Image Decay

by Mark Lisac

  Copyright © Mark Lisac 2020

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication—reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system—without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Image decay / Mark Lisac.

  Names: Lisac, Mark, 1947- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200159739 | Canadiana (ebook) 2020015978X | ISBN 9781988732893 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988732909 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781988732916 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8623.I82 I43 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Board Editor: Douglas Barbour

  Cover and interior design: Michel Vrana

  Cover images: iStockphoto; spxChrome, LoudRedCreative, g-stockstudio,

  MarioGuti, Simon Herrmann. psdbox.com: Andrei Oprinca.

  Author photo: Ellen Nygaard

  NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  NeWest Press wishes to acknowledge that the land on which we operate is Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous Peoples, including Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux.

  NeWest Press

  #201, 8540-109 Street

  Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  Printed and bound in Canada

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  To Ellen

  CONTENTS

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  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1.

  THE RIVER SLID UNDERNEATH HIM. THE WATER WAS NEARLY clear over the gravel bars. Over the deeper hollows and channels it folded in slowly undulating ribbons of olive and light brown. The surface looked like camouflage fabric with something alive underneath it. Some of the greens bordered on dirty blue but all the currents had the tint of suspended mud or dead leaves.

  It did not look like it was flowing hard. Random twigs floated by faster than his normal walking pace, passing out of sight under the bridge. There was still laziness to it.

  Not like the Niagara, which he remembered as cold, blue, and terrifyingly muscular.

  The light was not the same either. In the early September sun, the air here had lost the diamond hardness of midsummer and had taken on the clear, washed-out quality of faded jeans. Not the soft haze usually visible around the Great Lakes. Not the faint golden promise of the air in California. He could have lived in either of those places. He had chosen instead this pre-cast concrete city, frozen half the year, slovenly with litter and dust the other half, in denial about its nature always.

  “What am I doing here?” Ostroski thought.

  He stopped. Had he spoken the words out loud? He could not remember when he had started mumbling his thoughts, or when he had stopped being embarrassed about it.

  His mind wandered in other ways, he knew. Faded jeans. Sky like faded jeans. Why did they have to be faded? When had they stopped making powder blue?

  Sweat started trickling down his back. The sun had swung onto his side of the bridge and his jacket was now too warm but there was too much risk trying to take it off. He rubbed his back against one of the iron girders, its black paint starting to peel and rust starting to show around the peeled patches and the rivets.

  He looked at his hostage. She had short brown hair, darkening toward black in a few patches. Her liquid brown eyes met his. They looked alternately nervous and angry.

  He did not flinch from her gaze. If he had to, he would throw her over the railing. He had already threatened to do it once to keep the cops back. He thought he would need about one second—two at most—to send her dropping straight like an elevator into the water. It would probably take another two or three seconds for her to hit. She might survive. You never knew.

  He reasoned the cops would not shoot him because there was too much chance of hitting her. But he would have to do it fast. They might try to shock him with a flash grenade or tear gas. The big plainclothes cop who had got close to him to talk might have decide to rush up and grab him.

  He hoped they would find the lawyer or Adela soon. He was willing to talk to one of them, although even they would have to keep their distance. He did not want to send the girl sailing in a short arc and then straight down through the washed-out air and onto the surface of the river. Onto, not into. He guessed after a drop like that it might feel more like concrete than like water. He didn’t want to do it. It had already been a tough life for her. That idiot had named her Mitzi. “Don’t worry, Mitzi,” he said. “I’m not asking for much. They’ll see reason.”

  She tilted her head slightly with curiosity on hearing him talk. What he had hoped would be reassuring words seemed to have little effect. She was probably getting irritable with hunger. She was bored, too, getting squirmy. At least she wasn’t drooling much. He hoped her boredom and nervousness did not slide into aggression. He didn’t like the look of her pointed teeth. Her voice was snarly, too. That was even more disturbing.

  “Goddamn dachshunds,” he thought. The nastiest, most short-tempered kind of dogs he could think of. He would rather have been holding onto the leash of a small pit bull, or anything else light enough to lift over the edge. Just like that smug moron to breed dachshunds and think they’re lovable.

  Just like me to start concentrating on the goddamn squirming dog and forget how fast even a big cop could get to me, he thought as he heard shoes scratch on concrete. He felt the big cop slamming into him. He dropped the dog as a twisted and toppled to the sidewalk, scraping a knee and elbow. He lay still and tired as the shock of the collision and the fall seeped through him.

  Mitzi stepped up and licked his face. She was snarly, but not one to hold grudges. It was the most physical affection he had known in twelve years.

  On the ninth floor of a nearby administrative tower a grey wraith of a man’s silhouette let vertical blinds drop back into place. He had looked out to check the weather and been held by the drama taking place down on the bridge walk. Disorder mesmerized him. He had spent most of his last fifty years struggling to keep life under control, keep it as neat as the files in his office and the art collections he now supervised. He looked at his reflection in the glass covering a pen-and-ink drawing of an 1880s-era homestead on the wall across from his plain mahogany desk. He saw his metal-rimmed spectacles and thinning hair and flat, expressionless mouth, but he could not see past that surface detail. Nor did he want to.

  2.

  GEORGE RABANI LIKED BEING A LAWYER. HE DID NOT LIKE being an informal social worker, which his practice required on certain days.

  He thought people were enormously and unfailingly interesting. He saw in them a vast field of bleak self-interest interrupted by oases of compassion and generosity. He enjoyed talking to them. He found most of them a n
ever-ending source of delightful surprise. They constantly invented quirks or stumbled into improbable predicaments. Sometimes they strode into those situations wilfully. Sometimes they wandered in as if driving mistakenly onto a road that petered out, turning suddenly to gravel and then to dirt.

  He helped when he could. But he did not like dealing with people who seemed essentially incapable of understanding their situation. Jack Ostroski was on the border. Rabani knew Ostroski was smart. He was not sure what Ostroski understood and what he did not.

  The previous day’s incident on the High View Bridge could result in an order for a psychiatric assessment. It might be kept quiet instead, with Ostroski simply being calmed down and told to go tend to his store. Rabani thought there was too much behind the incident to go away. Who takes a dog hostage? And the episode suggested some capacity for violence.

  He had walked into the office seeing his image reflected on the plate glass of the building front and the door. The pictures flickered past like frames of old movie film. He had become used to his pockmarked face and the slight muffin bulge at his beltline.

  After nearly two years he was almost used to seeing that image entering one of the capital’s top law offices.

  Saying good morning to Julia at the front desk had brought him back from doubt. He was a lawyer with a promising future. In a good firm. In a city with cheap grey buildings, and a downtown filled with panhandlers and with haggard, blank-faced teenagers catching a bus to school. But the city had plenty of money. It also had many people whose hidden needs or bad judgments eventually dragged them into law offices. The variety of their inspirations and failings promised him years of education. Mere entertainment was not enough. He wanted to learn.

  Rabani was not a cynic or a voyeur. He was a student of humanity. Mostly he saw at least as much reason for hope in his clients as he did weakness. In his darkest moments he worried that he studied his clients as a way of learning about himself. People were not so different from one another. Yet they were different enough—some were lawyers and some were clients.

  Julia of the perfectly coiffed hair and expensively understated dress had given him her warm but utterly dispassionate smile and handed him a large brown envelope. He saw the previous day’s date and “Ostroski” scrawled on the upper-left corner. The delivery in itself was worrisome. It indicated that whatever Ostroski had thought he was doing on the bridge, he had planned it.

  Rabani tore the end of the envelope neatly and slipped out a thin sheaf of paper. It was going to take some time. He stepped outside to get a cup of coffee, double cream and double sugar. He asked Julia to hold any calls, returned to his office and settled into the massive chair that he thought was one of the best perks of working at a good firm.

  Then he began to read:

  “I am typing this on an Underwood from the mid-1930s. I like old Royals too but this is a solid machine and has been my favourite for a long time. It’s been such a long time that I can’t remember.

  “This machine is real. You can see the action. You can see the parts move. Press the concave button with the light letter printed on a black background and the long metal arm swings up from its resting place. It curves through the small space in its assigned arc.

  “The black fabric ribbon lifts and the end of the metal arm with the neatly cast letter on the end hits it. You can hear the thwack. The fabric transfers a shape of ink onto the rolled paper. Sometimes I hold the key down to keep the metal arm in place. The alloy kisses the ink-soaked cloth. It’s the moment of creation.

  “Yes, it’s a mechanical and chemical process just like a photograph. But you choose what image to put on the paper. That makes it creation. So does the transfer of the ink. A message appears on the paper. At that moment, nothing turns into something. It stays there. It can stay for centuries. Not like an arrangement of electrons in a computer.

  “I have an old Oliver too. Named after a guy from Canada. And a Remington Noiseless from 1938. They’re more like investments and I keep them hidden. If I have to, I’ll sell one of them to buy a bottle of good booze when I turn eighty-five. But the Underwood is what I write with. Like when I have to send a note to a lawyer once every ten years or so.

  “I’m taking one of Becker’s dogs hostage. It’s one of his special pets. He calls her Mitzi. She may or may not still be alive by the time you read this. That’s up to Becker.

  “The son of a bitch won’t listen to reason so he’ll have to deal with a madman. That’s what I am now. A mad man, which is also what I am, would steal a dog and hold it hostage. A madman would try to explain himself. Which is what I’m doing now.

  “Becker stole my photos. Maybe not technically. He didn’t break into my shop one night and carry off the cases. He might as well have. They said I walked off my old photographer’s job with a government Hasselblad. Total bull. Manchester said I could have it. It was sort of a gold watch deal, a present for years of loyal service. But after I left they wanted it back. I’d sold it by then and was still short of money.

  “Becker brokered the deal to have my photos donated to the archives. I could have sold them for a lot more than the Hasselblad was worth. He knew that, the son of a bitch. It was worth it to me then to get them off my back. I was getting worried about proper storage of the negatives and prints anyway. They last a long time but need proper care.

  “But here’s where it went wrong. They didn’t let me cull the collection first. It was pick up the boxes and go. The lawyer in Becker’s department said I agreed to sell the collection and there was nothing in the agreement that said I could take anything out. Becker’s a cabinet minister. He could have let me have a look through. But no. He had it in for me for some reason.

  “That was bad enough. I figured I could live with it. The photos would get stored somewhere. A few of the personal shots I took on the side when I was on government work might make it into a display case at the museum. Everyone wants to see candid photos of Manchester, that old con man, and the collection of mental dwarfs he pretended helped him run the government, right? There were some nice ones of historic oil wells too.

  “That wasn’t to be. I’ve heard someone has started snooping through the collection. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Becker himself. Then I heard someone has been assigned to look into new technology that may make it possible to transfer everything into copies on a computer. It’s got something to do with changing everything from physical copies to electronic simulations, the way that’s happened with turning vinyl records into CDs. Instead of chemical film or grains of silver nitrate the pictures get turned into a bunch of ones and zeros in a computer. The bright boys call this digitization, I hear. You may think it sounds farfetched but I’ll tell you, when I got to Hollywood in the late 1940s television sounded like a novelty. Five years later it started destroying the movies. And once real things get turned into electricity they can spread all over.

  They could decide to they could decide to ‘digitize’ everything and put it on this thing they call the Internet. Digitize. I never agreed to that. I agreed to let the photos go into the archives.

  “If they go that way, their idea isn’t to preserve anything, it’s to chew it up and spit it out into garbage. They want to turn silver nitrate and paper into electrons. It’s a perversion. Photographs are meant to record a passing moment and keep it forever. Converting them into an arrangement of electrons in a computer explodes them. It destroys them like an atomic bomb. You can’t take something meant to last through time and make it ephemeral—you didn’t think I knew words like that did you? Oh yeah. When I lived in Hollywood I drank now and then with screenwriters, back when they weren’t afraid of words and ideas.

  “Then there’s the invasion of privacy. There are photos in that collection that aren’t meant to be seen, at least not in my lifetime. Why didn’t I destroy them, you say? Because they happened and can’t be erased. Because I could not bear to see them erased from the record of life. But I thought they would be preserved out o
f sight, saved but unseen until it didn’t matter anymore. Now it looks like someday they’ll want to put these photographs on a computer network. God knows who might see them. It isn’t meant to be.

  “Becker is the culture minister. He could stop it. He won’t. I’m going to make him stop. He loves his dogs too much to let Mitzi die. He’d let me drop a person off the bridge but he won’t let me drop a dog. That’s what I’m counting on anyway.

  “By tomorrow this should all be cleared away. Come and see me in my shop. If I’m not out in the front I’ll be in the time machine. If I’m not there I’ll be in jail, or maybe the river.” Emotional but not insane, Rabani decided. Disjointed enough to suggest a psychiatric exam. That probably depended on whether Becker chose to press charges. The cops wouldn’t be happy about letting Ostroski loose but if the incident could be played as something closer to a potential suicide than to a crime, there was a chance.

  He put the three sheets of paper back into the envelope and put the envelope into his private file for cases he wanted to think about more before acting on them.

  “Time machine.” It didn’t sound good but he’d been a lawyer long enough now not to jump to conclusions.

  He turned his head and looked up, as he did from time to time, at the portrait of James Vickert on the wall behind him. Vickert, now retired somewhere out amid the extravagant flowers and shrubs on Vancouver Island. He would have smiled on learning that Rabani had asked for a large print from the office portrait file and said something about not putting too much stock in heroes. Vickert had drummed into him the importance of patience, had taught him in a short year many things about the practice of law and the daily effort of integrity, had been for him a model not only of a lawyer but of a gentleman, had given him hope that his essential optimism about people could more often than not be fulfilled. The photograph on the wall behind his desk, the phantom ideal behind his own reality.

  He picked up the next file. It was far simpler than Ostroski’s case. A condo association wanted to know if it would be worth suing a developer for drainpipes that had cracked badly after five years. Yes, there was probably a case that the dirt had not been properly compacted. No, there was probably no way a bunch of cash-strapped families in townhouses could come out ahead in a legal fight with an established firm with millions at its disposal.