What I Loved

camera, and said in a clear, precocious voice, "Happy tears is sweating." A little girl in a filthy tutu and crooked tiara bent close to a friend who was wearing a pink skirt on her head. "Don't worry," she whispered in a conspiratorial voice. "It checked out. I called the man and we can be wedding girls." "What's your doll's name?" Bill asked a neatly dressed little girl with cornrows in her hair. "Go ahead," said a woman's voice. "You can tell him." The little girl scratched her arm and held the doll toward the camera by one leg. "Shower," she said.
    The anonymous children came and went, aging by increments as Bill watched them, his camera lingering on their faces as they explained to him how things worked and what they were made of. One girl told Bill that caterpillars turned into raccoons, another that her brain was made of metal with eyedrops in it, a third that the world started with a "big, big egg." After a while, some of his subjects seemed to forget he was there. One boy stuck his finger into his nose and dug happily, retrieving a couple of crusts, which he promptly ate. Another, his hand deep in his pants, scratched his balls and sighed with pleasure. A small girl was seen bending down beside a stroller. She began to make cooing noises and then she grabbed the cheeks of the baby who was strapped into the seat. "I love you, you little dumpling," she said, pinching and shaking the cheeks. "You honeybun," she added fiercely as the baby began to sob from the pressure of her fingers. "Stop that, Sarah," said a woman. "Be nice." "I was nice," Sarah replied, her eyes narrowed and her jaw locked.
    Another girl, slightly older, about five, stood beside her mother on a sidewalk somewhere in mid town. The two were seen from behind as they looked into a store window. After a few seconds, it was clear that Bill was most interested in the girl's hand. The camera followed it as it roved her mother's back, moving north toward the shoulder blades, then south toward the buttocks. Up and down, up and down, that small hand idly caressed the maternal back. He also filmed a boy stopped on the sidewalk, his small face screwed up in tight belligerence, a sparkle of tears showing in the corners of his eyes. A woman seen from the neck down stood beside him, her body tensed with rage. "I'm fed up!" she bellowed at him. "I've had it with you. You're acting like a little shit and I want you to stop!" She leaned over, grabbed the boy by the shoulders, and began to shake him. "Stop! Stop!" The tears fell down his cheeks, but the boy's expression remained stiff and unyielding.
    There was a resolute, pitiless quality to the tapes, a dogged desire to look and look hard. The camera's focus remained close and tight as the children grew taller and more articulate. A boy named Ramon, who told Bill that he was seven, explained that his uncle collected chickens— "Anything with a chicken on it, he buys it. His whole basement is chickens." A plump boy, probably eight or nine, in wide jean shorts glowered at a taller boy in a baseball cap who was holding a box of candy. In a sudden fit of anger, the shorter boy said, "Shit on you," and pushed his adversary violently to the ground. Pieces of candy flew as the boy on the ground started crowing in triumph, "He said the S word! He said the S word!" A pair of adult legs ran into the frame. Two little girls in plaid uniforms sat on cement steps and whispered to each other. A foot away, a third girl in the same uniform turned her head to look at them. Bill caught the child's profile. As she watched the others, she swallowed hard several times. The camera moved through the crowd of schoolchildren and recorded a boy, with a mouthful of gleaming braces, as he removed his backpack and slammed it against the shoulder of the kid next to him.
    The longer I watched, the more mysterious I found the pictures in front of me. What had started as ordinary images of children in the city became over time a remarkable document of human particularity and sameness. There were so many different children—fat, thin, light, dark, beautiful children and plain children, healthy children and children who were crippled or deformed. Bill had filmed a group of kids in wheelchairs who were lowered from a bus that had been designed with a lift to bring the chairs to street level. As she rolled her chair off the mechanism, a chubby girl of about eight straightened herself up and gave Bill a mocking royal wave. He filmed a boy with