The first to come to mind is “A Pale Blue Dot,” an image of the solar system captured by Voyager 1. In it, earth is a speck of dust in a straw-colored streak of sand art.
Inspired by the way the photo inspired Carl Sagan, Remington had committed to memory his words about it. Teeth chattering, mouth dry, vocal chords frozen, he quotes them now, words not his own coming from a voice he no longer recognizes, visible breaths bathed in moonlight:
You see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Antique Christmas lights. Snowfall on a black night.
The Voyager image and Sagan’s words trigger thoughts of another cosmic image.
The deepest view of the visible universe so far looks like old-fashioned Christmas lights seen through a snowstorm. The image resembles two scenes from the film It’s A Wonderful Life—the beginning when conversing angels are depicted by stars blinking and, near the end, thick snow falling on George Bailey as he stands on the bridge.
The photo is composed of two separate images taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, and the Near Infrared and Multi-Object Spectrometer. It shows not only over ten thousand galaxies, but the first of them to emerge from the big bang some four to eight hundred million years ago, burning stars reheating the cold, dark universe.
Passionate.
Taking.
Swooning.
Elegant Arc.
Sculpturesque.
Planting one on her.
1945.
V-J Day.
Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph for Life Magazine of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day is perhaps the second most iconic of World War II.
The people.
The contrast of his navy blue sailor suit and her white nurse’s uniform.
The place.
The heart of America’s city.
The time.
The day of Japan’s surrender.
The onlookers.
The excitement of the crowd, the white dots of litter on the blacktop. The way she leans into him, the arch of her back, the bend of her right leg, the hint of the tops of her stockings peeking out beneath the bottom of her skirt. The grip of his right hand on her waist, the crook of his left cradling her head.
The intensity.
The boldness.
The commitment.
The surrender.
“The Kiss.”
Gray cloud and smoke.
Six figures atop a craggy heap of war-torn debris.
Lifting.
Hoisting.
Planting.
Staking.
Marines.
Mount Suribachi.
The only image from World War II more iconic than “The Kiss” is “Raising The Flag On Iwo Jima,” the Pulitzer prize-winning photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945.
The slanting angle of the pole, the stop-action of the men, the windswept unfurling of the American flag.
—You out there, killer?
Gauge’s voice is so calm, so flat and even, it chills Remington far more than the cold.
—I’m here if you need to talk.
Remington doesn’t respond.
—You ever killed before? Not very pleasant, is it? But you had to do it, didn’t you? See, there are times when you just don’t have any other options. And when it’s you or them, well, it’s got to be them, right? Hey, I understand. I’ve been there. Earlier today, in fact.
Jerking the radio to his mouth, depressing the button, speaking—no thought, no filter, no way to stop himself now.
—Who was she and why’d you have to kill her?
He hadn’t planned to. It just came out, as if independent of him, a rogue bypassing his decision-making process.
—Not knowing really bothers you, doesn’t it?
—She wasn’t trying to kill you.
—There’s more than one way to die. And some shit’s worse than death. A lot worse.
—Such as?
—Things that kill a man’s soul.
—Such as?
—Well, I’m sure there’re lots of things. Ruinin’ a man’s reputation comes to mind. Destroying his family. Taking away everything he’s worked for. I suspect prison would damn well do it, too. But I’m just speculatin’. Who’s to say what would kill a man—or cause him to kill?
—Bullshit justification.
—Don’t be too harsh on me now, killer. You and I obviously have more in common than you’d like to think.
—We’re nothing alike.
—We’ve both taken a life today.
—I killed a man, yes, but you … you murdered a woman. Self-defense is nothing like premeditated, unprovoked, cold-blooded murder.
Gauge doesn’t respond.
Remington realizes he’s said too much. He should’ve never started talking to him in the first place.
—Anybody hear anything? Gauge asks. Get a lock on him?
—No.
—Me neither.
—Nothing here.
—Keep looking.
—It’s time to call Spider, the big man says. Get the dogs out here and finish this.
—I think we’re closer to him than you think, Gauge says. Let’s give it a few more minutes. That okay with you, killer?
Remington doesn’t respond, and scolds himself for being stupid enough to do it before.
Allison Krause.
Jeff Miller.
Sandy Scheuer.
Bill Schroeder.
Protest.
Students.
National Guard.
Guns.
“Kent State Killings.”
Four unarmed students murdered, shot from hundreds of feet away, at least one in the back.
The photograph, a Pulitzer Prize-winning shot by John Filo, shows Mary Ann Vecchio screaming as she kneels before slain student Jeffrey Miller, an utterly perplexed look of disbelief on her tear-streaked and contorted face, mouth open, arms extended, hands upturned as if everything in existence is now in question.
Lost.
Again.
This tract of land that belong to him now is so much larger than he realized before. Of course, he may not even be on his property any longer. Depending on where he is exactly, he could have wandered onto paper company land or state protected property or … who owns the piece on the other side? A hunting club?
Occasionally, the cold wind carries on its currents the smell of smoke, causing images of the burning girl to flicker in his mind.
He wonders if his pursuers have built a campfire to huddle around or if in the distance a raging forest fire is ravishing the drought-dry tinderbox of timbers.
Certain he should’ve reached the pine flats by now, he enters instead the edge of a titi swamp. Do the flats border the far side? All he can do is keep walking, shuffling his feet along the forest floor, scattering leaves, divoting the dirt.
He has no idea of the time, and though it feels like the middle of the night, he knows that even with all that’s happened since he’s been out here, not much time has elapsed.
It’s probably between nine and ten.
—What time is it? he asks into the radio.
The question is addressed to no one in particular, but it’s Gauge’s languorous voice that rises from the small speaker of the walkie-talkie.
—You got somewhere to be?
—Just curious.
—We wouldn’t want to keep you from anything. Re
mington doesn’t respond.
—It’s 10:39.
—Thanks.
Is Mom okay? Is she lying on the floor after falling while trying to get her supper or medicine? Hopefully she’s sleeping. Oblivious to how late I am.
Wonder what Heather’s doing right now.
He had told Heather he’d call her when he came out of the woods. Did she grow alarmed when he didn’t or angry that he had failed to keep his word again?
Did her bad feeling cause her to call Mom? Did she discover that I’m not home and call someone to come take care of her? Did she call the police? Even if she had, they wouldn’t begin searching for him until morning. Would he be dead by then?
They haven’t found my truck, he thinks.
It occurs to him that they’d know his name if they’d found his truck or four-wheeler. Or do they just want him to think that, get him to circle back, return to where he started and walk into a trap?
Will he reach his dad’s Grizzly to discover it won’t crank? Or will they let him get as far as the truck and find its tires are flat?
The thoughts of these men even touching his father’s vehicles make him angry and sad. Since Cole’s death, Remington had become both sentimental and protective over every one of his meager possessions—even those Cole cared nothing about and had discarded.
Dirty old hunting boots had become priceless, notes scratched on scraps of paper sacred texts, discount-store shirts Remington would be embarrassed to wear around the house invaluable because his dad’s scent still clung to them.
A father’s funeral.
World watching.
Veiled mother.
Tiny fingers form a young son’s salute.
The heartbreaking photograph of JFK, Jr. stepping forward and saluting as his father’s flag-draped casket is carried out of St. Matthew’s Cathedral.
Personal.
National.
Individual.
Universal.
His father’s funeral procession took place on John junior’s third birthday.
Frost covered fronds.
Frigid wind whipping, whistling, biting.
Fog retreating.
Tiny ice shards like slivers of glass. Frozen dew drops sprinkled on limbs and leaves, grass and ground.
Shaking. Violently. Uncontrollably.
Too cold to think.
Body.
Dead.
Blink. Disbelief. Shock.
Beneath the base of a fallen oak, arm outstretched unnaturally, the gray-grizzled man he encountered when he first entered the deep woods lies dead.
Blood.
Tracks.
More blood.
Most of the man’s blood appears to be spilt on the cold, hard ground—splayed out along the path his body made while being drug toward the fallen tree.
Eerie.
Seeing a dead body out here, alone, on this cold, dark night disturbs him deeply. Frightening him far more than he wants to admit—even to himself.
Ghastly.
Ghostly.
Gray.
The man’s blood-drained body is even more pale than before, the pallor of his face advertising a vacancy, the departure of the ghost, the emptiness of the shell.
Holes.
Mortal wounds.
The man has been shot—more than once, though how many times, Remington can’t tell. Had he been with them? Is this whole thing about drugs? Poaching? More likely whatever he was up to out here was unrelated. He stumbled onto some men far worse than—
The man grabs Remington’s ankle, turning his twisted neck, opening his mostly dead eyes.
Remington startles, yanks his leg back, trips, falls, comes up with his rifle.
—Why’d y’all shoot me?
—What?
—I ain’t done nothin’ to nobody.
—Who shot you?
—Were it ‘cause of the bear? Y’all kilt me over a goddam old bear?
—Who—
Remington stops. Feels for a pulse. The man is dead. Fully and completely dead this time.
So he did kill the bear, but he wasn’t with Gauge and the others—and they certainly didn’t kill him for killing the bear. This is their way of silencing witnesses. A man like Gauge doesn’t tie up loose ends, he cuts them off.
—Goddam.
The sudden blast of voice on the radio makes Remington jump.
—What?
—It’s cold as fuck out here.
For the second time tonight, Remington leaves the dead where they lay and begins moving again, holding the radio to his ear to hear what’s being said.
—Coldest night of the year so far.
—Hey, killer, you okay? Didn’t look like you had on a very warm jacket.
—Can you believe this is fuckin’ Florida?
—It’s thirteen degrees out here. Colder with the wind chill. This is the kind of hard freeze we have only once every so often that wipes out citrus crops.
—Do us all a favor and blow your brains out.
Those final words uncoil an image from his subconscious, causing it to spring to the fore of his mind.
Eddie Adam’s “Execution in Saigon.” Another from his list of the greatest photographs ever taken. Perhaps the most memorable of all wartime photography, the picture captures the moment just before death. February 1, 1968. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s chief of police, shooting a handcuffed man in the head with a handgun at point-blank range on a Saigon street.
Facing the camera, the eye closest to the barrel of the gun, the right one, closed, his head tilted away from the weapon slightly, a horrific look of helplessness, hopelessness, and resignation at the inevitability of it all on his swollen face, the suspected Viet Cong collaborator has his picture taken just seconds before his life.
There’s something so casual in the stance of the uniformed South Vietnamese chief, something so terrifying in the expression of the North Vietnamese officer in civilian clothes.
We shouldn’t be looking at this. We can’t look away.
Feeling marginally better, less in shock, momentarily forgetting about his fatigue and the freezing temperature and the men with guns who are at this moment hunting him. He finds photography, even remembered photography, powerful and profound and inspiriting.
As if flipping casually, but quickly, through the pages of a photo album, he recalls other great, iconic pictures:
Muhammad Ali, mouth open, arm bent, standing over Sonny Liston, after knocking him out in the first round of their rematch.
Marilyn Monroe on a New York subway grille, white dress floating around her, one hand holding it down, the other behind her ear, mouth open in a seductive half-smile, painted toenails, high heels, arched feet, exposed legs. Sensual. Sexy. Seductive. Goodbye Norma Jean. Hello Venus rising.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, waving to a sea of two-hundred thousand people, Washington Monument in the distance. Activism. Hope. History. Birthplace of a dream.
“Fall of the Berlin Wall,” “Nelson Mandela’s Release from Prison,” 1948 portrait of Einstein, closeup of Louis Armstrong performing, first man on the Moon, press photo of a young Elvis demonstrating his patented pelvic twist, 1963 portrait of The Beatles following the release of Please, Please Me, the Wright Brothers’ first flight—all are pictures that make him happy, that remind him of the power of photographs, and why he takes them.
Exhaustion.
Fatigue.
Stumble.
Trip.
Fall.
Just as he’s about to reach the flats, he realizes he can move no further. He trips over an exposed hardwood root and falls. And doesn’t get up.
Rolling into a thicket of grass, palmettos, brush, and snake berry plants, he gathers leaves around him, covers himself as best he can, and falls asleep.
Dreams.
Evening.
Fall.
Teenage Remington following behind his father.
—Hurry, Cole
says. It’s almost dark. We’ve got to get home. Mom’s waiting.
Remington is younger and faster than his dad, but mysteriously unable to keep up.
—Come on, son. Don’t make me tell you again.
—I’m trying.
—You’re not.
—I am. Something’s wrong. I can’t—
—You have to or I’ll have to leave you.
—Okay, Daddy.
He hadn’t called Cole anything but Dad in over a decade. Where did Daddy come from? And why did his voice sound so small and weak?
—Who’s Heather?
—Huh?
—Do you love her?
The two men, father and son, are now seated in a small boat on a slough in the early afternoon of a summer’s day.
—I let her get away.
—That’s not what I asked.
—I love her.
—Is she pregnant?
—No.
—You think your mother will ever get well?
—She’ll be fine. Don’t we need to get home and check on her?
—You worry too much.
—I thought she needed us to—
—You gonna take a picture of her corpse?
—What? No. Why?
—I thought that’s what you and she did.
—Photograph dead bodies?
—You love her, don’t you?
—Mom?
—More than me.
—No. What makes you—
—She loves you more. It’s gonna break her heart when Gauge kills you.
—Is he going to?
Suddenly standing on the bank, Gauge looks through a scope on his rifle and fires a round that explodes the center of Cole’s chest. Blood gushes out. Cole falls over backwards out of the boat and disappears into the black waters.
Driving down the streets of Orlando in heavy traffic, Remington rushes to reach Heather’s gallery before it closes. Behind him, in a black Mustang Shelby GT 500, Gauge pursues him, leaning out of the window, firing rounds that ricochet off the trunk and bumper.
Passing the occasional cop, Remington signals and yells for help, but no one responds.
Sitting outside at a restaurant in Winter Park.
Summer evening.
Amtrak train clacking down the line.
Waiting.
Heather arrives, having walked down from her gallery. It’s a little after six. She has worked all day, but she looks morning-fresh, as if she just finished getting ready.
Stylish.
Double Exposure Page 7