”
He left the door open as he fled the bungalow, and Karen saw a doe, perfectly framed by the open portal, straining her neck to reach the tiny green fruit of an apple tree. The animal turned back to the commotion of the fleeing Actor, tensed her shoulders and haunches.
Karen regarded her with a half smile, the dream of connection, but she was already gone.
4
They looked like they were famous, all of them, even people Senderovsky had forgotten about, peripheral friends who spun off their own little groups, their own urbanized and suburbanized life streams. Whether the yellow time stamp at the southeast corner of the photograph read 1987, 1993, 2002, or any of the years in between, high school, college, the early years of his success, Senderovsky, Karen, and Vinod and the dozens if not hundreds of friends who once orbited them were brilliantly clothed, exquisitely framed by the camera lens （everyone wielding a disposable Fuji back then had been a budding fashion photographer）， smiling, smirking, pointing with their lit cigarettes, sticking out their tongues, laughing at the native-born whites （who always seemed both timid and cocksure and trendily doomed）， baggy jeaned, then tight jeaned, and garbed in kawaii panda hats from Japan, and posed in front of pay phones with a Coke can resting on top of the Bell Atlantic, and holding plates of what was then called ethnic food on their laps （food every bit as “ethnic” as they were）， and being hairy and scary and cuddly and looking off in the distance peeved, and all those drunk faces and Asian flushes, and tidy rows of books surrounded by glasses with ashes in them, and showing off belly buttons and synthetic duds, setting up feuding cigarette packs on barroom tables, hugging their hairdresser on loan from Osaka, examining the tattoos of more adventurous folk, joining bands with either “Pale” or “Fire” in their names, reading Geek Love amid the paltry sands of Rockaway Beach, sitting legs crossed on the hood of a relation’s dying Oldsmobile—and the care taken with every photo, because it would cost money to get the film developed, so that you couldn’t just snap away, so that everyone did their best to come together, to form a tableau, to try to contain a world.
“I don’t remember it like this at all!” Senderovsky said. “I just thought those were the puka-shell-and-Teva-sandal days. I thought we were all just trying to assimilate. But we were amazing! We looked amazing. Not just you, Karen, all of us. Jesus Christ, Vinod, you dressed in vintage Christian Dior.”
Karen’s assistant had sent up a half-dozen shoeboxes full of snaps, the better part of her predigital archive, and now the three of them were on the covered porch after dinner, orange candle glow bringing out the orange of the era, the orange of their polyester ski sweaters, the orange of Karen’s 1999 hair. “It’s so strange,” Senderovsky continued loudly （he was drunk）， “to think that I always wrote about us through this comical lens, but the reality on the ground was so different. We were happy children in a happy time. At least it was happy for us.” （As soon as he said it, he wondered about the future that would dawn around his own daughter, what kind of early adulthood would be allowed her, if any.）
“I think there’s a clear progression here,” Vinod said, puffing on a joint. “After 1991, it’s like all the work Karen’s put into us is finally starting to pay off.”