“An artist doesn’t choose his material, dahling. The material chooses him.”
“Those images belong to the Aborigines.”
“And you speak on behalf of Aborigines, do you, dahling? Of course, you don’t. You’re not even Australian. Aboriginal art is in the public sphere. It’s part of our shared world. It’s their stories that are sacred. Many of their traditional stories can only be told by designated storytellers, and, even then, there are some that are protected among Aborigines themselves, stories that one needs to be properly initiated even to hear. Have you been properly initiated? I didn’t think so. I admire their art. But you? You plunder their souls.” A bit melodramatic, but point taken.
This immediately led to an acrimonious debate about the differences between science and art. Any argument, pushed far enough, eventually comes down to semantics, and this one was no different; it was an argument that ran in increasingly smaller circles, in imminent danger of disappearing up its own arse. At which point, Rafferty cut in. “Des Moines?”
This threw her back a bit. “Do we know each other?”
“I’m from Winterset, we’re practically neighbors.” And from this would come the affectionate term and, later, bitter designation of Rebecca as “the girl next door.”
She had readied herself for the party, she who was more at home in the field, in the sun. She had put on lipstick, had paid for a perm, too tightly coiled, with foundation and eyeliner applied in an attempt to bolster self-confidence, only to make her feel more self-conscious. Rafferty could see the makeup line along her jaw where it went suddenly from powder-pale to a neck that was still reddish and real. She wasn’t very good at makeup, but she had tried, and he had no choice but to fall in love with her after that.
Here was the strange thing, though: For all the Artist’s pomposity, he was right. The swirls and colors and patterns used in Aboriginal art were indeed out there in the world, to be shared, to be appreciated and adapted. These patterns were part of the public sphere; it was the Aboriginal stories that were held close and kept secret. One doesn’t plunder light, one plunders stories—stories and the objects attached to them. For all Rebecca’s certainties, she was wrong about the artist, wrong perhaps about the nature of her own work as well. It was a lesson Rafferty would learn—too late, unfortunately: that being absolutely certain about something doesn’t make your views any more accurate for it, that being righteous is not a synonym for being right.
He tried to extradite her from the melee, but she couldn’t let it go, had a dingo-like grip, wanted to crack the bone, reach the marrow, a trait that would cause Rafferty no end of anguish over the years, though, of course, he didn’t know it at the time. The Artist had become bored with her by this point, had turned back to his cabal—and how quickly a cabal becomes a coven.
“Let’s get a drink,” said Rafferty. Always a stopgap solution. “They’re serving a nice shiraz,” he said. He was from Iowa. Back then, he didn’t know the difference between a shiraz and a sauvignon. Fortunately, neither did she, and he managed to disentangle her from further escalations.
He handed her a drink. “Tom Rafferty,” he said, and he waited for a reaction.
But she had no idea who he was. So much for the authorial fantasy of women swooning into your arms. (When asked what the best thing about being an author was, Rafferty invariably answered, “The hordes of love-starved women who are constantly throwing themselves at you.” The worst part? “The fact that said women are wholly imaginary.”) He repeated his name on the off chance she’d missed it.
“Who?” she asked.
“The author. Casablanca to Timbuktu? Y’know”—he gestured to the banner hanging in plain sight. “The Author and the Artist. He’s the artist, I’m the author.”
“He’s an asshole, is what he is.”
“Aren’t we all.”
She didn’t bother with a handshake. “Rebecca Hodges. And you are?”
“I just told you.”
“Oh. Right. I’m still a little addled.” She swallowed her drink, took a steadying sigh. Short hair, green eyes that rarely blinked. (She had an unnerving habit of maintaining eye contact for longer than necessary, or socially acceptable. It was an intensity that would both attract and repel him over the coming years.) Eventually, her anger subsided and the waver in her voice faded. But it would be back. Oh, it would be back.
Rebecca and Thomas, a.k.a. “Becky and Tom,” a.k.a. “Becks and Tom-Tom” in their more cloying moments: it had all started at a soiree in Sydney with a panorama of the opera house lit up in front of them. They talked about art and music and politics—he didn’t give a damn about art and music and politics—and by the end of the night he had completely fallen for her. It would take her a little longer. If ever.
When she told him she was a graduate student, studying ethnology at the uni (she’d already picked up the local slang), Rafferty had asked her, “Have you heard about this drum? The Kalinga, I think it’s called.” He didn’t realize then that it wasn’t an Australian artifact that the fat man had been alluding to, but Rwandan. It was just as well. Even after these many years, Rafferty was still dealing with the fallout of that African genocide, had no wish to revisit it.
“The Kalinga?” she asked.
“I think so.”
She hadn’t heard of it. “My area is more folklore, stories, that sort of thing. Not artifacts, unless they’re attached to a specific story. Why?”
“No reason, it’s just—I had this odd conversation.” He looked around, but couldn’t see him. “Anyway. He mentioned that drum like it was a secret that we shared. I thought, maybe, with your background— Never mind.”
She shrugged it off and so did he, and with that, they returned to items trivial and semi-truthful. He never mentioned Rwanda; she never pretended to have read his books. One always falls in love over trivial matters. It’s why love so rarely lasts.
ULURU
TAMSIN AT SEVENTEEN.
They were waiting for her after school, at the bottom of the stairs beside the flagpole, the stars-and-bars rolling on a loose Milwaukee wind. It was the last bell of the last day of the last semester of high school, and Tamsin wouldn’t be sticking around for the prom, so this was it. She jogged down the steps, not bothering to look back, and a flock of Ashleys were waiting. (She never bothered to learn their names, assumed they were all called Ashley.) Feathered bangs and honey hair, these were the girls who organized school dances, the girls who took notes during field trips. Tamsin, meanwhile, was the one with her feet up in the school cafeteria, headphones on, a Ramones riff blaring. Short, solid hipped (“childbearing,” as her grandma said, trying to make it a compliment), with black hair spiked in a failed attempt at a Joan Jett hairstyle, Tamsin was a mob of one: Tamsin Unlimited. She was the one who slowly removed her headphones and slowly looked up when Mr. Pritchard, the vice principal, shoved her boots, told her to get her feet off the table. She was the girl who slooowly took her feet down, first one, then the other, and then put them back up as soon as Mr. Pritchard was gone.
The feathered Ashleys wore shoulder-padded jackets at right-angle extremes. Big hair and square shoulders: this season’s look for Popular Girls, apparently. (Though truth be told, Tamsin didn’t know if they were popular or not; she was barely aware of their existence, let alone where they ranked in the social strata.) If the linebacker look was in, Tamsin hadn’t gotten the memo. She had on her ratty but beloved Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt, a jean jacket, studded with safety pins, and homemade clamdiggers—she’d cut her jeans off, midshin—and instead of her usual Doc Martens, high-top sneakers. Semi-formal, in other words. At first, she thought, hoped, that the Ashleys were waiting for someone else, one of the Brads maybe (the male equivalent of an Ashley), but no. They were waiting for her.
The main girl separated herself from the flock. The flicker of a smile, testing the waters. “Sign your yearbook?”
“Um… yeah, sure.” Tamsin shoveled around in her backpac
k, pulled out her Class of ’86 yearbook. Handed it over while the other girl readied her pen. This would be the only high school signature Tamsin would collect that year.
The other girl signed carefully, closed the book quickly and handed it back. If she was expecting Tamsin to return the gesture, she was sorely mistaken. Instead, Tamsin shoved her yearbook into her backpack and went home. Only later did she check to see what the head Ashley had written, assuming something mean or mocking or, at the very least, patronizing in that passive-aggressive Ashley manner, was surprised instead by what she read. It was written in curly blue cursive, with circles dotting the i’s: “Tamsin Greene is a cool machine.” It set her back then, still did now.
All these years, and Tamsin wondered if everything she’d ever done had only been an attempt at living up to that inscription. Wondered if maybe that wasn’t true of everyone, that maybe we are all of us trying to repudiate—or validate—the verdict we received in high school.
Tamsin Greene in the arid heart of a lost continent. Bone dry, with a fly net draped like a pesticide-imbued onion bag over her face. Tamsin Greene deep in the Australian Outback, wondering whether the many varied roads that had led her here had started with a signature in a high school yearbook. Strange that her thoughts would turn to Hamilton High, Home of the Wildcats! when she was so far from anywhere resembling home.
But home, of course, was only a notion. Uluru was here, was real.
She’d hung around the art deco diorama of Napier for a day or two after Rafferty had left, and had then traveled north to the very end of New Zealand, searching for a Japanese girl she once knew, the girl who swam with the dolphins. But Tomoka too had departed for points unknown—“I think she’s in Oslo, of all places,” her former landlord had said—and the compass needle had swung slowly back to that asshole Rafferty. Well. I guess I’m going to Australia.
She sent a one-word message to her editors in New York: Away. They could let the wire services cover the coroner’s inquest; how hard is it to photograph weeping families? The images that she captured of Christchurch had already had their impact, so she loaded up her gear, cashed in her frequent-flyer points, jumped on the next plane to Sydney. From there, another three-hour flight took her inland to the hotel village at Uluru National Park, where she rented a Land Rover—with requisite roo bar, should any kangas leap suicidally in front of her hood—and had driven it in from the Uluru airport, across the thornbush plains.
The silvery blue of eucalyptus. The golden rings of spinifex grass, prickly and ubiquitous. Tufted grass and Dr. Seuss trees, and the same four or five elements endlessly repeated, and now—rising up in the middle—the monolithic singularity of Uluru. Red, now orange, now mauve: it changed color with the angle of the sun.
A wind was moving across the curves and caves of Uluru, whispering ululations, but Tamsin had to turn her head to catch it. An IED in Taliban territory had once lifted a jeep up from beneath her, had burst her eardrum as surely as bubble wrap, leaving her deaf on one side and recasting her world instantly from stereophonic to mono, something she stubbornly refused to acknowledge. But she hadn’t come all this way for sounds. She was here to capture the light.
Uluru up close is very different from Uluru in long shot. What appeared monolithic from a distance became striated and variegated the closer you came: fleshy folds, curtains of stone, which hung like fabric; she swore she could see it move at times, as though rippling on the wind. But as she drew closer, it changed again. The surface became mottled with a metallic skin of iron and silica, scaled in chemical decay.
Every few years someone died on Uluru. The constant flow of climbers had worn away a thousand years of patina as they hauled themselves up, single file along a chain, conquering this minor Everest, minga, as the local Anangu called them: ants. The trail they left behind was known as the Scar of Uluru. The climbers that day included a bachelor party of hungover celebrants from a nearby resort and at least one team of Elvis impersonators, congratulating themselves on having mastered the sacred. It was the casual suppositions of the ill-informed traveler: Rafferty’s truck and trade. Where was he anyway, that prick? She’d called every hotel in Alice Springs, five hours away, had left message after message, to no avail. He seemed to have vanished. It was one of his more enduring habits.
The insect file of tourists plodded onward. A silvery trail. Scars, near at hand and far away. An Afghan chieftain. The dark chuckle of tannin-stained teeth. A straight razor drawn like a painter’s brush down the side of her face, almost a caress—but not quite. Instantly opening, a clean slice, not the jagged tear wrought by a blunt machete, but almost surgical—but not quite. A slice of pain, burning to the bone. Crude stitches on a medic’s gurney. Endless rounds of reconstructive surgery when she got home, severed nerves trying to reengage and mostly failing, a numbness on the face and a lopsided tilt when she smiled. Rafferty said it gave her a certain charm. He was the only one who did.
She changed her lens. Compensated for glare. Told herself to stay focused in the here and now. Forget the past, Tammy. Forget it. But the past was always present; as soon as you pressed the shutter, you’ve captured the past. Every photograph is an historic document, after all, and it seemed to Tamsin that there were only two types of memory, neither new. It was either Polaroids or flashguns, a slow emerging or the sudden magnesium explosion of old-timey photographers, hooded like an execution.
Tamsin Greene watched the sun play along the sides of Uluru, was forced to keep the fly net draped over her face even while she was framing the shot. We see Uluru as through a veil. And it struck her, somehow, that this was perhaps appropriate.
She had charted a walk around the base, starting at the scar. The dryness will fool you, she’d been warned. It is very easy to become dehydrated when you aren’t sweating. Out here, perspiration evaporated before it appeared, leaving crusts of salt on shirt collars and stubbled armpits. A desert without dew. In North Africa, the moisture-depleted harmattan winds from distant seas still managed to leave traces of their passing in droplets of dew. But not here, not in the Outback. One liter of water for every hour, so she was lugging five liters in her already crowded daypack. Granola bars, polarizing filters, a collapsible tripod, and a floppy hat draped in a fly net. She began shooting through the netting, a softened, pixilated effect, as a possible photo-essay took shape: Uluru in a new light.
A sudden kii and Tamsin looked up.
Birds of prey were riding the updrafts, watching for rodents, tracing lazy lethal circles in the sky. They must roost in the cliff face. She considered changing lenses, firing off a salvo, trying to catch them in midflight, but the moment quickly passed and the birds were soon lost to the sun.
Women’s caves and men’s: the first relating to childbirth, the second to hunting. Inside the caves, the art was a thousand years old, tawny ochres and charcoal that had been mixed with animal fats, tree sap and honey kneaded with rusted iron oxides. Dots and lines, swirls and spirals, and lower down, the red-eyed image of the Devil Dingo Dog, used to frighten children for generations into behaving properly. “Don’t sneak out at night, or the Devil Dingo will get you!” A thousand years of human history were overlain in the art of Uluru. Tamsin pulled out her tripod, set a long exposure to coax the colors from the stone.
Past these caves, a sandy path led eastward, into the worst of the sun, with Tamsin clinging to shade wherever she could find it. She was standing beneath the spectral protection of a ghost gum, photographing a strange rock formation, when someone spoke. She turned, saw a uniform. The immediate identification and evaluation of uniforms was a crucial skill in Tamsin’s line of work. Government forces (sympathetic?) or government forces (hostile)? Regular army? Police? A border patrol? Or the always dreaded Presidential Guard?
It was none of the above. A heavyset Aboriginal man in the khaki green of an Uluru park ranger was walking toward her, and he didn’t look happy. Eyes deeply set, unperturbed by the flies that flustered about, a face that was muscula
r, a stare the same. He was glaring, not at Tamsin, but at her camera.
“Off-limits, innit?” he said, his voice softer than his bearing would suggest. There were all kinds of authority at play here. Tamsin, abashedly, hadn’t seen the NO PHOTOGRAPHY sign, and even if she had…
“C’mon you.” He waved for her to bring the camera over, and they scrolled through the images together. “Delete that.” She did. “And that. That, as well.” When they got to the photographs of the cave art, with pigments richly rendered, he couldn’t help himself. “Nice.” Then: “Flash?”
“Tripod.”
“That’s okay then.” On it went, life in reverse, Tamsin reeling in the walkabout that was her life until, unexpectedly—smoke and rubble and a cross appeared. “Is that Christchurch?” he said.
“It is.”
He handed her camera back. “Journalist of some sort?”
“Sort of. But without words. And you? You’re from around here, right? Aborigine?”
“Anangu,” he said. “That would be the correct term, in this area. Aborigine, that’s just something you Whitefellas came up with.”
He walked with her to the next ceiling of stone, black with soot. “Old man’s cave,” he said. “They would sit and tell stories.”
“Can I?” She gestured to her camera.
“Sure. It’s just certain spots, ones too scared for photographs. This is more like a learning cave, where the old fellas would teach the young. In Anangu culture, we’re raised by our grandparents.”
“Me too!” she said.
“Were you?”
“I was! In a faraway mythical land known as Wisconsin, in a magical city known as Milwaukee.”
“Maybe you’re Anangu too. Your grandparents, kind were they?”
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