In Washington it often happens on the street that I enter into the space between a person with a camera and the other person being photographed, or a group of people smiling at the camera lens, and then my picture is taken. Or else I pass behind the people taking photos of each other. I’m on my way somewhere, not thinking about what has just happened. This happens to everyone. I have many unknown people in my photographs, I don’t know anything about them, I have never, until this moment, thought about those chance passersby, or about myself in other people’s photos. But in fact, a small miracle has taken place: I’ve entered the private world of some unknown people: I’m that stranger on the edge, in the background of the photograph. They know nothing about me, they take no notice of me: they see themselves in those photos; unknown and nameless, I’m not the subject here, but rather an object, just like the façade of the building behind them or the glass shop window. Some future observer will be more curious about the bird on the shoulder of the bronze horseman in the background than about me. But, nevertheless, I still exist in all those photographs. In those pictures I will never see. In a similar but far more intensive way, we exist in other people’s dreams. If those dreams could be transposed onto film, it would be interesting to see the whole, your life grown out of other people’s consciousness! I would like to see myself in someone else’s dream.

There are a lot of photographs from our past in which I’m holding you in my arms. And a father carrying his son in his arms is altogether a common sight. Far less frequent—and its complete opposite in emotional impact—is the image of a son carrying his father. Such as Aeneas carrying his old, weary father as they flee from burning Troy . . . I would not wish to live to a great age.

You lived in that apartment for just a few months, in the summer of 2002. Los Angeles. An apartment on two floors, in the upper one were you and your girlfriend, while the lower one was occupied by a girl about whom you didn’t know much yourself, apart from her name. (“She’s one of those girls who come to this city with the hope of making it into film, but if that doesn’t happen they spend the best years of their lives waitressing in cheap bars and nightclubs.”) After I arrived for a short visit, I went down to the lower floor for a shower. And then the girl appeared in the bathroom doorway, in a short denim skirt and T-shirt. She was smiling, she didn’t ask me who I was or how I had gotten here, instead she took off her clothes and stepped naked into the shower. I was unprepared for what had happened, I already had one leg out of the bath, but she held me back in an embrace and kissed me, if it could be called a kiss. At the moment when our lips met, there was a little spark of static electricity and I covered my mouth with my hand as though physically injured by that kiss. I got out of the bath and, apologizing, picked up my things and slowly made my way to the upper floor. I was quite disconcerted. I didn’t tell you anything about it of course, and I’m not sure that I would even have known how to describe properly what had happened, but I remember the unease I felt then, as though I were on the verge of incest. I still remember that girl today well enough that I could easily draw her face. I don’t know why I’m telling this story now or why I remembered it. Perhaps I could have kept it quiet.