She’s so serious and so earnest that I have to throat-clear a chuckle into oblivion. “I won’t get mad.”
With a half-unconvinced sigh, she opens the laptop and plays a video. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s our most recent episode, in which I assembled an admittedly too-bitter pizza topped with radicchio. It takes me another moment to realize that there’s no sound, but before I can tell her to turn up the volume, it happens.
A voice.
The original sound is gone, muted, in favor of a new vocal track. A voice speaking in a calm, measured, yet somehow breathless tone all at the same time, like a golf announcer. A voice with the slightest trace of an accent that could be British. Maybe. Or maybe not.
Finally, I realize—it’s Aneesa.
She’s dubbed over the entire episode, using some strange variant of her own voice. It changes the nature of the show—suddenly, it’s not some kid telling you how to make a pizza, but rather an admiring onlooker who encourages others to peek in and see something wonderful happening. The whole operation transmogrifies from a simple process story to an appreciation of the labor and the love and the art.
“… now watch as Chef Sebastian dices the onion,” faux-Aneesa purrs with satisfaction. She calls me Chef Sebastian throughout the episode. “I really respect such skill with a knife, don’t you? So deceptively simple. And now… into the pan, to sauté! I wish you could be here to smell the olive oil and the onion.…”
Silent and amazed, I find myself caught up in the moment. Even though those are my hands on the screen, and I know exactly what they are and will soon be doing, I can’t help but admire the craft and the precision on display. I’ve watched my own videos before, of course, but always with my own voice narrating, always acutely aware that This is me. This is me. Now, though, it’s an entirely different experience.
The video ends and Aneesa turns to look at me, worrying her lower lip. “Well? What do you think? I just thought”—she rushes on—“that maybe a different kind of narration might, I don’t know, change things up a little, but if you hate it, we don’t—”
“I love it.”
“You do?” Her expression goes from worry to delight at light-speed, with no intervening steps. Even if I didn’t love the new narration, I would fall in love with it right at this moment from the sheer joy my approval brings to her face.
“It’s just what we needed. It takes the focus away from the guy making the pizza and puts it on the pizza.”
“But it also makes you sort of mysterious!” she says excitedly. “It’s like, ‘Who is this mysterious Chef Sebastian?’ And that will get people thinking and talking and watching. I can go back and reedit the old ones. There aren’t that many of them, and no one’s really watched them yet.”
I nod, not even hearing her now because something else has occurred to me. It popped into my head when I said It takes the focus away from the guy making the pizza and puts it on the pizza.
“There’s one more thing we need,” I tell her. “The most important thing.”
“What’s that?”
I grab her hand, too preoccupied to be surprised by my own boldness, and drag her off to the kitchen.
Later, we watch a rough cut of that day’s new episode together. Aneesa narrates in her almost-British golf-announcer voice as I assemble a crabmeat-and-roasted-artichoke pizza atop a super-thin crust, with cheddar and alfredo sauce. It’s mouthwatering, and I cannot imagine anyone watching this—with the exception of those allergic to shellfish and super-observant Jews—who would not want to press themselves through the screen and take a bite.
Which is what’s been missing. As the pizza comes out of the oven, Aneesa zooms in for a super close-up. My hands disappear and then reappear wielding a pizza cutter. I deftly (if I do say so myself) bisect the pie on the diameter twice at right angles, then halve one of the quarters.
Then Aneesa’s hand comes into frame, snagging a slice by the crust and lifting it. With only a minimal amount of camera jiggle, she manages to follow her hand, turning the camera on herself as she guides the slice to her mouth and takes a huge bite.
And chews.
Eyes rolling in bliss.
“That is so good!” she exclaims, and takes another bite as we…
Fade to black.
“It really was,” she says now, toying with the crust of her last slice. Between the two of us, we inhaled the entire pizza while watching the rough cut. Usually we save a slice or two for Mom. Not today.
“This is what was missing.” I can’t help myself; I grin. “When I heard you narrating, like you were enjoying the whole process, that’s when I realized. We need a person. It’s about the pizza, but we need to show someone enjoying it.”
And it’s about her, too, I don’t say. About that look on her face the first time she took a bite of that pumpkin-and-manchego pizza. That look that thrilled me. If it thrills our audience half as much…
Who am I kidding? I don’t care about the audience. Just watching her.
Nodding, she types at the keyboard for a moment. Our page’s keywords are updated to include “girl eats pizza.” She pauses, thinks, then revises to “Muslim girl eats pizza.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Just sounds better. So, I guess it’s pizza every day for me from now on. Man, I’m going to get fatter than fat doing this.”
“Well—”
She chuckles. “It’s worth it.”
We touch pizza crusts like clinking champagne glasses.
And I wake up later that night, my breath hot and rapid. A part of me wishes it were just acid reflux from the pizza, but I know it’s not. It was the dream. A dream of my father.
Sitting up in the dark, I can’t remember the details, but it felt like him, sounded like him, tasted like him. He was there, in the dream, and I don’t know why, but I know that I can’t go back to sleep.
I dress without turning on the light. Two of the stairs to the foyer landing creak, but I avoid them. The front door’s hinges need to be oiled, so I sneak out through the basement instead.
No bicycle tonight; I want to take my time. It takes twice as long as usual, but eventually I arrive at my observation point among the trees, watching the still and silent trailer.
What am I doing? With the pizza stuff, with Aneesa? How have I lost sight of what’s important, what matters? The plan I’ve had for years now, the one that was coming, marching relentlessly toward me.
Is it because I’m happy? Am I happy? I don’t even know. Like love, it’s too foreign for me to translate. And does it even matter what I feel now, in the present? Does that override the past? Can it?
Do I deserve to be happy?
No. Of course not.
I lost sight, yes, but I haven’t forgotten. I promise I haven’t. I’m still going to do it. Yes. I am. I just need some more time. I’m not stalling. It’s only a matter of time. A matter of when, not if.
I promise.