Tom returns to the used-book store after Daria has left its employ. He regrets missing her and is relieved over it, in varying measure. He has an idea that feels downright sacreligious. The books are necessary.
Whether Daria or Jane feels more like an open wound fluctuates by the day. The highlights with Jane were longer ago, but that itself is enough to blur away the problems that had been there all along, when the weather conditions are right. The recency of the situation with Daria fills the times in between with its raw immediacy. Their embraces had been so few and so potent that each one stands out clearly from the others in his memory.
Jane had been a horny teenager, his exact counterpart that first night in the Zon and more than once after. But in scattered intervals amid the mutual hormonal rampage, for a moment here and there in isolation, there'd been presentiments of subtlety, that she'd grow into a woman whose sensuality came on like smoke.
He'd had no idea what was going through Daria's mind several of the times they'd kissed—perhaps all of them save those first two in his car—which did nothing to make her less alluring at the time and likewise nothing to help him clear his head now. Jane's creativity was freewheeling and animistic, while Daria's was measured, thorough in its exploration, writing that invited analysis that in turn, somehow, turned emotional. He had sensed that for her, the life of the mind was to be lived, in fullness.
The first new-to-him movie he sees after Daria, after his family returns from the Cove, is Jason and the Argonauts. The fight with the skeleton warriors blows him away harder than anything he's seen since The Matrix, in a different direction but with no less force.
He helps his sister Elsie get one of their older home computers set up in her room so that she can have a dedicated machine for schoolwork. In with the assorted accessory junk, he finds a CD-ROM encyclopedia, only a few years old and already feeling obsolete. It's not just the Web now. The very design of the CD-ROM visuals evokes a passion for learning, an optimism about knowledge that right now feels beaten out of him.
An idea begins to twitch in his fingers.
He needs a project. Something to throw himself into. Work that can consume everything else in this head of his. Driving aimlessly around town taking photographs won't cut it. He needs a goal. A vision to realize, so that he can stand back and say he has either realized it or not.
(It's about at this point that one of their family dinners boils over for the first time. He thinks his voice is pretty steady and equitable, honestly, when he says, "I can handle losing Jane. I can handle losing Daria. But the fact that I will always end up losing anyone like them suggests that something is wrong with how we do things, doesn't it?" That does not go over well. Indeed, it becomes a flash point for everything else they have been unwilling to discuss, which is more than he had known. Much more.)
He doesn't have Jane's visual instinct. He's not a writer on Daria's level. But captions and snippets are not much harder than the quips he traded with both of them, and by the law of averages, he starts finding photographs he likes from his museum trips.
(It's about this point that he meets Nathan. There's a shared interest or at least a complementary pair of them in the antique store, where Nathan is scouting for style and Tom is after images that can slot into the project. And there's a bit of what Tom would call bonding, if he were more generous, between the fan of '40s fashion and the film-noir buff. Nathan's particular way of taking himself seriously, and his blind spots about everything that wasn't "steak and onions", get on Tom's nerves to an extent. He's not sure how big that extent is, relative to the good stuff. They drive out together to an abandoned drive-in to hang with Nathan's crew, and Tom really begins to wonder about a lot. It turns out that Charlize and Asher wonder about the same thing, and Nathan blows up at the suggestion, and in amid the explosion Tom suddenly realizes that both Daria and Jane would have found the abandoned drive-in cool, in their disparate ways, had he only been able to see it alone with either of them, or they with each other.)
It takes months for the project to assume its final shape. Tom has to learn Flash as part of the whole deal. He sets the animation to the Rosenkavalier. It's a first-person perspective made of third-person glimpses, a visualization of an encyclopedia that does not exist whose entries are disjointed surreal fictions, the viewer led through what looks like an interactive CD-ROM teaching about a world gone mad.
"Not schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells's history," he tells himself, "it's your history." The light of learning dying by inches.
Elsie likes it. His parents are deeply unsettled. Well, good: The clips of the burning books had been meant to be deeply unsettling. They bother him.
Elsie has followed him around, out of a mix of pestering little-sister instinct and genuine interest, getting pretty good coverage of his production process with her own camera, a scavenged PXL2000 he had given her a couple birthdays before, and he cuts that footage into a "behind the scenes" video that's an entertaining and honest three minutes.
They visit a family friend on the Bromwell faculty, and Tom asks to interview him. Tom listens like he has spent a lifetime doing; he asks follow-up questions to a man who is accustomed only to making statements. This does not make the Bromwell visit go smoothly, but oh, it cuts together well.
Without intending to, Tom is building a kick-ass portfolio.