“I got it. I got the photo. From the crash.”
“Then email it to me. Let’s beat the others.”
“This is the one.”
“Aren’t they all? Send it over and I’ll be the judge.”
“No. You’re at the Flatiron, right? This one is going to the highest bidder and I’m going to give you first dibs.”
“You can’t email it? It’s that good?”
Phil laughed. “Not good. Great. The king has returned to the throne.”
“If it’s that good, first drink is on me.”
“You’ll be buying the whole bar a round.”
Phil hung up and laughed. He knew he had taken the photo of a lifetime. He started the car again and glanced in the mirror to pull out. The black threads in his vision, afterimages, ate a lane of traffic. He tried blinking them away, but they remained, clinging and he pulled out onto the road.
3
A few shops down from the Flatiron, after having parked his car, Phil caught sight of his reflection in one of the windows, and stopped. It was as if he were staring at a stranger. His middle was thicker, his hair thinner, his clothes more wrinkled. He had passed that point in life where he saw himself as becoming rather than decaying, of where the world expanded rather than shrank, of where more doors closed than opened. Ever since he had lost Samantha and that final tour in Kabul, everything had changed. The joy of living had begun to fade.
He wiped at his hair to smooth it on his head. That blur still wormed across his vision, the ghostly reversed image of the fiery explosion. The spot was gray now, fading from black, but still it covered the reflection of his face, almost as if trying to erase him.
He looked down the street. Twilight had descended in Los Angeles. The road had filled with cars, throbbing with bass beats, acrid with exhaust, their headlights stretched into long-legged stars rotating against the coming night. The spot blurred them all.
The windows in the looming apartment buildings glowed orange. Silhouettes drifted behind curtains. Babies cried against sleep and pots and pans clanged. He smelled grilled steak, onions, garlic. It all seemed so normal.
Cars slid into parking spots. A couple holding hands dashed through a break in the traffic. Further down the sidewalk, an ice cream vendor pushed his cart, his bell ringing ceaselessly.
He turned back to his reflection. The writhing spot ate his reflection. Worm food, as if everything he saw, the world as he knew it, was a veneer and the real world lay beneath it, slowly being consumed.
He blinked, rubbed his eyes. This was annoying. It was becoming disorienting as if the world were no longer complete. He closed his eyes, pinched his nose, and took several deep breaths. He opened his eyes. The blotch floated across his vision as if the explosion had permanently marred part of his field of vision, as if the brightness had seared his sight. This wasn’t good. Not for a photographer.
But he had experienced combat trauma before and healed. His ears ringing for days after the explosion in Kabul. The limp as a result of the car crash in Nicaragua. Given time all wounds healed.
He laughed sharply as he suddenly thought of Samantha. Not all wounds healed. Not wounds of the soul.
Phil turned from the window, hurried down the sidewalk, and pulled open the heavy door of the Flatiron.
The buzz of conversation mixed with the clang of silverware. The air filled with the smells of beer, sausages, and fries. Phil’s mouth watered. He had not eaten since lunch. He scanned the room until he spotted Justine waving from a table in the back, laptop open, other hand pressing her phone to her ear, half finished beer and plate of chicken wings in front of her.
He meandered through the tables and sat opposite Justine, who pointed at a pint of beer and gave Phil a thumbs up. He took a sip. Too tangy, one of those microbrews with too much flavor. Phil only cared for the numbness that came with alcohol. He wished Justine hung out at a bar that served cheap vodka shots.
She was impossibly pale, as if she had never stepped out into the Southern California sun, but her skin was wrinkled, textured in a way that reminded him of a desert lizard. Freckles spotted her forehead. She looked years older than she was. The sun, the ocean, time – all had left their mark.
“It’s coming through now,” Justine said into her phone as she stared at her computer screen. “Wow. That’s how you fail your driving test.”
She turned the laptop so Phil could see the screen. It featured a photograph of the Bugatti at the bottom of the canyon, where it had finally come to a rest, blackened, twisted metal. The photo was good, he thought, the windshield spiderwebbed, splattered with blood. Phil’s chest tightened. More than simply a good photo. Fantastic composition and lighting. He swallowed a mouthful of beer to drown out his growing jealousy. A photo after the crash. An image, beautifully framed, but one that could have been at any accident. It was textbook good, all the components in the right place. But to Phil it lacked soul. It did not dive deeper, below the surface of the mundane. Unlike his photo, it did not capture the last moment of a man’s life. It was not sublime. No Pulitzer material here.
“That was The Kid,” Justine said, ending the call and turning the laptop back towards herself. “He’s got quite the eye. Gonna make a name for himself.”
“My photo’s better.”
Justine chuckled, and wiped her lips, smearing the napkin with a smudge of grease and lipstick. “You don’t need to worry about him for a while. He’s going to be out of the country. On a job”
“Where’s he going?”
Justine slid her plate away from her. “You know Xavier?”
“Who doesn’t? We met a few years back.” He remembered reading a front-page feature of Xavier’s in The Atlantic about the hush money a religious politician paid to a prostitute, which had then been followed by Xavier’s circuit on the talk shows. He was charismatic, on the rise; a different trajectory than Phil. He was sure that Xavier did not remember who he was.
Justine crinkled her napkin, then ran it across the grease stains she had left on the keyboard. “According to the Kid, Xavier’s invited him along to chase a story. Too big for my Hollywood rag. But I’ve connected Xavier with some people. You might be surprised at the shady connections I’ve collected over the years.”
“So, what’s the job?” asked Phil.
“You’ve heard of El Diablo, the South American drug lord, right?”
“The legendary guy no one has ever taken a picture of? The one who some people think doesn’t even exist?”
“The one and only.” Justine leaned in. “Apparently Xavier’s got an interview lined up. Along with the first photo of this guy. Think about it. It would be epic. It would be a photo that would burn a hole in this world.”
“I’d die for that job.”
“Maybe you can convince him to take you along instead of the Kid. But enough small talk.” Justine tapped her finger at the beer in front of Phil. “I bought you a beer on the promise that what you’ve got is more than just good. Let’s see what this amazing photo is that you got for me.”
“That crash. That was Tyler Z.”
“The child star reviving his career courtesy of return visits to rehab?”
“The one and only.”
“And how do you know it was him driving the car?”
“I was behind him when he veered off the road. I climbed down the hill while his car hung in a tree.”
“Jesus, mother of god.”
“And I snapped a shot of him, trapped in his car, his last living moment.”
Justine hooted. “Now we’re talking. Enough of this tease. Show us what you got, Mr. Pulitzer.”
Phil dug his camera out his bag, clicked it on, and stared at the touchscreen. The image flashed on. It was the shot, the last moment before death. But it was wrong.
Horribly out of focus.
“Shit!” said Phil.
He scrolled left. The other photos were also horrible. It was impossible to make out anything other than broad swaths of
yellow, black, and green.
“Let me see. You’re killing me.” Justine reached across the table.
He slammed the camera against the table, rattling the plates and silver.
“What are you doing?” asked Justine.
He couldn’t speak. His heart pounded so hard the clatter of dishes and the ringing of silverware faded. He hissed out a breath of air. “Fuck! Every shot! Ruined.”
He spun the camera around so Justine could look and grabbed his beer afraid for a moment that he would squeeze the glass so hard that it would shatter.
“These shots. They were perfect. He was pleading. His last fucking moments. I had them. I immortalized him. Now, this.”
Justine bit her lower lip. “We got nothing here. It happens. Maybe you banged the camera when you were climbing down the hill. All these electronics and fancy computers. This shit breaks too easily.”
Phil shook his head, jaw clenched. He dragged the bottom of the glass across the table. His breath was hard, shuddering, uncontrollable. He became suddenly aware of the people the next table over glancing at him, whispering. He closed his eyes and counted to ten before opening them.
How could all of this have gone wrong? This was his chance to be seen again, to claw his way out of the hole he was in, get commissions for real jobs, not this paparazzi work. A chance for a return to meaning. A chance to turn back the clock, to erase the mistakes of the past.
“Beer’s on me,” said Justine.
Phil took a long drink and then released a shuddering sigh. Exhaustion washed over his body. “It was there. The perfect shot.”
“I know. It’s just the breaks, and right now you’re on an unlucky streak.”
“Ever since Kabul.”
Phil drank more beer. What a disaster. He picked up the camera, snapped a few shots, and quickly checked the images. An empty beer glass, sparkling with light. A line cook slicing through a bloody steak. A couple staring at their phones. All the photos were sharp, composed, held together in the light.
The camera worked. What had happened with the shots on the hill?
Did he make a mistake in the heat of the moment? Was that all it was?
Or was something wrong with him instead? He thought about the writhing spot across his vision, the shots out of focus. His breath caught in his throat.
Or maybe the blurred photos were revealing something deeper, a sign that he needed to make a change to become whole again.
Years ago, embedded with troops at the dark edges of civilization, he learned first-hand that life clung by a fragile thread. Death came suddenly. Without warning. Without bias. Phil knew how fragile it all was, how meaningless it really was. One moment you were walking alongside a laughing reporter in the slums of Colombia, and the next, the air shimmered, heat washed over you, and when you picked yourself up off the ground, you were alone, bathed in the blood of another.
And beneath those moments simmered the paralyzing fear of Phil’s own death, one he had held since his earliest days of childhood: that with death, the terror that his memories and being could be gone in the blink of an eye. Since the death of Samantha that fear only wormed more deeply in him. After he died, there would be no trace of him. Nothing would resonate beyond him. The great blackness, the great unknown would consume him. As if he never existed in the first place.
But he had a path out of that despair. The camera in his hand. His weapon against the darkness. If he could make a moment eternal, he could exist through his photos beyond his death. Through art, his being would be carried beyond his last breath. That was the light at the end of the tunnel. His pathway to meaning. A way to keep death at bay, a beacon.
“How can I get in touch with Xavier?” asked Phil. “I want to be the one that shoots El Diablo.”
This was Phil’s chance to be alive again, to put what he had done to Samantha behind him, to erase his mistakes.
4
Three years before, the call came while Phil was on assignment in Kabul.
He was in the backseat of a Humvee, on a dawn patrol, the only journalist among two dozen soldiers in the three-truck convoy.
Through the window, the sky glowed pink, clouds broken black against the snow-dappled peaks. Buildings glowed orange and blue, caught in the light of the rising sun. A postcard-worthy moment.
The convoy was approaching a bird market near the river; the day before, a terrorist had set off explosives in a religious school, killing eight and injuring a hundred others. The American and Afghani troops were planning to continue their interviews from the day before.
Phil was half-dozing, forehead bobbing off the glass window, when his phone vibrated. Samantha’s photo on the screen. It was an odd time for her to be calling.
He hesitated, self conscious the soldiers would overhear his conversation, so he did not pick up and tucked the phone in his jacket.
Twenty minutes later, when they arrived at the market, Phil told his liaison that he had to make a call and would join them shortly. He waited until all the troops were out of the Humvee, handing out candies to the sudden swarm of kids and spreading out to secure the perimeter. The market was a burnt-out concrete shell, walls blackened, roof sagging. No one had cleaned the blood from the floors.
He dug his phone out of his jacket. Three missed calls from Samantha, one after the other. Then nothing.
He called. It went straight to voicemail.
He had his hand on the door handle when the phone vibrated.
“Samantha,” he said.
A long silence, crackling, then her father’s voice. “She’s gone. She passed.” A deep quivering inhalation.
The phone became weightless in Phil’s hand and bile surged in his throat. He could not feel his heart beating and his breath drained from his chest. The humvee felt as if it were being lifted up by the back wheels.
“No, no, no…” His voice sounded small, as if he heard himself from the far end of a tunnel.
“She was asking for you. In those … those last moments. Phil. She was asking for you. We called.”
“I couldn’t pick up. I’m sorry.”
“You should have been there for her.”
Phil was suddenly cold, shivering uncontrollably. The silence was so long he was no longer sure whether her father was still on the line. Phil broke the silence. “I couldn’t. It would have broken me.”
Her father laughed, deep, like a dog’s guttural growl at the approach of an intruder. “And this hasn’t? This doesn’t break you, right now? Because it breaks me. Breaks me in half. She needed you there for her, more than anything else in this world. Fuck, Phil, she was crying for you in the end. Crying, man. You should have been there for her. Holding her hand. By her side. Soothing her. But you ran away.” He sobbed suddenly, and when he returned, it was with a whisper. “My god, she was so afraid, and you weren’t there for her. What kind of husband abandons his dying wife? What kind of man? Are you even human?”
Phil clenched his fist and punched the seat in front of him. God, he hated himself. Everything was winding up, a whining noise tearing through the gap in the open windows, as if distant screams gathered into a storm. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t. I can’t. I see darkness everywhere. You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m so afraid …” The disembodied screams sent chills up his spine. He wanted to kick open the door, run, hide.
“She needed you. You were supposed to be there for her in her last moments. She loved you more than anything.”
“I’m sorry.” He kicked the door open. Hot air blasted him. Children laughed, ran circles around one of the soldiers. Ghosts of dust pursued them. Phil smelled burnt bread and coffee. The screams weren’t real, but he still heard them, buried within him, lodged deep, unable to escape.
“We’re burying her on Thursday. Her mother wants you to be there.”
Phil staggered towards the charred market, camera hanging like an iron manacle in his hand. “I’m here, in the middle of thi
ngs. On assignment. I can’t leave like that.”
“You won’t even say goodbye?”
“I have said goodbye. She knew I loved her.”
“Fuck you, Phil!”
Her father had hung up, but still Phil held the phone to his ear. The children had found him. Barefoot, circling him, an escort of screaming laughter. They grabbed the tail of his jacket, his numb arms, pulled, cajoled, begged.
“Give us candy!”
“Candy, candy, candy!”
He had nothing for them. Still they clung to him, a swarm of manufactured hope, and he staggered forward to the spot where the day before death had descended; where he could capture everything from the other side of the lens. Through which death would be held at bay.
But he could not stop her death from haunting him. Over the next several weeks, he found he could not take any photos. Every shot, he saw Samantha’s face in the image, or the shape of her hip, or the color of her hair. Every shot haunted him.
It was as if his lens, the glass shield that he imagined protected him from his grief, had been broken. After another month with no photos, his assignment was terminated and he was sent home. He hadn’t been able to take any real photos since then - not until three years later, with the failed shot of Tyler Z.
5
The morning after the car accident and death of Tyler Z, Phil peered into the restaurant window where Xavier was supposed to be. But because the restaurant was dark and the street bright with the Southern California sun, he could not see past his reflection. Instead of spotting Xavier, seated somewhere in the restaurant, Phil was overwhelmed by the world behind him: the bright blue sky, the blinding white stretch of beach, the blur of cars.
He stared at his reflection. And he saw himself, an unremarkable man who was wasting his life. His image looked unreal, as if it had been pasted onto a street scene.
Justine had said that Xavier ate at the restaurant every Sunday morning with his family. Other than that it would be hard to get a hold of him. Because once he got his teeth in a story, he turned off the world; no phone, no email, just a relentless pursuit of the truth that lay hidden beneath the surface.
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