The Magician's Tale

by William Bayer

  I leave my telescope, go into my office, peer out at the Golden Gate Bridge. They say that when people jump from it they nearly always face the city, perhaps because to face west, the Pacific, would be to renounce the worldly causes of their sorrows.

  The eighteenth-century British chemist John Dalton was the first scientist to properly describe color blindness, namely his own. In truth he was a dichromatic protanope, meaning his deficiency was a not uncommon inability to distinguish red from green. Dalton's belief, that all color blindness was like his, has long been disproved. But convinced of his theory that the fluid in his eyes was tinted blue and thus absorbed red light, he willed one of his eyes to Cambridge University, directing that it be examined after his death.

  It was, in 1844, by his friend and doctor, Joseph Ransome, who even peered through it, finding the liquid transparent and colorless. To this day the pickled eye remains at Cambridge; Dalton's DNA was extracted from it several years ago. But it's the intimacy of the act, Ransome actually using his close friend's eye as a lens, that comes back to me with poignant force as I pull out the nude photographs of Tim I took just three weeks ago.

  Perhaps these pictures of his naked body will tell me something, help me solve the enigma of his death. That, at least, is my hope as I begin to study them, meditating over the vulnerability of his flesh.

  I hadn't planned on shooting nudes, though in retrospect, it seems a natural outgrowth of our work. Our Angel Island session, for instance, when Tim took off his shirt to pose for the portrait now on the posters being ripped off lampposts on the Gulch. There's something about bare skin that lends intimacy to a photograph, which is probably why one famous photographer is alleged to be so adamant that her subjects strip. Nakedness, after all, is the ultimate physical secret. In our time is there a commodity more precious than celebrity skin?

  I was, I confess, aroused on Angel Island, whether by Tim, his body, the sweetness of the air, the softness of the lambent light or, most likely, the whole gestalt. It was a balmy windless autumn day, the waters of the Bay were still, gulls circled and the shoreline grasses were lustrous as pewter.

  I often become aroused when work goes well. I love photography, the sense of capture, the sureness that possesses me when I'm getting at something deep. But on that day the arousal was especially intense. I remember wanting to grasp hold of Tim, roll with him in the high grass just above the island shore. I remember feeling certain he noticed my excitement, his only comment on it being a smile. It was as if he acknowledged my condition but, being the object of desire, left it to me to make the initial move. . . which, on account of pride, I did not do.

  A few days later, when I showed him the Angel Island proofs, he was thrilled.

  "This is how I want to look!"

  "The camera doesn't lie."

  "I wish I could always be so beautiful, Kay."

  "Perhaps you are," I said.

  He softly shook his head. "Some days are better than others." He brightened. "Would you shoot me nude? I'd like to see myself naked through your eyes, beautiful lying eyes."

  I took it that he was suggesting that if the camera doesn't lie, surely the photographer does. In the face of such a challenge how could I resist?

  We executed the nudes on a Sunday in my living room, beginning midmorning, working till late that afternoon. I loaded a second camera with color film, a concession to his wish for color prints. Normally I refuse to shoot color. What's the point since I can't see the hues? But no request of Tim's could be denied. I would shoot with one camera for him, with the other for myself.

  I was nervous about the session, looking forward to it too. Since I'd always felt that Tim was holding something back, a nude session could be a way to break through his reserve.

  Starting back in art school, I've shot numerous nudes in my career. Always as a session begins I'm filled with a sense of moral responsibility. This results from my feeling that with my camera I'm all-powerful, while my subject, of whatever gender, is defenseless before my gaze.

  I felt this way waiting for Tim, and when he arrived felt his anxiety as well. Yes, he had asked for this, but he couldn't help but feel nervous too.

  I was dressed skimpily, in sleeveless jersey and nylon shorts. My feet were bare. I'd turned the living room into a studio, drawn the shades, set up lights, spread a thick black velour curtain down one wall and across the floor. By so doing I'd made a conscious decision to shoot Tim in limbo against deep black. I didn't want to produce Avedon-style pictures in which he'd appear pinned against stark white walls. Rather I was after pictures that would be both luminous and romantic, emphasizing his beauty, imbuing him with glamour.

  I started to shoot even as he undressed, since his manner struck me as extremely sensual. When he was naked, I discovered no surprises. Everything was as I'd imagined.

  For the first rolls I had him pose against the wall, then lie down while I climbed a ladder and shot him from above. As I focused in on him I became interested in details: the way his arms met his torso, the curve of his ass, his nipples, armpits, genitals, the fuzz of hair on his chest, the musculature of his back when he lay down and extended his arms above his head. He enjoyed posing, rolling around, stretching and twisting, creating abstract forms. He did things with his body that, as I examine the proofs, seem nearly impossible unless he'd been trained as a contortionist.

  I'm looking at a shot in which he's standing on his hands. His body, in profile, fills the frame. His legs curl back over him so his feet extend further forward than his head. His face though concentrated is nearly expressionless, as if to show he feels no strain.

  In another shot he's leaping, arms up like a volleyball player about to execute a smash. His entire musculature is exposed, his cock has flopped up, his hard abdomen is tautly etched. At the sight of such beauty ruined I start to sob.

  As the session continued, I remember now, a glaze of perspiration rose to coat his skin. He began to gleam as if he were oiled, and a fragrance, musky and saline, rose from him, the sweet aroma of his sweat. It wafted to me as I moved about, filling my nostrils, snaking deep into my lungs.

  Such intimacy!

  It occurs to me now that in a very special way we were making love that day, he the model, I the photographer, synchronized, engaged in an elaborate courtship dance. We didn't speak, rather moved slowly in relation to one another, he posing, seeming to know what I wanted, I shooting, picking up on his signals. Yes! Kiss me here! Now over here! his body seemed to say, and the clicks of my shutter were like licks against his flesh.

  By the end, I recall, I was sweating myself, my shirt glued to my nipples and back. I remember envying him the freedom of his nudity while wishing I could tear off my own scanty clothes. The truth, of course, is that I wished he would do the tearing.

  There came a moment when I actually thought that could happen. We were both poised for it, I'm sure. But the spell was broken when a slight trembling shook the building. Then it was too late, the moment dissolved and the energy lost was not regained. That night on TV a reporter announced that a mild quake of Richter magnitude 3.2 had struck the city.

  We were finished. Tim pulled on his jeans; then we lay together on the velour, exhausted from eight hours of work.

  He asked how I thought the session had gone.

  "I'll know when I see the proofs," I said.

  "Your gut feeling?"

  "Great!''

  "Can we do it again?"

  "Sure, but not for a while. Too soon and we'll repeat ourselves."

  He nodded. There was at least half a minute of silence, then he told me he had a secret wish.

  "I've always wanted to be photographed a certain way," he said, "holding a special pose."

  I waited for him to explain. He was nervous, I could see, perhaps even ashamed.

  "Tell me," I urged.

  He stared at the ceiling. He didn't want me to see his eyes.

  "Saint Sebastian," he murmured in a confessional whisper. "You know who
I mean?"

  "The saint tied to the tree with arrows in his chest."

  "Stomach too."

  "You want to pose like that?"

  He nodded, then rolled onto his side.

  I was familiar with the eroticization of the Saint Sebastian image in the work of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima and the British filmmaker Derek Jarman. "Yes, we could set that up," I told him, "perhaps in a quiet corner of Golden Gate Park. Tie you to a tree beneath a shaft of sunlight, then glue the arrows on." I let my hand graze his bare stomach. "Do you identify with martyrdom, Tim?"

  While he thought about that I stood and began to unload my cameras.

  "Guess so," he said softly, "since it turns me on."

  I glanced at him. "Then we'll do it," I promised, "and you'll find out if it's the image that excites you, or playing the part."

  I took the rolls to my darkroom. When I returned he was fully dressed. He helped me dismantle my lights, roll up the velour, put my living room back in order; then I changed and we walked down to North Beach for pizza.

  Looking at the nudes now, I see decent enough studies but nothing that strikes me as powerful. That's always the problem when you work a well-mined field, and God knows, the human nude, male and female, is well mined. Still, in these shots I see Tim's body whole, the body with which he made his living.

  All those years when I was afraid of Polk Gulch, avoided it and, when obliged to cross it, strode through it as quickly as I could, it wasn't the atmosphere, buildings or even the people that frightened me, it was what they did.

  What kind of people, I'd ask myself, rent out their bodies to strangers? And who are these strangers who feel they have the right to rent the body of a person they don't care about or even know? It was to answer these questions, give face to these people, that I started to explore with my camera.

  When I started I had no idea how I'd feel toward them, whether I'd like them or despise them. All I knew was that I wanted to expand something within myself, overcome my fear, enlarge my sympathy for those who are reviled.

  Tim more than anyone showed me the way. Through him I learned to see hustlers as fragile beings with the same yearnings as myself. I also came to understand that their bartering of their bodies was in principle not so different from the transactions between athletes and their fans. In the latter case the ticket holder has bought permission to gaze, in the former he has paid to touch.

  I pick up a photograph in which Tim is facing away, posed like a Greek sculpture of a youth. With his head turned his body becomes idealized, a body beautiful—open, accessible, voluptuous. Again I feel desire for him, and as I do, am filled with regret. So many things held me back—fear of disease, ruining our friendship, being inept with such an experienced lover. Fear most of all of letting myself go.

  These, of course, are selfish thoughts, considering the terrible wounds inflicted upon him. Perhaps if we had made it, everything would have been different. He would have given up his trade, he would have lived.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I'm standing in mud on a ridge in Wildcat Canyon Regional Park, Hilly Lentz on one side of me, a Contra Costa County deputy on the other. Shanley, cell phone in hand, stands ten paces ahead. Below us, about a hundred feet, in an area of scrub demarcated by police tape, a number of county and S.F.P.D. criminalists are combing the brush. It was here today at dawn, deep in a thicket, that a hiker spotted a male torso.

  It's eight a.m., a raw, chilly morning. A slow steady rain has been falling for over an hour. I'm wearing a black slicker and boots, the cops are in ponchos, Hilly and Shanley wear nylon rain jackets with hoods, S.F.P.D. printed in large block letters on their backs. I hear the crackle of field radios as the criminalists communicate below. Through the surrounding mist I make out El Cerrito. San Francisco, a few miles across the Bay, is obscured by fog.

  Two men from the coroner's office lug a lumpy dark rubber bag up the hill. In it is the torso which may or may not be Tim's. It's two days since I looked at the shots from our nude session, studied the curves of his body, the texture of his skin. I have not been called here to ID him; the medical examiner will do that by matching the cuts on the limbs. They also have my Angel Island photograph which shows the freckles on his chest. Still I have come. Hilly called me as she promised and now I am here, standing on the muddy ground, camera in my hands, a witness.

  Click! I shoot a long shot of the advancing men. Click!Click' I shoot them again as they move closer. The images will not be clear, and that's good, I think, for my feelings on this ridge are not clear either. They're dark, they concern bloodshed and carnage, and blood for me is always black.

  Shanley is walking toward the men.

  "How's it look?"

  The older of the two wears a watch cap. He grumbles. "Rain's s messing everything up."

  His younger colleague nods. He's gawky, bareheaded, with stick-out ears.

  "Animals've been at him," he says. He gives a little tug to the sack.

  "What kind?" Shanley asks.

  "Dogs maybe. There're a couple wild packs around. Maybe a mountain lion. There's one killed a lady here last spring."

  I remember the story; it was on TV. The woman was walking a trail bike. The mountain lion, waiting in a tree, leapt upon her back.

  Suddenly I feel sick. I think I understand Shanley's question. He wants to be sure the person who did the butchering didn't engage in a little cannibalism first.

  I start down the hill. Shanley calls after me.

  "Where're you going?"

  "Take some pictures," I reply without looking back.

  "No, you're not. No!" His voice is stern.

  I ignore him.

  "Halt!" he yells. I halt. "You can't enter a crime scene. Restricted area down there."

  "I'll stay outside the tape, how's that?"

  Hilly has reached me. She takes my arm. "Better come back up, Kay," she says. "Otherwise he'll make you leave."

  She escorts me up the hill, then goes to Shanley. They confer. Shanley, I'm certain, wants me taken home; Hilly is arguing that I be handled with care.

  They're wrong, I'm not traumatized. Horrified, yes; angry, absolutely! But I'm not in the least disoriented. I know exactly what I'm doing: collecting material for Exposures.

  The rain starts falling harder. I watch as the crew spreads plastic sheets to protect the crime scene from the elements. Is this the killing ground, the place where the body was dismembered? Has the earth here been consecrated by Tim's blood?

  I take another shot so I can find this place again, revisit it when the cops are finished, leave flowers, light candles, sit and watch them burn down to pools of wax. Perhaps I will leave some kind of marker, too. I'm sure that the torso in the sack is his.

  Noon. Back in San Francisco. The rain's stopped, the fog's burning off, but on Russian Hill it's still thick. Hilly has just informed me by phone that the medical examiner has matched the Wildcat Canyon torso to the arms, legs and head from the Willow Dumpster.

  "It's your friend," she says. "At least now he can be buried whole."

  I phone my father, tell him I need to see him.

  "Love to visit with you, darlin'," he says. "Shall we wait till after dark?"

  No, I tell him, right away.

  He's surprised but doesn't ask me why. We agree to meet for lunch at the Tai Yuet, a dim sum place on upper Geary.

  As I arrive by bus I see him entering. He's wearing the same shapeless heavy wool sweater he's worn for years.

  Soft gray locks of hair curl over his ears. I race toward the restaurant door, reach it just in time to grab him from behind, press my face against his back.

  "Dad. . ."

  He turns, hugs me hard, then kisses my forehead. As always in his mighty arms, I feel safe.

  The Tai Yuet is filled mostly with Chinese, convivial groups seated at large round tables. Our table is small, square, set against the wall. The waitresses stroll about offering delicacies from trays. Dad speaks some Cantonese from th
e years he worked Chinatown. The girls giggle when the big guy with the meaty Irish face tells them in their own language he'll have a little of this, a little of that, and could they bring over a flask of rice vinegar please.

  "Grand to see you, Kay."

  His eyes sparkle through his squint. He's sixty-two, his skin is lined, there're bags beneath his eyes. Still, he's handsome. I think he looks like a character actor, the kind that play old-timers in Westerns. You know the type—they crouch around the campfire at night, sadly recalling the way things were, grieving over the end of the open range.

  I marvel at his gentle manner. Since he retired from S.F.P.D. and started City Stone Ground, a bread bakery two blocks away, he's become increasingly sweet and self-effacing.

  "You look pretty relaxed," I tell him.

  "Morning's over. That's the hard part of the day. Actually, I feel good," he says. "Cop work never felt right."

  "Took you long enough to discover it."

  "Yeah, well, some lessons are hard to learn."

  He sets down his chopsticks, peers into my eyes.

  "There's a sadness about you, Kay."

  A waitress offers a bamboo steamer containing pork dumplings. He mumbles "No thanks" in Cantonese without taking his eyes off mine.

  I tell him about Tim. Till now he's only had the vaguest notion of my project. I know it disturbs him to learn I've been hanging out in such a squalid milieu, but I detect nothing judgmental, rather a deepening sympathy as he gently shakes his head, swallows and exhales. When I get to the dismemberment he despairs.

  "Gotta be a copycat," he murmurs.

  "What if it isn't?"

  "Gotta be. Too many years."

  He wants to know about Tim's torso, whether and how it was marked.

  "Hilly didn't say anything about that."

  "Did you ask her?"'

  I shake my head. "If there're marks, what would they mean?"

  "If they're the same I'd say they'd mean a lot."

  He stops eating. When I offer him a shrimp and chives dumpling, he shakes his head.