Summary

Jim, Elster and Jessie meditate on the nature of heat—the word as well as the concept, how its form relates to its content. They pass the days talking, contemplating, wondering what they should be doing, if anything at all. Jim thinks about film, what made him interested in filmmaking, how he used to watch them, absorb every aspect of the production process: the cast and crew, the vocabulary, the job titles. Jim has stopped counting the days since he arrived, “somewhere around twenty-two” (66).

He closely studies Jessie’s behavior: the way she organizes the dishes and cleans them in a systematic fashion, how she reacts like a “dumbfounded cartoon child” when her father mentions the possibility of spotting a bighorn sheep in the desert (67). Now, he seems more intrigued than infatuated, as though he has a detached, abstract kind of crush. She tells...