Melinda Feingold may live in a basement apartment, but she talks like she's one hundred percent ivory tower. It's Saturday night and the twenty-six year old, single, post-doc student is nothing short of obsessed. The object of her late night fascination is lint. Not belly-button variety lint, but those long colorful patches that get trapped every hour of every day at the laundry. Melinda's thesis: If a society can be judged by the way it treats its prisoners, perhaps an individual or family can be better understood by the lint that gathers in its washer-dryers. The population base of her study are the lucky inhabitants of her nine story apartment building, the Gothamberg. Despite the strangeness of her request, a remarkable 38 percent of the building's adult residents agreed to give Melinda an interview and five lint samples. Having collected the raw data, she compares the oral histories with observations and analysis of the lint swatches in search of patterns of discrepancy and/or correlation. On this night she's studying subject # 67, a 34 year old male who says he came to the United States because India was no place for a gay man to feel in any way free. He was always hiding. Hiding. Always Hiding. Melinda writes in her log: Subject 63's colorful clothes produce unusually prismatic, shimmering patches of lint. Fluffy beach towels, silk pillow cases and chennel scarves give these specimens a velvety, almost luxurious tactility. Microscopic observation of the lint specimens reveal a topography that resembles the Himalayas, the land where the subject is from and a land of incredible variegated peaks, plateaus and valleys, a land the subject has tried so hard to reject, as he was rejected in its midst not that long ago. Melinda, basement, lint