“It was cracked anyway.”
He took her hand and pressed the towel to the cuts again, then inspected the damage. She had one nasty cut, over the middle knuckle. That one was going to leave a scar.
“Keep pressure on that. And don’t go looking at it. It’s not that interesting.”
In the cupboard under the sink he found a hand broom and dustpan, which he used to sweep up the glass from the bathroom floor. The broom smeared blood over the floor and the counter, and he mopped it up with a wet towel and then ran water in the sink to wash away the blood. That sight nearly sent him spinning again. It was amazing, how much blood.
Why is my life so full of blood?
He filled the sink with water and put the towel in to soak, and returned to the kitchen. Melissa obediently clutched her injured hand to her chest. She had blood on her shirt but her colour had returned. He dabbed disinfectant on the cuts, again admonishing her not to be a baby. Then he took the dressing and pressed it to her knuckles and wrapped gauze around her hand to hold it in place. As he worked she leaned her face into him and he felt the heat of her breath on his neck, tracing the line of his jaw, her mouth looking for his. She darted her tongue against his lips, the smell of stale beer.
“You’re pretty drunk,” he said. “I think I better put you to bed.”
“Yes. You better put me to bed.”
She has that endless talent for innuendo. Zane took her by the elbow and steered her to the bedroom and sat her on the bed and took off her shoes. She giggled at his order to take her jeans off, and wriggled out of them and then stood in front of him. He reached past her and folded back the blanket and sat her down, discouraged her sudden and enthusiastic efforts to unfasten his belt.
“Go to sleep, kiddo, and don’t punch any more mirrors tonight.”
“What’s your problem?”
“For starters, you’re half my age.”
“That never stopped anyone before.”
“It’s complicated.”
On the other hand perhaps it’s embarrassingly simple. But why go into details? He reached down and took her good hand and patted it in what he hoped was a sympathetic way. She gripped his hand.
“Nobody I like ever likes me.”
How do I extract myself from this? Zane essayed a reassuring smile while attempting to twist his hand free.
“Melissa, if I was your age, I’d whisk you off to Vancouver tomorrow.”
“All the way to Vancouver.”
“Sure. But for now, just remember you’re young enough to be my daughter.”
She still refused to relinquish her grip.
“Do you have any kids?”
“No. I have no family at all.”
“I could be your daughter.”
If you think that’s going to solve anything then you’re drunker than I thought.
“Okay, kiddo.” Zane extricated his hand. He left the door open while he retrieved a spare blanket from the closet, and then closed the door on her.
Zane threw the blanket on the couch and then went to the kitchen, where he mopped up the blood from the counter and floor with paper towels. He couldn’t remember if her shout had followed the sound of breaking glass or preceded it. Anyway, it didn’t much matter.
What a fucked-up kid.
When he was finished cleaning up he turned out the light and went into the bathroom, where he looked into the empty frame of the mirror. He was momentarily disturbed to discover that he had no reflection at all.
CHAPTER SIX
Sunlight spills over the building opposite, breaks over the windowsill where yet another backlit spider plant still clings to life in its coffee can, splashes against the walls and washes over Zane, inert and face down on the couch. The pattern of the couch fabric stamped into his face. Awake, awake and greet the day. A mouthful of paste and a head full of grog.
A persistent pain had settled in just behind his eyes. At first he thought he’d passed out there, on the couch, but then the events of the night before returned. He got up, went into the bathroom, checked for broken glass. Either you were less inebriated than you thought, or you’re better with a broom than you ever knew. Don’t drink and sweep. Don’t think and weep. The evidence suggests that you’re still drunk.
The worst symptom of hangover is the non-specific conviction that one is an incorrigible fuck-up. This time, there’s no shortage of evidence to support that hypothesis. It’s time to deal with the rest of the mess.
Bloody water and towels in the bathroom sink: these will forever after be formerly white. You are only a virgin once. He picked the towels out of the sink one by one, dripping pink water on the floor, pulled the plug and let the blood-tinged water drain. The blood was hard to handle and on a hangover it was worse. He had on one occasion dropped a glass of booze and when he saw it on the floor the liquid splattered among the shards was blood. He blinked hard and reality snapped back into place. It was about that time that he realized something was badly wrong. And the sight of blood remained disturbing in ways unfathomable to the merely squeamish. He wrung the towels out and rinsed them and and hung them over the shower rail and went to check on Melissa.
At the bedroom door he paused. What is the proper form for dealing with a wounded, hung-over, messed-up porno chick in one’s bedroom? We wish to establish, at least, that she is still alive, but still, we must respect her privacy. Miss Manners, that bitch, never addresses such real-world problems. A compromise: he tapped lightly on the door before opening it. He needn’t have bothered. She was still out and showed no sign of stirring.
Zane stood in the doorway for a moment and watched her sleep. Melissa lay face down, her head turned to the side, her breath slow and steady. A little bit of blood had seeped through the dressing in the night and showed as a small brown stain on the gauze. Her face was stilled by the slack-jawed stupidity of sleep, all its animation gone. The shape-shifter at rest.
Zane closed the door on her and went back into the kitchen. He started a pot of coffee. It was almost eleven but there was no need to wake her yet.
“This thing is just about ready to go,” he said to himself. He liked the sound of the words and the assurance in his voice as he said them. Today is looking up. He poured himself a cup of coffee. He was, indeed, ready to go. All the facts had coalesced into one. It was time for Lucas Zane to cut his losses. Time to get out.
The only way out is the door you came in. Zane took his coffee and the phone into the bathroom to avoid waking Melissa, and dialed Jack’s office number in New York. Jack answered with a tone of theatrical patience, demanded to know what he wanted.
“I want for you to give me a story.”
“And I want you to give me a reason not to hang up right now.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“It’s still early.”
“That’s still a reason.”
“It’s not a good one.”
The conversation is not going as planned. The script is straightforward: Zane needs work. Jack can provide it. Zane calls Jack. They discuss the possibilities in friendly tones. As a matter of fact, there is some work available. Negotiations over his rate are perfunctory. He is, of course, willing to work for less these days. The exigencies of the situation. We have to start someplace. Above all, Zane does not wheedle.
“I need work. You need work done. And you need me.”
Jack seemed to find this funny.
“The world does not need you. Nobody cares if the photos are any good, as long as they fill space on the page.”
“I’m stung.”
“Get over it. Let me put you in the picture.”
Jack had already put him in the picture many times before, and Zane could recite the salient points by heart. It’s ugly out there, good agencies are as rare as five-legged unicorns, and good agents like Jack are a dying breed. You should have fallen on your knees each morning to thank your deity of choice, or alternatively, Jack, that you weren’t competing with the scrabbling mass of ph
otographers for starvation wages on all-rights contracts drafted by the same lawyers who had advised Pontius Pilate in the matter of one Jesus of Nazareth. Instead, you bit the hand that fed you, and now Jack is fresh out of Milk Bones. So now you get to compete with hungry little upstarts who are only too happy to slide towards personal bankruptcy at seventy-five dollars a day in the vain hope of reaching the heights that the great Lucas Zane so recently abandoned. And I’m not about to take a risk on you given certain recent events that I’d rather not review. That about covered it.
Zane let it all play out.
“I mean it. I need a story.”
“I’m a busy man. I think we’re done here.”
None of this is in the script. Has no one read his lines? Zane’s lifeline was drawing in.
“You said you’d look at any story I came up with.”
“Then come up with one.”
“I’m starting to work on something.”
“Good. What is it?”
We have failed to think this through. The perils of ad lib.
“The details aren’t firm just yet. I’m going through the, ah, preliminary research. And I can’t really get into the details just now.”
“It’s been nice talking to you.”
“No, I really can’t get into the details just now, you know, sensitive subject. Anyway, the thing is I need to cover costs. I need some work.”
A long pause from New York, during which Zane could hear Jack’s fingernails drumming on his desk. He took this as a positive sign. It was in any case more promising than a dial tone.
“Don’t jerk me around. If you’ve got a story, do it. Alternatively, go to hell.”
Zane heard the bedroom door open. She was up.
“I don’t have the money to do this story.”
“I’m from Missouri. You want back in the game, show me.” Jack hung up.
“Fuck you if you can’t get your lines straight,” he said to the dial tone. I am tired of re-shooting this scene.
Zane went back out into the kitchen. Melissa had put her jeans on, for which he was thankful. Small mercies. She collapsed onto the couch and availed herself of Zane’s blanket, covered herself from knees to shoulders. Her hair was a cascading disaster and she looked bleary and pale.
“I feel like crap.”
“You look like crap.”
He put the phone on the counter and dug a coffee cup out of the cupboard and poured her a cup. She requested cream and sugar. You might have guessed. One arm reached out from under the blanket to take the coffee. She sipped at it and then held up her right hand.
“I smashed your mirror, didn’t I?”
“You cut your knuckles pretty good, too.”
“I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Hit it by accident, did you?”
“No, I mean I didn’t mean it.”
“It was a shitty mirror, anyway. It made me look all blotchy and sick.”
“I kind of remember other stuff. Please tell me it didn’t happen.”
“It did.”
She groaned and rolled her head back. How much worse would she feel if she’d woken up next to you? Then again, perhaps she thinks she did. The worst symptom of hangover. However bad things look you’re convinced that they’re probably worse. Zane knew that territory well.
“You were pretty drunk. I had to put you to bed.”
“Please say there isn’t any more.”
“There isn’t any more. You said you wished you were my daughter. It was kind of cute.”
“Oh, God. It’s worse than I thought.”
He finished his coffee and took the mug back to the kitchen and rinsed it and put it in the sink. He had nothing for breakfast beyond cereal but she said she couldn’t face anything solid anyway. When she had finished her coffee, she levered herself up off the couch and announced that she was going to take a shower.
“Let’s look at that hand, first.”
He unwrapped the gauze and inspected the damage. He had been as thorough with the hand as he had cleaning up the glass. The cuts were still crusted with blood but they were clean. Nothing looked deep enough for stitches. She looked at her knuckles, winced and flexed her fingers, which opened the cut on her middle knuckle. This explained the blood soaked through the gauze.
“You’re going to have knuckles like a bad drunk.”
“Apparently, I am a bad drunk.”
She didn’t sing in the shower. Zane turned on the television. Nothing, save an endless round of talk shows and fake court cases. He switched it off again and stood at the kitchen window and watched life go by in the street. It was now coming on for afternoon.
You have to get out. You need a story. You just need one credible idea. You need to get Melissa out the door and then you can go and get the papers and find out what’s going on in the real world. The names and details you can make up as long as the idea carries weight. Once you get something out of Jack you can tell him the whole thing fell apart. The subject backed out. All you need is to get moving, to convince Jack that you’re back in the game.
All Zane needed was to get rid of Melissa.
Rows of lenses beneath the glass top of a display cabinet: a couple of well-used 50/1.8s for less than nothing, two slow midrange zooms, an old 24 mm f/2 going cheap, a battered 300 mm f/4.5, an 85, a 20-35 zoom, some crappy third-party tele-converters. In short, nothing exciting. No good lens going cheap, no cheapie worth using as a beater, nothing worth playing with for its own sake. Nothing holds its value anymore. Returning from El Salvador, you sold those two battered F3s for three times what a mint F3 high-eyepoint will fetch now. Photography today is nothing but a game of technology. In the computer age, the philosopher’s stone is merely a serviceable paperweight.
Poring over the used gear cabinet became unpleasantly like looking at Lucas Zane preserved in a museum. He had gone down to the ROM that summer, wanted to see the dinosaurs, felt he could deal with all those bones. But the place was closed for renovation. You want to see a dinosaur, look for your reflection in the glass.
Charlie, run-down, slightly stooped, thinning grey hair, asked if he wanted to take a closer look at anything. Charlie had worked there as long as Zane could remember. Longer than that, in fact. Charlie had worked there since the Nikon F, knew every good camera made since 1959. Tell him you needed to rig a remote trigger for an arcane motor drive that hadn’t been made since 1983, and he’d drag a dusty box up from the basement and find the connector you needed. With a wink: you can have that free because I’m pissed off at the boss today. Charlie liked anyone who wanted things obscure and obsolete. He could have been an award-winning nature photographer but he drank too much. At least, that was the story as Zane heard it.
“Those prices are breaking my heart,” said Zane.
“Used prices are way down. Great deals in there.”
“That’s what’s breaking my heart.”
Zane wandered away from the used cabinets to the back corner of the shop, where new equipment competed for space with the used. Tripods, light stands, studio flash heads, umbrellas, light boxes, reflectors, power supplies, all the assorted clamps and widgets of the mad engineers of studio lighting. Scars and scratches and wear marks and chipped paint. This stuff wears forever, changes hands. You always need a widget. The place was a photographic thrift shop.
On the back wall he found a shelf where assorted used developing tanks lay jumbled. Yard sale junk; no-one uses this stuff anymore. The shelf bore three lonely bottles of liquid black-and-white developer, Kodak HC-110. Zane picked one up and inspected it, taking note of the colour change at the top of the bottle, where the developer had reacted to the air. Easy to work with, has a long shelf life, but like any liquid developer it’s heavy to carry. It was Zane’s favourite, in the days when he still shot a lot of black-and-white. In El Salvador.
He set the bottle aside. The chemicals on the shelf were jumbled together in no particular order but he found bottles of rapid fixer and glacial a
cetic acid without difficulty. He still had his old tanks back at the apartment, in one of the boxes. He had all he needed.
He deposited the chemicals on the counter and Charlie looked at him dubiously. He rarely used Zane’s name, probably couldn’t remember it without reading it off his credit card. But he could tell you that the difference between an AI-S Nikkor and an AI Nikkor only matters if you own the Nikon FA. And who owns a Nikon FA, anyway?
“I always preferred D-76.”
Which was exactly what Zane might have expected from Charlie.
“That’s what Saint Ansel used?”
“It is indeed.”
“Europe is in flames, and Ansel Adams is photographing rocks and trees. Cartier-Bresson said that.”
“Did he?”
“But no doubt, someplace else was in flames when Cartier-Bresson was shooting guys jumping over puddles.”
“No doubt.”
Charlie put the chemicals in a plastic bag. Zane knew he was far more interested in the merits of HC-110 as compared to D-76, and could cheerfully have discussed contrast curves and push-processing characteristics all afternoon. What a dead Frenchman had once said about a dead American, he couldn’t have cared less.
“Thing is, someplace or other is always in flames,” said Zane. Now that he had the chemicals, he felt no real desire to take any pictures worth developing.
“And there are always rocks and trees.”
“True, that.”
Rocks and trees. Who cares? No doubt Charlie will shake his head sadly after you leave: what a pity that Zane guy hit the bottle. Used to be good, you know, a real pro. In any case, Cartier-Bresson had taken to painting by the time Capa got himself killed in Indochina. Zane was more or less sure of that. If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough. Then Capa stepped on a mine. Cartier-Bresson was better off painting.
Nothing lasts. The Manual of Photography burns through new editions faster than Hollywood burns through marriages. Photographic Sensitometry is out of print; contrast curves are now a problem for software engineers. A Tessar is all very nice in theory, but what you want now is a constant-aperture zoom, fourteen elements in eleven groups. Alchemy is black magic again, and even chemistry is too imprecise. Now, you can edit pixel by pixel, colour correction by the numbers. We have progress.
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