The Photographer

I heard a sound, like thumping, thudding, like heavy footfalls. It sounded as if it were coming from inside my apartment. I turned away from the monitor, from the film I was watching. A documentary. An interview with a young man. I suppose he looked rather like the departed Heath Ledger. From the hall, I looked to my back door. There was a man standing there, focused on the door handle. I approached. He had keys in his hand and was using them to open my door. My only thought was that it must be the landlord, come to change the locks, or collect rent, or install my smoke detector, or some other thing landlords do. I looked at the man's face, and knew that this was not my landlord. He was old, rumpled. Heavyset and wearing a coarse, oversized winter coat. thick, unkempt grey and white hair, with a beard to match. I opened the door.

"Do you have any?" the man said, as if I should know what he desired.
"Any. . . what?"
"Change! Do you have any change!?" Like it were the most obvious thing in the world. What else would he be letting himself into my apartment for?
"That's what you're here for?" The man nodded. I sighed, and rolled my eyes, and was about to shut the door. I stopped -- I don't know why -- and considered. I do have change. Plenty of it, in a jar. Two jars, even.

I went to the computer room, and found my small jar of change. I poured some of it out onto the desk. There were more dollar and two-dollar coins than I would ever put in my change jar, but it felt wrong to deny him those simply based on the fact that they weren't cast-away slivers of metal. I wasn't giving him anything at all if I wasn't giving him something that I valued. This gift of coins was about sacrifice.

I gathered the coins and put them into a glass, a low, wide octagonal tumbler. It was filled half-way. There must have been almost twenty dollars there. I went back to the kitchen to find he had let himself inside, and was looking around, innocently, as if admiring the shabby architecture. I handed him the glass.

"Thank you," he said. "I'm going out to dinner with my wife. I have reservations at . . . " But I had tuned him out. My eyes swept over the kitchen. Something was strange. When I turned my attention back to my guest, he had, in his hands, an ancient Minolta SLR, its black metal roughly scratched and weather-worn, but at the same time gleaming, pristine in some places. It seemed I could see the camera twice, but in the same place, and at the same time. Two sides of the same coin. New and Old.

The photographer was focusing the camera on my television in the kitchen, taking photos not of the TV itself, but of the football match it was displaying. He held the lens flush against the curved glass screen of the TV, an extreme close-up of the player in blue-and white stripes, dribbling the football up the field towards his opponent's net. I decided to leave him be, and went back to my documentary. The interview was over. Police were handcuffing the young man, about to drag him away, and at their feet lay the bodies of three people, the interviewer, the cameraman, and some unknown third party, all of them had become his victims. I turned off the monitor with a feeling of shame, and turned, bumping into a small Japanese man in a Domino's Pizza uniform, blue and red and white. The box he carried in his left hand was bright orange, from pizza pizza.

"Did anyone here order a pizza?" He asked. I looked at the photographer, who had come into the room. He shrugged and shook his head no. I left the apartment, and knocked on the door across the hall. A voice called:

"Yeah?"
"Did you order a pizza?" The door opened. It was a young woman, long, dark hair and bangs. Her name was Emily. Behind her was another girl, much smaller.
"Thanks André," She said to me. "I told them the wrong apartment. . . "

And then I woke up.