Page 227 - A Little Life: A Novel

they’re no longer his own, he has the strange sensation that he is gone, that
he is suspended, and that his very life is an imagining. In those seconds, a
whirl of images whips through his mind, too quickly and jumblingly to

effectively identify each as it occurs to him: there is the scene he’s about to
shoot, of course, and the scene he’d shot earlier, but also all the things that
occupy him, always, the things he sees and hears and remembers before he
falls asleep at night—Hemming and JB and Malcolm and Harold and Julia.
Jude.
Are you happy? he once asked Jude (they must have been drunk).
I don’t think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had

been offering him a dish he didn’t want to eat. But it’s for you, Willem.
As Vanities tug and yank at him, it occurs to him that he should have
asked Jude what he meant by that: why it was for him and not for Jude. But
by the time he’s finished shooting the scene, he won’t remember the
question, or the conversation that inspired it.
“Roll sound!” yells the first A.D., and Vanities scatter.

“Speed,” the sound person answers, which means he’s rolling.
“Roll camera,” calls the cameraman, and then there’s the announcement
of the scene, and the clap.
And then he opens his eyes.