Myla looked up from the oak table where she was sitting, surrounded on two sides by curlicued iron bookcases. She distracted her mind with the architecture, its elegant simplicity, all the while trying to get her brain back to David. The best part about the space, apart from the privacy, was the full-length window that abutted the table and let light pour in. It was an old window, contemporary with the library, and the glass rippled toward the bottom of the panes. Glass was a liquid that moved so slowly that it spanned centuries, all the time looking like it wasn’t moving at all. That was why centuries-old windows like this were thicker at the bottom than the top. David had told Myla this when she was young.
His notebook lay like a flat hand against the desktop. Her own hands curved around the book spread before her, tracing words, marking whole passages, framing paragraphs, her fingers their own busy, autonomous people. She’d always looked at her fingers and invented personalities for them: her right ring finger looked sad, her left pointer was the leader of the group, her left pinky lagged behind like a child. She didn’t particularly like how her hands looked except that they resembled David’s. They were what he’d given her, and every time she looked at them, they summoned his memory.
He’d also left her this notebook, but she was feeling more and more that her hard thinking, her busy page-turning, her own notes in crisp black ink, were amounting to nothing. What had been planned as a blissful undertaking, a joyful reunion, was turning out to be less than positive. She hated to admit it, but without Samuel’s guidance or Steve’s company, Myla couldn’t decipher any of David’s notes. It would have been easier if they’d been in Greek, because then at least she could have checked out a dictionary. This was too hard, trying to determine the significance of each circled word, and beyond that, imagining all the different ideas, images, and theories that word would have signaled in David’s mind.
She was searching her memory for traces of these ideas. She felt sure he must have explained some of this to her, and she cursed her teenage disinterest. She flipped open the notebook, hoping it would jog something, anything. They were just words: paint globs—vanishing point—renditions of the real—Freud.
She refocused. She looked at David’s handwriting, at the words Camera Obscura, relaxed in them, and listened to her mind. She remembered what David had told her years before.
They’d been walking home from the college, Myla pushing her bike, David walking with two bags full of papers. She’d met him after school, and he was delivering one of his mini-lectures on European painting. She must have been about ten, which didn’t stop him from believing she should know everything there was to know about art. She’d been vaguing out, kicking along a stone, tossing him the occasional “uh-huh” to make him believe she was listening, when she found herself actually pulled in by something. He was in the middle of a sentence when she said, “Wait, say that again.”
“Say what again?”
“The part about the big debate.”
“Oh. Well, there have been recent rumblings in the art-history world, because some believe that Vermeer may have used the camera obscura as a tool in the creation of his paintings. It’s not a new assertion, but every once in a while my colleagues like to get up in arms over allegations that Vermeer ‘cheated,’ tracing the camera obscura’s projection—”
Once again, he’d lost her. “Wait. What’s a camera obscura?”
“Oh, it’s a simple mechanism, the first kind of camera we ever had, long before film was invented. See, someone realized that if you make a tiny hole in one side of a perfectly dark box, and you make things very bright outside the box, you get a projection on the opposite wall, inside of the box. You see whatever is outside. Upside down, of course. Exactly the way your eye works. Exactly the way Ruth’s camera works. Your brain turns the image right side up again. Ruth does it with her printing.”
“But how do they think Vermeer used it?”
“Well, now, that’s up to some debate. My money’s on the guy who thinks that Vermeer set up a camera obscura right at the painting’s viewpoint, and then projected the image onto the back wall. There’s all sorts of evidence too; the paintings are blurry in some places, hinting at the image being ‘out of focus,’ which never happens with the naked eye. And there’s a whole geometric study of the paintings as well. I’m not so interested in the hows of it as in the glorious idea of this painter using a camera as a tool. As if time could be captured.” David paused, reflecting, then shook his head. “The point these dissenters don’t understand is that regardless of whether Vermeer did or didn’t use a camera obscura—which actually means ‘dark chamber’ in Latin, in case you were interested—”
“I’m not—”
“Well, the point is, Vermeer still had to do the painting itself. Even after the tracing, he had, at some point, to take the canvas down and turn it right side up and make the traced world look real. Fill it with life. That’s where the talent lies. So I think we should be celebrating Vermeer’s entrepreneurial spirit. Not to mention the precedent this sets for photography. If someone could prove that this were the case, it would show, once and for all, that the concept behind photography, the depiction of the real, has been around much longer than people thought—”
And he was off again. Myla remembered him walking ahead of her, oblivious to her falling behind. She’d been interested. Something had thrilled her to think that all those years ago, people had done exactly what she did with Ruth, holding still so they could be recorded. Recorded as she was. Recorded as she saw herself. Maybe that was how Vermeer’s subjects had felt too. It truly proved her work with Ruth was art, and important.
Now Myla sat and tried to piece these ideas together. She could sense David’s ideas circling high above her, just out of reach, but that was even more frustrating than when she’d felt nothing pulling her at all. He seemed to be thinking about realism, or about how art depicted life. Every way she tried to put it in her mind, it felt trite, already examined. Maybe her father had just been a good man without good ideas.
She wished so much more for him. She was angry that this was all he’d left her. She wanted to give up, to forget the whole project. “But,” she thought, “I’m the only person up to the task. I’m the only one willing to listen. And here I am, alone with his notebook, with time on my hands and a willingness to work, and I can’t understand any of it.” She’d given it her all. The stuff she could understand fascinated, interested, enlightened her, but she knew she didn’t have the facts to string them all together. To get at his inner argument. It made her madder than hell.
She shoved away from the desk and grabbed her bag, feeling inside to make sure her wallet was there. She’d make the four-minute walk to the student center, buy some chips and a drink, try to clear her head. She grabbed David’s notebook and stuffed it in the bag, then berated herself for bending one of the corners. Even if it felt as though David were keeping her from something vital, even if she wanted to yell at him as she had when he was alive, the least helpful thing she could possibly do was to punish the only physical object currently tying them together. As she pushed open the library door, her right hand flattened the new crease, trying to ease it back into its original smoothness.
She sighed. The day was bright, brisk, easy. Light was everywhere, reminding her of her attempts to explain to all those lifelong easterners the joys that came with Oregon sunshine. Because you weren’t just getting sun when the Oregon sky was wide and blue; you were getting opposition to rain. It was a double benefit. As a child, she’d thought everyone lived this way, that light always came in layers: first you didn’t have to have rain anymore, then you got to have sun.
Myla turned right across the grass and startled a bird pecking in its depths. Normally she wouldn’t have noticed, but the bird hastened up before her and transformed into light itself—the wings and tail glowed from behind, carrying the sun and the golden disposition of the day. She gasped, and this startled her, her own gasping. Because now, standi
ng stock-still, she realized she was gasping from beauty and beauty only. Yesterday she’d noticed distinct leaves, and now there was this beautiful bird. She was seeing things.
Myla heard quiet steps behind her and turned just as a middle-aged man with rolled-up shirtsleeves and wire-rimmed glasses began to tap her on the shoulder. He was the reference librarian. He could have been a colleague. She’d noticed him on her comings and goings past the reference desk, and he’d smiled at her. Hadn’t been suspicious at all of this young woman appearing out of nowhere with a huge research task and no ID. That, in her experience, was the usual problem with librarians. They tended to rely heavily on the usage of identification.
But now he stood close behind her because she’d stopped dead in her tracks to notice a glowing bird. They were surprisingly close to each other, but she didn’t shift away from him. He backed up a half-step, shy. “Hi, uh . . . I’m Tim.”
“Myla. Nice to meet you.”
“Myla. Okay, good. I thought so. I think someone left something for you in my mailbox last night.” He shook his head and shrugged, and Myla noticed that the sun lit up his ears, much like the wings of the bird, only his ears glowed pink. “Um.” He was clutching a thick, oversize manila envelope under his left arm, and he pushed it toward her, laid it in her hands. “Is this you?”
The envelope was heavy and soft. She turned it over so she could see what was written on it. Penned in unrecognizable handwriting: “Myla Wolfe.” It must be from Marcus Berger.
“Yeah.” She waited a long time for the words to make it out of her mouth. “That’s me. Do you mind telling me—”
“How I knew it was you? Well, there aren’t so many new people coming in and out of the library these days.”
“Wait.” She smiled. “I was going to ask how you knew it was delivered last night.”
“Oh.” That made him smile too. A nervous habit. “I checked my mailbox at about two-thirty yesterday afternoon on my way to work, and when I checked it at ten on my way home, this was in it. So I guess it could have been delivered in the afternoon . . .” Then he cocked his head. “Wait, you weren’t expecting this?”
Myla tapped the package with her fingers and laughed. “Tim, I don’t even know what it is.”
Myla sat on a bench, curled her fingers under the flap of the manila envelope, felt the tug of paper around her hand as she pulled it open to see inside. It was simple, once she saw. It was an answer, almost as good as if David had decided to come sit down on the bench beside her to try and explain everything himself. Because it was himself. Himself in 581 pages of words and footnotes and diagrams and images. His book. The Book. Someone had kept it for her. And now it was in her hands.
It smelled like their house. God, it was overwhelming, the smell, and her childhood came back in the smooth, knife-edged paper, ripped diligently from the all-night ding of the typewriter. The smell of it, the sound of it, brought back the smell and sound of him, of the stoop of his shoulders when he ducked into a room, of his whistling in the morning, of the efficiency the length of his hands afforded him when cutting vegetables or holding a fork. How could this weight in her hands do this to her mind? Bring him back out of darkness and light to a place where she imagined she could touch him again?
Was touching him. For here David was. Here in Myla’s hands. If this wouldn’t help her know him better, she didn’t know what would. She would read his words. She would recognize him in his brilliance, make up for all those years she hadn’t listened to him speak. Then she’d share his mind with the world. People would finally know he’d been a wonderful father, a genius, and most of all, a good man. People would finally know all that had been lost with his death, all that had been denied the world. Hope swelled.
She lifted the cover page and leaned it, face forward, against her chest. She read the first words of his book.
There are no straight lines in nature. Of course, there are a few naturally occurring linear gestures that suggest “straightness”: a shaft of sunlight breaking through a cloud and hitting the ground below; a stiff reed/tree/stem rising single and upright against the light; the smooth horizon stretching on the far side of a plain, a desert, a sea. These things have always been visible. But look at the rocks, the trees, the shrubs, the waters that make up our natural world: not a straight line in sight.
So where did the line first appear? Inside the human imagination. The straight line was an idea in a person’s mind before it became a thing in the world. But once this abstract notion became visible, it became obvious, and was easily translated into projects that required straightness.
Think of the pyramids, the temples of the Greeks, the planed marble floors of the Romans, the simple wooden beam. The constructed world became linear, and the linear world became the place that civilization met nature. The straight line entered the natural world so naturally that there was no good reason not to base human experience on its existence. Its eternal existence. The line looked as if it had been there from the beginning, providing the correct way of seeing, the correct way of thinking, the correct way of making the world.
David. David. His words flowed toward Myla like liquid truth. He’d always had the gift of saying something that was so obvious, it shocked her with its newness. His words were his ideas and his ideas were him and he was her father. She missed him achingly. And the typeface, from his sturdy typewriter, was his handwriting. She swirled with his ideas, with the philosophical possibilities that lay in the architecture of an argument launched with such simple authority. She sifted quickly through the manuscript, catching fragments, phrases. His voice, throughout, was familiar, as if she’d heard the words in a dream now forgotten.
Then reality ripped through her musing. Where had this manuscript come from? Ruth via Marcus Berger? And if so, how had Ruth gotten her hands on David’s book? Why hadn’t Ruth given it to Myla sooner? The answer to that question haunted Myla the most, because it was almost as if Ruth had read her mind, had heard her reaching the end of her hope, and had decided to offer her a real incentive to keep going. Suddenly Ruth flitted onto her path as surely as the golden bird, and Myla didn’t know what to do with such a thought, mainly because it added to the ached missing in her heart.
She pushed these thoughts to either side of her mind, parted them with the knowledge, the weight, of what she held in her hands. Once she flipped through and came to page 581, she lined the pages back up, straightened them out on her lap and read what she hadn’t yet let herself read. The title.
It was typed neatly, centered: Spectacular Futures: How Art Makes Up Our Minds. Clever—no surprise—but beyond her amusement, she was also intrigued. Myla didn’t quite know what the title meant. “Well,” she said to herself, “he always did know how to tell a story.”
WE LIE ON THE DOCK AND squeeze lemon juice into our hair to make it shiny and blond. The water from Myla’s hair pools out onto the wood and gets warm under us. I use it to draw pictures that dry in the sun, and I use the end of her hair as a paintbrush. We’ve been at Elk Lake for two days now, with no photographs yet, but the feeling’s there, the knowing that today we’ll do it. We don’t even have to talk about this because we’re so ready. We stand up together and go back to the cabin. Myla and I pick up the film coolers and Ruth says, “Let’s head back down to the water,” so we do.
The eight-by-ten has a small depth of field, and its lens is long, so every picture it takes has a long exposure. These are things that I’ve known forever, and I know Ruth must have explained them to me sometime. But they’re things I know without her speaking them—they’re why she always says “hold still” when she’s about to take the picture. But now she tells us about the tricks she has to use sometimes to get a sharper focus. She explains depth-of-field theory for the millionth time, and I can tell Myla’s bored and wants me to be bored too, but I’m not. I want to hear about the way the wide lens of the camera works, the way the shutter opens, the way Ruth has to figure out how to get all of our bodies in focus
, and not just the tips of our noses.
I want to keep Ruth talking, but Myla jumps in the lake, so I wade in after her. I let it wet my knees but nothing more because it’s cold from the icy mountains. Myla doesn’t mind, though. She sees Ruth’s camera is out and is ready for anything. Then Ruth says, “Great. Just there,” and Myla stands in the water, her arms spread out like the legs of water bugs, and Ruth starts taking pictures.
At first I help Ruth by handing her the film she keeps in coolers, making sure to touch only the metal edges of each holder and not the soft negative middles, but after a while it gets boring. So I go back to the cabin and make myself a peanut-butter sandwich and watch them out the window. They move their heads the same way, but it’s not like they’re copying each other or anything. It’s that they know each other so well. They share thoughts, and that’s easy to see when they’re making Ruth’s pictures.
Myla moves up to the dock, and Ruth does some pictures of her face. I get tired of waiting for them, and I feel like exploring, so I put some peanut butter on my fingers so I can lick it off while I’m walking. I decide to walk around the lake. I hop over the rocks at the edge of it, wondering if they’ll even notice I’ve gone away. My sneakers get wet but it’s fun, and pretty soon I’m far away from them, on the other side. Ruth waves her arms at me and motions me to come closer. So I start coming back around, and when I get into a spot of sun, she puts up her hands for me to stop. She yells, “Take off your shoes and hide them,” so I do. And then I turn around and she yells, “Hold still.” The sun is bright, so I close my eyes. Then Ruth takes a picture of me, with my eyes closed, in the sun, on the other side of the water.
chapter twelve
from the street, Myla saw Samuel sitting in the porch swing, reading a magazine. Her hand gripped the shoulder strap of her bag, aware of the heavy manuscript inside, nestled with David’s notebook. She loved the privacy of her new treasure and was distracted by its presence. She walked up the stairs to the front porch. Samuel looked up when he heard her steps.
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