THE DUBS

You were a collector first. Tape traders, shop staff, the people who drove to a swap meet in Akron for a third-generation copy of something that probably didn't exist. That's how you got hold of one.

You watched it all the way through, once, before you knew. It didn't finish with you. Everybody else who was in the room that night has got on with their life, and you've been finding these ever since — or they've been finding you, which is the same thing said honestly.

A dub is a copy. It's also what it's called when somebody else's voice comes out of a mouth that isn't theirs. Nobody sat down and chose the word. It's what the people who know each other say, and it's what they call you now.

It left you something. One small thing you can't switch off.

Denise Vogel, 34
Runs the counter at a video shop in Parma
She remembers people who were cut. Nobody else does, and she can't stop saying their names.
Marcus Oyelaran, 41
Night shift, telephone exchange
He knows when a room has been altered. He walks into his own kitchen and knows.
Kathy Priest, 19
Community college, works weekends at a photo lab
She can tell when she's being filmed. She is being filmed more often than she tells anyone.
Sal Brennan, 57
Retired projectionist
He can hear the edit — the quarter-second before a scene changes. He hasn't slept a night through since 1984.
Bev Nadolny, 29
Sells cosmetics door to door, four counties
Strangers tell her a true thing inside a minute of meeting her. Afterwards they can't look at her. She's been asked to leave three houses she did nothing wrong in.

WHAT THAT MAKES YOU GOOD FOR

Nothing, on its own. None of you is stronger, faster or harder to hurt than the man behind the counter at the Gas-N-Go.

What you've got is that you can see the joins. A room that's been changed. A name nobody else has. A photograph that can't be right.

Everybody else in that town is living in the version the film wrote. You're the only five people carrying the other one.

That's not an advantage. It's a job nobody gave you and there's nobody to hand it back to.