SAME BUILDING
[The federation's media intake desk receives, on a Tuesday, a manila envelope bearing a return address in Memphis, Tennessee, addressed in capital block letters to: STRIFE FEDERATION / MEDIA ARCHIVE / FOR THE BROADCAST RECORD. The envelope is heavier than a letter. It is opened by a staff member who has been instructed by the federation's submissions coordinator to handle Mr. Braddock's filings with particular care.
The envelope contains two items.
The first is a four-by-six-inch photograph, slightly creased at one corner. It depicts the exterior of a low, flat-roofed building on a residential street, photographed in late-afternoon March light. The building is a converted bowling alley — the signage of the bowling alley has been removed, but its outline remains visible in the discolored brick where the letters used to be. There is a streetlamp out front. The roof is patched in three places with newer asphalt shingle, slightly mismatched from the rest. The sidewalk is wet. A black F-150 truck is parked at the curb.
There is no person in the photograph.
The photograph was taken recently. The light is consistent with a date within the past two weeks.
The second item is a single piece of paper, folded once. The federation staff member unfolds it. The paper bears a handwritten note in heavy black ink:
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Bríd,
I drove to Lubbock on Sunday. The building is still there. The leak in the roof has been patched three times but you can still see where it was. The streetlamp out front is the same one.
I do not smoke any more. I stopped in 2017.
The matter on my mind is what I owed her, my second daughter, when I came home from that card and told her mother I was going back out the next weekend. She is fifteen now. She is what comes after. I have been thinking about what comes after for as long as you have, and I have not solved it either. I do not have a thesis. I have a fifteen-year-old who will be in the front row at NO ESCAPE if I am in the building, and that is the version of what comes after that I currently understand best.
I would like to have the conversation in person. The corridor at The Foundry is fine. So is the parking lot. The kitchen with the worse light is also fine, but you would have to provide that one, because mine is in Memphis and I do not think the federation will fly you here for a kitchen.
I will be at Behind Closed Doors Eight whether they book me or not.
— C.
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The federation's media coordinator, on receipt of these two items, made copies of both with Mr. Braddock's standing authorisation for archive publication, and filed the original photograph and the original note in the federation's records department. The copies have been published to the federation site for the broadcast record, on the understanding that Mr. Braddock's correspondence to Ms. Ó'Súilleabháin is a public-facing piece of the same kind her letter to him was — a private communication that the federation's literary record includes by mutual convention.
The federation has not, at the time of this filing, received confirmation that Ms. Ó'Súilleabháin has received the original.
The federation, for the broadcast record, has noted the following:
Mr. Braddock drove approximately five hundred miles in a single day to a building neither he nor his correspondent has had any reason to visit for eleven years.
The photograph was taken at an hour when the light matches the photograph the correspondent's letter described.
There is no person in the photograph because Mr. Braddock did not bring one. He drove there alone, took the photograph, and drove back.
The federation will leave the interpretive work to STRIFE Nation.