I. THE FIRST QUESTION

I. THE FIRST QUESTION

There was nothing remarkable about the video except that everyone in it had once been alive at the same time. N. found it at two in the morning while looking for something else. The filename was only a date: 17 March 2003. A wedding hall appeared under hard white lights. People crossed the camera without knowing they had entered a future in which a stranger would study their faces. A boy ran past carrying a paper cup. A woman adjusted her sleeve. An old man in a grey coat looked directly into the camera for one second. N. paused the video. “Where could he be now?” he whispered. The question embarrassed him. He did not know the man, the family, or even why the recording had reached his computer. Yet he enlarged the frame until the old man’s face became a country made of squares. It seemed indecent that a person could once occupy an entire life and later survive as a few hundred pixels.

He resumed the video, but the wedding had changed. It was no longer a wedding. It was evidence. Every laugh became suspicious because it had already finished. Every gesture seemed to contain an ignorance so complete that N. almost envied it. None of them knew the room would vanish before morning, that the decorations would be removed, that faces would thicken, thin, wrinkle, disappear. Most unbearable was the boy with the paper cup. He appeared again near the stage, perhaps eight years old, irritated by an adult calling him away. N. froze the frame. “He would be around thirty now.” He imagined the boy bearded, clean-shaven, married, lonely, abroad, ill, wealthy, ordinary, dead. Each possibility felt like a corridor, and his mind insisted on opening every door. “You are inventing lives,” he told himself. Another thought answered with the calmness of a clerk: “No. Time invented them. You are only late.”

By sunrise N. had watched eleven minutes of footage in three hours. He began making notes in a blank document. OLD MAN, GREY COAT — STATUS UNKNOWN. BOY WITH PAPER CUP — APPROXIMATELY THIRTY NOW. WOMAN NEAR STAGE — POSSIBLY MOTHER OF SOMEONE. He stared at the phrase status unknown. It felt official. It suggested an office somewhere in which the living were properly recorded, where each person had a file and each file bore a stamp: CONTINUING, DECEASED, MISSING, FORGOTTEN. N. closed the document. Five minutes later he opened it again. There are questions that seek answers, and questions that seek permission to remain questions. His belonged to the second kind. Before sleeping, he returned to the old man’s face. If the man was dead, N. had just watched a dead man move. If he was alive, somewhere in the city an old stranger was breathing without knowing that another person had briefly doubted his existence.

At breakfast his mother asked why he looked tired. “I watched an old wedding video.” “Whose wedding?” “I don’t know.” She stopped stirring her tea. “Then why did you watch it?” N. considered explaining the old man, the boy, and the impossible administrative burden of their continued existence. Instead he said, “It came up.” His mother accepted this because people accept technology as an explanation for almost anything. Before leaving the table she added, “You always looked too long at things that were already over.” The sentence stayed with him. He wondered what she meant by always. A childhood memory came back: a playground after rain, empty swings moving in the wind, N. refusing to leave because another child had forgotten a red scarf on the bench. Even then, perhaps, absence had seemed less like emptiness than unfinished paperwork.