Generation Loss cn-1

by Elizabeth Hand

  It was another mask, like the frog I’d seen on Toby’s boat. Green, with a beaked mouth and a stiff ridged collar like some kind of horned dinosaur, only this thing had no horns. The glossy paint had peeled, revealing swatches of newsprint. I touched it. It felt pulpy and soft, like an enormous mushroom.

  I walked to the rear of the bus. Here a few windows were intact. A raised plywood platform held a foam mattress covered with the remains of an india-print spread, chewed to a paisley filigree. Above the bed, moisture-swollen paperbacks lined a small bookshelf.

  What the Trees Said. The Forgotten Art of Building a Stone Wall. Walden Two.

  The only hardcover was an old edition of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane. Its frontispiece was stamped Harvard Divinity School Library above a name written in faded blue.

  D. Ahearn.

  I opened it. The spine was broken, its pages heavily annotated in the same blue ink.

  UNDERTAKING THE CREATION

  OF THE WORLD

  GENERATION THROUGH RETURN

  TO THE TIME OF ORIGINS !!!!!!

  recovering this time of origin implies ritual repetition of the gods’ creative act.

  !!!!!!!! The marine monster Tiamat !!!!—symbol of darkness, of the formless, the non-manifested—

  Excitable boy, I thought.

  There was also a New Directions paperback of Stephen Haselton’s poetry, with a picture of him on the back. A thin guy, fair haired, clean shaven, blandly handsome. Photo credit: Aphrodite Kamestos.

  I flipped through this book but found nothing. No name on the frontispiece. No marginalia. I tossed it onto the shelf and wandered back to the front of the bus. The place looked and felt as though it had been stripped of everything that might have been of interest or value. Not even a torn Grateful Dead poster remained.

  So much for the counterculture.

  I went outside. Dun-colored clouds crowded the sky. The wind rattled stalks of burdock and dead goldenrod as I headed toward the path. As I entered the stand of trees, I hesitated, feeling that someone was watching me. I turned and looked back at the clearing.

  A gray stone loomed among rubble and dead ferns. That was all.

  14

  No one was in the house when I got back. I paced between the kitchen and the living room, anxious for Gryffin to return and tell me I had a ride to the mainland. I killed time by cracking the second bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I considered calling Phil to ream him out but decided I’d rather do it in person.

  Finally I decided to take another look at Aphrodite’s island photos. I’d spent my life dreaming of them. Maybe for just a little longer, I could pretend I was in my own private museum, with the pictures all to myself.

  The upstairs hall was cold and smelled of ash. I retrieved my camera and went into the room, leaned against the wall and stared at the photos.

  After a few minutes I shot a few frames. It felt good to handle my camera again without someone yelling at me to put it down. I knew I’d never get anything worthwhile—I was fighting nightfall, exhaustion, Jack Daniel’s on a nearly empty stomach. I stumbled around anyway, struggling to get enough distance, enough light, a focus.

  The sound of the shutter release was like a moth beating against glass. I took a dozen pictures then slid down to the floor. I began to cry.

  Those photos … They were so fucking amazing. It was like she’d thrown open a window and let you look into a perfect world, the most beautiful place you could ever imagine, but you could never get inside it. No matter what I did, I would never be able to produce something that good. I would never make something great. Even at my best, for fifteen seconds thirty years ago, I wasn’t capable of it. Aphrodite had been right.

  Bile and the afterburn of bourbon rose in my throat. I lurched into the hall and ran right into Gryffin.

  “Jesus!” He caught me and shook his head. “Can’t you walk out a door without knocking me over?”

  “No.” I pushed past him.

  “Hey, wait up—”

  He followed me to my room. I shoved my camera into my bag, avoiding his eyes.

  “What happened?” he said. “Did Aphrodite get back?”

  “No.” I fought to keep my voice even. “Did you find Toby? I really need to get out of here.”

  “He wasn’t around. Suze said he had a job in Collinstown and he stayed over there.”

  “I have to go! Isn’t there someone else? The harbormaster, the fucking Coast Guard—I don’t care who it is. Just get me back to my car!”

  “Hey, I wish I could, okay? But no one’s around. Merrill Libby’s daughter never came home last night. Everett’s helping organize a search party.”

  “Then why aren’t you there?”

  “I’m city folk now. They don’t want me.”

  He leaned against the door. “I came to see if you felt like celebrating.” He grinned and suddenly looked remarkably like the guy in the snapshot. “I just made fifteen grand.”

  I snorted. “Stock market?”

  “I sold a first edition to a guy out in L.A. That’s what took me so long. Suze has a better internet connection at the store, so I was working from there. I’ve been waiting till the market was right. I paid ten pounds for it—about fifteen bucks—at a shop in Suffolk a few years ago.”

  “Nice turnaround. What is it?”

  “Northern Lights. The original title for The Golden Compass.”

  “What’s The Golden Compass?”

  “I thought you worked at the Strand?”

  “Not in the stacks. Stock room.”

  “It’s a children’s book—that’s where the big money is. The English edition predates the American, so…”

  “Is it a good book?”

  “You think I have time to read these things? You didn’t answer me—you want to help me celebrate?”

  “How? Where do you spend fifteen grand around here?”

  He started down the hall. “I’m going to dinner again at Ray’s. I told him last night, if I came back I might bring another guest—I figured if you were still around you’d need to get away from this place. He’s a good cook. He has a decent wine closet. But I’m leaving now, so—”

  I followed him downstairs into the kitchen.

  “So either you come with me or you’re on your own, dinner-wise,” he finished.

  He went into the mudroom, pulled on his coat and picked up a big flashlight, dashed into the kitchen and returned with a small book that he stuck into his pocket.

  “For Ray,” he explained. “You coming?”

  “Yeah, what the hell.” I glanced down at my T-shirt and leather jacket. “I’m not dressed for dinner.”

  “For Paswegas, you’re overdressed.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Not that far. Come on.”

  He walked outside, heading for the water then turned to where a line of white birches glowed ghostly in the early dark. “Less than a mile. There’s a path through here, just watch your step.”

  He switched on the flashlight. The birches flared as though they’d been ignited, and Gryffin disappeared into a thicket.

  “Is Ray another book collector?” I said, hurrying to catch up.

  “Not really. He’s just … a collector. All kinds of things. Books, junk, stuff he finds at the dump. Folk art—he’s big into folk art. Primitive art.”

  “Like Cohen Finster?”

  “Not that classy. Ray likes his art down and dirty. Not pornographic—well, not necessarily pornographic—but he likes an artist with dirt under his fingernails. You know, guys who build a model of the Sistine Chapel out of old carburetor parts. Lifesized cows carved out of soap. That kind of stuff. But you’ll like his place—Toby helped him build it. Ray’s one of the original cliffdwellers.”

  After about ten minutes the path began to climb more steeply. I grabbed at trees for balance. The wind raged up from the water, bitter cold, and sent dead leaves whirling around us. Finally we reached the top.

  “This is it
.” Gryffin stopped. He pointed the flashlight to where the ground abruptly disappeared. “See that? Don’t go that way”

  The boom of waves echoed up to us, the relentless wind. He waved the flashlight, and its beam disappeared into the darkness. I turned and saw lights showing through the mist.

  “What the hell is that?” I said.

  “That’s Ray’s place.”

  It was made entirely of salvage. Clapboards, barn siding; car hoods and bumpers; washing machine doors and a satellite dish, as well as cinder blocks, corrugated metal, blue sheets of insulation. There were dozens of windows, no two alike. Solar panels covered the roof. A row of propane tanks was lined up alongside one wall, and a Rube Goldberg contraption that looked like it might have something to do with water.

  Weirdest of all was that it had all been fashioned to look like a castle, complete with a shallow moat filled with dead leaves, a footbridge made of two-by-fours, and a turret. Sheets of plastic flapped from the walls, as though it were a snake shedding its skin.

  “Boy, Sauron’s really fallen on hard times,” I said.

  “He built it all himself, and it didn’t cost a thing,” said Gryffin. He strode across the footbridge to a door which had once belonged to a walk-in freezer. “Hey, Ray! Company—”

  The steel door swung open, revealing a teenage boy, maybe seventeen or eighteen. Tall and heavyset, with sandy hair and beautiful, almond-shaped blue eyes in a pockmarked face. He gave Gryffin a perfunctory smile, but when he saw me the smile faded.

  “Gryffin, hey.” The boy lifted his chin in greeting and stepped away from the door. Around his neck he wore a necklace like the one Kenzie had made, of seaglass and aluminum tabs. “S’up?”

  I followed Gryffin inside. The boy gave me a hostile stare. His mouth parted so that I could see a black stud like a boil on the tip of his tongue.

  “Nice,” I said. “You oughta have that looked at.”

  We walked into a large room filled with freestanding bookshelves. Faded banners hung from the ceiling like flypaper, emblazoned with mottoes in the same lurid colors as the old school bus.

  VENCEREMOS!

  THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS HAS NO EXPIRATION DATE

  TEMPIS FUCKIT

  The books leaned heavily toward the Beats, mangled paperbacks of On The Road and Junkie and The Dharma Bums, but also some that were valuable. And there was artwork, if you could call it that: a couple of Paint-by-Number pictures in homemade frames; a series of paintings of fanciful dirigibles on small oval canvases; a poem composed of words and phrases cut from newspapers then glued on a sheet of cardboard and signed by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. That would be worth what the whole house cost to construct, plus a small retainer for Lurch back by the front door.

  There were framed photos, too, on the wall beside the kitchen, where Gryffin had disappeared. I heard a whoop, and Gryffin stepped out.

  “Well, glad you’re pleased,” he said. “I told you I might bring someone? Here she is. Cass, this is Ray—”

  A figure came bustling toward me. A stocky man in green drawstring pants and voluminous purple T-shirt, his white hair long and wild, eyes glinting behind purple-framed glasses repaired with duct tape. His face looked as though it had been dropped then reassembled by someone who’d never done it before. The hand he thrust at me was missing the middle finger.

  “Hello, hello!” he exclaimed in a hoarse Brooklyn accent. “So glad to have anuthah visitor. Ray Provenzano.”

  He shook my hand vigorously. “You didn’t mind coming to dinner, did you? Aphrodite’s a terrible cook. Robert! Robert!”

  He shouted, and the boy who’d let us in lumbered back into view. Ray clapped a hand on his shoulder and looked at me. “What would you like to drink, Cassandra? Wine? I just opened a great Medoc.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Robert, get another bottle, wouldja please? Here—”

  Ray stepped into the kitchen. There was the sound of stirring, a burst of fragrant smoke, and he reemerged holding two full wineglasses.

  “Shalom,” he said, thrusting one at me. “I know who you are—the photographer who shoots dead things. I googled you. I’ll hafta see if I can get some of your stuff. Your book, maybe. You still taking pictures?”

  He kept talking as he ducked back into the kitchen. “You can see, I’m a big collector. All kinds of stuff. If I’d known you were coming, I’d of gotten your book. How’s that wine?”

  “Good,” I said.

  “You like cassoulet?” He poked me with a wooden spoon. “Not in the kitchen! Gryffin, get her outta here. Go sit or something, I got stuff to do.”

  I went into the main room. Robert sat on a sprung couch, listening to an iPod through a pair of earbuds. Gryffin stood perusing the bookshelves. I made a dent in my wine, then inspected those photographs.

  He had a good eye, this friend of Gryffin’s. There was a signed early Caponigro; a Bobbi Carey cyanotype; an image from Kamestos’s island sequence that I’d never seen before.

  But it was the next photo that made me catch my breath.

  It reminded me of Aphrodite’s stuff. Threads and fuzz protruded from the hardened emulsion, and a stew of pigments bled through the image. Colors you normally wouldn’t see in the same frame—magenta, crimson, a sickly psychedelic orange; acid green, spurts of violet and leathery brown. The rush of colors was disorienting but also purposeful, like one of those untitled de Kooning paintings that seems to hover just beyond comprehension.

  Somebody knew what he was doing here. But I sure as hell couldn’t figure it out: I was at a total loss as to what I was looking at.

  To make it worse, the picture had been messed with after processing. I could see brushstrokes and the marks of a fine-point drafting pen, or maybe a needle, and there were bits of leaves or feathers just under the emulsion surface. It all distracted from the image itself, that abstract mass of color and texture; and while there was a real painterly quality in the use of pigment and brushwork, it was definitely a photograph and not a painting. All the post-production stuff—brushstrokes, dirt—made it impossible to get a fix on what the original image had been.

  Perversely, that’s also what made it hard to look away. It was weirdly familiar, like Aphrodite’s pictures, but like something else too. What? I kept feeling like I almost had a handle on it—a face, a dog, a branch—feeling like I knew what it was. I’d seen it before.

  I’d bet cash money that whoever shot this picture had looked a long time at Mors, maybe too long. And I’d bet my life it was the same guy who’d shot those peekaboo pictures of the little hippie chick.

  The weirdest thing was how it smelled.

  You had to be practically on top of it to notice, but it was there—a pungent, indisputably bad smell, like nothing I’d ever encountered before. It smelled like a skunk, only much, much worse, musky and intensely fishy at the same time. It smelled horrible and rank without smelling like something dead—whatever it was, it somehow smelled alive. I’ve been around corpses. I’ve seen a body hauled out of the East River. I’ve taken pictures of a severed arm.

  None of them smelled good. And none of them smelled like this.

  Gryffin came up behind me. “What’re you looking at?”

  “This picture here,” I said. “Who took it?”

  Gryffin squinted at it. “I dunno. Ask Ray.”

  “It’s not by Aphrodite, right?”

  “Definitely not. Although…”

  He peered at the corner of the print, then tapped it. “Look at that.”

  I had trouble seeing it at first, but then I made it out—a tiny word, in black ballpoint ink, printed carefully as though by a kid.

  S.P.O.T.

  “‘Spot’? What’s that?” I remembered the turtle shell I’d seen in the Island Store. “What, is it a pet?”

  “It’s a joke. It’s got to be one of Denny’s.”

  “Denny Ahearn?”

  “Yeah. Ray would know. Want more wine?”

  We
sat at a table set with candles and heavy old silver, also two more bottles of wine. I refilled my glass and said, “So Denny—he was a photographer too?”

  “Oh sure.” Gryffin rolled his eyes. “Drugs, sex, photography—Denny’s a Renaissance man.”

  “Robert!” Ray’s blistering voice rang from the kitchen. “Get in here, I need you. Now!”

  Robert stood, still jacked into his earbuds, hitched up his pants, and sloped into the kitchen. I leaned across the table toward Gryffin. “What’s with the kid? Does this guy like getting beaten up by the natives?”

  “Robert’s eighteen. Ray pays him to help out. I don’t think they sleep together—Ray just likes to have someone to boss around.”

  “Helps out with what?” I looked at the skeins of dust trailing from the ceiling and walls. “Is Robert in charge of the duct tape?”

  “Voila!” Ray made his entrance, carrying a Majolica tureen. “Cassoulet!”

  There was also home-baked bread and pickled string beans. The wine was great.

  And there was a lot of it. The cluttered space began to take on a warm glow. If I let my eyes go out of focus, I could almost imagine what our host might see in Robert, who ate in silence, earbuds dangling around his neck.

  Mostly, though, I looked at Gryffin. There was nothing special about him. He was nothing like my type, unless you consider too much melanin in one iris to constitute a type.

  But I couldn’t tear my eyes from him. I kept waiting to see him look the way he did in that stolen photograph.

  It wasn’t happening. Occasionally he’d glance at me, that oddly furtive look. When we finished eating, Robert cleared the table then brought in more glasses and a bottle of Calvados before flopping back onto the couch. Within minutes I heard him snoring softly.

  “Ray.” Gryffin pointed to the photo we’d examined earlier. “That picture—who took it?”

  “That one?” Ray’s broken face twisted into a frown. “That’s Aphrodite’s.”