It is New Year’s Eve, 1981. Rachel Stein prepares to remember this night, to map and preserve it in a kind of invisible neural acid. Such a process must be possible. This night is a psychic embryo. It will enter the fibers of her flesh and mate with her cells. It will settle in, and she will have this film as long as she breathes. This is the substance she really required all along, something tougher than the photographs she once thought she needed. They were the fraudulence. This, on the other hand, is more deceptive and permanent.
Rachel Stein is alone with her infant whom she must soon name. It’s been three weeks since she took the baby home from the hospital in a taxicab. Her parents didn’t come to the hospital. They have decided this event has not occurred. They have no vocabulary to define it, so they have deleted it from their consciousness. She thinks it is curious, how they could drive her to airports where planes would take her to countries racked by civil wars, regions with plagues and no roads, and teenagers with automatic weapons in the trees. But they could not admit to this configuration, their daughter with the infant and no husband.
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