On the ground rests a slip of paper worth $96. A janitor, mop and cigarette in one hand, kneels down and studies the fine print. CALDER LEG 1: 4, 6, 7; LEG 2: 3.



He stops there. He mops on, smokes on, looks on. Later he returns with a dustpan and wipes up the trash under Seabiscuit’s 1937 MassCap banner.



            Outside, the oval is kept well enough, dragged through and through with a six a.m. tractor and a six a.m. man. The enclosing fence defines pristine as white. In the infield lurks a fountain in its off-season.



            At the nearest betting window, a sign hangs reading “CLOSED.” In the window next to it, a sign reading “CLOSED.”  A third window missing its sign is closed.



            On the wall hangs a painting of a horse standing on a patch of grass. There is no one on the horse, but the length of the grass patch in front of the horse is equal to the length of the grass patch behind the horse.  Behind the painting of the horse is a mural of another horse. There is a man on the horse in the mural, but the painting is on that man.



            A square machine in a hole in the wall prints a slip of paper worth $24. It falls into the hand of a man with a custom-made coat made for someone else in someone else’s era. It will learn if it deserves the ground.



            The man limps out to the track and squints at the finish line. No one has crossed it in three months. Not a single loser. He limps back inside.



            Twelve TV’s in two rows of six flash odds, pools and payouts. POST TIME blinks on the set simulcasting live from Aqueduct. The horses approach the starting gate resolute and in low-definition.



            A cluster forms. All heads turn up, all eyes take in the screen a few feet under heaven. “I know a guy,” the man says. No one mutters an answer. “I know a guy who had a dream about the number five. So he woke up at five and took the fifth train out of the station. There were five people in his car. He shows up at the track, and in the fifth race puts five grand on the five.”



            The race goes off.



            “Horse finishes fifth.”



            2:03:20 later, the race ends. The $24 slip of paper lazily finds the ground, worth nothing.



            The man heads for the machine in the hole in the wall. It does not smell like horses. 

-*Venice, 2016*-



We met the soldiers twice that night, first at the bar and later at the pizzeria. They were American, stationed in Vicenza, and out of uniform for the night. We all lingered in the *campo* for a while, surrounded by old buildings that shrugged like sandwich bread in a backpack.



             Talking small and drinking large, we organized ourselves raggedly, partaking in the rituals that make us human: mating and idol worship. The Harvard boys wanted the servicemen to know *just how much respect* they had for men in uniform. They would *never *have the guts to do *anything* like that. A strenuous week of training meant that the army boys were itching to talk to some ladies—particularly, the lovely Harvard ladies they were *so lucky* to meet that fine evening. I whittled the word “infantryman” with my tongue until it felt like a normal word that could exist outside of a history book. I feigned a shadow of interest in their guns. Then, laughably and inevitably, came the question.



First, the innocuous “Where are you from?”



Then, “New York is great. But your family, where did they—”



            And lastly, “Wait. I’ll bet I can guess.”



            There’s a dreary kind of comfort in the time-honored “ethnic dartboard” tradition. The army boys guessed quicker than most—Charlie’s brothers had both married Filipina woman, wink wink, and Ed had *a real thing* for Asian girls. I thought about my grandfather’s limp and the history of blue eyes on brown skin and then I laughed like 1848-1946 never happened. The soldiers bought another round of drinks and showed us their tattoos. 



Soon, the other girls were gone and I felt their absence like a fishbone in my throat, and I watched the army boys and Harvard boys smoke their cigarettes, and it all swallowed me, that white American maleness that fills a room like steam in a shower.



-*Manila, 1945*-



The Republic of the Philippines took a 10-year breath of independence before the Americans came back in 1945. The whole thing (and by “thing,” I mean imperialism) really got started in 1521 after a visit from a fellow called Ferdinand Magellan, who led the first European visit to the strange little Eastern archipelago. Over the next four decades, other Spanish explorers came knocking, with Catholicism and a colonial regime tucked into their casserole tins.



The revolutionary stirrings began in the 1870’s, a Republic was formed in 1898, and said Republic was crushed by the end of that same year, after the Spaniards handed off the colony to the Americans. After a rocky adjustment (read: famine and war crimes) to American rule, the Philippines was granted Commonwealth status in 1935, marking the beginning of a supposed transition to full independence. This plan was thwarted by the worldwide ruckus of the 1940’s, and in 1942 the budding nation once again found itself under siege, this time by the Japanese. MacArthur and the rest of the American boys were back in 1945, recapturing the territory until July 4th, 1946, when the Philippines celebrated its first Independence Day.



My grandfather was born in 1937, and he limped for his whole life after being hit by shrapnel during Japanese occupation. He had been standing by a small bowling alley near his house when a bomb went off, and after some makeshift surgery in a makeshift medical tent, he never walked the same again. He was carried around on a stretcher until he could get back on his feet, and passing American servicemen would drop chocolate candies into the stretcher to cheer him up. He would make a peace sign with his fingers and shout, “Victory Joe!”



“Cute, right?” my mom quips as she relays this anecdote over the phone, and I say yes, because it’s as about cute as those kinds of stories get.



-*Cambridge - Harvard Kennedy School Library, 1962/2016*-



*SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY IN UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES: *



*The Philippine Experiment*



*by Roman A. Cruz, Jr.*



*a paper presented to*



*The Science and Public Policy Seminar*



*Government 260*



*Harvard University*



*1961-1962*



* *



*            *My grandfather smoked cigars at the Manila Hotel with painters and politicians. He was Jesuit-educated and light-skinned—*mestizo*, meaning he resembled the colonizers, not the colonized. He studied at the School of Public Administration at Harvard, which wasn’t called the Kennedy School because JFK wasn’t JFK yet.  



*A country would be capable of scientific research only after it has reached a certain “stage” of development. We shall be prudent enough to avoid a precise definition of this stage. It will be sufficient to suggest that India and the Philippines are among those who have reached it. Both are predominantly agricultural economies; their levels of literacy, while rising, are in general low by Western standards; their peasants are attached to unsophisticated and inefficient techniques.*



* *



There’s a portrait of him hanging in the National Gallery of the Philippines. His suit doesn’t fit him quite right, or at least the artist didn’t seem to think it did, and he wears boxy glasses. I stumble over his typewritten assessment of the *unsophisticated* ways of the *peasants* in the country he came from. He was *mestizo*. He was *guapo*. He was getting a degree at *Harvard*. Suddenly, the dapper man in the portrait is a doctor in latex gloves and a surgical mask, taking a scalpel to his own mother, pretending he never even knew her.        



*The historical revolutions in science and technology in the West have produced a priceless heritage of knowledge and techniques from which the developing countries scan draw: transferring techniques outright or, where necessary, modifying them to suit their own conditions. And the vast resources being poured by the West into research today are continually adding to that heritage.*



* *



I hold his words in my mouth like cherry pits. He describes the American conquest of the Philippines as an *association* of the two nations, cites a *strong influence of American values on Philippine society*, as if the state filled with brown people had any say in the matter. An *association* of two countries, like the *association* between walking and then limping. *Values* on *society*, shrapnel on skin. *Primitive*, *parasitic*, *pedestrian*: I picture myself storming from a Thanksgiving table, yelling, “The Arabs invented algebra, asshole.” When I call my mom to say that I’ve found his old essays, she tells me she’s crying.



“I miss him so much.” 



My grandfather became president of Philippine Air Lines when his dear friend Ferdinand Marcos became president of the Philippines in 1977—the company had been nationalized after Marcos declared martial law. My mom and her half-brother Gino grew up flying First Class. Smiling stewardesses pushed carts of ice cream and mashed potatoes through the aisles as my grandfather’s airplanes glided through the Eastern skies.



*Wall Street Journal April 10, 1981*



*PHILIPPINE AIR LINES TO GET $65.4 MILLION IN GOVERNMENT AID*



*MANILA — This week PAL reported a 1980 loss of $51.6 million on a 51% surge in revenue to $430 Million. Mr. Cruz blamed the loss on the higher cost of fuel and other expenses. But he predicted that the airline will make a profit in two or three years.*



*            Mr. Cruz's optimism isn't widely shared. Since it began flying to the Philippine mountain resort of Baguio on the eve of World War !!, PAL has always envisaged a brighter future, and since Mr. Cruz took over management of the airline for the government in 1977, the promises have come as fast as the red ink. *



* *



-*Venice, 2016*-



The soldiers were paratroopers, and they were in Vicenza training to jump out of airplanes, and it wasn’t at all like skydiving, because you had 120 pounds of weapons and equipment strapped to your body. *It fucking sucked *and you were lucky not to break your legs while doing it*. *Most of them enlisted because of money issues and family issues and nodded to the idea of becoming a better man, whatever that meant.



“The army sucks dick,” Brandon said. He was nineteen too, and he would have been an English major if the army hadn’t gotten to him first. He touched my knee and smiled. “No offense.”



            His fingertips didn’t go past my knee, didn’t even reach the soft stretch of brown thigh that I was too lazy to shave. I felt all my negative spaces, the gaps and gulfs and concavities that made him feel like he had to say sorry to me, because the army sucks dick and girls suck dick but girls and the army aren’t the same. 



            These are the good guys, I reminded myself, and he bought me a cocktail.



-*Cambridge - Harvard Kennedy School Library, 2016*-



            The worst part of discovering my grandfather’s secrets was realizing that they were never really secrets to begin with. My mother’s siblings are of the “half” variety, born to three different mothers. The Philippines is the only country in the world, besides the Holy See, that does not legally allow divorce. My grandfather’s close friend was Ferdinand Marcos, Ferdinand Marcos was a military dictator who was convicted of murder at the age of 22, and the sentence was handed down by—wait for it—Roman Cruz Sr., my great-grandfather. A few cursory Google searches would have yielded all of this information, yet I did not make those Google searches until I was seated in the Kennedy School library, next to an old man who coughed loudly, wetly, and awfully. 



            We were so similar, everyone told me. He was a writer like I am, as American as victory gardens and gelatin and ham. I read the damning gossip columns and damning newspaper articles, and an inane but still damning blog post by his ex-girlfriend, my uncle’s mother, written nearly eight years after his death. The coughing at the desk next to mine remained loud, wet, and awful.    



*Thursday, September 15, 2011*



* *



*What'll I do when you are far away and I feel blue, what'll I do?*



*What'll I do when I am wond'ring who is kissing you, what'll I do?*



*What'll I do with just a photograph to tell my troubles to?*



*When I'm alone with only dreams of you that won't come true, what'll I do?*



* *



*Those are the words of one of my most favorite songs that later on became the theme song of the film The Great Gatsby.  I love that song.  It reminds me of my life, which, come to think of it, was full of heartbreak. Some hearts, I broke.  Others broke mine.  We left a path cluttered with broken hearts so until one day I said, That's it!  No more heartbreak for me.  I am done with all that.*



* *



            And I was done with all that too. We had little in common. The red portfolio that held his essay yellowed dimly at the edges. I handed it back to the archivist and left the Kennedy School library, which did not yet exist when Roman Cruz Jr. studied at Harvard. We had so, so little in common. I never told him that the Arabs invented algebra, asshole, and I never asked why he refused to call imperialism by its name in his paper for Government 260, and I never got to tell him that the army boys bought me drinks instead of chocolate candies. John F. Kennedy Street opened earnestly in front of me, and my mom filled my inbox with more stories while I cried on my way to class. 



-*New York City - Terrace of His Fifth Avenue Penthouse, 2000*-



My grandfather and I shared this planet for four years. He liked to pronounce the double-L in my name as the Spanish would, foregoing the consonant sound in exchange for a “y” so that the “ella” ending became “eya.” I have exactly two of my own memories with him: confiding in him while sitting on a bench on the balcony of his Fifth Avenue apartment (I thought my mom hated me because she didn’t let me put ice cubes in my chocolate milk), and eating some white, starchy snack that the nurses gave me, the day before he died.  



-*Cambridge - The Walk from JFK Street to the Science Center, 2016*-



Mom



4:22 PM



One more story: when he was growing up, he had a pet pig named Guapa. She was the cleanest and nicest smelling pig, and possibly the only indoor pig in Manila



4:23 PM



When food got scarce, they had to slaughter Guapa. They were all so sad. None of them could eat.            



4:27 PM



Now you have me thinking maybe they’ve been playing us all this time and just made Guapa’s story more dramatic than it was hahah



4:30 PM



I think actually food shortage WAS an issue: google japanese occupation, Philippines, and food shortage



-*Manila, 2014*-



I was sitting in the backseat when my mom told me the wedding photos weren’t real. She and her father both got married within five years of one another, and my mother was forced to invite Emilie, the girlfriend who later became my grandfather’s wife, to the ceremony. (Emilie taught me the word “sexy” when I was four and bought me a velvet Juicy Couture purse after she lied to my mother when I was twelve.) Emilie and my grandfather had two children together and married at the same church a few years later. When the ceremony ended, the wedding photographer called out a roster of family members who would be posing for pictures. My mom, Gino, and their spouses and children were left off the list.



 No, trembled my mother’s voice in the passenger seat. It wasn’t a mistake.



The wedding picture fiasco had caused such a rift in the family that the bride and groom announced a re-take. We staged a second photo shoot, several weeks after the nuptials. In front of an opulent backdrop of red velvet, we dressed ourselves in wedding clothes again, repinned the stiff white lilies and re-fastened the coquettish strings of pearls. My grandfather had always been called *guapo*, and the fake pictures from his fake wedding suggested nothing to the contrary. A *mestizo* man and his *mestiza* bride, and all of his and their children.



I sat in my mother’s lap for the pictures, and we were smiling and waxy-skinned as if we had been embalmed, and we all were dressed in a dizzying, iridescent shade of beige.        

 



      I. 



In the myth of Narcissus, the boy returns to his room late at night. He has had a few drinks and is alone. At the party, a silent man followed him around and wouldn’t shake. Narcissus wonders what his famous face looks like tonight, through the sweat and smoke of the party. He opens his laptop, still logged into PhotoBooth. The webcam’s green light shocks back on. His face fills the display. It is as if the screen remembered him.



      II. 



Late one afternoon in January, a boy sat in my dorm room loading a movie he had brought with him. Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses flickered full-screen on my laptop.



“There’s only one good scene,” he said, like it was the best swing at the playground. Fastforward: Truffaut’s character Antoine Doinel is standing in a bathrobe in front of his mirror. He is looking at himself in the glass and spitting out the names of his two lovers and then his own name, over and over.



“Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel...”



“My film TF told me about this movie,” the boy said, pausing it. Antoine Doinel’s lips froze, pursed on the open vowel, as if he were about to kiss his mother, or his own mirrored face.



“I think I’m going to write my paper on it,” he said. “Talk about Lacan, throw in a little Rorty, mention Picasso’s “Girl before a Mirror” in a footnote, and call it a day. Even has a title already—‘The Mirrored Stage.’ Get it?”



“Nice,” I said, looking at his hands, curled on the keyboard.



“I actually made my own version of this bit last night,” he laughed. “I don’t think I’m going to upload it to my YouTube account or anything, but you want to see?”



“Sure.”



He double-clicked on a file on his desktop. His background was a picture of him swimming in a lake, probably near his home in Connecticut. QuickTime opened, and the video began to play.



In the video, the boy stood shirtless in front of his computer. He looked startled at the sight of his own chest. He moved in close to the display—he must have been using PhotoBooth—and his face glowed pale. Very quickly, in a bad French accent, he began to chant “Antoine Doinel.” His eyes were very still, looking straight back out at me as he looked into the webcam. After about fifteen seconds, he backed away and began to say his own name instead.



The space where I was sitting reappeared. I imagined him saying: “Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz...”



A minute in, the image froze where the playback ended. His face became a million pixels suspended mid-moment, lips pursed on the open vowel, as if he were about to kiss—anyone. I was not sure that he ever had before. The back of my neck was slick with cold sweat. He put his real hand to it, and my real skin. We did not turn our faces from the screen.



      III.



At age thirteen, I made a Xanga, then a LiveJournal. I wrote my heart out and shelved the contents online: my secret book of lowercase i’s and emoticons, my pitiable self-pity. Sometimes I even made up cool-kid tales about my digital alter ego, “julian gewirtz,” who faced problems I’d heard about on the radio or in books. No one could tell the difference. My friends commented, droll as robots. The more vivid, the better—and I admired the most exciting diarists among them, like my friend Aviva, who was in the year above me in school. 



Years later, on the second day of 2009, I moved to Beijing to study Chinese. I knew no one there and was terrified to be going. Aviva was the last person I said goodbye to. After we hugged, she called back from her car, “Skype me!”



At the end of my second week in China, I was as friendless and forlorn as I’d worried I would be. Aviva and I exchanged emails about finding a time to talk. After dinner in China, just after Aviva woke up in New York, I climbed into bed with my computer and logged onto Skype. A bubble popped up on my display: Aviva’s call.I hadn’t used Skype much before. When videochatting on Skype, a large box takes up most of the screen—let’s call it the thou-box—showing the person you’ve called. A smaller box, the Ibox, shows you your own image. In this way, you can see what the other person sees in his thoubox, and your faces appear together, as if you’re in the same room. My friends had been on Skype long before I’d even heard of it.



Aviva’s voice came through sounding like a present packed with tissue-paper. “Let’s try the video?” she asked.The thou-box holding her face sputtered onto my screen. As I searched for the button to turn my webcam on, my I-box was still dark. Aviva’s face froze, and her voice went out.



“What’s going on?” she typed in the chat box.



“No clue,” I responded. 



“Oy. What should we do?”



“Want to try again?”



We did. No luck.



“Another time, then?”



“Too bad. Sure. Just let me know.”



“Alright.”



“All right.”



“I thought either one was fine.”



“Maybe.”



“Bye!”



“Bye.”



I stopped typing and closed the chat box. My laptop hummed hot against my thighs. Inside the machine, its binary heart whirring, could the home I missed be processed? *Oh, one—*



* *      IV.



Last month, E. was sick at home and thought up an experiment. 



She set her laptop and her brother’s side by side. She opened Skype on both computers and called her brother on Skype from her computer. From his computer, she picked up. She accepted her request to video chat. Both screens glowed more brightly. In the I-box, she saw herself. In the thou-box, she saw herself. Then she turned the screens toward each other and lowered her face between them. In each I-box, a small thoubox appeared, and a smaller I-box within, and a smaller thou-box within again.



You can get lost between the screens, if you let yourself.



      V.



On one Friday morning, I had a very clear story in my head when I woke up. I’m still not sure about it.



It was a Friday night, the last time we were together. The hallway at 21 South Street was very dark. No lights were turned on in the office. We sat in old wood chairs and were not speaking. My computer rested on the desk beside him, its pale plastic logo undulating. Upstairs, a few people were dancing to The Supremes. “Reflections” came on. *In the mirror of my mind, I see reflections of you and me, reflections of the way life **used to be, reflections of the love you took from **me.* It’s all in the voice.



I wondered which room was darker, down here or up there. I wondered whether having more people in a room added any light, or took any away. There were three feet of room between us, three feet of silence, and then he stood up and walked out the front door. 



I didn’t move to follow. The only thing I could think to do was open my laptop. The room became much brighter. I went to Facebook, typed in his name, and looked at pictures of his face. I could not get through to it. I don’t remember what song the people upstairs danced to next.



Since that night, I have searched online for his last name so many times that those letters are working their order into my fingers. Have the small muscles in my right hand actually reorganized, rearranged to spell it out? 



I have been trying to get him back from the screen, and the screen has gotten back at me.



      VI.



I took my first computer class in third grade. The teacher, Mr. Peters, was about sixty, as old as Hewlett-Packard. He was deeply tanned, with a crew cut that sat unnaturally on his big head, like a too-tight silver helmet. In class, he held speed-typing competitions and showed us how to use the internet. My parents were delighted that I was getting a true twenty-first century education even in 1999.



One morning, Mr. Peters was explaining to the class the way that computer processors worked. I was bored. My gaze wandered to the bulky monitor, which we hadn’t been allowed to turn on yet, though below the desk the processor was already on. I saw my face reflected in the monitor’s dark, convex glass.



A few weeks before, Mr. Peters had given us an old computer to “dissect.” The machine was on a table in the middle of the room: the girls held back, but the boys swarmed it. We clawed at the box, ripping off the hard black plastic, tearing through the wires, pushing our fingers hard against the sharp metal shapes of the motherboard. The other boys in my class—one would not exactly call them my friends—pushed me to the side with an accidental elbow to my ribcage. I spent the rest of the period watching the action. I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was no blood.



Mr. Peters was still talking. Suddenly he was pointing triumphantly in my direction. “Just like how your brain works!”



I began to blush, but the head-rush didn’t stop with my cheeks. I felt a hundred wires—red, yellow, blue—quivering inside my skull. Copper plates, cool to the touch, pressed against bone. My eyes widened, screens opening onto a world of glimmers and beautyless bits. The classroom around me, the students at their desks, even Mr. Peters, were all flickering furiously. I was surrounded by holograms. 



And then it stopped. No one had noticed. My chair was hard beneath me. The monitor was still dark. I do not have a computer in my head.



      VII.



When I boarded my flight to Paris, I checked my email on my phone. Rachel, one of my oldest friends, had sent me a picture she’d taken of herself, a “selfie,” with a tray of fresh-made croissants:  *Self-Portrait* with Baked Goods. She was living in Paris, studying patisserie on a lark before starting at Yale. She wrote, “I’ll keep them warm until you get here!”



It was the November after we’d graduated from high school, the November of our gap year, and we were going to travel together. When I got off the Metro by Rachel’s apartment in the 4th, the sun had just crept over the horizon. A pinkish light filled the city’s bare trees, as if they were loaded with cherry blossoms. I felt tired and dirty. Few people were up yet. I noticed a woman walk past me. She was wearing a blue cotton dress and white wedges, but I couldn’t see her face. She paused quickly to fix her hair in the screen of her smartphone, then hurried on.



I dropped my bags at Rachel’s. She gave me a cold chocolate croissant and bad coffee and ran off to class. The croissant was delicious. 



I spent the day around the Marais. I went to a well-lit parfumerie and dabbed a half-dozen scents on my arms. I became a waft of lemongrass, vervier, clove, drifting through the city. I ate an omelette at Café Beaubourg, next to the Pompidou. I sat out in the Place Igor Stravinsky staring at strangers—cruising or people-watching, the difference is hard to remember—but didn’t meet anyone new.



The next day, Rachel was still busy with school. I went out to Versailles for the afternoon. The sky was one white cloud. I dawdled through the perfect gardens and the empty palace. I walked through the Hall of Mirrors. It must have been more impressive when Louis XIV built it, back when mirrors were rare and marvelous, like a wall of man-made diamonds. But now? The room was very chilly, and the pale sunlight glaring on the polished floor startled my eyelids closed. Shielding my face, I walked up to one of the mirrors and gave myself a looking-over. I noticed that the skin on my left forearm was red and raised. It didn’t look good.



I hurried back to Paris. Maybe I’d been allergic to one of the colognes, had contracted a horrible skin infection in transit, had an STD, had scarlet fever. What I didn’t have in Paris was a doctor, and Rachel was at school until the evening.



I got on my laptop and searched the Internet for pictures of something that looked like whatever was breaking out on my arm. I didn’t find anything that matched, so I decided to crowdsource. I pulled out my iPhone, took a picture, and uploaded it to an online medical message board. The caption on the photograph: “Does anyone know what this is?”



The next morning, I woke up early to re-pack. Rachel and I were heading off to Vienna. I was happy to notice that the rash had disappeared. I never checked to see if my post had gotten any replies.



In Vienna, Rachel and I went to the opera and the museums. She brought her sketchbook to the vast Kunsthistorisches Museum. I left her in a room of statues. 



The first time I read John Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” too early in high school, I wasn’t sure whether the painting that the poem reflects on really existed. “The portrait / Is the reflection once removed.” But there it was, Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, a small, dark circle framed on the museum’s wall. The sheen of the oil paints really did make its surface look like glass. I spent a few minutes watching it.



I don’t normally like to take tourist photographs, but—perhaps because I had been rereading Ashbery—I decided to take a selfie with the Parmigianino painting. All I had with me was my iPhone. I held it in front of me, my rash-free arm crooked so that I could position the painting in the frame. I saw my face in the screen, and Parmigianino’s behind. My thumb pressed a silver button, and the shutter clicked.The picture came out passably: not too blurry, with decent lighting for a smartphone photo. A piece of my hand holding the phone intruded at the bottom of the frame, bigger than my head—I’d kept it there too long after clicking the camera button. I looked a bit confused, but that was all right. I was a bit confused. I wandered back to find Rachel.And I deleted both the photos from my iPhone. I didn’t need to look at them again.