Combat Camera

by Andrew Somerset

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  It didn’t occur to him at first that she was no longer talking about letting him down.

  “I got no place to go here. What am I gonna do?”

  “Do what everyone else does: get a job.”

  Zane decided, belatedly, that this was an ungentle suggestion, but then changed his mind and decided that it was sound fatherly advice, and that it was about time somebody gave it.

  “Get a job. Yeah, there’s lots of jobs for me.”

  “Ring in groceries. Wait tables. Take a bit part in that bad dinner theatre production of South Pacific. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  He wasn’t sure that Melissa was up to it. The drizzle was gaining strength, and the engine had gone cold. It was time to move on.

  “I’m just about outa road,” she said. “And the worst thing is, I’m still in the same damn place.”

  Zane said nothing. He was getting cold. Her features were pinched and a drip had formed at the end of her nose. She wiped it away with the back of her hand without taking her gaze off the sea. Zane slipped the Leica out of his pocket and shot her like that, moved in close and shot her in profile, looking into the frame in the flat and even light. She might have been crying, or it might have been the drizzle. There was no way to know.

  “Shit, Zane, put that thing away.”

  He put the lens cap on and then rewound the film and put the camera in his pocket and closed the zipper.

  “That’s it.”

  “What’s it?”

  “The end of the story.” He slid down off the car hood. His backside was cold and wet. “Let’s get dinner. There’s a zillion good restaurants in White Rock.”

  They walked up the street and then turned at the corner, and as they climbed the hill a question struck him.

  “What’s your name, anyway?”

  She stopped and looked at him for a moment, and then she smiled and said, “Janet.”

  Zane took stock. Cash flow presented a problem. To wit, cash continued to flow, but in one direction only. He had no story with which to recoup his expenses, expenses that in any case exceeded anything he might hope to collect in fees. At some point, he had lost control of everything. The pilot daydreams while the aircraft plummets, the flight attendants cheerfully serving zero-gravity coffee to the terrified passengers; at two thousand feet he snaps out of it, but there is the problem of momentum. Also, strain on the airframe.

  Zane drove from White Rock to the outer reaches of civilization, and took a motel room in Port Coquitlam. The motel faced onto a rail yard, where dozens of freight cars sat slowly rusting in the interminable rain. Beyond them, the river slithered past rusting tugs and ancient pilings where rafts of logs awaited the saw mill. It wasn’t much of a view.

  On checking in, Zane got to work. He had film to develop. At some point, he had lost control of this also. How have you been remiss? Let me count the ways: thirty-six rolls of thirty-six exposures, some twelve hundred undeveloped frames of god-knows-what. Little wonder that the story got away from you. A thousand mysteries trace your route between Melissa’s apartment and Port Coquitlam.

  You don’t even know what the story is. I’m just an ordinary girl who doesn’t exist. I’m just the little engine that could. The developing backlog demands immediate attention, if only so that you can present to Jack some formless jumble of images. Perhaps an artist statement to go along with it. The case for the defence requires some evidence of a sincere effort. At this point it’s a matter of snowing the jury.

  Zane commandeered the bathroom and worked at alchemy. Processing his thirty six rolls took him the better part of a day. He had only one tank with him and it held four rolls. The room had a retractable clothesline over the bathtub and as he finished each roll he sprayed it down and hung it. By three in the afternoon the tub was filled with dripping black strips of film. Zane’s roommate was not reticent regarding her frustration with the state of their shared bathroom. His dabbling in the black arts, which had so fascinated Melissa, held no interest for Janet. It can be difficult, rooming with a stranger. Relations became fractious.

  “When are you going to get all this shit out of the bathroom?”

  All this shit: a life, preserved in silver. Immortality was not among Janet’s concerns.

  “When it’s dry.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Close the door.”

  She slammed the bathroom door and Zane cringed at the thought of the dust she had stirred up, now settling and adhering to his still-wet negatives. Hours of retouching loomed.

  She stood by the door with the air of a woman who intended to stalk off in anger, but found her ambitions thwarted by insufficient stalking space. It was a small room.

  What do you want from me? The work has to get done. That’s why we’re here. All those road miles, reduced to nothing. All that distance covered now lies between you. One morning you wake up to discover that you’ve never met.

  “I’ll take it down in the morning.”

  “I want to take a shower now.”

  “Then rent your own damn room.”

  “Fuck you, Zane.”

  Daylight slashed through the doorway as she walked out, stalking space no longer a concern. Her best efforts to slam the door were frustrated by a mechanism that slowed its swing. The point was clear, regardless. It’s the thought that counts. She had no money with which to rent her own room, and he knew it. I’ll take that punch in the nose now, please.

  Zane sat alone in the room and flipped through his notes. A thread of a story began to form but the slash of light through the doorway replayed and severed it. Somewhere here is a story, a tale told by an idiot; problem is, the idiot can’t figure out what exactly this tale is. For far too long, this particular idiot has disciplined himself to stick to the facts.

  Faced with a lack of facts, Zane found distractions. Foremost now was irritation that she had left without her key. It suddenly seemed essential that he go out, if only to walk and clear his head. He needed to get back in motion. But her key lay on the wardrobe, beside the television, and mocked him. He was stranded with the wet black ribbons of his negatives and four notebooks filled with bilge and nonsense.

  Zane watched television. He paced. He attempted to take further notes, and then crumpled those notes into balls and threw them at the wastepaper basket from various positions around the room, with a general lack of success. He attempted to read the novel that he had bought in Medicine Hat; it was moronic. He perused his road atlas; the road atlas reminded him of Calgary; Calgary reminded him of Connie. He returned to watching television.

  When she knocked, he considered letting her wait outside but decided instead to demonstrate his maturity. She walked past him into the room without speaking and picked up her key from the wardrobe and then went to the window and looked out. He watched her in the window light. It was good light for a picture, flat and directionless light filtered through the overcast, washing through the window as if from a gigantic softbox. But he had no idea what this picture was supposed to say. And he was done with pictures, anyway.

  “You forgot your key.”

  “I’m only staying ’til I find another place.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Fine.”

  He remembered her question, however long ago: when did we get married? Still she didn’t look at him. He felt useless standing by the door. He walked over to his bed and sat down and found the remote and flicked the TV on. She swore at him and walked out again. This time, she remembered her key.

  Zane had one thousand, three hundred and eleven negatives, from forty-three complete and partial rolls of film. In addition, he had the contents of the flash card salvaged from the camera he had wrecked against the iceberg of Bill’s skull. Most of those pictures, given their content, were unusable, but he had saved seven frames of Melissa in full colour, dressed as a cheerleader. The remainder of the Melissa file was in four reporter’s notebooks filled with neat
, pencilled notes. This was all he had.

  Of greater concern to Zane was what he lacked. He now realized that he had spent much of the trip either driving or sleeping, and too much of the remaining time messing around instead of taking pictures. He had failed to get a shot of her sleeping in the car, for example. This opportunity had presented itself on numerous occasions, but the shot had not occurred to him. It now seemed to him an obvious and glaring omission, and that he was driving at the time, a flimsy excuse. Winogrand was wrong: a thousand pictures had passed him by while he was loading film. It was gross negligence.

  Consequently, Zane chose to slacken his editing standards. In making the first cut, he selected two hundred and fifty-nine negatives for a closer look. Making the cut took an entire day, and scanning his selects took another. After reviewing them onscreen, he felt that the quality of his output had been fairly high, although he could not shake the nagging voice that whispered wishful thinking from behind his ear. Neither could wishful thinking mitigate the fact that he still could not distill the thread of a story from those two hundred and fifty-nine pictures, those two hundred and fifty-nine disparate facts. Janet remained a mystery.

  Zane’s cellphone lay on the night table. He looked at it with loathing, as one might regard a coiled and dangerous snake. No good ever came of the cellular telephone; all its inventor achieved was to unleash the evil of Bell’s original, wire-bound instrument. Then followed misery, plagues of rats, disease, pain in childbirth, and text messages. And this misery can reach you anywhere. It demands a non-proliferation treaty.

  The time approaches when you will have no choice but to pick up the phone, voluntarily, and release Jack from its innards. Jack, who is an asshole, and who will undoubtedly remember that you recently told him as much. And this time, you will have to admit that you followed this story to its end, that its neat, symmetrical arc has collapsed into a hopeless tangle of yarn, and that you can’t find either end. This time, you will have to admit to Jack that you have no story, that there was in the end no story to tell. And then, following a predictable dose of verbal abuse, the final, flickering light will go out.

  You brought this on yourself.

  Now for the hard part: with the developing done and the negs cut into neat strips, with the negs stored in archival plastic sleeves and filed carefully in manila file folders, and with the file folders secured with blue elastic bands that he had bought from the office supplies superstore down the road, nothing remained to Zane except to find the truth.

  After the rain, the rich, dark earth steamed as if all the ghosts of Liberia would now arise to accuse the living. The dead emerged from sheltering doorways and stalked the streets with amputated limbs. Some of the dead were filled with anger, and they shouted and waved the stumps of their wrists at him. And some of the dead were crazy, and they thrust their stumps at his face to frighten him and they laughed at him with mad glee. When they grinned, the earth itself split open.

  Zane rode in the front passenger seat of a crudely camouflaged Nissan pickup truck driven by a boy no older than fourteen. The boy had the glassy eyes of one possessed, and he did not speak. A half-dozen more boys rode in the open truck bed. None of them had ever shaved, and none spoke as the truck rolled down the main street of Tubmanburg. Only one of them had ever spoken to Zane. He had proudly recounted the number of men he had killed, and how he had killed them. Zane was thankful for the language barrier.

  In Liberia, you needed protection, and the boys were Zane’s assigned bodyguard. He travelled in a state of perpetual terror, afraid as much of his bodyguards as of any threat they might dispel. Nothing is so dangerous as a twelve-year-old boy with a brain full of drugs and a deadly weapon, and a deadly curiosity to explore its power.

  Zane had no idea why he was in Liberia. He wanted only to get out again. He had read backgrounders on the civil war, but they made no impression. One group of people sets out to kill another; he could find no reason in it. There was no history but killing, nothing here more organized than the mind of a schizophrenic.

  Only one fact made any strong impression. In the streets men armed with rifles carried machetes to hack off the arms of women and children. Before making the cut, the soldiers asked their victims if they would prefer their shirtsleeves to cover their stumps. And they honoured their victims’ preferences.

  “Just get the story out.”

  At a field hospital run by Medecins sans Frontiers. The doctor practised emergency medicine in Cincinnati.

  “I don’t even know what the story is,” said Zane.

  The doctor’s name was Carr. At home, he played golf and collected jazz records of the Swing era. He waved his hand over the patients in the tent hospital, who lay listlessly on cots while intravenous fluids dripped into their arms. Most of the patients were women.

  “The story’s right fuckin’ there,” he said.

  Zane saw rows of patients lying impassive in the heat, rows of people, but no story.

  “You have to get the story out.”

  “Where did these people come from?”

  “It’s not fuckin’ complicated. Just tell the story.”

  Nobody cares anyway. Zane took some photos and he fled.

  The men with guns told their child soldiers that they were under magical protection, that bullets would pass through them and do them no harm, and some of them believed it. Much of the time, Zane was too terrified even to get out of the truck. Zane went where the truck went, and counted the days. All Zane wanted was to get the fuck out of Liberia.

  Just outside Tubmanburg, the truck turned off the road and jolted along a muddy track that led through a rubber plantation. Zane asked why they were there, knowing that it was futile. The driver said nothing.

  They stopped before a low, whitewashed bunkhouse. A half-dozen men and boys kneeled in a row, their hands tied behind their backs and their heads hanging, staring at the ground. None of them looked up at the sound of the engine. Guarding them were two young boys with rifles, and an older man who, by virtue of being in his early twenties, was an authority figure. He, too, carried an AK-47, and wore an automatic pistol tucked into his belt.

  Zane knew him: Sheriff Williams, a title Zane had thought odd until he learned that Sheriff is a popular first name in Liberia. Sheriff appeared to be the archetype of west African manhood: a wide smile, straight teeth, flawless dark skin and a chest sculpted by a lifetime of hard physical labour. He smiled often and was a good-looking man and Zane liked him on sight, except for the fact that he was an egomaniac, a psychopath, and a drug addict. And certain flaws are hard to overlook.

  So now you know why you’re here. You’re here because Sheriff told the boys to bring you. Zane got out of the truck and Sheriff’s face split into a wide grin, the earth again cracking open.

  Sheriff extended his hand, and out of politeness, Zane shook it. Better a friend than the alternative. Sheriff smiled and squeezed Zane’s hand hard and then walked over to the line of kneeling men, pulled the pistol from his belt, and waved it at the man at the end of the line. The man looked up at Zane. He was about thirty. He had crooked teeth, and his eyes rolled in fear. A queasy apprehension crept over Zane.

  “This man is an enemy of our people. He has killed our brothers and raped our women. And we are going to show the world how we deal with such criminals.”

  Delusions of grandeur. For whose benefit can this man possibly be making speeches?

  “Get your camera.”

  Sheriff pointed his pistol at Zane’s camera, waved it about carelessly. Zane could feel the empty eye of its muzzle roaming over his body, an invisible force. Watching him. Don’t make any sudden moves, just stand there, frozen like a rabbit. You don’t want to get stupid here. Just get me to the airport, just get me on the first plane out of fucking Liberia, just get me off the runway. The pistol’s wandering muzzle is one thing, but the look in Sheriff’s eyes is worse. Looking in Sheriff’s eyes, Zane didn’t see a human being.

  Zane didn’t l
ook at the eyes of the kneeling man.

  “I am going to kill him, whether you take a picture or not.”

  The pistol muzzle wandering again, the remains of his insides contracting in fear. Feeling sick. No medevac helicopter for you in Liberia. No Special Forces to pull you out.

  Aperture priority, f/8 and be there. Light falls on the subject, bends through fourteen elements in eleven groups, threatens the retina and the visual cortex frozen like a rabbit.

  As the mirror blacked out the viewfinder, Zane heard the report of Sheriff’s pistol. For a moment, he was pleased at his good shutter timing.

  That was the last war Zane ever shot.

  She stood in the parking lot, leaning against his new car with her arms crossed and her bags lying at her feet like patient dogs, and Zane mentally cursed the Vancouver rain that stopped only now, now when he finally wanted her driven back inside. A faint mist rising from the river and the puddles in the rail yard. He felt that there should be more to say. She felt that there was nothing more to say, and had said so, and had since proceeded to say nothing more, at length. All her things were packed, and the cab was on its way.

  “You can’t afford a cab,” he’d said. “Let me drive you.”

  “I prefer to make a clean break.”

  She had found a place, found a roommate, found a waitressing job to pay the rent. She said it was a fresh start. What she’d hoped for. She said he should be happy for her.

  He wasn’t. He said he’d promised her a print, but he’d never made one.

  Story of my life, she said.

  I’ll make one and bring it to you.

  She said she didn’t want one, anyway.

  Across the road in the rail yard, freight cars stood silent like rusting oxen relieved at last of their burdens. Beyond, the river ran brown in early autumn flood. Soon the snow would hit the mountains, and the water would begin to fall. The endless cycle is always comforting when nothing else is. The Earth tilts away from the sun, our days shorten, and all of us at one time or another return to the soil. Interstellar space yawns. Events of the interim hardly matter. Zane wondered if oxen go to some eternal reward.