* * *
—
Dene takes a deep breath and holds it. The judges don’t look up at all. He lets out his breath, regrets everything he said. They stare at their laptops and type like stenographers. This is the time allotted for questions. Not questions for Dene. This is when they ask each other questions. Discuss the viability of the project. Fuck. He doesn’t even know what he just said. The Native guy taps the stack of papers that is Dene’s application and clears his throat.
“It’s an interesting idea. But I’m having trouble seeing exactly what the applicant has in mind, and I’m wondering, and please correct me if I missed something, I’m wondering if there’s a real vision here, or if he’s just gonna sort of make it up as he goes along. I mean, he doesn’t even have a work sample,” the Native guy says.
Dene knew it would be the Native guy. He probably doesn’t even think Dene is Native. Fuck. The work sample. Dene can’t say anything. He’s supposed to be a fly on the wall. But the guy just swatted at him. Someone say something else. Someone say anything else. The older of the two black guys, the more nicely dressed, with a white beard and glasses, says, “I think it’s interesting, if he’s doing what I think he’s saying he’s going to do, which is, essentially, to put aside the pretension of documentation. He’s moving out of the way, so to speak. If he does it right, it will seem as if he isn’t even the one behind the camera, it will almost seem like there isn’t a cameraperson there at all. My main question is whether or not he’ll be able to get people to come and tell their stories and to trust him with them. If he does, I think this could be important regardless of whether he turns it into something his own, something tangible, and with vision, or not. Sometimes we risk putting too much of the director’s vision on stories. I like that he’s going to allow the content to direct the vision. However it goes, these are important stories to document, period.”
Dene sees the Native guy shift uncomfortably in his chair, tap Dene’s application in a neat stack, then put it behind a bigger stack. The older white woman who looks like Tilda Swinton says, “If he can raise the money and come out with a film that says something new, I think that’s great, and I don’t know how much more there is to say about it. We’ve got twenty or so more applicants to review, and I’m sure there will be at least a few that will require serious scrutiny and discussion.”
* * *
—
Back on BART, headed home, Dene sees his face in the dark reflection of the train window. He’s beaming. He wipes the grin from his face when he sees it. He got it. It was pretty clear that he would get it. Five thousand dollars. He’s never had that much money before, not once in his life. He thinks of his uncle and his eyes well up. He clenches them shut and keeps them closed, leans his head back, thinks of nothing, lets the train take him home.
* * *
—
When Dene came home to an empty house, there was an old-looking camera on the coffee table in front of the couch. He picked it up and sat down with it. It was the gun camera his uncle had mentioned. With a pistol grip. He sat there with the camera in his lap and waited for his mom to come back alone with the news.
* * *
—
When she walked in, the look on her face said everything. She didn’t have to tell him. As if he hadn’t been expecting it, Dene stood up, camera in hand, he ran past his mom out the front door. He kept running, down their hill to Dimond Park. There was a tunnel that went below the park. About ten feet high, it stretched some two hundred yards, and in the middle, for about fifty of those yards, if you were in there, you couldn’t see a thing. His mom told him there was an underground waterway that went all the way out into the bay. He didn’t know why he came, or why he brought the camera. He didn’t even know how to use it. Wind howled in the tunnel. At him. It seemed to breathe. It was a mouth and a throat. He tried but failed to turn the camera on, then pointed it at the tunnel anyway. He wondered if he’d ever end up like his uncle. Then he thought about his mom back at home. She hadn’t done anything wrong. There was no one to be mad at. Dene thought he heard footsteps coming from inside the tunnel. He scrambled up the side of the creek and was about to run back up the hill, back home, but something stopped him. He found a switch on the side of the camera next to the words Bolex Paillard. He pointed the camera at the streetlamp, up the street. He walked over and pointed it at the mouth of the tunnel. He let it run the whole walk home. He wanted to believe that when he turned on the camera, his uncle was with him, seeing through it. As he approached the house, he saw his mom in the doorway waiting for him. She was crying. Dene moved behind a telephone pole. He thought about what it might have meant to her, losing her brother. How wrong it’d been that he’d left, like it was his loss alone. Norma crouched down and put her face in her hands. The camera was still running. He lifted it, pistol-gripped, pointed it at her, and looked away.