A Division of the Light

by Christopher Burns

  Alice believed in fate. She believed that lives crossed and became entangled in patterns that were not immediately detectable. She thought it probable that she had not been robbed merely by chance. Instead she had been humiliated and injured for a higher purpose; one that she could not yet discern, and one that the robbers would never appreciate because there was no need for them to understand. They, she and Gregory were all unconscious agents of an obscure force that lay outside the boundaries of the material world but which oversaw and guided it.

  Such a belief did not seem fantastic to Alice. It was as rational as Gregory’s faith in the immortality of the image, as certain as Thomas’s belief in the processes of time. It was even possible that neither she nor Gregory would ever grasp the true meaning of this synchronicity. Perhaps they were never meant to, for as Alice walked around his room any hint of purpose was clouded and puzzling.

  Gregory watched and wondered what was occupying her mind. “Take a good look round,” he said. “Feel free.”

  Alice wondered if the hidden intention of each event was to guide her toward a re-evaluation of her life. Perhaps her feelings had to be intensified, or an impetus given to decisions over which she was hesitating. Most unsettling of all, it was conceivable that the robbery had happened purely so that she and Gregory Pharaoh would meet and become involved, and that her choice of the Weston postcard had unwittingly sealed that pattern. Why else should she have suddenly decided to walk down that pavement at that specific time? Since she always carried her bag on the inside to lessen the chance of theft, why had she decided, without reason, to hang it from the other shoulder? It could not have been mere coincidence that she and a strange photographer had been in the same part of the city at the same time, just as it was more than just chance that had led her into being robbed. Gregory could just have stopped her, as he had said he would have done; but if so, she would undoubtedly have ignored him and walked on. Or he might not even have noticed Alice, not spoken, and allowed her to walk past. That was why it had been necessary to have the two of them thrust together in a manner dramatic enough to make it certain they would meet again.

  She looked round for the photographs he had taken of the robbery, but found none. Instead the first print that caught her attention was a portrait of an adolescent girl wearing what looked like a communion dress. The girl stared out of the limits of her life with a kind of mute integrity.

  “This was taken a couple of weeks ago,” Gregory explained.

  “Who is she?”

  “She has visions of the Madonna. Some believe that she’s been singled out and touched with holiness. It’s the usual kind of setup. It won’t be long before her village will be marketed as a shrine.”

  “She looks as if her mind is elsewhere, as if she doesn’t even belong to this world.”

  “You think so? I don’t know what to believe about her. Maybe her story is a fantastic lie that she has to maintain because everything has gone too far and now there’s no way out. Or maybe she really did see something. Or imagined she did.”

  Looking at the pinched, closed face, Alice became certain that the girl had indeed witnessed something extraordinary, and that she would always be convinced of the integrity of her vision. It was only the rising clamor of the encroaching world that she could not deal with.

  “She’s not making it up,” Alice said.

  “Well, schizophrenics don’t, do they? They truly believe in godlike voices that only they can hear.”

  “I’m sure it’s not just saints and martyrs who hear voices. Ordinary people must have had visions too. They must have had them before history even started.”

  “Ah, this is your boyfriend talking.”

  Alice was irritated by his presumption. “No, Mr. Pharaoh, it’s me. And what I was going to say is that their minds must have been filled with beliefs that would seem alien to us. Just like this girl’s mental world couldn’t be understood by you.”

  “Photographers can’t enter an internal world, but we can demonstrate its surface effects.”

  Alice nodded at the surroundings. “And all these demonstrations were arranged to impress me?”

  “It took a long time to set it all up,” Gregory answered. She was not sure if he smiled as he said it.

  “And my photographs?”

  “Look at this one first.”

  And he indicated a large print of a serious-faced man wearing bishop’s regalia. Every line on his face was clear as a contour on a map. The lens had captured a variance in the sheen of his vestments. An ornate ring demonstrated a jeweler’s art.

  “I’d been photographing him just before we met. That’s why I was carrying the 5D; it’s designed for close detail.”

  “You must specialize in taking religious subjects. But I don’t know who he is.”

  “Actually I’m much more interested in the worldly. As for this subject, well, the photograph tells you all you need to know—his position in the Church; his character. You can’t read that kind of formal information in the shots I took of you.” Gregory indicated a desk with a screen and printer. “I left the best copies there. Should I ever want to exhibit one, I’d pick it from them.”

  Aware of his judgmental stare, Alice approached the desk with deliberation. Now that the promised images were in front of her, now that she could study them closely, even touch them, she was unsure how she would react.

  At first she hardly recognized herself. The prints had been arranged to give prominence to extreme close-ups, and each had been scrupulously balanced for tone and form.

  “This could be anyone,” she said after a few seconds. “They’re like . . . pieces of me. Although it’s not really me at all.”

  “You’re wrong,” Gregory said.

  She lifted one of the prints to peruse it. Light from the high windows flexed along its surface.

  “It’s what was me. You’ve reduced me. I’m nothing but a kind of geometry.”

  “You’re not reduced at all. I’ve taken aspects of you and enhanced them.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like your hair. Look at the way the light flows across the frame from the upper left quadrant, and how the strands of hair pick up on that motion and break parts of it into tiny fractures. Or this one here. The fallen sunglasses suggest that something unusual has happened, or that it may still be happening. A sense of unease, of the incorrect, is magnified by the tension in the hands below the fallen body. And the next print, where—”

  “That’s what I mean. None of them give any idea of what I’m like. There’s nothing of my personality in these.”

  “If you want your personality to be shown, then you have to let me take your portrait in a studio session. You know I want to do that.” After a short pause, Gregory added: “I’m being honest and I’m being straightforward.”

  Alice put down the photograph and picked up another before she answered.

  “But you don’t even know what my personality is.”

  “The lens will show it. It showed the bishop and it showed the girl who has the visions. You saw that it did. People will look at your face and they’ll know, just as you knew when you looked at the face of the girl. You could see the past and the present in her face, and maybe you could see her future, too.”

  Alice stared hard at the sleekly doctored fragments of herself.

  Only one photograph showed her entire body. It was pitched forward with outstretched arms. It appeared to Alice that she was not falling but rising, borne aloft on invisible wings. Only one foot was still in contact with the ground, and that was lifting from her shoe as if to abandon it.

  “A portrait can’t show a whole personality,” she objected. “It would be just an aspect, as incomplete as these are. And maybe just as misleading.”

  “A portrait is never misleading; it’s illuminating. If the photographer is good then the subjects will discover things about themselves. Things that they had never known.”

  “Do you say that to all your sitters? T
hey must think you unusually arrogant.”

  Gregory raised an arm to show that she should look more carefully around the room.

  “You see those faces? They didn’t think I was arrogant when they saw the results. They knew I was speaking the truth. Deep inside, so do you.”

  Outside the immediate world something weighty and mysterious gathered momentum. Alice could sense its motion, but neither its direction nor its mass was clear.

  “I spend a lot of time thinking about decisions before I make them,” she said.

  Gregory nodded.

  “For instance,” she continued, “before I made any decision, I’d want to know if your daughter would be present.” Alice waited a moment before she went on. “I know you told me her name, but I’ve forgotten it.”

  The deliberate echo of his own question was not lost on Gregory. He answered without emphasis.

  “If you wanted Cassie to be here then she could be. But I’d ask her to leave if I felt that the chemistry worked better without her.”

  “But she would stay in the office downstairs?”

  “If it made you more comfortable.”

  “I’m sure it would.”

  “We’d have to see,” Gregory said, as if he found the discussion irksome.

  Alice wondered if his relationships with women were always fleeting and without depth. Perhaps that was the way he preferred them to be.

  “But if you took my portrait—if I let you take it—then what could I possibly find in it that I didn’t already know?”

  “We’d both find signs that we hadn’t expected. There are things going on inside you that I don’t know about. I don’t think you understand them, either.”

  Alice felt that Gregory would argue anything to get his own way. It was quite likely that he often did not believe what he was saying. He probably saw no contradiction in this. Stung at being patronized, she turned on him.

  “Why do you expect me to respond to flattery? You told me I was special. I knew you didn’t mean it. If you really thought I was all that special then you wouldn’t speak to me as if I was just another face to frame in your viewfinder.”

  The accusation irritated Gregory more than she had expected. He had reached the end of his patience, and it would be reasonable if he demonstrated anger.

  “Do you think I speak like this to anyone?” he demanded.

  “Don’t you?”

  “You keep asking questions—now let me put some questions to you. Why are you so suspicious of my motives? Why can’t you accept that I have an eye for composition, and for human features and form, which is out of the ordinary? Are you simply incapable of understanding that I can look at you and see things that you’ll never find in any mirror? You could stare at your reflection for days and never discover what I can show you. I know what I’m talking about—this is a job that I’ve done very, very successfully for more than thirty years. And I’ve always, always followed an honorable protocol, just as I would do for you.”

  He bent over the desk monitor and switched it on. Taken aback by the energy of his response, Alice took a step further away. After a few moments the screen flickered into life and Gregory moved the cursor to an icon. His voice had thickened.

  “Those prints are all enlarged detail, apart from one. These are the originals. All of them were taken on the spur of the moment. There was no time for proper composition. I knew I’d be able to work on them later to bring out their best qualities. But you can’t or won’t see the value in those versions. Instead you just want to study the raw material.”

  Twelve photographs appeared on the screen, lined up like cards in a game. Capping them, at their end, was the thirteenth, a blurred image of a distant motorbike about to enter a stream of traffic.

  “I’ll print out a copy of each one and you can take them away,” Gregory said angrily. “I don’t want them back. We’re not likely to see each other again.”

  Alice saw that Gregory had lied when he told her that he had taken only five or six. But she did not protest, and instead stepped closer to the screen.

  What she saw did not involve her. Instead she felt detached from the woman in the photographs, the woman who looked like her, wore her clothes and was thrown forward in the way that she had been. The sequence appeared as inauthentic as a re-enactment by impersonators.

  “These don’t seem like me either,” she admitted. Alice wondered if she might not even have recognized herself if she had not been told the truth.

  The comment made Gregory pause. From somewhere in the studio there came the sound of a ticking clock; Alice had not noticed it before. She turned to him.

  “Of course I know that it’s me—or rather, a semblance of me. And I know this is a record of what actually happened. But it seems to be happening somewhere else and to a different person.”

  “Why should you think that?” he asked quietly. “You recognize that all of these images are truthful. This isn’t your double, is it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Right. Do you often have a feeling of not belonging to the world?”

  “Sometimes,” Alice admitted, and would not look at him.

  Gregory became as sleek as a tempter.

  “Maybe you were just thinking of the girl with the visions. Maybe she’s been on your mind without your realizing it. You’ve been infected by a sense that the real world is a kind of illusion.”

  Alice shook her head. She was no longer sure what to think. Gregory went on.

  “When you looked at that girl’s face you must have seen that she was a contradictory mixture of the worldly and the unreal. What I told you was true. A successful portrait opens up the personality.”

  But Alice would not discuss it, and broke the spell.

  “Can you put these on a full screen? Or enlarge parts of them?”

  “That’s how I decided on the characteristics that were best.”

  “This one,” Alice said, pointing to the image of her body as it was flung toward the lens with its arms outstretched.

  Within a second it filled the screen. Alice stared hard at it, searching for signs that she could not detect.

  She held out one finger near to the screen and traced the shape of an oval around the head.

  “Can we get closer?” she asked.

  Gregory zoomed in on a close-up of the angled head. All that Alice could see was her hair, the dark glasses, a face so foreshortened it could have been that of a child being born. And no matter how hard she stared, there was nothing unusual, nothing unexplained and nothing unidentified that could be seen around her.

  “And my hands?” she asked.

  Again, there was nothing to the hands other than their reaching out in a reflex.

  “What are you looking for?” Gregory asked.

  “I’m not sure. I thought that maybe something would be made visible. It was all so sudden, so hurtful . . .”

  “Made visible? Objects are either visible or they’re not. I don’t understand.”

  “No. No, I imagine that you wouldn’t.”

  Gregory leaned purposefully on the table. It creaked slightly beneath his weight.

  “When we met by the river you hinted at something that might be found in the pictures. I told you there was nothing unusual about them. Do you want me to ask you again what you’re looking for?”

  Alice was aware that, for Gregory, the idea of the immaterial suddenly irrupting into the visible world was absurd.

  “I’ve heard it said that sometimes cameras catch light patterns around people. Light patterns that can’t normally be detected with the naked eye.”

  Still Gregory did not grasp what she meant, and he spoke as if he expected Alice to find his answer reassuring.

  “Photography has been going beyond the visible spectrum since just after its invention,” he said, and then he paused. She looked down at the prints again. “You mean auras,” he said.

  Suddenly defensive, Alice folded her arms tightly around herself and continued t
o examine the prints.

  “They don’t exist,” Gregory said flatly. “Oh, there are charlatans who doctor their photos to show faces and bodies surrounded by haloes of color, but that’s easy manipulation. Only the gullible would believe it.”

  “I see,” Alice said quietly, although it seemed to her obvious that under certain intense conditions the body would throw off an energy, a vibration, a shield that perhaps only certain kinds of photography would be able to capture.

  “I’m not interested in metaphysics,” Gregory said. “Meaning resides in the here and now. Truth lies in how a body moves or facial muscles react. There is no mystery, no transcendence, no Great Beyond. Images and memories are the only things that people leave behind. There’s nothing else.”

  Alice remained silent.

  Confidential, brotherly, apparently trustworthy, Gregory edged a little closer. He lowered his voice as if they could somehow be overheard.

  “It would be a big step for you; I know that. But it’s one that you should take. You have nothing to fear.”

  Alice did not react, but stared hard at the woman in the photographs.

  “More than anyone else I can think of,” Gregory went on, “you deserve to be in front of a lens. When you go home to Thomas Laidlaw I want you to think about that. And I want you to know that I’ll be considering the best way to pose you.”

  The muscles at the back of Alice’s legs had begun to tremble as though under pressure. She wondered if that shaking would be visible to Gregory if he stepped back and studied her again.

  “I’ll portray you in black-and-white prints,” he said. “Humphrey Jennings said that black-and-white film lives on ideas but color lives on sensation. That’s why I’ll show you in black-and-white. I think you’d approve.”

  Alice was not sure whether or not she had moved her head.

  “Promise me to think about it,” Gregory said, and then waited. “Of course,” he continued, “we’d save a lot of time, and a lot of uncertainty, if you agreed now. We would each know where the other stood.”

  Alice remained silent. Her mouth was dry.