One day, a filmmaker read about how a particular Somali had become a captain and how, somewhere in the world, a group of soldiers took ownership of land they knew only from magazines.
He shook the paper. He thought for a moment: is anything in here real? The sun streamed into the room, like snow, like windblown snow, like one thousand switchblades opening, like a spray or dash of citrus in the eye. In the opinion pages, a writer identified a terrorist on a train only to find a child eating an orange in a box.
“I swear it was a terrorist. But when I opened the box, I saw a child eating an orange. The child said he hadn’t eaten in five days and that he’d taken the fruit out of desperation, which was hard for me to believe. I snatched that orange away from him and told him that in the eyes of the Lord thievery was worse than starvation.”
The filmaker, of course, didn’t believe that the child had stolen the orange but that it had been given him by a woman with a red hat and white gloves. She carried oranges in her purse.
In the paper, he saw a photograph of a bird with enormous wingspan. Its feathers and beak were slathered in chocolate, like some nightmarish Easter treat. A sheen of brown mucus covered its eyes. The filmmaker wondered if the bird would go blind. Did they make contact lenses for birds?
He wondered if the woman with the red hat and white gloves loved films, westerns, actions, comedies, and was she watching the fence posts go by on the train and was she being chased by some mad lover who could never ever let her go? Perhaps he was seated just a few places down, hiding under a cowboy hat. He had brass knuckles in a pocket because the lover lacked imagination, a roll of mints in the other because he’d been bored.
Over the span of a few seconds the filmmaker wondered if the paper was a repetition; if he held this paper against another, older paper would he be able to distinguish the two? He wondered how he might test this idea. He shook the paper. He turned the page. He pictured the woman in the red hat and white gloves stepping off the train; he watched the man in the cowboy hat step off the train, too. In a window of the train he saw a child eating an orange. The child watched the red hat disappear into the station. The child watched the cowboy hat. The child told himself he wanted a hat just like that one. He told himself: someday, I’ll be on a train wearing a hat just like that one. Maybe I’ll be going to Chicago. Maybe I’ll be going somewhere else.
