Image Decay

by Mark Lisac

  “It would have been better if I’d seen her in the studio. I saw the illusion instead. I’d been around long enough to know the difference. But she was all the magic that was television in those days. You saw her on the screen and you just knew that something make-believe could become true. And the worst part, the worst part—after I’d been around her awhile she made the same magic in real life.

  “Looking back, I never figured out whether it was her I fell for, or someone I dreamed up. Maybe she was in a television show playing in my head. Maybe I’d been in the business too long. At the time I probably would have said only that she confused the hell out of me. I guess that’s one definition of love.

  “It wasn’t supposed to work out that way. We started going out for a drink once every couple of weeks. Then it was more like once a week, between the visits to Miller’s with the rest of the crew. I’d look at her when we were with the others and try not to look at her too much. That was easy in one way. She seemed more real than the other people at the station. It was like looking at her filled my eyes. Other people I could see, but somehow they weren’t completely there.

  “Then we started fooling around. We never did have sex although we got close a couple of times. She worried about getting pregnant, even with a rubber. Said she had risked that with her first boyfriend back home and got worried sick. Once she literally had been sick for a couple of days with the flu and got into a panic because she thought it might be morning sickness.

  “After a few months I didn’t know what I wanted more—get her into bed or hope that whatever was between us would turn into something more than just a good time. It’s funny. When I look back, the most intense physical thing that ever happened between us was one night on the way to the tavern we held hands. There were four of us in Randy Eberhart’s car, he was a floor director. We were in the back seat together and she took my hand in the dark. We started squeezing our hands together and somehow that was about as close as I ever felt to anyone. But even that didn’t prepare me for the topper.

  “A couple of weeks after we took that car ride, she asked me out to have some lunch in a park near the station. It was a nice day. It was warm enough but a little cloudy and we were sitting in shade. She started talking about life across the river. We went there a couple of times. A place called Crystal Beach. It had nice warm water and good sand but people like it just as much for the amusement park.

  “She told me she grew up on the Canadian side, over in a town called St. Catharines. Her real name was Sedlak. Her mother looked after the house. Her father worked in a GM axle plant and one of her brothers had followed the old man into the plant. Her other brother had just gone up to work in a nickel mine in Sudbury. She was talking about them, and about her American uncle who worked at the Nabisco plant in Niagara Falls, on the American side. They made shredded wheat there. She used to spend a couple of weeks each summer with her uncle and aunt. She had another uncle who worked in a paper mill in a little town on the Canadian side called Thorold. The U.S. was more exciting. That’s how she ended up crossing the border. I was listening to the way she talked about her family and feeling she was more than someone fun to be with. She was really likable. Special and down to earth at the same time.

  “And then I saw light shimmering around her face. At first I wasn’t sure what it was. It was just some brightness like the sun had come out more. Then it got bigger and turned blue. It was blue and moving, not really sparkling but shimmering with points like electric spikes at the outside edges. And around that a narrower gold border suddenly appeared.

  “I was staring at this and saw she was starting to look at me funny. She must have been wondering why I was just staring. It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. I didn’t want to say or do anything that would make it go away. It lasted about a minute and then it faded.

  “I never told her. I was too dazed to tell her then and there never seemed to be a right time after. We didn’t have much time. I never did figure out what the hell happened. You hear people talk about auras. But they seem to have in mind a kind of glow about a person. This was more like the northern lights, something you could clearly see, and in full colour. Naturally I hoped that it meant something about how she felt about me. Then years later I read somewhere that people can talk themselves into seeing things like that. Hell, you can even see things like that if you get a migraine, I guess. In the end I decided to believe that I just had a kind of tuner open up in my mind and saw a kind of life force radiating out of her. She had that.

  “She wasn’t alive much longer, though. A little later that summer she went out onto the river with Jenner’s son, Chad. He had a nice motorboat. They went out at night and had a few drinks out on the water. Buffalo could be awful hot and muggy in the summer. It was cooler out on the river.

  “The way he told it after, she decided to walk along the side of the boat, which had an edge about as wide as a foot. He got scared and told her she should get down. He said he even started moving toward her to take one of her hands and help her down. She started laughing. It was laughing that caused her to lose balance. She fell into the Niagara. Even offshore from Buffalo it has a pretty strong current. He lost her quickly in the darkness. Didn’t even hear her shouting. He tried to look for her but the more he looked the closer he got to the falls. He was shaken up but didn’t want to go over and eventually gave up and turned back.

  “She probably drowned before she went over. She’d had a few drinks and cold water shocks you. Plus there was the current. One big one and lots of little ones running this way and that. She could even have hit some rocks on the way to the edge. Canadian police found her in an eddy downstream from the falls the next morning.

  “I’d said goodbye to her on her way out of the station. Didn’t know she was planning to go out in the boat. Didn’t even know she was spending time with Chad. Not that there was any reason she wouldn’t. He was good looking and had money. I don’t think she was one to be after money, although in some ways I didn’t really know her all that well. Anyway, he wouldn’t have wanted to get serious about her. He wouldn’t have wanted to lose one of the station’s stars by marrying her. For that matter, he was small fry in the business. If she wanted money, he had it, but if she wanted to marry up in class, she’d have taken her chances in New York rather than Buffalo.

  “I’d taken a few pictures of her. Just for fun to see how she’d look, not to remember her by. She wanted to see how close a portrait would make her to looking like a movie star, too. Most of them were black and white. A handful were in colour. She had these starburst eyes—mostly green with an orange flash in the middle. You couldn’t see that on the black and white TV screen but it was the first thing you noticed about her in real life. Smacked you in the face. Never seen any eyes like them before or since.

  “After she died I never wanted to look at the pictures again. Didn’t want to throw them away either. They ended up in my collection. That’s why I want to go through it all. She’s not going to get dragged into public view. Not if I can help it. She’s gone. She’s been gone for years. Just like all that live television she did. No one’s turning her into a zombie. I don’t want to be responsible for bringing her image back into life. It doesn’t matter so much for me. The photos I can live with. I could even stand to look at them again now, I guess. They’ll use up my memory and help me forget. I should look at them again and hope they do that. It’s the pictures of her in my mind, the ones that I never put on film, that haunt me.”

  He stopped. Rabani let out a breath.

  14.

  SHE LOOKED AROUND THE ROOM AS SHE HUNG HER COAT IN the open rack and lifted her purse onto the shelf across its top. At least the room didn’t have cubicles. There were times the rough grey fabric lining of the cubicle dividers bored her into a frenzy, made her think of loud music and vodka. This room had two tables. There were even splashes of colour if you counted beige as a colour.

  People tended to think of Ginny Radescu as beige—too l
ively to be grey, not dominating enough in a group of more than three to be anything more than beige. That was fine with her. She had learned long ago that she could not stand out in a crowd, and that there was no reason to. What mattered was making a difference to one or two people. She learned that at about the same time that she learned something else: having a face that people usually thought of as plain rather than pretty did not matter if you had the right body underneath it. She exercised and ate lettuce. She drank vodka but avoided orange juice because she’d heard that it contained fructose, which she’d heard was bad for the waistline. Anyone given an advantage in life should be smart enough to keep it.

  Ostroski came in half a minute later and took off his coat and hat. They were supposed to go into the room at the same time and leave at the same time. They had already said hello in the building’s main foyer. He had reminded her of her father and uncle: working class, but with eyes that said smart. That didn’t bother her. She wasn’t there to spar with him, just to watch what pictures he was looking at. She figured she had just as good a chance of staying awake as he did.

  “Let’s start with that one,” Ostroski said. He pointed to a cardboard box at the side, intending to start at the top of the stack in the middle and work his way to the corner.

  He lifted the box onto the table but didn’t sit down. Instead, he turned to her and said, “Just so I can keep track, who are you spying for?”

  “Whoever asks me what I’ve seen and has some say in whether I keep my job.”

  “How many is that?”

  “Probably could be about five.”

  “But not that many will be interested.”

  “I hope not. I don’t want to spend as much time answering questions as looking at thousands of pictures that mean nothing to me.”

  She saw the wrinkles around his eyes stretch just enough to suggest he thought her answers were entertaining. He looked at her eyes and saw a light almond colour, a hue he didn’t recall having seen before. She gazed back at him steadily. He didn’t see hostility; he wasn’t sure whether he saw boredom.

  “Good,” he said. “The less time I have to spend explaining to you what any of these is about, the faster we’ll get through them.”

  They settled in for a long grind of staring at images. After the first half-hour he was surprised at how many he’d forgotten. Pictures of natural gas processing plants, pictures of an alfalfa pellet plant, pictures of politicians standing around with some of them holding spades sunk partway into the ground, pictures of politicians surrounded by kids, pictures of highway overpasses, pictures of visiting politicians and business leaders from outside the province. Had he really earned a living for years taking pictures of things no one cared about?

  It was a lucky start, though. He could measure how well she would stand up to the strain of paying attention for hours on end. He decided to take a break after every fifty minutes, getting up to stretch, getting a coffee at the start of one hour, going to the bathroom the next. He thought about locking the door each time he left and asking her to walk down the hallway with him. He decided that was pointless because he could not be there night and day. In the afternoon, he cut down the drinks and switched from coffee to cola. After that many hours of dull flipping through paper, a good fizzy cola would at least give him the gassy satisfaction of a full stomach.

  It went like that for two days before he got to boxes from Hollywood. On the morning of the third day, he opened a file and saw Sunset Boulevard, taken at sunset. He wondered if he had thought that was funny, or if he had just liked the light. Or maybe he’d just happened to have free time then. Photos from the RKO lot followed quickly. He’d talked to his watcher a few times, mostly about the weather and the best places to buy a good hamburger. He had discovered he didn’t really mind her looking at the pictures with him. Now that he had something exotic to tell her about he began a desultory commentary.

  “That was the New York street. They used it for a street in any big city. You’ve probably seen it a number of times.”

  “Probably not. I like pictures with a lot of colour and scenery. I don’t usually watch anything with old city streets in black and white. I remember I wanted to see Gidget when it showed up on TV when I was about eleven but my mom said I was too young.”

  “That was in colour and set in California.”

  “Like I said.”

  “Some of these shots were taken near the beach where they made Gidget. Some right on it.”

  “Why did you take them in black and white?”

  “Better definition. And never trusted colour not to fade.” He paused. “Also it was cheaper.”

  He saw the first photo of Norma Minton. It was the first one he’d taken of her. A sound stage was in the background. He remembered she had looked a little more than ordinarily pretty by Hollywood standards, but also unusually self-possessed. That was one of the things that kept her in the bit parts. The producers didn’t want women looking as capable as the male leads.

  He talked about Malibu as he set aside the first photo of Norma, surprised at how little effort it took to keep his voice steady. About forty years now, he thought. Radescu didn’t ask him who the woman in the photo was or why he was removing that one from the files. Either she’s been told what to expect or she’s been told to take a good look and keep her mouth shut, he thought. He stopped explaining about the studio and the beaches as he continued to flip through the photos with the government woman watching beside his shoulder. He found more of Norma in the studio, some of her on the beach, and two of her on the beach with her breasts showing. He didn’t like it that someone else saw these. She did not comment on them. He quickly found himself thinking instead about how he’d managed to take them: it must have been a quiet time with the nearest people a good hundred yards away.

  After they knocked off for the day she found a telephone and called Becker. He had asked her to report whenever Ostroski removed any photographs. She told him about the pictures of some starlet she did not recognize.

  “And that’s all?” Becker asked.

  “It’s all for now. We’ll be back at it tomorrow. There are still a lot of boxes to go. Keeping awake is the big problem.”

  “Hang in there. This is very important.” He let the implied promise of a reward glimmer through the words. “And you’re watching for the kind of picture I told you about, even if he doesn’t take it?”

  “Yes, there’s been nothing like that so far.”

  He thanked her and they hung up. Half a minute later she walked down the hallway, and took an elevator up nine floors to the deputy minister’s office. Jeffries wanted to know when Ostroski found something worth taking, too. He also wanted to know if a certain type of picture showed up, and whether Ostroski took it out or not, but the kind that interested him was different than what Becker had described.

  She looked at his bland face and wire-rimmed glasses above the barely pink, round cheeks; she thought again how much he resembled her old high-school principal. Something about him seemed more dangerous, though. He even sounded dangerous when he told her, “You can report by phone from now on. I wanted to see you once.”

  When he smiled he always seemed to have something else on his mind. That was all right with her. She never dreamed about outsmarting anyone she depended on, only about keeping him happy. In this case, all it cost her was a little boredom, which she thought was what people were paid for in most jobs.

  Still, she was glad to get out of his office and head downtown for one of her regular dinners with her friend Rosa. It was a weeknight. She kept herself to one glass of white wine. On a Friday night she would have drunk more. She made up the difference by talking with Rosa about the silliness of spending days looking at old pictures, and trying to spot certain pictures for two different bosses.

  Next morning she was back in the beige room with the mottled grey carpet that was getting worn in the middle and didn’t match the walls. She started talking to Ostroski without planning to. Tal
king came naturally to her. It was something people did, like drinking water on a hot day. It relieved the mind-numbing flip-flip-flip of the photographs being turned. He didn’t seem eager but didn’t seem to mind either. To her surprise, she found his stories about the early days of television were moderately interesting.

  “Television came late to this part of the country,” she said. “My mom and dad told me there wasn’t any until 1954, and then it was just the CBC. They watched the hockey and the late-night news. There was a show about an RCMP guy somewhere in the north but nothing much exciting ever happened in it, they said. My dad said he sometimes watched a show about a couple of truckers, called Cannonball. It wasn’t on very long.“

  “I think I remember that one,” Ostroski told her. “It had a couple of American actors in the lead roles but it was made across the river, somewhere around Toronto. Didn’t have much excitement in that one either. Don’t know about the series about the RCMP guy but I’ll bet it was the same. We noticed that shows coming out of Canada were usually more about ordinary people doing ordinary kinds of things. That’s why it was easier to get people in Canada to watch our shows being broadcast from Buffalo. Most of what we were showing came from Hollywood. I heard that even some of the ads seemed pretty exotic if you were watching from across the river. I remember someone telling me that there were ads for breakfast cereals like Trix and Chex, things people in Canada hadn’t heard of. It made them curious.”

  They finished a box and Radescu got up to get the next one. She liked the way that Ostroski was willing to let her do some of the physical work. She waited through the first dozen or so photos from the new box before she took up the conversation again. She didn’t want to exhaust it right away and have to spend hours in silence.

  “Didn’t you ever get bored just taking pictures?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  She stopped an urge to ask if he ever got bored looking at pictures. Half an hour later she suppressed it again. Then she began daydreaming about clubs and dancing. Then a photograph caught her eye and she said, “I think she looks sort of familiar, like I should know who that is.”