“Do you see it, Cass, do you see it?”
I looked out the window.
“Oh fuck,” I yelled and dropped the phone.
When I stuck my head out, eddies of ash and paper were showering onto Hudson Street, the stink of jet fuel. People stared up with mouths open like they were catching snowflakes on their tongues. Shouting.
It was like being inside a breaking glass. Christine was already dead, though I didn’t know that yet, didn’t know she had gone down there anyway, early, thinking I might show up. Thinking I might have changed. You never know.
I lifted my face to where a single white contrail blurred into the rain of black grit and glass and ember. A charred fragment of paper fell onto the back of my hand and stuck there, damp, warm. I peeled it from my skin and read it.
For when first we
I smoothed the scrap against my palm then placed it upon my tongue. It tasted of petroleum, scorched metal. I swallowed it: a moment later began to vomit uncontrollably.
No one ever contacted me about a memorial service for her. I wouldn’t have gone, anyway.
The wars began. I drank even more. For a while I saw flyers downtown with her face on them—her ex-husband and parents put them up. Every time I saw one I wanted to scream. I wanted to kill someone. Finally I began ripping them down, ignoring the angry looks I got from people on the street. Sometimes, alone in my apartment, I did scream. She was gone, it was all gone, there was nothing I could have done, nothing anyone could ever have done about anything. Why the fuck was I the only one who understood that?
That dead light that comes in late afternoon in winter, that light that makes everything look like it was cut from black ice—I could feel that light on me in the middle of summer; in the middle of the night. For a few months I got headaches, a blinding pain in my right eye, as though a spark had burned my retina. The ophthalmologist found nothing, but I could feel it, the hole left by a molten wire, a bit of ash or ember. I stared at my eye in the mirror, looking for a scar or scratched cornea, but there was nothing. It got so I had to drink three shots of bourbon just to get the nerve to pick up my camera.
I tried to forget I had ever been involved with Christine, or anyone else. Like the song goes, you can’t put your arms around a memory. I was forty-eight, and my life had been over for decades. That was when Phil Cohen called me about Aphrodite Kamestos.
4
Phil was an old crony from the East Village who now lived in Hoboken, a one-time drug dealer and music promoter who did freelance work for various print magazines and websites, along with writing a blog called Early Death. The rise of hip-hop and crap pop had reduced his job security significantly, but his addiction to speed had left him with admirable work habits, and he still got me meth or black beauties when I needed them. He seldom slept, he wrote compulsively, and he was constantly, obsessively, in touch with anyone who might give him work. If the city were to be flattened by a nuclear bomb, Phil would be scrabbling in the ashes, sending up smoke signals to other survivors in Hoboken. He resembled Don Knotts circa The Incredible Mister Limpet, only not quite as good-looking.
Still, Phil had always looked out for me, with mixed results. I ran into him at a coffee shop one rainy morning in October.
“Hey hey hey. Cassandra Android, how you doing?”
“Phil. It’s fucking great to be alive.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Hey, look—I was going to call you. Got a sec?”
We squeezed behind a table by the window. I sipped my coffee and stared at him. A few months ago Phil had shaved his head. He’d immediately realized this was a bad move and tried growing it back, with the result that he now looked like what you’d get if Edvard Munch had painted Chia pets.
“So what’s up?” I asked.
“So I think I got a job for you. I know this guy, editor for Mojo. That’s a London music magazine. Print mag, not a webzine. He wants to do a story with photos. I thought of you, Cass. It’s perfect for you, a real Scary Neary story.”
“I know what Mojo is,” I said. “Perfect for me? As in, ‘Underemployed Losers and the People Who Hate Them?’”
“That’s my girl! Close, very close! You know Aphrodite Kamestos?’”
“Do I know her? Or do I know who she is?”
“Well, either.” Phil’s eyes widened. “You don’t actually know her, do you? No, of course not,” he said and quickly went on. “This editor, he wants to do some kind of old-time photography feature. 1950s, ‘60s … you know, Avedon, Diane Arbus, that kind of shit. I was telling him how I’d actually been up at Aphrodite Kamestos’s place once. It was wild. So he wants a piece on her.”
“So? You know her, you do it.”
“I don’t really know her,” Phil admitted. “This guy she was involved with, he and I did a little business, back in the day. I still hear from him every couple of years. So I emailed him and asked could he maybe get me an in with Aphrodite Kamestos.”
“Is she even still alive? She must be, what? A hundred?”
“Nah. Maybe seventy. But well preserved. She’s got this place up in Maine, an island. There was a little commune there, that’s how I got involved. I was their private dope peddler for a couple months. So I told this editor I have a contact, I could probably get someone up there again. The money’s pretty good. Plus you’d be paid in pounds—good exchange rate.”
I stared at my coffee and considered throwing it in his face. “Why didn’t you suggest he do a story on me, Phil?”
“He said the fucking 1960s, Cass!” Phil looked hurt. “Christ, I’m trying to do you a favor!”
“Oh, right. A Phil Cohen favor—I almost forgot.”
“I pitched you big time to this guy, Cass. I told him no one else on earth is as well qualified for this particular job as you are.”
“Why the fuck would you say that?” I finished my coffee and pitched the cup into a trash can. “Again: why aren’t you doing it?”
“I’m not a photographer!”
“So why doesn’t this guy send a staff photographer?”
“Because I guess Aphrodite wanted someone they’ve never heard of. She’s, like, crazy or paranoid or something. She wants an unknown.”
He pinched his lower lip between thumb and forefinger. I started to laugh.
“An unknown? What’d she say? ‘I need a total unknown—I know, let’s get Cassandra Neary!’”
“Pretty much.”
“Shit.”
I sat and said nothing. After a moment, Phil shrugged. “Look, I was just trying to help you out some. I mean, she specifically asked for you, God knows why. But it could be an interesting gig. Remember how they used to say if you tipped the country on its side, everything loose would roll into California? Well, it’s like they tipped it up again, only now everything that was still loose rolled back up into Maine. And these islands—Cass, it’s your kind of place. ‘The old weird America’—this is, like, the new weird America. You oughta think about it.”
I sighed, then looked at him. “Really? She really asked for me?”
Phil shifted in his seat, staring at his cell phone. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “She did. Go figure.”
“Okay. I’ll think about it.”
Phil glanced at his watch. “You’ve got, uh, five minutes.”
“What?”
“I told the editor I’d call him back by three—three his time. Five hour difference. And it’s almost ten.”
“But I can’t—I mean, how’d you even know you’d run into me?”
“I didn’t. I was gonna call you—hey, I swear it!”
“But—Jesus, Phil. What, has this editor told her I’m coming?”
He shook his head. “No. I did. I promised I’d send you. Listen, don’t think about it, okay? Just say yes, I can set it up. You got a license, right? A credit card? You’re not a total fucking Luddite, right? You can still rent a car and drive?”
“Yeah.” I gazed brooding out at the street. The rain had turned f
allen leaves and blown newspapers to gray sludge. “Shit. Can they give me an advance?”
Phil looked as though I’d asked him to cook a baby.
“Well, is there a kill fee?”
“I’ll get you a kill fee. If it doesn’t go down, Cass, I’ll pay your kill fee out of my own goddam pocket, how’s that?”
“Tell me again why you’re doing this?”
Phil ran a hand across his stubbled scalp. “Aw, man. You know, Cass, you are so fucking hardassed, you know that? I really did think it would be a great gig for you. The legendary Aphrodite Kamestos, the semilegendary Cassandra Neary—I mean, you could get close to her, you know that? I saw her place, that island. What you always used to talk about, all that bleak shit you like? Well, this is it. All these rocks, and the ocean, the sky.”
He sighed. “And, I dunno, there was something about her. When I met you—you reminded me of her. You know?”
“The forgotten Cassandra Neary,” I said. “The never-fucking-happened Cassandra Neary.”
“Forget it.” He glared at me, then said, “You know, I should know better by now. To try and do you a fucking favor.” He picked up his phone. “I’ll find someone else.”
I shook my head. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it. I need the money. I need to get out of town.” I glanced outside again. “So are you going to call me, or what?”
He opened the cell phone. “I’ll call this editor. Then I’ll call this other guy in Maine. I’ll get him to set stuff up, bring you out in a boat or something. Then I’ll call you.”
“Well, that’s suitably vague.” I stood. “So I guess I’ll wait for you to call me, or for some guy to do some stuff, or something.”
Phil nodded. “Great. Hey, aren’t you going to thank me?”
“I’ll thank you when I get paid, how’s that? I’ll take you to dinner.”
I leaned over to kiss his unkempt scalp.
“Thanks, Phil,” I said, and walked home.
5
You’ll think i was leaving the city because I needed to escape from grief, or guilt, or fear: all the reasons people fled in those years, and a lot of them escaped to the same place I was heading.
But the truth is that when Christine had called me that morning, it had been almost two years since we’d last spoken. She couldn’t bear the sound of my voice, she’d told me: it was like talking to a dead person. Or no, she went on, it was like that nickname Phil Cohen had given me. It was like talking to an android, something that mimicked human speech and affect but wasn’t actually alive.
“The terrible thing is, I really loved you, Cass,” she’d said on that last message. “I love you now.”
I knew she wanted me to meet her, to say I loved her too. I knew she was giving me a chance to save her—to save myself, she would have said—but I couldn’t lie. I can’t lie about that kind of stuff. This isn’t a virtue. It’s a flaw, just as my seeing the true world is not a gift but a terrible thing. I’ve lived my entire life expecting the worst, knowing it will happen, seeing it happen. Making it happen, people used to think, then photographing it and making other people see it too.
People think they want the truth. But the truth is that people want to be reassured that it’s only there that the horror lies, there on the other side of the television, the computer screen, the world. No one wants to look on the charred remains of a human corpse lying at their feet. No one wants to look on unalloyed grief and horror and loss. I don’t always want to myself, but I won’t deny that I do, and I won’t deny that my photos show you what’s really there. I can’t look away.
6
I had vacation time saved up at the Strand, so I gave notice that I’d be gone for a few weeks. They were surprised, but they also seemed relieved that I was doing something normal—it was the first time I’d taken off in about five years. I spent most of my last days there ferreting through the stacks, looking for anything on Kamestos.
I didn’t find anything, except for that one iconic photograph of her in an Aperture volume on 20th century photographers, a black-and-white portrait taken by her husband, the poet Stephen Haselton, shortly after their marriage. I knew there were other images: a pencil drawing by Jean Cocteau that was on the dustjacket of the original edition of Mors, a sketch by Brion Gysin that looked like Jean-Paul Marat’s death mask.
I assumed that when I googled her, I’d learn more. There was some stuff online, including Susan Sontag’s repudiation of Mors, but little in the way of biographical information except for a thumbnail entry on Wikipedia. Despite her name, Aphrodite was as American as I was, a third-generation Greek who’d grown up in Chicago. But there were no details about her childhood, and only a fleeting mention of her marriage to Haselton.
I don’t know anyone who looked less like her namesake. Aphrodite Kamestos was beautiful in the way a violent storm is beautiful, if you’re watching it from a safe distance. In his photo, Haselton must have caught her unawares. Her head is half-turned, her dark hair falling back from her face, her lips parted and eyebrows slightly raised. Her eyes are startlingly black against her white skin, and the light glances off her cheekbones. The gaze she shoots at the camera is direct yet impenetrable. She looks unafraid, but also unguarded, caught in that fraction of a second before she could compose her face into welcome or annoyance or desire or attack.
It was a strikingly beautiful face, but it didn’t make me think of the Goddess of Love. It made me think of Medusa, someone whose beauty would be turned upon anyone stupid enough to mess with her. That was the power of the photograph. It didn’t make you wonder what happened to her. It made you wonder what happened to the guy who took the picture. It’s almost anticlimactic to know that he killed himself in 1976.
My Google search turned up some of her own images as well, but that was such a depressing experience I wished I hadn’t bothered. I hate looking at bad reproductions of great photographs, and these online images were uniformly lousy. Generation loss—that’s what happens when you endlessly reproduce a photographic image. You lose authenticity, the quality deteriorates in each subsequent generation that’s copied from the original negative, and the original itself decays with time, so that every new image is a more degraded version of what you started with. Same thing with analog recordings. After endless reproduction, you end up with nothing but static and hiss.
This doesn’t happen so much with digital imaging, but what I found online had been scanned from a 1970 pirate reprint of Kamestos’s only two books, Mors and Deceptio Visus, first published in the late 1950s. Anyone who picked up that pirate volume could be forgiven for wondering how Aphrodite’s photos ever saw the light of day. Unfortunately, those horrible reproductions were what had filtered onto the web. They were nothing like the images in the original editions of Mors and Deceptio Visus—I knew that because I owned both books—and those, of course, would be nothing like the original prints.
Her greatest images were vistas—islands, mountains. Highly saturated blues and violets and magentas detailing an impossibly beautiful, distant archipelago that resembled a landscape by Magritte: elusive, irrecoverable. I couldn’t imagine those places were real.
Only of course they were—the pictures were taken in 1956, decades before computers made it possible to twist the world into a pretty shape. That was the year Kodak started hyping the Type C color process. Type C enabled photographers to produce their own color negs without relying so heavily on a lab, and there was some interesting color work done then by people like Nina Leen and Brian Brake. I don’t know if Kamestos was using Type C, but she would have been picking up on some of the press it was generating. You can see in her husband’s photo how those eyes still burned, though her hands looked as though they could handle a garrote as easily as a camera.
It was a suspicion fed when Mors appeared: a catalog of places where terrible things had happened. Suicide, a murder, sexual torture. These weren’t like Weegee’s crime scenes, or Bourke-White’s photos of Buchenwald. Kamestos’s pictures lack
ed immediacy or historical import; their sense of transgression was visceral because it was so detached. When it first appeared, Mors was dismissed as a form of malign spirit photography, and the 1970 pirate volume only made things worse, with its over-the-top intro by Kenneth Anger. It would be decades before that book’s influence was acknowledged by people like Sally Mann or Joel-Peter Witkin. And me, of course. But no one was listening to me.
The thought of seeing those original photographs is what set my heart pumping. More than the thought of money or escaping the city. More even than the notion that Aphrodite Kamestos had asked specifically for me, or that if I went up there, I might shoot some decent work myself again.
Though I’ll admit, I was curious—more than curious—about what the hell had happened to her. A nervous breakdown? Failure of nerve? Failed marriage? Her husband had been a minor poet, a kind of fringe person in the Beat movement, and my understanding was that he’d been gay. Kamestos met Haselton in 1955, and they married just a few weeks later. As a wedding gift, his wealthy father gave the couple a house on an island off the coast of Maine.
And that is where I was now headed: Paswegas Island.
I’d never known its name before. The thought gave me a weird feeling. It was like I was going off on some strange, creepy pilgrimage; like a Nabokov fan setting out to find the motels where Humbert Humbert slept with Lolita.
Because Paswegas was where Aphrodite shot the dreamscapes in Deceptio Visus. It was a place I’d thought and dreamed about for almost thirty years, a place I’d never quite believed was real. You know how you can look at a painting or picture and wish you could walk into it and just disappear? That’s what I’d always wanted to do with those photos. Now I’d have my chance.
The night after I ran into Phil, I called my father. We hadn’t spoken for a while, and as always, I could tell he was relieved to hear my voice: I wasn’t dead.
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