THROUGH MY EYES

Chapter 4 — Lucid Nights

Chapter 4 — Lucid Nights

The industry had rhythms that were not on any calendar. Sets ran on a different time, a nocturnal economy of lights and coffee and small mercies. Rena learned those rhythms quickly. Nights were for work; mornings were for ledger keeping. Between them lay a thin seam of exhaustion that made memory soft.

On set, people moved like rehearsed weather. There were rituals: the makeup chair, the director’s note, the way a camera operator would nod when a take landed. Rena learned to make a silence read like a line and a glance read like a confession. She learned to give the camera what it wanted without giving away the ledger behind the gesture.

Tommina watched the calculus with a face that had learned to measure risk in cigarette burns. “Don’t let them make you a rumor,” he said one night as they left a set that smelled of hairspray and coffee. “Rumors are hard to cash.”

Rena laughed, but the laugh had a margin of worry. She had seen colleagues burn bright and then vanish. The industry loved a comet; it rarely loved the person who had to clean up the trail. She kept a small notebook where she wrote lines that felt like contracts: Who do I owe? Who owes me? The questions were practical and cruel.

Lucas visited the set one evening with a camera of his own. He watched her work with an intensity that made the crew shift. After the shoot he asked if she would come to a small screening he was hosting—an experimental piece that blurred documentary and fiction. “I want to show you something,” he said. “I think you’ll see yourself in it.”

Curiosity is a dangerous thing in a town that trades in forgetting. Rena agreed. At the screening she watched footage that made her stomach drop: a montage of faces, archival clips, and interviews that suggested patterns she had not wanted to name. The piece ended with a question: Who pays for forgetting?

She left the screening with a new ledger entry: curiosity had a cost. Lucas’s work unsettled her in a way that felt like a hand on the back of her neck—gentle, insistent. He asked questions that were not about optics. He asked about history, about labor, about the people who had been erased.

That night she dreamed of mirrors that refused to answer. She woke with the taste of yeast in her mouth and the city’s faces passing through the window like a slow parade. The ledger in the mirror had new lines. She had to decide whether to follow Lucas’s questions or to keep polishing the surface.