TM 194
The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place. ~The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon.
Magic? This quote makes it sound like that’s a good thing, or at least something that’s fascinating and wonderful somehow. Do you have. Any. Idea. How annoying it is to try to find evidence that you know is there, that will put away a killer for life, and it’s like it just vanished? Trying to solve a murder and it’s as though you’re chasing a phantom? Evidence pointing to one person, conclusively, and then everything unraveling with one fingerprint, which has no hits in any database available is one of my recurring nightmares. I’ve had it happen too many times to see magically disappearing evidence as something interesting. I know as an investigator, we investigate and find the evidence. And for the most part, we do find it eventually. It’s the cases we can’t crack, the ones that are particularly brutal, where it’s especially frustrating to know there’s evidence there and you just can’t find it. Those are times when it seems like the evidence is “thoroughly lost” or like it never existed, and that’s when it’s even more important that I find it.
People count on us, and I don’t have the patience to deal with evidence that won’t cooperate by letting us find it, and I see nothing at all magickal about it. I just see it as a broken world in need of repair, and the means I use to repair it are not to be found, no matter how diligently we search.
Magic? This quote makes it sound like that’s a good thing, or at least something that’s fascinating and wonderful somehow. Do you have. Any. Idea. How annoying it is to try to find evidence that you know is there, that will put away a killer for life, and it’s like it just vanished? Trying to solve a murder and it’s as though you’re chasing a phantom? Evidence pointing to one person, conclusively, and then everything unraveling with one fingerprint, which has no hits in any database available is one of my recurring nightmares. I’ve had it happen too many times to see magically disappearing evidence as something interesting. I know as an investigator, we investigate and find the evidence. And for the most part, we do find it eventually. It’s the cases we can’t crack, the ones that are particularly brutal, where it’s especially frustrating to know there’s evidence there and you just can’t find it. Those are times when it seems like the evidence is “thoroughly lost” or like it never existed, and that’s when it’s even more important that I find it.
People count on us, and I don’t have the patience to deal with evidence that won’t cooperate by letting us find it, and I see nothing at all magickal about it. I just see it as a broken world in need of repair, and the means I use to repair it are not to be found, no matter how diligently we search.