A small voice in the back of his head, a voice out of a textbook, demanded that he shoot the scene in a way that preserved the dignity of the victims, and his mind reeled at the suggestion. It could not be done. Nothing he framed worked, nothing explained the scene. He continued shooting to the end of the roll, rejecting each frame as useless even as he shot it, and then mechanically loaded a new roll. As he threaded the film leader onto the sprockets he absently noted the shaking of his fingers. His head swam in the heat and his ears were full of the droning buzz of cicadas.
The youngest of the victims was a dark-haired woman of about twenty, lying face-up in the grass. They had shot her in the chest, twice, and bayoneted her through the ribs. Her purse, brown vinyl cracked at the corners, lay spilled in the grass beside her. He knelt and began picking up her things, putting them back into the purse. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
A few sheets of notepaper, a pen, a flat tin of Aspirin, two tampons. A letter, written in a girlish hand, with big, open loops and careful circles dotting the i’s. Zane searched and found the envelope, addressed to someone named Christine. A return address in North Dakota.
A photograph. An Instamatic shot, the dead girl with two others, at a picnic table. All of them smiling at the camera. He noted that they were all a little bit blurred by the combination of poor camera technique and a poor quality lens. Nothing written on the back. Kodak paper.
Zane laid the photo in the grass beside her outstretched hand and changed lenses, switched to the fifty-five macro. He leaned in close and took a shot of her hand, dark with dried blood, with the photo lying beside it in the grass. Long slashes, no doubt from the bayonet, crossed her palm. He picked up the photo and the letter and tucked them carefully inside the envelope, and put the envelope in the front pouch of his camera bag. It was the only identification he could find.
Lucas Zane didn’t yet know it, but he had just won the Pulitzer Prize.
Zane inhabited a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a three-storey walk-up, far enough off Queen Street West to escape any trend toward urban renewal, rising rent or creeping fashionability. The place had a small and dingy bathroom that successfully resisted all attempts at cleaning; no amount of scrubbing ever quite effaced the granular feel of the bathtub enamel. Sitting room and kitchen were a single space, divided by a counter and by the cupboards suspended above. The furniture, provided, consisted of a battered couch, a coffee table, and an old television, and Zane had cable on the sly, as long as at least one of his neighbours paid the bill. His kitchen window overlooked the street, and when the television proved too demanding, Zane often stood at the window, watching.
On the windowsill behind the television, a spider plant in a coffee can slowly died of neglect. The plant was the gift of Zane’s neighbour, a large black woman with a thick Caribbean accent, a woman he carefully avoided, suspecting that she was insane. She seemed to him entirely too friendly and talkative to be completely stable.
Zane had few other possessions: a few dishes, a camera bag containing the tools of his trade, a toothbrush, a razor, the other essentials. In the corner of the sitting room was a small stack of cardboard boxes that he had never unpacked, bearing dust dating from the day he moved in. He had never needed the things inside. He had forgotten what the boxes contained.
His job with Barker paid the rent and the grocery bill. The work, which consisted of shooting the photos and then taking care of the photo editing, left him plenty of free time, and Zane could easily have found more work and made himself comfortable, but he felt no ambition toward comfort. Zane felt no detectable ambition at all.
In the mornings he got out of bed, shaved, showered, and cleaned up after the night before. Then, if he had no work to do and if no domestic chores presented themselves, he went out into the street and found ways to pass the day.
He shopped for groceries, for cleaning supplies, for abrasives with which to attack the granular surface of the bathtub. He browsed bookstores but never bought a book, thumbed through magazines, but avoided newspapers. Sometimes, he sat and drank coffee and watched the life of the street pass him by. He drifted into pawn shops, considered musical instruments in hock and cheap cameras abandoned. Not once did Zane take a photograph in the street. He never felt that urge.
In the early part of that summer Zane passed time in the park, where he amused himself by feeding the squirrels and the pigeons; this ceased after he saw a decrepit old woman mumbling to herself while doing the same. Her eyes possessed a rheumy vacancy that disturbed him far more than a glance in his bathroom mirror. He found new hobbies.
Sometimes, he rode the subway, pointlessly travelling east or north, lost in the anonymity of public transit. He observed men deep in their newspapers, women bathing in novels, kids staring vacantly at their reflected selves with wires hanging from their ears. He thought about Walker Evans but felt no desire to emulate him. Between subway maps and ads for career training services he read poems posted as a project in public art, and wondered just what distinguishes a poem from a run-on sentence interrupted by superfluous carriage returns. He got off at random stops and walked. He looked into shop windows. He invented purpose where he could find it.
Recently, he had started on museums. He went to art galleries, considered sculpture, looked at photographs. He tried reading National Geographic again, for the photography, but all of the mighty had fallen; Abell and Harvey and Allard had retired and what remained seemed empty. Most of the junk in the galleries he explored was the work of pygmies who imagined themselves somehow better than those mere journalists. Their greatest achievements lay in their artist statements, towers of finely crafted babble in which they explained the subjects their crap investigated and explored. Zane mentally composed an artist statement of his own, one he wished had accompanied his own exhibits in New York: just shut up and look at the pictures.
Once, he went to the zoo, where he passed an entire afternoon in watching a troop of monkeys. None of the monkeys had ever composed an artist statement, but each still seethed with unrealized ambition. He learned their personalities, gave them names, had a brief but earnest conversation on the subject of their internal politics with a six-year-old girl. He felt quite confident that he had this thing about nailed. Then the girl’s mother dragged her away by the hand. The look she gave Zane blistered his paint.
Throughout each day, he kept himself in motion. In the evenings, as the city slowed, stalled, and settled into quiet, he sat at home and locked the doors. It was only then that he started acting crazy.
Among Zane’s less terrifying symptoms was a recent tendency to talk to himself. Not that he carried on full-blown conversations, which would indeed be worrisome; he simply punctuated his long stretches of domestic silence with occasional remarks, like the elliptical conversations of a long-married couple that has long since run out of new topics for discussion.
Disjointed phrases presented themselves, and he uttered them: “I think I’ve just about got this thing nailed,” for example, or “the important thing now is to keep things plumb.” Just what it was that he intended to nail, or why it was essential to keep things plumb, Zane had no idea. Perhaps, in some past life, he had been a carpenter, and some karmic offence – a hammer dropped on a stink bug, perhaps, or a careless glue spill that had pinned and drowned a spider – had consigned him to this unhappy plane. Or perhaps he was just going nuts.
To his credit, this last possibility did give him a sense of creeping unease. Zane felt a growing suspicion that he was not entirely in control of himself, a feeling that he was up to something behind his own back. Up to no good.
But on good nights, the words themselves, and more importantly, the confidence in his voice as he said them, were soothing. He heard the voice of a man in control of himself, a man who had it together. All was well, or perhaps soon would be. If indeed he was up to something behind his back, at least he seemed confident about it.
It was only on the bad nights that Zane r
eally drank. He only started to run when he heard himself catching up.
Evening sunlight slanting through the resting air gilded the three-storey walk-up opposite, rendering brick and mortar, baked clay and powdered limestone, into gold. Alchemists toiled for centuries and never considered photography. Clay into gold, light into silver. The philosopher’s stone, it transpires, is multi-coated, low-dispersion glass.
Now is the magic hour. It is impossible to take a bad picture now, but it is easy to make a cliché. The problem is never the light but what you choose to do with it.
Below Zane’s apartment window, the street has fallen into shadow. A man crosses with a woman, shortening his stride to keep pace with her small, quick steps. She wears a light cotton dress, a flowered print. Reflections flee the windows of his passenger door as he opens it for her in a sudden, uncomfortable moment of formality. Her teeth flash in a smile, eyes catching reflected light, her bare leg retracting into the darkness of the passenger seat. Zane watched until the car pulled out into traffic. He had never lost the habit of staring.
Now you shoot chromes, high-speed chromes in defiance of the conventional wisdom, let the grain take over, let the lights along the street burn through the film. Chromes give the colours of the cars and the buildings weight and depth, render shadows a deeper black, conceal the eyes of people drinking in their shirt sleeves on the patio of the restaurant next door. Drag the shutter: the couple on the street blend into a blur of togetherness, all detail lost to shadow and motion, unknowable. The picture is as compelling as a dream.
But the picture says nothing. The picture is just a circus trick that lets you work with the impossible light. Shooting available darkness, you do what you can and alchemy takes care of the rest, silver halides and dye couplers distilling life and motion into a silent dream in which nothing is specific. Gone are the quickness in his step, his rush to beat her to the door, the shyness of her movements, his momentary awkwardness. The couple is silenced, stilled, suspended in a net of gelatin and grain and flash trickery. What remains is an eloquent lie. In the silence of the photograph, you will never see that this is their first date. And you will never see the breakup.
Die knowing something, Walker Evans said; you are not here long. So stare, listen, pry, eavesdrop. But you know nothing now, and every day, you know less.
Zane drained his beer and put the bottle on the counter by the sink and opened the fridge to find another. An unsteady step explained his uncharacteristic explorations beyond mere facts; a few beers and you abandon all your commitments, let the mind run free. Time to return to the facts. Among said facts, half this case remains. We’ll need to buy another, but that’s tomorrow’s project. Let us now focus on today’s. Zane twisted open another bottle and threw the cap in the sink.
Time for a change. You’ve seen enough imploring eyes, provided enough chauffeur service for Richard Barker, been appraised as a potential pervert on one too many occasions. Time to get moving. This exile has gone on long enough. It’s time to find a new gig. And the only way out is back through the same door you came in.
Zane found the telephone and dialed the New York number of his agent. The office was closed. He let it ring through to voice mail, then hung up and called Jack at home.
“Zane, let’s not go through this same old shit again.”
This was not the greeting he had hoped for.
Jack, fussing with his tie, inspecting his fingernails, immaculate. His hair would be neatly combed. An aging dandy in an Italian suit, silk tie and pocket square. As if to compensate for his effeminacy, Jack swore non-stop.
“I want a story,” said Zane.
“You’re drunk.”
“Not particularly.”
Zane enunciated with care, but the word contained too many syllables.
“You know the answer. We’ve been through the motions more times than a twenty-dollar hooker.”
“I need work.”
Zane left his bottle on the counter and wandered to the toilet. The beer was making its presence felt.
“You don’t want a story, Zane. You want to believe in a story.”
“I can’t keep doing this, Jack.”
“What exactly are you doing?”
“I’m taking a piss.”
In the long pause that followed, Zane completed the task at hand. For a moment, he thought that Jack had hung up on him.
“I mean, what exactly can’t you keep doing.”
Zane considered this carefully: I am photographing less-than-perfectly attractive young ladies engaged in various acts of a sexual nature, in an explicit manner, for the interest and enjoyment of the members of a predominantly, perhaps exclusively, male audience. I am not working in Los Angeles; my work therefore falls outside the mainstream of this genre. Although remunerative, it is decidedly low-rent.
“I’m en vacances.”
“Zane, are you okay?”
Zane tucked the phone under his ear and washed his hands and regarded his reflection. A long, diagonal crack transected the mirror and split his face into two halves that didn’t quite align. The more he looked at the faces, the less familiar they became. The man in the mirror was tired and unkempt. His hair rioted in disarray. He looked blotchy, had bags under his eyes like bruises. The man in the mirror was obviously not well.
“I think I’m coming down with something.”
“What I mean is, how are you doing these days.”
“I know what you mean. I’m fine.”
“I don’t think you are.”
Zane stared absently at his reflection and listened to the silence of the telephone line.
“It’s still the same deal,” said Jack. “Get yourself straightened out, come up with a story, pitch it to me, we’ll see.”
“I am straightened out.”
“I’d like to believe that.”
“Believe it.”
“Can’t talk myself into that one.”
“I can do this, Jack.”
“Stop getting drunk and calling me at home. I’m going to change my number. Goodbye, Zane.”
Zane leaned in closer to the mirror for a better look. The glass was streaked and dirty and somehow never seemed to come clean. His eyes were hollow pits. He looked as if someone had punched him out some days ago, and his face was just now returning to normal.
Had someone punched him out? If someone punched you out, you’d remember. Besides, who would make the effort? Anything’s possible, but.
These questions are too difficult to consider.
Food is simpler, if uninteresting. He made a turkey sandwich on white with a skim of low-fat mayo, accompanied it with a cup of skim-milk yogurt, approximately as appealing as a can of white paint and a poor match for beer. At a field hospital in northern Pakistan, the American surgeon asked casually what he had eaten for breakfast. Morphine allowed Zane to take this for small talk, and he joked of eating things that would be unobtainable in Afghanistan: bacon, eggs, hash browns.
Above his surgical mask the doctor’s eyes betrayed no hint of a smile. We need to identify the foreign matter in the abdominal cavity, he said. Then he cut out almost one third of the small intestine. Over time, the remaining intestine was supposed to adapt, to learn to deal with real food again. And Zane hadn’t tasted bacon, eggs, or hash browns since.
It starts to get you down. After a while, you start to wonder if this is living.
So you take certain precautions. The apartment contained no fixtures sufficiently solid to aid Zane in hanging himself, and the windows were insufficiently high for him to accomplish anything by jumping, beyond breaking his legs and thus making a fool of himself. His stove was electric, rather than gas. He did not own any old-fashioned razor blades, and his medicine cabinet contained no drugs powerful enough to overdose even a domestic cat. To shoot yourself, you need a gun; Zane had carefully ensured that he did not own one. This left slashing his wrists with a kitchen knife, something he was fairly certain he was too cowardly and squeamish t
o do.
The television spouted its usual comforting inanities. Lift the plot of one sitcom and drop it in another; nothing changes but the faces. Zane flopped onto the couch and opened his camera bag. He turned on his camera and the LCD display flashed at him. He zoomed the lens to about twenty millimetres, comfortably wide. He set the white balance to auto, threw the aperture wide open and set aperture priority. He didn’t need to think.
With the camera at eye level he tested the autofocus on the kitchen faucet and then on the cupboards and the television. He found the remote and switched to the weather channel where an enthusiastic young woman expounded on the likelihood of rain on the prairies, a low-pressure system sweeping in from the west; all this was a matter of pressing national interest today. Zane framed the desolate room with the television nattering away at its edge and released the shutter. On the LCD screen, the shot looked like nothing more than distilled loneliness.
What the hell are you doing here? Is this some kind of purgatory? There is nothing here to shoot. The camera is useless.
Zane slipped the camera strap from around his neck, widened the zoom to about seventeen millimetres, and held the camera at arm’s length, the lens aimed directly at his face. The glass stared back at him, black and implacable, splashes of colour catching the light, fragments of his apartment in cyan and magenta, his face reflected in the glass. He stared straight into the lens and then he released the shutter.
Light passes through the lens and forms an image on the sensor, confirming at least that you exist and are reflecting light in the normal way. On the LCD screen, Zane’s face still looked blotchy and unshaven, and his hair remained a chaotic mess. Crow’s feet around the eyes and deepening signs of age. A complete absence of expression. It looked like an ID card photo.
It will look good over your obituary: Lucas Zane, erstwhile combat photographer of some repute, was found dead in his apartment today at the age of forty-six. An image left on his camera’s flash card confirmed that Mr. Zane had committed suicide by shooting himself once in the head with a wide-angle lens. In his suicide note, hastily scrawled on the wall of his squalid domicile in unused pixels, Mr. Zane complained that even his own small intestine had abandoned him. Mr. Zane is survived by his photographs, which have taken on the life that he intended, but that he now regrets.
Combat Camera Page 3
