“Terry?”
“You know I wouldn’t do that. You do, don’t you?”
“Pictures?”
“Somehow, they’ve been mocked up. I’m not sure how you do it, but I know you can. Reilly says they look genuine, but he’s wrong.”
Her mouth was open and her head was shaking very slightly, very quickly, side to side.
“Joe says they’re real?”
“They’re going out to the FBI, Mel. They’ve got more sophisticated ways of analyzing them. I know … I’m absolutely positive we’ll find out they’re doctored, staged, mocked up, whatever you call it.”
I went to her and turned her around. “Please, have some faith in me,” I said.
Her face was pale and I thought for a moment she might cry. Her prying eyes moved quickly back and forth, searching my face. Tears welled up in the corners, but Melinda let not a drop fall down her cheek.
“I need to sit down,” she said.
I held her arm as we walked across the scuffed hardwood floor to the sofa. I sat beside her. I could feel her recoil, the proximity of her jangling nerves.
“What’s Wade going to do?”
“I’m on special duty. House arrest for my usual shift, eight hours a day. Full pay. That’s funny, isn’t it? While he collects evidence to charge me. Hawlsey and Zant are leading the charge.”
“Good God.”
It was just us and the silence of the house for a long while.
“I’d like a minute to just sit here,” she said. “Alone.”
“I’ll walk Moe up the hill. When I come back, I’ll do whatever you’ve decided is best.”
I had no idea I could get that far into the wilder recesses of Laguna Canyon so quickly. I wondered what the neighbors must have thought as I ran along the road with Moe on his leash. Then I thought, who cared? When I passed the burned foundation of Scotty Barris’s old home I cut off through the brush and onto the trail.
Moe was dragging by the time I made the cave, but I felt fresh and alert. The first thing I checked was my little cache of vices, near the cave. My sleeping bag was gone. My cigars, tequila and pillowcase were gone. Booked into evidence?
Inside, it was obvious that someone had been there. I couldn’t itemize all my furnishings from memory, but I noticed my old foam egg-crate pad, a GI surplus wool blanket and my propane lantern were all missing. I could tell that the fire ring had been used because the rocks were arranged in a neat circle that I’d never bothered to maintain, and because of the pile of blackened ashes in its center. I could smell the recent fire. Even the uncertain light was enough to show me that there were footprints everywhere. With some dread I shone a flashlight on the cave belly and saw the gray carbon fingerprint dust still on the harder surfaces of the rock.
I shuddered. If you’ve ever had a guilty secret, you know the naked shame you feel when you are exposed to the merciless light of day. And it’s all the more shocking when you realize you never really felt guilty about it until someone knows.
I stood there and wondered who I had told about the cave. Melinda and Penny. Donna. Johnny and Louis, I think. Ardith. Frances? I couldn’t be sure. Mel and Penny were the only ones I’d actually brought here. It was amazing to me how lax I’d been in talking about the place. I’d never considered the cave, or what I did in it, as something to hide. Not that I mentioned the blackouts, or the mornings when I’d awaken somewhere else altogether. But those were a thing of the past, right? Now all I could see as I stood there inside it was a blond-headed girl of maybe eight, engaging my own hungry, lascivious body.
And as I saw that horrible image in my mind, suddenly I had a thought that made all of this even worse. Considerably worse. I had to brace my hands on the cave wall to keep myself up, and lower my head for air. I breathed deeply to purge my mind of the image, but I couldn’t. Because the girl in the photographs looked familiar. I couldn’t say where or when, but I believed I had seen her before. I knew I had. But where? Somehow, my presence in the cave triggered the memory, a memory that wouldn’t come to me as I sat in Jim Wade’s ranch-house office, confronted with false evidence of my own criminal pathology.
I turned and looked around me, trying to picture her here. I tried to picture myself here. It was easy to do. But were the images in my mind’s eye scenes of what had happened, or scenes appropriated from doctored photographs by my desperate memory?
I stared blankly into the dead ashes in me fire ring. I stared hard while my chest ached and my stomach tightened into an even tighter knot. When I finally blinked, I could see clearly again. I could see clearly enough to understand that the first forty years of my life had just tapered to this tremulous point, then vanished. I was a man bisected, a man whose history had not prepared him for his future. And I knew that nothing to come would be anything like what had gone before. I was over. And I was just beginning. I stared into the dead fire, a new man with new eyes. How badly I wanted to be the old one.
Terry Naughton, I thought, champion of the little people, always on the case. Film at eleven. Donna.
My head felt light and my breathing was short and shallow as I walked back outside to the gathering dusk.
The image of Lauren Sharpe came to my mind. With her face next to mine and her teeth sunk into my cheek. No, it wasn’t Lauren in those pictures. But it was someone I’d seen.
I didn’t do that, I told myself. I didn’t do that. I didn’t.
Ishmael was leaning against the big pepper tree in our front yard when I walked up the driveway. I hardly noticed him at first, in the faltering light. He had one foot resting against the trunk, and his arms crossed over his chest. I noted that Melinda’s car was gone. He looked at me with his green panther’s eyes.
“Now that things are out in the open, I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am,” he said. His tone was jocular, amused.
“You’re a feeling human being, Ish.”
“And that if I ever see you in the general vicinity of Penelope again, I’ll kill you.”
“Whatever blows your hair back.”
“It’d make me happy, you little bagga shit.”
With this, he straightened off the tree and, watching me like a mailman watches a dog, walked across the yard, hopped the little fence in one graceful motion and moved toward his car.
I watched him drive off before letting myself into the house.
Melinda’s note was taped to the hardwood floor just inside our front door:
Dear Terry,
I’m looking for a way to believe in you. Maybe I’ll find one, because I love and respect you. I don’t see any way that your being here would be good for any of us. I have Penny to consider. Take whatever you’ll need and go. I’ll be here for you. I’ll be there for you. If you’re the man I think you are maybe we’ll laugh about this someday, after we sue the shit out of somebody. If you’re not, you must get the help you need. I’ll explain this to Penelope as best I can. God be with you, with all of us.
Mel
I packed a few things. Then I went to the liquor store, drove to the little apartment in the metro district, let myself in, opened the windows. I sat at a table in the dining nook and looked out. The Performing Arts Center was lit up like a shrine. The bean field was an empty black rectangle. Beyond it flowed a river of headlights, and the big hotels rose into the night and the palm trees stood erect and motionless. The dark glass of the business towers caught the lesser lights below, wearing them like medals. Tonello’s glowed with self-importance, and I could see the valets standing just under the awning in their red vests and bow ties.
I got out a notepad and made a list of the people I thought might have the opportunity to do this to me. Included were Jordan Ishmael, Jim Wade, Frances White, Johnny Escobedo and Louis Briar. I added Ardith Naughton, Melinda Vickers and Donna Mason. I added Burns, Woolton and Vega. But who knew about the cave, or could have found out about it? I hadn’t told Wade, Ish or either of the undersheriffs directly, but any one of them could conceivably h
ave learned about it, located it and salted it. Right? I added three fat question marks, for the people who might have been told about the cave by the people I had told. They could be anybody. Then I put the names together in various combinations, like cards in a poker hand. Even with knowledge of the cave, who had the opportunity to slip the falsified photos into Chet’s den? That eliminated Ardith and Donna. And even with knowledge and opportunity, who had the technical skill to create such documents? That eliminated only Melinda, positively, because I truly didn’t know what secret skills my co-workers might possess. Anything was possible. But even with knowledge, opportunity and technical capacity, who had a motive to see my career, my relationships—perhaps my life—destroyed? I could only write down one name for certain: Ishmael.
Strange, I thought, the way that name comes off the tongue: Ishmael.
I drank swiftly and earnestly.
I remember a cab ride through the metro district. I remember standing amid the fragrant furrowed earth of the bean field to behold the quarter moon. I remember part of a movie, a long hot shower that didn’t slow the cold shivers of my body, the tequila and beer vanishing, a late-night taxi stop to get more, words with two men as I got back into the cab, the way the floor of the apartment seemed to pivot steeply in alternate directions as I navigated my way across it. I remember fast-food wrappers flying out the window of a car I wasn’t driving. I remember a phone booth. I remember vivid dreams—I can only assume they were dreams—of caves and girls and women and various methods of execution, my body always on the verge of something either deadly or pleasureful, neither of which was consummated, and swirling planes of bright stars in a blue night, and smells. I remember the smells of damp stone, blood and sagebrush, female sweat. I remember dreaming that Donna crawled into bed with me and held my naked, clammy form and tried to reassure me. That morning when I awoke she was in fact there, splendidly fresh and dressed for work, running her fingers through my damp hair.
I felt like I’d returned from death itself. But I didn’t know how to feel about it.
I looked up at her.
“You said some crazy things last night,” she said. Her expression was more interested than accusatory.
“Bad. Dreams.”
“No. You were awake still. Lots of talk about the pictures. What pictures?”
“Hm?” There was a riot of pain, an insurrection of agony led by my soul.
“The pictures. Don’t you remember anything you said?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You kept saying the pictures had followed you. The pictures had caught you. Someone was trying to get you. What were you talking about?”
“Beats me,” I managed.
She brought me a cup of coffee, sat on the bed beside me and put her cool hand on my head. I closed my eyes. I could tell by the turn of her wrist that she looked at her watch.
“You and Melinda had a fight. You did tell me that much. I’m sorry for that. It brought us together for a night, but I’m still sorry.”
I looked at her. “No. I am. Sorry. About last night. About everything.”
“You don’t have to be, Terry. But you really ought to come clean with me. I can live with half of you for now, but that half’s got to be all there.”
“Yeah. I’m trying.”
“What’s happening?”
“Not sure yet. Special duty. I really can’t tell you about it. You know—regulations.”
She looked down at me with frank suspicion. Even through the throbbing fog in my brain I could tell she was vetting my stories. I was dully aware that that’s what she did for a living. She looked at her watch again. She leaned down and wrapped my head in her arms and whispered in my ear, Terry, I got to be at the newsroom in thirty-five minutes. It’s a half-hour drive this time of morning. That leaves five minutes to spare and I’m going to use that time to tell you something you might not understand.
I watched her make some adjustments in her underthings, then climb over me. She looked like she might on TV, the upper half of her a thing of beauty and intelligence, the lower half of her unseen. But that lower half was connected to me in a way that made me want to stay right there with her forever. It was like being plugged straight into heaven. Like a live feed from an angel. She closed her eyes. Her bangs dangled and cast moving shadows on her forehead. I heard the bathroom water running. Before she left she kissed me on the lips, then cheek, then stood there looking down at me.
She touched my face with her fingers. “I hate mysteries. I hate all the things you don’t tell me, all the mysteries you hold back. I like the truth. And I like things I can see and touch and hold—things that prove the truth. I love you, too, Terry Naughton. But you sure don’t make it easy.”
SIXTEEN
Darien Aftergood was an old acquaintance of mine from high school. We were both second-string guards for the freshman basketball team, the Laguna Artists, and we went 3-14 that year. I couldn’t really handle the ball and he couldn’t really shoot, but we had the boundless hustle of second stringers everywhere. We were skinny kids who rarely had our heads in the game. We left the hoops after that first year. He started running with the art-theater crowd and I spent my afternoon surfing Brooks Street. Darien must have taken our mascot name literally. Now he’s an artist and gallery owner in Laguna, with a studio/gallery/apartment downtown on Ocean Avenue. Darien is plugged into the art world at a hundred different sockets. He guest-curates for the Orange County Art Museum; he organizes shows at his own space; he is a critic for two national magazines and his work has been collected and shown around the world. He’s a photographer who manipulates his images in the lab. The results are images that sometimes look like photographs, but aren’t photographs at all.
He tried to explain to me, through the painful haze of my hangover, how he manages to create pictures that look so real but aren’t.
“We have to define ‘reality’ if we’re going to get anywhere, Terry. The reality of the image is what you see. It doesn’t exist until the artist creates it. To say it isn’t real misses a large part of the whole point. For instance, how can you say that this image isn’t a reality?”
I looked at the picture on the wall in front of us. We were standing in the main room of his little gallery. The art was done by a New York compatriot of Darien’s, and it depicted a huge can of tuna fish, upright on its side in the middle of an expansive American prairie. Two photographically “real” people stood in the foreground and looked upward at the can. The photographically “real” tuna fish can was about sixty feet tall.
“But that scene never took place,” I said. “It might be a real image, but it’s based on a false event.”
“No, not really, Terry. It’s not based on an event at all. The event is the image. The event doesn’t take place until the artist brings it into being.”
“But there’s no reality there.”
“Literal visual truth—as you’re referring to it—died decades ago. We photographers killed it. Even National Geographic was reworking its photographs for the magazine, I mean taking some pretty big liberties by the standards of journalism. Look at any supermarket tabloid. You can see the splices quite easily. But on a work like this, you can’t. It’s a matter of degree.”
“How did he do it?”
Darien explained the process: a combination of digital imaging and an Iris printer, which uses continual ink-jet technology to apply colored ink to paper or canvas; photographs altered with painted passages, combined with monoprints of video footage of computer-generated images; enlarged Polaroid prints; and images drawn from a digital file. You just scan in an image, he said, then go to work on it with the Adobe Photoshop program on your computer and hurl 129 megabytes of power at it.
“I’ve been working on some traditional, labor-intensive processes too,” he said. “That involves producing photographic prints using pigment transfer and platinum printing. The pigment transfer is suspending the pigment in gelatin or gum Arabic, then building up layers of th
e color. The interesting thing about the older process is that the color will be stable on the paper for five hundred years. It’s time consuming and expensive.”
I nodded. The price tag for the giant tuna can was $1,400.
“Is it one of a kind?”
“It is now, but we can pull prints. It’s up to the artist, how many copies he wants out there.”
I thought. “What about … what if … what if the artist had certain images to begin with? Say, photographs. Pictures of a background, and pictures of a subject. Could he manipulate those to create an image that looked like this certain person was doing something in this certain place?”
Darien smiled and glanced at the work on the wall. “The guy on the left there, that’s me. And I guarantee you I never stood on a Nebraska prairie and stared up at a monster can of tuna fish.”
“Then it’s easy.”
“No. It’s complicated. There are new tools now. That’s what all this technology is—it’s just tools. They’re powerful tools and you have to know how to use them. They’re expensive. No, it’s not easy, but a lot of things are possible now that used to be impossible. Most of these artists might tell you that making it look easy is part of the art. Others, well, they like to let the technology show. Two different aesthetics, really.”
“If I showed that tuna fish picture to an expert in photography at the FBI, would he be able to tell it’s fake?”
“Wouldn’t take the FBI to see that it’s fake, Terry! In the way you mean ‘fake,’ that is.”
“Okay. Say it was just a can of tuna fish on a table. And the tools behind the image were digital processing and the Iris printer. Then, could that expert tell by examining the picture that it was done without a real can of tuna fish?”
“It was done with a real can of tuna fish. The real can of tuna fish was reproduced and stored by the digital file. It’s as ‘real’ a can of tuna fish in the file as it is in a picture. You know?”
Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) Page 20
