like somebody learning. I couldn’t see where it was. Māyā Māyā Māyā was one word. The others I didn’t understand. Hell, I didn’t understand Māyā either. Not then. But I could make it out and I said it in Dagger’s ear. We’re in South Wales. How we got there is plausible enough. I had business on the Dorset coast. Then we drove up past Bristol where we had a mutual actor-friend. So far, Dagger was the casual traveler. I was the one talking about the images we needed to go with what was then the third section of the film. But when we got into South Wales and night had come into the soft farm valleys above Newport and dew chilled the manure and sweet grass and we were running snug between hedgerows, Dagger was scooting around curves and shifting down and accelerating as if now he had a purpose. And now he’s saying let’s find a bonfire to film—which seemed right to me because I’d said in the beginning that we ought to find visions intermingling England and America so you wouldn’t be able to tell. And here we were between villages hunting for a bonfire, though Dagger was also now saying he was looking for a roundabout that would get us onto the A-40 east to London.
Claire was looking at her hands wedged between her thighs.
The fog partly hid Dagger and me from these people. Claire didn’t yet know I was recalling my diary. Fog stood here and there as far as the edge of the ring. But passing through the ring the fog became something else gassy and jumped and bent through the forms of those people into the inner circle where it passed into the fire but freshened and inflated the colors of their clothes, the woven oranges and denim blues, a brown cloak, some yellow, some olive green.
A baby’s cheek flashed on a girl’s back. Dagger tracked a little boy in overalls who as he walked stared at the blaze they were all circling. The camera’s drive motor seemed loud, a softer or more musical dentist’s drill, a buzz saw under water. Dagger switched off and focused on one corner of the ring and shot till they’d all gone by once. I whispered wouldn’t it be funny if some were Americans. When he said, Recognize someone from Berkeley? he may not have been kidding, though he often speaks of his old bailiwick and feeding some friend who later became an official in Washington, for Dagger unlike me keeps up with the old Alma Mater. A big woman with a red and yellow blanket over her shoulders burst from her place and surged across the circle to hug and kiss the boy in overalls—and they all shouted something. And she, in a glad tantrum of head-wagging, stood aside till her spot in the circle came by.
My ankles were wet and tom. Sheep bleated. Dagger flipped the turret to get a closer shot of the fire.
What were they burning? They stopped circling and clapped. What was burning? I saw two branches sparkling and one gray label with letters that didn’t mean anything.
Is that all? Claire murmured, staring at her hands.
They stopped circling and began to clap.
We didn’t know about the Hindu group, said Claire.
Who didn’t?
At the office.
You mean you did know other things we filmed?
Dagger I thought had written her a note in April answering the tentative encouargement he said she’d given him.
Dagger didn’t mention Hindu to you, did he?
Māyā’s the giveaway, said Claire. I mean, that’s Hindu. Anyhow I think Dagger wrote me.
I let that pass. I told her that later an American whom Dagger and I know in London hearing me talk about the bonfire got worked up about looping zoom dissolves. He thought Dagger had zoomed in through the ring to the fire; but in May we had no zoom.
What was his name? said Claire.
Cosmo. And he had a friend from Delhi he wanted Dagger to meet who he said lives completely in the present. I said we weren’t interested in technical tricks like looping zoom dissolves but he just kept talking at Dagger saying we ought to make a separate cartridge loop. Dag said he thought