Poor kid, I thought. If he was my father, I’d hammer nails in my head too.
Merrill handed me a key. “Checkout time—”
“Eleven,” I said. “One question—is there anyplace to eat around here?”
“This time of night?” Merrill looked as though I’d asked for directions to the local Satanic Hall. “No.”
I wanted to point out it was only five o’clock, then recalled that I had not, in fact, seen anything resembling a restaurant for at least two hours. I hadn’t seen anything resembling a motel, either, and all the B&Bs I’d passed were shut for the winter.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
I went back outside and got my stuff from the car. The wind had picked up; my cheeks stung from the cold and salt mist. I hurried toward my room—Number 2—slammed the key into the lock and kicked the door open.
Inside was no warmer than out, but at least there was no wind. I shut the door and put on a light then located the electric heater, a pre-Sputnik deal with exposed heating coils.
Within seconds the coils began to glow. I huddled over them and warmed my hands and face until I felt like I could move without cracking. I did a quick room inspection—more knotty pine, a single bed with protective plastic beneath thin white sheets, a hundred-watt bulb in a lamp shaped like a lighthouse, Sears Kenmore television with rabbit ears. Propped atop the pillow was a small hand-lettered sign—
Please DO NOT LEAVE
Your Disgusting Germy Used Tissues
Under The Pillows
Thank You Your Host Merrill Libby
I had just tossed the card across the room when there was a knock. I opened the door. Mackenzie stood in the dark, wearing a ratty wool poncho.
“Hi.” She gave me that sweet shy smile, then glanced over her shoulder. “I just wanted to tell you—what he said about nowhere to eat? He’s wrong—there is a place. Down in Burnt Harbor, on the waterfront.”
“Wait, come in,” I said. “It’s freezing.”
“Thanks.” She stepped inside, and I shut the door. “It’s warm in here, anyway.”
“It’d be warmer if you left the heat on.”
“Huh?” Her brown eyes widened. “You’d be paying to heat an empty room all winter.”
“Right.” I hadn’t thought of that. “So there’s a place in Burnt Harbor?”
“The Good Tern—it’s right on the main street, you can’t miss it. The only street,” she added. “There by the water. The food is really, really good. They open for breakfast at five.” She looked around and her gaze fell on my bag. “So you’re really from New York? That must be really, really cool.”
“Really, really different from here, I can say that.” I rubbed my hands above the heating coils. “You work for your father? No child labor laws in these parts?”
Mackenzie shrugged. “Only part time. I go to the voc school up by Naskeag Harbor. I’m studying culinary arts. I want to be a chef. Or maybe make my jewelry and sell it.”
“Good idea. You could come back here and open a restaurant.”
“No way. I’m going to New York. Or San Francisco. I hear that’s a sweet place.”
I looked at her, the pink heart on her hand and the piercings that hadn’t healed all that well; the way she stared at my leather jacket, like it was a shiny new bike or whatever the hell kids dreamed of up here—a snow shovel? I leaned forward to peer at her necklace, the sea-glass glinting green and blue between the aluminum tabs. “Did you make that out of old cans?”
She fingered it and nodded. “Yeah. I like to do stuff like that.”
She held out her arm to display more tabs and sea-glass threaded with wishbones and broken seashells and dirty gray twine—beautiful and strange, like something you’d find buried in the sand. For a moment I thought she was going to say something else.
Instead, she went to the door. She looked at me, her face half-shadowed, and gave me that sweet kid’s smile.
“Okay, bye,” she said and left.
For a few minutes I sat on the bed and tried to warm up. The protective plastic crackled noisily every time I moved. I was afraid if I waited too long I’d end up stuck to the plastic, stuck here all night, hungry but still too buzzed to sleep.
Plus, I needed a drink. I peeled off my jacket and held it above the heater until the room started to smell a little bit too much like me, slung it back on and went outside.
I headed for my car, walking past Room 1. Without warning the door flew open. I ducked as a man stumbled onto the sidewalk. When he saw me, he backed up, smacking his head against the door.
“Hey, watch it,” I said and edged away from him.
He rubbed his head and glared at me. “Goddamit, that hurts. What, are you lost?”
“No. I was leaving my room. I didn’t know anyone else was here.”
“Yeah, well you’re sure acting like no one else is here.”
He stared at me—a tall, lanky guy about fifteen years younger than me, with shoulder-length dark brown hair, a wide mouth, aquiline nose, wire-rimmed glasses. He wore corduroy jeans and a suede jacket over a white shirt, none of them very clean. After a moment he shoved his glasses against his nose and gave me a wry smile. It made him look younger but also oddly familiar. I had a spike of amphetamine panic. Could this guy know me?
Unexpectedly he laughed. There was nothing overtly sinister about that, but I felt such a powerful rush of fear—not just fear but genuine terror—that everything went dark: not just dark outside, but dark inside my skull, like there’d been an abrupt disconnect between my mind and my retinas. The only thing I can compare it to is what I felt the one time I shot heroin: a black wave that buries you before you even know it’s there.
Damage. This guy reeked of it.
I backed away and glanced down at his hand. A scar ran from his middle finger to his wrist, as though someone had tried writing on his flesh with a knife. When I lifted my head, he was still staring at me.
“You don’t belong here,” he said.
His eyes were such a pale brown they were almost yellow. The left iris held a tiny starburst just above the pupil, emerald-green, rayed with black. It made me think of the trajectory a bullet makes through thick glass; it made me think of that scar on his hand, and how I’d seen it, him, somewhere.
But I’d never seen this man before. I knew that. My brain is hardwired for recalling bodies, eyes, skin; I absorb them the way emulsion paper absorbs light. I would no more have forgotten that scar, or that iris’s imploded green, than I would have forgotten my own face in the mirror. I continued to stare at him, until he began to lift his hand.
Without a word I darted past him toward my car. He took a step after me, stopped. I jumped into the Taurus and locked the doors, fired up the engine and the headlights. The windshield was glazed with frozen mist; I waited for it to defrost then peered out.
The man was gone. My hands were shaking so much the steering wheel trembled. I definitely needed to eat something and then try to sleep. My car was halfway out the parking lot before I realized I’d left my bag in the room.
I swore and glanced back at the motel office. The lights were on, and I could see a figure seated in the alcove—Mackenzie—and another, taller, figure: the guy I’d just bumped into. I sat in the car and waited until he stepped out of the office and walked over to an older gray Volvo sedan, watched as he drove off. Then I hopped out and ran back inside my motel room. I grabbed my bag and Deceptio Visus—I wanted something to hide behind while I ate. No more small talk with the natives. I headed back outside to my car then stopped.
The door of the room next to mine was ajar—in the confusion of running into me, my neighbor had forgotten to close it. As I watched, a gust of wind pushed it open another inch.
I hesitated then stepped over and placed my hand on the doorknob.
“Hello?” The hairs on my arms rose as I thought of that green-shot eye. “Anyone there?”
No reply. I pushed the door open.
&
nbsp; The light was on and the room empty. I looked back quickly to make sure no one saw me. Then I went inside.
You might think I’d never done something like this before. In fact it was exactly the sort of thing I did.
It was a room identical to mine. Clothes tossed were over a chair. On the bed was a computer case, open, with a laptop inside. A few books were stacked on top of the laptop, along with a small notebook. I picked up the notebook, flipped through lists of names, phone numbers, dates.
No interest there. I tossed it aside then peered into the computer case.
Pens, a calculator, cell phone charger; a thick yellow Rite Aid One Hour Processing envelope stuffed with photos and a CD-ROM. I took the envelope and walked to the window, angling myself so I could see outside without being seen, and looked through the photos.
They were color pictures, overexposed 4x5s. There were two copies of each. Hard to tell how recent they were. I guessed maybe a few years old, though some people still use film and transfer the images to CD-ROM. The photos showed some kind of family gathering—a brilliant sunny day, women in pastel and tropical-bright dresses, men in light-colored jackets or shirtsleeves. A white-haired woman in a broad-brimmed red straw hat held a champagne flute. Two dark-haired women who looked like sisters cocked their heads and pursed their lips in an effort to look disapprovingly at the photographer. A big dog ran past a crowded table, a black blur, its tongue hanging from its mouth.
Everyone looked happy, even the dog. A wedding? No one takes pictures of funerals.
But there was no bride or groom that I could see; no wedding cake or birthday cake or anniversary cake; no presents. A few darting children in the background, but not enough to herald a kid’s party. Round tables where people sat and smiled for the camera, their faces shadowed by big striped umbrellas, yellow and green. Pink blossoms strewn across some of the tables, wine glasses, wine bottles.
Most of the photos were like this. I’d almost reached the last of them before I found one in which I could pick out the figure of the man I’d nearly run into. He stood in a group of men and women, all dark haired, though sunlight and distance made it impossible to discern any other resemblance between them. All were nearly as tall as he was, and there was a similarity to the way they held themselves—squinting, shoulders canted slightly to one side, as though flinching from something—the light? a sudden cold wind?—that made it seem as though they might be siblings or cousins and not just friends. I stared at the photo for a moment, glanced out the window at the parking lot, then looked at the last two pictures.
Both showed the man I’d seen. In one he was sitting alone at a table. Light filtered through a canopy of leaves and splattered his face yellow and black. He seemed brooding, distracted, though maybe he was just bored or tired. Behind him the hindquarters of the black dog could just be glimpsed, its tail an arrow aimed at the man’s outstretched legs.
The last photo was different.
It was the same man in the same chair at the same table. The black dog was gone. Now the man’s head was turned, looking at someone out of camera range. He’d moved just enough that sun fell full on his face, which was bright but not overlit. His hair had blown back a little from his forehead; his face was split with a smile so rapturous it seemed contorted. It made me uncomfortable, and I looked away.
Then I looked again. I tilted the picture back and forth, as though the unseen thing he stared at might materialize; waiting for that same sense of damage I’d felt outside to rise from the image like a striking cobra.
But it didn’t.
I frowned.
What was he looking at? His lover? His child? The black dog? It wasn’t just that no one had ever looked at me like that. I’d never seen anyone look at anything like that. His expression changed everything. I went back to the first photo and skimmed through them all again, as though they might now make sense, offer up a shared secret like a shell prised open with a knife.
Of course that didn’t happen. It would never happen. I knew that. They were nothing but a bunch of snapshots of someone else’s party. I would never know who these people were, or where they were. I would never know what the man saw, or who he was, or why he was in the motel room next to mine.
Only he wasn’t in the room next to mine. I was in his room. I glanced out the window. The parking lot was still empty. I slipped the pictures back into the yellow envelope, retaining a dupe of the man with that rapturous smile. Then I stuck the envelope back into the computer case and left. I made sure the door closed tight behind me, made sure no one saw me leave. I got into my car and started it, sat for a minute and waited, just in case someone appeared who might have seen me emerge from Room 1.
No one did. I turned the heat and defroster up to high and shoved the photograph into my copy of Deceptio Visus. I waited until a black streak ate through the frozen condensation on the windowsill, and I could see into the darkness that surrounded me. Then I drove slowly away from the motel, out onto the main road and down the narrow spine of the Paswegas Peninsula, until I reached Burnt Harbor.
8
The village consisted of a handful of buildings perched on a rocky ledge overlooking the harbor. Maybe it was beautiful in the daytime, in the middle of summer. Now, in the early dark of a November night, it was as desolate as the Lower East Side had been once upon a time. For that reason the place felt—well, not exactly welcoming, but familiar. Like walking into a room full of strangers in a foreign country then hearing them speak my native language.
…all that bleak shit you like? Well, this is it, Phil had told me.
He was right.
There wasn’t much there. DownEast Marine Supplies, a lobster shack that was closed for the winter. A streetlamp cast a milky gleam onto a broken sidewalk. On the hillside above the harbor, lights glowed in scattered houses. There was a small crescent-shaped gravel beach and a long stone pier that thrust into the water, dinghies tied up alongside it. Farther out a few lobster boats and a solitary sailboat. It smelled like a working harbor: that is, bad. I looked for a place that might be the harbormaster’s office—a building, a sign—but found nothing.
There was no mistaking the Good Tern, though—a tumbledown structure a few yards from the pier, gray shingled, with a torn plastic banner that read budweiser welcomes hunters beneath a weathered painting of a seagull. There were pickups out front, along with a few Subarus, and I could glimpse more cars parked around back. The lid of a dumpster banged noisily in the wind.
I parked, stuck the copy of Deceptio Visus into my bag, and got out. The wind off the water was frigid. In the seconds it took me to run toward the building, I was chilled again.
The entrance was covered with photocopies advertising bean suppers, a used Snocat, snowplow services. Yet another flyer looking for Martin Graves, the same faded image of a young man in wool cap and Nike T-shirt. Wherever he’d run off to, I hoped he was warmer than I was. I went inside.
The open room had bare wood floors, wooden tables with miniature hurricane lanterns holding candles, walls covered with faded posters advertising Grange dances. A bar stretched along one wall, where six or seven people hunkered down over drinks. No TV. Blues on the sound system. Several couples sat at the tables, old hippie types or maybe they were fishermen; rawfaced women with long hair, bearded men. A man by himself reading a newspaper. One or two of them glanced at me then went back to their dinners.
I couldn’t blame them. The food smelled good. A middle-aged woman wearing a bright Peruvian sweater showed me to a table along the far wall.
“Cold out tonight!” she said, sounding shocked: Maine, cold? “What can I get you?”
I ordered a shot of Jack Daniel’s, a beer, and two rare hamburgers. I knocked back the shot and ordered another, sipped my beer. When my burgers arrived, I wolfed them down then ordered another beer. That ache you get after doing crank, the sense that your brain has been walled up behind broken rubble—that began to subside, replaced by the slow pulse of alcohol.
I turned the pages carefully—it was probably the most valuable thing I owned—until I reached Kamestos’s brief introduction.
I have called this collection of photographs Deceptio Visus, “deceiving sight.” But there is nothing here that is deceptive. Our gaze changes all that it falls upon. Within these photographs, I hope, the discerning eye may see the truth.
It had been a long time since I’d read those words. Once they had seemed to explain the world to me, the way I saw things; the sense I had that someone, or something, watched me. But I had lost that way of seeing or feeling, if indeed I’d ever possessed it; if it even existed.
Now it all just seemed like shit. I looked around for my waitress to order another beer.
Two of the people at the bar were watching me. One was a solid-looking man with a graying beard and close-cropped brown hair. A rat-tail braid dangled across his shoulder. As he cocked his head, light glanced off a jeweled stud in one earlobe. He wore a red flannel shirt, stained jeans, heavy workboots. He had a cigarette tucked behind one ear and a yellow pencil behind the other.
Beside him sat the man I’d run into at the Lighthouse. He stared at me, frowning slightly. Then he stood, picked up his wineglass, and walked over.
“Can I see that?” He pointed at my book.
Before I could say anything, before I could even remember the stolen photograph inside it, he picked up Deceptio Visus.
“No,” I said, but he had already opened it. He glanced at the copyright page then handed it back to me.
“My copy’s signed,” he said.
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