Mario's birth and defects (Film and Optics)
That he and his late father had been, no pun intended, inseparable. That Mario’d been like an honorary assistant production-assistant and carried the late Incandenza’s film and lenses and filters in a complex backpack the size of a joint of beef for most of the last three years of the late-blooming filmmaker’s life […] basically being the way any son would be whose dad let him into his heart’s final and best-loved love, lurching gamely but not pathetically to keep up with the tall stooped increasingly bats man’s slow patient two-meter stride through airports, train stations, carrying the lenses, inclined ever forward but in no way resembling any kind of leashed pet.
Context
Filmmaking as the medium of JOI's best fathering: "his heart's final and best-loved love" is cinema, and Mario is the one son let inside it — literally carrying the lenses. Carlisle reads the shoots as anti-passivity engineering (Jim had Mario help erect, furnish, and light the sets rather than doing things for him); the trimmed middle includes the Big Red Soda Water runs to the veiled graduate-intern, which belong to the missed-connections ledger rather than here.