What the fuck, Danny. Just like Dad always said. Life isn’t fair.
What a terribly mundane thing to feel at the transcendent moment. How utterly banal.
Sooner or later, it comes to us all: Capa, Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Terry Lapierre. Werner Bischof, who never got his due. At least I got my due, Danny, whatever that’s worth. Not much, anyway. I think it really is time for me to retire.
You want to keep it light. You’ve got to keep your mind off that cobra, even as he pumps more venom into you.
I’m going home, start shooting celebrities. You can take this particular job and shove it. And I’ll make a lot more money, because that’s all the news is these days. Mass-produced pop stars in skimpy tops and tight jeans are the future of journalism. Running around in the desert, a bunch of bearded guys with guns, what the hell is that?
Cold. He had no feeling in his arm, but his body swelled with pain. A pain balloon. And he was so cold now. High overhead, he heard the sound of a jet.
Someone dragging him, the sun and the ground gyrating wildly. A room with stone walls, a hole in the ceiling. Through which my spirit can ascend. Someone pressing down on his belly, and then they rolled him and he felt pressure on his back.
Shit, what a fucking mess.
Don’t give him morphine. Not with that abdominal wound.
Makes no difference anyway, this one’s not going to make it. What a fucking mess.
I’m in the room, dammit. If you don’t mind. And bring on the fucking morphine.
A face floated into Zane’s view, one of the Special Forces soldiers. Hang on, he said, we got a chopper coming.
Get Danny. You’ve got to get Danny out.
That other guy? Shit, half his head’s gone. He was dead before he hit the ground.
On a stretcher, moving, swaying. And then the rotor down-wash battered his face as they loaded him into the helicopter, and the helicopter whirled up into the air, and Zane whirled with it.
Zane traced the puckered scar with his finger and looked at himself in the mirror, haggard and blotchy. He picked up his drink from beside the sink and finished it and then started the shower. The chill was still on him so he ran it hot. When the water turned hot he stripped off his shorts and stepped into it, felt the heat playing over his skin.
He needed to get warm. He needed to get clean.
CHAPTER FIVE
Zane’s first camera was an Olympus Quickmatic 600, a simple rangefinder with an automatic exposure system and a thirty-six millimetre lens that used zone focusing. The camera was a Christmas present from his maternal grandfather, a keen amateur photographer who developed his own film and gave Zane his first lessons in photography. The Quickmatic used Kodak Instamatic film, which yielded small, square prints, and Zane received three cartridges of film that same Christmas morning.
By the time his father carved the first slice of Christmas turkey, Zane had used up all three, producing 60 fuzzy pictures of the Christmas tree, the family cat, his parents, his younger sister Connie, the snow-covered front lawn, and other such essential subjects. He continued to frame potential pictures after all the film was gone. By mid-afternoon, after throwing a tantrum, Connie was sent to her room; Zane had received a better present than anything she got, as usual, and it wasn’t fair.
Well, life isn’t fair, said Zane’s father. And: that girl is turning into a spoiled brat.
Connie had decided at an early age that she had been cheated on the family deal. Whether it was who got the last cookie or who had to stay in to practice the piano, it was unfair. Zane’s mother clucked sympathetically, and always caved in. Zane’s father, on the other hand, invariably replied simply that life is not fair, and this fact lodged firmly in Connie’s mind where it swelled over time, like a subcutaneous infection, obscuring the fact that life’s unfairness extended to people other than Connie. By fourteen, Connie had decided that the playing field was permanently tilted in Zane’s favour.
It’s easy for you, she said: you’re a boy. You’re just what Dad wanted.
But being just what Dad wanted introduced burdens of its own. Among these, thanks to Zane’s incurable lack of athletic prowess, was a generalized difficulty with playing fields, tilted, level, or otherwise. Furthermore, as Zane discovered in later years, arriving home shit-faced and underage in the small hours of the morning was not seen as desirable in the son of a police officer who spent his Friday and Saturday evenings handing out tickets, fifty-three dollars and seventy-five cents each, to the shit-faced and underage.
The discovery that Zane was a bookish shit-disturber with artistic pretensions was to the elder Zane a sore trial; he could have found it in himself to forgive the disturbance of a certain amount of shit if only, for example, the kid could play football. Low-grade shit disturbance in a football player constitutes mere hijinks, a blowing off of steam. But football was not among Zane’s talents. Instead, he liked to take pictures of things, pictures that to his father made no sense. It is, for example, a goddamn fire hydrant. Why do you need a picture of a fire hydrant? Looks like artsy-fartsy bullshit to me. And low-grade shit-disturbance coupled with artistic pretensions is immediately suspect: this kid is probably smoking dope.
None of this occurred to Connie. In retaliation for life’s refusal to be fair she became her mother’s daughter, and the family stool pigeon. It was no coincidence that Constable Zane happened to find himself at the head of the stairs each time Zane stumbled, shit-faced and underage, into the family home. Someone kept tipping off the cops.
This was all that remained to Zane when a drunk driver, distracted by the flashing lights of Constable Zane’s police cruiser, weaved too far to the right and killed him as he checked a speeder’s licence. Zane never had the opportunity to make a truce or to reach the kind of reconciliation that arrives when the barriers to things unsaid simply rust away.
Zane moved out, went off to school, got engaged, went to El Salvador, and returned with a hole in his head. With no one left to get all the breaks, Connie got over it, went off to school, started teaching, and met a plastic surgeon. Zane was in Tel Aviv when she got engaged, and sent a card. But the inexorable collapse of his mother’s mind put the kibosh on their nascent reconciliation. Connie might have forgiven Zane the events of their childhood, or even his being overseas as Alzheimer’s disease munched holes in her mother’s hippocampus, but she could never forgive the simple fact that, in rare lucid moments, it was always Zane that the patient asked after.
Where’s Lucas? He always took such nice pictures, she said.
Melissa stands at the kitchen window, in the soft wash of pale and indirect light that floods in through the dirty glass, flows over the walls and counters and cupboards, embraces and folds over surfaces. The light picks out her hair and separates her face sharply from the dingy wall behind. It picks out the cracks where the yellow paint is starting to peel, illuminates the point of her chin, the line of her jaw, her slightly upturned nose and the cryptic smile formed by her eyebrows and lips. You remain after all these years a collector of faces, prefer pretty to beautiful. It entails fewer complications.
This shot is easy. The light makes it easy. You can let the shadows fall to black. The rest is in the framing. You either get in close with a short tele and go for the profile, or you shoot wide, put the pretty girl in the context of the squalid apartment. You define what’s in the story and what remains untold. She looks into the frame or she looks out. Looking out is better, but this shot is an obvious cliché: the girl looks into the light, suggesting youth, or hope, or a bright future. Another eloquent lie.
Melissa knocked back the remains of a bottle of beer, which completely ruined the effect but offered a more truthful perspective on her situation.
“What’re you lookin’ at?”
“I was thinking of taking your picture.”
“Like you don’t do that enough?”
“Garry Winogrand said he took pictures to see what things looked like photographed.”
“You know what I look like.”
She didn’t bother asking who Winogrand was. He pressed on regardless.
“After a while you know what things are going to look like photographed. So you look at things in terms of what they’ll look like photographed.”
“Are you going anywhere with this, or are you just drunken rambling?”
Zane found this question difficult to address. You start off going somewhere but then she changes the subject. The conclusion flees and escapes, catches the next Greyhound back to its hometown. He took the empty bottle from her and fished two new ones out of the fridge. He had lost track of how many he had drunk, but he was reasonably sure that he was ahead. Zane had the drunk’s habit of keeping tabs on what was left for him.
“I was going somewhere, but I forgot where it was.”
Melissa found this tremendously funny, but Zane didn’t see the joke. When she stopped laughing and looked at his face, she laughed still harder.
“Anyway, I was just thinking that the light was good.”
“‘The light’s good.’ Oh, you don’t fool me with your artsy photo-talk, mister.”
“That diffuse window light is always good.”
“Zane with the artsy photo-talk. I’m losing the light here, people! Fuck harder!”
Zane didn’t think it was quite that funny. He didn’t find it funny at all.
“It’s not – ”
“Bill, what’s your motivation? What’s your inner conflict? Oh, yeah. Rich would just love that one.”
“You might be surprised. He has some theories.”
“Rich has all kinds of theories. The more he talks, the more theories he comes up with.”
“Rich says I’m a genius.”
A mouthful of beer sprays from Melissa’s lips, a mist of fine droplets followed by a series of choking noises. Shit, beer up my nose, she says, coughing; that hurts. Serves her right. This notion of genius shouldn’t be laughable, precisely.
Melissa retreated to the couch with an unsteady step. He heard the television come on, in the form of an advertisement for a telephone dating service that offered the chance to connect with local girls now. This he considered an unlikely prospect, given the paucity of ads offering local girls the reciprocal opportunity. Where do they find them all?
Zane stopped at the end of the kitchen counter and watched the light from the television play over Melissa as she sat on the couch. She took a small glass pipe out of the pocket of her jeans and loaded it, then lit it, a heavy smell filling the apartment, burnt grass clippings on a summer day.
“You thinking of taking my picture again, or are you working up to getting all artistic with me?”
“If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?”
“Other than your wonderful couch?”
“Play along.”
“On a stage.” She smirked, waved one dramatic hand. “Romeo and Juliet. I would be Juliet. As I stick myself with the knife, everyone weeps.”
“And everyone throws flowers. Everyone falls in love with you.”
“And then the curtain falls. I get up, run backstage, change into my street clothes and leave with someone far smarter than that dumb shit Romeo.”
“Then where do you go?”
“A long, long way from anyplace I ever been.”
Zane thought: fair enough.
Barker sat at his desk and worked the mouse with methodical efficiency.
“This girl,” he said. “This girl has got potential.”
Zane did not respond. He checked his lenses as he packed his gear, blew some dust off the camera eyepiece. As far as Zane was concerned, Barker was talking to himself. An easy mistake to make, although at the best of times, it was difficult to tell.
“Boundless potential. And once again, Zane, I must say that you are a genius. This deserves a drink.”
Barker slid open his desk drawer and pulled out two tumblers and a bottle of Scotch. He poured Zane a generous one without waiting for him to accept the offer, and then slid the tumbler across the desk and raised his own glass.
The opportunity for a gracious exit thus evaporates. Things have slid well out of plumb: the onslaught of Melissa on your carefully ordered detachment, the question of what the fuck is wrong with you, a beating, a certain problem involving groceries. You get asked to use another supermarket. Faced with all this it becomes difficult to smile and nod on cue. Still, one must rise to the occasion. Also, there is the prospect of free booze to moderate the experience.
Zane sat. He picked up the glass, raised it in return. Whisky, do your work and make it quick. Barker, on the runway, acknowledged takeoff clearance for another flight of rhetoric. Roger; go with throttle up.
“Here’s to genius, Zane.”
Drinking to his own genius did nothing for Zane’s balance. The great Lucas Zane had often been accused of genius, and Zane found the subject acutely uncomfortable. He hoped the Scotch would help.
“Do you know why you’re a genius?”
“I never really thought about it.”
“Because you see, Zane. You are a genius because you see.”
Barker lifted his glass to sip at his drink. His index finger broke free to point at Zane as he sighted him over the glass with his dominant eye, as if aiming a pistol loaded with cheap Scotch.
“Now, this is a rare thing, Zane. I had this guy before, he couldn’t take a good picture if it was hanging on the wall. The moment was wrong, faces were in shadow, you couldn’t see shit. He’d catch the girl rolling her eyes or looking bored. Who the hell is gonna pay good money to jerk off to that? This guy would miss the goddamn money shot and get a picture of her wiping it off.
“I said to the guy, you gotta capture the decisive moment, man. He looks at me, he says, what the fuck, this isn’t fuckin’ art, man. If you can see her boobs then what the fuck, right? But you know what?”
Zane paid attention to his drink.
“He was wrong!” Barker leaned back with a look of triumph and smacked his glass down on the desk. Half of its contents sloshed over the rim. He seemed not to notice. “You know why he was wrong?”
Zane elected not to reply.
Barker put down his glass and raised his hand to make the point, counting on his fingers: “Kaitlyn, Amber, Melody, Sugar, Natalie. Not a Mary or Anne or Jane in the bunch. It’s the same old game: ‘Who do you want me to be?’ Our customers, they all want to believe. The truth is too mundane. So we give the girls biographies. Melody here, she’s nineteen and her favourite position is doggy style and she likes to swallow and her secret fantasy is to be gang-banged. In fact, we can’t get her to do more than solo. But they believe this shit. And you know why?”
Zane asked no questions. You avoid getting engaged. You get into a bout of full-contact philosophy, you wake up three days later surrounded by empty Scotch bottles, your head pounding, thrumming with strange belief systems implanted by Barker using brute force and a number four Phillips screwdriver. The safe course is to play along. And at all times, stay between Barker and the door.
“They believe this shit because they want to.” Barker sat back with an air of triumph, having arrived at a profound revelation. “They make a willing suspension of disbelief. Coleridge said that. They know it’s fake, but they want to believe it.
“And that’s what this asshole didn’t get. They want to believe some kind of story here. This isn’t just a bunch of chicks getting drilled. This is fucking art, Zane: art!”
Round and round and round he goes, stream of nonsenseness, like dropping acid and watching Eraserhead, an error of Zane’s youth. Strange distorted images, sinister sounds. Somehow a baby is involved. None of this makes sense but you can’t get away. The soundtrack is overwhelming, mechanical, grips you by the base of your skull and shakes hard. All you can do is hang on and hope it ends soon.
“I’m feeling the need for another drink.”
Barker retrieved the bottle and casually poured another tw
o fingers.
“Now, a lot of people would laugh at that. We’re making art here: that’s a good one! But those people are dickheads. Fact is, art is that which moves you. And sex, sex is not about your dick. Sex is all up here.”
The index finger tapped Barker’s temple three times and then took aim, right between Zane’s eyes. Barker nodded earnestly; Zane tried to blink in a way that would suggest comprehension. He suspected that he had failed.
“What I’m saying is we got to get that willing suspension of disbelief. We got to get that story in there. You don’t get that when the girl looks like she’s compiling her grocery list. But we – and I mean, you and me, Zane – we are making that story. We are moving minds all across the world, and I got the credit card receipts to prove it. Tell me that’s not fucking art!”
When Zane was still in high school, he once carried on a loud and passionate argument on a city bus, on the question of whether the back of a chair could be art. At the time, nothing seemed more important than the question of what art was and whether the chair back was it. But that was thirty years before, and Zane had grown out of it. More importantly, arguing the point would only encourage Barker.
Meanwhile, if you’re going to suffer this, you might as well get compensation. Zane drained his glass and held it out for a refill.
Barker topped up Zane’s glass and then turned to the computer monitor. He looked at it carefully for a long while, rolling the Scotch around the bottom of his glass. An opportunity for a quick exit, but there is this free Scotch to deal with. Zane drank quickly. This proved to be a serious lapse of judgment.
“Yes, this girl’s got potential. This is a girl with potential. All we need to do now is to convince her to do more than solo. And we will.
Combat Camera Page 7
