The Smoked Paper

A bare interview room of the city police station in Berkeley in California on a bright spring morning, on a plain wooden table a recording apparatus, a long strip of soot-blackened paper running between brass rollers over a dark wooden base, three fine steel stylus arms resting on the soot, each scratching a single thin pale wavy line, rubber tubes leading from small brass drum capsules to a cloth arm cuff and a coiled corrugated rubber breathing tube lying on an empty wooden chair beside the table, a hand in a white shirt sleeve with a sleeve garter turning a brass crank, sunlight through a barred window throwing stripes across the floor.