It's simple. We roll up, two of us, to some loser whose wife ditched him. We find him parked on a chair by the bathroom door, pants still shiny from the seat. Remind him he was, not so long ago, a bigshot official. Then, rough, almost like cops, we start barking orders. Cops get answers. So do we. We stick him in front of a window, and while he’s somnambulating, picking the emptiness off his sweater, I set up the camera. The correspondent quickly preps the poor bastard, and we're off. I look through the viewfinder—I don't recognize what I'm doing. I don't care about the disgraced official, and even less about my partner. I'm studying the wall behind them, the background. Yeah, they’re both in frame, in focus, but I'm drawn to the breathing of the walls, I'm examining the wallpaper. Maybe an expert would find traces of cocaine on it, left by this guy snorting misery the night before. Maybe a fake passport from some ridiculously far-off country is stashed under there. I don't care about that. Used to. I used to practically worship those brave, energetic journalists, doing their independent investigations, spying, juggling clues. I was like them. Nobody got jailed because of me, nobody got into trouble, but I felt that rush, that buzz only a journalist knows. I loved it.

Ever since I first saw you—not on screen, but in real life—one word kept popping into my head: A.T.T.R.A.C.T.I.O.N. It was what I'd always felt for almost everything around me, without exception. Attraction became a natural trait for me, it soaked into my bones. I stopped noticing it, just like I don't notice how my hair curves around my right ear like a wave because of the camera, and like a waterfall on the left. I got so used to it that I stopped showing it outwardly. I'd have to play attraction for it to even show, even if it was something super important to me. The storms that raged inside me since childhood, they're only getting stronger. Meanwhile, externally, I'm more composed, my temper less explosive.

He told me: if you don’t want people to trash your footage, pay more attention, feel the picture, live in it. That was the editor talking, a guy who knew jack shit about camerawork and consistently raved about my stuff. Yeah, I get flak a lot. But not for the quality of my work. If only they knew what a picture in the lens meant to me! No, not like that… if only they knew what is a picture to me! If only they could see the wallpaper behind the boring subject of the report, like I can! They trash me because I'm a journalist. People love trashing journalists.

He told me: if you want to shoot something truly magical, something that will send everyone into ecstasy and piss nobody off, go to North Island—shoot there. Bullshit.

And now I was here, on the North Island. The camera was in the car, just because it's always there. I was walking. The day before, they'd treated me to another corporate party scene. We were chilling at the golf club after a tough day. We'd shot an insane amount of footage about the economic forum. Thoughts barely crawled in my head when the wall cracked, when the juice of goddesses streamed onto my face, my forehead. I ran across the golf course, balls whizzing past—about once every three minutes. I just ran. I was happy to be alone. My mind was full of economic jargon, which, turns out, fits perfectly with love woes, it plugs the holes in formulations. I’d never loved, hey, you!

How do I phrase what I need to tell you? I ran and thought about you. My state was so weird, my impressions so jumbled, my perception all off. Drenched in heavenly nectar, I kept repeating to myself. I repeated words of love, like second-graders reciting lyrical poetry.

If only I could convert you! No, don't laugh. I'm facing a stagnation of feelings. Cheap credit for large batches of attraction. I... I you. You're my accelerator. Yeah, something like that.

Well, where does that get us? Only one word could save me from these vulgar mixtures of economic jargon and attempts to articulate my feelings, if that's even possible. A.t.t.r.a.c.t.i.o.n. That's what I kept repeating. I was already passing the club buildings for the second time when one of the gray employees—some analyst from some department—called out to me. These are those boring, ugly people, tirelessly impressing you with their dull consistency and practicality. Attraction!

“Hey, Glenn, are you running?”

…That's typical of an analyst. I would have understood the question if it was delivered reproachfully. No, he asked it dead serious, expecting an equally serious and practical answer. But I looked at him closely enough for him to realize what an ass he was—and ran past.

"Glenn, don't you want to join us?" — This was serious now. The editor-in-chief. I stopped, shook his sweaty calloused hand with all my might, caught my breath, and exhaled a greeting into him. "Good work today, right, Glenn?"

"You gonna give me tomorrow off? Otherwise, I'll drop dead right onto the camera."

"We wanted you to shoot something," he nodded, giving me the day off. "The chairman wants to speak—it's barely half an hour. Then you can shoot some pretty views—girls, the field, little cars."

The last thing I wanted to do that evening. I slowly walked toward the gates to get the camera from the car. Some drunk crowd, from the cultural department, I think—such CULTURED ladies—latched onto my ear: "Glenn, why don't you have a drink with us?"

Damn it! Usually, I just pretend I'm not attracted, but this time, I genuinely W.A.S.N.'T.

Coming back with the camera, I kept my distance, so they classily shrieked across the whole club: "Glenn, are you gonna film us? Girls, who's pouring me some 'Roja'?" "Glenn, come back!"

See you in hell.

I filmed the chairman, standing on a podium in the conference area, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. Was that fat or piss on his leg? Moron. Gotta change the angle. His legs! Should probably cut them off later, I thought. The audience looked like Bandar-log, poorly shaven and armed with golf clubs and barbecue tools. Yeah, almost everything annoyed me that day. It was a unique day. I felt like someone else. The chairman's legs were red and scrawny, especially contrasting with his sweet little face, which was made of a yard-wide smile and various trinkets dangling on elastic necks like snail eyes.

He talked about our holding company reaching a new level. Can't say more, that was the only coherent string of words. I thought about you. How you'd look in that golf club! You'd conjure untamed whirlwinds, you'd make the sand in those bunkers form your name. You'd light up the whole field with a single gesture, a mere glance.

When the pig was gone from the podium, I found myself surrounded by the ladies from the cultural department and their hangers-on. They demanded I film their corporate booze-up. These girls, who in the hallways never allowed themselves vulgarity in my presence, who respected me and often fell for me—they must've chugged all the Roja on this planet—now thought I’d just go and film them. The camera was still rolling—I didn't remember myself, let alone that I needed to turn it off. I grabbed it by the handle and circled the tripod—faster, faster. I ran in circles, and the lens captured a haze of those doll-faced drunks. They shrieked with delight, they chanted my long-suffering name, they grew uglier and uglier in their alcoholic ecstasy, and when the camera started to fall, and I threw myself on my back beneath it to cushion the blow, their jubilation knew no bounds. The lens scraped someone's barbecue plate, liberally doused in some kind of gravy, and that was the end of the chairman's speech segment. Lens trashed, camera saved.

I was supposed to be the star of the evening, but I chose to bail. Needed a walk. I took off the lens, wiped the gunk off, tossed it in my pocket, put on a different, spare one, and left. I just couldn't stand being in that lunacy any longer. Unbearable. I needed a walk to become myself again.

I tossed the camera in the car and headed downtown. I met you at the corner of the golf club fence. You were walking up the sidewalk with your friend, whose name I never remembered. She stopped first. I stood in front of you and reached out. I affectively stroked your shoulder. I touched you. I wanted the camera with me so badly at that moment. I'd communicate with you through it. I'd pretend to interview you. It would be so easy! Then we'd definitely talk. After a couple of seconds, I pulled my hand back. It felt like something was threatening you, I didn't know how to save you. Something like a cable-stayed bridge collapse was happening in my head. I stopped hearing anything, I saw you as a piece of black-and-white photograph, charred at the edges.

I smiled. That, I remember clearly.

I smiled at you and said H., then O., then W. – I could barely think straight.

D. My phone buzzed in my pocket. You looked down, and I kept going.

Y. I wanted to put my hand on your shoulder again, but instead, I watched a garbage truck dump empty bins.

?. My shades fell from my forehead onto my eyes, and I couldn't see anything. Then I ripped them off, threw them on the ground, and stomped on them.

You looked at me as intently as I had just looked at the guy from the department. You pressed your lips together, which, like a coastal wave with its own reflection on a cutting knife, jutted out slightly, becoming incredibly thin, and then you spit me out, a mere splinter, onto the scorching sand. You nodded your head a few quick times, your hair swaying twice as slowly. You drilled, laser-burned two thin trenches into my forehead, then stepped forward.

My hand, my fingers still held the memory of touching that fabric. There were still particles of it, microscopic traces. I clenched my hand into a tight fist and slammed it against the asphalt. It crumbled, gave way. Or so it seemed to me. That's how I perceived reality. And again in my head, in those holes of yours, on the endless electrodes of your sinister fork, the same sediment settled. I can't play attracted, even if inside me it's stronger than instincts, more inert than creative dreams. Attraction can only be revealed by digging through me, lengthwise and crosswise, by tearing ragged ditches of love-fire-safety through me. I don't bother to do it myself. I won't submit to such self-torture. I want to live.

Life—it's incompatible with trenches. Life—it's a total absence of hedgehogs. Get it now?

I don't dig myself up because I want to live, but I also don't live for the simple reason that I can't till myself like arable land. I'm not earth. Perhaps that's my difficulty.

So thought the prisoner of his own sarcasm, that's how he treated his respect for you, that's how his most remarkable qualities manifested: non-flexibility, non-smoothness, non-scatteredness. How easy it is to mistake them for one crime: non-attraction!