The Origins of Iris
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Synopsis
Wild meets Sliding Doors, with a healthy dose of darkness thrown in, as Iris meets an alternate version of herself in the woods after escaping her abusive wife.
'I opened my eyes and the woman wearing my face opened hers at the same time.'
Iris, desperate to escape her unhappy marriage to her beautiful but controlling wife Claude, flees New York City for the remote Catskill Mountains. When she was a child, Iris and her father found solace in the beauty and wilderness of the forest and now Iris needs time and space to clear her head and come to terms with the mistakes which have led her here. But what Iris doesn't expect in this journey of survival and self-discovery is to find herself - quite literally.
Trapped in a neglected cabin deep in the mountains and with rapidly dwindling supplies, Iris is grudgingly forced to come face-to-face with a seemingly happier, prettier, better version of herself. An Iris who made difference choices in life and love. But is this other Iris all she seems? Can she be trusted? What is she hiding? And why did she end up here if her life went down such a different path?
(P) 2021 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Release date: August 19, 2021
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Print pages: 336
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The Origins of Iris
Beth Lewis
Balsam fir. Sugar maple. Trembling aspen. Northern red oak. My father taught me to name the trees. Along with the stars, the woods lit up his heart and gave him peace. He wasn’t a happy man, always looking for a way out, a different life. For a while, he tried to convince my mother to move to a cabin upstate, live off the land. The following year, he wanted to pack up and move across the country to Napa, California, to make wine. The summer after that, he put down an offer on a ranch in Montana but didn’t tell anyone about his idea to raise horses. He was outbid on the land and my mother didn’t hide her relief or her anger at him for being so reckless in the first place. That broke his heart.
For my father, it was anything but the suburbs. The homogenous, identikit life. The Saturday lawn mow, wave to Bill across the street, same conversations. How about them Giants? Where you headed on vacation this summer?
He soothed himself with trips to nature. He was a junkie, and the woods, the beach, the mountains were his fix. They became mine too, for a while, until he died when I was sixteen.
It was my fault. If only I’d gone with him that day, if I’d not been so selfish, he would still be alive. From then on, I couldn’t stand the emptiness of nature without him. When Claude suggested a vacation to the Rockies, I baulked, told her I hated the mountains, the forest, dirt of all kinds. The wilderness became hostile to me, a place of memories I’d locked away and an environment I couldn’t navigate without my father’s guiding hands. Only the stars gave comfort. He told me once the night sky was full of ghosts, old distant light from dead stars, visible to us for thousands of years but no less beautiful for the death of their source.
He was one of them. A dead star. But I still saw his light.
Walking did this to me. Made me reflect and reminisce. Like a trance. For the first time in years, I felt a spark of my old self. The Iris my father knew.
I walked into the woods with the vaguest idea of where I was headed. This section of the nine-hundred-kilometre-long trail, abandoned a decade ago in favour of pumping funds into the more photogenic and accessible Appalachian, wound through the Catskill Mountains and forests, up to the Finger Lakes, then south-west to the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania. The article I’d read devoted all of two short paragraphs to the shame of forgetting such a beautiful hike. It spoke of campgrounds long since demolished or stripped of value, and hiker huts sprinkled every thirty kilometres or so.
I had it in my head to go to one of those huts, make it my own. I’d live my father’s dream. Escape the city. Escape Claude. Forget Iris, become Jane.
That first day off the bus, I was still in blissful ignorance that this would be easy. That this was a clever plan of mine to simultaneously rid myself of Claude, be closer to my father and solve all my problems.
In truth, and I’m not too big to admit it, this whole adventure was an extreme overreaction to a marriage turned rotten.
I walked for about five hours along the ghost of a trail, still visible if you knew where to look – the occasional intact waymarker, painted post, rusted plaque. I stopped sometimes to sip at my water bottle and eat a handful of peanuts, to take a breath and calm the doubts.
As I got deeper into the forest, further from civilisation, I felt it. What my father had talked about when I was a kid. The deep sense of rightness and peace that came from the hush between trees. Sunlight struggled through the canopy, throwing shifting spotlights on the forest floor. Brittle brown leaves cracked under my boots, birdsong filled the air, endless and joyful and everywhere. Spindly aspen trunks strobed the landscape like a living barcode. Ferns brushed my bare legs. If warmth and calm had a smell, it would be the forest in summer.
The first hut I found was a ruin. The roof collapsed and rotten, the walls disintegrated to soft splinters, the stink of animal mess and decay. Nothing left to even camp beneath for the night. But that was okay, I told myself, there would be another one. A better one. Besides, I still had daylight. I would be fine.
Just fine.
So I kept walking, but no hut appeared between the trees. The sun was slipping, and night edged closer as I came to a relatively flat spot, thick with leaf litter and mosses. The trees made a tight horseshoe clearing, fringed with ferns and high bracken, a natural shelter from the wind. As good a place as any to camp.
I went about clearing fallen branches and the bigger rocks, then pulled out my tent. I’d never put up a tent. Never even packed a backpack. My father always made camp while I played as a kid.
Cross-legged on the ground, I read the instructions twice.
Lay flysheet down. Peg out groundsheet. Assemble tension poles. Insert into pole sleeves.
I sat in the middle of a mess of pegs, fluorescent ropes and reams of bright nylon with no clue what I was doing.
Claude’s voice purred in my head. Oh darling, really? This is your big plan?
Fuck her and her underestimation of me. Cue montage music and Rocky punching the bag.
I put up the stupid tent.
But I didn’t have a mallet and the ground was hard. I ended up hammering in pegs with a rock. Bent two. Broke one. The tent sagged on one side, but I didn’t care, because I’d done it.
Well into darkness, three-dollar head torch lighting my way, I slung my gear into the tent, unrolled the sleeping bag and climbed in. I ate the bus apple, the rest of the peanuts, too tired to mess about with the stove and astrofood, then zipped the sleeping bag up to my chin.
Day one. Probably lost. Barely made camp before dark. Not the best start, Jane.
Claude’s tittering laugh flitted through my head and I felt the red heat of shame fill my cheeks. She was laughing at me, like she always did, for not being strong enough.
The sun rose on the first day of my new life at 4.58 a.m. exactly, and I hadn’t slept a wink.
I saw the sun creep grey light up the side of my tent and almost wept with exhaustion. After thirty hours on buses, five hours of hiking, a dozen new aches in my side and back from the hard ground, I was on the edge of giving up, heading back to my apartment and grovelling to Claude, forgiving her everything, begging her to forgive me.
They say everything becomes clear in the cold light of day. I sat outside my tent, elbows on my knees, and took stock.
In my panic and desperation to leave, I’d grabbed everything in the apartment I could think of before heading to the outdoor store. I just needed to get out before she got home that evening, and well . . . I pulled over my bag, emptied it and laid everything out in front of me.
Three uneven changes of clothes. Half of them unsuitable for the environment.
Not enough underwear.
Three pairs of socks. One with polar bears stitched into the toes.
Two one-litre water bottles – one almost empty.
A road map of the Catskills I picked up at the Albany bus depot.
Money pouch.
New boots.
Notebooks. An assortment of pens grabbed from a drawer.
One pack of tissues.
Watch. One of Claude’s. All rose gold and diamond chips. Not waterproof.
Tiny single-burner gas stove with a spare bottle. Still in its box.
One pot.
A multi tool I’d mistaken for useful but was in fact just a folding fork, spoon, blunt knife, and toothpick.
Emergency whistle, because it was at the till and the cashier said it deterred bears.
The whole freeze-dried, pre-packaged food shelf from the outdoor store, swept into my cart in one dramatic gesture and later shoved into my bag at the bus depot.
Extra batteries for my torch? No.
Bug spray? Of course not, and the mosquitoes knew it.
First aid kit? Shut up.
Compass?
But I did have a telescope.
I looked at everything I had, spilled out onto the ground like I’d upended a trash can. Most of it just as useful. What was I doing out here? Where was I going?
‘I can’t do this.’
The bright bloom of rage and defiance that had carried me to this point had wilted to a drooping bud.
‘I can’t do this!’ I shouted, but the forest wasn’t listening. It smothered my negativity in moss and fern and projected nothing back to me.
I shook my head, sighing, then felt the smile. Tickling the edges of my mouth. Then I was laughing. Laughing hard at the sheer absurdity of what I’d got myself into.
Why would anyone walk away from their life to a situation so far removed from their everyday?
Heartbreak. Loss. Fear.
If I hadn’t made that rash, dangerous decision to leave, I would have withered to nothing. I would have died, like my father. Unhappy and beaten down flat.
‘Besides,’ I said to the trees like they were old friends, ‘can you imagine Claude’s face if I stumbled back home after two days lost in the woods?’
‘Iris, sweetheart,’ I said in her voice, ‘why did you think you could do that? You hate the woods!’ Oh do I, Claude? Do I really?
I looked around at the trees, then at my mishmash of gear and unsuitable clothing and pile of cardboard food, and groaned.
‘Yes. Maybe I do.’
Then Claude would tilt her head to one side, shake it sadly and hold out her arms for me to collapse into like a child. And I would, because I always did. I got upset, she held me, told me without ever actually saying it, to stop trying so hard. I shuddered and shook away the image.
I shoved everything back into my pack, wrapped the telescope in a T-shirt, took down the tent, swilled a glug of water around my fuzzy teeth and finished off another bag of nuts.
I pushed my tired legs until the muscles warmed, tenderised, found their deep, true strength. Then every step was easier. The heat of the day got up, prickled my skin in uneven dapples, irregular clearings of full-blast light into dark green shadows and cool air. I lost the trail twice, had to backtrack, but it didn’t deter me. I hadn’t been alone or in control in six years. I’d started to believe I couldn’t be, but I’d survived my first day and night with nobody else, no phone, no email, no constant news stream, nobody on the other end of a text message in the middle of the night.
I was alone. At least twenty kilometres from anyone else.
The trees stared back at me, silent sentinels.
I kept walking, watching the sky turn from blue to overcast grey, concentrating on each step and the way the straps of the duffel and daypack cut into my shoulders, the burn in my thighs, and the rocks I had to avoid, and the dry creeks I had to scramble down and up again and the trickle of water left in my first bottle. If I concentrated on all those things, I wouldn’t have time to panic or regret or feel how bone-deep tired I was or remember that night in the bar I first saw Claude or the next time I ran into her and fell head over heels or the first kiss or our first night together or the six years of firsts and seconds and hundredths. And now here I was, running away, cursing her name, painting her a monster in my own mind because it was easier than missing her.
After
I came upon the next, mercifully intact, hiker’s hut around noon. My back hurt. My legs hurt. My throat hurt from too little water and my stomach hurt from terrible food choices. I dropped the duffel and stared at my new, rent-free home. Four stacked-log walls, wide slanted roof, door, window, narrow porch with a picnic table outside and an uneven ring of flat stones circling a fire pit.
‘Home sweet . . .’ I sighed, trying to calm the fear bubbling up in my chest. The oh fuck, the journey is over, life begins, here I am, you made your bed now get eaten by bears in it.
I left Claude’s duffel on the ground and went to the cabin.
The door was latched shut, the window had a spidery crack in the bottom corner, and the porch was covered in leaves and a few toppled logs from a low stack against the front wall.
Inside, a forgotten relic of a hiking heyday. A fan of dust and leaves blown under the door. A cold black stove. A dusty radio. Two wide cabinets, a dull steel sink with no running water, a countertop, a square table, pinboard with maps, brochures and postcards tacked all over, a shelf of ragged paperbacks, three chairs and a fourth broken. A sagging couch. And a ladder.
I smiled.
A platform at the top of the ladder held a bed. Double mattress, balled-up sheet, a shelf, and all the dust I could eat.
‘Hi,’ I said to the cabin from the platform. ‘I’ll be your new tenant for a while.’
As I started airing out the place, letting the light in, the cabin seemed to relax its stiff shoulders, breathe out along with me.
I set up my gas stove and single pan by the pit and rehydrated one of the astro meals. Glutinous beef stroganoff containing nothing resembling either beef or mushrooms, eaten with a flimsy folding spoon. The height of survival chic. The dense, powdery mix coated my teeth and I wished I’d paid more attention in the store.
Inside, there were tools for the stove, a broom and mop for cleaning, mismatched utensils – mostly fork-knife and spoon-fork gadgets left by hikers – a pan with a broken handle, two enamel plates and a metal cup with GO TIGERS printed on the side. There was an old cooler, and a metal box containing an emergency radio, a flare gun, a bear whistle, six candles, an oil lantern and a tube of waterproof matches.
Despite a good airing, the cabin smelled strange. Not just musty and years-abandoned, but almost . . . alive. Like every backpacker who passed through left a piece of themselves in the grain of the wood. The smell of decades of trail food cooking on single-burner gas or over wood in the black-top stove. Of spilt energy drinks and milestone beer, of morning sachet coffee and creamer, of sweat, of laughter, of conversation and meet-and-greets and see you at the next checkpoint. They’d left postcards and phone numbers and physical remnants, JOSH + JAY SUMMER 2002 carved into the walls, pits in the floorboards from hiking poles. There was a transient energy embedded in the fabric of the place. A cabin full of ghosts.
Add the ones I’d brought along with me and the place started to feel crowded. I sat on the platform with my legs dangling into nothing, thinking of nothing. Below me, a phantom Claude strode into the hut, fresh out of work. Her Manolos stabbed into the wood; she swiped a finger over the table, looking around with a mix of worry and disgust, then up at me watching her.
‘This is it?’
I nodded.
‘You left our apartment for this? It’s smaller than the bathroom.’
‘Exactly.’
Her features softened, pretension and annoyance melting away to reveal the woman I fell for. Those brown eyes found mine, eyebrows creased. She stepped to the bottom of the ladder, gripped the rail. The hook dug deeper.
‘Come home . . .’
I clapped my hands together. The sharp sound snapped me back to the empty cabin.
Staying still was a mistake. Resting. Reflecting. Thinking of her. All a mistake. I had to keep busy. Keep my mind and body occupied at all times.
I dragged the mattress down from the platform – the mezzanine, if you want to get fancy, and I did – and manoeuvred it outside, leant it against the wall of the cabin beside a woodpile and a rusty axe. I beat the crap out of it with a stick and tried to ignore the stains. Clouds of dust belched out of the old fabric with every hit, and I kept going, my arm aching, until my strikes came away clean. Then turned it around and did the same to the other side.
While the mattress and cabin were airing, I explored the immediate area. A clearing to the east, full of wild flowers and meadow grass, a high ridge to the north-west where the faint trail carried on up and over, and a few hundred yards to the north, a fast-flowing stream and a huge sense of relief.
My father taught me about wild water. Streams and rivers are like people, Rissy, he said. You want the ones that move quick and strong, the ones that push over rocks, not the ones dammed up by them. If you find water standing still, it’s no good. Standing still will make you sick.
I went down to the stream, tasted the water. Fresh and clean, with a herbaceous hint of fallen leaves. I washed my hands and face, filled up the water bottle, drank it down and refilled it, then gave the sheet a good seeing-to. I scraped it on rocks like in the movies, expecting a bright white result, and got a soggy grey mess. But I was keeping busy. Making progress.
I went to the clearing and draped the sheet over a fat bush to dry, even though it was overcast and I hadn’t seen the sun for hours. But the evening was young and the air warm and I didn’t know what else to do with it. Then back to the cabin. I hefted the mattress inside and managed to get it back up onto the mezzanine without breaking my neck. I unpacked my clothes, folded them and set them on the shelf beside my new bed. Laid out the sleeping bag on the mattress. Resisted the urge to lie down.
The energy I’d gained from the rehydrated beef goop didn’t last long. I inhaled a granola bar while checking through the cupboards. Behind the couch, under a loose floorboard, I found a pack of instant noodles with a seven-year-old use-by date, a handful of coins, a torn park permit and an empty plastic soda bottle.
I set up my telescope at the broken window. Adjusted it. Checked the lens. Cleaned it. Adjusted it more. Tried to ignore the growing ache in my bones.
The light waned as I beat the couch cushions.
Head torch guiding the way, I set my food on the kitchen shelves, staring at the packets with a mix of disgust and hope that at least some of them tasted better than the beef. I tucked the stove and gas canister beneath the countertop, then stood in the middle of the dim cabin, muscles buzzing with exhaustion. Nothing left to tidy. Panic fizzed up my throat. When I ran out of things to do, then what? I’d have to live. Thrive. Here. There must be something . . .
The sheet. It would still be wet, but I could light a fire to dry it.
I grabbed a few logs from outside, brought them in and opened the door of the stove.
Something moved. Claws and fur and teeth.
I screamed. It screamed.
A blur of black and grey leapt out of the stove at me. It thudded against my stomach, dug sharp needle claws through my shirt, into my skin, and I screamed again.
The raccoon scratched, tried to climb me, while I flailed, backing away from the creature like a cat trying to back out of its collar.
I hooked a hand under its body and flung it away. It landed by the open door and hissed at me, bared dagger teeth. I balled my fists, waved my arms in the air, shouted. Didn’t think about rabies or plague or whatever raccoons have. This was my space. My home.
The raccoon didn’t move. Hissed back.
‘Get out!’
It tried to get back to the stove, but I jumped in its path.
‘Go away!’
What would Claude think if she could see me dancing with an angry raccoon?
Oh Iris, if you can’t handle a raccoon, what happens when a bear comes along? Such a silly thing, you are.
Hot rage.
I ran at the rodent – were they actually rodents? Or, like, dogs? – arms wide, banshee-screaming, kicking out at the air in front of me.
I chased it out the front door and to the base of a nearby tree. It scooted up the trunk to a high branch, where it looked down on me and growled.
‘Yeah and fuck you too,’ I shouted.
I went back inside the cabin, dropped down onto the couch and breathed. My hands shook. My lungs shook. But I’d be damned if a raccoon would scare me away. This was life now, there was no going back, nothing to go back to, so I’d have to figure it out. I’d be cold. I’d be hungry. I’d get hurt. I’d be bored. And after a life of relative privilege and comfort, of bagels and pizza and wine and movies and books on demand, those were foreign, fearsome concepts. But it was just the woods. I could hike into the nearest town when I needed supplies. If I ran out of money, I could find temporary work waiting tables in towns along the route. I could move on, further and further from the city, as soon as I felt like it. I could survive. I would survive.
I sniffed away the fear, went to the stove and pulled out the raccoon’s nest. Leaves, twigs, fluff from the couch cushions. I threw it all outside at the base of the tree.
‘Here’s your stuff, you little shit,’ I shouted to the now pacing animal.
It hissed back.
I opened up the vents in the stove, shoved in the logs and struck a match.
The flame guttered against the bark and went out.
I’d never made a fire. Course I hadn’t. My father always did that. I sat back on my heels and rubbed my face. I considered using the camping stove, stuck in there and angled to catch the wood, but decided an exploding gas canister wasn’t worth the risk.
I went outside, grabbed some of the raccoon nest and used it and one of the postcards as kindling.
The second match caught the paper, struggled against the twigs, but with some gentle encouragement crackled to life. I fed it more kindling until it was big enough to handle a log or two.
Smoke puffed up the chimney – the raccoon highway – and a strong flame breathed out heat. I closed the stove door and went to get the sheet.
Sundown was maybe ten minutes away, and because of the clouds and dense trees, the forest had taken on an eerie premature darkness.
But when I got to the clearing, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, as if an electric shock passed through me the moment I stepped away from the trees.
The sheet was there, covering the bush as I’d left it, but I stopped short. My legs wouldn’t move me.
Something was different.
An uncanny sense of wrongness needled at me, wormed its way in at my edges. I told myself everything was as it should be. The sheet. The bush. The ring of trees. And yet my primal brain was screaming.
Then I saw it.
The light.
There were no clouds above the clearing, like the hand of the universe had taken a cookie cutter to the sky. As a consequence, the ground, the bush, the sheet were bright, lit up by the rising moon.
I stepped closer. The sheet was dry and stiff, as if baked in full hot sun. But there had not been full hot sun all day.
The electricity hummed through me again, raised the hairs on my arms. I felt like I was being watched from all sides. A hundred eyes on me because they knew I’d stepped into something, somewhere else.
‘What . . .?’ I whispered, and the feeling grew so strong I could almost hear the buzz.
I looked up to the twilight sky, where the early night stars, as familiar to me as my own name, should just be crowning. Mars should be visible to the west. Venus low to the south. Serpentine Draco and Ursa Major to the north.
There were stars.
There were a lot of stars. Clear and bright in the sky.
I should have felt the calming influence of their constant, unchanging nature in a world of flux and uncertainty. I should have heard my father’s voice teaching me the names of the constellations, telling me their stories, like I did every time I looked up.
But I didn’t.
Instead, terror gripped me inside and out. Cold, hard, unyielding terror that I didn’t, couldn’t, understand. It was as if my eyes were no longer connected to my brain. I could see stars but did not recognise them.
They were not my stars.
After
Nothing was normal.
I woke wincing against the sunlight, sweating my white T-shirt grey. The cabin steamed, cheeks red, lips dry, mouth a pit of sand, ankle throbbing and stiff but bearable. A fire burned in the stove. A fire I hadn’t lit.
Other Iris was in the kitchen area, assessing my supplies, pulling out the space food, tutting and throwing it on the countertop.
I coughed and she turned.
‘You sleep like the dead. I haven’t exactly been quiet. That fire took the best part of two hours to get going. Had to cut the wood down to kindling before it would take, old trick my dad taught me. That axe out there? That blade’s for shit, you know.’
My chest ached and I didn’t want to be around her, couldn’t bear to hear stories about her dad who was my dad only better. Alive. I pulled myself up, wincing at my stiff ankle.
I dressed in warm clothes, almost dry thanks to her fire, and felt close to human again. I tied up my long, boring hair and glanced enviously at hers.
I grabbed an empty water bottle and limped outside. I felt her eyes on my back. My ankle was sore and still swollen, but with the broom as a crutch, I could get around without much pain. I hopped to the stream and filled up my bottle, drank half in one long gulp. She followed, watching with her arms crossed over her chest. I tried not to look. If she was anything like me – I almost laughed – her defences would go up as soon as I started asking personal questions.
‘Are you going to talk to me?’ she asked.
My voice. Same annoyed tone. Same inflection.
I didn’t look up. Told myself to make a plan.
God, Iris, do you hear yourself? Make a plan to talk to a hallucination and tease out information about an alternate life you maybe could have had?
I wanted to slap myself.
‘You’re going to have to at some point,’ Iris said.
I heard her sigh. Heard her pace behind me. Knew, without looking, she’d be throwing her arms up and shaking her head, because that’s what I would do.
She called out, ‘You can’t ignore this.’
She was right. Looking at her, at me, at a me so much healthier, happier, better prepared, was agony. The gnawing darkness that had pushed me towards the overhang, that had wished I’d had a rope so I could end it quicker, clawed at me from the inside. First it tested my edges, nudging at the chain link, pacing the perimeter. Then it began to whisper.
You know what you did.
It’s your fault.
It’s why you deserved what Claude did to you.
That’s why you’re out here, Iris. That’s why you’re playing woodsman, trying to please him, fulfil his dreams so he’ll forgive you.
He’ll never forgive you.
That’s why you see Claude, not him. Because he blames you. He hates you. And you’ll never have a better life.
You’re going to die here.
I splashed my face because it was the only thing I could think of that might shock some sense into me. I tried to stand, and in a moment Other Iris’s arms were under mine, helping me up. So strange. So foreign. And yet so completely known. It wasn’t like being touched by a stranger. More like when you sleep on your arm and wake up numb. It’s your hand, you can see it moving as it touches your other arm, but you can’t feel it.
When I was stable, she let go and I finally met her eyes.
‘Look,’ she said, sighing like I sigh, ‘I’m not going anywhere. I literally can’t. No matter which direction I go, and I’ve tried them all, the path brings me right back here. To you.’
‘What’s your point?’ I said,
‘My point, is that there is a reason for it. The universe, aliens, God, whatever, has put us here for a reason. Which means we need to figure out what it is.’
‘You said that before. Have you figured it out yet?’
Her eyes narrowed at my petulance but I didn’t care. I found myself hating her. Her perfect skin. The hair I wanted and had to give up. The clothes I’d needed. The gear I’d forgotten.
‘No. I haven’t,’ she said. ‘It clearly takes both of us.’
‘Right, right.’ I felt Claude’s mannerisms, her lack of patience, rise inside me. I moved my hands like she did, I felt her smirk on my mouth. ‘And I’m supposed to believe you why? Because you look like me? Because you say so? Or because you’re so desperate for something extraordinary to happen you’re willing to believe anything? Do you really think the universe gives a shit about you?’
I was talking to myself. S. . .
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