Destroy All Monsters

by Sam J. Miller

  Before that, she had been the assistant to—and protégée of—my favorite photographer, Diane Arbus. Somewhere along the line Cass’d gotten obscenely rich—maybe through marriage, maybe through savvy real estate investments—and bought this huge house far away from New York City. She was our town’s only Recluse, which is to say, the only person with enough money to be listed separately from all the other shut-ins, who are Just Crazy.

  “Coffee in the kitchen,” she called from upstairs. So I headed that way.

  When I was fourteen, and deeply obsessed with Diane Arbus, I saw Cass mentioned in a footnote in an Arbus biography. I knew the name, from hearing my parents talk—Cass was the closest thing Hudson had to a celebrity. I rode my bike to her house and went up to the door and knocked. She was pretty impressed by my fourteen-year-old chutzpah, and the camera around my neck (a battered barely working vintage Leica I’d bought cheap online), and she took me on a tour of her house. Her walls were covered in exquisite, priceless framed photographs by the greatest artists of a century and a half, carelessly hung in chaotic jumbles. Haunting sculptures crowded shelves and tables. She also agreed to look at my photos, if I brought some back, and give me her honest—brutal—opinions. That was the beginning of our awkward awesome relationship.

  I poured myself a cup of (cold) coffee and went up to see her. Her work desk was heaped with old photos and she was inspecting them with all the intensity of someone who still had a job. I picked up a photograph and then immediately dropped it. An Avedon; I could tell at once, from his signature minimalism and the almost-invisible expression on the model’s face. I felt like I’d just committed a grave sin. Like accidentally getting my greasy dirty fingerprints on a Rembrandt.

  “Calm down,” she said. “He’s dead; he can’t yell at you. Although he definitely would, if he saw that.” She tsked. “Such a little bastard.” She shuffled pictures from one pile to another. I noticed that she was wearing thin white gloves. “So, Ash, how is your project coming? What have you figured out?”

  “I’m stumped,” I said. “I want to create something that means something. Tells a story that needs to be told. If I’m going to get into a decent art school—and get the kind of scholarship I’d need to actually be able to go there—I need to create something . . . important.”

  I’d stopped at home, after school, to develop the pictures I’d taken and round up a bunch of other recent prints. I handed them to her, nervous as hell, the same as always.

  “This is shit,” she said of the first one, a photo of Jewel.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Jewel was smiling, in her living room. Hard focus on her, background blurry. Nothing special, but I hadn’t thought it was shit.

  “There’s nothing there. You can’t see that?”

  Now that she said it, I saw it. And I cringed as she shuffled through the next ten images, saying Shit for each one.

  “I think they’re very competent,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from breaking. I worshipped Cass, and she was forever putting my fondness for her to the test.

  “Precisely!” she said, and stabbed one finger at me, like I’d fallen into the trap she’d set for me. “Lovely. Well composed. Competent.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Competence is the enemy of genius,” she said, lighting another cigarette. Dogs barked in the hallway. “You can capture reality. Bravo! That’s the easy part. You need to go deeper. You need to capture something else.”

  She stared at a photo of a handsome boy in a T-shirt. “This one is a tiny bit interesting. There’s something naked in his expression. A hunger. A desperation. Very small. I don’t think you noticed it yourself.”

  I hadn’t noticed it.

  “I totally noticed it,” I said.

  Connor. Solomon’s stepbrother. Son of Mr. Barrett, the vice principal and football coach of Hudson High School.

  “Is that your boyfriend?”

  “Not really. Just . . .”

  “Someone you’re fucking,” she said.

  I nearly swallowed my tongue. “You know that from looking at the photo?”

  She shrugged. “I know it from what you just said. But yes, the photo made me think that. At any rate. I don’t believe you saw it, because if you saw it, you would have dug it out of him. Exposed it. That expression, that thing he’s hiding. That’s what photographers do.”

  I wondered how I would have done that. What could I have said, or done, to coax it out of him, the thing he was trying to hide from me?

  Photographing Connor, I had gotten stuck on his handsome face, on how he looked like a younger, softer version of his father. How to get past that? Beneath the surface? Sometimes Cass said things that filled me up with excitement and confidence, tips and insights that opened doors and made me feel like I could do anything, and sometimes she said things that made me feel like the most talentless hack in the entire world.

  “Now this!” she said, startling me back to reality. “This is something special.”

  It was the girl from that morning. The trailer park girl in the hallway, moments before all hell broke loose.

  No swirling ink clouds. No monsters. What I had seen through the lens, it didn’t come through in the final image.

  “Who is she?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “Well. You’ve come very close, with this one. Her face is a marvel. You can see how much she’s been through.”

  “So what’s missing?”

  “Her smile. It’s practiced.”

  “I asked her permission before I took it. So, she smiled. You always told me it’s wrong to take pictures without someone’s consent.”

  “You could have paused, for a second. Two, three, maybe five. Wait for her smile to falter just the slightest bit. You could have taken one right away, and when she heard the click, she would have dropped the smile, and you could have taken a second one that she wasn’t expecting.”

  I looked out the window and across the street, to the abandoned factories with brontosauruses spray-painted onto their brick walls. Past that were the cow fields. The air smelled like dung.

  “Seems shady to me,” I said. “Like I’m trying to trick people.”

  “You’re a photographer, not a friend. Being an artist sometimes means breaking the rules of civilized human behavior. Do you have the courage to do that?”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure if I did. And Cass’s words had reminded me that I hadn’t been a very good friend.

  Solomon. He had been hiding from the world. From what was wrong with him. I’d been letting him, because I was too frightened to go where he needed me to go. It wasn’t enough to bring him a vanilla Coke once in a while, and let him talk to me for an hour about whatever cartoon he was obsessed with that week. If I was going to help him, I had to follow him into whatever weird world he was living in lately.

  And then another thought occurred. Maybe I could get the honesty that Cass wanted. Maybe I could get to the soul of my subject—if that subject was Solomon.

  But first, I’d have to find him.

  Six

  Solomon

  The whole block of the Clarion’s offices smelled like brontosaurus dung. I could hear them groaning in the massive factories where they were shackled and marched in a circle, turning giant wheels to generate power to work the machines. Cass had kept the paper in the factory district, in the same building as the printing presses, long after all the other newspapers moved their editorial operations to the ritzier part of town.

  And of course Cass was hard at work when I got there, alone in the immense old building, except for the ink-splattered men working the print machines down on the ground floor. But they were the night shift, and their day was ending, whereas Cass’s workdays had no shifts; no endings and no beginnings. She slept at her desk, most nights. She was an addict, hooked on the never-ending stream of news that washed across her desk. The murders and the intrigue, the politics and the scandals. The backroom deals that wou
ld lead to a thousand people getting evicted. The movie star divorces no one could shut the hell up about, even though they made not a damn bit of difference in the lives of anyone.

  She stood there, tall and bone-thin and ancient, peering through thin glasses at stacks of clippings. Chain-smoking, like she always did. I wondered if printer’s ink was flammable, and decided it must not be, or she would have burned up decades ago.

  “Solomon!” she called, snapping her fingers like she’d summoned me. “Excellent. What have you brought today?”

  I handed her the picture of the thug at the Underbridge. It had come out as powerfully as I’d hoped it would. High contrast, the background full of energy and motion, his expression complex, equal parts rage and shock and even a little bit of shame, like on some level he knew what he was doing was wrong. Not because he was a decent person, but because the camera scared him. The thought of someone seeing what he was doing made him think twice, and I caught that single instant of self-doubt.

  “This is breathtaking,” she said. “I’m proud of you. When was this?”

  I told her the details. She picked up the phone, barked at whoever answered: “Gang attack on the Underbridge today. Head down there, get some eyewitness accounts, write it up for page three. Play up the angle that this was an organized effort; something is going on. Go talk to the precinct captain to see what they’re doing to protect people. No, you don’t need to bring a photographer. We got the shot already.”

  She slammed the phone down, and frowned, and then looked up and smiled at me. “Right place at the right time, or you went looking for this?”

  “The first one.”

  “Well. Luck is half of catching the shot. The other half is being prepared—having a good eye and ear so you know it when it’s coming.”

  She handed me two twenty-ruble bills, and rubbed my head. I nodded gratefully. I didn’t know why the great Cass Otterby had decided to take an impoverished othersider gutter kid under her wing, but she had, and I was damn lucky.

  My parents had moved to Darkside from the Waterlands during the plague called the Great Rot, back when I was just a baby, but like a lot of people who flooded into the city during those years, they got the Rot and died on the way. Before that they’d fallen in with a caravan of migrants, which included two men, a couple, who’d befriended them and taken care of them while they were sick. I was an infant and I had no one to take care of me, and the choice was either leave me by the roadside or raise me as their own. Luckily for me they did the latter.

  Pop was beaten to death by thugs who hated othersiders, when I was three. Da was arrested a year later, allegedly for using an illegal magical ability, and died in a camp. I don’t even know their real names. I was so little. They were only Da and Pop to me. The faces I see, when I think of them . . . I’m not even sure if they’re really theirs. I only know I still have the warm, safe, loved feeling I had when I was with them.

  That, and a camera. Pop had been a photographer, back in the Waterlands, and I’d inherited his battered old knockoff “Leika.” So when I was ten years old, that’s how I started. I took pictures for tourists in front of landmarks and I took pictures for street gangs of the graffiti in rival territory. Kind of like a spy. I didn’t know what I was doing; I just knew I needed to eat. I was small and quick and I didn’t ask for very much money. Pretty soon I was getting hired by jealous lovers, and taking pictures for business owners, of their competition’s price lists.

  One of them thought I had a good eye, and told me to talk to Cass. She often bought shots off street urchins. She took a liking to me. Bought my pictures even when they weren’t very good. Gave me advice. Sent me out on assignments with her actual photographers, so I could see how it was done.

  The rest, I guess, is history.

  “Have you seen this?” she asked, handing me an eight-by-ten glossy photo. Black and white: a bare white wall with “Destroy All Monsters” spray-painted across it.

  “No,” I said. “Where was this taken?”

  “Back of the Darkside Cinema Palace,” she said. “But it’s been popping up all over. The same tag—but lots of different handwritings and styles. I think it’s evidence of something new—a movement, a degree of organization that we haven’t seen before. It’s not just a bunch of random assholes anymore. Something scary is on the horizon.”

  I remembered the ultramarine armbands in the Underbridge attack. “I think you’re right.”

  “Keep an eye out, will you? Anywhere you see this tag, take a picture? And remember where you took it”—she crossed to the giant map of the city on her wall—“because I want to map out the places where this pops up. I’d be in your debt.”

  A thousand times Cass had helped me eat when I would have gone hungry, so I was pretty sure she’d never be the one in my debt.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said. “Thanks, Cass.”

  And it was then, just when I was starting to feel okay about everything, that I noticed the top item on one of her piles of folders. Attached to the front was a blurry old newspaper photo . . . of Ash.

  “What’s this?” I said softly. My heartbeat was so, so loud.

  She shrugged. “We don’t know yet. A reporter was holed up down at the docks, in a bar known to be popular among nativists, just listening, trying to see what we could find out. This one guy was drunk, saying a lot of nasty stuff, but like he knew something. A reckoning is coming; he’s got something up his sleeve; he’s going to change everything. Like he was in on whatever was going on. My reporter waited till he was half–passed out, then stole the guy’s satchel.”

  “You teach your journalists to be thieves?” I said, laughing. “Seems dangerous.”

  “I teach my journalists to get the story. Anyway, there wasn’t much in the satchel to tell us what’s going on with ‘destroy all monsters,’ but there was a lot of information about the Refugee Princess.”

  “Really,” I said, and it was hard to keep my voice neutral. “Do you think she’s a—a target of whatever’s going on?”

  “Could be,” she said. “Nobody knows anything about her.”

  “Wow.” I wanted desperately to open the folder and see what was there, but I couldn’t risk Cass wondering why I was so curious about it.

  Because that was my big secret. My friendship with Ash. A refugee; a princess; an othersider. She was the biggest news story of the year, maybe the decade, and I’d been holding out on Cass. Hiding what I knew. I told myself Cass would understand, even appreciate my loyalty to my friend—but I also knew that she was a newswoman before anything else. Her first allegiance was always to The Story. So she wouldn’t be able to keep from acting on anything I shared.

  To distract her, I told her about the graffiti I’d seen on one of the bridge pillars. The big blue man; the barely legible scribble underneath it: “He Is the Answer.”

  “Might be the same person,” I said. “The one that guy was talking about. ‘He’s got something up his sleeve.’”

  Cass didn’t know who he was, or what he might be the answer to.

  But Niv might. He had access to the Palace intelligence officers.

  I just needed to swallow my pride and ask for his help.

  Seven

  Ash

  A big blue man, spray-painted onto the side of the abandoned elementary school. An illegible scribble underneath it. The smell of swamp water and soggy marijuana joints. Broken glass. Discarded condoms. Rain-bleached jelly beans all over the ground.

  I should have loved this place. Desolation is photogenic. Graffiti makes for great pictures. I raised my camera, aimed it at the tags. Bright blue smears. But I couldn’t stop thinking about those swastikas spray-painted on the side of Judy Saperstein’s house. The thought of them made everything uglier. Scarier.

  I wondered if Solomon had heard. If not, I sure as hell wasn’t about to be the one to tell a Jewish boy who already thought the world was against him that there were swastika tags going up.

  Greenport
School had been closed and empty for three years. It was isolated enough, across from the abandoned match factory and up against the woods that ran along the railroad tracks, that you could hang out there and hardly anyone would ever mess with you. Cops never came around. Guys who were really up to no good had better places to go do that. Mostly the people who hung out here were teenagers nostalgic for the innocent kids they had been when they were elementary school students inside that building.

  Those kids and, I hoped, Solomon.

  I parked my car and made my way around the long single-story building. Past the playground, where the swings had all broken or been stolen so their chains hung loose in the wind. I took pictures of them, but I knew they wouldn’t come out right. I wasn’t skilled enough to capture their sadness.

  And every time I looked through the lens, I saw some new impossible, awful thing. Skeletons sitting on the monkey bars; bees as big as vultures wobbling through the air.

  My spine would not stop shivering.

  When I went around the corner, I saw him, exactly where I’d thought he’d be. Asleep on the rusty old purple dinosaur seesaw he’d loved so much when he was in first grade.

  What a happy kid Solomon had been. Back before his mind began to betray him.

  He was smiling now, at something in a dream. Flakes of paint were stuck to his face. At his feet was a battered old library book: Illegal Identities: A History of Homophobic Police Practices Around the World. I thought about taking his picture, but it seemed wrong. Like I’d be taking advantage of him. Cass’s words echoed in my head. Being an artist sometimes means breaking the rules of civilized human behavior. But before I could debate it internally any further, Solomon opened his eyes and reached out to touch my face.

  “Ash,” he said. “I was just going to go see you and Niv.”

  “And here I am,” I said, settling down on the soggy gravel, deciding not to ask who or what Niv was. “Your tyrannosaur is looking rough,” I said, pointing to the places where the metal was worn thin, bent, broken.