Aubrey McFate
Burn down the disco
I dreamt that I was a photographer (I am not one, but my father was). I was hired by a male-and-female journalist duo who were writing a story about a woman named Myriam Isobel Kack. The male journalist was a "bro" and the female was "dirtbag left." They were very annoying individuals, but something was compelling me to take photos for them.
They were writing about Myriam Isobel Kack as a "pop sci" piece because she was someone who slept (exclusively) in a standing position. The article was going to be called "Kack Kicks" because she had recently been arrested for kicking someone, but the two writers felt the charges should be dropped because she was mentally retarded. The article was about neuroscience, sleep, and prejudice against the mentally disabled. You would think it was serious and compassionate, but it was written with a pronounced snarky tone.
To get my pictures, I had to go where Kack lived. She lived in a janitor's closet in a city restaurant. When I went to the restaurant, they told me, "she's asleep, but you can go in and take a picture." I opened the door to the closet, and there she was, facing the opposite wall, stood stock still. As I approached, I began to get an uneasy feeling. I felt like this was the basement room in Psycho, and I was going to see a rotting corpse or something equally horrifying if I went around and saw her face. I thought about the line in Exodus: "no one sees my face and lives," and in my mind I saw a page of Exodus in a Hebrew bible, and the damp janitor's closet with its bare pipes and rusty shelves and brick walls began to feel like some sort of shrine or a sanctuary. Something told me this woman should not under any circumstances be photographed. I wondered if Myriam Isobel Kack was a Jewish name, and (inexplicably) I was about to whisper, "are you a god, or are you a worshipper?" but before I could, she started to slowly turn around, and I was consumed with dread, and then I woke up.
They were writing about Myriam Isobel Kack as a "pop sci" piece because she was someone who slept (exclusively) in a standing position. The article was going to be called "Kack Kicks" because she had recently been arrested for kicking someone, but the two writers felt the charges should be dropped because she was mentally retarded. The article was about neuroscience, sleep, and prejudice against the mentally disabled. You would think it was serious and compassionate, but it was written with a pronounced snarky tone.
To get my pictures, I had to go where Kack lived. She lived in a janitor's closet in a city restaurant. When I went to the restaurant, they told me, "she's asleep, but you can go in and take a picture." I opened the door to the closet, and there she was, facing the opposite wall, stood stock still. As I approached, I began to get an uneasy feeling. I felt like this was the basement room in Psycho, and I was going to see a rotting corpse or something equally horrifying if I went around and saw her face. I thought about the line in Exodus: "no one sees my face and lives," and in my mind I saw a page of Exodus in a Hebrew bible, and the damp janitor's closet with its bare pipes and rusty shelves and brick walls began to feel like some sort of shrine or a sanctuary. Something told me this woman should not under any circumstances be photographed. I wondered if Myriam Isobel Kack was a Jewish name, and (inexplicably) I was about to whisper, "are you a god, or are you a worshipper?" but before I could, she started to slowly turn around, and I was consumed with dread, and then I woke up.
