by Anthology
He grabbed an old man, stopped him, felt the soft, decaying flesh dissolve between his fingers. “What is this place?” he asked.
The old man reached out a trembling hand, touched Brady’s round eyes, his white skin. “American—” the old man took a deep breath and exhaled into a wail that became a scream. He wrenched his arm from Brady’s grasp, and started to run. The people around him screamed too, and ran, as if they were fleeing an unseen enemy. Brady grabbed his wagon, rocking with the force of the panicked crowd, and hurried to the far side.
People lay across the grass like corpses on the battlefield. Only these corpses moved. A naked woman swayed in the middle of the ground, her body covered with burns except for large flower-shaped patches all over her torso. And beside him lay three people, their faces melted away, their eyes bubbling holes in their smooth, shiny faces.
“What is this?” he cried out again.
But the woman who had brought him here was gone.
One of the faceless people grabbed his leg. He shook the hand away, trembling with the horror. The rich smell of decay made him want to gag.
He had been in this situation before—in the panic, among the decay, in the death—and he had found only one solution.
He reached inside his wagon and pulled out the camera. This time, though, he didn’t scout for artistic composition. He turned the lens on the field of corpses, more horrifying than anything he’d seen under the Pennsylvania sun, and took portrait after portrait after portrait, building an artificial wall of light and shadow between himself and the black rain, the foul stench, and the silent, grasping hands of hundreds of dying people.
1871
And hours—or was it days?—later, after he could no longer move the tripod alone, no longer hold a plate between his fingers, after she appeared and took his wet plates and his equipment and his wagon, after he had given water to more people than he could count, and tore his suit and felt the sooty rain drops dig into his skin, after all that, he found himself standing on the same street in Washington, under the same sunlit winter sky. A woman he had never seen before peered at him with concern on her wrinkled face and asked, “Are you all right, sir?”
“I’m fine,” he said and felt the lightheadedness that had threatened all morning take him to his knees on the wooden sidewalk. People surrounded him and someone called him by name. They took his arms and half carried him to the hotel. He dimly realized that they got him up the stairs—the scent of lilacs announcing Julia’s presence—and onto the bed. Julia’s cool hand rested against his forehead and her voice, murmuring something soothing, washed over him like a blessing. He closed his eyes—
And dreamed in jumbled images:
Flowers burned into naked skin; row after row after row of bodies stretched out in a farmer’s field, face after face tilted toward the sun; and the faces blend into troops marching under gray skies, General Grant’s dust-covered voice repeating that war needs different rules, different players, and General Lee, staring across a porch on a gray April morning, wearing his uniform for the last time, saying softly that being a soldier is no longer an occupation for gentlemen. And through it all, black rain fell from the gray skies, coating everything in slimy heat, burning through skin, leaving bodies ravaged, melting people’s clothes from their frames—
Brady gasped and sat up. Julia put her arm around him. “It’s all right, Mathew,” she said. “You were dreaming.”
He put his head on her shoulder, and closed his eyes. Immediately, flower-burned skin rose in his vision and he forced his eyelids open. He still wore his suit, but there was no long gash in it and the fabric was dry. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said.
“You just need rest.”
He shook his head and got up. His legs were shaky, but the movement felt good. “Think of where we would be if I hadn’t gone to Bull Run,” he said. “We were rich. We had what we wanted. I would have taken portraits, and we would have made more money. We would have an even nicer studio and a home, instead of this apartment.” He smiled a little. “And now the government will sell everything they can, except the portraits. Portraits that no one wants to see.”
Julia still sat at the edge of the bed. Her black dress was wrinkled, and her ringlets mussed. She must have held him while he slept.
“You know,” he said, leaning against the windowsill, “I met a woman just after the Battle of Gettysburg, and she told me that I would die forgotten with my work hidden in government warehouses. And I thought she was crazy; how could the world forget Brady of Broadway? I had dreams of a huge gallery, filled with my work—”
“Dreams have truth,” Julia said.
“No,” Mathew said. “Dreams have hope. Dreams without hope are nightmares.” He swept his hand around the room. “This is a nightmare, Julia.”
She bowed her head. Her hands were clasped together so tightly her knuckles had turned white. Then she raised her head, tossing her ringlets back, and he saw the proud young woman he had married. “So how do we change things, Mathew?”
He stared at her. Even now, she still believed in him, thought that together they could make things better. He wanted to tell her that they would recapture what they had lost; he wanted to give her hope. But he was forty-eight years old, nearly blind, and penniless. He didn’t have time to rebuild a life from nothing.
“I guess we keep working,” he said, quietly. But even as he spoke, a chill ran down his back. He had worked for the crazy woman and she had taken him to the gates of hell. And he had nothing to show for it except strange behavior and frightening memories. “I’m sorry, Julia.”
“I’m not.” She smiled that cryptic smile she had had ever since he married her. “The reward is worth the cost.”
He nodded, feeling the rain still hot on his skin, hearing voices call for help in a language he could not understand. He wondered if any reward was worth the sacrifices made for it.
He didn’t think so.
1871
Six weeks later, Brady dreamed:
The exhibit room was colder than it had been before, the lighting better. Brady stood beside his wagon and clutched its wooden frame. He stepped around the wagon, saw that the doors to the exhibit were closed, and he was alone in the huge room. He touched his eyes. The glasses were missing, and he could see, just as he had in the previous dreams. His vision was clear, clearer than it had ever been.
No portraits had been added to the far wall. He walked toward his collection and then stopped. He didn’t want to look at his old work. He couldn’t bear the sight of it, knowing the kind of pain and loss those portraits had caused. Instead he turned and gasped.
Portraits graced a once-empty wall. He ran toward them, nearly tripping over the boards of the wagon. Hundreds of portraits framed and mounted at odd angles glinted under the strange directed lights, the lights that never flickered. He stood closer, saw scenes he hoped he would forget: the flowered woman; the three faceless people, their eyes boiling in their sockets; a weeping man, his skin hanging around him like rags. The portraits were clearer, cleaner than the war portraits from the other wall. No dust had gotten in the fluid, no cracked wet plates, no destroyed glass. Clean, crisp portraits, on paper he had never seen before. But it was all his work, clearly his work.
He made himself look away. The air had a metallic smell. The rest of the wall was blank, as were the other two. More pictures to take, more of hell to see. He had experienced the fire and the brimstone, the burning rain—Satan’s tears. He wondered what else he would see, what else she would make him record.
He touched the portrait of the men with melted faces. If he had to trade visions like this for his eyesight and his wealth, he wouldn’t make the trade. He would die poor and blind at Julia’s side.
The air got colder.
He woke up screaming.
1873
Brady stared at the plate he held in his hand. His subject had long since left the studio, but Brady hadn’t moved. He remembered days wh
en subject after subject had entered the studio, and his assistants had had to develop the prints while Brady staged the sittings.
“I’ll take that, Uncle.”
Brady started. He hadn’t realized that Levin was in the room. He wondered if Levin had been watching Brady stand there, doing nothing. Levin hadn’t said anything the past few years, but he seemed to notice Brady’s growing strange behaviors. “Thank you, Levin,” Brady said, making sure his voice was calm.
Levin kept his eyes averted as he grabbed the covered plate and took it into the darkroom for developing. Levin had grown tall in the seven years that he’d been with Brady. Far from the self-assured twelve-year-old who had come to work for his uncle, Levin had become a silent man who came alive only behind the camera lens. Brady couldn’t have survived without him, especially after he had to let the rest of his staff go.
Brady moved the camera, poured the collodion mixture back into its jar, and covered the silver nitrate. Then he washed his hands in the bowl filled with tepid water that sat near the chemical storage.
“I have another job for you. Can you be alone on Friday at four?”
This time, Brady didn’t jump, but his heart did. It pounded against his ribcage like a child trying to escape a locked room. His nerves had been on edge for so long. Julia kept giving him hot teas and rubbing the back of his neck, but nothing seemed to work. When he closed his eyes he saw visions he didn’t want to see.
He turned, slowly. The crazy woman stood there, her hands clasped behind her back. Since she hadn’t appeared in almost two years, he had managed to convince himself that she wasn’t real—that he had imagined her.
“Another job?” he asked. He was shaking. Either he hadn’t imagined the last one, or he was having another nightmare. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Can’t?” Her cheeks flushed. “You promised, Mathew. I need you.”
“You never told me you were going to send me to hell,” he snapped. He moved away from the chemicals, afraid that in his anger, he would throw them. “You’re not real, and yet the place you took me stays in my mind. I’m going crazy. You’re a sign of my insanity.”
“No,” she said. She came forward and touched him lightly. Her fingertips were soft, and he could smell the faint perfume of her body. “You’re not crazy. You’re just faced with something from outside your experience. You had dreams about the late War, didn’t you? Visions you couldn’t escape?”
He was about to deny it, when he remembered how, in the first year of his return, the smell of rotted garbage took him back to the Devil’s Hole; how the whinny of a horse made him duck for cover; how he stored his wagon because being inside it filled him with a deep anxiety. “What are you telling me?”
“I come from a place you’ve never heard of,” she said. “We have developed the art of travel in an instant and our societal norms are different from yours. The place I sent you wasn’t hell. It was a war zone, after the Uni—a country had used a new kind of weapon on another country. I want to send you to more places like that, to photograph them, so that we can display those photographs for people of my society to see.”
“If you can travel in an instant—” and he remembered the whirling world, the dancing colors and sounds as he traveled from his world to another “—then why don’t you take people there? Why do you need me?”
“Those places are forbidden. I received special dispensation. I’m working on an art project, and I nearly lost my funding because I saw you in Gettysburg.”
Brady’s shaking eased. “You risked everything to see me?”
She nodded. “We’re alike in that way,” she said. “You’ve risked everything to follow your vision too.”
“And you need me?”
“You’re the first and the best, Mathew. I couldn’t even get funding unless I guaranteed that I would have your work. Your studio portraits are lovely, Mathew, but it’s your war photos that make you great.”
“No one wants to see my war work,” Brady said.
Her smile seemed sad. “They will, Mathew. Especially if you work with me.”
Brady glanced around his studio, smaller now than it had ever been. Portraits of great men still hung on the walls along with actors, artists, and people who just wanted a remembrance.
“At first it was art for you,” she said, her voice husky. “Then it became a mission, to show people what war was really like. And now no one wants to look. But they need to, Mathew.”
“I know,” he said. He glanced back at her, saw the brightness in her face, the trembling of her lower lip. This meant more to her than an art project should. Something personal, something deep, got her involved. “I went to hell for you, and I never even got to see the results of my work.”
“Yes, you did,” she said.
“Uncle!” Levin called from the next room.
The woman vanished, leaving shimmering air in her wake. Brady reached out and touched it, felt the remains of a whirlwind. She knew about his dreams, then. Or was she referring to the work he had done inside his wagon on the site, developing plates before they dried so that the portraits would be preserved?
“Did I hear voices?” Levin came out of the back room, wiping his hands on his smock.
Brady glanced at Levin, saw the frown between the young man’s brows. Levin was really worried about him. “No voices,” Brady said. “Perhaps you just heard someone calling from the street.”
“The portrait is done.” Levin looked at the chemicals, as if double-checking his uncle’s work.
“I’ll look at it later,” Brady said. “I’m going home to Julia. Can you watch the studio?”
Levin nodded.
Brady grabbed his coat off one of the sitting chairs and stopped at the doorway. “What do you think of my war work, Levin? And be honest, now.”
“Honest?”
“Yes.”
Brady waited. Levin took a deep breath. “I wish that I were ten years older so that I could have been one of your assistants, Uncle. You preserved something that future generations need to see. And it angers me that no one is willing to look.”
“Me, too,” Brady said. He slipped his arms through the sleeves of his coat. “But maybe—” and he felt something cautious rise in his chest, something like hope, “—if I work just a little harder, people will look again. Think so, Levin?”
“It’s one of my prayers, Uncle,” Levin said.
“Mine, too,” Brady said and let himself out the door. He whistled a little as he walked down the stairs. Maybe the woman was right; maybe he had a future, after all.
1873
Friday at four, Brady whirled from his studio to a place so hot that sweat appeared on his body the instant he stopped whirling. His wagon stood on a dirt road, surrounded by thatched huts. Some of the huts were burning, but the flames were the only movement in the entire village. Far away, he could hear a chop-chop-chopping sound, but he could see nothing. Flies buzzed around him, not landing, as if they had more interesting places to go. The air smelled of burning hay and something fetid, something familiar. He swallowed and looked for the bodies.
He grabbed the back end of the wagon, and climbed inside. The darkness was welcome. It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the gloom, then he grabbed his tripod and his camera and carried them outside. He pushed his glasses up his nose, but his finger encountered skin instead of metal. He could see. He squinted and wondered how she did that—gave him his eyesight for such a short period of time. Perhaps it was his reward for going to hell.
A hand extended from one of the burning huts. Brady stopped beside it, crouched, and saw a man lying facedown in the dust, the back of his head blown away. Bile rose in Brady’s throat, and he swallowed to keep his last meal down. He assembled the camera, uncapped the lens, and looked through, seeing the hand and the flames flickering in his narrow, rounded vision. Then he climbed out from under the curtain, went back into the wagon, and prepared a plate.
This time he felt no fear. P
erhaps knowing that the woman (why had she never told him her name?) could flash him out of the area in an instant made him feel safer. Or perhaps it was his sense of purpose, as strong as it had been at the first battle of Bull Run, when the bullets whizzed by him, and his wagon got stampeded by running soldiers. He had had a reason then, a life then, and he would get it back.
He went outside and photographed the dead man in the burning hut. The chop-chop-chopping sound was fading, but he heat seemed to intensify. The stillness in the village was eerie. The crackles of burning buildings made him jump. He saw no more bodies, no evidence other than the emptiness and the fires that something had happened in this place.
Then he saw the baby.
It was a toddler, actually. Naked, and shot in the back, the body lying at the edge of a ditch. Brady walked over to the ditch and peered in, then stepped back and got sick for the first time in his professional career.
Bodies filled the ditch—women, children, babies, and old men—their limbs flung back, stomachs gone, faces shot away. Blood flowed like a river, added its coppery scent to the smell of burning hay and the reek of decay. What kind of places was she taking him to, where women and children died instead of soldiers?
He grabbed his camera, his shield, and set it up, knowing that this would haunt him as the hot, slimy rain haunted him. He prepared more plates and photographed the toddler over and over, the innocent baby that had tried to crawl away from the horror and had been shot in the back for its attempts at survival.
And as he worked, his vision blurred, and he wondered why the sweat pouring into and out of his eyes never made them burn.
1875
Brady stared at the $25,000 check. He set it on the doily that covered the end table. In the front room, he heard Levin arguing with Julia.
