The Archive Replies at 2:17 AM
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
I clicked the link in the email titled "Your Memories from 20 Years Ago" expecting pixelated photos of a party I barely remembered. Instead, I found a video of myself standing in a kitchen I didn’t recognize, speaking to someone just off-camera in a language I never learned. The timestamp said today. The caption read: "Still waiting for your reply." The voice spoke a language I never learned but understood perfectly. "Hello?"
I stood up from my work desk and walked over to look at the kitchen in the video. It looked pale. The dark, wooden floor mirrored that of my apartment in Paris, but in the video’s frame was high gloss tiles. Every surface was reflective and perfect. Not a spot, but not a flash of dust, either. The room looked construction-grade, but freshly installed as if painted yesterday. I had never lived in a kitchen like this, full of light and white marble, but I definitely knew where it was.
We filmed these for class.
In Paris, I was studying archeology and taking my first year of French. As I walked through the kitchen, I recognized my knockoff Adidas running shoes, still covered in ash from the ashtrays in the wobbly Parisian apartment. The cooking smell in the air was beef (boeuf), potatoes (pommes) and garlic (l'ail). There were four of us in the video. All girls. I leaned in and listened to the voice. It was definitely a woman.
"Je m'appelle Elizabeth,” she said. Exactly how it sounded in class.
“Je cherche mon mari,” she said.
As I stepped closer to the screen, I started to see at the edge of the frame reflected in the mirror another person on the other side of the glass. It was a man I didn’t know. A stranger. He had a mustache.
"Now she's saying 'I'm blaming my Spanish colleague for this.'"
"Who is this, and who am I speaking to?"
A nanny on the French tag team.
"When exactly did this happen?"
As I turned my attention back to the woman in the mirror, I watched and listened to her video—and me—again. I say "again" here, but I've never known exactly what I was seeing.
This is an audio transcript of the video below covered in captions. Paragraphs in bold are stand-out moments from my research. -- N.B.
[Begin video feed]
Elizabeth, I found something unbelievable.
So I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you, Cecile...
The woman in the video was pulling the stake out of her shoes and reaching for a beer from one of the players in the background of the frame.
...So you don’t want me to read everything, but I came across a document that you filled out with Joseph robin and your… Around the same time all this started...
A document? What's a document?
I’ll type up what I can, but I need to walk through this with you.
I can barely read your writing.
Me too!
Right now I have my son in the bed...
And I have to walk him back later, but I’ve started...
Into the abyss.
... Once you get, ugh, once you get your… All your documents in line... I’m starting to get a picture of exactly how they messed us up.
I guess I am a mystery.
My God, Elizabeth, I went to the National Archives, but they can do nothing without proof of either residence or death.
This document was made in France.
I went back to New York today to keep up my search and went back to the same apartment building that you’d lived...
You had two Post-it notes and...
...disguised your their bread?
You’re saying I faked my disappearance.
Um, you have, we don’t have a gun thing in Paris, but you wrote like a shotgun down on your box in script. [rhinitis]
I am still here in New York, you will find me.
I asked Michael at the museum about that Elgin bust of you that you took when you left, the one that’s up on archv files...
We? What are you talking about? Somebody Googled me?
He knew your name at the museum.
"Elgin always liked calling dibs after the doctor."
I don’t know how many messages you sent out,” he said, as if he, too, were pulling the string off his waffle hat and was too tired to start over.
You think Martha wrote affidavits of identity. Elizabeth! Someone thought you were dead. The feds must have.
I have never known what sign to read; this was not an image about here. It was off-axis, sharper on the edges--a kind of despicableness. '"Smile for me,"' read the caption, and this was not a glimpse of my own face in some public space, smiling at me. This was a camera attached to my own body, smiling as if... behind, our, me.
That is bone dust, you know, that’s it—what I have always feared— and it’s bone dust behind the eyesockets. He wants me to get the blindfold down and stop this data come. I can’t swear how…
I won’t come find her you know at all where you’ve been landing all this time, and I’ll like, just call you…
[End transmission/record]
[Thud sound on the table]
"Never mind the irony," said someone.
"Whoever is behind the computer screen is not me."
"I think I am dead, and I’m sorry," said Cecile.
"I am still here in New York," said Elizabeth.
"I don’t know anymore what is real.”
--
When I walked out of my apartment in the inverse light of dusk coming on, the Google Streetview image of the place where this video had been captured was clear in the bolted glass of the door. That image of my dingy old apartment (in every way) looked like a day on a river: its reflected water washed clear of dirt and wet everywhere. Where did I learn to make pork in a pot on a green stove?
The camera had focused so closely on my face, I'd missed the person in the room. Not Joseph Robin, but the man standing next to◆ About the ending
❧ About the title