I don’t know why I am here.
The man before me is not him.
As I watch his profile—tilted toward some private delight, speaking on and on—I feel it slowly overlap with the one in my memory. They begin to fuse, as if the present were tracing an old transparency. And yet, come to think of it, I can hardly recall his words at all. What memory is it that I am layering over this face?
What returns to me is not a voice, but a transmission—sound reduced to signals, traveling through electric wires before reaching me. Smoke lit by the pallid glow of a cathode-ray screen. Rows of insistent letters, pressing forward with conspiracy-laced political fervor, extreme and airless.
I hated it—hated it enough to want to claw at my own skin. And still, it is this that remains.。