For the first time he didn’t mind not being alone here. These two men had strong reason to be here and he wondered if they were seeing what he was seeing. even if they were, they would draw different conclusions, find references across a range of filmographies and disciplines. Filmography. The word used to make him draw back his head as if to put an antiseptic distance between him and it.

He thought he might want to time the shower scene. Then he thought this was the last thing he wanted to do. He knew it was a brief scene in the original movie, less than a minute, famously less, and he’d watched the prolonged scene here some days earlier, all broken motion, without suspense or dread or urgent pulsing screech-owl sound. curtain rings, that’s what he recalled most clearly, the rings on the shower curtain spinning on the rod when the curtain is torn loose, a moment lost at normal speed, four rings spinning slowly over the fallen figure of Janet Leigh, a stray poem above the hellish death, and then the bloody water curling and cresting at the shower drain, minute by minute, and eventually swirling down.

He was eager to watch again. He wanted to count the curtain rings, maybe four, possibly five or more or less. He knew that the two men at the adjacent wall would also be watching intently. He felt they shared something, we three, that’s what he felt. it was the kind of rare fellowship that singular events engender, even if the others didn’t know he was here.

Almost no one entered the room alone. They came in teams, in squads, shuffling in and milling briefly near the door and then leaving. one or two would turn and leave and then the others, forgetting what they’d seen in the seconds it took to turn and move toward the door. He thought of them as members of theater groups. Film, he thought, is solitary.