Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

White winter moths.

Thousands of white winter moths.

Home, you turn on the television and meander from bright room to bright room, removing child-proof locks from cabinets and drawers.

Andi assembles in the kitchen doorway, wiping her wet hands on her jeans and before long joins in. She dismantles the gates at the top and bottom of the stairs leading to the basement and loft. You collect and throw out the plastic covers sealing the empty electrical outlets.

A familiarity reenters your house.

A comfortable sense of subtle disorganization.

Tomorrow you will call the phone company and have your service disconnected.

The late news comes on.

Behind the anchorperson floats the mug shot of an Asian man.

He appears to be in his early sixties and wears that tired, irritable, undershaved and poorly lit aspect people in mug shots wear. He resembles Oliver Stone if Oliver Stone had come from Cambodia. Across his chest stretches a long white number in a narrow black rectangle.

The news anchor is explaining that Dr. Kompong was arrested late Saturday afternoon for embezzling more than two hundred fifty thousand dollars from Gritman Medical Center over the course of the past seven years.

Embezzling is not the word the legal people in Idaho use any more, you learn.

Grand theft is what they use.

Dr. Kompong faces from one to twenty years in prison.

It’s Dr. Doomdoom, you say.

Will you look at that, says Andi, cleaning.

Which is what you think about as you stand there.

That is what you think about as you stand by the new white lozenge of marble in the cemetery on the other side of the gully, surrounded by a small circle of friends and family from back east.

The future and poker tells and the weather and the architecture of jokes.

Things, in other words, the camera does not know.

How, for instance, the day after tomorrow you will sit down at your computer and write this line:

The way the sheen on the grass looked like spilled white paint .

How you will write:

The electric stutter of the phone .

And something will have begun.

Things change. Things change. Things change.

But why?

It will be Christmas Eve then, by the way.

Outside the cloudy light will be failing at four o’clock.

Afterwards you will jog up to the loft and slip Miles Davis on the stereo and jog down to the kitchen and pour a strong scotch for Andi, for Andi and for you, naturally, and commence fixing an Italian dinner.

Jim Beam.

Your hands moving.

Penne, a light marinara sauce, baby shrimp.

A salad with bushy lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, oil-and-vinegar dressing.

For dessert, an airy lemon sorbet.

Success, you realize, chopping and dicing, amounts to nothing more than luminous stills like the one you are inhabiting.

The clink of scotch glasses, for example.

The way the candlelight catches them.

How Andi will meet your eyes at the table, you sitting there, breathing out and breathing in, listening, laddering down the flow chart, waiting to determine what these vertebrae of overlit seconds might resolve into.

Which is when you will sense the camera beginning to leave you.

That is when you will sense it beginning to pan back.

To include the wood-slatted blinds behind you, the dinner table in front of you, the cloud of light expanding where your hearts are beating.

Which is where it will stop.

That is where the shutter will open so quickly it is difficult to perceive unless you are staring directly at it.

Click .

Your puzzled face.

Andi’s hand self-consciously reaching for her jaw.

Your glowing red pupils.

Like the couple at a party who never saw their friend the photographer step from the clatter and hum to bring them into clarity.

Which is what you think about as you stand by the new white lozenge.

Over the empty grave.

How you will continue to examine this photograph as closely as you like, but will not be able to locate the child in it, will not be able to locate anything that will ultimately become important to you, no matter how hard you try.

How the light fails in many surprising ways, over and over.

Over and over and over again.

How they say the camera catches you, but how in point of fact you will always be able to get away.