1873
Brady stared at the plate he held in his hand. His subject had long since left the studio, but Brady hadn’t moved. He remembered days when subject after subject had entered the studio, and his assistants had had to develop the prints while Brady staged the sittings.
“I’ll take that, Uncle.”
Brady started. He hadn’t realized that Levin was in the room. He wondered if Levin had been watching Brady stand there, doing nothing. Although Levin hadn’t said anything about it during the past few years, he seemed to notice Brady’s growing strange behaviors. “Thank you, Levin,” Brady said, making sure his voice was calm.
Levin kept his eyes averted as he grabbed the covered plate and took it into the darkroom for developing. Levin had grown tall in the seven years that he’d been with Brady. Far from the self-assured twelve-year-old who had come to work for his uncle, Levin had become a silent man who came alive only behind the camera lens. Brady couldn’t have survived without him, especially after he had to let the rest of his staff go.
Brady moved the camera, poured the collodion mixture back into its jar and covered the silver nitrate. Then he washed his hands in the bowl filled with tepid water that sat near the chemical storage.
“I have another job for you. Can you be alone on Friday at four?”
This time, Brady didn’t jump, but his heart did. It pounded against his ribcage like a child trying to escape a locked room. His nerves had been on edge for so long. Julia kept giving him hot teas and rubbing the back of his neck, but nothing seemed to work. When he closed his eyes he saw visions he didn’t want to see.
He turned, slowly. The crazy woman stood there, her hands clasped behind her back. Since she hadn’t appeared in almost two years, he had managed to convince himself that she wasn’t real—that he had imagined her.
“Another job?” he asked. He was shaking. Either he hadn’t imagined the last one, or he was having another nightmare. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Can’t?” Her cheeks flushed. “You promised, Mathew. I need you.”
“You never told me you were going to send me to Hell,” he snapped. He moved away from the chemicals, afraid that in his anger, he would throw them. “You’re not real, and yet the place you took me stays branded in my mind. I’m going crazy. You’re a sign of my insanity.”
“No,” she said. She came forward and touched him lightly. Her fingertips were soft, and he could smell the faint perfume of her body. “You’re not crazy. You’re just faced with something from outside your experience. You had dreams about the late War, didn’t you? Visions you couldn’t escape?”
He was about to deny it, when he remembered now, in the first year of his return, the smell of rotted garbage took him back to the Devil’s Hole; how the whinny of a horse made him duck for cover; how he stored his wagon because being inside it filled him with a deep anxiety. “What are you telling me?”
“I come from a place you’ve never heard of,” she said. “We have developed the art of travel in an instant, and our societal norms are different from yours. The place I sent you wasn’t Hell. It was a war zone, after the—a country had used a new kind of weapon on another country. I want to send you to more places like that, to photograph them, so that we can display those photographs for people of my society to see.”
“If you can travel in an instant—” and he remembered the whirling world, the dancing colors and sounds as he traveled from his world to another “—then why don’t you just take people there? Why do you need me?”
“Those places are forbidden. I received special dispensation. I’m working on an art project, and I nearly lost my funding because I saw you at Gettysburg.”
Brady’s shaking eased. “You risked everything to see me?”
She nodded. “We’re alike in that way,” she said. “You’ve risked everything to follow your vision, too.”
“And you need me?”
“You’re the first and the best, Mathew. I couldn’t even get funding unless I guaranteed that I would have your work. Your studio portraits are lovely, Mathew, but it’s your war photos that make you great.”
“No one wants to see my war work,” Brady said.
Her smile seemed sad. “They will, Mathew. Especially if you work with me.”
Brady glanced around his studio, smaller now than it had ever been. Portraits of great men still hung on the walls along with actors, artists and people who just wanted a remembrance.
“At first it was art for you,” she said, her voice husky. “Then it became a mission, to show people what war was really like. And now no one wants to look. But they need to, Mathew.”
“I know,” he said. He glanced back at her, saw the brightness in her face, the trembling of her lower lip. This meant more to her than an art project should. Something personal, something deep, had gotten her involved. “I went to Hell for you, and I never even got to see the results of my work.”
“Yes, you did,” she said.
“Uncle!” Levin called from the next room.
The woman vanished, leaving shimmering air in her wake. Brady reached out and touched it, felt the remains of a whirlwind. She knew about his dreams, then. Or was she referring to the work he had done inside his wagon on the site, developing plates before they dried so that the portraits would be preserved?
“Did I hear voices?” Levin came out of the back room, wiping his hands on his smock.
Brady glanced at Levin, saw the frown between the young man’s brows. Levin was really worried about him. “No voices,” Brady said. “Perhaps you just heard someone calling from the street.”
“The portrait is done.” Levin looked at the chemicals, as if double-checking his uncle’s work.
“I’ll look at it later,” Brady said. “I’m going home to Julia. Can you watch the studio?”
Levin nodded.
Brady grabbed his coat off one of the sitting chairs and stopped at the doorway. “What do you think of my war work, Levin? And be honest, now.”
“Honest?”
“Yes.”
Brady waited. Levin took a deep breath. “I wish that I were ten years older so that I could have been one of your assistants, Uncle. You preserved something that future generations need to see. And it angers me that no one is willing to look.”
“Me, too,” Brady said. He slipped his arms through the sleeves of his coat. “But maybe—” and he felt something cautious rise in his chest, something like hope “—if I work just a little harder, people will look again. Think so, Levin?”
“It’s one of my prayers, Uncle,” Levin said.
“Mine, too,” Brady said and let himself out the door. He whistled a little as he walked down the stairs. Maybe the woman was right; maybe he had a future, after all.
1873
Friday at four, Brady whirled from his studio to a place so hot that sweat appeared on his body the instant he stopped whirling. His wagon stood on a dirt road, surrounded by thatched huts. Some of the huts were burning, but the flames were the only movement in the entire village. Far away, he could hear a chop-chop-chopping sound, but he could see nothing. Flies buzzed around him, not landing, as if they had more interesting places to go. The air smelled of burning hay and something fetid, something familiar. He swallowed and looked for the bodies.
He grabbed the back end of the wagon, and climbed inside. The darkness was welcome. It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the gloom, then he grabbed his tripod and his camera and carried them outside. He pushed his glasses up his nose, but his finger encountered skin instead of metal. He could see. He squinted and wondered how she did that—gave him his eyesight for such a short period of time. Perhaps it was his reward for going to Hell.
A hand extended from one of the burning huts. Brady stopped beside it, crouched, and saw a man lying face down in the dust, the back of his head blown away. Bile rose in Brady’s throat, and he swallowed to keep his last meal down. He assembled the camera, uncapped the lens, and looked through, seeing the ha
nd and the flames flickering in his narrow, rounded vision. Then he climbed out from under the curtain, went back into the wagon and prepared a plate.
This time he felt no fear. Perhaps knowing that the woman (why had she never told him her name?) could flash him out of the area in an instant made him feel safer. Or perhaps it was his sense of purpose, as strong as it had been at the first battle of Bull Run, when the bullets whizzed by him, and his wagon got stampeded by running soldiers. He had had a reason then, a life then, and he would get it back.
He went outside and photographed the dead man in the burning hut. The chop-chop-chopping sound was fading, but the heat seemed to intensify. The stillness in the village was eerie. The crackles of burning buildings made him jump. He saw no more bodies, no evidence other than the emptiness and the fires that anything had happened in this place.
Then he saw the baby.
It was a toddler, actually. Naked, and shot in the back, the body lying at the edge of a ditch. Brady walked over to the ditch and peered in, then stepped back and was sick for the first time in his professional career.
Bodies filled the ditch—women, children, babies, and old men—their limbs flung back, stomachs gone, faces shot away. Blood flowed like a river, added its coppery scent to the smell of burning hay and the reek of decay.
He grabbed his camera, his shield, and set it up, knowing that this would haunt him as the hot, slimy rain haunted him still. He prepared more plates, and photographed the toddler over and over, the innocent baby that had tried to crawl away from the horror and had been shot in the back for its attempt at survival.
And as he worked, his vision blurred, and he wondered why the sweat pouring into and out of his eyes never made them burn.
1875
Brady stared at the $25,000 check. He set it on the doily that covered the end table. In the front room, he heard Levin arguing with Julia.
“Not today,” she said. “Give him at least a breath between bad news.”
Brady touched the thin paper, the flowing script. The government had given him one-quarter of the wealth he had lost going into the war, one-tenth of the money he spent photographing history. And too late. The check was too late. A month earlier, the War Department, which owned the title to the wet plates, had sold them all to the Anthonys for an undisclosed sum. They had clear, legal title, and Edward Anthony had told Brady that they would never, ever sell.
He got up with a sigh and brushed aside the half-open bedroom door. “Tell me what?” he asked.
Levin looked up—guiltily, Brady thought. Julia hid something behind her back. “Nothing, Uncle,” Levin said. “It can wait.”
“You brought something and I want to know what it is.” Brady’s voice was harsh. It had been too harsh lately. The flashbacks to the horrors he’d seen on his travels, the strain of keeping silent—of not telling Julia about the fantastical events—and the reversal after reversal in his own life were taking their toll.
Julia brought her hand out from behind her back. She clutched a stereoscope. The small device shook as she handed it to Brady.
He put the lenses up to his eyes, feeling the frame clink against his glasses. The three dimensional view inside was familiar: The war parade he had taken over ten years ago, as the soldiers rode down Pennsylvania Avenue. Brady removed the thick card from the viewer. The two portraits stood side by side, as he expected. He even expected the flowery script on the side, stating that the stereoscopic portrait was available through the Anthonys’ warehouse. What he didn’t expect was the attribution at the bottom, claiming that the photography had been done by the Anthonys themselves.
He clenched his fists and turned around, letting the device fall to the wooden floor. The stereoscope clinked as it rolled, and Brady stifled an urge to kick it across the room.
“We can go to Congressman Garfield,” Levin said, “and maybe he’ll help us.”
Brady stared at the portrait. He could take the Anthonys to court. They did own the rights to the wet plates, but they should have given him proper attribution. It seemed a trivial thing to fight over. He had no money, and what influence he had would be better spent getting the plates back than fighting for a bit of name recognition. “No,” Brady said. “You can go to the newspapers, if you like, Levin, but we won’t get James to act for us. He’s done his best already. This is our fight. And we’ll keep at it, until the bitter end if we have to.”
Julia clenched her hands together and stared at him. It seemed as if the lines around her mouth had grown deeper. He remembered the first time he’d danced with her, the diamonds around her neck glittering in the candlelight. They had sold those diamonds in 1864 to fund the Petersburg expedition—the expedition in which half of his equipment was destroyed by Confederate shells. You are going to be a great man, she had told him. The problem was, he had never asked her what she meant by great. Perhaps she thought of her wealthy father as a great man. Perhaps she stayed with Brady only out of wifely loyalty.
She came over to him and put her arm around him. “I love you, Mathew,” she said. He hugged her close, so close that he worried he would hurt her. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything without her. None of his work, none of his efforts would have been possible—especially in the lean years—if she hadn’t believed in him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her shoulder.
She slipped out of his embrace and held him so that she could look into his eyes. “We’ll keep fighting, Mathew. And in the end, we’ll win.”
1877
And the assignments kept coming. Brady began to look forward to the whirling, even though he often ended up in Hell. His body was stronger there; his eyesight keener. He could forget, for a short time, the drabness of Washington, the emptiness of his life. On the battlefields, he worked—and he could still believe that his work had meaning.
One dark, gray day, he left his studio and found himself hiding at the edge of a forest. His wagon, without a horse, leaned against a spindly tree. The air was thick and humid. Brady’s black suit clung to his skin, already damp. Through the bushes he could see soldiers carrying large rifles, surrounding a church. Speaking a language he thought he understood—Spanish?—they herded children together. Then, in twos and threes, the soldiers marched the children inside.
The scene was eerily quiet. Brady went behind the wagon, grabbed his tripod and set up the camera. He stepped carefully on the forest bed; the scuffing noise of his heavy leather shoes seemed to resound like gunshots. He took portrait after portrait, concentrating on the soldiers’ faces, the children’s looks of resignation. He wondered why the soldiers were imprisoning the children, and what they planned to do to the town he could see just over the horizon. And a small trickle of relief ran through him that here, at least, the children would be spared.
Once the children were inside, the soldiers closed the heavy doors and barred them. Someone had already boarded up the windows. Brady put another plate into his camera to take a final portrait of the closed church before following the army to their nasty work at the village. He looked down, checking the plates the woman had given him, when he heard a whoosh. A sharp, tingling scent rose in his nostrils, followed by the smell of smoke. Automatically he opened the lens—just as a soldier threw a burning torch at the church itself.
Brady screamed and ran out of the bushes. The soldiers saw him—and one leveled a rifle at him. The bullets ratt-a-tatted at him, the sound faster and more vicious than the repeating rifles from the war. Brady felt his body jerk and fall, felt himself roll over, bouncing with each bullet’s impact. He wanted to crawl to the church, to save the children, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t do anything. The world was growing darker … and he saw a kind of light.…
And then the whirling began. It seemed slower, and he wasn’t sure he wanted it to start. It pulled him away from the light, away from the church and the burning children (he thought he could hear their screams now—loud, terrified, piercing—) and back to the silence of his studi
o.
He wound up in one of his straightbacked chairs. He tried to stand up, and fell, his glasses jostling the edge of his nose. Footsteps on the stairs ran toward him, then hands lifted him. Levin.
“Uncle? Are you all right?”
“Shot,” Brady whispered. “The children. All dead. Must save the children.”
He pushed Levin aside and groped for something, anything to hold on to. “I have to get back!” he yelled. “Someone has to rescue those children!”
Levin grabbed his shoulders, forced Brady back to the chair. “The war is over, Uncle,” Levin said. “It’s over. You’re home. You’re safe.”
Brady looked up at Levin and felt the shakes begin. She wouldn’t send him back. She wouldn’t let him save those children. She’d known all along that the church would burn—she wanted him to photograph it, to record it, not to stop it. He put his hands over his face. He had seen enough atrocities to last him three lifetimes.
“It’s all right,” Levin said. “It’s all right, Uncle.”
It wasn’t all right. Levin was becoming an expert at this, at taking Brady home. And to his credit, he never said anything to Julia. “Thank you,” Brady said. His words were thin, rushed, as if the bullet holes still riddled his body and sucked the air from it.
He patted Levin on the shoulder, then walked away—walked to the end of the studio, his room, his home. Perhaps the crazy woman didn’t exist. Perhaps what Levin saw was the truth. Perhaps Brady’s mind was going, after all.
“Thank you,” he repeated, and walked down the stairs, comforted by the aches in his bones, the blurry edge to his vision. He was home, and he would stay—
Until she called him again. Until he had his next chance to be young, and working, and doing something worthwhile.
1882
Brady sat in front of the window, gazing into the street. Below, carriages rumbled past, throwing up mud and chunks of ice. People hurried across the sidewalk, heads bowed against the sleet. The rippled glass was cold against his fingers, but he didn’t care. He could hear Levin in the studio, talking with a prospective client. Levin had handled all of the business this past week. Brady had hardly been able to move.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 54