by Chris Cander
Standing on the crater’s rim at an elevation of twenty-six hundred feet, Clara had to plant her legs in a stagger, one forward and one behind, to keep from blowing over in the great gusting winds that smeared thin clouds across the sky.
“Miren,” he called to the movers, pointing to the lowest spot on the southeastern rim.
“Sí,” Beto answered.
“I need you to take the piano around the crater to the other side”—he panned his hand across the northern ridge—“and unload it just opposite from where we are now. Me entiendes? Okay, good, but listen. It’s probably a mile walk on soft, loose terrain and it’s going to be really windy. Once you get it out there, you’re going to need to hold on to it. Just get it out as close to the edge as you can but then you’re gonna have to lie down behind it, both of you, still holding on. You know what? Use the straps. Just keep them on. They won’t show in the photo at this distance. And given how the wall’s angled, I probably won’t be able to see the feet anyway. Here, take the walkie-talkie. I’ll tell you what to do.”
“I can go with them,” Clara said, unable to disguise her concern. The gusts were strong, and she knew all too well how unstable the piano could be when it was off-balance. Her hand ached just thinking about it.
“Clara, don’t worry. I wouldn’t risk it if I didn’t trust them,” Greg said. “I told you they work for a buddy of mine at a set-design company. Movie sets. You know that one about the guy who falls off the apartment building? Where you see the whole story of his life as he’s passing each floor? My buddy built that set. Won an Oscar for it, too. Anyway, these guys aren’t piano tuners or anything, but they know how to move heavy shit around.”
Juan smiled at her. “Es true,” he said.
Without further ado they began hiking slowly around the edge of the crater, struggling to stay upright. During one violent gale, Clara thought she might fall over right where she stood, and flung her arm out to brace herself against Greg, her heart pounding at the fleeting vision of the movers and her Blüthner being hurled over the volcanic edge, bumping and rolling until crashing into rubble at the bottom, six hundred feet below.
“They’re fine, Clara.” Greg heaved the SUV’s hatch door open and reached in for his camera bag. Clara stood a few feet away and watched the movers wheel the piano slowly around the edge of the crater, wobbling on the loose ground, getting roughhoused by the wind just like Beto’s long hair. How could he even see anything with it whipping into his eyes like that?
Finally, they were in position. Greg adjusted his tripod and bent down to squint through the viewfinder. He held a small device toward the piano and, after checking it, modified some settings and pressed his eye to the camera again. He pushed a button on the end of a cable that was connected to the camera, adjusted the settings once more, pressed the button. “A little more to your left,” Greg said into his walkie-talkie, and the movers popped up from behind the edge like gophers. “Okay, hold it.” He moved around, changing lenses and settings and the height of the tripod, wiping the lens clean. He told them to shift the angle of the piano a few degrees, which they did, and to disappear again, which they also did. As he worked, Clara noted the fluidity of his movements. He had the kind of comfortable authority over his own tools that she admired.
She stared at the Blüthner, sparkling in miniature across the chasm, and turned to him. “What does it look like?”
“See for yourself,” Greg said. He stepped haltingly around from behind the tripod and pointed at the viewfinder. “The goal is to create a grand atmosphere. Normally I’d put the background as far away as possible to enlarge the piano, but in this case I wanted to showcase the fragility and danger of something on a precipice. See how I framed it? Big sky spread out above? Mysterious depths below? It suggests a potential for disaster. Can you feel it?” He sounded wound up, like he was excited by the danger he was describing.
Clara eyed him, concerned, but he pointed again at the viewfinder. “Take a look,” he urged her, and she pressed her right eye up against the camera. Still distant, the piano looked lonesome and, yes, fragile, even though she knew it was being gripped securely by Juan and Beto, who were unseen behind it. After she’d spent a minute studying her piano in a context at once dangerous and beautiful, her left eye felt tired from being squeezed shut, and she turned the camera back over to Greg. Even above the wind, she could hear the shutter clicking. The rest of him was utterly still.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked him.
“Why am I doing what,” he said without lifting his eye from the camera.
“Dragging my piano through the desert. It seems like a big expense and a real pain in the ass. Not to mention…precarious. I mean, I like your idea about showing what it looks like when the music stops, but why out here? Why Death Valley, of all places?”
He took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly as he unfolded himself from his crouch. “Okay,” he said. “That’s fair.” Then he held the walkie-talkie to his mouth and said, “Okay, bring it back.”
He replaced his equipment in the SUV. Before he began breaking it down, he rummaged around until he found a leather portfolio and handed it to her. “Go ahead,” he said.
She unzipped it and withdrew something flat wrapped in a sturdy linen cloth stamped with blue and ocher-yellow wildflowers. She glanced at him and he nodded his permission to continue. Inside was a small hardcover photo album. Its white cover featured a single black-and-white image of a strange, frozen landscape with a desolate sky and mountains in the distance.
“You recognize it?” Greg asked. “That’s Badwater Basin, where we were yesterday afternoon.”
“Oh. Yeah, now I do. But it looks like ice instead of salt on the ground.”
“My mother thought so, too. She used to say it looked like the Siberian tundra, that she couldn’t believe it wasn’t cold. All of them, actually.”
Clara turned the pages carefully. There was only one image on each one, a replica of an old-fashioned Polaroid picture with the white border and that slightly underexposed, dim, sepia-like quality.
“Is this your mom in these?”
“Yep. And me. Those are scans of pictures from a trip to Death Valley we took right after we got to California. They’re the only family photos we have, actually. Most of the time, my mom kept them wrapped and hidden in a drawer, but sometimes she’d take them out and look at them. She’d sit there at the kitchen table for hours staring at those pictures. I have the originals in a safety-deposit box back in New York. I made this as a backup.”
Clara scrutinized each of them. She recognized Salt Creek and Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, Devil’s Golf Course and Artist’s Palette, and several other places they’d been in the past four days. She was surprised, though, by the desolation the images seemed to embody. In fact, all of them, while beautiful, were jarringly stark.
“Wow, these are amazing. But really depressing. It’s a lot prettier here in person.”
“I agree. But she also said they looked like how she felt inside. Dead, just like the name.”
“But I thought you said this was her favorite place,” she asked, peering more closely at the woman in the photos.
Greg glanced at her, his forehead wrinkled.
“On Sunday, in the casino parking lot. That’s what you said.”
He pressed his lips together. “Right. Well, I suppose I was being sarcastic. As far as I know, she only came here…twice.” He shook his head, as though to rid himself of a thought. “We left Russia when I was a baby. It changed her, I think. She was so unhappy. I’m sure there was more to it, a real depression or something, but she used to say she was sad because she had to leave her Blüthner behind in Russia.” He passed a hand over his face. “It was eventually shipped over, but until then those pictures were like a fetish for her. She said the reason the vistas looked so barren was because there was no music in the
m. She even made up a story about it, about a little girl, Sasha, who lived in Siberia. Everyone was miserable and cold until someone gave Sasha a piano, because once she played it the snow and ice melted and the whole landscape began to change. But then some terrible things happened, a bad marriage, a jealous merchant, and in the end the piano was destroyed and the tundra returned and Sasha froze inside a casket of her own tears.”
“That’s awful!” Clara said.
Greg huffed. “I loved that story. I probably wouldn’t have asked her to tell it to me so often if I’d realized back then that my mother was the little girl. There we were in L.A., the warmest place she’d ever been, but inside she was frozen.”
“Even after she got her piano back?”
“We weren’t a very happy family, I guess.” He shrugged his shoulders. “There were times she seemed okay. But happiness for her seemed, I don’t know…fragile. Maybe it’s like that for everybody to some degree.”
Carefully, Clara rewrapped the album in the linen cloth and handed it back to him, just when two riders on a Triumph Roadster pulled up to the trailhead. They climbed off, peeling their long legs from around the motorcycle’s wide tank, and pulled their helmets off. The woman shook out her hair while the man put his gloves into the trunk box. Their dusty leathers creaked as they walked hand in hand toward the rim of the crater, far enough upwind that they didn’t need to say hello to anyone else nearby. Clara looked at the Triumph with envy. It was mammoth, even bigger and shinier than the Blüthner. Even at rest it seemed like a street fighter ready for a brawl, as if it wanted to tear off down the road, hovering over the asphalt. She wanted so badly to slide onto it and feel it roar aggressively to life beneath her. Just by looking she could feel the torque of the engine in her elbows, the sensation of speed in her gut. Then she glanced again at the couple. Their happiness didn’t look fragile. They stood pressed together, the woman leaning back against the man’s chest as he wrapped his arms around her. Clara turned away, but stole intermittent peeks while they pointed across the crater at the wonder of the piano that was being pushed along the rim. The wind carried their voices close, making them intimate. “Being out here and seeing things like this makes me want to believe in God,” the woman said in a clipped British accent. The man responded by cupping her breasts and kissing her on the neck. She laughed, and they set off down a steep route inside the crater’s western edge.
“What about you?” Greg asked Clara as he collapsed the tripod. “Do you believe in God?”
“I don’t know,” she told him. “Not really. You?”
“Fuck no,” he scoffed. “Every time anybody talks about God, all I hear is their own brand of fanaticism, dogmatism, elitism, or bigotry. Some excuse to feel morally superior to everyone else. No thanks.”
“That’s religion, not God.” She thought of something her uncle had once told her one Sunday morning. They’d turned off Weedpatch Highway and onto a dirt road, passed several TV antennas and microwave relay towers, and finally came to a gate. They had to hike the last few hundred yards, but when they got to Breckenridge Lookout, Jack put his hands in his pockets and scanned the slopes of the Sequoia National Forest below them. He looked at her and smiled. “I’m glad we could come to church today,” he said.
Greg lifted a shoulder as he unscrewed a telephoto lens from the camera’s body. “Same thing,” he said. “Zealots and murderers and politicians are always justifying their actions by invoking rules made up by an imaginary friend. Or fucking athletes! They love pointing up at the sky during post-game interviews and saying crap like ‘The Big Man Upstairs was watching out for me.’ Could they actually believe that shit? That they’re somehow superior enough to attract God’s attention away from the other team? What do the other guys think, huh? If they’re also into that, then they have to say, ‘Oh, it’s all part of God’s plan’ or some BS. Why doesn’t somebody, anybody, ever say that one side worked harder or just got lucky? Why does it always have to be part of some divine plan?”
Clara, taken aback by his hostile reaction, by how his pale cheeks were blooming scarlet red, felt the need to both defuse his irritation and defend a more neutral position. “Well, what about the crater? Or those weird bushes behind us that look like grazing sheep? Or that hawk up there? What about the mystery of it all? No big plan.”
“Maybe that hawk is God. Watching out for us.” He pointed at the sky, then waved. “Hey, Big Man Upstairs! Thanks for everything, okay?”
“What’s the matter with you?” Clara said.
He let go of his camera and put his hands against his head, then pulled them down his face as if he were wiping something away. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to overreact. It’s just that there have been plenty of times in my life when it was obvious I wasn’t going to be winning any of the games. You know what I mean?”
The morning after her parents died, waking up at her friend’s house, she remembered having a dream: she was wearing a sparkling blue leotard, bounding across a floor covered with a thick layer of powdery white sediment like the surface of the moon. With each leap she gained more air, leaving widely spaced footprints behind her. A crackling roar came from the spectators, the judges, and the other gymnasts, a sound that coalesced into a chant of her name: Cla-ra! Cla-ra! She was smiling as she took the final bound, so high that she escaped the gravitational pull completely and was released from one world to another, twinkling in her leotard like a star. Tabitha’s mother’s face was pained as she shook Clara by the arm and whispered, “Clara. Clara, wake up. Something terrible has happened. There’s been a fire.”
She let her gaze rest on the lunar-looking silt at the bottom of the crater, then moved it up the jagged wall to the Blüthner inching toward them. Was the hawk flying anywhere nearby? No, it was gone. The sky was a shock of blue, empty except for streaks of clouds.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know what you mean.”
“You asked why I’m taking these photos here,” he said. “It’s because the second time my mother came to Death Valley, she killed herself.” He shrugged. “And I miss her.”
“GRISHA?” KATYA KNOCKED on his closet door. “Your father is home. Come have dinner with us.”
“Sorry, Mama. I can’t come out right now.”
He heard her hesitate, noted the disappointment in her voice. “Then soon, yes?”
“After I’m finished.” He sighed. He did want to have dinner with his mother. But with only her.
Now that he was almost an adult, a recent high school graduate, Greg—he’d announced that he didn’t want to be called Grigoriy anymore—had the habit of going to his room before his father came home from work; he couldn’t stand the sight of Mikhail heaving himself into the worn easy chair, making rude demands of his mother, crumbs dropping from his mouth onto his mountainous belly. Instead, after Mikhail came home and assumed his bitter position in the living room, Greg spent the evenings in the darkroom he’d set up in his closet. He wanted to go to a good college somewhere else and study photography, though he was afraid that this would mean abandoning his mother. Instead, he’d enrolled at the community college near their home to buy himself time before making a big move.
He’d bought his first good camera, a Nikon F70, when he was a sophomore, with money he’d filched from his father’s wallet over a period of six months. At first it was little more than a shield against the social swirl taking place around him. At school, whenever he felt embarrassed by cruel upperclassmen or uninterested girls, he could hide his blush behind the camera. But before long, as he trained his eye, photography became far more than just a barrier between himself and others. He took a part-time job at a custom photo lab to learn as much as he could, and to earn money for more equipment. When he wasn’t working or in school, he spent his free afternoons on solitary hikes in the canyons, practicing the art of making pictures. He played with depth of field, perspective, rise and fall m
ovements, exposure, distortion.
Besides landscapes, his favorite subject was her hands, especially when she was playing the piano, her thin fingers stretching across an octave. He also liked shooting the Blüthner’s stark interior while she played, the blur of hammers and strings that translated her music into imagery. His mother’s happiness, it seemed, was tentative and conditional, but she seemed most herself when she was at the keyboard. The tether between the two of them had grown frighteningly thin over the years; Greg worried that now that he was an adult, she wouldn’t think he needed her as much, and it wasn’t true: he needed her more than ever but didn’t know how to say so. Instead, he took pictures of her. He thought if he didn’t capture her making music, if he didn’t make those moments real, make them his, then they might disappear. And then what would he have of her?
In his closet, under a special red lamp, he performed the steps: develop, stop, fix. Then he strung the wet papers up on a clothesline above the pans to dry, and watched the images emerge. He felt powerful when using a camera, doing things that victors do—exposing and capturing. With music there was too much letting go. With photography he could be greedy, acquiring the things he shot, like a collector or a pillager or a thief. The piano gave. The photographer took.
Greg could hear his father yelling at her in the other room. Even with his door closed, the anger in his father’s voice was clear. What was it this time? Was his dinner cold? Had his mother forgotten to buy vodka? Had she sat too long at the piano again, instead of sitting in the dark with him while he drank and stared at American sitcoms he couldn’t understand?
No, this was something else; it sounded worse than usual. Mikhail’s voice was hoarse and crackling. It was bad enough that Greg opened the closet door while his prints were in the chemical bath, ruining them instantly with the light, but still he hesitated by the door. He had learned that it was better for his mother if he didn’t get involved when they argued, but when Mikhail screamed, “You whore!” in English, Greg ran to her.