He must have twenty years on me, I decided, coasting on his calm and fine lines both.

A trauma surgeon. What does it take to push someone that way? You don’t avoid the most unexpected tragedies; you invite them. What is there to fear. You know you will see the worst. You have control. Resurrecting lives. Setting up stories. Dealing with pain.

I thought about how my father once told me that he found coolness as an old man. The story I’d always heard was that he’d lost it. No, he said, cool came to him when he decided to no longer go after things. He set it up so that everyone would have to find him. And they did. He went full detachment. I think my mother caused this desire of his to withhold. He gave her more effort than he’d ever given anything, but that didn’t make her stay.

He changed himself when it was already too late to become what he thought the person who abandoned him wanted. So much character development happens this way. Self-cancellation. Don’t love me. You’ll get no results.

Graves told me there is a thing, like the cinéma du corps, called the cinema of attractions. A term coined by a guy named Tom Gunning. Something like you present a series of images to tell a story, without worrying too much about the words. “Exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption.” He brought up a short movie on YouTube with his phone: “How It Feels to Be Run Over,” shot in 1900 by the Hepworth Manufacturing Company. A motorcar crawling towards imminent collision with the screen.

Graves’s ad hoc curriculum worked with what was at hand. We had 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman, Anna Karenina, Bandits in Milan, Charlie Bubbles, The Red and the White. They were all dated 1968. There was a graphic printed on the faded pieces of paper that lined the bottom of the box. It had the digits “2” and “1” in red and orange arranged like a sun, 21212121212121212121. Below, “21e Festival International du Film: Le Rendez-vous Mondial du Cinéma. Cannes 1968. Du 10 au 24 Mai.” And then, taped below that: “Interrompu par solidarité avec les étudiants et les travailleurs, le Festival de Cannes est annulé.”