Near the flat in New York there is a pleasant restaurant that is, I believe, part of a chain.  On the Saturday the boy and I were together we went there for lunch, having awakened late.  We were put in the corner of a small back room, which suited me; it was quiet there.  We were at a small cafe table, our hands touching, or his hand sometimes on my cheek, in that gesture.  Our plans were to go to Top of the Rock after the meal, to see the vast sweep of New York afforded from its height.  It was a fine, mild winter day.  We discussed film, as we often do--or, rather, I told him of films I felt he should see, most of which he’ll never even have access to in his country.  Small American films, Irish films, Canadian films.  Films whose special qualities lie in accents and sensibilities and the haunting of history; things he is too young and clean and sheltered and foreign ever to catch in the artifacts of another language or culture.

I mentioned the film Precious--or, as it’s tediously titled in full, Precious:  Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire--and how I thought he should make an effort to see it when it opened in his city, as I assumed it would do eventually.  I talked a bit about the film, and about how impressed I was by the ending--by the fact that it presents a finely-balanced blend of hope and sharp, injurious reality that is both triumphant and sobering.  Of course I did not wish to give anything away to him--although with a film like Precious, I’m not sure one can speak in those terms--so I spoke in broad strokes about these things.

The boy looked at me and said that he did not think it was right for a filmmaker to present an audience with a hard story without hope at the end.  He did not, it seemed, believe in despair.  It was wrong.  His tone was serious, as though he were speaking about an act of grave immorality that he had witnessed.

I probed a little.  We began to speak about catharsis.  He remained firm.  So, then . . . Oedipus?  Macbeth?  I could not move him.  We spoke animatedly.  He talked of, I don’t know, change, movement, going on, whatever it is people say now, in this age of American optimism, when our capacities are limitless if we just tell ourselves so.  Such speech is always full of movement, travel; people are changing.

Frustrated, I erupted suddenly, But we’re not going anywhere.  I tried to say that catharsis is the thing that rises up and showers us with ourselves, knocks us out and awakens us in a pool of us.  We have been taken apart and reconstructed, so that something is unfamiliar, slightly out-of-place; we hurt.  But we hurt in ways that, at their best, make us walk differently or smile differently or look differently, and that is the salvation.  That is the only promise.  Few enough of us see it and are redeemed.  Earthly redemption, like divine, is hard.

We know, the boy and I, when we speak of these things, that we are not that far apart.  We know that the world is often the same thing for us, full of beauty and joy and good fortune; we both know we have been lucky.  But looking at him, I thought of how different the angles and curves of our vision are.  I do not think that I was ever in his place, even as a young person, relatively sheltered, bookish, not close to the world in that way that young people are meant to be.  I was never big enough to see over anything; I always saw undersides, pits and gutters.  They are not bad things to me.  They give dimension.  But to the boy, young and with only theoretical acquaintance with the uncharmed and the ugly, these things are weights to be shunned.  Those eyes will see only beauty.  Those eyes reflecting life.  Those pelagic eyes.

We are appointed guardians of different places.  His hand on my cheek, all warmth, all above.  Who was I, in the deep, cold zone, to direct his gaze downward from that height?  Time may do things to him, against those eyes.  I am not time.

He notes all of this, files it away.  Briefly, in the way young men do; ultimately it means little.  But I regret the flash of exposure.  I endeavour to be silly and young and playful.  

I think of us, in the night, lying on our backs, hands linked.  I think of us in effigy.  I think of time.