“Try to stand.”
“I’m not sure I can,” she said.
“Oh come on.”
She put a hand on my shoulder and I put an arm around to catch her. She leaned forward and I felt her shake a little and then she stood. I felt her hand loosen on my shoulder and then I stepped away and she was standing on her own.
“Hey! Hey!” I yelled to the nurses. They all looked up. “She can stand.”
The one nurse shook her finger at me. I was yelling in her unit. Emily sat back down, out of breath. Later that afternoon, I wheeled her to the bathroom. I helped her put on some street clothes and a shirt over her gown with a cuff that covered her hospital bracelet. With the IV hidden in her jacket I took her down the elevator and wheeled her outside to a cab. I hung her IV up on the coathook inside the cab. I wheeled the chair back inside the ER bay and then I came back out and sat next to her. She told me where she wanted to go. My face must have dropped.
“You said wherever I want,” she said.
I was quiet.
“It’ll take a minute,” she said. “You aren’t backing out now.”
We stopped by my apartment and I ran up and got my portfolio and then we drove to the Scala. I sat with the portfolio in my lap. I didn’t move. She squeezed my forearm as if to say go on, and I jumped out and ran inside. The same woman was behind the desk, the one who’d held her hair back with a shoestring. She recognized me. I’m sure she did. I gave her the portfolio, and before she could open it I ran back down and jumped in the cab. I’d been gone about two minutes. Not more. Emily was suspicious.
“You hurl it in the door and run?”
“I gave it to her. I put it in her hands. Not that it’ll do any good.”
“Well, you did it anyway. That’s something,” she said.
She told the driver to go to the Cloisters. It was rush hour and we fought traffic all the way uptown. I could feel her shivering next to me. The driver turned the heat way up but she kept shivering and I sat her on my lap and held her, wrapping my jacket around her small, frail body.
The Cloisters is on a palisade north of the George Washington Bridge. We parked at the west end, where there was a view of the bridge and the river. The lights were on. It was just getting dark. The driver, who was Pakistani, sat in front reading a real estate textbook. Glancing back at us, he saw Emily’s hanging IV bag.
“Are you sick?”
“I’m dying,” she said.
“Oh, that’s no good,” he said. “No good.”
He put in a tape of Pakistani music that was discordant. A wailing, nasal voice, rhythmic drums. We were quiet for the whole length of the song, Emily stroking my neck softly, my hair. When it was over the driver leaned back with his arm over the seat.
“You like?”
“Yeah, I liked it,” Emily said. “Thanks.”
She looked really tired.
I gave the driver my camera and he took a photograph of the two of us, shot through and framed by the square in the thick window that separated the front and back seats. In the photo her hands are linked loosely around my neck, and she is looking up at me. The driver took the picture, then handed me the camera and turned back to the front and she rested her head against my chest. In the window’s reflection I watched her eyes close. I nodded to the driver and we started back for the hospital.
78
I wanted to take a last portrait of Emily, but she was all tubes and oxygen masks, red, scabbed skin, sickly emaciation, and bruises from where the needles had been. I did not want to take a picture of those things. I took a whole roll of just her eyes. She was looking at me with the camera and I was looking at her through the viewfinder. Afterward, developing the photographs, I fell asleep in the darkroom and woke up four hours later. I developed a contact sheet and chose the three best. I cropped these three prints so they were just the bridge of the nose to the eyebrows. Then I mounted the rectangular strips, one on top of the other, making a square. I brought the composition to the hospital for Emily to see. She lay there, looking up at me. Her blood pressure was ninety over sixty. Her heart rate was 110 beats a minute.
“That’s nice, Frank,” she said.
79
Four in the morning. She lay flat with an oxygen mask over her mouth. She opened her eyes slowly and looked up at me. She did not say anything for a while. Then she said, very weakly, “Have you slept?”
“Yeah, I slept,” I said.
“I felt you here all night, Frank. You haven’t slept.”
“I will later.”
“Go sleep.”
“Nah, I don’t want to.”
“Frank.”
“Yeah.”
“Go to sleep. I want to be alone.”
She squeezed my hand and nodded and looked away and I walked out past the night nurse and the wheeled cart with the medications on top. I went into the lobby, where the old newspapers were spread out and there were coffee cups on the windowsill. I lay on the plastic couch. It was too small for me, so I put my legs on the armrest and my jacket over my head. I woke an hour and a half later, shivering, with my jacket on the floor. It was dark. I could hear the dinging of the elevators. By the glow of a streetlight out the window I could see it was snowing. I put on my jacket and walked back to the ICU and as I was coming in the night nurse was going out. She passed me, trying not to catch my eye, and I went on to Emily’s bed. It was empty. There was no sheet. The name had already been erased from the board and the heart monitor was turned off, blank. I sat on the bed. A nurse stepped past, not looking at me. I sat there for maybe three minutes. Then I got up. A doctor stood when he saw me coming but I didn’t hurry. I felt ashamed. I didn’t want anyone to see me when he said it. We walked to the window and he had the chart open and he was showing it to me, telling me about it, but I was already walking away, half-blinded. I walked down the stairs, past the security, and out into the street. I did not go back to her apartment again.
80
It was seven months later, the middle of summer, and it was really warm out, ninety degrees. Through the glass door I saw the benches were all in the sun. Norman had pulled a chair into the shade on the east side. He was in surgical scrubs, sitting back with his feet out, slumped against the bench, a plastic cup near his hand, and an open medical book on the table. He’d started wearing his snakeskin cowboy boots into surgery, slipping the little blue booties over them. When he heard the door open he put the book down and walked over to me. I had my camera bag on my shoulder.
“You ready?”
“I’m ready,” I said, and followed him into the hospital.
“Have you met Mr. Holmes?” he asked as we went up.
“I’ve talked to him on the phone.”
“You should meet him.”
In the surgical preparation room a portly man in his forties, with graying hair, a reddish nose, and two buck teeth that rested on his bottom lip, lay in bed wearing an open-backed blue gown. He sat when he saw Norman.
“This is my brother.”
“Yes. The photographer. I talked to you.”
I got a shot of Mr. Holmes sitting up. Of his wife at his side. Of Norman going over the surgery with him. Of them shaking hands. Of him looking at me, smiling nervously. Of him lying back down and looking at the ceiling. I got a long shot of the whole room and the other patients, all of them waiting for surgery. And then I followed Norman into the locker room, where I got a shot of folded scrubs, of blue booties, the masks. I took a shot of the surgeons’ names on the lockers, some of them with scrawled nicknames, like professional athletes. In the operating room I took a photograph of the steel bed surrounded by enormous round lights on hinged arms. I got the anesthetized Mr. Holmes with his eyes closed, mouth open, a tube between his lips. I took a shot of the row of scalpels with Mr. Holmes’s naked belly in the background. I got the row of monitors, the medical interns watching, eyes wide, the anesthesiologist on his chair. I got Norman holding the scalpel delicately, deftly, in his right hand
, the first cut in the abdomen, the blade easily parting the skin, entering into the yellow layer of fat. I got his hands moving swiftly, with precision. I switched to color film. I got the blood suctioned away, the abdomen spread wide open, and the organs, surprisingly, astonishingly, colorful—the purple liver, the green gall bladder, the yellow mesentery, and the milky intestines. I got Norman’s dark eyes above his mask. I got his bloody gloves with the scalpel. I got him cutting the mesentery from the intestines, finding the cancer, and removing it. I got the diseased lump of intestine in a steel tray. I got them waiting for the biopsy, a clock in the background. I got the surgical nurse returning with the results. I got Norman sewing the abdomen back up. I got the fresh scar afterward, the scattered, bloody gauze, the mess of used scalpels on a steel tray. I got Mr. Holmes in the recovery room, waking up, groggy, feeling sick, hearing the good news, they’d removed the cancer. Then I walked out to the courtyard. Eight hours had passed and I’d taken twenty rolls of film. It was late afternoon, and I had a feeling of pleased exhaustion. I’d done a good job and I knew it. The prints in the old portfolio had sold. I was pretty sure I’d be able to sell these new ones. I sat on a wooden bench and eventually Norman came down in street clothes.
“You get what you needed?”
“I need one of you,” I said. “I was looking through my pictures. I have about five hundred dead bodies. I don’t have one portrait of you. You’ll let me?”
He agreed immediately, and by the way he agreed I could see he knew I hadn’t taken any photographs of him before that day and that it had hurt his feelings.
I thought of putting him in the sun, but the light was too stark. In the corner, in the shade, there was some reflected light. I put him in that gentler shadow. His hair was black. The background was that grainy, whitish concrete.
“Do you still have your mask?”
He said he did.
“Put it on.”
“The mask?”
“Yeah, like you’re in the OR.”
He tied it on and I took a close-up, but that wasn’t right. I already had that. I took one with the mask around his neck. Two doctors walked by, laughing, making jokes. Norman smiled, but I didn’t pay any attention to them. I just kept on taking photographs, trying to get it right. Norman looked awkward at first, but after a while he loosened up.
“I want it like the way you looked in the OR.”
“Ah . . .” he waved his hand.
“Can you look like that? Stern and kind of . . .”
Norman’s expression became serious, even a little predatory. He glanced up and I took a shot like that. I took a long shot against the wall and then I let the camera dangle.
“That’s good for now,” I said.
I took out my notebook.
“I have to ask a few things.”
“Oh, so now there’s questions.”
“Yeah yeah. The interrogation.”
He waited. I didn’t really know what I wanted to ask him.
“Why’d you become a doctor?” I said.
“I wanted to help people. And I wanted to make a lot of money.”
“Honorable.”
“You know. It was a good fit.”
“And why surgery?”
“I found sick people didn’t like me.”
“Oh come on.”
He spoke matter-of-factly.
“Sick people don’t like me. I have no tact. And it bothers them.”
I was writing this down.
“Like with Dad. You were the one he wanted to see. When he was sick, depressed, it was you he liked. So I knew that about myself. I grate on sick people. So I went into surgery. Not what I initially intended, but big deal. I make five hundred thousand dollars a year and all my patients are asleep. I don’t have to deal with a bunch of people whining. Or not liking me. Or both.”
I wrote all this down just as he’d said it. It was the first time I’d heard any of that. I thought of asking more, but he seemed uncomfortable already.
“Are you a good surgeon?”
“I’m a great surgeon,” he said.
I wrote that down, too. He was looking at his watch.
“Frank.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
“If you have any questions . . .”
“Yeah yeah. I’ll talk to you.”
I looked at his feet. He had those blue booties over the snakeskin boots.
“I have to get this,” I said.
I bent down and took a shot.
“You realize those boots are ridiculous.”
“You think I give a fuck?” he said, and I held a hand up and walked to the doorway. I was thinking about what he’d told me. I was thinking of the studied, casual tone he used when he spoke of our father. I walked back. Norman was gathering his book, his cup. I was going to say something more, tell him that what he’d said wasn’t entirely true, that Dad had wanted to see him, but didn’t know how to show it, that no one in our family expressed themselves directly. After a moment, it didn’t seem necessary to say this. There was time. I’d bring him the developed photographs. We’d look at them together. It would be something between us. We’d talk then. I just nodded to him, turned.
“I’ll see you,” he said over my shoulder.
I walked back out, holding my camera.
81
It was an hour later. I was on the subway going home. I felt good about the photographs. I felt good about talking to Norman. I imagined telling Emily about these things, and I imagined her response.
As the J train clacked its way up the bridge toward Brooklyn I had a view of the Lower East Side, Houston Street, and Emily’s apartment building. I thought of taking a picture out the window, framed by the window. She would have liked that. I held the camera to my eye but the view was cut by a swinging string of lights on a bridge cable. One light in the string flickered, faded, surged, and then died completely. Slightly, almost imperceptibly, the other bulbs brightened.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to several people who helped with the completion of this book. I want to thank Susan Falls and Tom Garrigus, who each gave specific suggestions at critical moments. I want to thank Tracey Thorne for her expertise on fencing. I want to thank my family for moral support throughout the long process. I want to thank David McCormick and Dan Menaker for believing in the book—it would not be here in this form without them. I want to thank Steve Gaghan for reading it many times, and for his excellent suggestions on plot and character. And last, and particularly, I want to thank my wife, Amy Billone, for her unerring line editing, and her unrelenting optimism.
SAFELIGHT
Shannon Burke
A READER’S GUIDE
A Conversation with Shannon Burke
DAVE MAHER
Dave Maher was a paramedic for the New York City Fire Department. Dave and Shannon worked together at Station 18 in Harlem for five years.
Dave Maher: I want you to talk a little bit about how you decided to be a writer.
Shannon Burke: Well, I’d always written things as a kid— poetry and song lyrics, and little plays that I videotaped. Short stories. That sort of thing. In college I was an English major and I guess I wrote stories and some poetry, though I hardly showed anybody. I think I was embarrassed about it. After college I was planning on going to law school, but I wanted to go traveling first. I moved back home for about four months. I worked as a cabdriver and I taught tennis. I saved about ten thousand dollars, then took off for a year, and while I was gone, over that year, I read around a hundred novels: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner, García Márquez, Fielding, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, everything. And it really was . . . life-changing for me. By the time I came back I’d decided I wanted to be a writer.
DM: And what’d your parents say?
SB: They were really happy.
DM: I detect a little sa
rcasm.
SB: Uh, yeah. . . . They weren’t bad about it. They were even supportive. But I don’t think they saw it as a shrewd career decision.
DM: So did you decide to be a paramedic then, as a day job?
SB: No, no. That didn’t happen for a long time. I just moved around to different cities and worked shitty jobs for the next five or six years. I was in Chapel Hill for a while, where I’d gone to school. Then I was in Prescott, Arizona. I was in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago. I went to Mexico for about five months at one point.
DM: Was there a design behind the places you went to?
SB: Not really. The first place I went after Chapel Hill was Prescott. I just wanted to live in a small town. I’d never done that before. I was interested in the southwest and my finger sort of fell on Prescott on the map. I thought I’d check it out, but then my car broke down and I sold it to the junkyard, so I got a job at the Pizza Hut and stayed.
DM: And you were by yourself?
SB: Yeah, yeah. It was kind of weird. For that whole time, five or six years, I just moved around by myself. I wrote during the day. I worked at night. I lived in the worst places. Like, in New Orleans for a while I lived in a transients’ hotel—the sort of place where homeless people sleep in the hallways. I was the weirdo who was always carrying a book. It was kind of lonely.
DM: And you were writing during this time?
SB: Oh, yeah. All the time. Every day. Initially I wrote stories. I think I wrote about fifty bad stories, one after the other.
DM: And they were based on things you were seeing in these towns?
SB: Not really. It’s interesting. I mean, in retrospect it’s interesting. These were mostly stories without plots or characters.
DM: That’s one way to do it.
SB: That’s exactly what everyone else thought, too. My sister once said, “Hey, Shannon, maybe you should write a story where something happens.” And of course she was right. But at the time I thought that plot didn’t matter. I was obsessed with style. And I just . . . wasn’t seeing the big picture. Later on, it might have ended up helping me. I mean, that I spent all that time thinking about the most efficient way of describing something. Or the most pleasing way to have dialogue flow. But it would have been much easier to have gone at it from the other direction. Like, start out thinking about a plot and characters. Because at least then I could have written something that other people wanted to read, even if it wasn’t great literature. The way I did it, there might have been a nice sentence or description, but when there’s no plot, people are just like, What the hell is this?
Safelight Page 16
