ㅤㅤㅤㅤNothing did.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤI just fixed myself some tea on the hot plate here. My stomach’s gone. I can barely keep even this honey milked—up stuff down but I need the warmth. I’m in a hotel now. My studio’s history. Alot these days is history.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤI haven’t even washed the blood off yet. Not all of it’s mine either. Still caked around my fingers. Signs of it on my shirt. “What’s happened here?” I keep asking myself. “What have I done?” What would you have done? I went straight for the guns and I loaded them and then I tried to decide what to do with them. The obvious thing was shoot something. After all, that’s what guns are designed to do—shoot something. But who? Or what? I didn’t have a clue. There were people and cars outside my hotel window. Midnight people I didn’t know. Midnight cars I’ve never seen before. I could have shot them. I could have shot them all.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤI threw up in my closet instead.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤOf course, I have only my own immeasurable stupidity to blame for winding up here. The old man left plenty of clues and warnings. I was the fool to disregard them. Or was it the reverse: did I secretly enjoy them? At least I should have had some fucking inkling what I was getting into when I read this note, written just one day before he died:

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January 5, 1997
Whoever finds and publishes this work shall be entitled to all proceeds. I ask only that
my name take its rightful place. Perhaps you will even prosper. If, however, you discover that
readers are less than sympathetic and choose to dismiss this enterprise out of hand, then may I
suggest you drink plenty of wine and dance in the sheets of your wedding night, for whether you
know it or not, now you truly are prosperous. They say truth stands the test of time. I can think of
no greater comfort than knowing this document failed such a test.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤWhich back then meant absolutely nothing to me. I sure as hell didn’t pause to think that some lousy words were going to land me in a shitty hotel room saturated with the stink of my own vomit.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤAfter all, as I fast discovered, Zampanô’s entire project is about a film which doesn’t even exist. You can look, I have,
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