Then, when I developed into her shadow, I became Click the Tick. I was in two places at once. I followed her career, and flashed it ahead of her at the same time. With my photos, I made Kiara, and she made me.
Click the Tick, her tongue castanets. Click the Tick, her fingers snap. Click the Tick, her heels on tile. Not only do I cling tight; I measure time, her second hand. I count.
But we don’t talk to each other. One does not expect conversation from one’s deity. One expects lightning bolts. And Kiara delivered, turning me with one syllable from ordinary Thomas, nerd with a telephoto, to Click: best of the celluloid infantry. A man worthy enough to have a nickname. Loners are never called anything but what’s on their birth certificates, called out in medical waiting rooms and at airport gates. Until they become unhinged and acquire a pet name. Unabomber. Killer Clown. Jack the Ripper. When they see their new moniker hit the papers, they know they’ve become somebody, important enough for re-christening.
I can’t forgive her when she disappears like this. Every year, the same time, up in a puff of smoke. Before she vanishes, she starts to cover herself up like a virgin fundamentalist, and her voice starts to crack. I could never pinpoint the date’s significance – not her birthday, not the solstice, not the anniversary of her Mexican grandmother’s death – but I’ve learned that tomorrow marks the beginning of the annual Huichol pilgrimage to Xapa, the Tree That Rains. The villagers have begun to file out in droves, heading for the peyote ceremony to get fried in the name of extinct gods.
Before her annual evanescence, Kiara refuses interviews or performances, claiming laryngitis. She hides behind sunglasses, scarves, and baggy dresses; the baby bump rumors start. She takes a new lover. Then she goes underground, untraceable. She re-emerges a few weeks later looking fresh and young, bikini-clad and gorgeous, her voice sliding up and down the range of a piano as easily as hands do. The rags crow that she’s gone under the knife. These know-it-alls know nada. I know every crease of her flesh better than my own (no one wants to look at me, including myself). I am her microscope. No knife, no injection, but … something.
Flawless, like last year around this time, at the gala benefit – for cancer, or animals, or animals with cancer, who gives a rip, we just care about the gowns and games – Mi ácaro, my tick, she mouthed silently to me and blew a kiss. Then turned away, into the microphones of the yakking interviewers.
But I don’t hear. I only see. Freeze-frames parade through my head, as if I look at a contact sheet instead of at the chaotic mob. First: her sandaled toes peek out through the cracked-open limo door. No nail color, ever. We glimpse her long, sepia leg – no stockings, always bare skin, one of her trademarks. Then: a pause. We intuit the whole of her, complete entity in the dark and cool interior. We stare, yearning, as funereal congregations gaze upon the coffin, knowing what’s inside. We sense the pearled and powdered beauty beneath the mahogany slab.
Then comes the heel, ankle, calf, nudging open high skirt slit, my life’s meaning thrust through a stage curtain. So like her tongue through her lips, taking her time, teasing. Then knee, thigh. A hand. A twist at her waist, unseen. Then Kiara. We receive the whole of her, but we never get enough. Not even with the backless dress, tease of drapery and miracle of architecture cascading from threads at her shoulders, offering us the entirety of her spine. Each vertebra, count them, fulcrum of her grace. The wisp of cloth waterfalls beneath her sacrum, sacred seat of her soul, god-made indentation for a man’s palm to guide her – but no man will. This she proffers to us, so much more profound a revelation than pedestrian cleavage heaving along the catwalk.
Amidst the perfume and hairspray and sweat, her natural fragrance shimmers: nutmeg and mango and oak-barreled whiskey. Chocolate and chili. All simmered into the essence of her skin.
Most paps don’t work the red carpet. After all, the paparazzi get top dollar for the shots of stars with their clothes off, not their makeup on. We want the wrinkle, the wart, not the de la Renta. But Click’ll get the candid of her that everyone wants (Kiara checking, over her shoulder in the limo’s reflection, the transition from skin to silk just at the swell of her tailbone, a mere millisecond). All the other hacks with single lens reflex stand in the same place, with the same equipment. But blind.
Just a few weeks before that, I caught her on an icicled balcony in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, 1,000 mm and F2.8 all the way through, grainy but solid gold, unmistakably her despite the sunglasses, ushanka, and white mink coat swaddling her up past her chin. The tabloid editors say Christ, Click, how’d you know? How’d you get the shot?
She’d sprinkled none of her usual clues for me to follow. She cuddled with a new lover (cropped out), descendant of some Svalbardian prince, or so he claimed. His Highness soon disappeared, though his absence never hit the US papers – we don’t care much for the fate of jaundiced, bottom-runged nobility. An alleged accident on the way to his hunting lodge. It seems that his Stolichnaya-fond majesty had always been careless near crevasses. Poor out-of-the-frame prince, wedged into his gorge of snow like a pallid lemon slice. Shaken like an ice cube, his dentures chatter and clatter in that great martini glass in the sky. But who knows if that’s really how he met his maker, since the body was never found?
Then Kiara lost me again, as I knew she would. I’m sure she, too, was shaken when the photo hit the checkout stands, and she realized I’d tracked her without the calculated hints she left for me throughout the rest of the year. I’d sniffed her out despite no phone bills left in her garbage, listing calls to her next destination. She knew I’d cropped out the only evidence that paired her with the wan prince.
Along with the digital shots I take for the pimps who sell my work to the highest bidder, I shoot film – high and low speed, 35 mm and 4×5, color and b/w, long and short exposures – for my experiments. I pondered Prince Icechip’s frozen image under my Agfa Lupe. Why him? Anodyne, disinherited scion, won’t be missed. No thorough inquiry. Lost himself on the rocks. A shrug, case closed. Still, a poor specimen. Kiara has slipped, skittering over the edge with an elbow called time at her back.
She resurfaced in LA for the gala, once again looking as if she’d bedded Father Time, nudging back his hands. So gentle, turning over this mythic, snoring bed partner without waking him, so that he doesn’t know he’s rolled back the clock in his sleep. Dark in her new tan, even her eyes seemed darker, the whites tinted, like her image had steeped too long in fixer bath. Stiletto-heeled starlets, starving over salads and suffering under the knife, clutch skinny soy lattes by her poolside, begging for her secret. She confesses with that impish, ever modest smile, that she’s blessed by her genetics. A little relaxation, a little amarosa, and food of the soul, a recipe passed down from her ancestors – and here she pauses over her enchilada, smothered in mólé, the traditional dark sauce that Latina grandmothers take three days to make with a hundred secret ingredients – all work wonders for an overworked girl. She could say goddess. Say star. But she says girl, as if she were still a waitress in Cleveland who had need of a surname and a phone book listing.
She knows I’m there, watching through my telephoto, her shadow at noontime, underfoot but unseen.
But not today. She doesn’t know I’ve finally tracked her to this filthy Mexican town. So this is where she goes when she ditches me every year.
I wait in the cemetery, City of the Dead. La Ciudad de los Muertos, I say out loud, killing the time, but I make a hash of it, as usual. I cannot master my own tongue, much less her adopted one. The words are clear in my head, but they tumble out of my mouth like scree down a talus of shale, all clatter and squawk.
My telephoto points across the small bay to her house, perched on a rock outcropping at the north end. Behind me, the graveyard’s haphazard, angled headstones look as if they erupt from the mounded earth, not as if human hands lodged them there. The jungle creeps nearly to the ocean here, and the strange trees that lurk around the graves creak and groan as the branches rub together.
Strangler Figs, requiring sacrificial host trees of a different species to wrap themselves around. I had asked my hotel proprietress about the peculiar, tentacled trunks. The host tree eventually dies, mummified in the arms of the Strangler.
The Stranglers’ dry leaves whisper in the sibilant wind. Crones chattering, clicking their tongues, tsk tsking. They scuff their gnarled toes, shy and tall ladies wallflowered behind me, waiting to be asked to dance. They skulk and scuttle. But when I turn to face them, they haven’t moved. Their canopy blends together, like schoolgirls holding hands overhead, singing “Ring Around the Rosy”. A massive Strangler towers over the others, most likely the mother of all the other trees, sending out vines that snake down doomed host trees; the aerial roots encircle the helpless tree and fuse together to become daughter Stranglers. I lean against a coarse, latticed trunk; my hand comes away sticky with a dark pus. Wasps cluster around the bitter fruit.
Hummingbirds levitate near low bushes, pollinating as they suck up oleander dew that would kill a man three thousand times their size, click click clicking, mocking me as I wait for her. Even before dawn like this, the hot pumice air grinds me down. A dry scraping hasps at my ankle, a skeletal caress. The roots form into fleshless hands, winding around my Achilles heel and up my shin.
I start awake, kicking. I must have dozed standing-up, leaning against a Strangler. A small branch snags my sleeve, and another scratches down my collar. A prehistoric-looking beast, the size of a newborn baby, crawls over my foot. It hisses at me, frantic pulse visible in its corded neck, then thrashes away through the underbrush. Just an iguana, mistaking me for a tree in my khakis and camo vest. I swipe at the prickles left by its thick hide and move to the tideline, washing him away with the sting of salt water.
It makes its ungainly way up the shore of Moth Bay, Bahia de Polilla. I follow it in my viewfinder until it disappears beneath the sudden onyx of her skirts close in my sights.
Covered up like a Biblical virgin, all Jackie O shades and glimmering veils and robes, she’s still somehow ripe with curves and supple secrets under the shapeless drapery. She moves between me and the burial ground and rasps, “Ácaro,” the first word she’s said out loud to me since that fateful day backstage two decades ago. Her voice seems abraded by incinerated bones, as brittle as the papery husk of dead moth’s wings. Nothing like her usual velvet butterfly voice. She mimes pulling a swollen acarid from her scalp and flicking it away. But she can’t get rid of me so easily. Such careless removal leaves the tick partly embedded and contaminates the host. Ticks require gasoline and fire. Only hellish conflagration removes us.
I snap her: click. She grabs my camera. I don’t resist her. We’re never this close, and I smell her skin, though I’ve barely noticed the dank, whale breath smell of this Mexican town that the few off-season tourists gripe about. Fingers under their noses, they flee north, where the sand is infested with fleas, but they prefer bites to this unholy stench.
Sucking waves lick at our feet, leaving green-tinged foam on the hissing sand. Seaweed litters the dingy shore in gnat-plagued mounds. A crow-like bird caws on the sodden mass, a masticated-looking clump. Three turkey buzzards peck at a fish carcass – the fishermen here gut their dorado and huachinango immediately and dump the carrion on the sand. The buzzards pause to look up at her, then return to their grisly work. Their beaks click click click on dorsal bone.
The smell of her overpowers the ocean brine and decomposing sea plants, the fetid jungle and mulching cemetery. But instead of wanting to pinch my nose, I yearn to chew her odor like cud. Beneath the yeast of her lurks a spice that tingles on the tongue.
She pops open the catch and yanks out the film, then shoves it all back at me. Her fingers brush my hands. I’m never privileged to touch her. But I’ve seen the goose bumps that rise on her lovers’ skin. Hers isn’t the warm maggot touch I would expect in this tropical germ whorehouse, but is the icy touch of a princess asleep for centuries on her crystal pallet. My sense of her is always only of sight. So today, with smell and touch, I’m satiated, as with the sex I only have with her photo collage and my own hand, a découpage tryst.
“You shouldn’t have followed me here.” Her voice grates like a rusted lock.
I don’t mind that she’s destroyed my morning’s work. It’s not like I could sell these photos of her looking like a war widow, unrecognizable in her weeds. I stuff the exposed negs into the darkness of my bag, where I’ll save them for my experiments later.
She whirls around and creeps back up the inlet, returning to her casa on the jagged bluff. The thatch-roofed, adobe manor lords it over the tiny, high peninsula of cragged black rock. She moves slowly, as if she aches. Her black form climbs the steps, past the terraced gardens, past the pool, past the large palapa with its umbrellas and lounge chairs (where her latest man-boy, whom she ignores, dozes).
I follow her with the telephoto, one eye shut to all around me, the other eye open only to her in the crosshairs. She looks like a scarab, an injured beetle that continues to limp along, making its crushed way toward its final destination despite being one of eight legs away from death. She crests the top step and passes behind the cratered walls surrounding the house. Rows of arches form the walls – like skeletal eye sockets stacked in catacombs. The skulled arches are too small for a man but let in the breeze. And mosquitoes. And celluloid, an almost impossible shot from daylight into darkness. Almost.
Dingy stucco, grimed with dust and time, slathers the strange walls. A domed and thatched roof rises behind it. Support beams at haphazard intervals thrust up through the dark straw and pierce the sky, hinting of heads speared on dungeon gates.
As she disappears, she doesn’t even glance my way. I am shut out, like a lens cap blotting my sight of her. I imagine her standing in the mottled darkness of her temple that I was never meant to see. If I could manage a complete picture of her behind this bank of blank eyes, I imagine it would look much like the pieced-together collage of her on my bedroom wall. But instead of being assembled from chopped-up film squares, she would be dissected by these gaping ovals.
The malicious sun breaks behind me and washes her out.
Her boy stirs; she’s called to him. He lifts his designer sunglasses.
Kiara’s voice. How could a planet, a nation, a man, help but fall under its spell? She flirts with octaves as she toys with lovers like this palomino colt, foolish braying boy with his golden skin, sun-bleached hair, and nothing between his mule ears.
Sad to think that – unlike the Stradivarius, whose song remains ever beautiful through the centuries, deepening with time into mournful eloquence – the human voice must weaken and falter, soundtrack to the lines and sags that must eventually mar our skin. Unlike the strings of that fabled instrument, our vocal cords cannot be replaced. Not an ageless instrument composed of wood, but mortal, with sinews and synapses that rot and atrophy.
The boy, dressed in a skimpy Speedo that doesn’t bother with his rump, stands up and crosses over to the pocked wall. Straight-spined, no shame or hard work to weigh him down, he left a trail of brags about his famous mistress, all too easy to follow. Who knows how old this preening donkey is? Twenty? Thirty? Hard to tell now that I’ve passed forty and then some, and she’s not far behind me though she still looks just beyond jailbait. Youth all looks the same to me now, bland, like this new crop of bare-bellied hoochie girl singers who can’t touch Kiara’s talent or beauty; you can’t tell them apart except for the Kool-Aid streaks in their hair that I want to yank. So easy for me to pollute their images with the shots I manufacture, their disgrace smeared across the checkout stands.
The boy, this spoiled pony, kneels in front of the cat-holed wall. Kiara’s panicked, grown careless to allow his unbridled mouth. He reaches through an opening, his scapula flexing as his arm disappears up to his shoulder. The other hand reaches between his own legs. I know he paws under the folds of her shrouds as she stands on the other side. Thinking he fondles a creature who looks like the poster
in his gym locker. She hasn’t wholly given herself to him, yet. She makes them all wait, until they have little sense left when the time comes. Their last glimpse of her must paralyse them.
This little display is for me. Not you, she’s saying to me. Never you.
I cap the telephoto; she sees my eye blink closed.
The boy’s hand drops free. Even from here, I see his fingers rise to his nose, see the snap of his head, turning away, the hand snapping in the other direction away from his face.
Put it in your mouth, I say out loud, but he kneels beside the pool and splashes it in the water, then dries it on a towel, rubbing until it’s well past dry.
Developing film has been almost impossible in this sun-drenched town. Dust, salt-laden air, and Cancer’s Tropic light all leach through door seams and window cracks, infiltrating even inner rooms, like the ants and cockroaches. I can’t darken even the back bedroom or bathroom, but I manage to stuff myself into a closet and feed the negs into the metal roller. I cap the lid on the canister and move my wrists, not rapid like a bartender’s, but smooth like a dancer’s, to agitate the developer evenly over the film. The solution is not one I purchase over a counter, but my own concocted recipe. It’s taken a great deal of experimentation and patience to perfect the formula.
I’ve done this so often that I don’t need a timer’s beep to let me know when to rinse and fix. Trapped in darkness with the fumes, I don’t need a red light to illuminate my task. The rattle of coat hangers at my back startles me, as if a cold hand taps me on the shoulder. I snap on the light, unsurprised by what I can already make out in the celluloid coils. Her image isn’t there, of course, no residual ghost of her in her Bride of the Dead costume. Even the murky dawn light flashed her out, like a nuclear bomb would disintegrate a real person.
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