That didn’t last long. The next day, while he was lifting her skirts in the grass outside the house, all but the few rooms that had been there from before his arrival collapsed into a red powder. The lizards, the mice, the birds, the spiders scattered into the fields. In their midst was some indescribable creature that left burn marks where it passed. When he saw this creature, he stood up but had to quickly sit down again because of vertigo. There, before him, like a slice of darkness in the ground, was a huge hole down which the red powder slowly sank.
He developed an aptitude for silence.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER IN SEARCH OF DEATH
Kosmo, his boss at International Darkrooms Ltd., called him into the main office, away from the scurrying of minions who carried dusty folders from one section of the building to the other. Kosmo had his back to Quetzal but his pensive face reflected in the tinted window that covered one entire wall. Before him on the desk, opened at the last page, was a large black photo album, the old-fashioned kind with fancy little edges into which pictures could be fitted, pictures reproduced from film. No digital files need apply, the album stated. Quetzal was busy admiring its gloss when the entire building trembled and Kosmo swivelled about. His fingers were stained with silver nitrate and his deep-set eyes surrounded by lines and shadows.
“As you well know,” he said with an accent that demanded respect, that was definitely not local, “you’re my best photographer. The rest range from dilettantes to incompetents, from snap-happy digital cretins to cellphone starlets. You’ve filled most of the pages in this album.”
Quetzal felt light-headed with pride, pleased to have been singled out. And for having his love of old technology valorized. The floor shook beneath him. Across the road, a ledge gave way, plummeting to the ground below.
“Now, I have one last assignment before I leave for my high-country villa, an assignment only you can carry out.” He paused for a moment and stared intently at the album. “I want a photograph of death to complete this album. That’s it. I don’t think I need to give you further instructions.”
He looked up at Quetzal, stained fingertips touching, hooded eyes brooding, then swivelled to continue his quiet scanning of the city, a city coming apart at the seams.
International agreed – without bickering – it should pay all Quetzal’s expenses. The first thing he did was to arm himself with the latest-model SLRs (there was a limit to his Luddite tendencies) and accessories from the company stockroom, as well as film that was “guaranteed to capture the most minute of details and not become grainy under normal conditions.”
But, never before having thought of capturing death on film, what he needed most was practice in getting the concept right. All his best photographs had been done that way – with the realization it’s not the snap of the shutter that counts but the preparation that went into the shot. Gatta, the woman who for the last few months had shared the small basement apartment with him, volunteered to pose and together they converted his place into a temporary funeral parlour. Gatta put on a scratchy recording of Bach’s “Suite No. 1 for Cello Solo” and then covered the bed – the only piece of furniture in the room – with a red comforter. Finally, she lay down and folded her large bony hands so as to form a cross on her scrawny chest. Quetzal, in a moment of inspiration, pushed one of Gatta’s plastic flowers between them.
He milled about the inert, seemingly unbreathing body, quickly arranging camera angles and lighting. Between tremors and cascades of dust, he snapped his photos. On his mimed instructions, Gatta stripped so that he could capture the extreme whiteness of her skin, always pale and horribly lacking in blood. Each shot – especially those taken with the 4-by-5 portrait camera – proved a marvel of technical perfection. He hung the finished prints to dry along the cracked walls, next to a faded hieroglyph depicting a stylized corn stalk. While Gatta applauded his skill by rubbing herself against him and keeping up a constant chatter, he sat on the bed musing.
“The stillness isn’t there,” he said at last, letting a print float lazily to the ground.
Quetzal turned off the record player, then opened his only window with some difficulty. It was narrow and triangular in shape, no more than a foot high in all. Soon, he thought, it would become impossible to open. Or close. The prints flapped back and forth as the dusty wind picked up. Gatta took his hand and began to kiss his fingers one by one, licking the webbing between them, sucking the tips. He continued to stare out at the remnants of skyscrapers in the distance, jagged like rotten teeth in a crone’s mouth. A blackbird settled gently onto a light cable – and was charred to a crisp.
“No. The stillness definitely isn’t there. I have to go out. Don’t wait for me.”
The brisk autumn weather forced Quetzal to wear his downlined coat and a long-striped scarf, the one that had been knitted by his mother while in the hospital. The far end was unfinished since she had died suddenly (of heartbreak, she claimed with her dying breath) after making a miraculous recovery from a combination of breast, lung and cervical cancer. He had to be careful it didn’t unravel completely on him. In her zeal to keep him warm, Gatta wrapped the scarf too tightly about his neck. He loosened it and, shouldering several different format cameras, went in search of death. Gatta stayed behind, not insisting but nevertheless convinced her version was infinitely better than the real thing. She kept a bag permanently packed under the bed but had no intention of leaving. For the moment.
As Quetzal walked along the cracking, undulating streets, he admitted to being frightened. Certainly, not of death, no. He knew, however, this was the most important assignment of his life. Kosmo was obviously testing him for still more valuable tasks. His personal photographer, perhaps, in charge of recording him for posterity. Landscapes or Portraitures at the very least, sketching the beauty of the sylvan valley surrounding his protected highland villa.
And, if he bungled it, he would have no one to blame but himself. Death – or rather its most impressive representatives, dead people – could be found on almost every corner. Sections of the city were completely cut off from water, gas, electricity; some parts even physically with wide chasms plunging deep into the bowels of the earth. Hourly, new tremors were set off, slicing open everything in their path. Those who could afford to had left for the countryside – and safety – long before it had come to this. Only the poor, the indifferent, the trapped remained, living in the few reasonably safe places – the cellars that had been uncovered in excavation, the cellars built long before the skyscrapers, their walls a reddish clay imbedded with what seemed shards of pottery and broken figurines.
Of late, the tremors and the subsequent opening up of the city’s intestines had attracted the interest of archaeologists from around the world. Everywhere could be heard the beating of propellers, the whipping up of choking dust as the helicopters carrying them swooped in to land. And they swarmed out, hard hats on, wading knee-deep through the shells of collapsed structures, their delicate brushes sweeping away even the tiniest speck of dust from newly raised artifacts.
A bone fragment here, the tip of an antique rattle there. Quetzal admired the way they were able to reconstruct a city beneath the city with these bits and pieces. The speculation ran rampant. According to the latest cluster of theories, the lower half, the half below the street-line, was in actual fact the remnant of an ancient civilization which had migrated or been driven north. Naturally they believed in human sacrifice of some form or other and these were the victims’ bones being discovered since the dominant culture indulged in cremation.
“Why would anyone in their right minds,” Gatta had asked in her mockquizzical manner, “want to migrate north from that warm, sunny place?”
Quetzal had shrugged and looked once again at the hieroglyph on his wall, as if this time illumination would come. He had spent many hours at the library on account of it, risking the most tremor-riddled portion of the city. But he never got any further than the rather obvious fact it was the representation of a corn st
alk, stylized and angular, a corn stalk gone to seed.
A platoon of eager archaeologists, all wearing the insignia of the Lost Wax Corp., was busy reconstructing what moments before had been a rare book store with a set of apartments above it. They dusted clean a group of skeletons, squatting in unnatural ways around the petrified remains of a low tree trunk. Above them, hanging from a balcony and completely ignored, were the bodies of the building’s latest occupants. Quetzal slipped into the wreckage and began taking pictures, first of the skeletons and then of the bodies. A piece of string dangled from a child’s pocket, his foot caught in a balcony railing. Quetzal couldn’t help himself. He reached over and pulled on it. The child’s sweater fell apart in slow-motion. A scowling archaeologist shook his fist at the photographer and told him to get out, the area was out of bounds for civilians. Quetzal, overjoyed at having found death so quickly, paid no heed. Something flew by his head and exploded behind him. The archaeologists had set aside their brushes and were advancing on him with shovels held high. He scrambled away, still snapping wildly as he backed out of the excavation site.
“I have it!” Quetzal yelled, using his shoulder to force open the door to his apartment.
He hurried to embrace Gatta who was sprawled on the bed with one of her many swarthy lovers – and almost choked when his scarf caught on a shard.
“I have it!” he cried in a falsetto.
He released himself from the scarf’s stranglehold and quickly set to work in the tiny room he used for developing his prints. This room had been excavated to a level even below that of the basement-suite to protect it from any hint of light whatsoever. It was damp and fungoid and full of pale, translucent creatures that scuttled in the corners, but Quetzal worked cheerfully. On the bed, Gatta and her gaunt-eyed friend made desultory love, spurred on by the increasing tempo of the tremors that added new crevasses by the minute. Then, entwined, the two fell asleep. Gatta opened her eyes when Quetzal emerged in the middle of the night, the disappointment etched on his face like the ever-widening cracks on the street. Placed side by side with her poses, the shots of the family could hardly be distinguished.
“I told you,” Gatta said gently, gobbling up a bowl of cottage cheese, milk and bread and following it up with a bottle of beer which she waved about as she spoke.
“Death isn’t there. Everyone’s faking it just to get sympathy. Tell what’s-his-name to stuff it tight up you-know-what.”
She ushered her lover out of the house, giving him one last, deep tongue-to-tongue kiss. Quetzal absent-mindedly took his place on the bed – right on the lover’s indentation – and lay musing with his arms spread out over his head.
“It’s my fault, not the camera’s.”
Gatta wiped her mouth and eased herself down beside him. Her head was against his waist; her long legs dangled over the edge of the bed. That’s how they fell asleep.
Quetzal returned to International Darkrooms the next day for instructions and guidance only to find the entire building one gigantic pile of rubble. Truckloads of archaeologists pored over the site and sheets of photographic paper blackened in the sun. Kosmo and his photo album were gone. No one could tell him if the boss had escaped or had been swallowed up. Quetzal had wanted to ask him for an extension. He considered it granted.
With the ever-increasing state of confusion in the city and the migration of better qualified personnel, Quetzal was able to secure a job as a male nurse for a man dying of leukemia. The stricken man lived by himself on the outskirts of the city – his wife having left the moment the diagnosis had been made – and he welcomed a suggestion to have Gatta reside there as well. He fell in love with her “alabaster skin” the moment he laid eyes on her, and Quetzal saw to it the two of them slept together whenever they desired.
In no time, that was a nightly occurrence.
Quetzal discharged his duties honestly and with tender care. Each day, he washed the man thoroughly and fed his emaciated frame. Each day, until the wretched fellow was no longer able to stay on his feet, he walked with him around the walled-in garden.
Afterwards, they sat, all three, under the central sycamore tree and talked. The man said he was an author of some renown and had written dozens of books on any subject that came to mind – from knitting to strange customs. Quetzal or Gatta wiped his mouth when he dribbled, something he was prone to do when lost in his flights of fancy.
But, no matter how much Quetzal wished him to remain as he was, frozen perhaps at a certain moment between sickness and health, the man weakened daily as the white blood cells in his body multiplied unchecked, fighting a phantom disorder. Gatta persisted in sleeping with him to the very end, allowing him every considerable pleasure of which she was capable. Quetzal would often come in to perform some menial duty and find them struggling with each other beneath the blankets.
After several months, the man became bedridden, hardly able to shift about on the huge king-size mattress that made him look even more shrivelled, even more childlike. A week later, he summoned Quetzal by means of the bell at the head of his bed. He was sitting up, pillows supporting his head, a thin arm tightly about Gatta who sat beside him.
“Tomorrow,” he said, in a reedy voice barely above a whisper, “is my birthday. My thirty-third birthday. You know what that means? I want you to gather up all my papers and flush them down the toilet. Will you do that?”
Quetzal nodded and returned to his own room, settling down to wait for the death rattle. He was certain it would come that night. As he listened to the springs sounding in the dying man’s room, tears streamed from his eyes. His clothes were soaked with perspiration. He placed a finger across his heart and listened to its insistent beat. He felt nothing could still it. All night long, he alternated between the death vigil and moments of half-sleep. But the morning came and nothing happened.
Gatta rose out of bed long enough to freshen up and help Quetzal bake a cake. The three sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Gatta and Quetzal danced a bit while the dying man clapped his hands feebly and made gurgling noises. Then he fell asleep.
Quetzal took the opportunity to search through his dressers and commodes. He found sheet upon sheet covered with geometric designs – triangles in particular – and the design of a man in a conical cap, surrounded by bright feathers and the abstract heads of animals, leopards and snakes in particular. These seemed to have been photocopied endlessly, filling whole drawers. Quetzal gathered the papers in his arms and was about to dispose of them when the man awoke.
“What are you doing!” he cried hysterically, his voice a loud squeak, a look of absolute horror on his face. “Put those back! What are you doing with my papers? I didn’t mean it. It was only a joke. Put those back or I’ll have you arrested. Police! Police! He’s trying to kill me!”
Gatta smothered his face with kisses, pushed her breasts against his lips, half-shoving them into his mouth. This gave Quetzal the opportunity to flush the papers bit by bit down the toilet. The man struggled pathetically each time he heard the water running, but Gatta was irresistible. Her body provided clean blood for him and an unnatural warmth. Quetzal examined the room several times to make sure he had carried out his orders fully. He found another cache under the bed. The man blubbered well into the afternoon. Each time Gatta released him to catch her breath or to relieve the rawness between her legs, he would start gesturing with his hands as if drawing in air.
Quetzal slept well for most of that night, a dreamless, dark sleep in a cool, mushroomy room. The next morning, with the sun half-risen, he was jolted awake by a sharp thud against the adjoining wall. Another followed as he was about to sink back into sleep. He threw on a robe and rushed into the room. Gatta shivered beside the dying man although thick blankets covered her. She tried to say something but the words dribbled down her chin. The dying man lay unperturbed, his hand fastened to Gatta’s. Quetzal sobbed. He couldn’t bring himself to raise the camera to his eye. Especially since the dying man had taken the opportun
ity to fix him with his own eye, had nailed him right through the heart.
“Quetzal… Quetzal,” Gatta mumbled. “Please. I can feel him. I can…”
A tremor shook Quetzal into frenzied activity. He pulled the red blanket off the bed, revealing the two naked bodies attached beneath, and set up his twin-lens portrait camera. When that didn’t totally satisfy him, he climbed onto the bed itself and straddled both Gatta and the dead man. All the while, leaping from position to position, he kept wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. Gatta fought half-heartedly to release herself from the man’s grip, attempting at one point to pry him loose one finger at a time.
“Keep pulling at him!” Quetzal yelled. “Keep tugging! Let’s see a bit of fear in those beautiful black eyes! He’s dying; he’s dead; to a bleached corpse you’ll be wed!”
Gatta tumbled out of bed, dragging the light-as-a-feather man behind her like papier mâché. She pushed at his chest, kicked at his head without the least sign of emotion, causing a long gash across his mouth. But there was no letting go and, surrendering at last to the inevitableness of his hold, she knelt down beside him and started kissing his body.
Quetzal, with death squarely in his sights, had no intention of being interrupted. An objective observer, he followed the struggles with interest, choosing with a professional eye the best framing, lighting, composition, etc. He took close-ups and wide-angle shots, portions of bodies and bedposts, time-lapse studies and flights of fancy. It was only after running out of film that he helped Gatta get loose, prying his fingers apart. She didn’t move but continued to kneel with the dead man’s arm straddling her thigh. Quetzal threw the red blanket on her. Then, folding the dead man’s arms across his chest, he picked him up and carried him to the bed. Gatta curled up on the floor, knees up against her chin. Deep tremors shook loose a portrait of the man’s wife. The glass splintered around her smile. Gatta pulled spasmodically at the loose threads on the blanket. She started at one corner and pulled till she reached the other.
The Photographer in Search of Death Page 3