Sneak Peek of My Volcano, a novel by John Elizabeth Stintzi

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PRAISE FOR MY VOLCANO

Winner of the Sator New Works Award.

“Climate change, time travel, startup culture, and volcanic eruptions intertwine in this sui generis outing from [Stintzi]… Told in a series of buzzing numbered fragments, the narrative whirls around a volcano rising in Central Park that looks like Mount Fuji. As the volcano grows, Stintzi builds out the wide-ranging narrative with jump cuts… That Stintzi keeps all these plates spinning is a wonder; that they transform the chaotic present into a fiery, transcendent vision of the future is even more impressive. It’s a brilliant achievement.”

Publishers Weekly, starred review “A genre-bending novel that circles a volcano mysteriously rising from the Central Park Reservoir… Stintzi has a gift for meticulously crafted worldbuilding and captures the tender drama of human (and, in this novel, extrahuman) relationships.

Patient readers will be rewarded by their arrival at the book’s dazzling conclusion. A vibrant ecosystem of a novel that deals honestly with the beauty and horror of human and ecological connectedness.”

Kirkus Reviews “Nonbinary author Stintzi’s science fiction / eco-horror novel is an ambitious, global tale that begins with the discovery of an emergent volcano in Central Park. An eclectic group of characters, from Mexico City, Tokyo, Nigeria, Greece, Mongolia, and more grapple with their personal changes and transformations as the earth undergoes its own.”

Casey Stepaniuk, Autostraddle

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“With the panoramic scope and astute sharpness of Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes and the eerie chill of Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, John Elizabeth Stintzi’s My Volcano immediately grabs you by the shirt and doesn’t let you go.

Structured like a spiral moving through time and space, and deftly mixing history and myth and vision with poetic prose, this dread-inducing book will keep you up at night until you get to its last devastating, but ultimately, I think, hopeful line.”

Alicia Elliott, bestselling author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground “A kaleidoscopic, contemporary folktale with added acerbic juice, like when Dylan went electric. Stintzi somehow funnels the tumultuous present into a sprawling novel of collision and connection that’s both timely and timeless. This is very weird shit indeed.”

Hazel Jane Plante, author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) “My Volcano is a fast-paced, gripping, singular novel that belongs to the new wave of eco-horror yielding to no conventions.”

Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig

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WHO WE ARE Two Dollar Radio is a family-

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All Rights Reserved ISBN4 9781953387165 Also available as an Ebook.

E-ISBN4 9781953387172

2022 BY COPYRIGHT4 © JOHN ELIZABETH STINTZI

Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.

Book Club & Reader Guide of questions and topics for discussion is available at twodollarradio.com

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AUTHOR PHOTO4 Courtesy of the author.

Angry Myna : Photo by Vivek Doshi on Unsplash.

John Elizabeth Stintzi.

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ANYTHING ELSE? Yes. Do not copy this book—with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews—without the prior written permission from the copyright holder and publisher. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means. WE MUST ALSO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Any resemblances to names, places, incidents, or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental or are used fictitiously.

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“Reality is nothing but the opinion of power.”

—old witch’s proverb

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Books by John Elizabeth Stintzi My Volcano Vanishing Monuments Junebat

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PRIMARY WAVE ////////////////

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1 The jogger, the first person to see the peak of the volcano sprouting from the middle of the reservoir in Central Park, in the early hours of june 2, thought the volcano was a breaching humpback whale. But as split second turned to two turned to five, the jogger didn’t see the form rise or fall, and it peaked at only about eight feet high from the surface of the water. She stared at it for a full minute—stretching all the while—before continuing her run. She couldn’t afford to stop any longer because she didn’t want her heart rate to drop.

By noon, the same jogger would approach a local news crew in the park, saying that she was the first to have seen it, she was, and that her mind first thought it was a humpback whale.

On several of the evening news broadcasts they put a photo of the volcano rising in the park next to a photo of a humpback whale breaching just off the coast of Rockaway Beach, perfectly foregrounding the Empire State Building. Viewers were asked to respond on social media if they thought there was a resemblance or not. Two news anchors believed the resemblance was there, but four others didn’t. A great many people mocked the jogger relentlessly on Twitter. Near as many people commented on her looks.

When asked why she—the jogger—didn’t report what she’d seen when she first saw it, she didn’t have an answer. She grew quiet. The dead air that followed filled the noise-hungry microphone with the sound of camera mirrors flapping until she added: “You never think you’re seeing something new anymore.

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL I figured it was old news. I didn’t want to say anything because someone would tell me they knew; that everyone already knew.

Also, I had six more miles to run.”

2 Waking up on the street, that midafternoon on june 2, Jahan Mokri thought he was dreaming. He woke up and stumbled into the talk, the talk of some thing rising from Central Park. He was near the East Village and went down into the subway, jumped the turnstiles to climb onto the train that ran uptown to the park. The attendant in the booth yelled emptily to him, knowing he was paid enough to be outraged but not to take action. He didn’t want to think of Jahan as a human being; otherwise, he might have chased him down.

Jahan sardined his way uptown and surfaced near the Met to try and walk into the park. It was bustling with life, but he pushed his way toward the reservoir. The crowd gave in to his pressures. Police were trying to keep the huge swell of people out of the park, but the bodies had no better place to be, to force themselves, and so the cries of the police were largely ignored.

There was nothing they could do. Eventually, Jahan made it to the tall metal fence and could see it, the short jut coming out of the water.

There was a small dinghy with a camera crew and police in life vests embarking from the shore toward it. There were ducks on the water, confused more by the crowd than what was growing in the reservoir. There were more cameras than eyes on the rising mass. The crowd behind him were all holding their phones in the air like periscopes. Somewhere, an opportunist walked through the tight crowd plucking phones from upraised hands.

Fights started, all elbows. Jahan was unimpressed by what would eventually be identified as a volcano.

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Near him, a woman was being interviewed. There were at least thirty microphones stuck in her face. Jahan tried to get close, to hear what she was saying, but was pushed away by an intern. Jahan had not been touched directly in so long, so he kept pushing himself toward the woman, and the intern panicked, used both hands, and soon the whole surrounding crowd, the whole city, seemed to turn on Jahan with open, pushing hands: groping him, trying to stop his momentum and quiet his screaming. Many of the camera operators paused their shots, took five, waited for him to be subdued, while almost as many others turned their cameras toward him. The woman, no longer wearing her running shorts or her sweat-stained crop top, watched. Had she still been wearing her heart rate monitor, it would have beeped at her.

“You bastards!” a voice cried, sinking into the crowd. “You bastards!”

3 On june 4, Angel Barros Vargas, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City, walked around the Zócalo trying to kick pigeons. Usually, he would sit in the shade, where his father could watch him, but on june 4 Angel walked wide circles—counterclockwise— around the huge Mexican flag.

In the Zócalo, Angel’s father tried to sell white tourists pictures he took of them with an old Polaroid camera. The film was expired and faded, the images quaint. Angel’s father broke his English—pretended he understood less than he did—to make the sale, while Angel walked around the square. Angel did not know anything about New York, about the peak that would rise to about thirty feet that day; he just walked and tried to catch the pigeons off guard. His foot did not catch any, and after a while he sat down in the shade again, until finally his father came back John Elizabeth Stintzi | 7

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL to collect him, sweating, with bills in his fist, pockets jangling with coins. When he told Angel how much he had made, Angel noted to himself that it was the exact same amount as the day before. Twenty-seven dollars and 354 pesos. They went home and ate the same food they always did.

The next day was the same. Angel walked around counterclockwise again, tried and failed to kick the pigeons, and eventually gave up to sit in the shade. When Angel’s father came to pick him up, he was sweating. But his father had made twenty-seven dollars and 354 pesos.

After the third day of this, as they walked back home after the peak hour of tourists was over, Angel asked his father if he had ever made the exact same amount of money three days in a row before, and his father looked at him confused and said he had never made the same amount of money one day to the next.

He told his son that, for example, the day before, he had made almost half of what he did today.

On the fourth day, Angel didn’t ask any questions. He did not walk around the Zócalo, and did not try to kick any pigeons.

When his father came to him, he lamented that he’d not brought an extra pack of film, that he’d sold all the shots he had and made almost fifty dollars.

The next day was june 6. Angel was too young to keep track of dates, so the date didn’t matter to him. He walked the counterclockwise circle that day, got extremely close to kicking one pigeon, and when his father returned he lamented that he’d not brought an extra pack of film. They went home. That night, Angel could not sleep. He listened to his cousin sleep in the other bed. He listened to his uncle and aunt arguing.

The next day, his father did not go to the Zócalo, because there were thunderstorms during the peak midday period. Angel wrestled his cousin. Angel went onto the porch and tried to throw a kitchen knife into a cardboard box. He napped, woke up, and felt very tired for someone so young.

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL When they got to the Zócalo the next day, june 8, Angel took off. He didn’t say anything to his father; he just started sprinting counterclockwise around the flag. He didn’t kick any pigeons on purpose. A few ran into him, in confusion, in slow motion. While he ran, the city began to shrink. Buildings disappeared. People.

He ran and ran. Eventually, the city’s turning back sped up. The city went from construction to rubble to fire and destruction, slowly reversing. By the time Angel gave up running, he was in the center of the square in Tenochtitlan.

His father was not there, and when the people noticed him, they froze. The city surrounding Angel was a collection of stone palaces on an island in the middle of a lake—Lake Texcoco— that he’d never been told existed. The Mexican flag was gone.

The people stared at Angel, who was dressed unlike any Mexica they’d seen before. Angel did not know what to do, so he raised a hand to them.

If Angel had run in the other direction, had he found himself running toward the end of june, and if he’d stopped early he would have walked home with his father, who would have informed him that there was apparently a huge volcano sprouting from the middle of New York’s Central Park. If he had stopped at june 23—the day the volcano stopped rising—he might have been told the volcano was nearly two and a half miles tall.

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june 5, 2016.

“Goddess” Diamond.

New Orleans, Louisiana.

Found in a torched car.

Age 20.

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4 After the first few days, nobody thought too much of the volcano. It had been a top story at first, when the media was able to play off the jogger’s description of it looking like a whale, but soon the networks had a hard time holding people’s attention.

They held editorial meetings to strategize about how to keep it interesting, and how to keep it more interesting than other stations were. They racked their brains for the secret to making it an occurrence they could keep viewers invested in.

One network stationed a reporter in the park for a week, interviewing pedestrians and tourists about it—the mountain, crag, growth—and after the novelty of the first day or two, nobody really had anything to add. Tourists would often refuse to answer their questions, instead asking whether there were still Frankenfish in the water, and where the best place in the park was to watch the ducks.

Another sent an intern to the park, who—because she’d minored in math in college—was tasked with estimating the peak’s height daily. But the numbers didn’t seem to grow fast enough to enthrall anyone, as it seemed to only get about ten feet higher per day. weird outgrowth in new york’s central park now over 70 feet, one of the last headlines ran on june 6.

Attention waned as no station could find a good way to work tension into the story. They started to move on, but even without the cameras watching, the weird outgrowth still rose as quietly and consistently as it had been, speeding up slowly but exponentially.

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL On june 13—the day after forty-nine queer people were shot dead in Florida, and as the height reached 514 feet—the word to captivate the country, the world, finally came. That was the day that the mountain that was growing in Central Park was determined, with a very small margin for error, to be a volcano.

5 On june 2, in central Mongolia, a bumblebee landed on the bloom of a Mongolian thistle—a singular bloom with a mutation that blotched the flower’s white petals and its pollen with a near-luminescent purple. The bee was tired, diligent, and messy as it stuck the pollen all along its legs. As it took off, to visit another bloom, its smooth stinger was dusted a bright purple.

Later, on june 3, the bumblebee got caught in the hood of Dzhambul, a nomadic herder whose cattle and horses were moving through the area the bee had been pollinating. The bee, in the dark of the hood, felt threatened and stung the herder on the cheek, near his eye. He yowled and slapped at his cheek, but the bee flew back out of the hood, escaping. Dzhambul doubled over atop his horse—Od—in pain, the rest of his animals looking at him suspiciously as he held his swelling face.

Into his bloodstream went the bee’s venom and the pollen of the thistle.

6 About midday on june 8, six days after he was pushed out of the crowd in Central Park, and around the time the interest in whatever was growing there had plummeted, Jahan Mokri woke up sore and staring at the gray sky.

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Jahan didn’t remember what had happened to him, which was that he’d been carried through the crowd and handed over to the nypd, who zip-tied his wrists and feet together until they decided they simply didn’t want to deal with him or his ravings.

The police were more interested in ending their shifts and going home, so they decided to just drive Jahan downtown, to NoHo. Parked on an empty street, they cut the zip ties and let him out of the cruiser. Jahan proceeded to kick at lightposts and scream and curse at people until, finally tiring in the Bowery, he crawled under a parked box truck—which belonged to the prop department hired by an ad agency to build a set for Sun Chunk Juice Co.’s lemonade commercial—and passed out.

On june 8, the filming was finished, and the crew tore down the set and packed up the truck. When they pulled away from the curb, one of the rear tires ran over Jahan’s hair, tugging at his scalp a little, and waking him up. He’d slept, dreamlessly, for nearly a week.

Jahan’s head pounded as his sore body rose from the asphalt and slowly climbed onto the sidewalk. Jahan didn’t remember the thing he’d tried to see growing in Central Park, but he did remember hearing people talk about it, did remember jumping the turnstiles to go in that direction. Once he got his bearings and realized how close he was to the Bowery Mission, he wandered that way, asking passersby staring down at their phones if they had anything to spare. Four people pointed dollar bills in his direction, only the last one willing to look him in the eyes when he did so. By the time he reached the Mission, Jahan had enough change to get a sandwich instead and just kept walking.

After sleeping for nearly a week, and waking with such a calmly blank mind compared to the state he’d been in the night he crawled under the box truck, Jahan walked all the way back uptown to the park. Things seemed to be back to normal, despite the fact that, in the reservoir, a dark mountain was sprouting—fully formed—in the middle of the water. Jahan John Elizabeth Stintzi | 13

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL dodged joggers running the track around the reservoir to get to the fence, put his head against the cool metal, and stared at what was not yet known to be the volcano, still far from the shore but with a peak that was now 100 feet in the air.

Although Jahan had woken up calm, being near to the volcano agitated him, reminded him of all the things in his life that had gone wrong—a marriage he himself had caused to fail, his refusal to return to Tabriz to visit his dying mother—and all the wrong things that happened to him—losing his job as a high school gym teacher at the same time that he was being gentrified out of Brooklyn and found himself bouncing between streets and shelters. His forehead became hot between the metal bars of the fence as his eyes were fixed on the volcano, which was growing a little more than a foot an hour at that time.

But eventually, as he felt his vision go blurry, he was able to pull himself away, storming out of the park, parting a clear path for himself on the crowded sidewalks. Thankfully, with every block farther away he got, he felt a little bit lighter.

7 Around noon on june 10, Dr Duncan Olayinka woke up alone in his apartment in Toshima. The alarm on his phone had not gone off at nine as he’d set it, so that he and Aithne could have a leisurely breakfast and a full, quiet morning together before the panel, but went off three hours late instead. When he saw the time and the emptiness of the bed, Duncan jumped up and looked in the bathroom, and then ran into the living room, the kitchen. She wasn’t there, but propped up on the dining table was her note.

Got a call from the uni. They bought me an early am flight to ny and had to run. No choice. Team got called 14 | My Volcano

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL in to take a look at the hill growing in cp. You know how they are. This is an important opportunity. I called Dr Aki and he is going to sit in for me on the panel tonight. He knows as much as I do. You understand.

I set your alarm late so you could sleep in. You seemed to need it. Will call. xoxo ae

Duncan pushed the note off the table. Back at his phone, there were a few notifications: Dr Aki confirming the time to arrive for the panel, his mother emailing him a badly taken selfie of her and his father from their vacation in Hungary, the caterer at UTokyo confirming they had gotten the two servers they’d needed for the reception that would follow the panel. Nothing from Aithne, not an email or a text or a voice mail. He left the phone on the bed. He pulled on underwear and shorts and his Oxford University shirt and went down to the streets.

At the convenience store, Duncan stooped, tall among the aisles, and bought two cans of coffee and a bread roll, leaving the young teller with the usual pleasantries in his oddly accented Japanese. All of this was common ritual when he was alone, when Aithne was gone. He felt like life had snapped back into place.

Duncan thought about the last three days he and Aithne had been together, the day trip they’d taken in Kyoto, the bus they took up to Lake Kawaguchiko—one of the best views of Mount Fuji—and their several worthwhile attempts at sex.

They’d been seeing one another for years, but it felt like their bodies were never in the same place long enough to get in sync.

By the time they saw each other again, their bodies had forgotten each other. They moved in such odd, physical rhythms, and the longer they were together, the further away that synchronization seemed to get.

Duncan went back to his apartment, showered in the tiny stall, drinking one of the cold cans of coffee. As he scrubbed John Elizabeth Stintzi | 15

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL the mat of thick hair on his chest, he looked over at the little webcam in the corner of the bathroom. The camera had an angle wide enough to be able to see everything in the bathroom but the toilet. The little red light to the left of the steam-coated lens blinked, but Duncan didn’t expect anyone was watching.

Midafternoon, clean, dry, and well dressed, Dr Duncan Olayinka went downstairs to catch a train to UTokyo, reviewing the questions he’d made up for the panelists, reviewing as well the bold-faced jokes about sound and seismic activity that he’d devised for the occasion—just in case.

8 The camera pans down a mountain in California, resting on a tiny town at the base. The music is quiet, upbeat yet melancholy, as the camera cuts to the derelict town, people walking down the street. Some of the people nod at one another, while others keep their heads down. But then, the camera starts to shake, and everyone looks up, horrified, and a sign falls off a storefront with a visceral crash as the camera pans up to show the rumbling mountain. Sharp cut to the townspeople running away from the mountain, running toward the camera, looking back to the mountain until it becomes clear that this is a mudslide. But it isn’t mud that comes down the mountain—it’s lemons. As the townspeople notice this, they pause to watch the lemons engulf the town they have safely escaped from. The rumbling stops and a few lemons roll to the crowd. A man picks up a lemon, smells it, and nods his head approvingly. Cut to a shot symmetrical to the first landscape shot with the text one month later … over the screen, and then cut to the town, which is revitalized and crowded. The camera walks through the street filled with happy people in nice clothes, many of whom are drinking from plastic bottles of lemonade. As the camera makes it down the 16 | My Volcano

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL main street, it turns to show a huge juice factory, with Sun Chunk Juice Co. written on the sign. After a beat, bright sansserif letters cover the screen: WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, WE’VE GOT YOU COVERED.

9 On june 10, Dr Aithne Elgin woke up thousands of feet above Manhattan, Kansas, in a window seat in coach. It was around 2:30 p.m.

It was already june 10 when she left Duncan’s little apartment in Toshima, Tokyo, about six hours before she got on her tenhour plane ride from Haneda to lax at two p.m. She reviewed data on her laptop in a lounge in Haneda until her flight took off, still in Japan despite her note saying that her flight left early.

As she worked, she watched Duncan sleep on the life-stream video from his apartment, watched Duncan wake up and read her note, watched Duncan’s face shift as he realized she was already thousands of miles away from him, watched Duncan put down the note and shower. There were around 400 steady viewers watching along with her.

The clock on the screen on the back of the seat in front of her ticked along, 2:31 p.m., 2:33 p.m., as if it had only been half an hour since she took off from Japan, and she looked out the window at the blank America beneath. The quintessential flyover state out of all the flyover states. She knew that she was looking down at Manhattan because the little airplane on her screen was just passing over its dot.

Aithne thought about the absurdity of a mountain sprouting from Central Park—one that was nearly 200 feet tall, by then, around twenty stories—and she thought about the panel she was meant to be presenting on at UTokyo—which Duncan was mediating—on noise-based monitoring of volcanic unrest. It John Elizabeth Stintzi | 17

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL was not yet confirmed that the mountain was a volcano because Aithne was not yet in New York, because the rest of her colleagues were still in the air elsewhere, due to be landing soon.

Dr Aithne Elgin didn’t think about that then, the future; she was focused on the flat earth below, on trying to decide if the panel had already happened. Maybe Duncan was still asleep.

Maybe he hadn’t noticed she was gone or hadn’t found her note.

Time seemed to be in many unequal pieces as she looked out, on june 10, and imagined what it must be like to live in a heightless world, a world that did not have any significant peak or depth. At thirty-five and as a professor of volcanology, Aithne struggled to imagine what it must be like to live a life without mountains—without stratovolcano.

She looked away from the window and back to the plane on the map on the screen, where the letters making up the shortest Manhattan in America blipped away behind the plane, replaced ahead with Topeka, with Lawrence, with St. Joseph, with Independence.

10 While Angel, eight years old, stood in the central square of Tenochtitlan—in the early summer of 1516—the guards of the palace and the men of the city began to approach him, bearing clubs, spears, and with atlatl in hand—just in case. He lifted both his hands, thought about running in circles again, but his knees were rubber. As they got closer, he fell to his knees in fear. He was just a boy.

As the men circled him, curious—speaking words he did not know—down from the sky came a small wisp of a cloud, gray and crackling with little lightning bolts, circling Angel before stopping in the air. He didn’t know what to do, so he let it come to him, let its cool weight engulf him until he’d opened his 18 | My Volcano

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL mouth, until he’d breathed it in. “Gracias,” the voice in his head said as he felt the cloud’s static charge give power to his legs again. Angel stood back up, surrounded by the men who looked as if they’d seen a ghost. Perhaps they had.

Angel lifted his hand and said hello. That he was not there to hurt anyone. That he got lost. That he did not have anywhere to go.

The language he spoke was perfect Nahuatl.

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