Standing alone in the morning light, Phil suddenly felt out of place. And not just because of the uncomfortable feeling that he was spying through a window trying. But rather that he did not belong in the world that swirled around him.
Laughter rippled from across the road, from a woman running on the beach with her daughter. A couple in matching teal shirts held a map folded open in front of them arguing about which way was north. He smelled hot dogs from a food cart, exhaust from cars creeping by, and the salt of the endless sea.
All of these things were the world, a snapshot of existence, and Phil was apart. He was a reflection captured in the window, a displaced image against the shadows inside the restaurant. Two worlds, to neither of which he belonged. He floated, adrift with the consequences of the choices he had made.
Suddenly, he feared what he was pursuing was meaningless. A great photo would change nothing. Since losing Samantha, he had lost the sharpness with which he once viewed the world, and the emotional anchor that allowed a captured image to speak to the viewer. Without a sense of meaning, he felt he had become a leaf fallen from the highest branch and swept along in whirpooling waters.
He turned to leave, unsure of what came next. Perhaps to lie in the warm sand, or to wade into the numbing ocean until his feet lost their grounding, or to drive up into the mountains and steer straight against a sharp turn.
He heard his name.
“Mister Waterston.”
Phil turned back towards the restaurant. Xavier stood at the door, wide legged, fists on hips. For a moment the sounds of children laughing and silverware rattling against dishes cottoned him, and then Xavier closed the door.
“How is it that on this bright Sunday morning, that you, Phil, are unexpectedly standing in this ray of sunlight? How could you be here right when I finished mopping up the last of my eggs with toast and needed to get away from the seductive safe family life for a moment? How is it that the famous Phil Waterston is not on assignment in some godforsaken war zone capturing the last moments of a raw-boned farm boy from Iowa who’s realized that the blood on his shirt is his fellow’s and that the enemy is himself, his own doppelgänger with a ragged beard and dark skin? How is it that a Pulitzer Prize winner is standing next to me on this very sidewalk on this very day of all days?”
“I am just here.”
“Yes, here you are.” Xavier was a decade younger than Phil, at the age and of that stock that he did not yet appear to be on the decline. Dark hair pulled back into a samurai bun, biceps bulging out of his Mickey Mouse shirt, slim pressed jeans tucked into leather boots. He swam on the surface of the Hollywood scene, his star still rising.
But Phil knew he was more than shine. Xavier could write. His pieces won awards, and more than that, they earned him money, books deals, cable spots. He was more than the bluster that propelled so many writers. Phil had read nearly everything Xavier had written and every single piece, from the very first sentence, had lured him in, dragged him into spiraling emotion, transported him to an undiscovered place, and left a burning afterimage in his mind, for hours, days, and returning in random moments much later, haunting dark parts of his soul.
“You still shooting people?” Xavier asked, pointing to the camera slung around Phil’s neck.
“Until my dying day.” He felt self-conscious, like a voyeur caught with his vice. “Last couple of years, Hollywood’s been home. Celeb pictures. Steady money.”
Xavier raised his hands over his head, muscles flexing beneath his shirt, and yawned. “Paparazzi nip slips and bum fights. That’s wasted potential. I still think about some of the photos you’ve shot. The boy waiting for food in the shadow of a vulture. The soldier afraid of his own reflection. That shit imprints into your psyche. You know what I mean? The stuff we’ve seen… People don’t even know. The stories we tell, the pictures we take, they’re only glimpses of completely different worlds, those places where we’ve erased the border between this place and Hell.”
“I didn’t really think you knew who I was. We only met that one time.”
Xavier laughed, the sparkling light of the ocean dancing in the reflection behind him. “This is destiny. You here with your camera, and me in pursuit of the story of my life.”
Phil wanted to leave. He was feeling uncomfortable. The vast difference in their lives, the forking of the paths, was becoming unbearably clear. It was obvious who had failed. He was a fraud. A cheap thrill photographer. A man whose trajectory was to crash and burn. He glanced off towards the rollerblading girls, the sunburnt tourists, the disheveled man dragging his overladen shopping cart, front left wheel spinning and squealing. He did not feel like he belonged here. That he was out of place. He felt an overwhelming urge to walk across the sand, into the ocean, to vanish beneath the surface, disappearing from this world.
“Great seeing you again,” Phil said. The waves whispered an invitation across the sand. “Can’t wait to read your next piece.”
As he turned towards the beach, Xavier grabbed his arm. “Didn’t you hear me? This is destiny. A writer on assignment in need of a photographer, and here you are, standing before me. I have an exclusive interview with El Diablo, the story of a lifetime.”
“I’ve heard, and the Kid is coming along with you.”
Xavier shook his head. “The Kid is a kid. He’s off to Joshua Tree. Spiritual trip, he said. More like an acid trip. He left me to go eat peyote in the desert and howl with the coyotes. And this has presented me with a problem, because the interview with El Diablo is tomorrow, and here I am, shoveling eggs into my mouth, ignoring my screaming kids, wondering how the hell am I going to get the photographer I need for this story, and who do I see on the other side of the window, but Phil Waterston, Pulitzer Prize winner, a man who has lived through hell, and I know right away that the gentle winds have shifted and I have my shooter. So, can you pack your gear and be ready to fly? Midnight flight to La Plata. Tonight. Are you in?”
Phil nodded, wanting to speak, but the words caught in his throat. A single moment and everything had changed. Destiny.
6
Phil woke to the shudder of the plane hitting the runway. His stomach felt as if it jumped up in his chest. He gasped, hands grabbing the edges of the seatback in front of him. The overhead compartment trembled, heavy objects thudding. The sour smell of vomit caught in the recirculated cabin air made him bare his teeth, and seize the seatback for a moment, before he choked back his own rising bile.
The old woman in black next to him thumbed prayer beads through her fingers, muttering and whispering. Somewhere behind him, a baby alternated between crying and coughing. The brakes squealed. He fought the momentum of his body still hurling forward against the hard-fought slowing of the plane.
In that first moment, waking from an unremembered dream, he was disoriented.
He glanced out the window. He saw a weed-choked runway dotted with burnt out military vehicles, and a squat terminal painted tropical green and yellow, faded and peeling, consumed by blotches of mold. Beyond the palm trees that sat sporadically along the airport’s chain link fence, a city of low buildings nested in a wide valley. Verdant mountains stretched along the horizon. Somewhere in that city, black smoke snaked towards the muddied ceiling of pregnant clouds.
La Plata.
The airport had once been part of the US base in La Plata, but decades ago political winds swayed when the generalissimos dressed in shimmering silk sashes and neatly pressed peasant blouses had decried Yankee Imperialism and promised that the vast silver mines would launch their country out of poverty and into prosperity. The future of La Plata was the people’s, the strongmen claimed from their podiums, on state-run television stations, from the backs of white stallions. When the US withdrew its soldiers, parades and music filled the streets, and confetti fell from windows. Soon after the generalissimos dropped their opponents out of helicopters and the confetti soaked up the blood of protestors. Enough voices of protest vanished that calm and peace descended on La
Plata with the promise that if you were quiet, the masked angels of death would not break into your house at night and whisk you off to oblivion.
Away from the capital, near the southern border, drug lords no longer hunted by the US soldiers set up their operations. Ramshackle camps, at first, and then jungle labs, and finally walled compounds. When the generalissimos of La Plata sent troops to scour this disease from the countryside, the drug lords shot back. Not only with bullets. They also fired back with words.
And one voice rose above the others, a gravelly whisper floating on the radio waves, slipping into remote villages, filling the cabs of taxis, and planting itself into the barrios of the capital.
He spoke of the death of La Plata, the death of the dream of a nation, of tyrants, of freedom stolen from the people. Of second chances.
It was the voice of El Diablo.
Xavier had shared translations of some of his recordings for Phil to read on the flight down. El Diablo sang a song of despair. He pined about a country lost, of how far they had fallen, of how mourning grandmothers had been dragged out of their beds in the dead of night. He spoke of the heart of La Plata, of heroes with guitars, and heroes with guns. He recounted tales of farmers returning from their fields to fall on their knees before beds of blood. He talked about the music of machetes being sharpened to cut down the weeds and plant a harvest of shope.
Always a song of blood.
Phil stared out the window as the plane taxied. The city lay dark beneath the clouds. And the darkness grew. It was as if he stared through a slowly contracting lens.
The plane came to a stop a hundred yards from the tarmac. People stood, stretched, grabbed bags from the overhead bins.
He heard the cabin door open. An unimaginable damp heat snaked into the plane and with it the chilling realization that he had touched down in a dangerous land, and Phil suddenly wanted to stay in his seat and wait in the plane until it took off again to return to Los Angeles.
But he couldn’t. He needed to get this photo. He needed something to erase everything he had lost.
He met up with Xavier on the tarmac at the bottom of the stairs.
“I ended up swallowing those pills. Knocked me out,” Xavier shouted above the roar of two military helicopters farther down the runway. “Now I’m gonna need a gallon of coffee to wake up. What a fucking rollercoaster. We’ll clean up at the hotel and then I’ll call our security consultant, our bodyguard. I’ll get my story, you’ll get your shot. Afterwards, we’ll go to this little hole-in-the-wall fish restaurant I know. Fish and rice and plantains and chili water. And whiskey. Bottles and bottles of whiskey. Cause we’re gonna need it to rinse ourselves clean.”
7
An hour later, Phil sat in the lobby of the hotel wondering if he had packed the right camera kit for the interview. Two camera bodies, three lenses, back up batteries, a handful of extra memory cards, cables, cleaning kit. He suddenly worried that he had not brought an extra camera body. Something always failed in situations like this, and he couldn’t afford to mess this opportunity up.
Xavier leaned against the reception desk, a small canvas bag slung over his shoulder. The hotel was modern – marble floors, exposed steel beams, colorful, almost gaudy, paintings on the walls – but sandbags had been piled chest high in front of the glass windows fronting the street, lending the place an air of impending doom. The restaurant was closed but the bar was still open. A handwritten note in English and Spanish taped to the front desk indicated room service only and a limited menu.
The only other guests at the hotel that Phil had seen were men with thick beards dressed in black fatigues, mercenaries brought in by one of the warring sides, or maybe positioning themselves for the highest bidders as the situation escalated. The arrival of mercenaries meant that things in La Plata were deteriorating fast. He hoped the airport would still be open tomorrow. He did not want to find himself trapped in another war zone. He wasn’t sure he could handle that.
“You look nervous.” Xavier had crossed the lobby and plopped down in the chair across from Phil. He turned an unlit cigarillo between his fingers.
“I haven’t done this in a while. And this place is hot.”
“Don’t make me regret picking you.”
Phil paused before speaking. He felt a rising annoyance, maybe even anger, that Xavier was questioning his ability and courage. “Not my first rodeo. The Kid would have been shitting his pants when we touched down.”
“You still look nervous.”
“I just want to take this picture and get out. The air… It’s electric. The proverbial shit’s about to hit the fan. If you’re not nervous, you’re stupid. You get complacent and then your luck runs out.”
Xavier pinched the cigarillo between his thumb and index finger. “This thing is my lucky charm. I unwrap it once I step in country, and it’s not until I get my story that I light it. Clint Eastwood-style, baby. Gets me from here to there.”
“That’s the goal, right?”
Xavier drew the cigarillo beneath his nose and sniffed. “What happened to you, man? You vanished. Right off the scene. One day you were sending back heart-wrenching shots from Kabul, the next time I see a photo of yours it’s a vomiting starlet at an after-Oscars party. Icarus crashing to the cold dark sea. What the hell?”
Phil closed his eyes and rubbed his palms over his face. A part of him hoped Xavier would have magically disappeared when he opened his eyes, but he was still there. “Do you really care?”
“You have an eye. You create worlds with your photos. Just like I do with my words. It’s a gift. But you and I know it’s more than that. It’s a curse, too, because we have to do it. Otherwise, life means nothing. To create is to live. And when I stop putting words down on the page, everything falls apart. I get irritable. I snap at my wife and kids. Even the cat avoids me. The hours in the day stretch and vanish. Dark thoughts descend, a veil over everything, and only getting back to writing burns away that gloom. So, I care because I know. What happened?”
Phil fiddled with the lens of the camera hanging from his neck. He wasn’t obligated to say anything to Xavier. Because if he shared what he felt deep inside, what he kept locked up, he and Xavier would connect, and connection was dangerous in a place like La Plata. Connection would mean choice when things got bad. Choosing between capturing the perfect image or stopping to help a bleeding comrade. Right now, without being connected to Xavier, to anyone really, his choice would be simpler: to take the photo.
But Xavier’s question burned and Phil couldn’t suppress what he felt anymore. He had kept his emotions bottled up for too long, and they had been gnawing at what light remained in his world.
“The last time I went to Kabul,” he started, “I really shouldn’t have. Did I ever mention Samantha?”
Xavier shook his head.
“My wife.”
“I had no idea you were married.”
Phil pressed his lips into a tight smile. “And I didn’t know you had a family until I stood outside that restaurant. Better to keep that stuff separate. You don’t want that world to mingle with what we will be facing here. In a warzone it is always the tension between what was there and what we left behind, and keeping those worlds separate. You can’t bring the horrors back with you. The death, the suffering, the inhumanity you never thought possible. You have to keep the border intact between those worlds. You can’t let that darkness come back with you. Those things would ruin the world you have left behind.”
“Yeah,” said Xavier. “It will infect everything. A seeping blackness. And no one else understands.”
“And yet we keep venturing from our safe world. Because we can’t stop. We are alive when we cross those borders.” Phil closed his eyes and clenched his fists. He fought back the rising tears. Not here. Not now. All of that was done and there was nothing he could do to turn back time. “I made a choice. Just like you made a choice yesterday. I went to Kabul. Because of what was always just at the edge of the horizon
- that shot, that one shot, the shot above all other shots. Just like you chasing the perfect story.’
Xavier shook his head. “This is our choice. This is how we live. You say it like it is something bad.”
“The choice is a fork in the road. We choose to go and we choose to leave something behind. I left Samantha to go to Kabul. I left when she was sick. Her cancer had come back. She told me to go, but I knew she really wanted me to stay.” Phil’s hands were shaking; he wanted to leap up with his camera and dash into the streets. Somewhere out there was a photo that would save him, that would be so true that it would erase the mistakes of his past. “She was dying while I was in Kabul. Died a little bit every day. It ate her up. Then she stopped answering my calls. Eventually her parents called and begged me to return to her side for her last moments. But I couldn’t face the fact that she was dying. Instead, I did what I always found solace in. I chased photos. I’m a bastard. I don’t even know where I was when she took her last breath. Was I cowering in the back of a Humvee? Was I drunk in the hotel? Brushing my teeth? I let her die alone. I plunged into war zones but I didn’t have the courage to sit beside my wife and hold her hand as she took her last breath. I ran. That was the choice that I made. We pretend that we can put up a wall that stops the darkness from bleeding over from the other side. But what happens when we become that darkness? What stops us?”
A black SUV swerved to a hard stop in the driveway outside the hotel and its horn honked, two urgent blasts.
“Shit,” said Xavier, tears edging his eyes. He wiped them quickly and incompletely with the back of his wrist. “That’s our ride. We gotta go.”
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