anti:freeze

A body, when revealed again to the earth's surface, will tell the story of its own burial. If eye caps dig into the underside of the eyelids, if screws wind through the jaw to clamp the mouth shut, if cotton is packed into the ears, anus, nose and throat, the body was embalmed. Which really means it was most likely buried with funeral rites. For the archaeologist, this means it was excavated from a cemetery (perhaps one long forgotten) and not a random burial site. Embalmed bodies are not normally buried in random plots.

The skin flakes away after an embalmed body is lowered into darkness. Cracked, like the surface of an old painting; shattered like a dropped mirror. When the body's fluids leak into the coffin lining, conditions become perfect for mold - a thin layer of black spores spreading over the skin's surface. The softest under-parts decay faster because of the moisture, while the brain is preserved in shape and form. Embalming reverses the direction of decay - legs first; torso and head last. The forensic taphonomist searches for these signs; determines if a body was dug up from the grave of an unknown cemetery (for even these go missing, become anonymous) or if perhaps a murderous shovel sealed a lost man's fate beneath the cold dirt. Sometimes there is no skin or casket left, and the eyecaps and screws must be sought out in the soil layer, loose, like bones popped from sockets.

It's the peeling-paint skin that amazes me. The paint of old houses on Iowa highways. The paint of closed-down car garages and gas stations. Of unrestored chapels and ancient caves. When a body is not preserved, the skin cracks and slips away in pieces, like little continents, drifting into the soil, disappearing into the sediment layers.

When buried by people who long to keep you alive, your body becomes a kind of painting, with a delicate layer of color and brushstroke. And when buried by murder, it collides with the chaos - chaos, of course, not being lack of order or cause, but in the mathematical sense. Continents colliding, landscapes merging. The body's true nature revealed.

on a hillside in Iowa, 1996 (too bad there was no lomo in my life then - this hill would have looked amazing)

Think about the hair you've left behind. The texture, the color, the tapered, razor-cut tips, the highlighted strands you were trying to grow out ... Have you ever shed the same hair twice? Where did you leave your best evidence?

When police collect hair from a suspect or victim, they must test the strands right away. Otherwise the samples lose their value, no longer useful as evidence. Hair changes. Sunlight. Chemical colors dripped into the shaft. Curls twisted around a hot iron, cuticles torn. Over time, strands lose color. Change texture.

Hair grows in three phases - anagen, telogen, and catagen. Anagen is growth, when the cells around the dermal papilla are still metabolizing, dividing, pushing upward. Cells lie dormant during the telogen phase, stop dividing. Strands stop growing. Catagen is the transition between the two. At any given time, ten percent of your hair is in telogen. This is the hair you leave behind.

I have lived in Oregon approximately 1095 days. The average anagen cycle lasts 1000. With ninety percent of my strands in the anagen phase at any given moment, this means I am only just now wearing a full head of Oregon hair.

And I have noticed. In the picture above, my hair was several shades lighter, streaked from the sunshine in Iowa. My hair is darker now, more brown than gold. My skin lighter, less rosy.

It's too late to perform any forensics. My sample no longer matches what I left behind.

lost notes, recovered:

Mondrian moving away from objects (opposite: moving toward them, as in american culture)

The terrorist goes to a strip bar to avoid looking like a terrorist (the terrorist goes to a strip bar because he likes strip bars)

so uncomfortable with people you have to make them into squares

forensic scientist as special expert, with vision into the unseen

The painter is trying figures again, painting two young girls amidst the forest and flowers. His critics do not understand what he's trying to do. It's not about portraits. He is trying to show people what they could be. Thus he paints the girls red, washes them in the stain of the next world.

A figure in space?

What about space inside a figure?

How tall do you suppose a building has to be before it dissolves into the immaterial?

The critic will ask: If the painter can't paint people, why does he paint? Can the painter paint people? Aren't all people just high-level abstractions?

If the painter can't paint ideas, why does he paint? Can the painter paint ideas?

The man who reads the bible to himself, under his breath (the one who sits at the center table at the cafe, the one who hasn't showered in months, so thin the bones of his knees poke through his pants) buys a small square of dark chocolate every day. He likes the texture of the foil, how it feels when he opens it. I can tell because he opens it slowly, crinkling the thin silver between his fingers.

*some of these notes became their own notebooks, and later, their own essays ... funny to see them again in their raw form.

People are always getting all over everything. Their hair sticks to sofas and they leave a trace. They touch their lover and their fingertips leave a trace. Paint chips fly from their cars. Saliva sticks to their lovers’ mouths and can be detected with a swab. Semen on the sheets. Blood on the shaving razor. Carpet fibers stuck to shoe soles and left behind on the tile of a diner’s greasy floor. No one ever really disappears without a trace. -From my essay, Interstate Radiographs

I was first introduced to forensic art four years ago, while excavating old memories and news articles for an essay. I was obsessed with Tammy Zywicki - a woman who had gone missing back in 1992, and whose body was found ten days later, stabbed to death and wrapped in a red blanket, dumped beside a Missouri highway. Why couldn't I just let her go? Hyperlinks led to more hyperlinks, questions to more questions, and every new fact complicated my memories of the case. I stared hard into her black-and-white photograph, and I realized this image was all I really had. It was worse than DNA, worse than a hair sample or skin cell. I wanted evidence, something I could use to tell her story.

That's when I learned about forensic sculpture, how artists can reconstruct a face from just the skull. Wasn't this what I was doing? From that day forward, I began to think of writing as forensic, meaning that it uses an essentially scientific process to establish facts about a case (facts which are later called into question by yet another forensic process - see below). All the little fragments and objects of our lives - makeup scraped beneath fingernails, chemicals laced in the cuticles of the hair, torn tights and piles of dirty clothes, the specific frequency of a voice, chipped teeth, limps, worn-down shoes, pollen trapped in ink as we drag a pen across the page - are evidence. They are not evidence simply because they exist, but because they exist within a specific context. That is, they form spatial and temporal relationships that can tell a powerful story. Rigorous investigation adds dimension and depth, uncovering the emotional and intellectual connections, making poetic leaps from one piece of evidence to the next.

This is not literal. I don't take my writing to the laboratory. But it is not exactly a metaphor, either. Think of it as writing in an epistemic mode. I am a detective, and so I understand the world in terms of evidence. A pathologist who thinks not in terms of disease, but in terms of the mechanism of death. Or a forensic pathologist, too, examining shattered skulls, determining whether accident or blunt force trauma broke the bones. A scientist, constantly aware of my biases. An artist, concerned with aesthetics.

Forensic has more than one meaning, and one of them is relating to, used in, or appropriate for courts of law or for public discussion or argumentation. And so, I am also a prosecutor presenting her case. A defense lawyer cross-examining witnesses, calling their testimony into question. Just as the prosecutor takes evidence before the court, so does the writer take the specific - and often dark - details of her life (or the lives of others) before an audience. That point of intersection is what I'm interested in, the place where epistemology ends and collaboration begins. The audience - the jury - changes everything. And I want them to do this. Without this transaction, my process is incomplete. The writing might as well be a diary entry. This is different from writing for an audience, or with fantasies of publishing in a particular journal. It requires that you write in order to ask more questions, not to solve them. Let the story emerge from the evidence. Let the audience construct the narrative.

This is why I often write in fragments, barely tracing a narrative arc between the lines. It leaves my process - and my epistemology - bare, so that the story emerges from the relationships between evidence, as opposed to an explicit rendering on the page. You might even call this sculpture in reverse - a peeling away of the layers, until I can get back to the rawest form of evidence I can find. But like the prosecution and defense, I have to make sure I give enough. There's a fine balance between collaborating with your audience and making them work too hard.

It is also why I love Mondrian, with his primary colors, golden rectangles, and meticulously ordered compositions. He, too, was excavating evidence, looking for ways to reveal truth without telling it outright. His compositions reveal the structural relationship between man and nature, humanity and divinity. Vertical lines represent the universal, horizontal the individual. Intersection is the place where his art lives. Primary colors, for primary sources. No portraits. No myths. Only the structure is explicit. The rest is left to his audience, his jury.

The same is true of Mark Rothko, whose color-field paintings are all about transaction and transformation, structure and its relationship to truth. E.L. Doctorow's City of God is probably the best literary example of what I'm getting at, with its multiple voices and fragmented narrative.

As for why I think about process at all, perhaps R.D. Laing says it best, in The Politics of Experience:

The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.

There is really nothing more to say when we come back to that beginning of all beginnings that is nothing at all. Only when you begin to lose that Alpha or Omega do you want to start to talk and write, and then there is no end to it, words, words, words. At best and most they are perhaps in memoriam, evocations, conjurations, incantations, emanations, shimmering, iridescent flares in the sky of darkness, a just still feasible tact, indiscretions, perhaps forgivable ...

City lights at night, from the air, receding, like these words, atoms each containing its own world and every other world. Each a fuse to set you off ...

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.

*I have added a forensics category in the sidebar. My very first post on this blog was about forensic taphonomy, a field which has captured my imagination so deeply I'm considering a career in it.

Forensics is all about individualization. Saliva smears on a half-empty glass, loose hairs trapped in the vacuum cleaner, paint chips, shoeprints, tire tracks in dried mud, cigarettes smashed out on the garage floor - all of these are unique. Clamp your molars into bubble gum, and you have just handed over your toothprint. Light the cigarette, let your spit soak the tip of the filter. You are leaving your DNA all over the place. Very few things aren't part of your story.

This is why I still write in notebooks. I love the pressure of my pen as it drags across the thin sheet, the way my handwriting starts out neat and controlled, then expands until it fills several lines at a time. Notebooks are evidence in their own right - a whole stack of DNA samples, right here in my closet. They turn documents into relics. You are not just reading words. You are examining the shape of the letters, the color of ink, the coffee stain inside the front cover, the elastic band that holds the cover shut, the inside pocket, the cross-outs and smears and illegible handwriting, the heavy pressure of the pen one day, the fainter lines a few days later. You are making an identification.

Notebooks remind me that writing is, above all, an epistemological act. The notebooks are not clean. The writing is not controlled. They represent creation in its rawest form. The form before the form. The form that identifies me most.

Did you know there's a whole field of forensics devoted to pollen? That pollen gets trapped inside the dark liquid you trace across the page? That your signature contains an entire landscape? A season?

Later, I will post about the different kinds of notebooks I use, and why each one is devoted to a distinct process or question - another form of individualization.

I. In the lobby of the lawyer's office, Wednesday morning:

Today's newspaper tells the story of a woman who set fire to a house, kidnapped a ten-day-old infant from inside, and raised the baby as her own for six years. Meanwhile, authorities presumed the baby burned to death. The body must have been incinerated, police said. Bone fragments were all that was left. This is exactly what the kidnapper planned. If the baby was dead, it was not a missing person. No missing person, no kidnapping.

The baby's mother, however, had questions. Why was the crib empty when she ran into the nursery? Why was the window pushed open?

Fast forward to January 2004. This mother attends a birthday party, where she immediately recognizes her long-lost daughter among the toddlers. She leans down and pretends to pry bubble gum from the girl's hair, yanking a handful of DNA for the forensics lab.

And the DNA matches. And in that insant, her dead child becomes a missing child.

I am impressed by the mother's presence of mind - that she could press her fingertips into the scalp, yank the hair by its root, remembering the tiny bones in the nursery, the empty crib, the body no one ever found.

The receptionist stands up to stretch, notices the newspaper. "Amazing story."

"I wonder how she knew," I say.

She nods her head. "Mothers just know."

I fold the paper and lay it down on the table, checking my watch. Conversations like this make me nervous. Waiting rooms make me nervous.

The receptionist picks up her coffee mug and sips slowly, staring out the window. "There are no secrets. Not anymore. Not with all that technology out there."

There are no secrets.

Later, I think about the little girl, how she let a stranger tug hair from her scalp, how she never asked to see the bubble gum.

II. In the cafe, watching people walk in and out of the door, Wednesday afternoon:

Did you know that most RFID tags have no batteries? Probing radio signals provide the power, the charge, the spark that brings them to life. In other words, they are charged by the interest that is shown in them.

So what happens when the secrets are all leaked? When you listen in on all my worst days? When I can't hide the lipstick in my pocket, or the torn dollar bill in my wallet, the shrinking measurements of my clothing? When there is nothing left to probe? No need for a new signal, a new spark? Do we all become missing people, now that we can be found?

more rough notes (toward an essay I am writing for a friend)

other notes here, here and here.

Last night, I learned that scientists are mixing lanthanide metal oxide ions with glass, and from this, creating almost-invisible beads. No two beads are alike. When exposed to ultraviolet light, their lanthanide glows in 100 billion unique combinations - like bar codes. These beads can be mixed into ink, spread invisibly across money and letters and political pamphlets, stuck like pollen inside the rough alphabet of your signature.

I picture the beads as microscopic eight balls. The magic kind, with the fortune-telling dice inside. I imagine them stuck between teeth or strung like a necklace around the inside of my neck. I imagine you tossing whole fistfuls onto the pool table.

I think of your tattoo, like a bar code for the coroner, when no dental records are found, no matches in the fingerprint system, no identifcation cards or housekeys strewn in the grass. Who needs the beads when we already have skin? When the tattoo is already unique? How many layers of identity do we need?

I have been learning about geographic profiling. Some initial notes:

In geographic profiling, jeopardy surfaces represent the areas in which a known serial criminal is most likely living. The idea is that you can pinpoint a perpetrator's neighborhood based on the various locations of his crimes - the bars where his victims were picked up, the parks and highways where bodies were left behind. Profilers plot body dump sites and victim encounters on a map, drawing circles to generate Venn diagrams. The killer sleeps where the circles overlap.

How can you plot the movements of a madman? Murderers move just like the rest of us - forced onto the most convenient sidewalks and streets, rushed through the downtown grid, tempted into cafes and restaurants. Work schedules, transportation, education, and class all generate different movement patterns. And certain areas provoke certain behaviors. Imagine the moods and desires sparked by empty parking lots, narrow sidewalks, crumbling warehouses, and shopping malls. While places do not create crime, they can direct it. Geographic profiling, it turns out, requires a deep understanding of psychogeography.

But what about the victims? What enticed them into particular bars or alleyways? Were they wandering far from home? There is no way to calculate their movement patterns, no way to pinpoint their neighborhoods, from the places their bodies are found.

And this, to me, is the ultimate metaphor for loss: when your location plots a point for someone else, when your map is not your own.

Thymidine dinucleotide.

I like the sound of these words - like to break them down to thyme and nuclear. Sometimes, my tongue slips, mixes them into a new chemical solution: thalidomide. I do not correct myself.

Thymidine dinucleotide is a fragment of DNA - made from just two nucleotides. When rubbed into the skin, these snippets mimic chromosome damage from ultraviolet radiation, inducing cells to repair themselves. In other words, you get a tan. Skin lesions take much longer to develop.

What interests me is the source for the snippets - how the most basic - and most invisible - components of our bodies, when forced onto the surface, will fool us. Imaginary damage protects us from real damage. Damage at the surface prevents damage deep inside.

What if I wear this lotion in the commission of a crime, my face and lips and fingertips coated in two extra nucleotides? What if my finger traces your lips and leaves just one nucleotide behind?

Imagine slathering yourself in the nucleotides of a lost lover, watching the tan develop, allowing someone to damage you so subtly, so close to the surface. Just so you can be safe from something worse.

I unload my blueberries, oranges, apples, oatmeal, & cherries and smile at the Whole Foods cashier. My cheeks flush. This is the cashier that used to smile at me in the aisles when she walked past, the one I thought sort of liked me. Until I complimented her haircut, and she recommended a barber shop on Hawthorne, and I repeated the compliment and she looked at me like I had just asked for a free pound of bananas. Now I catch her staring at me sometimes, and we both look away. I avoid her line whenever possible. Today, only one lane was open, so I had no choice.

I ask, How are you? She says, fine. And then I feel stupid for even asking. I mean, she answers that same question how many times a day?

My jaw clenches tight for a moment and relaxes. I wonder if she saw me in here yesterday. I had to stop in for soy milk and omega-3 eggs. The day before that it was dandelion root, green onions, and grapefruit.

She snatches up the blueberries, types their SKU into the register, and winds a rubber band around the containers to hold them shut. I notice a small bruise at the base of her thumb.

I take out the cotton sack I brought with me and lay it down while I type my PIN into the debit card terminal.

A bagger has walked up to my lane in the meantime, and he leans on the counter as he says something I can't make out. Since I lost hearing in my right ear, I have a hard time hearing words, especially when the words come from my right. I assume his words are meant for the cashier, some private joke or grocery store emergency. Then I realize he is staring at me, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised.

Were you talking to me? I say.

Do you want me to bag these or not? He asks.

I choke up. What is the right answer? If I say yes, I am the jerk who expects him to bag my groceries. If I say no, I will stand at the counter and take far too long, and other people will scowl and roll their eyes. And anyway, isn't this his job? Does he ask everyone this question, or does he only ask when he doesn't want to do it?

By the time I decide to do it myself, he already has his hands all over the apples.

My sister asked why I write about missing people so often. Why I obsess over cold cases. Why I love forensic art. Why so many of my essays and stories center on violence, surveillance, and murders.

I had no answer.

But here is the first image that flashed in my mind: carpet.

Everywhere I lived for years and years, the hardwood floors were covered in soft carpet. I left footprints in my own home, and I hated it. It made me uncomfortable, standing there looking at my own footprints. I wondered if other people stopped to read them, to trace back my path, notice my pacing. As a kid, I thought about my dead grandfather, how he could see everything I did. I wondered if he kept track of the footprints, watched to see if they matched up with the stories I told, the excuses I made. Could I ever tell a lie, with footprints to rat me out?

So I vacuumed all the time. I scrubbed with sponges. I kept the carpet smooth.

Several years ago, I wrote a short story in which a character did the same, and my teacher wrote in the margin: Obsessed with her own subjectivity.

Years later, I read Being and Nothingness, and I finally understood.

I thought back to how I purposefully kept my photograph out of my highschool yearbook. Why I wanted to skip out on graduations.

Why I hate being remembered in stores. Why I feel flushes of shame when I pass strangers on the sidewalk. Why I pause by the door sometimes, fighting the urge to stay home, struggling with the very idea of being seen.

My erased footprints. Smooth carpet. Why I think all the time about RFID. Forensics. Evidence.

Somehow, I have to follow the tracks I erased. Where will they lead?

These are old notes from a messy, chaotic pocket Moleskine. Last winter, I wrote a piece weaving together several missing person cases and questions, forensic photo analysis, Lucretius' theories of light (and other ancient theories of how we see), and questions about what I would do, given certain circumstances. Now that I have been writing a meditation on why I write about missing people, some of these rough notes (raw, messy, unordered, unstructured) have taken on new meanings. The notes are more polished in the actual essay, of course.

But I thought, why not post some of them?

Thus for the idealist as for the realist, one conclusion is imposed: Due to the fact that the other is revealed to us in a spatial world, we are separated from the other by a real or ideal space. - Sartre

Ideal meaning: constituting or existing only in the form of an idea or mental image or conception. (Though I cannot help but also think of perfection.)

Does missing mean that you can no longer plot my point on a map? Or is that you have the wrong map - that I have wandered past the boundaries of our charted territories, into places you cannot find?

Or does it mean that the ideal space we always felt - always suspected would force us apart - has simply transformed into something real?

(lots of messy cursive I cannot read - this continues for several paragraphs)

I cannot stop thinking of Tara Calico, who went missing in 1988 while riding her bicycle in New Mexico. Detectives found the cracked window of her Sony Walkman near a campground several miles away, and her mother immediately knew: Tara had left breadcrumbs for police to follow.

Detectives never found Tara's pink Huffy, but they did discover tire tracks along NM 47.

But the tracks led nowhere, and the trail went cold.

Six months later, a Polaroid turned up outside a convenience store in Port St. Joe, Florida. In the picture: a young woman, bound and gagged; a paperback copy of My Sweet Audrina beside her hip; a boy to her left, his mouth taped, his head resting on a blue-and-white striped pillow.

Tara loved VC Andrews. Was My Sweet Audrina a sign? Some kind of code? And what about the little boy? He resembled a missing child from the same state as Tara - New Mexico. It seemed this could not possibly be coincidence, two people in the same bizarre shot, both resembling missing persons from the same state.

Tara's parents hired an expert in ear identification, and he positively identified the woman as Tara.

Police disagreed.

_____

Lucretius.

Imagine: if light could adhere, if two bodies could touch - leave traces - across a distance, just by being seen. (And what if they were not seen? Would those atoms still travel? Would they still touch?) Imagine a camera: the shutter opens, and your face touches the lens, touches the photo paper, so that it leaves actual bits of the skin, not just the image. Not just an image, but something you might extract, like DNA. Proof. (Note to readers: This fragment appeared in two different forms in my original notebook. I originally posted one form, but then decided to use the other, which is the paragraph you just read.)

And you would never have to compare ears, never have to cut an image to pieces.

Lucretius:

Now will I undertake an argument- One for these matters of supreme concern- That there exist those somewhats which we call The images of things: these, like to films Scaled off the utmost outside of the things, Flit hither and thither through the atmosphere, And the same terrify our intellects, Coming upon us waking or in sleep, When oft we peer at wonderful strange shapes And images of people lorn of light, Which oft have horribly roused us when we lay In slumber- that haply nevermore may we Suppose that souls get loose from Acheron, Or shades go floating in among the living, Or aught of us is left behind at death, When body and mind, destroyed together, each Back to its own primordials goes away.

_____

Over the next couple of years, more photos appeared - each one more puzzling, each one trumping the others, like an ace. The strangest one shows a woman - Tara? - bound in gauze while seated on an Amtrak train. The man sitting next to her grabs her neck and pulls back her head. Every detail seems theatrical: the woman's oversized glasses; the man's gaping mouth; the setting. How could that possibly be real? On a public train?

If the Polaroids were real, Tara was on the move - nowhere in particular, no place you could plot on the map. She was always in a truck or a train, always leaving or arriving, living in the space between spaces.

The empty spaces on maps, with no dots.

_____

You can walk to the end of the earth and never once touch the vanishing point. It wraps around the horizon and comes back to kiss your heels, like a latitude line. The vanishing point, it turns out, is you.

A note to the woman in the photograph (fragment from my essay, Shutter Release, which is on its way through the postal system as I type, except of course I end up revising a bit here - cannot resist):

I want light like Lucretius imagined it. Sight like Leucippus. I want the surfaces of things - and of people - to flit off into the atmosphere and float: to the eye, to the camera lens, to photo paper. To adhere.

If light were a faint film of you - peeled away like a sticker or fruit skin - it would adhere to the photo paper, haunting the Polaroid, a two dimensional ghost. I could dig into the photo and scrape a sample from your miniature cheek, yank out a tiny hair, extract your DNA.

I could pull you right out of the image of you.

I could pick the dirt and skin and food from under your nails and see what and who you last touched. I could pry out a paper tooth and see if it matched the radiographs on file under your name.

(And in this reality, last seen is synonymous with last touched.)

But that would mean: cutting you into pieces. Like the forensic artist disarticulating a skull to make a sculpture, I would have to do real damage, all for the chance to know your name.

And like the archaeologist, I would have to destroy the site, rendering it useless to future digs.

A fragment from one of the intermediary chapters in my final manuscript for graduate school, a book/collection of essays entitled Last Seen:

When Alaska Airlines Flight 261 went down in the Pacific, just off the coast from Los Angeles, it spun and spun as if the whole plane were a propeller. Captain Ted Thompson told the passengers there was a flight control problem, nothing big, that the plane would land in LA in twenty minutes, and that everything would be smooth from then on. One minute and seventeen seconds later, everyone on board was dead.

“Ah, here we go,” Thompson said, as if the problem were only a loose screw that he could tighten back into place, as if he didn't feel the thrust downward. Ah, here we go. The last words on the cockpit voice recorder before Flight 261 disappeared from radar.

Sometimes I wonder if he knew has dying, that he was already half-dead just for knowing it. Here we go. Not to a place, but to a new state of matter. As he sped toward the water, Captain Ted Thompson transformed into light and sound, his voice the only trace left of his life.

I first read the cockpit transcript while sitting in LAX, just minutes before a flight home, and my first thought: Let me leave my luggage behind for the forensics team and swim from the wreckage to an empty stretch of beach no one knows. Let me move like a radio signal through the world, passing through buildings and bodies undetected, unseen, unfelt. Let me transit my signal so weakly, so far below radar that no one ever finds me. I tore that last line from the transcript, tucked it under my arm, and boarded an Alaska Airlines MD-80 jet, the same model that crashed just one year before.

Ah, here we go. Every day is like getting on that plane.

___

This fragment holds another clue to my current investigation: Why do I always write about missing people? Even when my essays explore other subjects or themes, missing people begin to populate the pages - literally haunting my work.

So back I go to Flight 261. I have all the transcripts, and I will study them intensely. Process, process, process.

You can find another fragment from the final manuscript Last Seen, in this old post at evidentiary:alchemy.