A shot. A shot in the dark; the dark of a small room at a time that was somehow larger because there was more time; more time to play, to be a part, to be apart; to be a part of the shot, shot with a small camera in a small room, a long time ago.

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The Plenitude: New York Water Towers

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He said: "I don't mind being around mad people. I often find myself in their company. Crazy people are just like the rest of us except that they are not firmly anchored to this world. They disperse, like water that has been heated in a pot. They are more ephemeral than "sane" people. Mad people will laugh when there is no joke being told. They will panic when there is no one else around. They see things that we can not see and they do things that are unexplainable. But, in some ways, they are inspirational because they must deal with so much more than we do. They fight on several levels and that is why I admire some of them. They succeed in spite of themselves."

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She said: "We were always afraid because of the illegal books. We would hide them in our room, but was always afraid that they would be found. It would have been very bad for both of us if the illegal books had been found. These books were banned! I loved to read Pearl Buck and Faulkner. Ahmina was always reading Camus and sometimes Hemingway. You could always find the outlaw books at the market. Sometimes someone would smuggle them in for you, but it was very dangerous. Every once in a while we would hear of a book seller who had been arrested for having banned books. I could stay up and read a book all night and be shaking with fatigue in the morning. It was dangerous, but we loved our illegal books."

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He said: " There was something about me, apparently, that people found attractive. It wasn't my face and it wasn't my body, but something inside of me that I sometimes had trouble controlling; like I could start dancing when there wasn't any music to hear, or I could drive to a neighboring state to see the sunset over a lake I'd heard about; or sing to a record and feel that I was right there in the song, or feel a tear roll from my eye at the remembrance of a book that ended with the main character's regrets. Or sail a kite in a snow storm; things that "normal" people don't do during their "normal" life. But it was the "not normal" part in me that people seemed to tune in on and enjoy watching or joining in on. I don't know why, really. I don't think of myself as being any different than anyone else. I don't hardly think of myself at all. Maybe that's the part that the most strange of all. I don't know anymore. I don't know what to think."

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She thought to herself: "This is so amazing: a tree that looks like it is on fire on someone's roof. This means something, but I can't think what. Maybe it's a sign; fire in the sky; the end of days or something. Like the Seventh Day Adventist people who knocked on my door and then asked me if I thought this was the end because of global warming and no food left for poor countries and sky high gas prices and all. I don't know, but I can't help but feel that by the time we figure it out, it will probably be too late."

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Report from The Plenitude: The Beach

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He said: "I lost something back there. I know it sounds stupid, but the only way I can describe it is to say that what I lost was my soul, whatever that is. Instead of warmth, inside I feel cold. I wake up screaming in the dark. Everything is dark. Some of the guys have that look that I see so much of in their faces. They look like blanks. They do crazy things. I saw on of the guys in our troop shoot about 100 bullets into a body that was already dead. And he was laughing and screaming cuss words at the same time. I'm different than I was before, but not in a good way; not in the way I thought I would be. My uncle said that it would make a man out of me. He was in Nam; said it was the best thing in his life. I can see now that he doesn't have a soul anymore either to have said something like that. So, that's why I can't recognize or celebrate any holiday that's build around a war. Any war, anywhere, ever. It don't mean anything to me."

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