All That You Love Will Be Carried Away

Alfie Zimmer, a traveling salesman peddling bar code readers and instant dinners, pulls into a Motel 6 in Nebraska for the night. He settles in, and pulls out a revolver, ready to commit suicide because he “couldn’t go on living the way he had been living.”

He has a wife, a daughter, and a hobby: recording strange bathroom graffiti which he discovered on his many long, lonely travels. He first started noting down scrawls on the walls that attracted his attention without any reason but then became “fascinated with those messages”. Alfie has filled a whole notebook with such gems as “Save Russian Jews, collect valuable prizes” and “Mammon is the king of New Jersey.”