I wouldn't have gone to live in that decrepit and pitifully worn down town if the Man that could reasonably be called my Doppelganger rattled it off of a list of places to live after seeing him in a film.
I tried talking to him, and he insisted that he really didn't want to play it off like that. He told me he had even brought his own list of ghost towns and uninhabited communities, tiny places that die as soon as the Postmaster says adios! and dutifuly creates a new identity, a new set of rules to play with, a new past, a shadow that doesn't need to be there.
Play it off like that sounded like such an off-the-cuff response. I sat in the Cafe Luna that night next to Rose, who I had always assumed to be some breed of ancient, inscrutably strohng California blood. Here before riches or famine or clotted worlds beneath. At the end of the night, Rose wrote a bizarre message - backwards - so that it could be read outside:
Holding my floppy-disk camera, I took a picture of the message as I left. Rose looked happy as she tossed all the designs and postersand photographs into garbage bags. She looked so happy that I found it alarming, and I screamed like a young, seething boy as a kind-of trifecta of madness, mania and fear came across her face and she cobbled towards me. I had no choice but to fall, and she had no other choice but to do what she said - to chase, to beg and to writhe. !