Two hundred and fifty

Richard Attenborough.

I think I must have seen him first in The Great Escape (1963); it was one of the movies in the background of my childhood to which I added actors' names as I learned them. Jurassic Park (1993) was the first time anyone told me his name and The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) was when I started paying attention. I still haven't seen Brighton Rock (1947) or 10 Rillington Place (1971), although I know they're famous; I haven't seen In Which We Serve (1942) in so long that I can remember the stoker's arc perfectly well, but nothing about Attenborough in the part. (To be fair, I have the same problem with John Mills.) When I think about him, mostly he looks like Roger Bartlett and Lew Moran—I've seen them the most times. I don't think of him as looking like anyone behind the camera of Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) or Gandhi (1982). I'm missing a lot.

Ninety is a reasonable age. Links to the past break all the time, even if it's past that never existed off the screen. The pictures are there.

She moves like a cold breath in the air

Of last night's dreams, I remember most vividly the plot where an eclipse turned the moon silver and its light could be caught in an earthenware dish, turning it to a mirror and then to silver plate. Various factions were jockeying to be in the right place at the right hour of night, not all of them human; I don't even think it was our world. There was royalty in the faction I was mixed up with, less a lost prince or a returning king than a great-grandnephew I'd known at the university I didn't study at, here. It wasn't Faerie, although I recognized that I would have characterized them that way if I hadn't known better. We ended up on a hill surrounded by parked cars, some of which were rusting; we'd negotiated some ridiculous situations to get there, but I have only vague memories now of arguments and running down hallways and something about a tour bus, which I very strongly believe wasn't ours. The moon was impossibly huge and mazelike in the sky, like a rope knot of twisted silver. I watched the light from somewhere else wash across it like fire through a reflection in a darkened window, until it was white-hot and heavy as metal in a foundry. And the young man who wasn't a prince of anywhere held out the dish and there was no thundering pour of energy, no industrial light effects; it brightened in his hand until the light began to fade. Like a piece of theater, that simple and that symbolic. The moon was still too big for the sky, but it looked like a drawing on parchment rather than some planet-sized sculpture half wedged into starry space. And then something came swimming across the air between the moon and us. It looked most like a nudibranch, a little, rippling slip of bright color with soft horns and tentacles and a mineral dryness to its skin: azurite blue with dusty red outcroppings. By the time it reached us it was a person, although not even the same kind as the nonhuman people I was already with. She wasn't an alien any more than they were fairies. (She wanted to be called Deirdre. She wasn't retelling anything; the name was as arbitrary as calling her her.) She looked more ordinary than any of them and that was how we knew, whatever she was, it was stranger than we could imagine.