Black Dance

I. LADAINHA

Milo, 2010/1990

DON’T WORRY, ASTUTO, I’ll do the keyboard this time. I’ll capture it — or seize it, as the French say. That was always your job, on pretext that you typed faster than me. . yeah, but chances were you’d either get your computer ripped off in a train station or accidentally erase—Oops, goddamn it! — a whole month of our work including backup, so this time you can relax and let me handle it. Take advantage of the fact that you’re flat on your back and hooked up to a drip to give your ten fingers a rest.

I love you, you bastard. Tell me your tale. Yeah, or at least a piece of it, ha-ha. Don’t make me laugh, you’ll make me cry. Come on, Milo, get serious. In all likelihood, this will be the last screenplay cowritten by Milo Noirlac and Paul Schwarz, directed by Paul Schwarz and produced by Blackout Films — so let’s get it right, babe, let’s get it really right. Kiss me. Come on, kiss me, you meshuga bastard, I won’t catch anything. I love your ass off.

OKAY, THIS IS just a suggestion. . INTERIOR — DAY. The camera finds Milo Noirlac — graying mahogany ponytail hanging halfway down his back, black cowboy hat, cowboy boots, white pants — and Paul Schwarz — wearing a new, unbleached linen suit that makes him look even svelter and more sensual than usual — in the crowded foyer of a tiny cultural center in Rio’s Zona Norte. It’s late morning, they’ve just screened their film for the men and women of the neighborhood who played bit parts in it, the response has been warm, people come up to hug, congratulate and thank them.

Given that the important producer/director of the film has a whole slew of important appointments with important distributors set up for the afternoon, he’ll be driven to Centro by an important taxi. The more modest (though naturally no less handsome) screenwriter announces his intention of returning on foot to their hotel in Gloria. Are you out of your mind? That’s a five-mile walk and it’s forty degrees Celsius out there! says his gifted collaborator and favorite lay, who has never held much truck with high temperatures, as he mops his brow.

But Milo, giving his beloved a last touch on the arm, turns and saunters out into the street. As he moves away, close-up on that beautiful ass of his, charmingly molded by his white pants. Don’t worry, baby — much as I’d like to, I won’t overdo it. . We’ll be with you, inside of you, subjective camera: in your brain we hear the distinctive atabaque rhythm of capoeira—ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . must be a roda going on nearby.

Upon emerging from the low white building, Milo turns left instead of right on Rua General Roca and heads for the hills. We follow him following the drumbeat beneath the hot sun. If there’s a roda going on, he wants to join it, but he can’t hear the twang of the berimbau, only the drumbeat, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . the one we listened to night after night as we lay in bed together in Arraial d’Ajuda — the one you recognized all those years ago on our first trip to Salvador, the one you think of as your heart call, your root call, the rhythm of your mother’s voice. Important to establish that right from the start.

The drumbeat intensifies.

The minute General Roca starts up the hill, the Saens Peña area — a flat, dreary patch of urban sprawl with the sort of gray ten- and fifteen-story high-rises that can be found anywhere in the developing world — falls away and the neighborhood swiftly slides from moderate to abject poverty. No more whites or light browns, nothing but blacks. Milo’s arms swing at his side, his hands are empty. Images of the Dublin slums, the Waswanipi Cree reserve, his father’s rooming house in Montreal ricochet and reverberate in the scorching sunlight. Sweat pours down his brow and neck and back but he doesn’t wipe it off. Men idling in doorways stare as he passes and he lets them stare. .

(Oh, Milo! I once thought of it as rashness; your ex-wife Yolaine used to call it passivity. . If you leave me, you leave me, you once told her, and today, were a crack addict to threaten you at gunpoint, you’d look him calmly in the eye and say, If you kill me, you kill me. . But it’s neither recklessness nor passivity, it’s capoeira. Lack of fear and jealousy, openness, curiosity, indifference — all your character traits derive from the capoeira attitude, which you’d espoused long before you discovered the Brazilian fight-dance.)

As Milo advances the incline grows steeper, the drumbeat louder, the sun hotter. A bright green church looms up on the hill above him and again, because of the color green, he thinks of Ireland, a country he’s never set foot in. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . He sees dilapidated three- and four-story concrete blocks, their walls painted in peeling pastel colors and streaked with graffiti, and because of the corrugated tin roofs, he again thinks of the reserve, which he also doesn’t know. Sunlight. Black people staring at him. Tropical greenery. Tough dusty roots and grasses, leaves and vines. Gutted buildings. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. Cement walls give onto gapingly empty ideas of rooms. The rise steepens again. He passes a staircase drowning in creepers and studded with broken glass, sees the remains of a candomblé altar, nothing left of it but an electric cross with all but one of its lightbulbs smashed, a few chipped statues of African gods and goddesses amidst dust and cigarette butts. The world reverberates, beats and glitters, summoning Milo with dreamlike intensity. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. .

Turning a corner, he finds himself face-to-face with a wild-haired, middle-aged black woman. His mother’s age? No, his own, give or take a bit. The woman mutters something but he can’t hear what she says because the atabaque beat now fills his head completely. Come, says the drum, you’re almost there. From a terrace higher up the hill, a straggly group of teenage boys frown down at him, hostile, daring him to come up any farther. What’s with this crazy cowboy?

He’s directly below the green church now, and though the drumbeat is almost deafening, instead of a roda he sees only a series of overflowing dustbins. Then his eye catches the smallest of movements amidst the rubbish in the gutter — and he freezes. Abruptly the drumbeat softens into heartbeat. The camera becomes his eye. This was what had summoned him — a human heart beating from within a ripped-off, rolled-up tiny piece of cloth. A discarded newborn. Black. A useless, half-dead, famished, thrown-away boy. The madwoman’s? No, she’s beyond childbearing years. He approaches, his steps making no sound at all. When he reaches down to turn it over, the thing quivers.

Suddenly Milo’s brain fills with a soft cascade of men and women’s voices from the past in French and English, German and Dutch, Cree and Gaelic. They gurgle and babble and blend as he stares at the unwanted infant. Is it breathing? Yes, it is. Milo sits down for a minute on the concrete steps that lead up to the church, in the thick shade of a rubber tree. Gets to his feet again, removes his black Stetson and sets it next to the baby’s head so that its eyes will be protected from the sun, even once the sun has moved. Stands there. Moves a step away, a step back. Crosses the street, looks around, returns to the kid.

Finally, he turns and heads back down the hill. Watching, we sense an invisible rope stretched taut between the nearly quadragenarian gringo screenwriter and the tiny, dark-skinned, scarcely breathing bitty baby in the gutter.

CUT to Paul Schwarz, his new suit now clammy and wrinkled — isn’t it infuriating how linen wrinkles? — and Milo Noirlac — as above, minus the Stetson — toiling back up the Saens Peña hill in the swift tropical sunset. Having smoked too many Cuban cigars today, Paul is panting.

“He won’t be there anymore, Milo.”

“Yes, he will.”

“You’ll see. Your hat’s already been sold to tourists in Santa Teresa, and the kid has either been scooped up by the garbage trucks or devoured by a stray dog. He won’t be there.”

“Yes, he will.”

“You’re completely meshuga, Astuto. What was it, seven hours ago?”

“Yeah.”

“He won’t be there.”

“Yes, he will.”

“Jesus Christ. So what’ll you do if he is, adopt him?”

“Find him a home.”

“What’s with the Good Samaritan shtick all of a sudden?”

CUT to the gutter across from the bright green church. The Stetson hasn’t budged. The two men rush over to it. .

WHAT DO YOU think, Astuto? Okay, I know you never think much of our first drafts, but still. . Do you like the idea of starting off with the day you found Eugénio? Are you having fun, at least? Aw, don’t go to sleep yet — we’re just getting into it. You’ll have plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead. Come on, keep talkin’, you indolent Quebecker. You know how films work: for the first ten minutes, the audience is infinitely tolerant and will accept whatever you choose to flash at them, but after that you’d better start making sense. Okay, so let’s take advantage of that precious tolerance window to teach them the ropes of this film. The first two minutes are already in place. Stay with me. Hang in there, baby.

• • • • •

Neil, April 1910

IN VOICE-OVER, WE can hear the muddled mutterings of a gangly, well-dressed eighteen-year-old after his first night on the town.

Fog along the deep, dark Liffey this morning, or mist shall we call it, no, for soft not sticky in the air, feathery and floating, yes, but still, still, a bit thick and wet like sweat only coolish. It’s six A.M., the haze is glazing and the eastern sky faintly tainting with the palest of lights and we’re on our way home, jolly gentlemen, after one stupendous night with the bawds. Gulls wheeling overhead — have they any choice but to wheel? Must pen a poem about gulls and girls, directly after my morning nap. Yes, I’ve just done something that would shock my mother and annoy even my da, for everyone knows that a young man who plans to embark upon a career in the law should keep his personal reputation pristine — I’ve just wanked a wench, that’s what I’ve just gone and done. What think you of that, Judge and Missus Kerrigan? Trussed up her petticoats and spun her round and lodged myself firmly between those alabaster thighs, then wanked her and spanked her. Strumpets don’t mind a thump on the rump every now and then, ‘tis all part of the fun. Must pen that poem the minute I get home.

Thus dithering and blathering, Neil Kerrigan stumbles from bridge to bridge, utterly delighted with himself.

Yes, at last I know what the jokes were all about, the innuendos, the suggestive raising of eyebrows and wiggling of hips, the priest’s insistent prying during confession on the first Friday of each month — did you do this, did you do that, tell me how exactly, when, where and how many times — and often as I confessed his voice would change, his breathing grow labored, and I would wonder what was transpiring beneath his soutane. Yes, at last I know the convulsive shudder of one’s being that comes in a woman’s arms, as more powerful than self-pleasure as a bomb than a firecracker. Am I right, Willie Yeats? Sing to me!

O love is the crooked thing

There is nobody wise enough

To find out all that is in it,

For he would be thinking of love

Till the stars had run away

And the shadows eaten the moon

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

One cannot begin it too soon. .

Sure and learning’s a fine thing, Father Wolf, he goes on. Singing in a bleeding choir as well. Yes, I know I used to be a good little altar boy with a fluty clear wavering voice that sang God’s praises each Sunday morn, I know you believe the cant you pump into your flock about sin and sorrow, brimstone and hellfire, temptation and self-control, I’m not contesting your sincerity — but still, a man worth his oats deserves a bit of a rut on the weekend. Ha-ha! At last I’ve seen for myself the Monto brothels Cousin Thom told me about years ago, having himself heard of them from his raving classmate Jimmy Joyce. The madams, the girls one can pick and choose, the things one can say and do to them behind closed doors. . No, you must be shaggin’ us, said his comrades at University College, can one really? Precocious, cocky and unfazeable, Joyce was the most fascinating young prick Thom had ever met. The image of everything I longed to be and wasn’t — yet. Rumor had it he’d already signed a publisher’s contract for a book of tales about Dublin, and Thom and I wondered if tales like this would figure in it — tales about the underworld of the overworld, the dark side of the bright side, the hell side of the heaven side. Had Jimmy dared express himself in public as he did in private, holding forth about his priapic performances with the Monto Messalinas in a mind-boggling mix of English, Gaelic and Latin?. .

(Nice work, Milo! And then, through a series of ephemeral flashbacks, we’ll discover the dissonance between the way Neil is describing the night’s events to himself and the way they actually unfolded. .)

Masses of girls and women roving the streets, standing or sitting on the front steps of houses — smoking and joking and yawning and scratching themselves, beckoning and clucking at the men who amble past. Puddles of piss and beer and rainwater on the ground. Neil follows Thom and the others into one of the Georgian houses.

Here we could use a close-up of his legs, his fine leather shoes, going up the steps in slow motion. Yes, we hear him mutter to himself, one actually can do this. One’s brain can order one’s legs to mount a staircase to a brothel and the legs will obey. .

The Trinity boys cluster in the tacky foyer with limp lace curtains at the windows — but only at the edges of the windows — leaving the main pane brazenly naked. Should I be seen, Good Lord, should I be seen! Should my father drive down Talbot Street in his carriage! Or Father Wolf, the roly-poly preacher who christened me at age six weeks and has kept tabs on me ever since!

As if in a bad dream, Neil watches his friends select the pretty girls in swift succession and vanish, so that within thirty seconds he finds himself alone with the one remaining harlot — an old woman! Forty if she’s a day, grinning up at him with tobacco-stained teeth, then grabbing his hand and pulling him after her down the hallway. He winces at the sight of her lumpy rump jouncing beneath her brightpink satin housecoat, gags at the thick mix of strangers’ body emanations in the bedroom she draws him into. .

“Tanks, luv.”

Having divested him of half a pound, the woman slides her hand into his breeches and pulls at his member with ghastly efficient know-how, then hikes up her petticoats and turns her back on him. Poor he, meanwhile — heart thumping in temples, eyes starting from head, sweat tingling on forehead, breath speeding malgré lui — loses sight of his own hands amidst the woman’s flouncy mess of petticoats. He moans. Good Lord, where are my hands? And is she not diseased, will she not have warts and sores, will I not die, ta, ta-da DA, will I not die, ta, ta-da DA, will I not die — this in the capoeira rhythm as he pushes, a die with every push—yes, for certain I will DIE.

“Goodness, luv, you’re scared stiff! You’ve just now left off wearing short pants, is it? A blushing virgin! Don’t worry, darling, I won’t keep it. You’ll go home to mummy in one piece. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

The woman laughs at him even as she wiggles to hasten his spurt, force his body to express, in two dizzying breathless seconds, all it can express.

And now, as he stumbles home in the misty Liffey dawn a mere three hours and six Guinnesses later, Neil is energetically rewriting the night’s script, carefully crafting the future tale of his erotic initiation. He needs to boast.

I’m as proud of having crossed the threshold of a Talbot Street brothel as that of Trinity Law School. Yes, dear Mother!

For man is made of cock and brain

and never never never never again

shall you lead me down the little rabbit hole

with your insipid tales about the soul!

. . The soul God loveth, the soul God maketh and putteth into the flesh in order that we may resist temptation year after year and drudgingly trudge through this vale of tears to everlasting bliss or brimstone in the Beyond. No, Ma, no, Ma, no, Ma, no. Never met a soul in my life, Ma — never did run into a single soul. I do, on the other hand, have a cock and a brain, and beg to inform you that I intend to put both to good use. Never shall I set up a respectable household like your own, with a white-capped maid serving meals at appointed hours and dark-robed priests droning Mass of a Sunday morning. Done with all of that. It’s the 29th of April, my first year at Trinity is drawing to a close and my future stretches ahead of me, green and lovely as a meadow. Oh, I shall cut capers in it, believe you me!

He dances on the bridge. Hop, skip, trip, delighting in the clack of his soles on the wood in the quiet dawn. Yes—he smirks, no doubt about it—the sole exists.

CUT to an hour later. Still running off at the mouth, Neil staggers up the shrubbery-bordered walkway to his parents’ house in one of Dublin’s wealthier surburbs.

Flagstones in the grass, grass wet with dew, don’t mind if I dew. Mustn’t wake them now — if I can simply, noiselessly jiggle the shaggin’ key in the shaggin’ lock, tiptoe into my room, slip between the sheets and lumber down to slumber without drawing maternal or paternal attention to the hour at which I returned to their fair abode. . Ah, success. And so, though it be day, good night. The downy white pillows willn’t tell on me, nor will the slut who got her wad. Ah, and a fine fuck she was, too, wrigglin’ down below while gigglin’ up above. .

OKAY, ASTUTO, THAT brings us to. . what, seven minutes or so, would you say? So we’ve got three minutes left of our precious ten to bring the final strand into existence, after which we can begin to braid. Over, under, in between, over, under, in between. .

My mother once told me that the day she noticed how much I loved braiding her hair, as a kid back in Buenos Aires, was the day it first occurred to her I might be gay.

• • • • •

Awinita, March 1951

CLOSE-UP, MAYBE IN black and white, of ugly, cold, wet, gray, garbagey slush in the gutter of Saint Catherine Street, Montreal. A harsh sight. A woman’s high-heeled boots walking in it — black and shiny, made not of leather but of some thin cheap leather substitute that lacks all of leather’s essential qualities: suppleness, strength, especially impermeability.

Through the woman’s eyes, we glance up at a streetlamp. It shivers whitely on as the gray daylight, after a halfhearted attempt at illuminating this March day for a few hours, gives up and dies. We go banging into a bar, where the light is even dimmer than outdoors. It’s only four P.M. but Awinita, dressed in a shortish red dress and those high-heeled, shiny black boots, hikes herself up onto a red stool at the bar.

We are Awinita, we are the woman; always in her sequences we will be she. Now we catch sight of ourselves in a mirror above the bar. We are blond.

The barman (seen both in the flesh and reflected) serves us a Coke without greeting or even glancing at us. Our face being in shadow, he can’t see it and neither can we. An indefinite amount of time elapses.

In the mirror, still from Awinita’s point of view, we see a man enter the bar, tracking slush and depression. The door slams behind him. When he takes in the sight of a lone blond lady seated at the counter with her shimmering red back to him — young, from the curves of her — his eyes squint in surprise.

Emerging from the penumbra, the stranger resolves into a young man with red hair cut short and a face too gaunt for freckles. Our gaze flicks downward — the young redhead’s cowboy boots are neither new nor clean — then back up to his face, now decked out with a smile.

“Mind if I siddown?”

“Free country.”

“Free, my ass.”

She laughs shortly. Pleasant surprise for him. Nice, low laugh the girl has.

He tries again, repeating, “Free, my ass,” and succeeds; she laughs better.

“Happy to free your ass for you, sir,” she mutters in a husky, jokey voice that shocks and excites him coming from such a young body or rather such a young face. He hasn’t yet checked out either in much detail but he does so now and gets another couple of shocks in quick succession: this blonde is an Indian, and this child is with child.

Instead of doing a double take, he orders a double whisky. Oddly enough, the fact of the girl’s pregnancy relaxes him, maybe because it implies she isn’t underage (though of course you can knock up a twelve-year-old if you set your mind to it, or whatever that thing is called). The barman clunks his glass down into their silence just as, simultaneously, the girl and he decide to break it.

“What’s your name?” says she, and “What you drinking?” says he.

“Declan,” he answers, just as she says, “Rum and Coke.”

Again they laugh and he can sense how, already, even before the liquor hits his brain, their laughter greases the cogs of their conversation, making it easy.

“Bring the lady another rum and Coke, if you please, sir,” he calls out, lighting a cigarette and offering one to the girl, who takes it. . and because of her instant acquiescence to drink and smoke he realizes she meant what she said earlier about his ass and that there could be other acceptances. A hard thrill rides through him from balls to toes and he wonders about the difference between the price of her body and the number of singles in his wallet. The second figure is probably higher than the first, though not by much. He’ll need to sip his drink slowly and pray she’s not a lush. Bad for the kid in her, too much rum. Quick, a sentence, anything. . but all he can come up with, raising his glass, is a lame “And yours?” just as Awinita thanks the barman for handing her what she knows to be a second glass of rumless Coke.

“My what?”

“Name.”

“Nita.”

“Nita. That’s nice.”

“Weird name, Declan. Hard to remember.”

“That’s okay. I’ll say it to you again if you forget it.”

“Huh.”

“I can say it again right away, if you like: Declan.”

“Didn’t forget it yet.”

“Yeah, but now if you do, you got an extra copy in storage.”

“Funny man.”

“Do my best.”

“Declan. Sound like a brand name. Some cleanin’ fluid or someting.”

“Good old Irish name my dad gave me. Know about Ireland?”

“Whoa. . Got anoder fag?”

“Sure.”

“Got a dime for de jukebox?”

He fishes a dime out of his pocket, still doing subtractions in his head: he’ll manage without his coffee tomorrow morning, and anyhow, no two ways about it, he’ll have to swallow his pride and head back up to the farm later this week.

“What’s your pleasure?” “Lady Day,” says Awinita at the same time, and this time they really laugh.

She slips off the stool and struts over to join him at the box. Despite the curve of pregnancy, her whore-strut is touchingly childlike, so much so that he surmises she might be underage after all and his heart wrenches with wanting her. “Love it,” says he, and as his left hand inserts the dime and punches in “Baby Get Lost,” his right hand slides around the girl’s thickened waist as though it were home. When, turning, she smiles up at him and murmurs, “Hey, baby, you’re sweet,” he pulls her close.

We can CUT here. . find them together later, after the payment and the act, naked amidst a tumble of dirty bedsheets in a cruddy little bedroom above the bar? No. . Be with Awinita in the thick of it, her eyes widening in surprise as Declan, having gotten things under way in the traditional galloping-stallion manner of human males under the age of twenty-five, slows down, withdraws and moves to do her good. We see his head bobbing just beyond her belly swell. .

(Yeah, you’re right, Milo, that could be tricky to get past the MPAA — don’t want an R rating, to say nothing of an X — well, we’ll cross that river when we get to it, hey? Dream first, cut later, you always used to tell me. .)

We slip into Awinita’s mind. A huge bird flies across the sky with a great rushing noise. It touches the sun and bursts into flame. It tumbles over and over in the air, burning, dropping away, until it vanishes behind a distant hill. .

When we open our eyes, Declan has moved back inside of us, gently but passionately.

“You’re so lovely,” he murmurs. “You’re so lovely. .”

They are dressed again and sitting on the bed side by side. The spaces between their sentences are huge. Awinita strokes the back of Declan’s neck with one finger.

“Never done it wit a Indian girl?”

“Nope. Specially not with a pregnant Indian girl. . Who’s the poppa, Nita?”

“A guy.”

“A gone guy?”

“Yeah, gone.”

“Well, how far along are you?”

“Ah. . baby s’pose to be here like in May or June. Got a fag?”

“Sure. . You’re nice, Nita. You’re amazing.”

“You’re not bad, too, Mister Irish Declan.”

“Not everyone would agree with you on that.”

“Some people tink you bad?”

He laughs. “Plenty of people. Guys up at Bordeaux, to start with.”

“You been in de jug?”

“Just got out yesterday.”

“Yeah? In for long?”

“Coupla weeks.”

“What dey nail you for?”

“Said I stole a car.”

“You didn’t?”

“Nah. I just. . you know. . borrowed it.”

“From who?”

“Sister of mine.”

Awinita releases her low laugh.

“Nah. .”

“I swear.”

“You take your sister’s car and she call de cops on you? Some broderly love!”

“I got a whole slew of brothers and sisters. Unfortunately Marie-Thérèse is the only one owns a car, and she’s also the meanest.”

“Marie-Thérèse? Don’t sound Irish.”

“Our ma’s French and our pa’s Irish, so in our family the girls got French names and speak French and the boys got Irish names and speak English.”

“Why not Irish?”

“’Cause the British occupied Ireland for six hundred years and made us lose our language.”

“Why not British, den?” mutters Awinita, but Declan doesn’t hear her because the drink is making him voluble.

“Point is, the boys gotta work. Can’t get a job worth shit if you’re francophone.”

“You got a good job den, Declan?”

“Nah, you kiddin’? I got a black-sheep reputation to live up to.”

She barks a laugh; he pulls her to him and revels in the feel of her firm, round tummy pushed up against his rib cage. “Wouldn’t be caught dead with a good job,” he adds, and she laughs again, though not quite as loudly.

CUT to the bar, which has filled up with customers in the meantime.

Elated, Awinita purchases real drinks with one of the two five-dollar bills Declan gave her. The barman glowers at her when he sets their glasses on the bar but she turns her back on him saying, “Keep cool, Irwin,” and spins her stool toward Declan.

“I don’t get how you can call the cops on one o’ your own family.”

“Marie-Thérèse wants me out of the family. She’d kick me off the family property if she could. Says I’m a good-for-nothing.”

“You good for someting, man.”

They laugh.

“Ah, but she doesn’t know about that, eh? She’s already married and a mom, goin’ on for thirty. I’m twenty-four, how ‘bout you, Nita?”

“. .”

“Hey. . you’re not underage, are you?”

“. .”

“Jesus.”

“Jesus got notin’ to do wid it. I been in de trade tree years already, help my moder out to feed de family. Your sister, she respectable and put her own broder in jail. How Jesus s’pose to figure dat out?”

Again they laugh, inebriated. Euphoria seeps into them. Declan knocks back his drink.

“Ever since she got her poor lumberjack of a fiancé to buy her a three-carat diamond, Marie-Thérèse thinks she’s better than the rest of us. Poor Régis. . He went into debt to pay for that ring. .”

Billie Holiday sings “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness if I Do” and the two of them dance close, Awinita leaning into Declan’s shoulder with her eyes pressed shut.

A white woman, her face a blur, has fastened a sparkling diamond brooch to her throat. Bright red blood trickles down in two lines on either side of her jugular vein. .

CUT.

• • • • •