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Sport 38: Winter 2010

A Degrading Story

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A Degrading Story

Everybody has had one of those flatmates. I'm not talking about the arsehole, the guy who steals the rent money, or fills the house up with his worthless friends, or cracks racist jokes in the kitchen, or never does the dishes, or bends your ear talking about his problems with women, or disparages your taste in music and television, or is always drunk or always stoned, or won't eat vegetables, or will only eat organics, or likes to strut around in his dressing gown all day, as if he were Hugh Hefner and your flat the Playboy Mansion. Those archetypes play no part in this story.

Gordon was the other sort of flatmate that everybody has had. He was a young male professional, average height, build and looks. When he came to ask about the room he spoke softly and never quite met our eyes, but we gave it to him anyway because he was the best of a bad lot of applicants. Being friendly, helpful young people, we offered to help him move in, but he declined and shifted his stuff by himself on a Sunday morning, while we were all sleeping or busy with our part-time café jobs.

When I walked past his door, later that day, I could not resist the temptation to snoop inside, but found nothing of real interest, just a single bed, a desk and a chair, a computer and a CD rack half-full of predictable albums. As I stepped out of his room, Gordon stepped out of the bathroom at exactly the same time, and perhaps things would have turned out differently if that had not happened, perhaps we would have come to know him better and he would have trusted us more, but I cannot say for sure. I grinned when I saw I had been caught and made up some lame excuse about looking for him—we're all in the lounge, like, going to make some nachos and watch reality shows, if you're interested—but he just shrugged and mumbled something, brushing past me, closing his door behind him and not opening it again until the following morning, when he left for work.

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When he returned in the evening the door was closed again and this pattern continued, day-by-day, week-by-week. We would only ever see him flitting up and down the hallway through morning or evening shadows, maybe ducking into the kitchen to quickly toast a cheese sandwich. We tried to rouse him once or twice, knocking on his door to say that we were playing cards in the lounge if he'd like to join us, or having beers out on the porch if he fancied a brew, but he always declined and we always forgot about him. Please remember that we were still young and too preoccupied with our loves and hates and passions to spare much thought for the life of some mostly absent data-processor, who occupied the least desirable and most expensive room in our flat. And so Gordon became the sort of flatmate that everyone has had.

When I think about Gordon now, the first stanza of that old poem by Dame Edith Sitwell always springs to mind.

Do not take a bath in Jordan, Gordon,
On the Holy Sabbath, on the peaceful day . . .

It seems appropriate somehow. I can only wonder at what Gordon thought of us: the bright young things he shared the flat with. At one time, his life had not been so very different from ours and if he had not been quite so bold as we were in our bohemian disaffection, nor so smugly self-aware in the dread and mystery of young-adulthood, then he too had at least tasted the euphoria of early love and friendship and had strayed close to the brink of all the life-changing moments and liminal insights that might be expected from one's formative years. But that life was gone by the time we knew him. Gone and almost forgotten.

Each day he lived with us, Gordon fastened his tie to his yellowing dress shirt with a clip and walked to his workplace, a cubicle in an office room that was shrouded in venetian-blind shadows. He chewed biscuits in the break-room, made small talk with the co-workers who found him pleasant but 'kinda weird in a, you know, a quiet sort of way', and then hurried home each night to cook his usual dinner of ramen noodles and frozen mixed vegetables. He would retreat with page 238 his bowl into his room, turn on his PC, listen to its crackle of life and power, then sift through his bookmarks for a porn site, then hunch over into a teapot-like position—one hand in his crotch, the other on his mouse—for the remainder of the evening.

Gordon had come to pornography in a perfunctionary way. At first he was socialised into it, sharing magazines with friends during puberty, swapping website codes and internet files with friends as he proceeded into adolescence. From what I could find out from these old friends of his, he did not seem to like it very much at first.

'He feigned interest, I think,' one of them told me, years later, in a nightclub in a distant city. Of Gordon's old forgotten friends, he was the one most willing to discuss this subject openly with a stranger, though I'd had to perform a number of bizarre and distasteful acts to gain his trust. 'He wasn't really into it. He fooled the others, but not me. I can always tell.'

But Gordon had lapsed back into pornography, as he got older, aided by a broadband internet connection and high-definition computer screen. I am sure that Gordon had told himself that he was just making time between his real relationships, keeping the blood flowing where it needed to. But as the real women fell out of his life, one by one, year by year, the images remained. Legs, arse, breast. Anal, facial, money-shot, fist. The women in his office, the women in the streets as he walked to work, the women he saw in shops, in cinemas, on public transport, they all gradually disconnected themselves from the still-lifes on his screen. Fetish, rubber, costume, latex. Double-penetration, gang-bang, barely-legal. The internet was not a web but a tunnel, a long dark mineshaft, and every night Gordon would click himself deeper and deeper. When he looked up occasionally, as an image lagged or loaded, he would see his face reflected back at him in his window-pane. With his cheeks lit by a yellow glow, his lips long and distended, no eyes visible in the dark shadows of his sockets, Gordon always thought that his face looked like that of a ghost or a demon, hanging in the night sky, above the city lights.

When the first message arrived in his inbox, Gordon barely registered it. He had only just reached the culmination of his nightly search, the point where just one more splash of breasts and thighs and bellies page 239 and buttocks was enough to push him into a hunched and muted ecstasy and therefore failed to notice the you've got mail icon that momentarily lit up his desktop. Now if you think that post-coitus all animals are sad, then just picture Gordon's lonely paroxysms over his computer and you'll understand why it took him a moment to fight down a rising tide of despair and focus once again on the screen in front of him. It was only after he had eased his release into a wad of tissue paper and clicked his web browser closed that he noticed the new message.

You see me.

That was all it said when he opened it. The address wasn't much help either. Lila@prisoner.com. Gordon dragged the email to his trash folder and shut his computer down for the night. It was only some kind of spam, not worth any thought, and it was past 2 am already. He climbed into bed and, through the wall that separated us, I could hear his mattress springs creaking as he rolled back and forth, trying to find a comfortable position, trying to sleep.

When Gordon arrived at work that morning there was a new girl in the cubicle next to his.

'Hi,' she said, peering up over their corkboard partition not long after he had sat down. 'I'm just filling in for Tabitha. I'll only be here for a week.'

'A temp,' Gordon said.

'That's right,' the girl nodded happily, 'just a temp.' She was younger than Gordon, in her early twenties, with straight dark hair and glasses. 'What's your name?' she asked him.

'Gordon,' he told her.

'I'm Lila.'

Gordon looked up at her sharply. 'That's funny . . .' he started to say.

'What is?'

'No, it's nothing. Nothing's funny.'

'Okaaay . . .' Lila raised her eyebrows and then sat back down at her desk, vanishing from view.

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'It's nice meeting you,' Gordon said, because he felt that he should say something more, but Lila did not respond. He could hear her fingers on her keyboard through the wall of his cubicle. He did not like her.

That night he found a new website, entered his credit card number and started to click through its archives. Photo after photo, thousands of them, catagorised by date, by model, by theme, by position. As always, Gordon felt an initial thrill at the unknown expanse of it all, the elation of unfamiliar faces and bodies, motifs and camera angles, but that faded before too long as the images blurred with his memories of all the flesh he had seen before; all the falsely ecstatic grimaces and pleasure-lidded eyes, all the squeezing, writhing and twisting before the camera. Still, Gordon had started to work himself into a rhythm when the mail button on his web browser lit up again. There it was, the same message.

You see me.

Gordon looked back through his browsing history for any indication of where the messages might be coming from. In the list of URLs from the day before yesterday, he found it—prisoner.com. He did not remember ever visiting any site of that name. He followed the link; the site took a long time to load, but when it did all he could see was a grainy video playing against a black backdrop. It showed a basement room, bare and dark and empty save for a figure swaddled in blankets, leaning against the wall. It did not move. Gordon watched for five minutes, then ten. Then a pale white hand started to push out from under the blankets, so slowly that Gordon almost did not register it at first. It tapped its fingers along the concrete floor, as if it was feeling out the space for the first time, and then started to tug at the blankets, pulling them down. That was where the video cut out, just before the face of the figure was exposed, freezing as a connection error signal flashed up on screen. Gordon deleted all his emails, and then went to bed.

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Over the years, I have come across other people who had seen that website, though they never wanted to discuss it with me in any detail. In New Jersey, I met the manager of a pornography warehouse, who had stumbled upon it once, shortly before the collapse of his marriage. He had received emails as well, though he would not tell me what they said. A year or so later, I found myself sharing a cell in a Thai prison with a man who claimed to have visited the website three or four times. Eventually he admitted that he had seen the figure pull the blanket all the way down. What did its face look like? I asked, but he had refused to answer. A week after that, he was stabbed five times during a soccer game in the prison yard and died that night in the infirmary. From my own experiments in later years, I found that connecting to the site was almost impossible. Although I often checked it daily or hourly, the link was always dead. I only ever saw the room once, at the end of my search.

The next day, at lunch, Lila had sat down next to Gordon while he was eating his sandwich on a bench outside their building. 'You're kind of awkward,' she said, after he rebuffed her initial attempts at small talk.

'What do you mean?'

'I'm guessing you haven't talked to a woman in a while. Socially, I mean.'

'That's none of your business.'

'No need to get defensive. I'm just curious.'

'Why?'

Lila smiled brightly. 'Maybe I think you're cute.' She stood up from the bench. 'I'm taking the afternoon off,' she said. 'I'll see you tomorrow.' Lila walked off down the street, her heels clacking on the pavement until she had turned the corner, out of sight. Gordon tossed his half-eaten sandwich into the bin. He had lost his appetite.

When he got home, Gordon did not turn on his computer. Instead he sat on his bed and stared at it as the sun went down outside, sinking his room into shadows. Eventually, I passed by his half-open door in the hallway and saw him sitting there.

'Hey Gordon,' I said. 'Is everything okay?'

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He looked up at me, surprised, distracted. 'I've met a girl,' he told me.

'Well . . .' I chuckled a little. 'That's good, isn't it?' 'I don't know,' he said. 'I don't think so.'

At work, the next morning, he checked Lila's cubicle, but she was nowhere to be found. In the late afternoon, Gordon hid himself in a men's room cubicle and masturbated, hunched and furtive, but was soon distracted by his cellphone's buzz, alerting him to a new text message.

I see you.

The sender listed was Lila@prisoner.com. Pulling up his pants, Gordon pushed his way out of the cubicle and looked around the men's room. No one else was there. But outside, in the corridor, Lila was waiting for him.

'Gordon!' she said. 'Haven't seen you all day.'

'Did you just send me a message?' he asked.

'How could I do that? I don't even have your number.' Lila leaned back against the wall, smiling. 'I did leave you a message though, on your desk. I wanted to invite you over for dinner tonight.'

Gordon stared at her. 'What are you talking about?'

'Dinner.' She reached out, running her fingers lightly along his arm. 'You'd like to come, wouldn't you? Of course you would, I left my address on your notepad.'

'Why do you want to know me?' Gordon asked, a tremor creeping into his voice. 'No one wants to know me.'

'See you tonight, round eightish,' Lila said, as if she had not heard him. 'I'm clocking off now.' She started to walk away, down the corridor.

Lila's home was a little way out from the inner city, hidden at the end of a valley, a small, single story bungalow with flaking white paint and an overgrown garden, surrounded by dense, dripping bush.

'I don't know why I'm here,' Gordon said when she opened the door.

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'I do,' said Lila, 'come on in.'

He stepped over the threshold and she led him down the hallway, into the kitchen. A flat stale mustiness hung heavily in the air, a faint scent of decay, the odour of rising damp. The kitchen table had been set up for dinner: placemats and wilting flowers in a vase, an open bottle of wine. On the floor, next to the table, Gordon noticed a trapdoor set in the floor. It was fixed with a rusty iron pull-ring and half-covered by a faded rug.

'What's that?' he asked, tapping it with his foot. The boards creaked.

'Just my door in the floor,' Lila said. 'Sit down. Dinner's almost ready.'

Gordon sat down and allowed Lila to pour him a glass of wine. She started to talk about the office and the weather and other tiny banalities. She asked him where he had grown up, where he had gone to university, and Gordon found himself answering, tersely at first, but then more fluidly as he remembered what small talk was, and he started to relax almost against his will, allowing the air to fill with the pleasant neutral hum of chatter. Lila served him dinner: thick slices of roast meat, pink and oozing, over-cooked potatoes, yellowish vegetables. The wine and heavy food made him feel light-headed and tired. He was not used to this much company, this much conversation, even the gentle back-and-forth of dinner table banter was too much.

'I don't know why I'm here,' he said again at one point. 'I really don't.'

'I do,' said Lila, smiling at him over the rim of her wineglass.

'Why did you ask me to come?'

'It's just nice,' said Lila. 'Nice to see you.'

That night, Gordon's dreams took him on a race through dark places. He could feel someone's hot breath on his skin, a woman's voice murmuring sleepily into his ear, the silky smooth rub of a bare body brushing past him in the blackness, teasing fingers running along the line of his jaw then looping around his throat and squeezing down. Then all of these sensations were gone and Gordon found himself standing naked in Lila's kitchen, falling to his knees and pushing back the rug that hid her door in the floor. Outside, the rain was page 244 pouring down in torrents and somehow it was pouring down inside the house too, Gordon's body was slick with water, his hair pasted flat to his scalp. He could hear a fist beating against the pane of the kitchen window, an aching, repetitive thump. From further off, deep in the darkness, came a ragged, raspy gulping noise, like the sound of someone swallowing water, draught after draught down a dry throat. Wrenching back the trapdoor, he plunged down into a small, dusty basement room where a figure was hunched up against the wall, covered with a blanket. Gordon watched, shivering in the dark, as the pale hand pushed its way out from beneath and slowly started to pull the blanket down. The swallowing noise grew louder and louder. I'm not here, Gordon thought. I'm not seeing this. I'm not seeing this. But before he could move the blanket was thrown in his face and the figure had knocked him back against the far wall, pressing its cold, bony, distended body against his. Gordon tried to scream, but the folds of the blanket filled his mouth, smothering him, and that was when he woke up, tangled in a knot of his own bed sheets.

'Gordon?' I said from the hallway, knocking on his door then hesitantly pushing it open a crack. 'Mate, I think you're going to be late for work . . .'

Gordon sat up in his bed, blinking groggily. He ran a hand through his sweaty, spiked-up hair. 'God . . .' he said. His head felt thick and heavy and his mouth was dry; he could still taste the souring flavour of Lila's undercooked meat from the night before. Beneath the sheets, his skin felt raw and tender and his body tingled, energetic, electric, like something about it had changed, like it did not quite belong to him in the way that it had used to. 'I can't even remember coming home last night,' he told me. 'What time did I get in?'

'I didn't know you were out,' I said. 'I mean your door was closed . . .'

'I should get to work,' Gordon told me.

'Are you okay?'

'Fine,' he said sharply, almost angrily. 'I'm fine.'

I closed his door, unconvinced.

Gordon arrived at work half an hour late and slipped into his cubicle without anyone noticing. He sat there for a moment, breathing hard, page 245 concentrating. He could hear Lila shifting and moving in her chair on the other side of their corkboard partition, he could hear her fingers tapping on her keyboard, her faint sighs of frustration, her brief, bored splutters. Minutes ticked by. Eventually he stood up, peering over the divide. 'About last night . . .' he started to say, but then stopped, because Lila was not there. Instead, there was Tabitha, plump and middle-aged with her frizzy hair and laughter-lines, re-arranging the photos of her family on her desk.

'Sorry Gordon,' she said, looking up at him, smiling. 'What can I do for you?'

For a moment, Gordon couldn't speak. 'Excuse me,' he said, then hurried out of his cubicle and knocked on the office manager's door. 'The temp who was filling in for Tabitha,' he said, 'what company did you hire her from?'

'We had a temp filling in for Tabitha?' the office manager said, swivelling round to face him. 'Shit, I don't know, things have been pretty crazy . . .' He flicked his thumb through the stack of forms and memos in his out-tray then shrugged. 'Check with HR.'

Two flights up, Gordon confronted a blond HR woman in pink lipstick and a shoulder suit. 'We may have hired someone, it's possible,' she said, 'but I can't remember getting a request.'

'She was here all week,' Gordon said.

The HR woman nodded, not quite meeting his eyes, looking at the space just above his head.

'There must be forms,' he said.

'Oh, sure,' said the HR woman.

'Contracts.'

'Undoubtedly.'

'So will you find them for me?' Gordon asked.

'No,' said the HR woman.

'Why not?'

The HR woman looked up at him, frowning slightly, like she had just realised something. 'I don't like you,' she said.

Gordon left his office that day at lunchtime and did not go back. Instead, in the thick afternoon rain, he caught a bus out to Lila's neighbourhood. The journey took him over hills and through narrow page 246 winding streets, jolting him from side to side in his seat with sharp twists and bends, his breath slowing misting the window next to him until the outside word was lost behind a soft, white haze. When the bus shuddered to a halt at the end of Lila's street, Gordon pulled his jacket up over his head and ran to her door, the rain pounding his back with hard, heavy droplets. He knocked, but got no answer.

'Lila!' he called out, hammering harder and the unlocked door slowly swung open. Panting, dripping, Gordon stepped inside. 'Lila?' he called again, but got no answer. He walked slowly down the hallway, this time noting the water-warped floorboards, the long streaks of green mould in its cracked and peeling wallpaper. In the kitchen, the table was still set up for dinner, with two placemats and two plates smeared with dark food scraps. A cockroach slowly crawled up over the rim of the vegetable bowl, flopping down into a forest of cold yellow broccoli and blackened carrot. Gordon had not noticed how barren the kitchen was before, with all its grimy surfaces and rusting utilities. He peered down to the open door of Lila's bedroom and saw nothing but a frame and a bare mattress, the sheets all bunched up in a sweaty tangle at the end of the bed. Turning back into the kitchen, Gordon felt that something was hanging heavily in the air, an odour of rot, cloying and sickly sweet. He dropped to his knees by the kitchen table, took hold of the dusty rug and pushed it back, but the trapdoor underneath was now secured with a heavy chain and padlock. He thought he could hear someone moving around, a scratching, shuffling noise from down below. In his pocket, Gordon's phone started to buzz.

I see you.
I see you.
I see you.

Gordon climbed to his feet and fled the house.

Gordon did not go to work for the rest of that week. The office manager called, the HR woman called, even Tabitha called, expressing a warm, matronly concern, but Gordon never emerged from his room to take the phone. No, he's not sick, we were forced to say. No, it's not a page 247 family problem. He just won't come out, no matter how many times we knock. He won't talk to you.

Gordon became even more of a ghost than he had been before. Now we never saw him in the mornings or afternoons, but somehow his presence in the flat became more tangible as the days passed. We would wake in the night to hear him murmuring or pacing back and forth in his room. A stale, sour smell seemed to linger in the hallway outside his door. Bills went unpaid. Rent was due. A hurried meeting was called in the lounge and the vote was unanimous. Gordon had to go, something had to be done. But we were all bright, beautiful young things and therefore unused to confrontation. None of us wanted to be the one to deliver our ultimatum. And so we continued to meet and discuss and agree and resolve and Gordon's door remained closed.

Inside his room, Gordon sat hunched over his computer, surfing back through every website he could remember visiting. He entered all the sites he had ever joined: the vanilla, the hardcore, the cheesecake, the fetish. He visited every bulletin board, forum or group, laboriously clicking back through their archives, through every post and picture, one by one. He sat at his desk until his knees and elbows ached and his eyes stung from the pale computer light. He clicked on and on, barely moving, barely blinking, through day and night, across an endless, pleasureless expanse of bare flesh and false ecstasy. Here were two woman with shiny, candy-floss skin, clutching at each other in front of the camera. Here were two hairy men, penetrating the orifices of a single squirming girl. What was Gordon looking for? Perhaps he was trying to find the right link, or the right pattern of links, whatever had triggered the messages and brought Lila into his life. Perhaps he was simply trying to reclaim his history, his real history, having realised that he was no more than the sum of the sites listed in his browser. He was the bright red flash of a mature-content-warning, the garish provocation of a pop-up ad, the solid cold boxes that sat on the screen, waiting for his credit card numbers. This was all of him, the whole of his life.

Outside his room, our meetings continued. Eventually it was decided that I should be the one to ask him to leave. 'You know him best,' one of my flatmates said. 'He should hear it from you.' I resisted for as long as I could, but then the constant meetings and discussions page 248 became too much for me and so I found myself hesitantly knocking on his door and then pushing it open, stepping over the threshold, into his lair.

'Hey Gordon, I need to . . . oh Jesus . . .' I recoiled at the sight of a Japanese Hentai picture: a green-tentacled monster raping four anime girls with its penis-shaped appendages.

'Yeah,' Gordon said. 'Sorry.' He clicked the web-page shut and hit the link to prisoner.com again. Connecting . . . Connecting . . . No connection.

'What is it?' he said.

'I'm sorry, mate,' I said, 'but we're going to have to ask you to leave . . .'

'That's okay,' said Gordon.

'It is?'

'Yeah,' he said, not taking his eyes off the screen. 'I'll be gone soon anyway.'

'Well, thanks for being so understanding . . .' I hesitated in the doorway, but Gordon had already gone back to his web-surfing. 'Hey,' I said. 'Whatever happened with that girl you said you met?'

'We still see each other,' Gordon said.

The message came two nights later. Gordon was dozing on his bed when the you-have-new-mail chime of his computer woke him. He sat up slowly, blinking into consciousness, his joints snapping and popping. It was still raining outside, like it had been all week, and the heavy droplets flecked his window pane and drummed on the roof. He sat down at his desk and peered at the screen. There it was in his in-box: <no subject> from Lila@prisoner.com. He clicked it open.

I see you
You see me
I see you
You see me
I see you
You see me

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He stood up from his desk and opened his door, stepping out into the

hallway for the first time in days. In the kitchen, Lila was waiting for

him.

I knew you'd come, she said, smiling. Her pale skin seemed to ripple

with a sickish plasticity in the dim light. Looking down, Gordon saw

for the first time that a jagged black hole had been cut into the lino in

our kitchen floor. There was no telling how deep it went.

What's that? he asked.

Just my door, Lila said. Just my door in the floor. Then she took a step backwards, into the hole, and, after a moment, Gordon followed her.

In the morning, when we woke up, the door to Gordon's room was open and he was nowhere to be found. We waited for him to return, or at least to call and make arrangements for his stuff, but days passed and then weeks. Eventually we had to report him missing. His family got in touch and his brother came around one afternoon to collect his things. I was curious to meet him, but he could not tell me much about Gordon; he had not seen or heard from him in years. I helped him carry Gordon's stuff out to his car, but he hesitated when it came time to pack up the computer. 'Ah hell,' he said. 'I'll never fit that in the boot. Why don't you just keep it? He must owe you money for something . . .' He walked out of the flat, in a hurry to make traffic, leaving me alone in Gordon's barren room, facing the bulky, brooding machine that still hummed away on his desk.

My search began. Of course I agreed with my flatmates that I would sell the computer and divide the money with them, but I kept putting that off. Instead, I would slip into Gordon's old room at night and sift through the files on his hard-drive. I found his recent browser history: pornsite after pornsite, but always returning to prisoner.com, always returning to that broken connection. On Google, Gordon had searched for the phrases I see you and you see me and had clicked through hundreds of pages of results.

My flatmates soon forgot about Gordon, throwing themselves back into their classes and part-time jobs, their troublesome romances and unfulfilled creative urges. Sometimes, at a party or in a bar, they page 250 would mention that one weird flatmate they'd had, but then everyone has those kinds of flatmates, don't they? But I could not forget. Site by site and link by link, I started to follow Gordon down the rabbit hole.

Some of this story I have made up, but the rest has been built from bits and pieces, over many years and between many countries. I began by seeking out most of the people who had ever known Gordon, but that had only been the start. From the websites he visited, from the forums, archives, groups and chatrooms, I gleaned scraps of information that led me to locate others whose lives had mirrored his in some way, people who had seen things and had allowed themselves to be seen. He was not the only visitor to prisoner.com. Other people had ventured down through its door in the floor and this discovery led me to expand Gordon's pattern further, clicking it out into even darker online realms. Of course, my long search has required certain sacrifices and has led to several unpleasant misunderstandings in my life, both personally and professionally. And what have I got in return? Nothing but a story, an incomplete story, a degraded story, perhaps even an imaginary story. But then aren't they all?

And yes, of course, I have paid my own visits to that site. I think that the prisoner is different for everyone and I am not sure whose face may be waiting for me beneath the blanket. I do not know how much longer my search shall continue, I cannot even say why I began it in the first place, and there are nights when I think that I only became obsessed with Gordon's story because it is easier to tell than my own. During daylight hours I do my best to put these thoughts out of my head and I go about my business, treading the lonely routes between work and home. I am not sure if anyone sees me yet. Time will tell.