Both literally and figuratively, that seemed the perfect reason to freak out.
But with a calm that somehow fed off my frenzy, Teddy insisted that we’d fix it. And what he said next is embedded in my memory, proof that we were once good to each other. “I’d rather get it wrong with you than get it right with anyone else.”
We rolled up to the rusty green gates of the Rescue Center, greeted by a sign: THANKS FOR NOT INSISTING TO SEE THE ANIMALS. An odd marker when there seemed no animals to see, only a storybook hamlet of dark green huts nestled within the leaves, connected by a shaded walkway where one could pause and study the posters of animals on the walls.
The sky was overcast, diffusing a clean cold light through a woolly skein of cloud. I wanted to take advantage of the light and shoot Ravi on his rounds with the animals — the elephant calves, the goat, the langurs who streaked through the air on long, windmilling limbs. But Teddy argued that we’d shot it all before, and what was another langur sequence compared with the final shot he had gotten from the calf reunion? “I think we can even leave it as is,” he said. “One long shot, like in that Obenhaus film about the jewelry factory.”
He was always referring to That Obenhaus Film About the Jewelry Factory. I’d never seen it but felt like I had, what with all the times he had described the opening — a man punching a time clock, a shot that Obenhaus held for a full minute until the clock hands met, which Teddy called brilliant in its illustration of work and its weight on the passage of time.
“Keep in mind,” I said, “we want actual human beings to see this thing.”
Teddy followed me into my room. He lived next door to me at the Rescue Center, each “guest suite” appointed with a chair, a desk, and a twin bed on which Teddy could only fit himself diagonally. He set the camera on my desk. “Just watch the dailies tonight.”
“Why — where’ll you be?”
He unscrewed the filter between careful fingers. “Sanjay’s wedding, I told you. You can still be my date.”
“Pass.”
“Come on, he’s not that bad.”
Sanjay was Teddy’s former roommate, a soft-spoken guy who had renounced alcohol for religious reasons and embraced weed with equal fervor. In stoner mode, he was always making the sort of prickly asides (Why don’t you guys make out already?… Get a room!) that put his own loneliness on display.
I set a pot of water on my hot plate. “I’d rather stick around here,” I said. “In case something happens.”
“In case what happens?” He slipped the filter into its pouch, nestled the lens inside the camera bag. “We don’t need more elephant baths and feedings. It’s the human stories that’ll read on film.”
“Well, and I also need a break from humans.”
Teddy looked at me. “Which ones?”
I took my time breaking a cake of ramen, neatly, delicately, into the water.
Two weeks before, Teddy and I had been editing side by side, late into the night, when he leaned over and kissed me. I’d been saying something about the aspect ratio when the kiss cut me off midword, and I remember thinking, as it was happening, that contrary to every rom-com movie I’d ever seen, spontaneity was a poisoned dart to romance; in reality, the kissee needed warning, a questioning look or a leaning in. How weird to be friends for five years and then, in the space of a second, conjoined at the face.
But then the weirdness gave way to an inviting familiarity. He smelled like summer, like sunblock, scents from home. It was comforting more than thrilling, which was what caused me to pull away. Teddy seemed hurt when I asked him to go, but the next day, he returned with a sheepish apology. He understood that this was the wrong place to start something between us, that it was important to maintain an air of professionalism at the Rescue Center. “But we should, you know, revisit this,” he said, looking only at his hands. “When we get back home.”
I told him there was no need for apology, it was no big deal, hoping all the no’s would add up to a subliminal never. Whatever comfort I’d felt in that moment of indiscretion had shriveled to a sickening knot; I’d led him down the garden path, as my mother would’ve put it.
Now, as I forked the wormy noodles apart, I could feel Teddy looking at me with dread, as if he sensed I was about to burn the garden to the ground.
But I couldn’t do it. Not then and there. Not when he was my only friend.
Instead I said I wanted to stay behind and log tapes. “See if there’s an Oppenheimer in there.”
“Obenhaus,” he said, reluctantly releasing me from his gaze.
After Teddy left, I planted myself behind my laptop, plugged in the camera, and watched the rescue. The calf was on the ground, waiting to be released from the harness. Teddy zoomed in on the needy eye, the pupil like a fly trapped in sap. That close, I found the eye haunting for reasons unclear: Because I saw something familiar inside, a consciousness I could recognize? Or because I couldn’t?
For my fifteenth birthday, my father had bought me a parakeet. I loved Daisy, how her feathers gave off a powdery smell, how her feet embraced my finger with a lightness I took for trust, the shiny droplet of her eye. Sometimes I worried that Daisy was depressed, to which my father suggested I put Prozac in her feed, a joke that annoyed me. Why couldn’t Daisy be depressed? Why couldn’t she feel a host of emotions, some of them beyond our explanation? She could fly, so if her body were capable of acts beyond human limitation, couldn’t her mind be capable of emotions beyond our own, like Wing Boredom or Flock Joy or Plummet Buzz, things we couldn’t feel and, therefore, could never understand?
“Maybe you’re the one who needs medication,” my father said.
During preproduction, I had envisioned a film that would encompass my youthful questions, that would exhume the traumas sealed deep inside animal minds. Day by day, the film I’d imagined seemed to inch a bit farther from the footage we had, until now.
Teddy had been right. The shot would hold its weight on-screen, all sixty-two pulsing seconds, the heart of our film. During the moment of mother-calf reunion, Teddy hadn’t fiddled with the zoom, had let the action unfold, giving wide berth to those twining trunks, whose ministrations seemed to suggest comfort and tenderness and yet seemed somehow private, primal, on a plane of communication we could glimpse only indirectly.
I started logging the tape, marking time codes, jotting impressions. The camera followed Ravi through the crowds, into the van, pulled in on his hands. There was something I hadn’t noticed at the shoot, amid the commotion and confusion — how calm he was throughout. The showdown could’ve been set to Morricone, with Ravi as Eastwood moving through the green, arms around the gun. Wolfish, deliberate. I felt myself ambushed by awe.
So when Ravi knocked on my door, around nine, I was slightly starstruck. There he stood, the hero at rest.
“You missed dinner,” he said.
“Teddy went to a wedding. I just thought I’d get a head start on today’s stuff.”
“He left?” Ravi asked, almost hopefully.
“Yeah, he gets back day after tomorrow.”
“Then let me take you to dinner.”
“Oh.” The offer seemed fraught. “Well, I already had noodle soup …”
Ravi peered over my shoulder.
“Is that Dev?” On my laptop, an elephant calf filled the screen. Dev was easy to spot with his signature mini-mohawk. “You have more footage of him? Can I see?”
It seemed an innocent request at the time, though, I can admit to myself now, I didn’t want it to be.
I stepped aside, and easy as that, Ravi walked into my life.
Ravi had rescued Dev from a cave where a female elephant had gotten herself stuck between boulders. By the time the team found her, she was starving to death, Dev tiny against her ankle, sore spattered and weak. Ravi shouldered Dev like a sack of rice and carried him out. At the center, Dev was too weak to stand, so they propped him over belly slings.