Melissa sat backed against the wall, knees up, face full of blood. Blood ran from her nose and from a cut over her eye, the eye socket already swelling closed. Blood spattered her knees and chest as she breathed. Jade tried to talk to her and she screamed back to fuck off, go away, leave me alone. Barker was up off the floor now, yelling something and Zane turned and realized that Barker was yelling at him.
“Are you fucking crazy?”
“Fuck off,” said Zane. His guts jumped, twisted, knotted. No butterflies here. Instead, three angry weasels fighting over a bloody lump of raw meat.
“You’re telling me to fuck off?”
“Fuck off.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it.”
He picked up Melissa’s robe. Barker yelling, Jade shouting let it go, let it go. Barker yelling now at Bill, Bill on all fours, shaking his head to clear it. Zane wanted to kick him again, to get his foot into his face, split his mouth and break his nose. He wanted combat boots, steel toes, hobnails. Teeth breaking like bone china under the poll of a single-bit axe.
He went to Melissa and helped her up and put the robe around her and shepherded her to the door. Blood ran down her face, stained her robe. Her hands were wet with it.
Why is my life so filled with blood?
“You get her cleaned up and get your ass back in here,” said Barker.
Zane said nothing. He wanted to be gone before Bill’s head cleared. He got Melissa into the bathroom and started the water in the sink and wet a fresh face cloth and used it to wipe the worst of the blood off her face. Then he handed her a towel.
“Get cleaned up. I’ll get your clothes.”
She had left her street clothes neatly folded on the chair in the changing room. Zane checked that his hands were not covered in blood and then picked them off the chair and went back to the bathroom door and knocked at it.
Melissa had cleaned off the blood but her nose and the cut over her eye were still bleeding, the eye now swollen almost shut, her upper lip puffy and split. With one hand she held a wad of toilet paper to her nose, while with the other she wiped at the cut over her eye.
“You’ll want to put pressure on that.”
She just looked at him.
“Wipe at it like that, it’ll just keep on bleeding.”
She stopped wiping at the cut and let it ooze.
“There’s no fuckin’ bandages. That fuckin’ asshole.”
“We need to get the hell out of here.”
She put down the wad of toilet paper, now stained a dark, heavy red, and started pulling on her clothes.
“Is my nose broken?”
“Doesn’t look to be. Get your shirt on. I don’t want to stick around.”
“And you think I do?”
In the studio Bill had put on his shorts and now sat on a chair, holding a hand towel to his head. A dark stain spread over the towel where it touched his scalp, and trickles of blood had run down from his hair, over his neck and into the teeth of the tattooed shark. Murder lay coiled in his eyes.
“You’re gonna wish you hit me with something heavier,” he said.
“Maybe I will.”
“That’s enough,” said Jade. She had blood on her hands. The blood was drying, getting sticky. She held her hands away from her clothes, fingers apart. Jade was fresh out of latex gloves. What we had here was a mishap of the first order.
Barker looked up as Melissa walked in, took up his seat at the desk, opened the drawer and took out the bottle. He asked if she was okay.
“Do I look okay?”
“We’ll take care of you. Have a seat.”
Melissa didn’t move. Zane picked up his camera bag and slung it over his shoulder, keeping his camera in his right hand and one eye on Bill and trying to stay between Melissa and Barker. His stomach had started again. The weasels had found a new scrap to fight over.
He tried to strike a conversational tone: “We’re out of here.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Call me tomorrow.” Zane opened the door and held it for Melissa, without turning his back on Bill.
“Melissa, I want to talk to you, too.” Iron in his voice.
“Then call her tomorrow.”
“It’s just a misunderstanding here,” said Jade.
“I think we all understand perfectly.”
“We should talk this out. Let’s not blow this all out of proportion.”
“I’ll decide what’s out of proportion.”
Zane backed through the door and then put his hand in the small of Melissa’s back and marched her down the hall. The streetlights had come on and glowed orange with light still in the sky. He made for the hospital without asking. The cut was going to need stitches. Eyebrows like a hockey player, a career minor-league scrapper. They drove for several blocks before Melissa spoke.
“I never took you for a tough guy.”
She dabbed at her nose. It was still oozing. Blood had dripped onto her shirt. She essayed a smile but it came off hollow.
“I’m not.”
“You sure took care of Bill.”
“I hit him from behind. You know what that camera weighs?”
“Did you bust your camera?”
“I don’t know.”
She twisted, reached for the back seat where he had dropped the camera, and held it up for him to see. Blood and hair was stuck to the tripod plate and the polycarbonate body was cracked.
“Looks like it’s fucked,” he said. And Bill’s skull is probably fractured. Zane felt badly about the camera.
“That sucks.”
“It’s insured.”
She twisted again to put the camera back. Blood matted her eyebrow. He heard her trying to breathe around the wad of tissue she still held to her nose.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay.” She inspected the tissue, drew a long breath and put it back to her nose. “Mind if I crash at your place?”
“Of course.” He almost added something goofy, mi casa es su casa, decided not. He straightened in his seat, tried both hands on the wheel. Ten and two.
“I’m sorry. I’m making a mess of your car.”
“It’s already a mess.”
After a few minutes, she inspected the tissue again. The bleeding had stopped. She looked for a garbage bag, found none, held the crumpled tissue in her hand.
“I want to go home.”
“It’s okay. I’ll take the couch.”
“No, I mean home home. Vancouver. I want to go home.”
A half a block passed under the tires.
“Good idea, probably.”
“Tonight. I want to go home tonight. I want to go back to my place and pack, and then I want you to take me to the train station, and I’m going home.”
“You need a hospital.”
“No, I want to go now. I want to get the fuck out of here.”
The air vibrates with desperate harmonics. You better be careful. Let her get her stuff, and then take her down to the ER for stitches. By the time she gets out of there, all she’ll want to do is sleep.
“Okay,” he said.
Marilou sat on the couch with the lights off, the blue television light shifting and flexing around her. Men, she said; fuck. You get these creeps and stalkers. At night, you look up from the TV, there’s this blue disembodied face leering at your window. Ever since that one time, they’d kept the curtains closed. The good thing in the basement was bars on the windows. You didn’t want to be on the ground floor.
Melissa finished packing inside twenty minutes: a bathroom bag, some clothes stuffed into a gym bag, an old knapsack. Everything else stayed. Sell it to cover the rent, she said.
“What about your spider plant?” said Zane.
“I was the one watered that thing anyway,” said Marilou. She hugged Melissa, said take care of yourself. Little late for that, Melissa said, and she hugged her again. She compressed her lips but couldn’t hide the trembling of her chin.
Zane picked up her bags, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, put the bags down again. Women: all this emotion, everything a blubberfest. He’d long since forgotten his long distance ads, his affection for eggplants.
“You take care,” said Melissa. “I’ll call you when I can.”
Zane took Melissa’s bags, loaded them in the car. She got in, fastened her seat belt, stared fixedly through the windscreen. He put the key in the ignition, hesitated a moment, and then started the engine. The familiar rush of clattering valves.
“You sure about this?”
“I’m sure.”
“That eye needs stitches.”
“Just drive me where I want to go. Please.”
He paused before pulling out onto the street, hand on the turn signal, then pulled out quickly. He neglected to check his blind spot.
“Where are you going?”
“My place.”
“I told you, I want to go now. I don’t want to wait for morning.”
“I need to get my stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“My stuff. You’re not taking the train.”
He drove with his left hand on top of the wheel, moved his right up from the gearshift to rest on his leg.
“Shit, Zane, don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not. I’ll drive you.”
“To Vancouver.”
“To Vancouver. I’m fucked if I’m letting my story get on a train to Vancouver.”
She looked away, through the windshield, and shook her head. After a moment she looked back at him.
“You sure about this?”
“Are you?”
“I’m going home. Where you think you’re going?”
“Vancouver.”
“You got a job. You answered an ad, remember?”
“You think I want to see Bill after he’s got over his headache?”
She shook her head again, said okay then.
Zane packed one small bag and his essentials: the Leica, lenses, film, notebooks and developing paraphernalia. On impulse, he dug in his unopened boxes and packed his book. For Melissa. He was ready in fifteen minutes. Zane travelled light.
He made her sit and went into the bathroom and found some cotton swabs and the last of the disinfectant. Above her left eye the cut was deep and the swelling held it open. He found a cotton ball and dabbed disinfectant on it. She pushed his hand away and he told her to grow up.
“That’s a bad cut. He must have got you with his ring.”
“I’m not going to the hospital,” she said.
Fair enough. What you need is a proper first aid kit, like you used to carry, tincture of benzoin and some wound closure strips. Even then it’s like patching her up with tape. The valuables get smashed, the silver gets stolen, your books get torn up. You do what you can, but you know nothing’s ever going to be the same. At the very least, you know this one’s going to leave a scar.
Part Two
CHAPTER NINE
I see you’re asleep.
In the soft grey light of the early morning, somewhere up past Sault Ste. Marie, coasting along the north shore of Lake Superior under an unbroken grey sky and a thin, incessant drizzle. On the right, forested hills, pine needles dripping onto wet ferns; on the left, the vast, pewter expanse of the big lake.
I remember reading somewhere that ferns are among the oldest plants on earth, and that pines came along long before broad-leafed trees. We could have slipped out of time to find ourselves here, could have slipped back to prehistory, violated fundamental laws of physics and somehow cut our moorings. The anchor dragging in the night, you wake up lost and out of sight of land. But this road cutting the landscape, these speed limit signs, fast-food wrappers and discarded pop cans: all this refuse places us in our own tarnished century. Lucky us.
I’m getting tired, kiddo. I feel worn thin, worn out, a watch spring winding down. The whole world is closing down, falling away from the sun, a planet tired of its orbit. The lights are going out all over Europe – who was it said that? They will not be lit again in our lifetime. They just keep on winking out. One minute you’re alive and the next is nothing. Gone. And if we died now, nobody would notice, except the highway crew responsible for cleaning up the mess.
I just feel like my part is done, and in the end it all amounted to jack-shit. You strut and fret your hour upon the stage and it comes down to this. Maybe I’ve just been driving too long. Maybe I just need to find a place to stop.
See what happens when you go to sleep?
And look at you: one eye black and swollen shut, blood still around your nostrils and in your eyebrow. And I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you quiet. But maybe I’m making that up. Maybe that just makes a better story.
You look so young. Strange to think that you can’t remember a world without microwave ovens and personal computers and cellular telephones. You’re too young to remember any of that. Too young to remember the Bomb. We don’t even think about the Bomb anymore. Even the word now seems silly, a capital-B bomb that makes everyone capital-D dead. To you, I guess, the Cold War is just a history lesson. And I somehow doubt you’re up on your history.
But I remember when the Wall came down. I was there when it happened. I was there when the Cold War ended. I remember the people hammering at it and pushing at it until it fell. I remember the soldiers looking on, unsure of what, if anything, they should do. I remember the dancing and the cheering, the delirium of victory. Because it was a victory, a great victory. And that particular victory will never be written up in thick serious books with campaign maps and biographies of its dead generals. But I was there, with my cameras. When you see some historical retrospective of it, when you see pictures from the end of the Dark Ages, some of those pictures are mine.
Someone said it was the end of history. Well, it wasn’t.
I guess it wouldn’t mean much to you, anyway. You can’t understand what it meant to see that wall come down unless you lived through all that. Maybe you’ve seen a news report, when the anniversary rolled around, when people still cared. Maybe you learned about it in some high-school history course. But still, you wouldn’t really understand it, you couldn’t really feel all that it meant, unless you’d lived under the Bomb. Unless you lay awake late some night, thinking what you’d would do if the balloon went up, if the curtain went up. What you’d do if you heard the sirens sound, or if you’d even hear the sirens before the warheads hit. Whether you would see it coming. Whether you would do it the quick way, and simply walk out into the street to be incinerated, or if you’d die in your basement like a coward.
And when the wall came down, all that was over. Sanity and human decency had finally prevailed. We all got a death-row pardon. And the focal point of it all, the point at which the whole evil mess collapsed into rubble, was that spontaneous celebration in Berlin, when we took down the wall. Because that crazy fucker Reagan didn’t take down that wall, whatever they might tell you now. That senile bastard had nothing to do with it. We took that wall down ourselves.
I guess I must be rambling. You go ahead and sleep; I might as well tell you a story. It’s a fairy tale. Once upon a time.
All through eighty-nine the big story was Eastern Europe. I was in Hungary that fall, where the Communists simply gave up and there was nothing to photograph. From Budapest I travelled back to the NATO side, to West Germany. The East German government was losing its grip. Things were tense. People with power don’t let go so easy. We used to talk about the curtain going up, and I was thinking that if the curtain went up now, well, that would be my last war. No need to open the shutter to catch that flash.
You have to understand, in 1989 the East Germans were still shooting people who tried to get over the wall. In February that year, they shot a man eleven times for trying to get to the west. His name was Chris Gueffroy, and he was twenty-one years old. He bled to death in the border strip, by the Berlin Wall. The men who shot him got commendations. S
o this thing was by no means a slam dunk. Anything could happen.
The East Germans said they were opening travel to the west for those with proper visas, but the need for proper visas had been lost in translation. Everyone headed for the west. Berlin went crazy, huge lines backed up at the checkpoints. And there I was, stuck in a hotel in Bonn. I tried to get a flight to Berlin but everything was booked solid. No trains, no flights, no buses. So I bought a map and took whatever transportation I could find. I made the last leg by hitchhiking. A bunch of Danish students picked me up and I wedged myself in the back seat of this tiny car between two blonde girls, who were both a little drunk. After a few miles of this arrangement their boyfriends, in the front seat, weren’t quite so happy anymore.
I said, why are you going all the way to 4Berlin, from Copenhagen.
The girl on my right had a clean, boyish look, short blonde hair and little makeup.
This is history, she said. A revolution. How could anyone miss that?
There’s an old cliché in the news business about having a ringside seat to history. So I knew all about history. I’d seen a lot of history. History was my particular specialty, and one thing I’d learned early on was that history is best avoided. If you’re smart, you ignore it, stick your head up out of your gopher hole at age eighty and ask what you missed. Chances are you didn’t miss much.
I said, you aren’t worried what might happen.
What could happen? Why would I worry?
What if there are riots? What if there’s shooting?
She snorted. The other girl laughed.
She said, why would there be shooting? All that is over. You are a very silly man.
Berlin was madness, chaos, anarchy. Germans rushed to the city to join the revolution, students from all over Europe poured in to join the fun, parents brought their young children to witness history. All these people slept in the streets or in the homes of complete strangers, because there were no hotel rooms to be had. Shops flouted the law by refusing to close. Pubs gave away free beer. And nobody knew exactly what was happening, or why, just that everything had changed, that nothing would ever be the same.
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