“They’ve already started,” Dad said, ignoring my profanity. “The military and NASA have been scanning scenery into their computers. It’s only a matter of time until everybody is able to do something similar from their homes and personal computers, anybody who can afford it, just one more ordinary task. With microchips and miniaturization advancing the way they have lately, we—but that’s not the point. The point is that you don’t have to wait passively for salvation to arrive from the sky. It’s up to you to accelerate that development. See what you can learn from this, Fitz—the latest books and papers, these confidential instruction manuals I borrowed from our lab.”
I looked at the pile he hauled from his briefcase. It seemed an awful lot of reading.
“Up to me?” I said dully.
“You’re smart, your teachers always said you were a genius at mathematics, how you knew how to talk to machines as if they were people. Read this literature, let me know what else you need, what equipment. Show him what you’re made of, kiddo. Hell, you’re American, not a loser.”
I wasn’t sure if he was just trying to shake me out of my depression, but it made sense, it tingled a fiber, long dormant, inside me. Perhaps that is why I was dumbfounded when Mom confessed that she had indeed changed sides. She had sort of fallen off my radar during the year or so dedicated to my new digital labors, most of my waking hours spent trying to defeat with science my Amazonian visitor’s witch-doctor magic. I had, in fact, discovered just a month before the cinnamon-and-vanilla bread pudding incident a way to code images on a Mac and then engineer and display them on the startup screen. Dad was thrilled, wanted to show the program to the folks at the MIT computer science lab—though not before patenting my designs in DC under the name Imageplus—“We’re going to be rich, Fitz! That savage may have done us a favor, set you up for life!”
I did not share Dad’s enthusiasm, knew this was merely a modest first step, but it did help convince me that soon—perhaps some years down the road—I would be able to scan the photo from just before I was fourteen onto a computer and manipulate the image to simulate what the years had wrought on my real face. Though I still would be fettered by my need to hide from millions of practitioners of traditional photography, I could begin to envisage a future when I might be able to obtain a passport, create an ID for myself, perhaps even travel if I took every precaution.
We had not revealed any of this to Mom. If her delusionary quest for an outcome in the faraway Amazon jungle spared her from further dejection and guilt, why bring her down to earth? But after her outburst that night over dessert, she needed to know there was another solution to my problem.
“The way,” Dad said, “to rid oneself of a curse is more science, not less science. Do your thing, Margaretta Foster. You’ll never hear a word of reproach from me. But this monster won’t be defeated by good intentions. You can’t cure a plague by embracing it.” And he proceeded to give her details of our plans.
She was not swayed. “We’ll see who’s right,” she said. “You two, who want to scratch the surface of this crisis, or someone like me, who understands that you have to go to the roots, the origins, address the underlying cause.”
And that’s how Mom and I, over the next two years, went our separate ways. I plunged into computing and digital imaging with the ferocity of an explorer hacking his way through a thicket of trees and she navigated atrocities as if she had been born to document them. I studied spectrographs and pixels and binary formulas and she studied indigenous customs and religious ceremonies and shamanic rituals, she ever deeper into the past while I voyaged to what I thought was the future. Her new language: Portuguese. My old language: mathematics. A contrast in lifestyles as well: I ensconced myself in my room, and she expanded into the wide vast world, joined Survival International, organized a local Boston chapter to help the indigenous peoples of the world, particularly centered on the Amazon, an unremitting devotion that gained her the confidence of activists and leaders of the cause.
So this time, when she dropped her next bombshell, I was not entirely caught by surprise.
Mom announced, again at dinner, again as dessert was being served, that she was leaving for Brazil in a week. Part of a mission, she said, to confront the loggers, put white, Western bodies between their machines and weapons and the forests they were bent on destroying with the complicity of the government and the multinationals.
Again, absolute silence.
Fractured, finally, by my father’s tremulous voice.
“And this is supposed to stop this man and his destruction of our tribe, our tribe, Margaretta, and not his, to save him you’re ready to destroy our family?”
“I’m doing this for all of you, for us. I’ve made arrangements through Claudio and Orlando Villas-Bôas to meet the chiefs of the Kalapalo and Kuikoro and their shamans. I will plead for their intervention, to shut the portal that was opened by Western meddling in their culture, the looting of their souls.”
“I forbid it, I forbid this insane trip.”
“You know how the loggers decide what parts of the forest to cut down? Do you, Jerry? By aerial photography, Jerry, that’s how they mapped out the Amazon and the Matto Grosso. You know who invented that form of surveillance, Jerry? Your precious Edwin Land, your divine Polaroid lab. You’re in no position to forbid anything or anyone. You and your accomplices in genocide. Just be happy I’ll be coming back to this house. And by the time I am back our Roy will be free. Or has your science found the solution you promised two years ago?”
“This is crazy.”
“Crazy? I’ll show you something crazy.”
She went to the living room and came back with a large portfolio. Pulled out a sepia photo of an indigenous family under a thatched roof in what we presumed was a clearing in the Amazon: an older man, a woman showing her breasts, two younger boys verging on adolescence. “Look at him,” Mom said, pointing at one of the youngsters. He shimmered with the faintest resemblance to my visitor, the shadows playing across his face making it difficult to establish a definite correspondence.
“Maybe yes, maybe not,” my dad said. “So what?”
“So this photo and fifty-three others were taken by Albert Frisch, a German explorer, in 1867. The first ever snapped of the Amazon Indians. Captured for all time inside a camera and transported for everyone to see, at the mercy of anybody’s eyes. 1867. Albert Frisch.”
“And this justifies your trip because . . . ?”
“Because the photo was snapped exactly one hundred years before Roy was born. Because you once mentioned that a certain Frosch was one of your forebears, and your grandfather’s name was Albert and your dad is Bert—”
“Frosch isn’t Frisch and millions of people are called Albert or Bert and Frosch wasn’t German but French Alsatian and the photo doesn’t really correspond to the man who keeps cropping up and—and—oh what’s the use?” Dad stopped, then pounced with another argument: “Didn’t your Dr. Beck say that the photo couldn’t have been taken of the tribe you’re going to visit, that they weren’t even discovered until the middle of our century?”
“Dr. Beck was old and his memory was fading.”
“The hell to Dr. Beck! What I really resent is you blaming my family history for this malevolence. Why not your ancestors?”
“Yours, mine, that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that it’s him in the photo. Poor young man. You understand what he must have gone through, right, Roy? That we can’t free you until we free that boy from whatever curse is weighing down on him. Don’t you? Don’t you?”
Her words reminded me of another traumatic moment. Like Camilla, she was more interested in my visitor than in me. She’d chosen to champion some savage stranger over her own son.
I wheeled around, left the room, did not speak a word to her for the rest of the week.
The night before Mom was to depart, I left the door of my room unlocked on purpose, knowing she would come. I hardly heard her enter, so silentl
y did she sidle up to my bed. As she used to when I was a child, as she still did from time to time to give me a good night hug.
But I was not a child anymore. I was almost nineteen and had endured years of agony and she, my own mother, had betrayed me.
I pretended to be asleep.
Maybe she knew I was faking it. Maybe she didn’t care. She needed to speak to me, whether I was listening or not. Needed to hear her own voice. To feel that she had tried to make me understand, forgive her: it’s about love, love for you, Roy, love for those who suffer just as you’re suffering. I’d realize, she said, that the meeting with the shaman had been successful, she’d been able to persuade at least one of them to lift the spell, the haunting from 1867, I’d realize this because any photo of my face snapped at home after that remote exorcism would be clean of interference and I’d then see myself in that image as if in a mirror or a lake, as she was seeing me now with her eyes so full of compassion. Next time I greeted her, we’d all be free, she and Dad and the boys and me, her darling Fitzroy.
She kissed me, stood up, I could hear her tip-toeing to the door. Then she must have paused there to take one last look, because she glided back and I felt her hand caress me, the fingers parting the hair that I had inherited from her, the color and the strands and the lock that kept pushing itself out of place.
I still didn’t move.
And then she was gone.
A glimmer in me wanted to believe that she would succeed, that love would win the day.
A week later we received a phone call from the US consul in Manaus.
TWO
“All I know is a door into the dark.”
—Seamus Heaney
Ianswered the phone that night, it would have to be me, of course, so insistent, ten rings and it would stop and then start over again—and I thought that maybe it was Dad or one of my brothers, they would have to be away from home, off to the Schubert Theatre in Boston to see the first touring production of Les Miz—there was an extra ticket, Mom’s seat, and Dad had suggested that maybe I’d like to use it, we could find a way of sneaking me in once the lights had dimmed, photography was prohibited during the show anyway, make it an all boys’ night out, his voice exasperated because Mom was not with him to share the occasion. He’d been wanting to see the show for so long, his favorite author, Victor Hugo, and Les Miserables, his favorite novel. He’d read it to me when I was ten, one page him, one page me, decrying Javert and cheering Jean Valjean on and crying for Cosette. Dad had even brought down from the attic a picture of the great French author that we had inherited from Dad’s grandmother. So he wasn’t home, nobody was home but me that night, they were listening to Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? Not me, I wasn’t listening to anybody singing, I had my own anger to deal with, and I picked up the receiver with irritation, expecting Dad to tell me how much they had enjoyed the show and what a fool I was not to have joined them, Dad belting out, It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again.
But it was not Dad. It was the consul in Manaus.
An accident, he said, the boat had capsized. My mother had not survived the river. Foul play, the consul insisted, had been ruled out.
I bit so hard into my hand that blood sprouted from the wound.
“Mr. Foster?”
“It was murder,” I said.
“No, sir. An accident. We’ve investigated thoroughly and there is no doubt that there was no outside intervention that—”
“Murder,” I said.
“Can I speak to someone else in the house, sir?” I told him my father would be home soon with my brothers, got his number, watched the blood drip from my hand onto the floorboards, carefully placed the receiver back in its cradle.
Are you happy now, you bastard? Now that you killed my mother, used me to kill her, you bastard, you sonofabitching motherfucking savage! It wasn’t enough to destroy me, you had to go and seduce her, drown her. Drown her because I wouldn’t drown myself. I’ll get you, I’ll track you down, I’ll burn down every tree you ever loved, make the goddamn Amazon jungle go up in flames!
But I did not track him down, I could not.
And he did not, could not, abandon me.
The photos were there, he was still there.
He and me, motherless, each of us now without the woman who had given us birth, stranded, both of us, in different centuries, with nobody near to take care of us, detesting each other across time, miserable, miserable, both of us.
I was not, however, as bereft as I imagined myself to be.
Months after my mother’s death—more months than I could even begin to count—the phone rang again in our house. It was for me, my brother Vic said, a puzzled look in his eyes. Nobody ever called me.
I almost didn’t answer. I had spent the time since the news about Mom in my room, blaming myself for her death, venturing out only for evening meals with what was left of our mourning and resentful family and, once a week, for the sterile photo sessions that Dad and I continued to hold, not because we had any hope that something would change, but out of respect for Mom, because that was what she would have wanted. I had advanced not a bit in Dad’s project of digital imaging as a response to my dilemma. That’s how disheartened and guilt ridden I felt. Lifting my little finger seemed to be harder than raising the Titanic. And besides, success at ridding ourselves of the intruder through computing would have proven even more how stupid and pointless had been my mother’s sacrifice. I did not want to say to her tomb or her face that smiled at me from the living room, from the family album that I masochistically kept examining: Why didn’t you wait? Why didn’t you trust that we could solve this with rational means instead of traipsing off to a jungle where you did not belong to meet strangers who couldn’t care less about me or our troubles?
So I was not in the mood to speak to anyone that Saturday.
“Who is it?” I asked apathetically.
“A girl,” my brother answered. “She wouldn’t say her name. An old friend, that’s all she said. And that she really needed to speak to you.”
It was Cam.
“I don’t expect you to remember me, Fitzroy Foster, but—”
She waited for me to say yes, I do, or no, who the hell are you, but I couldn’t possibly articulate what was racing through my blood, not just my astonishment at this voice from the past, but everything she had meant to me, her incessant phantasmagoric company all these seven years. Yes. Seven years. Tomorrow was my birthday, I would be twenty-one years old.
She must have tired of the silence, because she said: “I have something for you, something I need to show you. Can I come by? I mean, I know you don’t go out anymore, nobody has seen you for ages, so you’d probably rather we met at your home.”
“What for?” I asked.
“It’s important,” and though her voice was calm, there was a gentle urgency in each word, and I conjured up her image as I had done so often in my solitude, as I had by the Charles River when she had come to rescue me from those waters, and said, “Yes, of course, come by whenever. Tomorrow is best.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Sunday. Better still. It’ll be a birthday present.”
She remembered! How could she remember? Why would she?
I understood the answer when she stood in front of me and gave me a hug and saw in her eyes how I had changed as she saw in mine how she had grown. And yet, we were still the same, as if only one second had passed since she had asked who that man was and what he wanted and I had retreated, as if keeping my swimmer girl alive inside had produced the miracle that she had not forgotten me, not for one instant, she said. And had something to prove it.
We were up in my room, in my refuge, among the computers and lab equipment, away from prying eyes. It was peaceful, having her there, perched on the chair by my desk while I sat on the bed, a good distance away. As if, in effect, the demon was in abeyance, excluded from this relationship, perhaps averting his gaze, perhaps I had earned tha
t interlude by abstaining from any sexual activity for these seven monastic years. Had she banished him? Was that why I did not sense his dark eyes boring into my skull, watching me as he did all day long, all night long, cannibalizing me, eating my light, chewing my life up, then spitting me out exhausted and drained? Would it have been enough to have invited her into my room, nothing more, just once for the monster to be vanquished?
It was not that at all.
He was there, but did not need to make his presence felt in his ordinary, invasive way.
Because Cam took out an envelope from her handbag and passed it to me.
“Your birthday present,” she said.
I trembled at the touch of the envelope, almost handed it back to her, anticipating that if I opened it everything would be altered from that moment onward, altered, inevitably, for the worse. These seven fallow years had made me fearful of the future, any future, scared of being hurt.
“Go ahead,” Camilla said, with a smile. “He won’t bite. He never could, you know.”
It was him.
An old postcard.
His portrait. There. The first time I had ever seen part of his body, something more than the face he had shown me. The short neck below the chin and its shadow, the naked torso, the sloping shoulders and bare arms. The bottom of the picture had been cropped off or perhaps merely framed in such a way that it stopped just above his belly button. One arm, the left one, was hanging down next to his body and the other one jutted slightly outward, with the elbow crooked, so that the unseen hand seemed to be covering his genitals, shielding them from photographer and viewers. Just a surmise, but that merest inclination of the elbow and the forearm toward the juncture between unseen legs revealed a sense of vulnerability that startled me, so accustomed was I to the defiant look, the omnipotence of his glare, the wildness of his hair. Floating by itself, the face that had infiltrated my photos was ghostly and daunting. Now that it was attached to a body, it appeared more like that of a helpless child, without defense against a world that was invading him, plundering his life, stripping him naked in order to take the shot. That nakedness made him look so much younger, as if he was calling for someone to rescue him and knew, the eyes knew, the eyes I knew too well, that there would be no rescue, no salvation, nobody was coming for him except death.
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