Chapter 1: The Badge

At 06:17 in Prague, I changed the same sentence for the ninth time and called it preparation because cowardice looked better when it had formatting.

The hotel room was too warm. Conference hotels all seemed to share the same theory of air: sealed, beige, and faintly hostile to sleep. The curtains were heavy enough to keep out the morning, but a line of pale light had found the gap and laid itself across the desk, cutting through the mess I had made of the night.

Laptop. Camera. Half-dead phone. Two lens caps, neither attached to the lens they belonged to. A conference program folded open to my name. A white badge on a blue lanyard.

EVAN REED
SPEAKER

I kept turning the badge facedown, then turning it back over as if the words might become less ridiculous through repetition. They did not. My name sat there in clean black type, calm as a lab result, pretending no one had made a mistake.

The talk was called The Anatomy of a Wedding.

That had seemed clever four months earlier, when the invitation arrived and I had been alone in my office above the print shop, staring at the email as if it had been sent to the wrong Evan Reed. There weren’t many of us, probably, but I had still checked. Twice. A former medical researcher turned wedding photographer. Observation. Pattern recognition. Social pressure. The body under emotion. The physiology of rooms. A good title could make almost anything look intentional.

At 06:17, with the talk eight hours away, the title looked like evidence against me.

I had thirty-seven slides for a forty-minute talk, which was either disciplined or deranged depending on how generously one felt toward anxiety. I had rehearsed it enough to know where the laugh might come, where the silence should sit, where I could pause and drink water without looking as if my mouth had dried from fear. I had cut the medical section by half, then added two slides back because without it the talk felt too simple. I had cut the personal section by half, then stared at the blank space it left and understood that I had removed the only honest part.

So I put one sentence back.

A wedding gave my attention too much to do, and for once, that made me calm.

I hated the sentence enough to leave the cursor blinking inside it.

I clicked into the text box and changed calm to useful.

A wedding gave my attention too much to do, and for once, that made me useful.

Better. Safer. More professional. Less pathetic.

I looked at it for ten seconds, then changed it back.

I didn’t know why calm embarrassed me more. I only knew useful sounded like a man trying to pass.

The room made a small electrical sound from somewhere inside the wall. The minibar hummed. Outside, a tram bell rang faintly through the glass, thin and bright in the early city. Prague was waking with more dignity than I was. I had arrived the previous afternoon and had seen almost none of it beyond stone, rain, taxis, registration desks, and photographers wearing black like colour had personally betrayed them.

The conference venue was five minutes away on foot. I had walked the route twice the evening before, once because I wanted to know where I was going, and once because knowing hadn’t helped. Old habit from research days: when the mind couldn’t solve the fear, give the body a route. Door. Lift. Lobby. Left at the glass entrance. Past the café with the red awning. Across the square. Into the old theatre they had converted badly and beautifully into a conference hall. Registration on the ground floor. Main stage upstairs.