worthwhile. And if they want to imprison me, why wait as long as they have?
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. They’ve got the wrong guy.
But the Thin Woman knew exactly who I was. As did the ticket agent at the airport and the clerk at the Bauer, all of whom studied my passport. She wanted David Ullman here. And now I am.
This internal debate, I realize, has been conducted with an imaginary O’Brien. There is a pain in my chest as I wish she were with me now. She would have answers that the O’Brien of my making doesn’t.
I turn on the camera.
I don’t try to run, don’t try to call the polizia . For some reason I am certain that I’m not in any immediate physical danger, that I haven’t been brought here to be strapped to a chair.
The man before me is why I am here. He is the “case.” The phenomenon.
I press REC and look through the camera’s viewfinder, square it on the man in the chair. In the corner of the frame, the digital clock starts to tick away as the footage rolls in. The autofocus briefly blurs him before it adjusts to render him clearly on the screen. Still asleep.
I test the zoom button. Push in closer to exclude the floor, the walls.
1:24
Then closer still, so that only his upper body and head fill the frame.
1:32
Suddenly, his head jumps up straight, throwing wet tendrils of hair off his forehead. Eyes wide open, at once alert and glossed with exhaustion. For however long he rested his chin on his chest, they never closed. He was never asleep at all.
He stares directly into the camera’s lens. And I hold it on him. Recording his expression as it shifts from a blank apprehension to recognition. Not of the room, but of me. A smile spreads over his face as though at the arrival of an old friend.
But the smile grows too wide, his mouth stretching open until the corners tear open old scabs there from when he last performed this trick. It bares all of his teeth.
He snarls.
Fights against the restraints that hold him in place. Thrashing his torso to one side, then the other, testing the chair’s fix on the floor. The screws remain secure, but the force of his struggle sends creaks through the room’s entire structure, the light fixture swinging over my head. In case it falls, I take a step forward. A step closer to him.
A slight pause before he lunges his head at me. Stretching his neck and shoulders as far as the restraints allow. And even farther. His body elasticized, extending forward whole inches past what I would have guessed the natural length of his spine would allow.
I step back again to a safe distance. Record what feels like minute after minute of his seizure. Barks. Spits of white froth. Voices emanating from within him, growling and hissing.
He is insane. A violent madman in the middle of an extended fit.
Or this is what I try to convince myself it is. It doesn’t work.
Everything he does is too intentional to be a sickness of the mind. It appears to be the random, pointless sufferings of some advanced neurological corrosion, but isn’t. What is being shown is the revelation of an identity, however alien. It has the patterns, the crescendos, thedramatic pauses, that come from some internal consciousness. One meant for the camera to record. For me.
More unsettling than his most explicit shocks—the feminine cackle, the agonized whinnies, the eyes rolling back in his head to reveal whites so bloodshot they appear as tiny maps of pain—are the moments when he suddenly sits still and looks at me. No words, no contortions. His persona is “normal,” or what I take to be what remains of his formerly sane self: a man of roughly my own age, unsure of his whereabouts and trying to calculate who I am, how he might alter his situation, find the way home. A man of intelligence.
And then, each time, his expression changes. He remembers who he is, the nature of his plague, and a cascade of sensations—images? emotions? memories?—returns to him in a rush.
That’s when he
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. They’ve got the wrong guy.
But the Thin Woman knew exactly who I was. As did the ticket agent at the airport and the clerk at the Bauer, all of whom studied my passport. She wanted David Ullman here. And now I am.
This internal debate, I realize, has been conducted with an imaginary O’Brien. There is a pain in my chest as I wish she were with me now. She would have answers that the O’Brien of my making doesn’t.
I turn on the camera.
I don’t try to run, don’t try to call the polizia . For some reason I am certain that I’m not in any immediate physical danger, that I haven’t been brought here to be strapped to a chair.
The man before me is why I am here. He is the “case.” The phenomenon.
I press REC and look through the camera’s viewfinder, square it on the man in the chair. In the corner of the frame, the digital clock starts to tick away as the footage rolls in. The autofocus briefly blurs him before it adjusts to render him clearly on the screen. Still asleep.
I test the zoom button. Push in closer to exclude the floor, the walls.
1:24
Then closer still, so that only his upper body and head fill the frame.
1:32
Suddenly, his head jumps up straight, throwing wet tendrils of hair off his forehead. Eyes wide open, at once alert and glossed with exhaustion. For however long he rested his chin on his chest, they never closed. He was never asleep at all.
He stares directly into the camera’s lens. And I hold it on him. Recording his expression as it shifts from a blank apprehension to recognition. Not of the room, but of me. A smile spreads over his face as though at the arrival of an old friend.
But the smile grows too wide, his mouth stretching open until the corners tear open old scabs there from when he last performed this trick. It bares all of his teeth.
He snarls.
Fights against the restraints that hold him in place. Thrashing his torso to one side, then the other, testing the chair’s fix on the floor. The screws remain secure, but the force of his struggle sends creaks through the room’s entire structure, the light fixture swinging over my head. In case it falls, I take a step forward. A step closer to him.
A slight pause before he lunges his head at me. Stretching his neck and shoulders as far as the restraints allow. And even farther. His body elasticized, extending forward whole inches past what I would have guessed the natural length of his spine would allow.
I step back again to a safe distance. Record what feels like minute after minute of his seizure. Barks. Spits of white froth. Voices emanating from within him, growling and hissing.
He is insane. A violent madman in the middle of an extended fit.
Or this is what I try to convince myself it is. It doesn’t work.
Everything he does is too intentional to be a sickness of the mind. It appears to be the random, pointless sufferings of some advanced neurological corrosion, but isn’t. What is being shown is the revelation of an identity, however alien. It has the patterns, the crescendos, thedramatic pauses, that come from some internal consciousness. One meant for the camera to record. For me.
More unsettling than his most explicit shocks—the feminine cackle, the agonized whinnies, the eyes rolling back in his head to reveal whites so bloodshot they appear as tiny maps of pain—are the moments when he suddenly sits still and looks at me. No words, no contortions. His persona is “normal,” or what I take to be what remains of his formerly sane self: a man of roughly my own age, unsure of his whereabouts and trying to calculate who I am, how he might alter his situation, find the way home. A man of intelligence.
And then, each time, his expression changes. He remembers who he is, the nature of his plague, and a cascade of sensations—images? emotions? memories?—returns to him in a rush.
That’s when he
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