The Luminist

by David Rocklin

  “I’ve lost you already.” She held the plate to her chest.

  A noise startled him. He lifted the winding sheet. Gita played guilelessly under Charles’ bed. She cooed with pleasure at being found.

  “ I showed her what you did,” Sudarma said. “ You made the dead stay in the world. I told her, we are watching him sail to a strange place and we are happy for him. A boy who can make light do as he wishes can surely find a way home again. But I ask you, meri beta. If you go, take Gita. She’ll be safer with you.”

  “She would become a servant, amma. A woman without a family in a strange place.”

  “She would be worse off if she remained. I don’t want her to live like this. Like me. A mother raises her children to leave home and not look back. Let me say I succeeded at just this one thing.”

  He put his arms around her. “ You did,” he told her.

  AS THE NIGHT deepened, the activity of packing paused for sleep. Eligius stood on the porch, considering Sir John’s mapped sky. He saw Julia emerge from the gazebo and followed her to Holland House. Inside, she opened the camera’s legs and stood it upright.

  “ I have to pack this,” he said.

  “And you will. Is there a plate and some of that dreadful water you need?”

  “There is. But – ”

  “Can you make a photograph alone?”

  He thought about this. The breaths between the opening of the camera eye and its closing. The amount of chemical needed to wash the exposed glass. The light. “ Yes. I can.”

  “Then make it of us.”

  He set the candles in a circle around the chair and placed more in a cluster across the floor. Outside were the far sounds of guns, as Ceylon cut deeper into its own throat. Yet the cracks came to him as if he lay under deep water. The lights he set loose rippled in her eyes. There was nothing else to know.

  She sat in the chair and watched him prepare the glass. “One night, mother spoke of you to my father. How you wanted to refashion the camera’s glass to reach the stars. I think they were discussing mother ’s desire for knowledge. For accomplishment and a lasting place. Yet she spoke of you as well, in the same breath.

  “ I kept my father company more so than my mother or brother. I understood his treasury of quiet more than they. I knew how to hear him, and I expected no response from him to mother ’s idle chat. But to my surprise, my father said that every night he would gaze at the photograph of me with the light in my hand. He spoke of it as the portrait you both made, Eligius. He said you made me beautiful.”

  Eligius slipped the new plate into the camera. He gazed at her as the camera would. “ You were beautiful before I ever saw you.”

  He opened the camera’s eye, then went to sit next to her. Her arm pressed against his and remained. Around them, the night cooled. It tasted of winter. She would not be under the next rains. Where he would be could no longer be seen.

  How strange, he thought as her skin’s warmth joined with his and became indivisible from him.

  He counted his first breaths. “ What to call it,” he murmured.

  Her hand found his cheek and turned him. “ We must be still,” he said.

  “We are.”

  He felt himself becoming woven into the air, into her. When their lips touched it was like the silver on his skin, replacing his flesh with what they ’d stolen out of time. They would never die. They would always be here.

  Soon he told her that enough breaths had passed. He took the plate from the camera. “ Now,” she said, “pack it all. Tomor - row will be as it is. By week ’s end we’ll be on the sea. My father will be buried here. To make sense of all that’s happened is a farce. I don’t understand any of it, but there is tonight. I wish life could stand still, here in this moment.”

  He told her he would make the photograph. She asked that he pack the camera quickly so her mother wouldn’t be angry. “ I will think of what to call it,” she said. “ Without a name, it’s an orphan.”

  After she left he washed the plate and himself. The nitrate of silver cascaded over his hands. He set the plate to its light and himself with it. Their faces came to glass and skin. An amniotic haze enveloped them; a pigment of refracted candlelight that they seemed to float in like stars behind milky clouds.

  He lay down, weary from the packing. Every second of the last days radiated through his legs, but he wanted to see the tide of them come.

  The stain on his hand began to arrange itself. A little mote of pale – her eye, in profile, gazing at him. In the dry crease of his palm, their kiss. She’d asked that life stand still here and he’d lit a candle and burned the two of them into permanence.

  “Of course, you know what you’ ve done.”

  Catherine stood in the doorway, regarding the coming image. Julia and Eligius must have wanted that moment above all, she thought. To be free. To burn down all that held them still.

  “ You kept your promise. You made a portrait sitter of a star.”

  “ Not yet, memsa’ab. But I will. And you. You tied light to the sa’ab as he departed.”

  “ Perhaps.”

  They were quiet awhile.

  “ It is a marked improvement over mine,” she said. “Clearly, I need your hand with me. Your light. The English sun can be as capricious as Ceylon’s.”

  “ Is it your desire that I come?”

  It surprised her, to cry in front of him. “ You have become a part of my life. I cannot allow you to simply leave it. There’s so much we’ ve yet to do. You found the way to me. This cannot be meaningless, that you have remained.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve always wanted more of the world than I am meant to have. I cannot imagine my life with another hole in it. I cannot imagine not knowing you. And Julia …”

  “ Memsa’ab, what do I do?”

  “About loving her.”

  “About wanting to belong where I do not.”

  “ I am acquainted with that problem myself.”

  They laughed, content, while the cottage filled with the sounds of their twinned voices.

  “ I don’t know what will become of you and her, Eligius. It would be hard. But if it matters at all, I think you belong with her.”

  He moved to be next to her. “ It matters very much.”

  “ May I tell you of things? Of London?”

  “ I cannot create a picture in my mind to equal what it must be.”

  “ May I tell you of Hardy?”

  “ Yes.”

  “ I don’t think I’ve spoken of him. Not to anyone.”

  “ Look at every image you make. Each time, you speak of him.”

  She talked about the child she never knew. She described the lights of London. She told him of people they might portray. Poets, scientists, seers, divines. She told him of the day his father died, of his shadow across the Court floor.

  By then the moon had dipped below the trees. He could hear the weariness in her softening voice.

  “Look at her,” she said. “ Look at you both. Like one of Sir John’s double stars.”

  Memsa’ab, you should sleep. The image remains. It will still be here in the morning. So will I.”

  “ Tomorrow, then.”

  She kissed his cheek and left him. He lay down next to the photo and closed his eyes. Exhaustion consumed him, but the plate and paper hadn’t finished with each other yet. When the candles burned down, it would be done. Then he would pack the camera and sleep.

  There must be as many candles as stars in London, he thought. I can live among them. I may grow old and be wretched in strange rooms, but I will always have this night. We all wish we were better than we are. It won’t matter where I do the wishing.

  Before he could stop himself he was still and dreaming of the John Company ’s Court on Chatham Street, at six degrees and eighty degrees below the southern hemispheric orbits. He was in the lobby, watching Julia make her bauble’s lights dance across the wooden floor while the memsa’ab tried to arrest it all. Her light
s grew brighter and brighter. His eyes stung the way they did when he stood too close to his mother ’s cooking fires. The room grew fiercely hot. The lights ignited the floor, the walls, everything was burning—

  Life Stood Still, Here

  ELIGIUS LEAPT TO HIS FEET AND WENT TO THE DOOR. The stars shimmered sickeningly through the heat and smoke. A sea of flame erupted in the Colebrooks’ field. Then they came. Shapes of men emerged from the burning rows. Their hair and clothes trailed tendrils of gray smoke. Some of them carried spent torches. Others carried machetes.

  They left the field and moved towards the main house. Flames followed them, engulfing Dimbola’s eastern fence line and twisting angry red veins into the cracking wood. Drawing a breath, he broke from Holland House. The men didn’t see him as he raced up the porch steps and pushed against the front door. Locked. He ran around to the servant’s entrance, picked up a rock and threw it through the window, then scrambled in as glass teeth raked his skin. He screamed for Dimbola to wake up. Trailing blood, he pounded on doors until Julia stumbled into the hall, clutching at her dressing gown. “ Don’t go near your windows. They’re setting fire.”

  She went to her brother ’s room. Sir John opened his door, holding his gun in a trembling hand.

  Glass shattered somewhere else in the house.

  He moved to the memsa’ab’s bedroom, terrified. Smoke lacerated his throat and eyes. He pushed the door open. She was on the bed next to her husband’s body, cradling his head in her lap. A hail of stones burst the window behind her, showering the floor with glass. Hands took hold of the window frame.

  She kissed her husband goodbye.

  Sir John appeared in the doorway and cried that the back of the house was on fire. There were men already inside, taking everything they could carry.

  “Go to the front of the house,” Catherine told them. “ I have to find my children.”

  She pushed them toward the dining room, then ran towards the rear. The hall was full of burning black clouds. In the sooty smoke she heard the cries of the men. Lost as well, they clawed at everything on the walls. They tugged violently at the carpet beneath her feet. Bodies pummeled her as the men careened past without recognition. A gauntlet of hands swept the air, looking for purchase. The sounds of hoarded glass and metal made a terrible music.

  Already the smoke was gathering at the front of the house. She found her children and led them there, where Eligius and Sir John waited. Opening the door, she peered out as Dimbola came apart behind them.

  “ I see Sudarma,” Sir John said. He pointed to the gate, where Sudarma stood, gazing out at the sea.

  Catherine wrapped her arm around her children. Julia’s eyes were vacant. She held her writing pad to her chest as if it would save her. Together they stumbled out, sobbing and screaming down the porch steps and across the lawn. Men carrying paintings and furniture continued to stream in and out of Dimbola through its open wounds.

  “Take them to the carriage!” Catherine cried, and left them for the yard.

  Eligius brought them to the barn. The old horse whinnied pitiably as he harnessed it and pulled it to the door. Swarms of embers spewed from the field. Some landed on the gazebo. Its roof began to curl as new flames rose.

  He pushed Ewen into the carriage and climbed to the seat above.

  “ Mama!” Ewen screamed. He pointed towards Holland House. Catherine was running from the cottage, her arms full. She reached the carriage and climbed in next to Ewen. “ Is everyone all right?”

  Ewen sought refuge in her arms. She held him, her living and dead child, his features stained from the heat of the fire.

  Thrusting the reins into Sir John’s hands, Eligius slapped the horse into motion. In an instant the carriage was across the yard, taking them into the veil of smoke.

  They pulled up at the gate. Sudarma handed Gita up to him, then withdrew the stake holding the gate closed. Eligius folded Gita into his arms and made room for his mother.

  “There was never a time when I did not love you,” Sudarma said. She backed away from the carriage, shaking her head. “ But I must go where I belong.”

  “Amma!” He stood, ready to leap from the carriage. But his mother looked at him as if he were better than he was; the boy who took her from home and broke her over Dimbola’s wood and stone. He couldn’t move.

  “Catherine,” Sudarma said. The English word trembled in her mouth.

  This was the amma he’d known, whose word was heeded, whose love was infinite.

  “ I know she hears me,” Sudarma said. “ Tell her.”

  Eligius translated.

  “ Yes,” Catherine said.

  “ Finish what I began. Raise my son to be a good man.”

  Eligius said the words.

  “ Yes.”

  “ Do not make a secret of him.”

  Ewen touched Catherine’s hand. He began to cry. “Bleed.”

  Childish words. She raised her palm and marveled at the permanence of all she’d become. Mauve and apparition, interstitched with the skin whorls across her palm. She saw what alarmed Ewen. A trickle of blood from the cut across her hand. She’d gripped the photograph too tightly as she’d fled Holland House. Now the cracked glass had struck back. There would be a scar, ever. She would look at it one day, under a different sky.

  Her cupped hand filled with blood. She listened to Eligius as he translated, then wept. “ I will never make a secret of him. Never.”

  The world Sudarma turned and walked into was blackened and quieting. They waited until she entered the remains of the house. As Sir John took the reins and guided the carriage out onto the lane, Dimbola creaked in capitulation to the insistent fire. Pieces of the roof crumpled.

  In the murk, Catherine saw the last of Dimbola fall away. A curtain of ash and umber. Flames leapt high into the air, then down to the invisible earth. Over it, she heard the sounds of the wheels.

  She took her children into her arms. Ahead there was a ship, and the sea, and a city men crossed the world to glimpse. They made their way to the port, the last of the colonials to depart their lives.

  FROM THE HILL above Queen Street the Galle Face appeared to clasp Ceylon’s jungles and the colonials’ dock together in a grid of interwoven color. The jeweled sea washed against the gunmetal of the Royal Captain. A swath of crimson soldiers held a crescent line against the massed knot of crinolines, cashmeres, silks, and cottons of the colonials, who dressed as if decreeing the fires in their once-country contrivances.

  At the far end, the hues of saris and dulled white servant smocks, blackened from unwashable labor and uprising. The servants were not moving forward with the mass intent on reaching the ship. They remained behind, near the green carpet of jungle and the seams of fire inching in every direction.

  Eligius steered onto a path that narrowed as it descended. Before Ceylon opened to afford them a glimpse of the sea, they saw empty fields, streams of char where the flames had traveled, processions of people.

  They arrived at Queen and Chatham. The roads trembled with so many pressed onto the dock. An impenetrable queue of carriages stretched from the Company ’s receiving gate back into the road and to the foot of the solemn clock. He brought the carriage alongside another and tied the horse to its brethren.

  They took what they could carry and left their horse to whinny amongst its own. Satchels of clothes, a trunk filled with Catherine’s photographs and Sir John’s celestial map, the camera itself, folded like a dead bird; they dragged their belongings to the foot of the dock. There they clambered over a fallen retaining wall and joined the hundreds. In the pall of smoke and the rattling of fearful voices, they gathered together and braced against the relentless surge of the crowd.

  Water washed against the shoreline. Voices at once close and at odd distances drowned all else. The crush of so many made their progress hot and oppressive.

  Catherine smelled the bereft odor of ash, sweat, flight. Ahead, the Royal Captain blotted the horizon. She felt the insistenc
e of the sea beneath her feet. It moved under the dock and back again. She could see it in the slow sway of the ship. All around them the men of each family frantically waved bills of entitlement. They shouted at the cordon of soldiers. Men unaccustomed to begging begged uniformed boys for permissions and favors. One more crate. One place ahead in line. Pleas on behalf of sun-poisoned children and wives made mad with close quarters. Promise of tobacco, coin, glowing letters to superiors, introductions to London firms.

  She saw Andrew at the ship’s rail. He looked old as men approached him and spoke into his ear. He nodded assent to what they said and they scurried off to be replaced by the next.

  “He cannot see us,” Sir John shouted.

  Eligius brought the bauble out from under his tunic. He held it towards the smoke-blighted sun and twisted it until it found what little light could be sent towards the ship.

  Andrew looked up when he saw the light burst from the crowd. For a moment he was still. The distance was too great to discern his expression.

  Somewhere behind them, a roar went up. A great collapsing into the fire. Trees, maybe, dried to splitting, or the collective shudder of falling structures traveling across Ceylon’s air like the light of a far sun. Old by the time of its arrival, the remains of something already gone into history.

  Eligius heard the dirge of prayer. He felt eyes on him. Faces interspersed among the colonials. They gazed at him with recognition. As the English bodies passed, they held their ground.

  Julia took her mother ’s arm. She clutched Gita to her chest. Like everyone, she turned at the sound. Now she pulled Catherine close. “ Mother – ”

  Catherine grabbed Eligius’ hand and pulled him next to her, so no one would mistake him for anything but hers. She’d seen what alarmed Julia. Ahead, the colonials’ transit from the dock to the gangplank and safety. Behind, the Indians who had lived among the British. None of them moved forward. They didn’t beg the soldiers for passage. Some silent message had already been conveyed.