Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  Catherine stands from the sofa and tucks her phone into her pocket. “Two weeks?” she asks.

  The shopgirl nods, but the question isn’t aimed at her. Catherine clasps Peter by the elbow, gently guiding him into a corner. They stand beneath a high shelf lined with birds chirping in their cages. “We could keep him at your place,” she says.

  “You’re not serious?”

  “It would be a good distraction for William.”

  “And when you leave?” he asks.

  “We’ll bring him back here. It’s a two-week wait for new passports anyway.”

  “So now you’re getting new passports?”

  “Peter—”

  “It’s not fair to get him a dog when you know that it can’t work out.”

  “Fair?” she says in a single exhaled breath.

  She clutches Peter’s hand and laces her fingers through his. Her hair still smells faintly like the cigarettes she smoked at Deniz’s apartment last night. Before Peter can pull Catherine closer to him—or choose not to—she lifts her head so that her eyes affix to his. She then releases her grip on his hand and turns down the next aisle, finding her son and the shop owner. William holds a little red collar. Catherine takes it from him, kneels down and fastens it around the neck of the terrier. The shop owner lifts the dog and places him on the counter next to the cash register. The girl in the hijab touches the bar code scanner to the collar and rings up the price. She offers Peter the receipt for him to review. He is hesitant to know how much all of this will cost. So without reading the receipt he hands over his debit card.

  * * *

  The shop owner had tried to sell them more things: a dog bed, an enormous sack of food, inflatable chew toys, but Peter refused to buy anything else, much to William’s and Catherine’s disappointment. They have wandered back out into the mall, where they still quibble about it. “We didn’t need all that stuff,” Peter insists. They meander toward the escalator that will take them to the first floor and then out to a taxi stand.

  “He at least needs a tag,” says Catherine.

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “We need to put his name and address on it, in case he gets lost.”

  “He doesn’t have a name and address,” says Peter.

  Catherine grasps William by the hand. The two of them—and the dog—take a few quick steps and distance themselves from Peter. Catherine searches the mall for a place to purchase the tag. She soon stops in front of a window filled with cheap curiosities: copper lockets, tarnished music boxes, chipped porcelain statuettes, the junky paraphernalia of a thousand attics. Catherine disappears inside with William and the dog. Peter trails after them but stops for a moment before he enters, examining the handwritten prices stickered to each item. The tinny brass bell affixed to the doorframe jingles as the door closes behind Peter. He soon finds Catherine in the back of the store, where she and the proprietress wander among the merchandise searching for some trinket they could engrave for the dog. Catherine then stops her search. She fixes herself above one of the black-felt-lined display cases, staring at the contents.

  Peter steps beside her. “What did you find?” he asks.

  She startles at his words and then averts her eyes to the floor. Catherine scoops up the dog and takes William by the hand, leaving the store. “This wasn’t a good idea,” she says to no one in particular as she exits, the bell once again jingling against the doorframe.

  Peter gazes down at the display. Laid out among the trinkets is the same model cigarette case he bought her when they began their affair. Beneath it is the price, written on a small tag. The thing is worthless, which, of course, he had known all along.

  May 28, 2013

  He watched the dawn with sleepless eyes. Peter lay on the sofa in his living room. A seam of light expanded over the hilltops and dissolved when it reached the Bosphorus, which was filled with mist and shadows and a relentless parade of ships, their stern lights and bow lights faintly visible as some traveled north to the Black Sea and others traveled south to the Mediterranean. Occasionally he heard the long mournful blow of a foghorn. Seagulls circled the ships, disappearing into the grainy mist as they scavenged scraps of food from the idle deckhands who gazed landward, catching glimpses of the city and civilization for the hour or so it took to transit the strait before they would once again return to the vast, roiling emptiness of the open sea.

  Peter turned over so he faced away from the window. The grant money he had received from Kristin nearly a year before had almost run out. He had nothing to show for that time. He had taken a year’s worth of photographs but had ceased to see how they fit together. The concept at his project’s heart—the idea of a strategy of tension—no longer made sense to him. Hundreds of black-and-white portraits, each one indexed, then re-indexed and eventually altogether unindexed lay strewn across his kitchen table. He had stopped believing in his theories, which is to say he had stopped believing in his work. He had taken to sleeping on the sofa because that was where the television was, and he watched it most nights until he fell asleep, or didn’t.

  He checked his phone. There was a missed text from Catherine. She would be coming by at their usual time. He hoped that she’d stay for dinner but doubted she would. Out on his windowsill a few birds landed and took off, heading between the hillside apartments with their damp laundry hanging from the lines and the ships that passed along the strait, plying their enormous frothing wakes through the water. He lifted his camera from the coffee table and practiced shooting the birds just before they landed or right after they took off. It was a drill he had learned years before to help improve reaction time. The impulse he still felt to take photographs had kept him from despairing entirely in his work. After a few minutes he had ten perfectly captured frames of birds transitioning in and out of flight. He deleted all of them.

  His trousers were folded over the arm of the sofa. He stepped into them while watching the television. The morning news, which was in Turkish and thus barely intelligible to him, showed images of what looked like a hobo encampment. The newscaster was commenting on a live feed, in which the cameraman had placed himself behind an advancing phalanx of baton-wielding police officers. He held his camera above their navy blue, practically black, helmets. There were perhaps two dozen tents—some of them just tarps strung between the trees—with university-age students splayed beneath them in congregations of brightly colored sleeping bags. Peter recognized the location immediately—the thick-trunked elms, the surrounding office buildings and five-star hotels, the concrete footpaths hemmed in by weeds, the haphazardly planted flower beds and the fountain anchored at one end: it was Gezi Park.

  Peter turned up the volume. He could hear a popping noise, and then in the corner of the television he could see wispy trails of smoke spiraling through the air as the police launched arcing salvos of tear gas. The protesters fled, wheezing into their bent elbows and tripping over one another and their brightly colored sleeping bags, which tangled around their feet as they ran through the thick, noxious clouds. The police trampled over their encampment, enthusiastically hacking down the tents with their batons as if they were carving a machete path through deepest, darkest jungle. The cameraman fell away. The live feed filled with the sound of him choking on the tear gas, for which he had come unprepared, while the police had donned their gas masks, which transformed them into a faceless singularity of navy blue uniforms, plastic riot shields and glossy black leather boots.

  Peter shut off the television. He checked his watch. It was just after seven o’clock. He had nothing to do that day, except to see Catherine in the afternoon, which he felt he could miss. Their encounters had come to feel routine, a series of continuing no-things. He sat on the edge of the sofa, his eyes fixed on the television. In its blank screen he soon perceived his own reflection, and not wanting to stare at himself he looked down at his bare feet. The sound of fogho
rns resumed outside his window. He stood. The birds that had perched on his windowsill minutes before had all gone elsewhere. The noise of the foghorns picked up. There were two of them, dueling with one another. A pair of lights, one green and the other red, sliced through the mist, which was still thick in the strait. The red light hardly moved. The green light approached it relentlessly.

  Watching the lights, Peter recalled a story he’d heard as a boy. It was about a ship off the Atlantic coast, a behemoth oil tanker, one of those steel-bellied monsters that with a single navigational error could spill its contents and destroy an entire coastline. The tanker had been blown off course in a storm and had become shrouded in a dense fog when a light appeared off its bow. Up on the tanker’s bridge the lookout handed a set of binoculars to the captain, who peered through them and then grasped the radio. “Approaching vessel, adjust your course twenty degrees northwest.” A moment passed and a sleepy voice replied, “Negative, adjust your course twenty degrees southeast.” The captain snatched up the radio’s handset again. “Approaching vessel, this is the SS North Cape. Adjust your course twenty degrees northwest.” Again the sleepy voice replied, “Negative, adjust your course twenty degrees southeast.” The captain glanced around the quarterdeck, at his first mate, at his radio officer, at the various members of his crew, who in their time together at sea had always thought their captain to be able and had never seen his authority openly questioned. Once more the captain spoke into the radio. “Approaching vessel, this is the SS North Cape, supertanker with over two million barrels of crude aboard and a crew of one hundred and thirty-seven souls. I repeat, you are to adjust your course twenty degrees northwest!” For a moment there was silence. The captain glanced out of the corner of his eye to his crew, who continued unquestioningly with their duties on the bridge. The radio crackled back to life. “Understood, SS North Cape,” came the sleepy voice. “But this is a lighthouse. Adjust your course twenty degrees southeast.”

  Peter stood at his window. He watched the determined green light approaching the small, immovable red light. He took his camera and bounded down the stairs of his building, out into the street, where he would find a taxi to Gezi Park. Although he didn’t see it, about the time he left his front door the green light shifted its course. Had Peter been watching, he would have seen a break in the mist reveal the large, hulking ship and, directly in front of it, the red light affixed to the insignificant yet immovable Kız Kulesi, or Maiden’s Tower, built on an islet that was inconveniently located at the mouth of the strait.

  Peter saw none of it, however. To know the outcome, he hadn’t needed to.

  * * *

  The first two taxi drivers Peter stopped refused to take him to Gezi Park. The third agreed, but insisted that Peter pay double the normal fare, and that he pay up front. With his depleted funds, this was a not insignificant expense. Peter accepted the terms, however. He fished a billfold of cash out of his pocket and paid the driver nearly all of it. The two of them then rushed along Cevdet Paşa Caddesi, the driver grasping the wheel in both hands as though it was a jackhammer’s T-bar and he was tearing up the ancient pavement. They sped through chic waterfront neighborhoods such as Arnavutköy and Ortaköy, which in Ottoman times had been sleepy fishing villages, and they soon passed the beautiful yet ominous stretch of road that abutted Dolmabahçe Palace with its unscalable limestone walls built by the sultanate with the single purpose of protecting the royalty that had once lived in opulent seclusion inside, isolated from the populace—the same populace which now defied the current authorities in Gezi Park.

  Past the palace, two police cruisers had parked herringboned across the road, their siren lights turning orbits. The officers leaned against the hoods of their cars. Holstered pistols brooded at their sides, as they commented on the passersby and exchanged risky grins. Across from them was the new, incomplete stadium for Beşiktaş football club. A placard staked into the ground touted the project as a public-private endeavor, sponsored by both the government and Yaşar Enterprises. As much as the police officers manned their roadblock in order to regulate traffic heading toward the protests, it also seemed as if they’d taken up this position to ensure that no one disrupted construction on the new stadium, which from the lack of building equipment or materials on-site appeared beset by an indefinite delay.

  When Peter’s taxi approached the roadblock, one of the officers glanced up and flicked his wrist in the opposite direction. Needing no further instruction, the driver immediately turned around. He double-parked adjacent to the football stadium and motioned for Peter to get out. This was as far as he would take his taxi. Peter leaned over the gearshift and gestured through the windshield to a couple of narrow, unblocked alleyways, which could likely get them all the way to Gezi Park unnoticed. The driver responded by removing his key from the ignition and stepping onto the curb. He then opened Peter’s door and stood, impatiently waiting.

  Peter gathered his camera bag and walked in the opposite direction from the police, who rerouted traffic while they continued to chatter idly with the heels of their palms resting on their pistol grips. Although the seaside road had been cordoned off, dozens of tributary passages unspooled toward Gezi Park. Some were just wide enough for two people to pass shoulder to shoulder, while others could accommodate a single car. It was impossible for the police to block all of these. Most of the shop fronts had been shuttered, but housewives and children who’d been kept home from school because of the turmoil throughout the city filled the apartment windows from the second floor up. Leaning over window boxes or out toward the wash lines stretched between the buildings, they kept vigil above their streets.

  Peter made a quick survey of what would be the quickest route to the city’s interior. As he glanced to the heights and the park, he could smell the faint chemical scent of tear gas tumbling toward the waterfront. The trace of it in the air excited him and he could feel his stride lengthening as he passed around the back of the football stadium in the direction of an access road that would—he thought—deliver him to Gezi Park undetected.

  Halfway up the access road he came across a pair of excavators poised to dig out a new foundation although they had not yet begun; the teeth of their steel shovel blades remained clean. Crouching by the treads of one of the excavators, a pair of men sipped tea from paper cups. One was smoking. The other was not. The one without the cigarette, who was tall and slim with the lean sunken cheeks of a distance runner, shouted for Peter to stop. He had spoken in Turkish, but he could have issued the command in any of two dozen languages and Peter would have understood him by inflection alone.

  Upon noticing Peter’s camera and fair complexion, the other man, the one who smoked and was of a normal height and handsome, or at least appeared comparatively handsome next to his companion, called after Peter in English, “Come here!”

  Peter stood motionless on the dirt path he had been following, which curved around the back of the stadium. A hundred meters up, the path would fork in a half dozen directions, leading him into a labyrinth of neighborhoods where he could, likely, get away. He considered the option of running for an instant and in that same instant surveyed the pair of men who’d called after him. They were dressed shabbily, in old jeans and nearly identical fake leather jackets. Neither had shaved for a few days and Peter could see the traces of gray in their stubble. If they were thugs out to profit from the morning’s chaos, they appeared about a decade too old. Peter also noticed their identical black leather boots, which were shined to the same mirrored gloss as those worn by the uniformed police.

  Peter followed their instructions and approached.

  “The roads up to Gezi are closed,” said the shorter of the two as he exhaled a plume from the nub of his cigarette, which he’d smoked nearly to the filter. He flicked it on the ground, where it drizzled a cascade of embers at Peter’s feet. “What are you doing back here?” The man had meat-flavored breath, a dog’s breath, and o
ne solid gold tooth, an incisor, which gnawed fang-like on his lower lip as he spoke from the corner of his mouth. The rest of his teeth were clean and straight. Peter wondered how he’d lost the tooth and imagined it had been punched out in a brawl.

  The taller man, the lean one, pointed to Peter’s camera bag. He raised his dark eyes, which contained no expression, and then muttered something to his friend in Turkish, which Peter couldn’t understand.

  “What have you got there?” The man with the gold incisor cocked his head and gave a lopsided smile. “Are you a journalist?” Before Peter could answer, the taller man took a step toward him, grasping after the bag. Peter tugged away.

  “I don’t have to show you anything.”

  As soon as Peter issued this challenge, both men reached into their pockets and removed their wallets, inside of which they carried police badges that they now brandished like a winning hand of cards, one that they had held through several rounds of betting, knowing all along that they’d collect from anyone foolish enough to gamble against them.

  They ordered Peter to hand over his bag.

  The prospect of losing his camera sent Peter into a mild panic. He didn’t have the several thousand dollars he would need to replace it and without the camera there would be no reason for him to continue with his project. And so no reason for him to stay in the city. It would be the perfect excuse to abandon the work he’d invested himself in. He couldn’t be blamed for a crime perpetrated by the authorities. He would be a victim, not a failure, and could go home as such. His panic strangely began to feel like relief.