Generation Loss cn-1

by Elizabeth Hand

  “They live in the quarries here,” whispered Denny. “Lakes and quarries and swamps. They eat the dead, did you know that? So that they can be reborn.”

  I glanced around. I didn’t know what would be worse—to see some sign that Kenzie had been here, or not.

  There was a sofa and armchair, a few tables, an old turntable and rows of LPs. A wooden drying rack hung above the woodstove. Tucked into a corner was a propane-fueled refrigerator, a slate sink with an old-fashioned hand pump. A stale smell hung over everything, sweat and marijuana mingled with woodsmoke and the underlying stink of fish and musk.

  There were lots of books. Joseph Campbell, Carlos Castaneda, Terence McKenna. The Whole Earth Catalog, the Anarchist’s Cookbook. Photography books. A copy of Deceptio Visus. I opened it and saw Aphrodite’s elegantly penned inscription inside.

  For Denny, who longs to see the Mysteries

  With love from One who knows Them

  There were other photography books, and numerous tomes on folklore and anthropology—including, of course, The Sacred and The Profane. I picked it up.

  “You know that book,” said Denny. It wasn’t a question.

  He touched the volume with a trembling hand. His fingertips were dark pink, as though they’d been dyed.

  “To emerge from the belly of a monster is to be reborn,” he whispered. “The beloved passes from one realm to the next and is devoured to be reborn. When I found her they had been at her already for a week. But there is no death. You understand that. I always knew that you understood.”

  He bared his teeth again in that blue-veined smile. “I told him to send you. Because you’re the girl who shoots dead things. So I knew you would come.”

  He lifted a shaking hand and pointed to another book. As though sleepwalking, I knelt and drew it from the shelf.

  DEAD GIRLS

  PHOTOGRAPHS BY CASSANDRA NEARY

  The pages were soiled and worn from being pored over. I turned them slowly, while Denny stood above me and watched.

  “Hannah gave me that,” he whispered. “As a present. She thought it was better than Aphrodite’s book.”

  I stared at all those portraits of my twenty-year-old self, all those speed-fueled pictures of my friends. On every page, in every one, he’d effaced the eyes with White-Out then drawn another pair with a tiny green star in each.

  I turned to the last page. There, beneath the Runway colophon and a small black-and-white photo of me in torn jeans and T-shirt, were three carefully formed letters in black ballpoint ink.

  I C U

  I fought to catch my breath. What I felt was so beyond damage it was like a new color, something so dark and terrible it left no room for sight or sound or taste.

  I put the book back on the shelf and stood. Denny stared at me. His eyes shone, childlike.

  “I’m a photographer too,” he said.

  “I know. Toby—he told me. I saw—he showed me a couple of your pictures. Ray Provenzano too. And I saw the ones at Lucien’s place. They’re—they’re beautiful.”

  “We have the eye.” He looked at the ceiling, his face everywhere, and laughed. “When I saw your pictures, that was when I knew. Aphrodite began the process, but she stopped. You and me, we carry the dead on our backs. We write on the dead. Thanatography—we invented that.”

  “I don’t think I invented it,” I said. “Matthew Brady, maybe. Or, uh, Joel-Peter Witkin.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Just us, Cassandra. You and me.”

  I looked around, fighting panic. Other than the single picture enshrined on that table, there were no photos anywhere.

  “That girl.” I pointed at the photograph. “Who was she?”

  He said nothing; just stared at me.

  “Your pictures,” I said. “Don’t you have any of your other pictures?”

  “Of course.” He turned and shuffled toward a door. “It’s why you’re here.”

  He held the door for me, switched on a fluorescent bulb to reveal a tiny windowless room with no furniture, only a small round prayer rug on the floor. Around its circumference was a circle formed of turtle shells.

  “Be careful.” Denny picked up a turtle shell, pressed it to his forehead then replaced it on the floor. He straightened. “These are what you came to see.”

  Photographs covered the walls, all in handmade frames: color prints on handmade emulsion paper, worked with pen and needle and ink. They had the same eerie, highly saturated glow as Aphrodite’s archipelago sequence.

  But seeing these, I knew why Aphrodite had stopped working, and maybe why she’d started drinking.

  Because they weren’t just better than her photos. They were better than almost anything I’d ever seen. Every comparable artist I could think of, all those so-called transgressive photographers—the ones who pretend to push the envelope, then before you know it they’re signing a deal with Starbucks and doing the Christmas windows at Barney’s—this guy wiped the floor with them. Those photographers would take you to the edge of something.

  Denny went the rest of the way, to a place you didn’t want to go. And once he got there, he jumped.

  Aphrodite had pulled back from there, and from him. Wisely, I thought, now that I could see what he’d been doing all these years.

  But it was too late for me. I was already falling.

  I wanted to touch them, I could touch them. I could smell them too—the entire room reeked of musk and rotting fish. I gagged and covered my nose with my sleeve.

  Denny seemed to have forgotten I was there. He stood in front of one picture and stared at it. I forced myself to breathe through my mouth then shoved my hands in my pockets so he wouldn’t notice how they shook.

  Based on what I’d glimpsed in the tree outside, I now had a pretty solid idea as to what they were pictures of. But I might have a hard time convincing anyone else, unless they’d seen what I’d seen by the quarry. These images were so murky and strange, so tied into Denny’s own, incomprehensible mythology, that they defied any simple description. They didn’t shout out Dead Body! They shouted Beautiful, and Weird.

  Beside the door hung a black-and-white photo that seemed older than the rest, the only picture that wasn’t in color. It showed the arching limbs of a leafless tree, its bark striated black and white against a gray sky. A large animal crouched in the crux of two limbs ten feet above the ground. I immediately thought of the fisher.

  But when I peered at it more closely, I saw that it wasn’t crouching. It was dead.

  And it wasn’t a fisher. It was a dog, a black Labrador retriever. Its front legs dangled so that I could see where the fur had been eaten away. Where its eyes had been were two coronas of bone, and a tendril that might have been an insect or a bit of tissue. The flesh had drawn away from its muzzle, giving it a snarling rictus. Its loose pelt appeared to be sliding from its body.

  “That’s my dog, Moody.” I jumped as Denny breathed in my ear. “He was a good old dog.”

  I stared at the words the bottom of the print: S.P.O.T 1997 and a title.

  “‘Sky Burial,’” I read aloud.

  “That’s what they do in Tibet,” said Denny. His eyes were huge and nearly colorless in the fluorescent light. “Excarnation. A bridge between the worlds, we carry the dead to be reborn.” He smiled, flashing blue-lined gums. “The first step.”

  “Right,” I said. “Thank you for letting me see these.”

  I edged toward the door, and something broke beneath my boot.

  I’d stepped on one of the turtle shells. Denny looked at it then ran his tongue along his lip.

  “Wait for me in the other room,” he said.

  I did. The turntable had gone silent. I thought of Toby, snoring on Lucien’s chaise, and of Kenzie, God knows where. I fumbled for my Jack Daniel’s, heard myself saying Fuck fuck fuck beneath my breath.

  Denny stepped back into the room. “What?”

  “Nothing.” I ran a hand through my hair, stalling. “Just, I’m sorry.”


  “Sorry? For what?”

  “The—the turtle. Your turtle shell. It seemed, they all seemed … special. The dog too.” I hesitated. “And her. The dead girl. Hannah.”

  “Nothing really dies. You understand that. Cassandra. Cass.” My name came out as a soft hiss. “Your pictures—you understood. You know what happens. You’ve seen it.”

  I remembered being in a car in the woods, headlights shining through trees then fading into darkness; something I saw but could never look at.

  “No,” I said.

  He flexed his hands, tugged the cuff of his shirt as though it irritated him. Above his wrist were three raw red lines where he’d been scratched. He glanced up and saw me staring.

  “You said you had news.” He went to the woodstove, picked up a log, and shoved it inside. “What is it?”

  “Aphrodite. She’s—she’s dead. Last night, there was an accident. She, it looks like she fell.”

  He stood, silent, as though he hadn’t heard. Finally he whispered, “Aphrodite. She told you to come see me?”

  “No—no, she’s dead. Because—”

  “Because what?” His head tilted and his eyes went black. “What happened?”

  “I came here to talk to her,” I stammered. “To interview her. That’s how I saw your pictures. I—”

  “I brought you here.” His voice rose hoarsely, and he lifted his hand as though to strike. Abruptly he covered his eyes. “Oh, Aphrodite, oh, oh…..”

  His voice dropped so I could barely hear him. “Does the boy know?”

  “Yes.”

  Denny’s eyes opened.

  “It was you,” he whispered.

  Everything contracted to a pinprick of pure black. The room was gone, he was gone. There was nothing but the memory of light, and myself plunging into a void. My hand shot out to keep from falling. Something grabbed it, cold and horribly strong. Within a guttering streetlamp I saw an eye, the eye, turning upon itself until it swallowed everything.

  “No.” I blinked and pulled away. The eye belonged to Denny, not me, green flecked, staring. “No. It was an accident. She fell. That was all.”

  Denny gazed at me. At last he said, “You watched.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I watched.”

  He picked up a poker and looked at it contemplatively. Then he walked to the rows of records, withdrew an LP and placed it on the turntable. After a moment, vinyl hiss and pop gave way to a sound like a heartbeat. Harry Nilsson, “Jump into the Fire.”

  “Such a beautiful song,” he whispered.

  He stood between me and the door and ran his hand along the poker. My voice broke as I asked, “Do you—could I use your bathroom?”

  “It’s right in there.” He gestured toward the back of the room. “It’s a composting toilet.”

  He walked to the front door and stared outside.

  The composting toilet reeked of fresh sawdust, shit, spoiled meat, and musk. There was no lock inside the bathroom, no window, no sink. Just a plastic bucket on the floor and a metal shower stall with a heavy canvas curtain.

  But there was a second door with shiny new brass hardware. The addition: the new darkroom that Toby had built. I slipped inside and closed the door behind me.

  It was pitch black and smelled of sulfur and almonds. I trailed my hand along the wall until I found a switch that bathed the room in red safelight.

  Shelves held bottles of pigment, processing chemicals, sheaves of watercolor stock; a five-pound bag of granulated sugar. A table with three sinks was recessed into the wall alongside a plastic water barrel and footpump, a metal garbage can with a lid.

  A second table looked as though it had been set for a macabre dinner. Feathers and dead leaves surrounded a single large sheet of paper. Fanned around it were locks of hair arranged by color—black, gray, pale gold—and what appeared to be slivers of dried fungus.

  And something else. An oversized scrapbook, its cover made of much-patched and heavily embroidered denim, its title picked out in ransom-note lettering.

  EYE

  AM

  WITHIN

  DENNIS AHEARN, S.P.O.T.

  Photos spiraled around the title, fragments of snapshots, SX-70 Polaroids, pictures ripped from magazines and newspapers. Every one was an eye.

  I touched the raised medallion that surmounted Denny’s name. It was a snapping turtle carapace no bigger than a quarter. Where its head should have been was a minute braid of human hair.

  The book was so heavy, I needed both hands to open it. The pages were crowded with Denny’s handwriting and Denny’s photographs, retouched with paint and decorated with dried leaves and flowers, dead insects, feathers, scraps of fur, and human hair, a toenail. There were pictures of a girl with long brown hair, mugging for the camera with a spotted turtle shell in each hand: covering her breasts with the shells, covering her face, laughing. I turned to a Polaroid of Denny and Hannah Meadows, naked and lying side by side, a caption inked beneath in painstaking blue letters.

  Sacred and Profane Order of the Turtle

  I thought of the awful irony, to play at ritual then have your rites become horribly real, when you discovered your lover’s decomposing body attended by your totems.

  When I found her they had been at her already for a week.

  I thought of lying facedown on the backseat of a car in the dark; of kneeling in an empty street beneath a broken lamp as another car sped away; of erasing a voice from an answering machine a few hours before the sky filled with ash.

  You and me, we carry the dead on our backs.

  I stared at the pictures before me, photographs of the dead and collages made of hair and human skin, a fringe of pale eyelashes like a tiny feathered wing, fingerbones and teeth strung on a length of silver cord.

  I shivered. Not because I was afraid.

  Because it was beautiful. And because I recognized it.

  It was like neurons firing inside my own skull, like something I’d dreamed in childhood. I have no idea how long I stood there, turning those pages, but for those moments nothing else mattered. There was only me and a book of photos illustrating rites only I would ever understand, heroes and heroines only I knew. A girl in a white nurse’s uniform, a brave black dog, a schoolbus like a tortoiseshell palace. Lovers dressed in carapaces of bone and dried flesh and hummingbird pelts. A trapdoor had opened in the world and I’d fallen through, onto a bridge built of bone and flayed skin and eyes, the wings of dragonflies and a snapping turtle’s shell. I couldn’t look away.

  I turned the final page. A piece of crumpled paper dropped to the floor.

  have you seen martin graves?

  I closed the book. Music still swirled from the living room. I went to the shelves above the sink, grabbed a packet covered with brown paper and ripped away one corner.

  Sheets of plate glass.

  I covered my nose then pried open the metal garbage can. It was filled with eggshells and a putrid syrup of rotting yolks. I shoved the lid back in place.

  Albumen: egg white. It’s what the earliest photographers used to create a glass negative. It was low-tech, perfect for someone living off the grid. Perfect for someone with time on his hands. You take egg whites and sugar—that’s what the sugar was for—water and potassium iodide, beat them to a froth and decant them. You pour this over a glass plate, then fix it by suspending it above a heat source. A woodstove would be ideal. Afterward you soak each plate in a bath of silver nitrate and gallic acid, rinse off the excess silver, repeat the entire process and let them dry.

  I’d read about this stuff, but I’d never known anyone who actually did it. I searched until I found the last part of Denny’s fantasy factory—an unwieldy contraption of black canvas and long wooden poles.

  A dark tent. Beside it stood a homemade box camera.

  He was making daguerreotypes. The dark tent’s legs—that’s what caused the indentations I’d seen in the ground by the corpse tree. He’d slide the glass negative into the box camera, go outside
and set up the tent with its black curtains to keep the light out. He’d shoot.

  It would take a long exposure time, a quarter-hour if overcast. That’s why the people in old daguerreotype portraits always have such fixed expressions—they couldn’t move, or the negative would register a blur.

  This wasn’t a problem with Denny’s subjects.

  And after the neg was exposed…

  I looked quickly among the shelves until I found a very old glass prescription bottle.

  BOLTON-LIBBY DRUG CO.

  BURNT HARBOR, MAINE

  I tilted the bottle toward the safelight to read the last word.

  MERCURY

  Daguerreotypists developed their negs inside the dark tent, holding the glass plate above a bowl of mercury and a spirit lamp. As heated mercury vapor whirled around the plate, the image appeared.

  Denny must have done this hundreds of times, for years and years. It’s why his hands shook, and why his gums had turned blue; it explained why everyone said he was such a sweetheart.

  He had been, once upon a time. Then Hannah Meadows died, gruesomely, and to memorialize her he revived a lost art, without bothering to learn about its dangers. Otherwise he’d have known that what drove 19th century hatters mad, with brain damage and psychosis, had driven daguerreotypists mad too.

  Denny had mercury poisoning.

  I put the mercury down and looked until I discovered another century-old bottle, the reason why Denny’s darkroom smelled of bitter almond.

  CYANIDE OF POTASSIUM

  Daguerreotypists used it to clean glass negs, so they could be reused. I remembered one of my NYU instructors reading a 1856 text on the subject.

  I feel a little unwilling to recommend this mode, as it involves the use of the deadly poison cyanide of potassium; but as every man who photographs must necessarily use what we call dangerous chemicals, I can only caution the beginner.

  I replaced the bottle, turned off the safelight, and stepped back into the bathroom.

  And froze.