by Brian Short
I’d once been a professional. Right? A professional… But hadn’t the fish-people, oh…? I’d thought the fish-people had taken all these things away. It seemed as if they had. Abilities, qualities… anything. But I was wrong – thankfully – and now I was back again, making something, making pictures – yes, pictures, looking for shapes in the scatterings. I was looking amongst shapes for a shape. I was looking for the shape, even though I couldn’t remember what that shape looked like, not exactly. No. No? Everything that had seemed clear to me once wasn’t any longer. It had gone all fuzzy. Things that I’d known so well were now obscure and out of reach. This was, as I told myself, their work – what the fish-people had done; it was because of my time in the sea, wasn’t it? Everything had gone away, everything was taken. They’d taken these things, taken everything, with their flashing silver bellies and their flat fish eyes, as they’d swum in schools of the thousands past, hypnotizing me, making me forget and go all blank and empty. But also, in return, I’d wondered, how maybe they’d given me something. Something? No, no, they had, they had given me something, however inadvertently. They’d not meant to. Really, I don’t think they’d meant to do anything, but they’d done it, all the same: they’d given me this something, this one big thing, while taking all the rest of it away. I just didn’t know yet what that was that I was left with. But I was happy, here, now, to find that I could at least still put something together out of the shapes that were in my reach, and out of the things and the pieces that I found, each visually laying around, such as it were, to make a picture. What a relief!
The park was about half an acre of this – the grass, one tree, the wooden bench – a park in name only, located at the edge of the suburbs of Gig Harbor, and the first item of twenty-four on my list of tourist attractions to photograph. I did the best I could with it. The place had no quality to it beyond the fact that it was there, and it was, technically, I supposed legally, a park. I photographed the bench from every conceivable angle. I took close-ups of the bent tips of the living grass, the bench a distant and monumental blur in the background. I even got the tree into one, not that it helped.
Whoever had supplied this list seemed to have little to no knowledge of what these sites actually were.
The Narrows Bridge along the way was not on my list, though by all rights it should have been. It was spectacular; the sort of thing that made a person stop and gape in awe. I’d pulled the rental car off to the shoulder of the highway, walked to where the view was unobstructed, and took several shots of it, raising the camera to frame its tall, arched spires, the support of its curving span. This was the same bridge – or if not the same bridge, the one that replaced it, that spanned the same gap – as that one made famous, mid-century previous, in grainy black-and-white film, so often replayed, that captured its just-completed road surface twisting and buckling in the heavy winds that blew, as they did, through the Narrows; between the wind and its own resonance, an improbable standing wave had formed in steel and concrete, wobbling the whole road surface like a huge guitar string that finally snapped and broke into bits, and collapsed completely into the void. This one stayed intact, stood still, did not appear to be going anywhere.
I took the pictures; the ad guys could do with them as they chose. It seemed a waste to come out this far and not do that much.
•
Most remaining locations were in or near the downtown area of Tacoma and made little more sense than the first. There was a street corner at the bottom of a hill beside the waterfront – just the corner, with no particular structure or feature to it (I shot the street signs so that no one could mistake it for something else, or accuse me of not finding the right spot) – and a warehouse, not a very large one, seemingly abandoned and in obvious disrepair, some few blocks up the hill (I checked the address on this location again and again, finally certain that I had it right), a bland little strip mall with a 7-Eleven store, nail salon and franchise adult store, another grocery store on a corner further along that sold cheap wine, with a lot of ragged-looking characters loitering outside (I photographed this location surreptitiously and did not hang around); there was a demolished building that was nothing more than a pile of broken concrete with tall weeds growing through every crack, a wide parking lot without a single car in it, another park (this one actually was a park, with trees and everything, and people on blankets in the sun), the City Hall building (I could at least see the logic in this choice, since it was a rather nice old structure made of stone), and an old library. Finally, my roughly circular route took me back to the waterfront and its blue harbor, which wasn’t such a bad place. I’d not quite finished the list, but the outlying locations I could find tomorrow. I had the car until Monday anyhow. With the light beginning to take its golden colors from the ball of the sun that dipped toward the horizon, and with all the moored sailboats that rocked in the gentle waves, their multiplicity of verticals, masts lined right-angled from the docks, it made not a bad subject, not at all; reflections all a-scatter and wavering in the mirroring water. And as I framed and shot and I caught the little tufts of clouds in the distance, with their sideways highlights and rich shadow, it seemed at last that there was maybe a point to this exercise.
I heard the sound of a racing motor somewhere, distantly behind me, and at first I scarcely noticed it, though it was, oddly, the only sound in the city now at all. Everything else had gone silent, or receded toward some dim background hum, as a wind-hush now swept, just barely there. From a far-off rumble, the engine at once screamed in some unlikely, high roar – a sound so wrong, so at odds with the surrounding silence and peace, that by then I couldn’t help but hear it. I turned to look behind me, up the long, straight street like a concrete tongue that led back up the hill in a steep slope, where at the very crest nearly a mile away I saw a gray and yellow box appear and shoot over, leave the ground and float airborne, exposing its dun-colored undercarriage for a long moment, a moment of incomprehension and stillness and gathering. As the metal shape reached its apogee and crested downward, exposing its yellow topside in a smooth arc, then hit the tarmac in a radius of sparks, I finally realized what I was seeing: this was a car, a big one, a fast one, kept, it seemed, in pristine shape. It glinted brightly in the failing sunlight with polish. Apparently well-tuned as well, I thought, this car. It bounced on its struts; it raced down the hill; it was the only traffic anywhere in sight, and didn’t so much as hesitate at any of the long row of red lights hung regular in its path.
It was headed straight at me.
Not that this impressed me so much; no, I was entranced by the incongruity, by the yellow flashing in sunlight, by this material grace and velocity. By now it was only half a mile away, if that, and growing closer – to my perspective, larger – and showed no signs of slowing. If anything, the car only picked up speed as it ran down the slope, its engine still a mad roar. I could start to make out the shapes of the driver and at least one passenger, two silhouettes without features or detail, both of them absolutely still, as if they were cardboard cutouts stuck behind the windshield. I wondered who would do that, leave two silhouettes to drive a car really fast?
At the bottom of the hill, where the road ended at the entrance to the harbor – where I stood, where it also occurred to me that I was directly in its path and should maybe do something – the driver expertly turned a controlled skid onto the adjoining waterfront avenue, drifting in a wide arc (and in that moment I saw the eyes of the passengers, and for some reason, the driver too, who turned, all turned as one, who stared straight at me, their eyes wide and flat, all their heads turning, all watching in silent, if mindless, recognition: they knew me, they knew who I was, these eye-people, these fish-people, they knew me), and finally the car recovered and sped along the harbor road, eventually rounding the curve of a point and disappearing out of sight, the hollow hornet’s-buzz of the motor from this rapidly increasing distance trailing to reverberant obscurity. After that nothing moved except for my breathin
g and the slow-rocking boats, with their chiming clatter of rigging against metal. Black marks of peeled rubber lay in the road where the car had been, where dark smoke and the smell of creosote lingered.
I didn’t know why – the danger of it had never seemed like anything real, though I supposed it was; nothing had until that fading moment – but I looked up then, straight up, into the deepening blue of the cloud-feathered sky directly above. For what? For my protector? No, not that, something else…
I felt, with that shivering sense, a certainty, that it was there – it… it… – that something had to be there.
•
This is my body. These eggs are my eyes; I don’t close them. And this is the electrical shiver in the air, the static being, the being of waves, and I sink, and I find that I am sinking.
I know, I know – or rather, it’s he who knows, because this really is his errand, isn’t it? The sort of thing that Proteus gets his physiognomy stuck into, more so than I – that “up,” insofar as there is “up,” is the first direction, the primary z space, the thing you generally mean if you say the third dimension. Yes, up is a good thing, I won’t knock it, and the sky a perfect canvas. It looks flat, but really it isn’t. It looks like a lot of things if you squint, and it looks like itself only if you don’t.
Proteus squints. Yes he does. He wrinkles his eye-skin up hard, and the sky looks to him just like the place where he might find everything, all the shapes and the pieces that are missing.
•
The adman, whose name, he told me, was Rick Progress, was one of three partners in the small firm occupying the Belltown storefront office of Persun, Progress & Persun, the other two being the brothers Persun. I considered suggesting they shorten this redundancy to “People” but thought better of it and kept my mouth shut, pulling a wheeled desk-chair up beside Rick, while the brothers threw a football past our heads at each other, one to each end of the large and sparsely-furnished open space. The pigskin made a hollow, reverberant ring at each end of its arc; first, leaving one brother’s hands, next, caught by the other.
As Rick plugged the flash drive into his computer and loaded the files, I found that I was calm and confident, nowhere near as worried as I might have been after so long out of the loop. I’d been nothing if not thorough in my coverage. That was the reason why. The files I’d given him contained hundreds of photographs, and I’d done everything I could to pull something of visual interest out of every site I’d visited, running the route from straightforward documentation to more artistic treatments – of features at the site, of details, of whatever lent itself, however thinly these compositions represented the location. More often than not these tended toward the abstract. Sometimes their subjects became entirely unrecognizable. Not that I expected these latter images to be especially useful; I’d only wanted to make things interesting for myself, and also show what I was capable of. The anxiety that until now had inescapably dogged me was that I’d somehow gotten it all wrong, gone to all the wrong places. No matter how thoroughly I’d checked the addresses I’d been given, I couldn’t shake this feeling that I’d maybe… I don’t know, gone to the wrong town or something. With few exceptions, everywhere I’d visited had struck me as something less than touristically attractive.
“The list,” Rick explained (I found him much easier to understand in person than over the phone, able somehow to read his pauses visually, if in no other way, as he still spoke as fast as anyone I’d ever met), “does not originate from us. It comes from the board of tourism, from someone – I don’t know who it is – who has their own criteria for what gets selected. I think it’s mathematical, a program, maybe, a bit of software. Or maybe not; perhaps someone just writes it all on a napkin. Since we’ve been to a lot of the sites already ourselves, I can understand your confusion. They likely run an algorithm and extract the coordinates according to certain parameters they’ve written into the code. We take the coordinates and plot them on a map, then feed you the addresses, insofar as there are any, that we extract from this process. It’s all quite precise and I’ve had it explained to me, though I don’t think I can explain it adequately myself. But you’ve actually done exactly what we asked you to do. Those are the sites that we sent you to, and these photographs are entirely sufficient, very good in fact. I can appreciate many of the decisions you’ve made with these other studies too, though for the style of the website they’re not always appropriate. Still. You did get the coverage we needed. I’ll have Alan cut you a check right now.”
“That’s great. And thank you,” I said, greatly relieved, then added, “You wouldn’t by chance know what those parameters are, would you? Like who are they trying to attract to these places and why? I mean, like, for instance,” I pointed at one frame still on Rick’s screen, “this manhole cover here. In front of what I’m pretty sure was a methamphetamine lab?”
One of the Persun brothers missed his catch and the ball smashed through a stack of books, sending hardbacks, cups of coffee, a computer keyboard scattering loudly over the cement floor, all smashed into various pieces. “Fuck!” he shouted, rummaging through the mess for the football.
“You asshole!” shouted the other. “Who taught you to catch?”
“You did!”
Ignoring them, Rick waved my question off. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Once they finally see what it is they’ve asked for, I think they’ll probably have to re-evaluate their system. Not that we haven’t already showed them plenty of evidence how it works. I was sent once to a rock in the middle of a farmer’s field in Carnation. The farmer was mad as hell – not at me, but at the rock. Swore it hadn’t been there the day before I showed up. The thing was too big to move and he had to plough around it. There was another location in the San Juans, not on any island, but a channel between them, in the middle of the water. I went out there in a little boat… utterly baffled by it, thinking maybe… I don’t know what maybe. But I took a picture of the water at that spot and the tourism board was happy with it. I guess they were happy. They never said they weren’t. But until they do revise their system, we’ll just do what they’ve asked, to the letter. They’ve been, actually, rather extraordinarily specific about that point. If they say they want a location, they want that location, it’s no use arguing what it is or it isn’t. And since they’re paying the bills and all…”
“Well, I guess, if that’s what they want, right?”
“There’s more,” Rick said. “I mean there’s more of them, more locations, more sites. A few, at any rate, further out. We’re almost done with this, but it will take too much time for us to drive out there ourselves. So I was thinking? That is, if you’re available?”
At the far end of the room, light spread through the wide and dirty windows that faced out into the alleyway, white and irregular. Rick Progress seemed like a ghost in it, silhouetted and blur-edged. So did I.
One of the brothers, the one who managed the ledger, having given up momentarily on indoor football, popped up from the desk where he’d disappeared, looking for his dropped ball, bounded to where Rick and I conferred and set a freshly cut check onto the desk in front of me.
“Of course,” I said. “Sure,” I said. “What’s next?”
TEN
The World
[2005]
The nights. No different. I’ll find her. She will be.
Headlights drift in sharp streaks to my side, a sound like fabric torn. I’m up the hill. Hate the hill – no, don’t hate the hill, hate this part of it, climbing this part of it. Hate/No hate. Pull it together. Okay, okay. Inclined to the smell of hate, they smell it on you, they sense reluctance, they’re inclined to distrust. In either case, no matter, towards them or not. You. Will be. Distrusted. It’s in the nature of. They will smell your lack of sleep. They will smell the dust.
But you have not been erased. Tell the fish-people they missed that part, the part that’s you.
Every single noise it makes, every single beast. Its b
ack is broken. A thousand beasts with broken backs. Tell them that. Because the mind has spat up blood.
Bending forward toward the upslope.
There he is. There he is; that is he.
•
Tall Davis at the corner, at the top of the hill, where the avenue met the busy street, stood waving his arms, twisting his body, first in one direction, then the next. He was a windmill. He loomed, large. He would do this forever.
“Davis, good evening,” I said as I approached. He looked at me without recognition, warily. His arms continued to flap. He watched me as I walked past and continued to watch as I approached the house. His eyes were like dimes on my back, and I could feel them. On the porch’s bench sat Henry, no tape deck tonight (thanks be to Jesus, and his, the glory!); he watched the street in silence while Willy turned his cornered circles in a private space, where no one approached, and Mary remained on the steps, as always, as always in a pillar of smoke, her skin as gray as ash. Her eyes stared forward as I climbed around her.
I was early, by nearly an hour, hoping to find–
The kid looked up from the desk as I bound in, stopping me dead at the door. “Hi!” he said, pleasantly enough.
“Oh… hello.” I’d never seen him before. “I thought Vivianne was working tonight.”
“Who?”
“Vivianne.”
He shook his head and shrugged, I don’t know who that is. “Nope,” he said aloud, “I am.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I’m Jim.”
“Hi, Jim.” The kid couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but his beard reached to his sternum, where it was braided at the ends, and woven through with beads. His eyes were clear and bright, very clear, and very bright. I hovered at the door. “Yeah…”