Member-only story
When Our Past Becomes the Future
“Tell me again what you do with him when you go into that room.”
We were in the new offices of the production company where I’d been hired for a summer position. They called me a production assistant or “PA” but I was really a gopher — someone who went for coffee and picked up people at LAX and did all kinds of things the others didn’t want to do. I was thrilled to be there and didn’t mind anything they asked me to do during this time. It was an adventure and I wanted to breathe it all in and digest it to shift my thinking and change my life.
“There’s a big machine in there, taller than me and so long that it takes up half the room. He gives me the stack of papers to be sent to either the Paris or Tokyo offices and I feed them in, one at a time. I have to do it slowly and they have to be face down. Then the machine makes a little sound, and I walk to the other end and take each page out, one at a time. If the pages went through, there’ll be a small, faint red mark on the back of each page. When they’ve all been fed through and each one has the red mark, I go find him and let him know.”
Michael shifts in his chair, stroking his chin whiskers and looking me in the eyes while deciding what he’ll say next.
“Then what?”
