The Cropped Version and What Remains

Someone cropped him out of me and I don't know if that makes me the witness or the crime.

I keep coming back to the staple. Not the photograph, not the blood on the envelope—I keep coming back to the staple. A rusted staple, holding a lie together, and my own skin broke on it first. That's the order of events. The hotel did not wound me. Cha Seong-jin did not wound me. I wounded myself on his evidence, and then I bled onto the thing he wanted me to find. I have been thinking about that all day like it means something. Maybe it does.

My name in the filing next to Im's. I should be furious. I am furious. But there is something else underneath it that I do not want to name yet. He used me. Cha Seong-jin used me. I was a prop in his documentation, cropped neatly out of the frame so I could be discovered later, so the discovery would look accidental, so I would be the one holding the evidence and not him. I have been used before—by guests, by supervisors, by the quiet gravity of being the person people unload onto. This is different. This one has a rusted staple.

The VIP in 2104. The bandage on my hand, and he asked about the cropped man like he already knew. I gave him nothing but I could feel him reading the space around my answers. That is the job—to read the space. He read mine faster than I read his. I do not like guests who are better at my job than I am.