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facts of her life: the unmanageable workload in her law courses, the fact that her mother supported the whole extended family, the fact that her mother kept secrets, and, with each disclosure more intimate than the last, with him leaning forward, on the verge of comforting her, finally she said that the young men her age merely wanted her to do more than she was already doing for everyone else, and this she could not stomach. He sat back, shunting his chair a little away to the left. But when she continued about all the things that needed fixing—the university, the gender divide, immigration laws—he began to admire her for the clarity of her sense of obligation, her easy recourse to action.
    “Go ahead. Ask away,” he says. He notices that Olivia is carrying a hardcover book whose spine reads
Death in the Nineteenth Century
. She surveys his office, up and down the shelves and over towards the window.
    “You have even more books than last year,” she says. He looks up with pride at the shelf piled with film theory, cinema history, books on their sides, books standing, rows and rows of them. Poetry chapbooks and pamphlets line the window sill. He must ask the school office for another shelf.
    “My one bad habit,” he says.
    She looks down to the book in her lap. “I was wondering if you would help me with something … part of my final year law project. I wanted to investigate paupers’ graves,” she says and looks up at him. Her brown eyes are slanted and he sees now that there might be Chinese as well as African and Caucasian blood in her. These eyes go into a squint as though she’s now embarrassed about what she’s just said.
    “Oh yes,” he says and sits forward, wanting to show enthusiasm but not yet knowing where this is going. Parenting will be like teaching—he can do this.
    “Not just about the people who can’t afford a burial, you know, but also about those who have no one,” she says. Her enthusiasm is undercut with anxiety.
    “Yes, okay.”
    “Well, whose responsibility is it?” Her eyes go wide with the question.
    “I suppose the state’s—”
    “I don’t mean for the burial, I mean to honour them,” she says.
    “I don’t know. No one’s, I guess,” he says. His sadness meets hers and waltzes through the room. She shifts and begins to tap her foot. He finds himself wanting to tell her about his baby, about Katrin and his heart.
    “My research isn’t about this, exactly,” she says.
    “Oh?” He holds her gaze, not wanting to press her.
    “But I was just wondering if in films, like, in film history, there is anything that deals with that, with how you can remember the dead, how they can be honoured.”
    He leans back. He is trying to grasp her vision. As a father he will have to entertain ideas more oblique than this. In the Mexican Western,
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
, the quest is tohonour Melquiades, to find his home, to do right by him. But that is a stretch. Then there is that romantic comedy that rebranded British cinema, but that’s just—but still, yes, here is something to say.
    “Well, poetry is one way it’s been done in film.…” he says, leaning forward. Her face lights up. “‘Fear no more the heat of the sun,’” he says, but sits back; in this territory he is merely an interloper, and Shakespeare is surely not what Olivia has in mind. But her question has him churning now. A song: everyone needs their own song. He is tempted to mention “Brokedown Palace,” his secret signature tune, the song he’d like played at his own funeral. Instead he says, “But my area is really film—I use philosophy to discuss images: movement and time. Sometimes that intersects with concepts from literature, with poetry, but … that’s not the same.”
    She looks disappointed.
    “What are you looking for, Olivia?” he says, thinking that this young woman holds truth as a cup holds water. He himself is a sieve.
    “A link, I suppose,” she says,