The Tusk That Did the Damage Read Online Free PDF

assignment, we were sent out into the wilds of Boston with only a tripod, a light meter, and a hand-crank Bolex camera. Each of us was to shoot a light journal, to capture light and shadow on black-and-white sixteen-millimeter film. It was exhilarating—the feel of the Bolex rumbling between my hands, its spring-wound arm tracing circles in the air.
    I came to class burning with anticipation, sure that I’d netted a string of beautiful shots from the reflecting pool at theChristian Science Plaza. But as we screened our dailies, it was Teddy who stole the show with his time-lapsed shots of shadows fading, darkening, interlacing, pouring like ink across stone, a calligraphic symphony of lines until the film fluttered to white, leaving the whole class enchanted. All this he’d filmed in the courtyard of his dorm.
    As the years went by, Teddy and I fell into step, collaborating on every film down to his junior project, for which I served as DP. It began with an exterior shoot on a day so snowy and cold the Aaton camera had to be hugged in blankets every few takes, to keep it from stuttering to a stop. A week later, we screened the dailies to find a thick river of white coursing down the left side of the film. A whole day ruined. I’d been the one to seal and unseal the camera mag, to off-load the film into its can, a process that required nimble hands inside a lightproof bag. Apparently mine hadn’t been nimble enough. I was mortified, excuseless, solely responsible.
    “So,” Teddy had said, rewinding the film, “reshoot on Thursday?”
    I couldn’t believe he would trust me to shoot again. I’d expected him to demote me to gaffer’s assistant, angling a bounce board by the actors’ faces.
    Teddy shrugged it off. “So you shit the bed. Nothing to freak out about.”
    Both literally and figuratively, that seemed the perfect reason to freak out.
    But with a calm that somehow fed off my frenzy, Teddy insisted that we’d fix it. And what he said next is embedded in my memory, proof that we were once good to each other. “I’drather get it wrong with you than get it right with anyone else.”
    We rolled up to the rusty green gates of the Rescue Center, greeted by a sign: THANKS FOR NOT INSISTING TO SEE THE ANIMALS . An odd marker when there seemed no animals to see, only a storybook hamlet of dark green huts nestled within the leaves, connected by a shaded walkway where one could pause and study the posters of animals on the walls.
    The sky was overcast, diffusing a clean cold light through a woolly skein of cloud. I wanted to take advantage of the light and shoot Ravi on his rounds with the animals—the elephant calves, the goat, the langurs who streaked through the air on long, windmilling limbs. But Teddy argued that we’d shot it all before, and what was another langur sequence compared with the final shot he had gotten from the calf reunion? “I think we can even leave it as is,” he said. “One long shot, like in that Obenhaus film about the jewelry factory.”
    He was always referring to That Obenhaus Film About the Jewelry Factory. I’d never seen it but felt like I had, what with all the times he had described the opening—a man punching a time clock, a shot that Obenhaus held for a full minute until the clock hands met, which Teddy called brilliant in its illustration of work and its weight on the passage of time.
    “Keep in mind,” I said, “we want actual human beings to see this thing.”
    Teddy followed me into my room. He lived next door to me at the Rescue Center, each “guest suite” appointed with a chair, a desk, and a twin bed on which Teddy could only fit himselfdiagonally. He set the camera on my desk. “Just watch the dailies tonight.”
    “Why—where’ll you be?”
    He unscrewed the filter between careful fingers. “Sanjay’s wedding, I told you. You can still be my date.”
    “Pass.”
    “Come on, he’s not that bad.”
    Sanjay was Teddy’s former roommate, a soft-spoken