Combat Camera

by Andrew Somerset

  I think that, before the end, the humanity did go out of Terry’s pictures, the people turned into shapes and ideas. If you go on long enough it’s inevitable, in the same way that one hotel room after another makes all cities seem the same. You get your bed and the TV and the table and the neutral painting by some local artist, and outside of that is a whole city and a country and a people, a whole wealth of detail that you never see. It all just turns invisible like you’re stuck inside yourself.

  It was easy to think that Terry was stuck inside himself. He never showed much emotion, even in the early years. He said, it doesn’t help anyone for you to cry or get angry or yell or get drunk. It only helps to do your job.

  It certainly didn’t help anyone that I was getting quietly drunk in a hotel room in Graz, looking out at a city disguised as a Christmas confection, but there was no one left for me to help in any case. Putting the bottle down wasn’t going to restore Lapierre to life. It wasn’t going to do anything except to save me from a hangover, and I didn’t much care about that.

  And I couldn’t see that doing my job really helped anyone, anyway. If my car went off the road as Terry’s had, Time would just go ahead and find someone else. The world isn’t going to suffer if I stop doing stories.

  I mixed another drink and stood at the window and looked out on Graz. This is an old city. Living in Canada you have no idea of the ancient, no idea of history. The old walls of Graz once repelled Turkish invasions. There’s a church there that was built in 1277. In its bones, this city still remembers the Black Death, the bodies of the damned in those medieval paintings.

  Lapierre used to say that he was responsible to history. His photographs were court exhibits with which he intended to condemn humanity in posterity. They were witnesses for whatever reckoning might come, to trials presided over by future historians who would condemn the wicked long after it had all ceased to matter. The present, to Lapierre, was already lost.

  But history itself is just bullshit, a sophisticated process through which the past effaces itself. Pictures don’t preserve anything, much less the truth. What you put on film is 1/250th of a second. There are 15,000 equivalent moments each minute, 900,000 each hour – how can one such moment tell the immutable truth? What’s past is as changeable as a badly told lie. History morphs and twists under interrogation. You can’t even trust your own memory. I could have sworn I put the map in the glovebox, you say, but there it is. Or rather, there it isn’t. Lost.

  All those people carried away by the Black Death are dead and forgotten, as if they had never lived. And each of us suffers the same fate within two short generations. What can you tell me of your great grandfather’s life, or even your grandfather’s? Death is the great disappearing act. All of history is amnesia.

  But Terry believed. He made every shot as a record, a data point, a middle finger raised at death. He had a joke about taking his own photograph to prove that he existed. And maybe, on some subconscious level, he was right. Maybe the point of all this is not to record the external world at all. Maybe it’s about ourselves.

  They say the Inuit put up inukshuks not only to aid in navigating the trackless tundra but to create a record of themselves, to prove they were there. Maybe we’re all just putting up inukshuks. Maybe all the supposed subjects of all my photographs, and all of Lapierre’s, were merely objects occupying space in the frame. Maybe the real subject is our own minds.

  Anyway, Lapierre was right: normal people don’t fuck around like this. They make babies and raise children, so somebody remembers them for a generation or two. They don’t travel the world sucking the life out of people, trying to achieve immortality.

  I was making inroads on the rum but wasn’t getting anywhere useful with the obituary. None of Time’s loyal readers in barber shops in Michigan or dentists’ offices in California gave a shit about the nature of photography or the root of the creative impulse, or about Lapierre’s compulsive lens-cleaning habits.

  All I needed was something short and simple about someone whose pictures they had been seeing for years, without realizing all that time that those pictures all came from the same man, or that the pictures made a mark on photography itself. Bob in a barbershop in Kalamazoo knew nothing of Thierry Lapierre from Sainte Nazaire. Not until Lapierre went off the road somewhere in the dismembered Yugoslavia and became the history he’d worked twenty-five years to record. And then barbershop Bob simply shrugged, and reflected that it was too bad, but it was a dangerous way to earn your living. Adrenaline junkies. And Bob got his short back and sides and carried on with his Kalamazoo life.

  In the end, I wrote some drunken bullshit about Lapierre’s faith in some future reckoning, which eventually I reworked into the foreword to his posthumous book. You read that shit. And Jack searched the files and found a photo of Lapierre and me, the same photo as in the book, of us standing in front of a church in El Salvador, and Time ran that photo with the obit, with a black border on the page. Someone snapped that with my Leica, my happy snap camera, about one week before Lapierre saved my life in that grenade attack. If I’d only known that they were going to run that picture, I might have written something about that, instead of some rambling bullshit about history.

  It’s always best to stick to the facts.

  They stopped to change drivers a half-hour out of Winnipeg. Zane pushed himself up out of the driver’s seat and stretched, trying to pull the ache out of his calves. Melissa took the keys and got in, but he remained at the side of the road. When you know it’s up to you to take the first step, you develop a strategic inertia.

  “I have to make a phone call.” The cellphone weighed heavy in his pocket.

  “Don’t let me stop you.”

  Zane took his phone out and looked at it with loathing.

  “Come on,” she said. “Get in.”

  “It’s kind of a personal call.”

  A truck passed and the blast of its passage blew through him. He felt suddenly fragile.

  “I have to call my sister.”

  “You have a sister?”

  “She lives in Calgary. I thought we could stay there, passing through.”

  The consequences of passing through Calgary without visiting Connie, should she discover the snub, did not bear considering.

  “I’d like to meet her.”

  Oh, no, you wouldn’t.

  “We don’t really get along.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Or you can walk to Vancouver, kiddo.

  He put the phone back in his pocket and crossed to the passenger side and got in. Melissa started the engine, checked her mirrors, and pulled out onto the highway.

  “Why don’t you two get along?”

  A thousand possible answers, all of them facile. There never is a why.

  “I don’t know. The same old brother-sister thing.”

  When his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Zane was working in the West Bank. After he wrapped up the story he flew home to visit. As soon as he got in the door, his mother’s dog rushed around his legs, barking, a flow of white fur around his ankles like a breaking wave. Buddy was a poodle cross, a small white scrap of fluff, and he loved Zane. This did not rank high on Connie’s list of grievances, but it was there.

  “She’s asleep,” said Connie.

  Zane dropped his bags and stooped to scratch Buddy behind the ears, and Buddy whined at him.

  “I think he needs to go out.”

  Connie opened the front-hall closet and handed Zane the leash, and then walked back into the kitchen.

  Zane descended the front steps like an astronaut emerging from his capsule to explore an alien world: big, quiet houses with sprawling, precisely mown lawns over which sprinklers slowly rotated. Big cars gleaming in the driveways. In the West Bank he had sat in the evenings with a cool drink while rifle fire popped in the background, Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets at rock-wielding teenagers. A week previously, he had photographed the aftermath of a
bus bombing, volunteers collecting body parts and blood for burial in the Orthodox Jewish tradition. Now, he walked a poodle over the alien surface of Suburbia.

  Zane hated them all: the Palestinian kids, the Israeli soldiers, the Orthodox Jews with their Zionist certainty, the suicidal fanatics with bombs strapped around their bodies. Ye shall reap what ye sow: fuck you all for the wages of sin. The pieces that the volunteers collected commingled the bomber and his victims and in that knowledge Zane found an angry satisfaction.

  His head felt like a helium balloon tethered to his body by the finest of threads. In West Bank time, it was well into the small hours.

  Buddy failed to do any of the business he had seemed so desperate to do, as if he had forgotten the purpose of his walk. When Zane got back and let him off the leash he trotted off without a backward glance.

  More than anything, Zane needed sleep. He collapsed into his father’s old recliner, which still occupied the place of honour in the living room. His mother had decorated the house in pastel colours and had hung flowery curtains and bad still lifes of fruit, painted in acrylic by artists with little colour sense. All of the furniture was overstuffed. The recliner threatened to swallow him, like a predatory flower. He fumbled with the lever to pull it back to the upright position. He laid his head back with the chair upright and closed his eyes.

  Connie came into the room and made a snorting noise.

  “It’s two in the morning in the West Bank,” he said.

  “It’s suppertime in Oshawa, and I’m making pork chops.”

  You just have to roll with it. Buddy was back at his feet. He whined, and Zane reached down to scratch his ears, which sent him into excited orbits, running to the door and then back to Zane.

  This dog was clearly constipated.

  “Has he been getting his walks?”

  “I’m taking care of him.”

  Buddy positioned himself in front of Zane and emitted a single insistent bark. Zane made a point of not looking at him.

  “Mom used to take him out,” said Connie. “And then she’d forget, and take him out again. So now he wants twenty walks a day, but I can’t let her out with him because she forgets how to get home.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted you to learn the hard way.” Connie went out into the kitchen, and the room was cold behind her.

  But when Zane was wounded in Afghanistan, Connie flew to Germany to visit him in hospital, and brought Jim, the plastic surgeon, with her. She insisted Jim speak to the doctors and review the charts, and this he did, explaining to his peers and to Zane behind closed doors that he was a plastic surgeon, not a trauma specialist, and was only humouring his wife. Connie brought flowers to Zane’s bedside and brought him books and read to him. She tidied his room and terrified the nurses, and she never once spoke of the past.

  Zane took the phone back out of his pocket and dialed. She picked up on the third ring.

  “Connie,” he said, “it’s Lucas. I’m coming to visit.”

  “Uncle Luke?” said the voice on the phone. “It’s Amanda. I’ll get Mom.”

  Saskatchewan is flat and boundless and seems to have no edges, but it does, and somewhere near its eastern edge, they picked up a hitchhiker.

  That is to say, Melissa picked up a hitchhiker, as Zane was asleep when the decision was made and had no say in the matter. He awoke to the sound of the tires on gravel as the car lurched onto the shoulder and when he got oriented he saw the hitchhiker trotting up in the wing mirror.

  “Why’d you stop?”

  “We’re gonna give this guy a lift.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to pick up hitchhikers?”

  “You can protect me,” she said, and waved her hand at him.

  At that particular moment, Zane saw no reason why he would do so. There can be no peace in the rabbit warren if the ferrets insist on inviting their friends in to join the party. But the fait was in any case accompli, as the hitchhiker was now at the passenger window, a young man perhaps in his mid-twenties, tall and thin, with a hint of stubble on his chin and long, unruly brown hair held in place by a baseball cap. His hair and clothes suggested gap teeth and a badly done tattoo, but he had soft brown eyes and the features of a model. He paused, his orthodontically perfect smile fading, apparently taken aback by Zane’s failure to open his window.

  Zane resisted the temptation to swear at him and instead rolled down his window and smiled, hoping that the result did not appear obviously forced. The hitchhiker’s smile returned.

  “I sure am glad you stopped,” he said, in a voice so sickeningly and effusively sincere that Zane momentarily considered rolling his window up and reaching across to stamp on the accelerator. The man’s voice had the burr of the Maritimes.

  “Don’t mind my dad.” Melissa activated her brightest possible smile. “He’s always grumpy.”

  Zane turned to practical matters, namely the question of where the hitchhiker was headed.

  “West,” he said, waving vaguely in that direction.

  This answer is inane; this road leads in only two possible directions and one is already out of the question, unless this young man is seriously confused.

  “Edmonton. Grand Prairie, Fort MacMurray. Lookin’ for work in the oil patch.”

  “Well, get in,” said Melissa, who had apparently forgotten that the car was Zane’s.

  Zane sat up straight. Show any sign of sleepiness and Melissa will no doubt evict you from the front seat of your own car in favour of her new travelling companion. Fickle woman that thou art.

  Melissa swung the car back onto the road with a heavy touch on the gas pedal that made Zane wince, unsure as he was over the state of his engine. Her touch didn’t lighten as she worked her way through the gears.

  “You’re probably wondering about my face.”

  “I figured it was none of my business.”

  “My boyfriend liked to hit me. My ex-boyfriend, I mean. I’m Melissa. My dad’s name is Zane. You ever hear of Zane Grey? He wrote all these cheesy western stories. My grandfather loved westerns so he named my dad after Zane Grey. How lame is that?”

  At least you get to keep your real name, as Melissa freely reinvents your family history. Zane struggled to find a stupid reason to name a child “Melissa” but came up short. Their new passenger barely had time to introduce himself (Mike, he said) before she carried on.

  “Bill was sweet until we got engaged. Then he turned into a whole ’nother person. We were together for like, a year, and then.” She completed the sentence with a wave of her hand.

  How much of this revisionist life story is worked out in advance? How much is ad lib? How long can she carry it on before she trips over a conflicting fact? You don’t want to involve yourself in this. The trick to successful lying is to stay as close to the truth as possible, but the truth has a habit of putting its hand up and clearing its throat at inopportune moments. You have the right to remain silent. It seems prudent to exercise it.

  “It happens,” said Mike. “I just got divorced myself.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Too bad for the kid but it’s for the best. We got married too young. She got pregnant. Then things change and you end up blaming each other for all the ways you fucked up your life, pardon my French.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I was pissed off for a while. But then one day you realize the only person who fucked up your life is you. You make your own luck, man. She don’t owe me anything.”

  Mike picked up after the divorce and took a job in a pulp mill for a year before deciding to go west, young man, to the land of opportunity. His truck broke down somewhere near Winterpeg and he’d been hitching since. But the truck was old. It didn’t owe him anything. He figured to replace it once he got an oil patch job, figured to make good money to send back to support his boy who had just turned seven. He had pictures. Zane tried to be appreciative. The pictures were fuzzy and overexposed.

&nb
sp; “It’s good to make a fresh start,” said Melissa.

  “I made my fresh start back in Fredericton. Fresh start’s all in your head.”

  Melissa drove on for a while before responding.

  “I guess I’m not there yet.”

  Saskatchewan stretched limitless to the horizon, as empty as the moon. A small cluster of lunar cattle moved across a field to the north. One small step for a cow, one giant misstep for cow-kind; there’s this rumour that we’re all to become hamburger.

  Zane wanted to say that there are no fresh starts. You carry your scars with you everywhere you go, a suitcase of troubles. All you can really do is learn to ignore them, although sooner or later someone will always ask where in the world you got a scar like that.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said. “A fresh start’s all in your head.”

  All Zane really wanted was to get back to sleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Christine, he said. Get lost. You’re supposed to be dead.

  Of course I’m not dead.

  You’re dead. I saw you dead.

  Wake up, man. You’re scaring the shit out of me.

  Now the scene snaps into focus: darkness, sweaty sheets, his legs tangled in the blankets. Another foreign room in which the only light is the soft red glow from the clock radio. A woman holding him, pressing his head to her shoulder, rocking and shushing him like a child. The warmth of her body, an alien feeling of comfort. And in the strange warmth of Melissa’s embrace, Zane felt a rising feeling of helplessness and loss.

  He pushed away from her and sat up.

  “You okay?”

  “Bad dream.”

  “Don’t freak me out like that.”

  She stood and turned on the bedside lamp, went briefly into the bathroom and emerged carrying a glass of water.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “You’ve seen the pictures.”