Spliced Together

On the screen, the white square was replaced with a black highway—the double yellow lines rushing downward—the pre-paved travel of time. The footage was spliced together—a combination of the opening of “Lost Highway” and as a leitmotif throughout “Terminator II”, culminating in the epilogue with sexy ass Linda Hamilton's overdubbed purrrr about the future being an open highway stretched out before us...

There was a jump at the point where the two films had been spliced together…as I stood there the footage jumped again and repeated itself and jumped again.

I saw the silhouette of a woman standing beneath the screen. Atop her shoulders was a fluttering shape I immediately recognized as being that of a hooded falcon. Although I was sure I’d never seen her before, there something immediately familiar about the woman. She disappeared in the darkness before reappearing a few seconds later in the wide white swath of the projector beam that cut across the black room I felt my heart jump in my chest, out of joy, excitement and fear. It was TRUE! The real TRUE—not me playing her, but the idea of a person that I’d concentrated upon while playing her. I gasped. The falcon outstretched its wings, beat them in place for a few strokes, and came back to rest upon her shoulder. Beneath this her wide staring blue eyes dazzled like the last reservoirs of a drying up lake. Her brown hair stuck up in sexy stalks with long bangs curling back into a greasy, disheveled pompadour a la Morrissey or Johnny Depp. My own hair was far too fine to pull it off, try as I had back in junior high, enlisting every mousse and freezing gel product known to mankind.

She wore a black leather coat with a white leather bones carefully stitched onto it—a pimped out version of Donnie Darko’s Halloween hoodie. A thick gold necklace with a giant blinged-out eye hung around her neck.

“Hey yo hey yo,” she said. She was coming up to me, real and breathing.