The Photographer in Search of Death

by Michael Mirolla

  You walk out halfway when the post-doctoral professor launches into his demonstration of how to spot – and heal – the hurt centres through the use of an apparatus he has just recently patented. An apparatus that “analyzes the spoken word, breaks down its artificial constructs and then converts it into a deep-probing biologo-tool”. For a nominal fee, of course.

  The closest you come to recovering your old excitement is when you spot a notice on the bulletin board of your favourite espresso bar. It announces a spectacle to be held at the nearby park the following Sunday. Nothing unusual about that, you say. Sunday shows are a regular occurrence in the summer, using as a stage an octagonal bandstand that had once reverberated with old-time live music concerts before the invention of cell phones and iPods. But what attracts you is the grainy graphic on the announcement: a half-dozen or so members of a troupe wrapped completely in white bandages from head to toe – not even allowing holes for eyes or breathing space for mouths.

  So intent are you on not missing this performance that you sleep on a park bench that night, covered in advertising flyers and curled up like a child against the damp. It is thus that you see, as the sun rises, the actors – seven in all – hold hands and grope to form a circle around one of the old-growth maples. Then, after breaking the circle and walking in a stumbling fashion the circumference of the park – during which they pick up several more spectators (including the old man who is still looking incredulously at his twiggy arm), they lead each other on to the old bandstand platform. And reform their blind circle, now spread at arm’s length.

  In the silence that follows, or perhaps it is only your concentration that shuts everything else out as you strain to see, to understand, they slowly unravel each other’s bandages. Gently unwind the strips of white gauze, inch by inch, around and around, and lower them floating to the ground.

  And the first to go are their feet. And then their legs and torsos vanish. And this is followed by their arms. And their heads. And finally, their fingers, their plucking nimble fingers.

  And the only things left on that platform are seven mounds of cloth, light as the feathers of invisible birds.

  But, of course, that’s all there is in the first place.

  THE ANARCHISTS

  “And so he tried to make the world

  safe for when he, too, would be

  helpless.” —An epitaph

  Lying in bed and unable to sleep anyway, Becker found it enlightening to pull the covers over his head and listen to the short-wave radio. He liked to spin the tuning dial at random, picking up far-flung signals, gravelly, even-handed, often unintelligible voices, and crackling hints of insurrections, followed inevitably by the snap-snap of gunfire. On this particular moon-bleached night, a Mass – being celebrated in St. Peter’s where it was actually dawn – was cut off briefly by a news bulletin. “We interrupt this blessed celebration,” the soothing voice intoned, “to bring you an announcement of local interest, of strictly local interest. Earlier this evening, in two widely separated sections of the city, a handicapped vendor was murdered and a bronze statue decapitated. Police are unable to say at the moment whether these two crimes took place simultaneously or simply in rapid succession.” The voice faded. Becker turned up the volume and listened more closely – but that was all for the time being, save for an announcement that further details would come with the early-morning newscast. There was the sound of snoring from the adjacent bedroom – and a snuffling, braying noise like that of a contented animal removing its snout from the trough before being led off to slaughter. Becker lowered the volume again so that he had to place his ear against the speaker of the radio to better hear what was being said. The High Mass resumed at the Introibo (the miracle of modern technology) and continued unhindered to the end.

  The police, it was whispered on the regular news hour, hadn’t a clue to either crime. And it didn’t even cross their minds that the murder and statue decapitation might have been the work of one and the same criminal. It never would. But, from the moment Becker first heard the report, the identity of that person was crystal clear to him. He lay back on the bed and shut his eyes, letting the warm feeling spread over him. After all, how often does one get the opportunity to savour such knowledge, to be so positive about something? Becker asked himself. Think of it: For the moment, I alone know who the criminal is. I alone. Well, except for the culprit himself – if, that is, he thought of himself as a criminal at all.

  Someone was up and making noise in the kitchen. That had to be his stepfather, who in politically correct 21st-century style always arose to prepare breakfast. Becker slipped both his head and the portable radio under a pillow. It droned on, amid the static, the loss of clarity that morning brought, giving details. The handicapped vendor had been a Vietnam War amputee who pedalled a special bike with his hands because his legs had been blown away in a minefield. Death had been by garroting as he wheeled towards the corner where he waited daily with a tin cup in one hand and crumbly pencils in the other, trying to catch the eye of passersby. The murder weapon, a thin copper wire, was found neatly folded in his camouflage jacket pocket. No fingerprints could be made out. Such murders were common enough in that section of the city so as to attract little attention from the authorities. The other crime was considered both more important and more bizarre. A statue – not any statue, mind you, but of an illustrious founding father of the city – had lost its bronze head to a stick of dynamite. This dynamite, carefully measured so that it would cause damage only to a particular area, had been wrapped about the statue’s neck and equipped with a thirty-minute timer. That’s what made it possible for him to commit both crimes at what seemed the same time. Becker was positive. As usual, there were no witnesses to either crime and experts had already been sent to take measurements of a replacement for the statue’s head. As for the amputee, well…attempts were being made to inform the next of kin – and a collection was taken up for a proper burial. Becker made a note of the address so he could consider sending his contribution. The radio announced that, on the following night, the Mass would come from the beleaguered but ever faithful Catholic minority in Beirut who, despite almost constant harassment and shifting military allegiances, risked their lives daily for the body and blood of Christ.

  Becker’s Notebook I:

  As children, he and I had been neighbours and the closest of companions. We had revealed intimate secrets to each other because we believed secrets were the only true bonds of friendship. He told me once his worst fear was that the statues would suddenly come alive. Then, there would be no stopping them, especially those in armour and wielding swords. And the streets would reverberate with the cracking of eggshell skulls, the impaling of helpless, wriggling humans. I remember being profoundly jealous of these fears, my own being so much more petty, so much more mundane.

  “Statues,” he’d said to me again and again, “have fooled us into believing that they are immobile and have no life. Not true! Not true at all. They just exist in another dimension, that’s all; just move too slowly for our eyes to follow. All our accidents are caused by statues; all our mistakes can be blamed on them. And cripples are dangerous, too, because, being partially immobile and often missing parts, we pity them and think they’re harmless. Wait and see. You just wait and see. It’s their immobile and missing parts that’ll get us, that’ll do us in in the end. You wait and see.”

  The two parted suddenly and dramatically one night after his friend totally demolished Hephaestus, the Greek god Becker’s parents kept in the backyard as a bird bath. He splintered it with a sledgehammer, pulverizing it till only the ragged-edged stand remained. Becker helped him but with none of his passion or brilliance. The last he’d heard, his friend had found himself a room in the downtown area. It was across the street from a park in which stood one of the largest, most imposing statues in the city. Becker’s parents had puzzled for days over who could have committed such a senseless act of vandalism, then replaced the Hephaestus with Cron
os. Becker could see his hoary face each morning as he performed his customary 100 push-ups on the bed – to the background of a call for prayer from Mecca.

  There were now two people making noise in the kitchen – lovey-dovey sounds from what Becker could gather – and eggs sputtered as they fried. He clenched his fists and kicked against the mattress. How dare they? He hissed “Enough! Silence!” through his teeth. Instead, the noise increased: taps started to flow; the toilet flushed; there was the happy chirping of birds as they plucked dewy earthworms out of the ground. All the trappings of life. Becker held the pillow down hard over his head hoping this regular, ordinary morning would go away; fantasizing it was a lover in the kitchen with his mother, pressing her up against the ironing board and taking her standing up, panties around her ankles. Becker started to masturbate with that thought in mind, but couldn’t sustain it, couldn’t keep the image from dissolving into ludicrous parody.

  Several times before, on the occasion of a handicapped person’s murder or a statue’s decapitation, he had been tempted to confront his friend. To reveal to him that he knew who was responsible, that he should give himself up or seek some kind of psychiatric help. But Becker had always held back, knowing his friend would deny it, perhaps laugh in his face. After all, where was the proof? And he knew it would be almost impossible to catch his friend in the act. Still, he followed each case religiously from ardent beginning to listless conclusion. Invariably, they went unsolved and ended as abandoned files in the police department backrooms. “Motive,” the detectives said. “Where’s the motive?” Becker knew the motive but had no way of making the police understand. Instead, he had spent many hours in those backrooms, trying to decipher the pattern of the crimes so that he could be present to witness the next one, to catch his friend red-handed. There was no pattern that he could see. First, a hydrocephalic dwarf was suspended by the neck from the roof of a 13-storey building. Then, the pigeon-shit-encrusted breasts were blown off Joan of Arc, the biggest piece no larger than her nipple. Following that, an elderly woman suffering from elephantiasis was suffocated and her giant legs meticulously sliced and deveined. Always, a lengthy period elapsed between one act and the next, between the murder and the mutilation. Never before had the two crimes been committed so close together. He was becoming desperate and thus careless. Patience, Becker told himself. Patience. The thought of confronting him was exquisite. Becker squirmed in bed, no longer able to lie still. His name was called out from the kitchen, followed by the announcement that breakfast was on the table. He refrained from answering and instead raised the volume of the radio. What was suddenly making him so bold if not the knowledge, the secret knowledge? He leaned over and pulled the gun from the holster taped to the bottom of his bed. It was a snub-nosed .38, oiled and loaded. He’d picked it up a year before after seeing it dropped into a downtown garbage can. When he’d first handled it, the barrel was still warm – and one bullet was missing. He sat up, twirling it on his finger and pointing it out the window at Cronos, happily serving as a repository for birds.

  “Come on, you fucking fake,” he said, imitating his friend the anarchist. “Move a fucking millimetre and I’ll blast you to fucking smithereens.”

  Becker’s notebook II:

  For several days, while my parents concentrated on the income taxes, I sat cross-legged and utterly motionless in the cellar, sharpening my willpower and blocking everything else out. When I finally did meet up with my childhood friend, I would have to be prepared for any sort of treachery. He might plead with me, for example, hoping I would lower my guard long enough to be disarmed. Would he then be able to kill someone who was neither cripple nor statue? Better yet, would he have the courage to do away with someone he knew, a childhood buddy? Why not? I was ready to do it for the greater good, why not he for his own very clear, if peculiar, motives?

  One evening, as his parents worked their way down to the final calculations, the exempted exemptions and discredited credits, Becker left the house by the basement door and, portable short-wave radio in hand, took the bus downtown. Finding his friend would be no problem, as he had provided Becker with specific directions the one time he’d written: “Sit right beneath the front legs of the rearing horse. Then, by looking straight ahead, extend the line made by the sword of the gaunt rider. At the end of it will be my apartment. You can’t miss it.”

  A small, irritating and obviously imbecilic child sat beneath the raised hooves. He looked up with idiot eyes at the horse’s bronze belly, looked up and laughed. Then he started to climb awkwardly up its back. Becker glanced about for his mother. Several women – stooped, jowly legs spread and with their backs to him – were surgically removing chicory plants from the ground. The knives gleamed in their calloused, claw-like hands. There was no one else around. The child was having difficulty maintaining his balance. Becker walked by the horse twice before he accidentally lifted the child’s leg (trying to keep him upright, of course) so that he screamed and fell over the other side. Becker whistled and moved along, turning around surprised when he heard the thud of the child’s head striking the concrete base of the statue. The mother dropped her bags and waddled towards where he lay wailing. She picked him up, screaming in a language Becker had heard previously only on short-wave, then whacked him hard across the face and dragged him away. Becker sat down beneath the horse and followed the line of the sword. It pointed directly at a window above a seedy grocery store, the only window without curtains. He could see bright orange walls inside and could hear the faint sounds of free-form jazz. There was no music Becker detested more.

  “The cripples, the mental deficients, the useless,” his friend had written, “are destined to confront me. They’re too dangerous to keep alive. Walking, crawling, slithering time bombs all of them – and without even knowing it. While they sleep the drugged sleep of innocence, sliding slowly into statuehood, I suffer for them. I will be damned for them.”

  In order to observe him more carefully, Becker stayed in the park as much as possible. There was a public toilet at one end where he could go to wash up and occasionally change his clothes, using the hot-air vents to dry them. For food, he relied on the straw-hatted, candy-stripe-suited hot dog man who pushed his little cart through the park twice a day.

  As far as Becker could tell, his ex-friend never left the room. Occasionally at night, he peered out the window, always bare-chested and with his eyes blazing in the dark. Human to the unfailing end, passion had not left him. He stared directly at the statue, using an instrument that closely resembled a ship’s sextant. It suddenly became very important for Becker to discover whether he was completely naked or only half-so. His life depended on his not having a stitch of clothing on. Becker slipped the gun from its holster and held it beneath his coat, barrel pointed in the direction of his friend’s head. Many, especially lovers of statues, would have had Becker shoot him on the spot. I believe in justice, not revenge, he said. Besides, it would have been a miracle shot from that distance.

  Becker’s notebook III:

  I should have known he’d have a woman with him: “When the time comes, I’ll need a member of the opposite sex to soothe my conscience, to help me plan, to goad me on and to blame afterwards. She’ll be fat and dumpy with folds of flesh hanging loosely over her abdomen. Her breasts will sag to her knees and flap about when she wiggles. Varicose veins will striate her legs. But beware of her face. It’ll be that of an unwavering accomplice – soft-skinned, smooth and most of all angelic.”

  His description had been extremely accurate, as if he were talking about someone already well known. For the first two nights, the routine didn’t vary. They kissed, lips mashing, tongue to tongue, in a thoroughly disgusting way, and then sank slowly to the floor, vanishing from view. It would have been simple for me to sneak closer and lodge a bullet in her thick back when they pirouetted and slipped away. But the time hadn’t yet arrived. Then, arising on the dot half an hour later, she rested her breasts – her long pointed breasts
– against the windowsill and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke away in a careless manner.

  “It’ll be necessary that she do all the shopping for me. She’ll throw on a dirty red blouse with stained armpits and will walk to the store below. We’ll sit on the ledge chewing white bread and cucumbers. Despite her filthy appearance, she’ll be a very dainty eater, careful to wipe every crumb from her face with the discarded blouse.”

  Right after the meal, he took out his sextant and a notebook. Wrinkling his brow, he made what seemed precise measurements of the statue, then inevitably became very excited after studying the figures in the notebook. The woman paid no attention to him. She stood against the far wall and massaged her breasts to the howl of a jazz saxophone from a tinny transistor radio. I almost wanted to rush up and offer them my radio – but thought better of it. Whenever he jumped up excitedly, she drew in her breath and the breasts popped straight into the air, exposing her rib cage. On the third night of my vigil, the light went out in his room. This was it. The calculations were finished and he was now ready for his latest crime wave.

  Becker went to the nearby phone booth and dialled home: “Hello, hello. Is anyone there? He’s leaving his room right now. Are you listening? Forget the goddam income tax – just this once. They’re walking down the street arm in arm. As if they were lovers or something of the sort. Fancy him a lover! Yes, that’s the problem with catching anarchists. Having no fixed principles, they can transform themselves into whatever is necessary to complete the task at hand. Look, to make matters even worse, they’ve stopped right in the middle of the street. Right in the middle! And they’re kissing for all the world to see. Like real lovers. Listen!” Becker held the phone out so that whoever was on the other end could hear. It went dead.