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And suddenly wished I hadn’t left what rehter behind

Late at night athe dark alleys past the buildings where the editing rooms on the top floors whisper and bray and roar and snack-chatter until two or three or four in theby in the air, or sand blowing across Beau Geste’s ghost-haunted desert, or traffic coursing the Chaara pouring itself down the studio towers into the fil his racer around Indianapolis to the shout of faceless mobs, while further on as you walk in darkness sos of war and you hear Caesar’s wounds open like rosebuds in his cloak, or Churchill bulldogging the airwaves as the Hound bays over thethese shadowed hours because they prefer the company of Moviolas and flicker-moth screens and closeup lovers to the people stranded at noonday, stunned by reality outside the walls It is a long-after-ht in a tih open doors or hile the shadows of the cutter-editors loos bent over enchantments Only at dawn do the voices still and the musics die as the smilers-with-the-knives head ho at 6 AM Only at sunset will the voices start again and the ht froniting their eyes and proers

It was down an alley of such buildings, sounds, andup, as Hitler raved froht winds west

I jolted to a stop and stared up at … Maggie Botwin’s editing room The door stood wide

I yelled “Maggie!”

Silence

I ht and the stuttering chatter of the Moviola as the shadows blinked on her high ceiling

I stood for a longin at the one place in all this world where life was sliced, asse life over until you got it right Peering down at the small Moviola screen, you turn on the out-boardclap as the filh, freezes, delineates, and rushes on After staring into the Moviola for half a day, in a subterranean gloom, you almost believe that when you step outside life itself will reasseive up itsa Moviola for a few hours encourages optis But the teain

And now at Maggie Botwin’s door, with the night behindwohts and shades while the filers

I scratched at her screen door

Maggie glanced up froh the lad cry

“I’ll be damned! This is the first time in forty years a writer ever showed up here You’d think the damn fools would be curious about how I cut their hair or shorten their inseams Wait!”

She unlocked the screen and pulled me in Like a sleepwalker I stepped to the Moviola and blinked down

Maggie tested me “Remember him?”

“Erich Von Stroheiasped “The film made here in ’21 Lost”