Combat Camera

by Andrew Somerset

  “This country takes me back.”

  “What?” Melissa sat slumped in the passenger seat, her feet up on the dash.

  “Sorry. I thought you were asleep.”

  “You only talk to me when I’m sleeping?”

  “I was talking to myself.”

  “You mean like a crazy person?”

  “To stay awake.”

  The slipstream whipped at her hair, lashed it across her face. She reached up to tuck it behind her ear, tilted her sunglasses towards the sky.

  “This takes you back to what?”

  “Summer camp.”

  “Summer camp. Yeah, right.”

  This disbelief, the scorn in her giggle, stung him.

  “I was a camp counselor and everything.”

  “Leading singalongs of Kumbaya?”

  “Get your damn feet off the dash.”

  Sunburn and wet shoes and the smell of dry pine wood and sunscreen. When the car pulls away for the first time, gravel popping under its tires, your mother waving from the passenger window, you have never felt so alone. The conviction arises that this was a serious mistake.

  It began, as far as Zane could conceive, as another exercise in Character Building; thus far, none had succeeded, but the elder Zane was not easily defeated. Like most of his colleagues he seemed neither to like nor to understand teenaged boys, and sending Zane off for the summer seemed to him an appropriate way to ensure the boy learned leadership and integrity. Instead, Zane took advantage of his barely-supervised time with girls his own age to learn lessons of his own. Legions of parents go unaware that their camp fees pay primarily for sex education. Zane could report, for example, that despite certain cherished national myths, a canoe makes a decidedly poor venue for an amorous tryst. It is for sound and sensible reasons that the thing across the middle is called a thwart.

  At seventeen everything is a crisis and every adolescent crush a lifetime love affair. Zane fell in love anew every six weeks, each time with the conviction that if we can no longer be together then it’s all over, in the best Romeo and Juliet bare-bodkin-to-the-aorta tradition. Driving over the same Canadian shield again, he wondered what had become of Suzanne or Karen or Sarah or whatshername. Especially whatshername. He remembered the striking ice blue of her irises, the precise curvature of her nose, but certain other identifying details now escaped him.

  In any case, it had been a long time since Lucas Zane had fallen in love with anyone. You start to think you’ve forgotten how.

  “You got geese walking on your grave again.”

  He watched the country slide by. All these geese, breeding and multiplying. You go to the park and your feet are slip-sliding in great gobs of goose-shit. They’re everywhere, trampling all the best gravesites. Something ought to be done.

  “I was just thinking what happened to all those people.”

  “What people?”

  “Kids I knew from camp.”

  “Kids you knew from camp.” She shook her head.

  “I guess they all grew up and got married and had kids.”

  By now, those kids would be discovering the limitations of the canoe for themselves. The wheel turns again. The scale of the journey grows overwhelming and you just want to lie down and feel the sun on your skin and watch the clouds roll by.

  “It’s not like you to get like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “All sappy like that.”

  “I don’t know. This country is all happy memories.”

  “You’d think different if you lived up here.”

  “I guess I probably would.” But everyone needs some happy memory to cling to. We need the happy memories to make us sad.

  I still remember my first time, she said. He was driving at the time. They were right out in the middle of nowhere and had been talking far too long. He said, let’s not go there. Too much information. I’m not gonna tell you about my first time, either.

  “Not that. I mean stripping.”

  He wanted to reach for his notebook, but there was the small matter of keeping the car on the road.

  “I guess you could say I answered an ad.”

  “It happens to the best of us.”

  “What would you know about that?”

  Nobody will ever say she isn’t quick.

  “So I answered this ad where it said I could make two thousand bucks a night. And I was making like eight bucks an hour and I just split on this boyfriend who was an asshole and I didn’t have any money, so I said, what the hell, right?”

  You could swear you heard this one before.

  “So I called the number and talked to this woman, and she asked a bunch of questions and said come on down Thursday night and try out. And I was in.”

  “Questions?”

  “Just questions like why I wanted to do it and stuff.”

  “So you didn’t always work for Barker.”

  She looked at him and shook her head.

  “You think Barker’s the be-all and end-all? I been doing this for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “I was seventeen.”

  Zane checked the gas gauge, mentally calculated the distance remaining to Winnipeg.

  “They gave me a fake ID.”

  Zane pushed himself up in his seat and shifted his weight. His wallet was digging into his buttocks.

  “That surprises you?”

  He shifted his weight again.

  “Anyway, I went in and they told me what I had to do and then I went out and did it.”

  “Easy as that.”

  “Easy as that. Shit, Zane, I knew how to dance.”

  So that’s that. They tell you what to do and you go out and do it and there it is, easy as that.

  “That really bothers you,” she said.

  “I’m just tired.”

  He could feel her eyes on him.

  “Okay, it wasn’t easy as that. I got baked first but it was still really fuckin’ weird.”

  He didn’t know whether to feel relieved.

  “Shit, Zane, you’re seven fuckin’ teen, and you’re up there in the lights and the lights are hot, and there’s all these fuckin’ guys out there and they’re just watching you, just watching. And you’re on this schedule and you know that by the end of the second verse you’ve got to be out of your bra. And it didn’t excite me or anything. I just needed the money.”

  “It must have been hard.”

  Canned sympathy. You uncork it on demand.

  “Fuckin’ right it was hard.”

  He wanted to say something more but he couldn’t find the words.

  “Girls like coke for a reason,” she said.

  “And you?”

  She wasn’t watching him anymore.

  “Everybody does it, man.”

  Fair enough. Enough of this sentimental shit. She’s just another messed up kid and it’s not like she owes you anything.

  “Anyway, it gets easier. But the first time is pretty weird.”

  He didn’t have the words to answer and then he decided not to look for them. You let it ride and then she stops and you can go back to driving on to Winnipeg.

  “You know the weirdest thing? The weirdest thing is I was up there and I was taking off my bra, and then it was like it wasn’t me, it was someone else. And I was watching her do it. It wasn’t me. She was doing it, you could see her doing it, and I wasn’t there.”

  You let it ride and then she stops and you can go driving on to Winnipeg. Zane drove on.

  Eventually, every mile of this endless road looks the same: a river of blacktop, with its yellow line, divides scraggly pine forest. Periodic “moose crossing” signs serve only to reinforce the monotony. Mile after mile, the same thing, and the mind wanders. The mind wanders down alleys best avoided. It gets lost in bad neighbourhoods and asks directions of men with crude tattoos and hard, penetrating eyes. It has no fucking street smarts at all, the mind, no common sense. Like a dog that chases a stick into a sewage lagoo
n, it brings back the kind of things you can’t bring yourself to touch, even to throw them back.

  I was staying in Graz, Austria, ten days before Christmas, when Lapierre was killed. This was, I think, in ’96. You lose track. I even lose track of cities, of places. They all seem the same. One hotel is just like another. Places become generic. But Graz, I remember.

  Snow covered the rooftops of the old city, and lights glowed along the crooked streets, and Graz looked like a freshly iced cake, a gingerbread town built to excite tourists from Tackyville, Ohio, looking for the real Austria. It didn’t seem real.

  You have to understand, I don’t like to be cynical. It’s a cheap way to think about the world. But I was just back from the ruins of Groszny, taking a few days off between assignments. So that coloured my opinion of Graz, made the whole place seem as if it couldn’t possibly belong to the real world. And I had got to the point where I’d started to feel out of place everywhere.

  I went for a run that morning, and then I took my camera out for a walk around the city, just to shoot some happy snaps. I had no place to go and no one to see and I wanted to put this surreal Christmas in Graz on film, if only to stave off the loneliness that lurks quietly in hotel rooms. And I wanted to buy a postcard to send back to my niece.

  You can only pretend for so long. Eventually, the light started to die and the deep streets darkened between the snowy rooftops. It was all of a sameness, anyway: snow, lights, and people walking through the slush with their heads bent down. Instead of rosy-cheeked Austrians, cheerfully inhabiting their gingerbread city for the sake of tourists from Tackyville, I had grumpy shoppers trying to get Christmas over and done with for another year. At street level it was all much the same as you might find anyplace else.

  When I got back to my room, the message light on the phone was blinking. I left my camera out to let the condensation evaporate from the lens, and let the message wait while I kicked my boots off and ordered dinner from room service. Watching a foreign city sunk into the Christmas dispirit had left me in no mood to take messages relating to war or to hotel administration, and the message light was undoubtedly blinking for one or the other.

  I did the postcard first. It was a winter scene looking over the old city, and I wrote that I was staying in a magical Christmas city but that it was filled with American tourists who were buying all the houses and taking them apart and shipping them home to give to their friends for Christmas, so it didn’t look like the postcard anymore. When you looked out the window of the hotel you just saw all these Graz families sitting around the kitchen table or the television with no houses, but they were all happy because of all the money they got from the tourists, and everyone was getting a pony for Christmas. I thought that was pretty funny. Amanda was something like eight, then, and I wasn’t fooling her anymore.

  The message was from Jack. I had started working with Jack a couple of years before. He had also represented Lapierre for many years, which was how I met him. In a voice less brash than usual, he said he had bad news for me. Would I please call as soon as I got his message. Regardless of the time.

  A message like that can mean nothing good. I dialed New York, where it was still mid-afternoon, with a stone in my gut.

  He said, Terry is dead.

  I was surprised to discover that I didn’t feel a thing. You’re supposed to feel anger or denial when you lose someone, but I had none of that. It was like, I suppose, learning that a relative had died after a long struggle with cancer, a battle that had gone on well beyond the point at which even the most deluded optimist believed that anything could be done. It was like when my mother died. Shock comes only from the unexpected.

  When, I said.

  Yesterday, near Vlasenica. It was a car wreck.

  The war in Bosnia was over, but it had still killed my friend. So that was that. There really wasn’t anything to say.

  I don’t have the details, he said. His car went off the road and down an embankment, and he was dead at the scene, I think. It took some time to get him out of the wreck. They were worried about mines.

  I said, are you okay?

  Jack had known Lapierre even longer than I had. And Terry was close to retiring. I figured that Jack would take the news hard.

  Well, you come to expect.

  When I get back to New York, I said, let’s get together for a drink over it.

  I’d like that.

  We’ll drink Talisker, I said. I knew Jack liked Scotch.

  Silence crashed through the line and I tried to think what else to say.

  Then Jack cleared his throat. Just one thing, he said. Terry was doing a story for Time, on a suspected mass grave, near Srebrenica. And they need someone to step in and finish it.

  The last place I ever wanted to see again was Bosnia. I was through with Bosnia. But a story is a story.

  So I took the details from Jack, and made a couple of phone calls to set things up so that I could get rolling in the morning. Then I called room service again, and ordered up a bottle of rum. I didn’t want to hold a private wake in the hotel bar. Graz was the staging point for journalists covering the war in Yugo, and there was a good risk of running into someone I knew. Then you have a public wake on your hands, and I wasn’t in the mood to go public.

  And Time also wanted a short, personal obit. Terry had worked for them for years and they wanted to mark his passing. They wanted me to write it. As a colleague, as a friend. It was to be a leading photojournalist’s view of the great Thierry Lapierre. And I didn’t know what to write.

  Chemical assistance was in order. Terry would not have approved. He did not drink. He had, in fact, not one recognizable vice. He even eschewed wine, which seemed odd in a Frenchman.

  You should not drink, he would say. It may help with sleeping but it opens the door to too many problems. When you drink you lose your grip on yourself and become careless. And to Lapierre, becoming careless was the worst mistake you could ever make. Lapierre was never careless. He was always in control.

  I am alive, Lapierre said, because I leave nothing to chance. Luck favours the prepared.

  I remember him sitting on his hotel room bed with his camera bag open, having carefully emptied it of its contents. He was cleaning his gear. It was his standard ritual.

  First the bodies, two big Nikons, almost new but already battered, which he carefully wiped down with a cloth and then placed side by side on the table. Then each lens in turn, in order of focal length: wipe down the lens, remove the UV filter, check the front element, clean and replace the UV filter, and finally fiddle with the aperture lever, to make sure that the blades snapped back without sticking. Each lens took its place beside the camera bag, until they formed a neat row. Then he cleaned and tested his flash, which he never used but nevertheless insisted on carrying, counted and tested his supply of spare batteries, and sorted his film. That was back when we still shot film.

  On one of the bodies, he mounted a wide-angle, and on the other a mid-range zoom. Then everything went back in the bag, in order, each item in its specific place. Lapierre could reach in his bag without looking and immediately come up with the lens he wanted.

  He kept meticulous records, using only mechanical pencils because they continued to work in the cold or if they got wet and because their fine points suited his tiny, precise handwriting. He marked his expended film with the date and a roll number, using a felt-tip pen, so that he could relate it back to his notes. The final step of his cleaning routine was to check all his expended film against his notes, apparently out of concern that a roll had wandered off unsupervised.

  Everything I know, I learned from Lapierre. Starting out, I copied him, down to this precise cleaning routine.

  People will tell you that it is only the light that matters, Lapierre said, but this is all bullshit of street photographers who think they are making art. What matters is the subject you shoot, and how you see it. You can’t wait for a certain light. All light is good light if you find a way to us
e it. You think a war will only happen when the light is good?

  Wars never happen when the light is good. On the other hand they are full of subjects.

  Lapierre shot for the symbol and composed with strong graphic design, and at first I copied him. His trick was to find symbols in the frame, so that Sandinista machine-gunners were transformed into the stylized, heroic workers of Soviet socialist realism, or a farmer carrying a scythe became the Grim Reaper himself. His trick was to find the symbol and then arrange the frame so that the symbol dominated the picture and defined the photograph. This was the source of his renown.

  Eventually, I started shooting in my own way. Some critic in a New York paper called this the flowering of my nascent sensitivity, or some shit like that. I just thought I was finding a way to make good pictures. That’s really all you think about, regardless of what the critics might say.

  But I didn’t even do that on my own. Lapierre picked up on what I was doing differently and pushed me down that path, before I even realized I was doing it. We were in a hotel room someplace, looking at contact prints, and he picked out one frame and pointed it out to me. It was a shot of a soldier attempting to flirt with a teenaged girl. I guess it must have been Nicaragua, or maybe Honduras.

  You should work more this way, he said. You see how the soldier is standing, and you see her eyes and the way she hunches her shoulders? You can see everything that is happening here, without needing a caption. You should stop trying to make grand, graphic pictures and just make pictures like this.

  Grand, graphic pictures work for you, I said.

  I work like me. This picture, this is like you. He pushed the contact print closer to me and tapped his finger on the frame in question. When you try to make symbols, Lucas, you forget they are people. Then people are just shapes. You have no humanity.

  Terry was big on humanity, but at first glance, you wouldn’t have mistaken him for a human. He was too tidy, too compulsive, too cool and controlled. Even under fire, his hair remained neatly parted. And even after touring some refugee camp, filled with people in the final stages of malnutrition, ribcages protruding from emaciated frames, figures like the damned in some medieval painting of hell, Terry would return unruffled, clean his cameras and sort his film, and then go to bed. Lapierre was like a Swiss watch.