Combat Camera
Page 12
Slavic cheekbones smiled and tilted her head. These were the two most interesting and attractive men she had ever met. Gentlemen, in fact; apparently they’d paid five bucks each for a couple more beers. First, a table dance. Things were looking up for everyone.
She cupped her breasts, looked coyly at them through her eyelashes, drooled a long string of saliva down onto her left nipple. One hand smeared it over her chest. She turned and bent over, smacked her buttocks, a wobbling shock wave like so much rubbery jello. She looked back at them and repeated the performance. Cheekbones notwithstanding, the effect was more bovine than erotic.
Zane shot the entire performance. A tricky proposition, likely to provoke a mishap of the sort Jade so detested. But you learn all kinds of tricks. In Somalia, Zane had left his camera slung around his neck and leaned his hand on the shutter button while he argued with rifle-toting teenagers, the clatter and roar of truck engines covering the whine of his motor drive. Here he had the Leica in his jacket pocket and an undesirable corner table beyond the pool of light around the stage. He shot under the table with the camera on his leg, used zone focusing, luck, experience, T-MAX pushed to 3200 and a lens made for night shooting. The fact of the matter is, no-one’s here to watch you, anyway.
Melissa weaved among the tables toward Zane, made a face, and flopped into the seat beside him.
“That’s it. I’m on my fuckin’ break.”
“How many breaks do you get?”
“Not this one. But far as anyone can see, I’m sitting here with a paying customer, doing my job.”
“You’re a hard-working girl.”
“You better believe it, buster. I just had this table dance, this jerk kept pawing me.”
Too bad you missed that. That was a picture.
“That must have been very nice for you.”
“Not now, Zane. Please.”
“I thought they kicked you out for that kind of thing.”
“Shit, Zane, you believe that? What they say is a long, long way from the real world.”
He shot a vertical of her, the camera concealed behind the table, worried in the back of his mind about keystoning. You can correct it in the printing. It was a good shot.
“You okay?”
“Don’t.”
She looked away. He watched the stage show, the same show he had seen fifteen minutes before, an hour before, two hours before. Only the faces changed. It could be the same dancer, a thousand masks.
Coming back from Jerusalem he had a painful cab ride in from the airport with a driver who never stopped talking. He was about fifty and he kept repeating the same words: to me, it’s just another shaved pussy, you know? A hollow laugh follows. This man had discovered the Internet. You come back from the Holy Land and your plane descends into this.
The cab driver’s mantra rang in his head. You’re a creature of memory, the sum of your experience, and all the useless brain can drag up is it’s just another shaved pussy, you know. One more good reason to take notes.
The dancer was about ready to drop her top, according to formula. Where x is duration of music, 3x/16 = show yer tits. There were fines for deviating from the plan. Someone had worked it out, studied the male attention span. Marilou could no doubt clarify this research.
In the crowd a voice yelled get on with it. The dancer had her halter untied, her best I-know-you-want-it look on her face, when a hand came out of the shadows and grabbed her ankle. She dropped it all, came down hard. In the shadows, a tidal surge as the bouncers closed in. The dancer got back to her feet, wobbly on high heels, blood trickling down her leg from a cut on her knee. A smile like an escaped psychiatric inmate.
“I need to put my feet up,” said Melissa.
She put her feet on Zane’s lap. Her heels were an inch higher than the limit of reason and of good taste. They looked dangerous. This is not the kind of thing you want in your lap. Also, Zane was disinclined to foot rubs.
The song had changed. According to formula, x/2 = floor show. The dancer rolled onto her back and spread her legs, rolled again to face the other way. The cut on her knee continued to bleed and each maneuver smeared blood down her shin and calf and over the stage. Every move she made smeared the mess around. Everywhere you go there is always blood; there seems to be some message in this, but it doesn’t bear decoding. In any case, the show must go on.
The waitress returned with his drink and he handed it off to Melissa. She sipped it through a straw, an act that struck Zane as entirely too childish for the surroundings.
“I saw you the other day, when I was dancing,” she said. “That was kinda weird. Normally, you know, I don’t see anyone. I just tune it all out.”
She kept trying to sink the ice cubes with her straw, but they refused to stay sunk. In high school he had once got badly drunk and had tried to slide down a banister. The feat was beyond him sober. This had cost him a boxer’s fracture to two fingers on his right hand. Walking to the hospital, he worked the two fingers, discovered he was almost too drunk to feel pain. Such amusement. Thinking of Melissa onstage he had much the same feeling. This time it wasn’t the rum.
You won’t be seeing yourself in the mirror anytime soon. Roland the Headless Leica Shooter. Count Noctilux of Transylvania.
“Thanks for the break,” said Melissa.
“You made short work of that drink.”
“It doesn’t help to be sober ’round here.”
She swung her feet down to the floor, adjusted her skirt and stood. Zane knocked back the rest of his rum.
“What’re you doing after work, there, sweetie?”
“I’m going to take a long, long shower, and then I’m going to crash on my friend’s couch. What did you have in mind, creep?”
“You better get back to work,” said Zane. “And try to stick around this corner, if you can. I’m gonna need lots more pictures.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
When Zane was eight, a pair of robins built a nest in the tree outside his bedroom window, and by chance a gap in the foliage allowed him a clear view. Connie called it no fair: she didn’t get birds outside her window. Even migratory songbirds, apparently, were in on the conspiracy.
Zane borrowed his father’s binoculars and when the eggs hatched he adopted the entire family, offering four updates each hour on his hatchlings’ progress. After school, he dug worms out of the garden and left them at the base of the tree, on a dinner plate. It seemed a reasonable way to help out. Inexplicably, on finding the use to which her china had been put, Mrs. Zane did not agree.
Two days later he found the tail feathers of a robin on the garden walk, a puff of down, a scattering of rusty breast feathers. From his window he could see no birds on the nest. He fretted, checked again, threatened death to all cats. His mother checked, told him not to worry. His father shrugged.
That night, a bird was on the nest. The following day he sighted a robin in the yard, hunting worms. It did not fly away as he approached it, and on drawing closer he saw the dangling leg, the absence of tail feathers. He worried that the mother bird could no longer fly, but at dusk she flew up onto the fence rail where he saw the other robin feeding her. He ran to the kitchen to tell his mother, knocked a glass off the counter in his enthusiasm.
The following day, the birds were gone and the hatchlings dead. His mother helped him to bury them in the garden.
Life goes on. The neighbours always own a cat; you do what you can. You turn black potting soil into the earth, plant your hostas ringed with marigolds and impatiens, water daily. The neighbours’ cat shits in the garden, uproots the flowers, rolls in the hostas. He toys with you, waits until you’ve finished planting to do the deed. You have a hose with a spray nozzle, but the cat is quick. When you run for the tap he hops the fence. He has a sense of humour. He plays with his kills.
One morning you open the front door to find half a mouse, its entrails trailing over your front step, his calling card, his mocking advertisement: dormice, fifty percent off.
He opened a gallery show in New York. Giant prints of his best-known photos hung on mid-toned walls under neutral spot lighting. The opening was wine and cheese, all-purpose little black dresses. People drifted through the gallery and said intelligent things: look at the lighting, consider the remarkable sensitivity, isn’t it extraordinary the composition. A critic in one of the papers wrote of people drinking wine and laughing between walls covered with blood and despair, people talking about art in the midst of mayhem. He called the audience pretentious and he called Zane a vampire. Zane read the review and threw it out with the rest of the paper and pretended that he didn’t care. All he’d really done, he said, was collapse the critic’s sense of distance.
That opening was also his book launch. He liked that expression, book launch, liked the connotation of ships sliding down slipways amidst explosions of champagne. But the Titanic had a launching of its own, and Zane’s first printing went to remainders. Don’t let it bother you, said Jack. They all go to remainders, unless you’re dressing babies up as eggplants.
Zane liked babies dressed as eggplants, in his sentimental phase. He liked the flowery sentiment of the cards he had received in hospital, of the poster of a kitten hanging from a branch in the physiotherapist’s waiting room: hang in there! All of us fluffy kittens. We’ve sure got guts!
At home, he cried over television commercials for long-distance telephone service. The daughter off at college phones home on mother’s day: Mom, I got accepted into med school! Mother calls father in from the garage, where he’s been tinkering at restoring his MG-A, says, our little girl is going to be a doctor. Look at this photo; do you remember when she was just an eggplant? Our own little aubergine! Mother and daughter alike wipe away heartfelt tears of pride and joy. Father smiles indulgently, inflates with pride. Zane, on the couch, blubbers like a halfwit.
Eventually, he had to give up watching television. He couldn’t keep up his supply of tissues. Also, Jack asked him to see a therapist. It was the eggplants, above all, that Jack found disturbing.
Zane stood at the kitchen sink and drained the developing tank, keeping his hand over the opening to keep the spools from falling out, cold water running out between his fingers. He let the first spool slide out into his hand and put the tank down on the counter, and then caught the end of the film with a fingernail and pulled it out of its cage. The shining black ribbon twisted and shone in the window light. Melissa pressed in at his elbow. He held it to the light, and she squinted at it.
“I can’t see a thing.”
“That’s you doing the dishes.”
“If you say so. All this messing around with lost arts.”
“It’s not a lost art.”
Zane snapped weighted clips onto each end and took the film into the bathroom. He picked up a spray bottle from the counter beside the sink and held the film over the bathtub while he sprayed it down with diluted wetting agent. In school they learned to use squeegees but he found this led to scratches. You develop your favoured routines. He hung the film over the bathtub and went back out to the kitchen.
He lifted the second reel from the tank, rolled the film off the reel in a long, shining black strip, water dripping on the kitchen tiles. Three dozen moments preserved in metallic silver. Immortality by way of the philosopher’s stone. Visual permanence, at least. If not immortality, the closest thing to it.
“Are they any good?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He handed her the strip of film with his left hand and stepped aside, picked up his camera from the counter. He shot her twice, peering at the film with the window light washing over her face. After the second frame she turned and raised an eyebrow at him.
“And how are pictures of me looking at your pictures going to be part of this story?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you know anything?”
“How many of the usual photos did you ever want to look at?”
“That’s different.”
“There you go, then.”
“There I go what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She rolled her eyes at him and he took the film from her and hung it, and then unloaded the next spool.
Melissa reading the label of a jar of spaghetti sauce, in the supermarket three blocks from her apartment; a young man with thin stubble along the line of his jaw pretends not to appraise her out of the corner of his eye while his girlfriend buys rotini and an overweight woman in her late thirties recedes into the background. How a porn star obtained spaghetti sauce in the early years of our benighted century; or, I’m just another ordinary girl.
Sometimes, when Zane looked at old photographs, he found himself beset by a sadness he could not quite grasp, a certain melancholic restlessness of mood. A feeling of autumn. It was in the work of the usual suspects, in Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. It was in anonymous blurred birthday snapshots and class photos, in wartime regimental photos whose panoramic sweep of khaki uniforms resolved on closer examination into doomed rows of youthful, nameless faces. Faces in silver prints smile forever after, none of them realizing that everything photographed, in a sense, is already dead. Photographs persist to haunt us, like ghosts.
Zane had this sense again as he lifted the negatives up to the light. And he regretted saying that he didn’t know if they were any good. In a certain light even the most ordinary moment is ineffably beautiful. Zane just wanted to find that light.
“Did a goose just walk over your grave?”
“What?”
“It’s what my grandmother used to say: did a goose just walk over your grave?”
Geese don’t fuck with the undead. There’s no grave to walk over.
“I was just thinking, you’re immortal now.”
“What’s that? Me eating my immortal breakfast?”
“That’s metallic silver you’re looking at. These pictures are still going to be around long after you’re dead. You’re immortal.”
“So when are you gonna make these into real pictures?”
Immortality didn’t much impress her.
“Print them, you mean?”
“Whatever.”
“Most of them, never.”
“So what’s the point?”
“You just take a lot of pictures and try to get some good ones.”
“But you don’t know if they’re any good.”
“When I get a good one, I’ll know. I’ll make you a print.”
He pulled out the next reel, unspooled the film, and held it up to the window. Lights as black orbs emanate darkness, Melissa’s face a pool of darkness ringed by bright hair, her eyes two bright points. Melissa at the sink in her dismal basement apartment, washing the dishes, watching television, eating breakfast cereal, clearing away Marilou’s debris, waiting for the bus. He sprayed the film down and hung it.
Dressing room shots from the club: Melissa half-naked, alternatively laughing and looking tired. Mostly looking tired. Close-ups of drug paraphernalia, parts of costumes, pictures pinned inside locker doors. None of them pictures of men. Pictures of kids or friends or places where people would rather be. Some, he could never publish. Not the kids, certainly. None showed any faces save Melissa’s.
Melissa turned and opened the fridge. She opened a beer for him and put it on the counter while he sprayed down the film and hung it to dry.
“What I need is a picture of you with your friends.”
“Shit, Zane, you just don’t get it, do you?”
“What?”
“You are my fuckin’ friends.”
&nb
sp; He fished the last reel out of the tank and pulled off the film, looked at it closely. Unspectacular. He sprayed it down, hung it with the others. What he needed was a proper drying cabinet.
“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d have anything to say to that.”
He rinsed off the tank and reels and stood them on the counter to dry. He put the chemicals away in the cupboard and then wiped the counter down with a cloth. He had nothing. He needed to find that certain light.
You have to keep believing. In the face of all the evidence, you just have to go on trying to reinvent yourself.
The following week, Bill’s renewed sense of commitment expired. He gave up on understatement, abandoned subtlety, slipped back into overacting. In short, he punched a woman in the face, three times. He gave no reason. It did not occur to Zane to ask for one. The woman in question was Melissa.
Zane didn’t see it happen. The mirror was up. He heard a dull wet thud and a shriek. The mirror came back down and the frame was empty. He lowered the camera to see what was going on. Then things got confusing.
In Croatia Zane saw four people shot, four civilians, two women and two men. They scuttled around a corner and the troops opened up with AKs, chips of brick and mortar dust flying off the wall behind them. They all went down and the soldiers broke cover. One of the four, a woman in a bright green sweater, was still moving. Blood blackened her sweater just above the kidney and she reached out with one hand, fingers opening and closing, grasping for something that wasn’t there. One of the soldiers walked up and kicked her, his rifle dangling carelessly from his right hand, kicked her in the ribs like a soccer ball and Zane heard the dull thud of leather into ribcage carry across the street as he took the picture.
Bill wore that uniform now. Zane pushed himself up and Bill hit her a third time and Zane took two quick steps and hit him with his camera and he went down. He hit the floor like a slab of beef. Zane kicked at his face, missed, kicked him twice in the ribs (there’s your payback) and then Barker pushed him back, shouting at him. He wanted to kick Bill in the face, see blood and teeth fly, wanted to see the skull implode like a suburban jack-o-lantern after Hallowe’en, wanted to kick him until his breathing stopped. Barker shouted again and Zane pushed him, hard, and he fell. His jaw clenched so tight the muscles hurt.