I found a room where I sat down and I remember being calmly elated: this was something I could write about, this was an incident I could place into the narrative of the novel I was working on, and I began to think of ways to embellish it—paint it darker, give it an eerier vibe, push evil. I thought about adding the stench of shit from the pile of excrement the hippie had laid out, the knife he was now clutching, a deeper wound inflicted upon the girl, more blood. I wasn’t even looking at the video projected on the wall because I was dreaming a different one.
