The Age of Inertia: Prologue
Eternity of Youth
I wonder, from time to time, what the world must look like to a dying person. We've all heard stories of a blinding white light, the flip-book of memories racing before our eyes, maybe the odd supernova of colors here or there. As for me, I've never died; I couldn't advise you on which of these I would even claim to see. it's all very much a thought-experiment to me, a dark pool I dip my toes in mainly because I am not sure if it will ripple - or if it is worth wondering whether it will.
For my thought-experiment, I imagine that time is no longer sequential to a man or woman lying on his or her deathbed.
Entertain this example:
Police are sealing shut a dark body bag. The street is closed off with orange and white barricades; a neon-clad deputy is redirecting traffic from his post thirty feet down the block. The road, recently paved with fresh tar, is still pitch black; the outline of the victim's body has been chalked onto the pavement in white. Two gloved workers examine the murder sit and a blood smear expert kneels by the sidewalk, photographing the fine red spray that's colored up the concrete. Like common cargo, the body is slammed into the boot of a van and driven away.
All of this happens as a function of time; linear, always moving forward. But to the dead man, time spun off its track the second the bullet struck; the two minutes it took him to die were spent remembering his regrets. Even after all these years, he recalls that he never took action when the schoolyard bully called his sister names, so he apologizes to her as his heart beats out its dying rhythm. He sees his sister's face and remembers the time she cleaned out the bicycle wound he'd won from speeding down a hillside without having bothered beforehand to put on a set of kneepads. Although he has never been religious, his last thought is of the Rosary.
Or even this one:
An old woman is lying in a hospital bed, and her family finally decides to turn off her ventilator. Foggily, in a dream, she thinks she's nine years old, fishing in a creek with her brother or father or friend, her lungs hooked to a pump siphoning each breath backward, forward, and backward again with the strangest current she's ever seen in water. She is vaguely aware of the pressure of her daughter's fingers and tries to squeeze back, feeling her frailness as a memory of her fatigue after delivering that baby girl fifty years before. She dies quietly and without pain.
Rendered artistically, I suppose some deaths might look like this:
The sun is setting, and the dying person is suspended in midair over an ocean. Thrusting high above the sixty-feet waves is a one-thousand-foot cliff. Each passing instant is characterized by one of those waves moving smoothly over the shore and crashing into the side of the cliff in an explosion of spray. Each drop of water is a prism, one possible lens through which this person might be viewing his or her past. The light refracts as it hits the drops and splits into red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, and violet, each color illuminating one more facet of the truth of the dying person's life.
Somewhere else on Earth, a child sees that rainbow, reaches up, and tries to touch it. He isn't sure what he expects a rainbow to feel like, but he discovers it's just air and a spray of water, perhaps raindrops. He can't hold it, not really, so he wonders why it is that he can see it. He only knows that it stirs something inside him; but that if he tilts his head a certain way, it disappears.
x.x.x.x.x.x
My grandparents had an oceanfront cottage on the northern Atlantic coast. Petunia and I often spent weeks of our summers there when we were young, building sandcastles, bodysurfing, or hunting for seashells. We would play with the other children who frequented that stretch of the beach-a pair of stocky, freckled twins named Edwin and Noah, and a small Asian girl named Penny who didn't speak much English. The two boys liked to roughhouse with me, though Penny preferred to follow Petunia around the vicinity with a pail and shovel to dig for shells. This being the case, I almost invariably found myself being dragged into the water-careening headfirst, rather-and had to thrash my way back to the surface while the twins splashed and wrestled to the chorus of Penny and Petunia squealing each time the water struck their legs.
Once, though, when we were six years old, the boys decided to pass the time by throwing rocks into the surf. Naturally this resulted in a rock-throwing contest, with me as the smallest and most ridiculous of the three contestants. Edwin, the twin with the longer range, tried to show me how to hold the rocks before letting go.
"Like this, see," he said impatiently, putting an oval-shaped piece of granite into my hand. "No, don't put all your fingers on it. Just two."
"But then it falls out unless I hold it really tight."
"You have to throw it before it falls out, stupid."
I scowled and pitched the rock as hard as I could. It flew roughly five feet and plunked into the water with a small splash.
"No, not like that."
"You're making me mess up."
"Am not."
"Yes you are. Bugger." I snatched another slab of rock out of the surf and threw this one as well, this time flinging it off to the side. It skipped twice before disappearing under the surface.
Just then Petunia approached us, incongruously tall and lanky in her nine years, the sand and briny spray making long blond ropes of her hair. "Lily. How did you do that?"
Faintly awed and bemused by what I had accomplished, I shrugged and said, "I just did."
"You still throw like a girl," Edwin scoffed.
That evening, after the other children had gone, Petunia and I stood alone on the beach, she watching me with her arms crossed and her pail dangling from her fingers, and I trying to re-create the incident that had occurred in the afternoon.
"I bet that skip was a freak accident," Petunia said in bored tones as I tried in vain to get a piece of round stone to skim the surface of the waves again. "You do have a lot of those."
I glared at her and flung another rock into the water. "I do not." Plunk. There it went.
"Give it up, Lily."
"No."
"You're just being dumb."
"You're just being mean." This time, I picked up a disc-shaped stone and tried flicking my wrist as I threw it; I gasped when it struck the water, bounced, and flew into the next rolling wave. "Look! I told you."
Petunia rolled her eyes. "That one only skipped because it was flat."
"So?"
"So you can't skip every rock," she said, sticking her nose in the air.
"I dare you to try it. I bet you can't."
This time she glared at me. "Just watch me."
I put my fists on my hips. "Then go ahead."
Petunia stared at me for a moment, then hesitantly waded another few feet into the surf. She made a face as the sandy water hit her legs and splashed her thighs, holding her pail high above her head as she bent down to fish a rock out of the mud. She recoiled as the water soaked her hair and stained her swimsuit. Finally she straightened up, scowling and holding a flat piece of stone between the tips of her fingers.
"Let's have a contest," she said. "You find one too and throw yours first, and then I'll throw mine."
"I'm not going to let you copy me."
"I am not going to copy you, you little brat," Petunia said, flushing.
"Ehh, you're the one who's acting like a brat," I scoffed, kicking water in her face. She gasped and wiped it out of her eyes with her wrist, spitting.
"Lily Evans! Stop that!"
"What're you going to do, tell on me?"
"Yes!"
I rolled my eyes and folded my arms. "Oh, I'm so scared."
Red-cheeked and angry, Petunia hurled her rock as far as she could, at which it struck the surf with an insolent splash. Then she turned, slapped some water in my direction, and flounced back up to our grandparents' cottage, her pail swinging at her elbow. Her feet left muddy tracks in the sand.
x.x.x.x.x.x
There were times during our childhood where Petunia and I got along quite well. My bouts of accidental magic had a tendency to get me in trouble, and these were the times when Petunia shone like the big sister she had always wanted to be. I was the hapless little sister who made worms leap out of the ground and flatten themselves over my classmates' faces, and she was the protective older sister who explained everything away with an "Oh, shove it, Lily's just quicker than you, now get out of my way before I tell the Headmaster on you," and march me off to a wash room to tut-tut at me as she scrubbed dirt off my fingers. Naturally I protested and argued when she did this, but privately I was grateful. Petunia had a way of making other children feel stupid for looking at me as though I were a freak, and because she did so, I knew she loved me, in her bitter, insecure way. And for that I loved her back.
But then, of course, there was the day I received the letter from Hogwarts. I had no trouble believing it; I hardly questioned the contents of that letter until both my parents had read it. You're a witch, the handwriting in green ink said, and you've been enrolled in a school where you'll learn all number of spells. You'll learn to hold a wand and levitate lead; you'll learn to transfigure matter and heal wounds without bandages. You'll learn to defend yourself with magic.
"You'll learn how to make cards disappear and pull rabbits out of hats, more like," Petunia snarled, snatching the letter and whisking it out of reach when I lunged for it. "What a load of tripe. What a load of crap. What are you going to do with magic? Bewitch my wardrobe so that it flies out at me every time I open my chest of drawers and-"
"Give me the letter back, you bloody-"
She was laughing now, a bitter, high-pitched screech. "'Talented young witches and wizards!'" she repeated, cackling. "What a joke! Lily, my dear, you don't really believe this is true, do you? So brilliant and you still fall for this! Hark, magic really does exist!"
"Petunia. Give me my letter!" I was chasing her around the room now, stumbling over furniture as she darted out of my reach, holding the letter over her head.
"Oh, look, Lily wants it back. She thinks it's a magical passport to fairyland! What, Lily, you don't actually believe this, do you? Come on, you're my little sister, you can't possibly be that stupid--"
"Give it BACK!" I tackled her to the floor and tried to pin her arms down so I could pry the letter out of her fist. She was still laughing, her face red, blond hair all over the place, ropy muscles standing out on her bony arms as she attempted to wrestle me off of her. "What the hell is wrong with you!" I yelled.
"Ah-ah-ah, none of that, Lily! Mummy'll be angry!"
"Petunia, God, what's got into you! Give it back, what is wrong with you--"
Petunia kept laughing, gasping now, her face growing redder by the moment. She was out of breath; and never one to miss an opportunity when I saw one, I shoved my knee against her chest and snatched the letter out of her hand. Just as she began to thrash and lunge for the parchment again, our father burst into the room, shouting.
"Girls!" In a moment he had yanked me off Petunia's chest and pulled her up off the floor. "Stop that this instant! Lily, what do you mean by pinning your sister against the floor? And Petunia, what the blazes did you think you were doing?"
"I got a letter," I explained furiously, breathing hard, "and she thinks she can just steal it, as if that's going to stop me from going. I just got enrolled in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I'm a witch, Dad. And if you don't believe it, read that letter. It'll tell you everything you want to know."
"She's got that right," Petunia cackled. "Burn her at the stake, that's what I say. I always knew she was a freak!"
Our father grabbed her by the shoulders and gripped her, hard. "Stop it. Now. Do you hear me?"
She was shaking with laughter, so badly that she didn't appear able to breathe. She nodded almost imperceptibly and kept laughing. When our father let her go, she collapsed against the wall, gasping.
"You are fourteen years old, Petunia, and you're acting like a child. You should know better than to pick fights with your sister over a letter. Apart from being completely immature, this is-"
"Hah. Immature! I have my reasons."
"Would you care to share any of them?"
She lifted her chin and gave a proud, saccharine smile, but she was visibly livid and there were tears forming in her eyes. There was a small tremor in her voice when she spoke. "No, I would not like to share them at all, thank you very much."
"Then you'll put your reasons away and never act on them again, or I swear you won't see the light of day for the rest of the time you're living under this roof. Now you," he said, rounding on me, "you are not to attack Petunia under any circumstances, no matter how infuriating you find her. She is your sister, and it is your responsibility to treat her in kind."
"I hate her," I said, my throat tight. "And she isn't my sister. I don't know what you think she is, but if she can say that shit about me, I am not related to her."
"You are related to her whether you like it or not, young lady. Now tell your sister you're sorry."
"What!"
"I'm waiting, Lily."
I stared at him, open-mouthed, unable to believe the punishment he was demanding I inflict upon myself.
"I'll wait all night if you make me, but you'll regret it if you do."
I waited a moment longer to see if he would stand his ground. When I saw his face harden, I rounded on my sister and thrust out my hand. "Petunia, I apologize for retaliating. I should've known better than to fight with you, because you were obviously going to give the letter back on your own. I'm sorry you've always secretly hated me for being what you aren't. I'm sorry I'm not just your stupid little sister." With that I wrenched my hand out of hers, stuffed the letter in my pocket, and stormed out of the room, eyes blurry with tears.
x.x.x.x.x.x
I was always getting into fights, of course; not by intention, but often because I simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was one incident at Hogwarts where I tripped on my way from the dormitories to the common room; my books went flying, my uniform ripped, and I went crashing down the stairs, only to barrel straight into James Potter and Remus Lupin as they dodged into the stairwell with the apparent intention of avoiding a flying seat cushion. The three of us landed in a heap at the bottom of the staircase, yelling and swearing. We were thirteen years old.
"Oy! What the-watch the hell where you're going, Evans!"
Coughing, I shoved James away and scrambled to my knees, groping on the floor for my wand. "Excuse me? Who's in the bloody girls' stairwell when they're forbidden to be there? Eh?"
"Excuse me while I knock your block off," James said, putting on a high voice. "Hang on, let me snap my brassiere in your face-"
"POTTER! You little berk-HEY! My WAND!"
"AAAGH! YOU HAVE VIOLENT TENDENCIES, EVANS! Wait, are you grabbing my zipper? Hey! Hey, Evans is trying to strip me, ha ha-"
"I think it's more like she's trying to kill you, James, I'd quit trying to cop a feel if I were you-"
"I'm not trying to kill him, I'm just trying to get my wand back, JESUS, Potter, will you give me the stupid thing so I can HEX the crap out of you-"
"Ha, you would, wouldn't you-whoa, whoa! Bitch slap, bitch slap, watch the face! OW, your nails SCRATCH! THE GLASSES, Evans, have some respect for the GLASSES!"
"Hark, I hear the voice of an idiot! HA. Die." I snatched my wand, clambered to my feet, and yanked a loose shoelace out from under James's stomach as he felt blindly under the couch for his glasses. Ten seconds later, I stomped out of the common room to study in the library, so that, perhaps, he'd stumble by a bit later and see that I'd proven my point.
x.x.x.x.x.x
Then, later on, there were the times when it wouldn't stop raining.
When I was fourteen, I would sit by the window, watching the drops trickle or, as the case often was, stream down the glass. Floodwater would fill the streets outside our house and shallow whirlpools would form around the drainage grates. I tried my hand at writing poetry but gave up when the words began to look frivolous and vain. That year, I developed a venomous hatred for my own penmanship and vowed never to write poetry again.
When I was fifteen, Alice and I got caught outside the castle in a thunderstorm. I had just broken up with my first significant other-a Ravenclaw boy with few romantic sensibilities-and had thrown off my raincoat, yanked the rubber band out of my hair, and stomped one sneakered foot into the deepest mud puddle I could find. My white blouse was drenched to transparency, my skirt was clinging to my thighs like plastic wrap, and the red and gold tie I had placed around my neck was coming undone.
"You know, this is probably going to sound crass," Alice mused later as we ran up the steps to the Entrance Hall, "but you two were more like a pair of eight-year-olds trying to figure out how to hold hands than an actual, you know, couple anyway...at any rate, please tell me you'll wear a different set of underthings when you get your first real date."
x.x.x.x.x.x
When I was sixteen, I began to study the rain. It seemed that I could never get out of it, so I would go to the library every once in a while and take out a book on weather patterns. I would then spend my spare time flopped on my bed with them, reading about the formation of hurricanes, tornadoes, and anvil clouds. I began to analyze weather dynamics and tried to predict whether we would receive rain, sleet, hail, or snow. When my roommates began to stare and ask questions, I simply told them, "I like it when it rains."
After James and I became a couple, we made it a point to sneak out of the castle whenever it was raining. He had a penchant for sucking the water off my lips when we kissed, and so the more torrential the downpour, the better he liked it.
Once we found ourselves outside in the rain and lightning. We hadn't realized how close the storm was until a resounding crash shook the wall against which I was leaning.
"Wow, shit," I remarked.
James laughed and began unfastening the buttons of my blouse. "I love how we're just standing here, waiting to be struck by lightning."
I felt his lips at the base of my throat and moaned as he worked his way down. His hair was soaked and black as coal between my fingers. "Yes, you do, don't you?"
x.x.x.x.x.x
One thing that's particularly interesting about memory is that it can be almost absolutely subjective. If you are at all confused over your past, memory bends to your every mood; what seems like a good memory one day can be an embarrassing, cringe-worthy memory the next. For example:
It's sunny outside and I'm sprawled on the grass reading a book. Some young children are playing on the swing set twenty or thirty feet from where I'm lying, the same swing set I played on with Severus Snape when I was ten. The children are shrieking with laughter, one of them throwing himself as high up in the air as he can go before letting go of the swing and flying into the sandbox before them. I remember the look on Snape's face when I did the same and think, You know, he wasn't so bad.
Then a cloud moves over the sun and the sky becomes subdued. Now I remember the hollowness of Snape's cheeks, the sunken shape of his eyes. His smile was a tight, thin puzzle I could not solve - and then, when we were older, one I flat-out refused to solve. I wanted nothing from Severus Snape, and so I had nothing to give; whether he liked it or not, that would have to be enough. I remember him and I feel sick.
A better example of subjective memory, though, is this:
Alice's parents had just been murdered, and we were standing before their open caskets. Her mother's eyes were shut, and her hands were folded quietly on her stomach. She wore a black dress with a white lily pinned to the breast; her hair was wavy and golden. Alice's father was wearing black as well, and his hands, too, were folded quietly on his stomach. Death exaggerated the broadness of his shoulders, threw the scars on his face into sharp and ethereal respite. And there they were, mother and father: elegantly, artistically, and irretrievably dead.
It was I who wrote and delivered the eulogy. For some reason she'd never fully explained to me, Alice had wanted me to be the one who did it, so I complied with as much dignity and composure as I could summon. I did well for a seventeen-year-old girl - but I was exactly that; a seventeen-year-old girl, fresh-faced and still young enough to think that losing my virginity made me adult enough to comprehend the weight of the speech I was delivering.
Sometimes I can see myself standing at that podium again, dressed in black, hands trembling; my eyes are dry, and my voice is controlled and even. I'm giving the classic eulogy - fond memories and profound sentiments with moral undertones. I've expressed the thoughts of the funeral congregation, and I'm providing a lead-in for their prayers.
Other times, though, I look back on that and see myself standing at the podium, feeling sick to my stomach. I'm nervous and inhibited and don't feel like I deserve to be up there. Alice is looking up at me as if she can't see me anymore, and she's leaning back against the pew with her hands folded tightly in her lap. Her eyes are red and her corsage is drooping. And although she never says it, I can tell that she's asking me, silently, why I can't sound a little more sincere.
Why can't I, indeed? I'm seventeen. My family is still alive. I can't possibly grasp her pain. What stupidity moved her to think I could?
She thanks me after the funeral and tells me she's sorry for putting me on the spot.
"No, really, you didn't screw it up," she says, swirling her drink as we sit at the bar after the reception. She's staring at the ice as it clinks against the sides of her glass. "I just...I don't know what I was thinking. You told me you didn't want to do it, and I still...God. It's my fault, Lily. Don't beat yourself up."
But the catch is that I'm not really sure if she was disappointed at all; perhaps I merely think she was disappointed because I'm projecting my insecurity onto her. The day was such a whirlwind that all I remember with any real clarity is a myriad of images and emotions-faces, strange voices, shadows, black robes and dresses, smeared red lipstick and women crying in the lavatory while cheap, pearly hand soap dripped from the dispensers. The scenarios I recollect for myself at any given time are entirely dependent on the lens through which I choose to view the event. I can make the memories brave, pensive, sad, perfectly ludicrous, or some bitter and satirical combination of the four.
It's funny, this art of self-delusion. You would think it'd make you feel empowered, but in fact it makes you feel just the opposite: just a little too susceptible to lies, just a little too vulnerable to emotion, just a little too human for your own liking.
But then, who am I to be a judge of such things?
Who am I to be a judge of such things, indeed?
x.x.x.x.x.x
Before my grandfather died, he would let me sit with him on his back porch in the evenings, the two of us listening to the ever-present crash and sigh of the waves along the shore. Often he would while away the entire night whittling small wooden figurines with a Swiss Army knife, a lantern perched beside him on the wooden steps.
"How do you define wisdom?" I asked during the summer after my sixteenth birthday. "It seems like it should be pretty simple, but all I ever hear nowadays is this debate over who's wise enough to lead mankind to its inevitable suicide."
He chuckled. "Ah, Lily," he said, carving the dorsal fin of a driftwood dolphin, "Astute as always." He shaved a few flakes of wood off the dolphin's back. "I learned a thing or two while I was in the Navy-always keep track of your socks, for one," he said with a dry laugh. "But if there was one thing that struck me, it was that life was cheap. Yet...cheap as it was, we all clung to it in our own ways, as if by revolting against what every day in combat reminded us of, we could take back the value of our lives. Human nature, to be sure. Testament to the idea that the appearance of things depends on the how we choose to think about them. It's easy to lose sight of our convictions when we're under fire. Wisdom is the ability to see things with clarity and keep your balance."
I groaned. "Does everyone over the age of sixty talk in generalities like that?"
"Ah, now that I couldn't tell you, but I can assure you that a bloody load of them will talk your ear off if you give them a chance." There was an amused twinkle in his eye. "From what I understand, most young people find this brand of specificity tiresome."
Later, after the sun had set and my grandfather had retired for the night, I walked down to the surf and fished blindly for rocks to skip. From what I remember, I found two or three of a suitable shape. Whether they actually skipped or not, I don't know; but I like to think they did.
Wisdom.
How easy it is to throw that word like a wrench into the heavy machinery of your brain and jam every cog and wheel you've ever suffered and triumphed to create. How simple it is to muddle, how insolently it invites you to invent new and foolish definitions for it. And, incredibly, we all do: "Wisdom is the ability to understand, not just know"; "Wisdom is the ability not to be misled by either end of an extreme"; "Wisdom is the ability to content yourself with the world as it is, not as you want it to be"; "Wisdom is the ability to know what's right". It's easy to sound wise when you're speaking in generalities, and equally easy to say, "Yes, but that's not what I meant, you've got me all wrong" or "No, no, I meant that in a different context" as soon as someone else comes along and proves, simply, logically, and empirically, that your definition was nothing but hot air.
It follows, then, that the only way to ensure you won't lose the argument is to come up with a definition for wisdom that nobody can disprove. The hidden premise here is that if you can win the argument, you somehow know enough to be considered wise, and you are therefore qualified to comment on things other people don't understand.
That seems to leave a bit to be desired, doesn't it?
x.x.x.x.x.x
It's raining now as I write this by the indolent light of a lantern in King's Cross train station, in a makeshift notebook of parchment and tin paperclips. I'm working what used to be my shift as a night watchwoman for the Order of the Phoenix, dressed as a shabby university student waiting for her train to arrive. King's Cross station is the entry point to the Order's escape network, through which we've been smuggling targeted Muggles to safety for the past six months. By day, I work as an undercover mail clerk for the Ministry of Magic, where I screen all incoming mail for Dark Magic.
Mail room duty on a good day is dull but tolerable. We see just enough Dark Magic there to keep things interesting. But nights in the train station - I'll be honest: That is a tense and terrible job. The numbers of Muggles we shuttle through each week is increasing; what's more, we are never sure if those people, wrapped in blankets, shaking, weeping, befuddled and frantic for their loved ones, are truly the only ones amongst their friends and families who are being hunted. There are many more we never know existed until they turn up dead or missing. Often these are the Muggle families of witches and wizards - which begs the question: How many more were being killed on spontaneous Death Eater raids? How many might we have saved, but didn't?
This was my job until I began writing the obituaries of the people the Death Eaters have killed. I do it because the last person who wrote obituaries for The Daily Prophet disappeared and, for some unfathomable, ridiculous, and likely very ill-informed reason, someone volunteered me to fill his shoes.
When I come to the train station now, it's check on the new recruits who share the position I recently held. I'm not much older than they are, these baby-faced kids straight out of Hogwarts. I suppose the only difference between us is that they haven't been at this job long enough to have realized that they aren't the guardians of innocence they were told they are, that the real fight is being fought elsewhere, that they are sentries standing at the front gate when the enemy has known all along to use the back door. This used to be a source of endless frustration for me, so strongly did I believe that we had too many people working in the escape networks, and not nearly enough in the field; but now I'm just supremely grateful that the Order of the Phoenix is squeamish about sending seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds off to die. I met a fourteen-year-old last week whose eighteen-year-old brother was killed in a Death Eater raid. I wrote about them both and The Daily Prophet paid me fifty Galleons for my trouble.
I have a confession: I'm writing this out of guilt and shame. I'm nineteen years old and I know nothing. I'm not qualified to write about anyone's life but my own. I wish I were, because nobody deserves to die and then have their story botched. But here I am, for whatever reason, for whatever purpose, hoping that - at the very least - I understand life well enough to write death with some small measure of dignity.
x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x
Disclaimer: As thrilled as I'd be if I were J.K. Rowling, I am not her and I own nothing you recognize. Sigh.
Author's Note: June 2011: I finally got off my lazy bum and edited this after, I don't know, five years of letting it sit? I took a three-year hiatus when I went off to college and didn't come back until last summer, right before starting grad school. Anyway, this fic has been written up through Chapter 9 and will be updated regularly until all available chapters are uploaded here. I'm still pretty busy these days, but I've been cranking on this fic since last July and hope to finish it.
Cheers. Hope you liked!
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