I went to the kitchen and found myself a glass and mixed a rum and coke and then returned to the window to watch darkness descend, to see the glow of twilight fade until electricity provided the only illumination. The city becomes a splatter of lights: the same old light show all over again.
For a moment, I considered loading some high-speed black-and-white in the old Leica and going down to Yonge Street for an evening stroll, shoot some happy snaps, push the shit out of the film, produce odd and surreal visions of the urban crush. I could rediscover my muse. But I had never liked street photography. It’s mostly derivative or downright imitative. Street photography has nothing to say.
I thought for a bit about calling someone up for company, perhaps this blonde Elaine who had recently expressed a strong admiration for my photography, but whose art education had failed to teach her that this need not translate into an admiration for me. When we met, at the opening of a Burtynsky show, she radiated an availability that materialized into a slip of paper bearing her telephone number. A practical demonstration of wave-particle duality, I like to think.
I didn’t call her. Truth was, she held no more interest than street photography on Yonge Street, which is to say that it had all been done before, by people with more talent and more interest than me.
The last thing I wanted was to listen to someone enthuse about the guts and commitment it must take. I left that pretense in El Salvador, about 1981. People have been killing each other since the earliest caveman returned early from a hairy mammoth hunt to discover his erstwhile friend Thag, who was supposed to be repainting the antelope on the dining cave wall, making the two-backed hairy mammoth with the lovely Ughla. And all that’s changed since then is we’ve gotten a lot better at it, and a lot more organized. Practice makes perfect, and we’ve had lots of practice. One guy with a camera isn’t going to change all that.
Anyway, as far as Elaine went, things hadn’t been working properly, both in terms of capability and of desire, since I’d had my guts shot out. I had experimented long enough. No need to explore Elaine’s capacity for disappointment. Instead, I intended to explore my own capacity for rum. It keeps the ghosts from dropping by.
It seemed about time I faded away. I wanted to commit the great Lucas Zane to the trash can of history, once and for all. I wanted to leave myself behind.
I needed a job, and my qualifications were limited. I could tell from the sound if an incoming shell was likely to pass harmlessly overhead, I could turn light to silver through alchemy, and I could keep my lunch down when all around were losing theirs. These skills seemed of little practical use on the mean streets of Toronto.
Then I found Rich’s ad. I needed only two qualifications: a camera, and an absence of qualms. It seemed the solution to more than one problem.
“You’re awake,” he said.
“I am.”
Zane concentrated on the highway, which was now definitely descending. Wherever he was, it was somewhere on the long downslope towards Vancouver and the lower mainland of British Columbia. He drove for some time in silence.
“How long have you been awake?”
“For some time now.”
So you keep driving. She’s heard the whole monologue, more or less. It doesn’t matter. It makes sense to lay it all out, anyway. Zane was surprised to find that he felt relief.
“So I suppose you know all.”
“I suppose I do.”
“I should probably express annoyance that you’ve been listening to me chattering on for some time, without alerting me to that fact.”
“You want to express annoyance, I’ll express you some fuckin’ annoyance, man.”
Zane drove. Where the hell was this coming from?
“I ask you a question, you brush it off, then soon as I’m asleep you’re all chatty Cathy. So just go right ahead, express all the fuckin’ annoyance you want.”
It had not occurred to Zane that this could form a casus belli.
“I was just talking to keep myself awake.”
“Whatever. Fuck you, anyway.”
This is what it feels like to be torpedoed: you’re cruising along, salt air on your tongue, watching a seagull wheeling through an overcast sky, and the next thing you know you’re wrapped in a sheet of flame, wheeling through the air like a broken doll.
“I’m sorry.”
He directed his attention to the road. You would not want to lose control of things here. A rolling ball of mangled consequences, a tangle of metal somewhere in the Fraser Valley, just another newspaper headline. A Tragic Weekend on Area Highways, soon to be forgotten. On page fourteen, below the fold.
“Why are you so fucking afraid to just talk to me?”
Zane let that slide into a long silence. I’m a man; what the hell do you want? We don’t open up, don’t explore our feelings, don’t revel in the masturbatory pleasure of sharing. The silence lengthened until he felt it was safe to respond.
“I am not afraid, per se.”
“Per se? What the fuck does that mean, per se?”
“Per se? Well, it means that – ”
“I know what fuckin’ per se means, smart guy.”
So the road will now require your undivided attention. It seems reasonable to put off further discussion until you get to the next stop. A matter of road safety on these lethal switchbacks. It was now getting into late afternoon. One more stop, and then Vancouver.
“Is there a reason we need to do this now?”
“No reason. Fuck, why would you want to talk to me, anyway?”
I am just one lonely man, as helpless as all the rest. Why must I exceed your expectations? Why do you all expect so much of me, when the radio has nothing to offer but this worthless new country music? I don’t know what you want of me. There is no why. Stop haunting me with your accusations.
“You want my life story?”
“Shit, Zane, I just want you to fucking talk to me.”
“Go rubberneck at some other car wreck.”
“Yeah, sorry for yourself.”
I’m sorry for everyone. I’m sorry for everything. It’s a stupid thing to fight about anyway. It takes a woman to pick a fight about something stupid like that.
A car is a small space, and Zane had a small car. Despite the hum of the tires on the pavement and the steel guitar noise pouring out of the radio, the space was pregnant with quiet.
“You’re just like your sister.”
“Leave Connie out of this.”
“You’d be just fine with me if I worked at the supermarket.”
“I am just fine with you.”
“’Til it counts.”
Now she starts to cry, chin a-quiver, face collapsing. It’s one thing to keep your cool with bullets flying overhead, but the sight of this woman crying engenders the sense of panic that arises from helplessness. Zane tried to rewind the tape, to make sense of the discussion, but the recording might as well have been in Urdu.
“We’re all good until it counts. Then I’m just your fuckin’ story.”
“You’re not just my story.”
“Like I say what I am and your sister freaks on me.”
“I thought you were going to make something up!”
“Why would you think that?”
“You always make stuff up.”
“Why’s it all up to me?”
Zane felt a rising, desperate frustration. He had no idea how to put this fire out.
“I’m not my sister.”
“You sure didn’t want her to know what I am.”
“It wasn’t up to me.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I mean it’s not up to me.”
“You wouldn’t even fuck me.”
She spat this through her tears with alarming vehemence.
How does talking to yourself lead to this? I don’t know what basis we built this thing on but whatever it was, it was clearly wrong.
“Melissa,” he said, “I liked being your d
ad.”
“My dad? What the fuck do you know about my dad?”
“I don’t – ”
“You want to know about my dad? You want to know how I was daddy’s special girl?”
Oh, Jesus.
“I’m sorry.”
You get to saying that a lot these days, but what else is there to say? Melissa carried on, reciting a litany of wrongs. He pulled off the road, onto the shoulder of a curve, put on the parking brake, and killed the engine.
“Melissa,” he said.
She punched him in the face.
Zane heard the car door open while his head was down. He felt a trickle but when he dabbed a finger at his nostril there was no blood. When he looked up, she was sitting on a granite block fifty feet down the road.
Fair enough. She probably owes the world a few punches. Four or five in particular, and you probably deserve at least one of them.
Zane dabbed at his nose again but still there was no blood. You would expect Melissa to pack more of a punch than little girl Connie, but there you go. Some of us get lucky and some don’t. How this all went south so fast, nobody knows.
Melissa got up from the boulder, walked to the edge of the highway, and stuck her thumb out. The theatricality of this gesture, given the lack of traffic, did not occur to Zane. Foremost in his mind was the thought that the first trucker to round the curve would think he had hit the jackpot, and would bring to their arrangement all of the expectations that Melissa had so recently decried. Zane swore and twisted the key in the ignition and threw the car into gear. His tires threw gravel as he stopped in front of her.
“Get in.”
“Afraid your precious story’s going to hitchhike away?”
“Your bags are in my trunk.”
Melissa shrugged and got in, evidently choosing to treat that observation as an immutable fact rather than a problem easily solved by operating the latch. Maybe, by whatever scoring system she uses, she wins the day. At some point you stop caring to win anyway. Just as you probably deserved the punch, you probably deserve to lose. Zane pulled onto the highway without checking his blind spot.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry’s just a way of making someone feel guilty over something you did. Sorry’s a guilt-bomb.”
I’m sorry you feel that way.
“I don’t mean that.”
“Well, I’m sorry about your face.”
“You hit like a girl.”
“And it wasn’t the fucking Stones did ‘Not Fade Away,’ it was Buddy Holly did it first. You fucking boomers are all the same, you think it all begins and ends with you.”
She started to cry again. Over a remark like that. He handed her the box of tissue, the same box he’d used after Connie punched him, bloody fingerprints still on its sides.
“I see you giving up on your sister, man, I don’t even have a sister.”
“Leave Connie out of it.”
“You just give up on her.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Bullshit. You just write people off. You just leave them behind.”
“Easy to say when you don’t have a sister.”
“How the fuck do you know if I have a sister?”
“You just said you don’t have a sister.”
“If I had a sister I wouldn’t give up on her.”
“This is just going in circles,” he said. She was scattering balled up tissues all over the floor of his car.
“Last night? You were all sitting there, and the postcards, that story about the postcards. I just wanted to be a part of that, you know?”
He looked out the windscreen at the long gravel shoulder and the pines and the sky arching over the river valley. All the trees had moss growing on them and the gravel at the edge of the road was damp. Up ahead, the road disappeared around a curve. He wanted to say the right thing. He wanted to know what that was.
“Amanda likes you, I think.”
She sniffled and wiped her eyes.
“I just need you to be my friend, Zane.”
At some point you know all you’re ever going to know and it has to be enough. You make the best offer you can.
“Why do you think I never slept with you?”
“Because you can’t get it up,” she said.
Zane sat on the hood of his car and watched a mile-long freight crawl across the rock face on the far side of the valley. The train somehow clung to the side of the mountain, a long and tenuous thread, its track a groove etched in the granite face. From where Zane sat, it looked as if the train could at any moment lose its grip, slip, and tumble down the long slope into the river below.
His new road atlas placed him in the middle of the Rockies, at a node on the Trans-Canada that had turned out, on arrival, to consist of a gas station, a motel, a roadhouse, and about four other buildings, which presumably housed the proprietors of these businesses and their employees. If not for Melissa’s meltdown he would have blown through the place. But it had been a long day. They both needed to get out of the car.
Zane’s head felt as if it was not properly connected to his body. He told himself that he was exhausted, but another voice in the back of his mind whispered that he was beginning to lose control. He feared he was suffering a relapse.
It was essential to remain grounded. Zane carefully marked his position, triangulating from the car, the motel room, and the freight train. One of these points was not stationary, and a second was only temporarily so; this may have explained his dizziness.
You conduct these periodic inventories, if only to keep things straight. Your driver’s licence, in the wallet that you carry in your back pocket and which is now making an indentation in your buttocks, bears a photograph that looks just like you, except that the man in the photograph has shaved. In your pockets are said wallet, a set of car keys, a cellular telephone, and about twenty-seven dollars in cash. In your car are a book of photographs (out of print), a new road atlas with a shiny cover, two thermal coffee mugs, several empty juice bottles and paper bags, a bag containing someone else’s belongings (contents unknown), and a brassiere, which drapes itself impudently across the back seat. This last is faintly disturbing. As brassieres go, it is a rather striking specimen, not in size but in colour and quality. If only it could behave more discreetly.
Inside your motel room are a camera bag, a small bag containing your clothes, another bag containing someone else’s belongings (contents again unknown), and a striking young woman with a black eye and a sardonic eyebrow held together with stitches, whose presence accounts, at least, for the brassiere.
Inside the freight train are several thousand tons of wheat, perhaps, although it could equally be loaded with coal, or iron ore, or any of the many other things that freight trains are known to carry. It could be carrying marbles, or jelly beans. One cannot know everything. This aspect of the situation remains a mystery.
How can anyone expect me to get properly grounded, faced with a moving freight train carrying god knows what?
The woman in your room is the subject of a story that you’re alleged to be working on. That story is now approaching its end. How it will work out remains uncertain. Whether you are still working on it, equally so.
Precisely who is this woman in your room? More importantly, precisely who is she to you? She has recently sown a certain confusion on this very subject, on where this relationship is going, on whether, as daytime television has it, we are moving to the next level. On what she expects.
Fact: a young woman, whose extraordinary brassiere now graces the back seat of your car, is now napping in a motel room rented under your name. Let us consider the possible reasons. First is her role in this alleged photo story. Second, we must consider that perhaps the same guardian angel who keeps the apartment free of razor blades now wants to get you laid. There are, indeed, certain technical issues, but it is also possible that your guardian angel knows the true score on that one. We have not experimented with this problem in some time.
Zane was making heavy weather of the question. The fact that vampires do not have guardian angels was not lost on him.
It was time to return to the territory of facts. It was not too late to catch Jack. Zane pulled out his cellphone and checked to see if he had coverage. He was not surprised to discover that he did not. There was a pay phone by the motel office. Zane walked over to it and dialed Jack’s number. He did not want to make the call where Melissa could hear him.
“I’m going to wrap up, probably, in a day.” He laid out the situation: he had a story, but the ending was in question.
“So you’re calling to tell me that you don’t quite have a story.”
“No, I do have a story. But there’s a question as to how things will work out.”
“Is this a problem with your female companion? You make your girlfriend your subject, that never works.”
“It’s just that I have the sense that things could go south on me. That’s the peril of non-fiction.”
“I’m more worried about the perils of Lucas Zane.”
The satisfaction in Jack’s voice was palpable. Aren’t you a wit. Zane discarded the freight train as a point of triangulation in favour of the pay phone. Compiling an inventory of the pay phone’s contents was a simple matter: it contained Jack, who was an asshole.
“Don’t be an asshole, Jack. It’s messy out here.”
“Just show me the pictures.”
“We used to be friends,” said Zane, and he hung up.
The window of Zane’s motel room looked out on a bleak and empty parking lot where two crows fought over the remains of a small animal that had neglected to look both ways before crossing the road. You tell the kids to be careful, but they never do listen. Then a logging truck settles matters, permanently. It’s the circle of life; cue the music.
The sun slanted low, backlighting the window grime, splashing long, dark slabs of orange light and dark shadow across the scene. Good light for photography, and gorgeous light for colour. It was light to make an evening look warm regardless of the chill and the wind coming down the valley. It was wonderful light for roadkill.
Combat Camera Page 22
