Image Decay

by Mark Lisac

  Not a social worker, he thought. But sometimes being a lawyer was like being a boxing manager. You picked the right fights and avoided the ones that looked unwinnable. That limited the upside for the clients and himself. But the downside of taking on a weak case was usually too painful to risk. Taking risks was what brought people into lawyers’ offices; his job was getting them out of the office and back into their own lives. That was his life.

  3.

  TWO DAYS LATER, RABANI STROLLED THROUGH DUST AND rolling paper cups and scraps of candy-bar wrapper flying in the spring wind down 108th Street and looked up at the sign for Ostroski’s Cameras. An image of an old Kodak Brownie decorated the upper right corner.

  He opened the grainy wood-frame door and saw a woman behind the counter—not young, far from old, not suspicious when he gave his name and said he had come to see Ostroski, but gazing at him as if taking mental notes. A melody of Spanish in her voice.

  She told him Ostroski was in back. Rabani walked through an open doorway and looked around at piles of boxes and a battered desk. He called, “Jack, it’s George Rabani.”

  A voice answered him from behind a black cylinder set against a wall: “I’m in the time machine finishing some prints. Be out in a minute.”

  The cylinder began to revolve. It appeared to be a sliding door of sorts. Ostroski stepped out, a few centimetres shorter than Rabani but more solidly built.

  “Good morning.”

  “Good morning, Jack. Hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “You’re a lawyer. That means I’m in trouble. Of course you’re disturbing me. Then you’ll send me a bill and I’ll be disturbed again. Someday maybe your firm will hire me to take a portrait of the partners for five hundred bucks. Then I won’t be disturbed.”

  He saw Rabani looking at the round compartment with a curved, sliding door built into the flimsy wall.

  “Never seen one of those? It’s a door for a darkroom. A cylinder. You turn it, there’s always an opening on one side and a black surface on the other to keep the light from passing through. That way you can go in and out of a darkroom without outside light having a chance to come in. Effective and simple, just like a camera shutter. Except more simple than a shutter. A work of genius but not complicated enough to have people think so. You came to talk about what happened?”

  Rabani looked out toward the doorway, where the woman was within earshot.

  “Adela,” Ostroski said, “it’s a good time for you to walk down the block for a coffee break. Doesn’t look like there will be many customers this morning anyway.”

  Her voice came back through the opening without her looking through it: “Yes, Jack. Would you like me to bring one back for you?”

  “Thanks.”

  They waited until the front door closed. Ostroski said they might as well talk out front where there was more light. Rabani went first and surveyed shelves while Ostroski gathered two chairs. He saw 35mm cameras bearing famous names, two boxes full of leather cases, a few vintage Kodak Instamatics that he guessed were from the 1950s. One old Brownie. Other shelves offered filters, brushes, and other paraphernalia.

  “Why do you call it the time machine?” he said as they sat down.

  “You think this whole place is a time capsule, right? Nah. This is just a store for people who like working with old equipment that still does the job. The darkroom in back, that’s the time machine. Because working with photographs is working with time. You know about Cartier-Bresson’s theory of taking pictures at what he called the decisive moment?”

  “I’ve heard the phrase.”

  “So have a lot of people. A lot of people think they can recognize those moments and can take pictures. Well, every moment is important in someone’s life. And taking a photograph is recording a moment on film, then printing the record on paper. The moment lives on for a long time. Maybe not forever, but for a lifetime. That’s forever to most people. They don’t care much about what comes after.”

  “But the moment is gone. Having a picture of it doesn’t bring it back. Those prehistoric cave drawings in France can’t bring back ancient horses and antelope.”

  “You’re right, lawyer. The people in photographs are gone for good. The people they were at that moment are gone the next day, or the next hour. Even stone buildings that last for centuries aren’t the same as they once were. Just ten years can add scratches and dirt. That doesn’t matter. What they meant lives on. That’s what photographs do—they keep the meaning alive. Hell, that’s all Cartier-Bresson was talking about when he talked about the decisive moment. He thought there were times when the way things looked expressed the real meaning behind a person or a place or an event.”

  “Okay. What was the real meaning of you being on the bridge threatening to throw a dog off it? Because right now there’s a real court and real police machinery that could end up throwing you into a real jail or mental hospital.”

  Ostroski looked at him, grey eyebrows raised. “I was trying to get his attention. Like hitting a mule with a two-by-four. You know?”

  “You got the cops’ attention.”

  “Don’t worry. I got his, too. He doesn’t care much about anything but he cares about his dogs.”

  Rabani looked at Ostroski’s eyes. Not looking for the person inside but taking in their pale blue colour, and their unblinking frankness. Or was it playful guile? He made guesstimates and hoped he was getting them right: open and honest, but open only as far as he wanted to be; experienced and knowing about the world; capable of taking risks but preferring risks on which the odds could be calculated in advance; naturally friendly, but unafraid of fights; dangerous.

  A so-so client, Rabani thought. He’ll listen to reason, up to the point that suits him but maybe not after that. Co-operative, but also unpredictable. There were better clients, and many worse, and many less interesting.

  “What do you want from Becker to settle everything?” Rabani asked.

  “I want my photographs. The ones that are really mine. The personal ones.”

  “I don’t know if we can do that, Jack. Ownership has been established. It would have to be a matter for negotiation.”

  “Well, that’s what lawyers are for, isn’t it? Negotiate them back for me. The ones I want are of no interest to anyone anyway.”

  “What if he gets stubborn?”

  “I’ve thought about that. It wouldn’t surprise me. Then I’ll settle for control of what gets displayed and or put on this Internet thing for public access. Most of them don’t matter. They can do what they want with all the old oil wells and politicians and stuff I collected over the years. But then I want a realistic price. Not some token to wipe out that trumped-up accusation that I walked off with a Hasselblad. Fifty thousand. Start higher and bargain down if you have to. But fifty thousand is the cutoff. They pay me or things keep happening. I’m not the only one who wants to avoid more trouble.”

  “You can’t be kidnapping his dogs, Jack. Or throwing strychnine-laced hamburger over the fence to them or anything else. You’ll end up in jail or worse. And you won’t get money or pictures.”

  He thought he saw a glint of humour, so faint and fleeting that it was barely visible, spark through Ostroski’s eyes.

  Ostroski said, “Maybe there’s more than one kind of dog. Maybe there are other pictures, too.”

  Rabani stared at him. Ostroski said, “Don’t bother asking.” He got up from his chair—lithe and quick for his age, Rabani noted—and half-turned toward the door to the back room. He stopped, turned his head back to Rabani, and continued, “See if you can get a little more than fifty thousand. I need it all and I’d like to have some extra to pay you.”

  Rabani watched him go through the doorway, got up and went out the front, leaving the wooden chairs where they were.

  He walked down the street in the direction he had seen Adela take. The storefront windows needed cleaning. One had a “for lease” sign taped inside. The window frames were mostly old and made of wood,
with dingy paint that had faded in years of harsh sunlight and rain. The paint on most of the frames was cratered. Older layers underneath had not been scraped smooth before being covered. Yellow and brown were common colours.

  A small storefront at the end of the block had an aluminum frame window and a sign reading “Sunrise Coffee.” Rabani looked inside. He saw Adela sitting on a high stool at a round table, a takeaway cup in front of her, reading a paperback book. He also saw a rack of muffins and what looked like banana bread and date squares.

  His mouth filled with the taste. He wondered if the reflex would ever go away. He was currently near the upper limit of the seven-kilogram swing in weight he allowed himself. Once he had gained eight kilos and been overcome by mortal fear of diabetes and, worse, of loss of control. This year he was starting the weight loss only about six and half too heavy, disturbed by no more than having to switch to his larger pants. He walked into the café and to the table.

  Adela looked up, her expression neither surprised nor indicating she had been expecting him. Her colours ranged from the faint brown of her skin to the dark brown of her eyes and hair. She wore no makeup. She said, “Hello.”

  He would normally have sat down on the stool opposite her. Looking at her face and hearing the inexpressive steadiness in her voice he decided that he should ask first if she minded.

  “For a minute,” she said. “I have to get back to the store and take Jack his coffee, too.”

  “I won’t waste time, then,” he said. “I’m going to try to help him settle the business with the dog. Have you worked at the store long?”

  “Nearly two years.”

  “Long enough to know what he’s like then. Has he been acting especially nervous or depressed?”

  “Jack? No. He is as you no doubt saw him.” She did not elaborate.

  “You’re from Latin America somewhere?”

  “Nicaragua. And you’re wondering why my Spanish accent has almost disappeared and why my English sounds American.”

  He waited.

  “I learned English when I was young and spent two years in New York, studying at Columbia. I thought I wanted to be an architect, specializing in historical preservation. Then I came here and found there’s almost nothing old enough here to preserve and almost no interest in preserving what is old enough. And a reluctance to trust foreign credentials, which you probably know if you’ve ever asked foreign-born cab drivers or security guards what they did before they came here. Now you know my life story as well as everything I can tell you about Jack.”

  “Does that mean you don’t like me?”

  “I like people. I don’t trust strangers. Nobody should trust strangers. But I don’t tell other people how to live.”

  Rabani searched her face for any hint of irony, or of interest in him. He saw only honesty backed by impenetrable blackness—the qualified openness of a mirror. He wanted to see more.

  She closed her book and said, “I have to get back to the shop.”

  He looked at the roundness of her face and the rounded curves of her body and thought about the contrast with what seemed to be an angular mind. He made a quick decision and blurted out, “Would you like to have dinner with me sometime? Or just a coffee if you prefer? After Jack’s legal business is settled, that is.”

  She stood up and said, “We wouldn’t be strangers then. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “I’ve never been good at predicting the future.”

  “Perhaps. Let’s see what becomes of Jack’s case first.”

  He let her walk out of the café ahead of him, not watching her as she turned north and headed back to the camera shop. He walked out and turned south, and then east, back toward his office. He wondered how many calories walking eight blocks would burn.

  After he got the day’s routine out of the way, but before rush hour, he put a file into his briefcase to work on that night, went down to the parking garage, and drove to the northeast end of downtown. It was a multitalented neighbourhood. There were poor people, some middle-class Italians and Portuguese who ran nearby businesses or just liked to be close to people who spoke their language and knew their card games. They had recently started being joined by a scattering of young professionals buying properties ten or twenty years early, before the real gentrification might set in. There were hookers and drug addicts, some trying to straighten out and some not. Once in a while there were gang outposts but the police usually closed those houses within months, sometimes a couple of years.

  On the main business street there was a pawnshop with a small appliance repair annex in what had once been a garage. Rabani parked in front of it and walked across weeds, dirt, and a broken concrete pad. He said hello to a solemnly calm man wearing a blue polo shirt under a jacket and sitting on a frayed lawn chair just inside the annex doorway.

  “Doing business today, Alex?”

  “Not today. I had time to work on the latest model. This one has a nice rack system. I expect it to sell fast.”

  Rabani looked at the three other models displayed in the onetime garage. Two former freezers and a former refrigerator. He calculated that sales were still running about one a month—enough to make converting them into barbecue smokers a small, worthwhile source of pocket money for a man collecting income support for the permanently disabled.

  “The apartment okay?”

  “Yes, it’s fine. The vacuum cleaner broke down but Jerry said he’ll let me borrow any cleaner in the store once a week until I can find a new one.”

  “Have you been looking?”

  “It takes a lot of research, George. You don’t want to jump into something like that without knowing what you’re doing.”

  “You could probably take a look at Consumer Reports in the library.”

  “Yes, I could. I’ve been busy on a new book, though.”

  Rabani pulled up a paint-stained wooden chair that had probably been someone’s good kitchen furniture about fifty or sixty years earlier. He sat down to hear the newest turn of Alex’s imagination.

  “What’s the book about, Alex? I thought you were working on the roads book.”

  “The roads book. It’s coming along. I think it will sell when it’s published. People all over the country drive on highways without really looking at them. I will tell them what it’s like to stand on the asphalt and feel the local breeze. They will see the differences in the colour and granularity of the pavement. Every road has its own unique border of weeds and birds and insects. They will know the sounds. I just can’t quite remember all the roads I’ve stood on so I’ll have to do some more research. And I’ll have to see about buying a camera. People will probably want to see pictures. Something more urgent has occurred to me—a long-term project. It won’t require photographs. I’m going to do a books arcade.”

  “Sounds interesting. What’s that going to be like?”

  “It’s going to be a collection of interesting passages from books. Some people might call it a collage. I’m thinking of something more like Walter Benjamin’s arcades project, though. But it won’t be random thoughts. The selections will be carefully selected and placed. The chapters will be like literary landscapes. Each one will have its own theme and own organization. I think the first chapter should have F. Scott Fitzgerald as a centrepiece. You know there’s that line in the middle of The Great Gatsby that I love.”

  “No, I don’t think I know that, Alex.”

  “I thought I’d told you about it. I read it again a few weeks ago and the sentence jumped out at me. It’s in the part where Gatsby and Daisy meet face to face again for the first time and Nick tells Gatsby the sun is coming out. Gatsby is too excited by the meeting to understand at first. But then Nick writes that when Gatsby realized what he was trying to say, that twinkle-bells of sunshine were entering the room, Gatsby smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to Daisy. I don’t know why the mysterious part of that didn’t strike me before. I’m sure I rea
d the book before. What did Fitzgerald mean by weather man? There were no TV weather men in the 1920s. What did it mean to smile like a weather man? And ecstatic patron of recurrent light. Who else would write like that? You see? It’s not just the language. There’s a deeper meaning. He caught something mysterious and mundane. It’s something evanescent yet lasting. People tend to let these things go by unnoticed, just like I did. I can make a book out of such quotations. There would be commentary, of course. The question I’m wrestling with is whether the commentary should be interpolated with the quotations or grouped in separate chapters. There’s also the collection of the passages. I imagine I’ll be spending a little more time in the library.”

  “That sounds like a good project, Alex. I’ll be interested to read it. Will you show me what you’ve got when you’re halfway through?”

  “I don’t know, George. It might be something that requires seeing as a whole. It’s going to consist of small pieces fitted together. That sounds like you could read just the pieces. But you may not understand what I’m saying until it’s all fitted together. Art is like that.”

  “Well, let me know when you have something you can show me.”

  “I’ll do that, George. Jerry is still letting me use that old typewriter. I may have to find some more paper. People don’t bring paper into a pawnshop. How’s Mum?”

  “Oh, she’s fine. I went to see her last week.”

  “I’d like to go see her sometime.”

  “I think we can arrange that. Maybe next week.”

  “That would be good. Let me know first. I may be doing research in the library. I may have to arrange a time.”

  “I’ll do that, Alex. I think I can find paper for you, too.”