Billy the Kid now sees, very clearly, that the brown motionless shoe out in the middle of the asphalt must, by necessity, not be a good thing. An image published on the New York Times website flickers on his PC screen. It would appear to be very famous, but he isn’t familiar with it because at the age of 12 there’s no such thing as fame, or if there is it’s something else entirely. It is of a man, also motionless and standing on asphalt, in the middle of a deserted road in Hiroshima. He clasps an open umbrella and stares at the nuclear mushroom in the distance. That’s where the story of the photograph ends, and the exercise consists of asking oneself what the man hoped to protect himself from with that umbrella, what fate he thought he might rebut, and what then became of his life. There are three possible solutions to the enigma. The first is negative in character: in a typically Japanese fit, he becomes angry and sprints straight into the nuclear mass, perishing in the act. The second is neutral in character: his anger threshold is reached, and this reversal prompts him to develop an understanding for the enemy, their motives, their children, the families they are fighting to defend, and in a moment of excessive compassion, he joins the other side, which means he avoids death, and sees out the rest of his days very happily working at a fruit and veg warehouse in a midsized town somewhere in the U.S., until eventually dying of cancer. The third is positive in character: the plastic nature of the vision fascinates him, it takes on qualities of the sublime, of a mystical archetype, and he takes several photographs using the Instamatic that, like all good Japanese, he carries in his pocket, and he opens the umbrella as a way of emulating the shape of the mushroom, and then asks someone else to photograph him, initiating the chain of the legend of this photo (in this version it makes no difference whether he lives or dies). There’s also a fourth, but it’s larger than the Western Hemisphere, and perhaps the Eastern one, too: the Japanese man never existed, and neither did his solitude or his umbrella, just as the bomb, Hiroshima, the United States of America, insects, trees, and the woman’s breasts did not exist, because all that we can see, including the human race, is an immense hologram conceived by some outside observer, a reflection on the flat screen of some kind of cosmic PC. In this illusory world, the Japanese man could well have thought that the nuclear mushroom was the Tree of Life, and the rubble and radiation clinging to it were akin to baubles on a Christmas tree. Or something.