I take my camera out to load it moments before I shoot. “Fuck, what the hell is this roll of film from?”
I open a drawer. A lonely roll of film stares up at me. “Fuck, what the hell is this roll of film from?”
I reach in my purse, a pocket, a cupboard. “Fuck, what the hell is this roll of film from?”
Mystery rolls.
When Zoetrope: All-Story asked me to design this edition, I wanted to draw from my archive. Af . . .
Hotels were different in those days. You could smoke in them. The rooms had bathtubs, where you could also smoke. You didn’t need a credit card or identification, though you might be made to sign the register, so later the private detective—just like that, we’re in a black-and-white movie, though I speak only of the long-ago days of 1993—could track you down. Maybe you anticipated the private detective, and used an assumed name.
Nobody was looking for me. I didn’t use an assumed name, though I wasn’t myself . . .
A few years ago, I was summoned to the local office of Homeland Security for fingerprinting, but my fingers did not yield acceptable results. The staff wiped the screen violently and then examined my fingers, and the routine procedure was prolonged without resolution. For the next few months, I received a notice every other week, summoning me for another attempt, until, after the sixth failure, a final notice instructed me never to show up again but to wait for the police department to contact me.
A woman at a party, upon hearing my fingerpri . . .
It began with the subterranean stealth of a pandemic. Later, we would each recall our first encounter with the thing, the moment in an otherwise routine day when someone, our spouse, perhaps, or a flight attendant on our plane, or the nice lady who takes our clothes at the dry cleaner, suddenly burst into tears for no obvious reason. And such a strange sort of weeping this was, so quiet, so seemingly detached from personality, that whoever was shedding tears had no idea they were crying. Our quite natural alarm—Are you all right? What’s the matter?—quickly led to . . .
