Generation Loss cn-1

by Elizabeth Hand

  I felt pretty good, in between spasms of speedy paranoia. Kenzie Libby’s face, an outboard engine droning into voices that whispered my name. I wondered what Kenzie had said about me when she’d been online with Robert. I remembered what Toby had said about the islanders.

  Every couple of years you get a witch hunt.

  I pushed the thoughts aside. Time to move.

  “Hey ho,” I croaked.

  I went to the bathroom and drank from the tap then stared at my reflection in the mirror.

  I looked like I’d crawled here from the city. I popped the lens cap from my camera and took a picture of myself. A great photographer could make something of all this, night and speed and that raw face in the mirror, shaky hands holding a cheap camera and a black T-shirt riding up to reveal a faded tattoo. A great photographer would see past that, all the way back to shadows in an alley and a car wreck in the woods.

  I thought of Aphrodite.

  Our gaze changes all that it falls upon.

  I needed to talk to her again. I needed to make her see me; I needed to tell her how her photos had changed me all those years ago. I needed her to understand that I’d come here now hoping they would change me back.

  The door to her room was open and a light was on. I listened for the television, the sound of voices, or dogs.

  But the TV was off. If any dog was in there, it was asleep.

  And Aphrodite? I peeked inside.

  No dogs. No drunk. The rumpled bed was empty, still strewn with photography books. A lamp cast a piss yellow glow across the floor. I stood in the doorway and listened in case she was just out of sight, in a closet maybe.

  But everything was silent. I went inside, stepping around a pile of black tights and underwear, a shapeless cardigan felted with dog fur, an empty bottle of Courvoisier. The cast-iron woodstove was cold, but the space heater worked overtime, cooking the room’s scents to a stew of dogs and brandy and unwashed laundry.

  I stepped around heaps of clothes until I reached a wall of photos. Aphrodite when she was young and beautiful, a hybrid of Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Liz Taylor. A faded photo of a tall bearded guy, very handsome, glancing at the camera through lowered eyelashes. He held a toddler on his knee, the little boy’s head turned from the camera. Gryffin and his father.

  Steve Haselton looked different from the photo I’d seen on that New Directions paperback: edgier, less blandly patrician. I guessed it was the long hair and beard and manic smile. He looked kind of like Hunter Thompson, right before or right after the drugs kicked in. There was a picture of Gryffin too, standing on the rocks by the ocean; maybe ten years old, gawky and wildhaired, holding up a starfish. Unsmiling. A somber kid.

  And there were photos of the Oakwind commune at what I guessed must be a clambake. It looked more like the down east version of an acid trip. Long-haired people in gypsy clothes gamboled on the beach. It was raining. Smoke rose from a pile of stones covered with black gunk—seaweed? Mushrooms? In one photo, a naked little boy poked grimly at smoking rubble with a stick. Gryffin again.

  It was less Summer of Love than it was Lord of the Flies. The photos were underexposed and out of focus, like the negs I’d processed downstairs. The kind of artsy stuff an ambitious high school photographer might shoot.

  But each bore Aphrodite’s signature in the lower right corner. I turned away.

  It was true. Something had been stolen from her. She’d had it, and she fucking lost it.

  My foot nudged an empty bottle. It rolled beneath the bed, and I noticed something beside it, a stack of three oversized portfolios, expensive black leather Bokara cases.

  They didn’t seem to have been moved for a while. The leather had a dull green bloom of mildew. I gingerly picked up the first portfolio, sat on the bed and opened it.

  Inside were clear vinyl sleeves. Not the kind any serious artist would use today—chlorine gas leaches from the vinyl and turns your photos yellow.

  But these pictures were old. More middle-class hippies playing at a freakshow; a sad photo of Aphrodite with her arms around her younger husband, his head turned from her, long hair covering his face. I replaced the portfolio and pulled out the next one.

  This was more interesting. The vinyl sleeves held color landscapes, not the hand-worked images of Deceptio Visus or Mors but stark views of distant islands. With these photos she was almost onto something, but the pictures were all too literal: a stormy sea, some jagged rocks, forbidding clouds. There wasn’t the imminence that irradiated her earlier work, the sense that she’d witnessed something unearthly and terrible yet lovely, something that had only revealed itself for that hundredth of a second and would never be glimpsed again, except here, now, in this image. There were so many photos crammed into this second portfolio—not just photos but contact sheets, negs, even faded Polaroids—that I could almost imagine her desperation, shooting hundreds of frames in hopes of nailing just that one.

  From what I could see, she never did. I reached for the last portfolio.

  These photos were different.

  For starters, they were all shot on SX-70, the famous One-Step film developed by Polaroid in the early 1970s. The SX-70 camera was a huge innovation, and the first model, the Alpha, was hugely expensive—three hundred dollars, which these days would equal almost fourteen hundred bucks. SX-70 film came in individual sheets, each containing its own pod of developer, covered by a layer of transparent polyester. After the film was exposed, it would slide between little rollers inside the camera, like the wringers of an old-fashioned washing machine. These rollers burst the pod and spread the developing chemicals across the film. Once it developed inside the camera, you had what Polaroid called an integral print.

  But the SX-70 had a feature that the folks at Polaroid hadn’t counted on. The exposed film took a long time to fix. So you could use your finger or a pencil or just about anything you wanted, as long as it wasn’t too pointed or sharp, and manipulate the developing chemicals in their polyester sheath. This produced cool, if simple, special effects—halos, silver and black dots, penumbras like solar flares. They looked like those blotches you see when you hold a piece of Mylar up to the sun. If you really wanted to work with an image, you could extend the time it took to fix by warming then cooling the print, over and over again.

  It was like a very primitive form of Photoshop. Some people played with the chemicals on purpose and declared the results a new art form. Most people, of course, did so by accident, made a mess of their snapshots, and complained. Almost immediately Polaroid rushed to make cheaper versions of the Alpha, “improving” the film to something called Time-Zero, so that the problem wouldn’t exist in later camera models.

  Some artists still use SX-70s—you can buy the film through Fuji. But these weren’t recent photos. I’d guess they’d been taken around the time that the cameras first appeared, in the early 1970s, roughly the same time as the Magic Clambake. I recognized some of the people, commune members I assumed: a couple of skinny guys in overalls and flannel shirts; Aphrodite, looking far too imperious to be hanging out with a bunch of longhairs ten years younger than she was; little Gryffin.

  And then, a series of pictures that made my neck prickle. They showed a pretty, freckled girl with long hair—the same girl in the 8x10 I’d processed in Aphrodite’s darkroom. In the SX-70 photos, she was sleeping, or pretending to. The pictures were in extreme closeup, and the film had been manipulated so that little wiggly shadows ran across her face, giving the images a spooky, submarine quality. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or shut. Someone had gone over them with a needle-sized stylus, so that in some photos it looked as though they were covered by silvery green coins. In others her eyes seemed wide open with amazement.

  Same deal with her mouth—the chemicals had been moved around so that her lips were distorted and discolored. It looked as though something were protruding from them, a snake’s head, or maybe a finger.

  This will make the pictures sound grotesque, and they we
re. But they weren’t just grotesque. Small as they were, they seemed outsized and even kind of funny, the way R. Crumb drawings are, their creepiness outpaced by audacity. Why would someone do that to a Polaroid picture?

  Someone wanted to do it a lot. There were dozens of photos, most of the same girl, her face altered so that she resembled a broken statue, mottled green and black. But a few pictures seemed to be clumsy self-portraits. One showed a mirror and the flashlit reflection of a figure holding the SX-70. The others showed portions of a face, badly out of focus. A scalp, a nose or ear, a toothy grin. Someone had gone to the trouble of taking these photos. And someone else had taken the trouble to save them.

  None of these photos were signed. They didn’t need to be. I knew it was him.

  Denny Ahearn.

  Those Polaroids pumped out damage the way that little space heater cranked out BTUs. I could taste it, a tang like biting into an old penny, like the taste you get from speed that hasn’t been cooked enough. I wanted to recoil, but the images drew me on. I looked at one after another, impelled by the eye behind that camera, a presence so strong it was like it was in the room with me.

  And then, there really was an eye, staring out at me from the last page. It was the only photo that hadn’t been manipulated. A single amber eye, gleaming as though it had been coated with glycerin. The cornea wasn’t white, but a custardy yellow, threaded with red filaments. I could see the pale reflected outline of a camera in the iris.

  That was creepy enough. What made it worse was a blotch of green pigment like the one in Gryffin’s eye. Only this was a bigger flaw, and it was in a different place, just below the pupil.

  I couldn’t look away from it. It was like staring at a painting where the canvas has been torn: if you could only rip away the ruined canvas, another painting would be revealed: the real painting. I felt the same vertiginous horror I’d experienced as a girl, looking into the sky to see a great eye gazing down at me.

  Now I felt that jagged bit of pigment was the real eye, the realest eye I’d ever seen. I brought the photo to my face to get a better look, and grimaced.

  It stank. Not the musty, doggy smell of Aphrodite’s room, but the smell I’d detected on the photo back at Ray Provenzano’s house, a reek like someone had dumped rotting fish on top of a dead skunk.

  It was faint, but unmistakable. And it was coming from the Polaroid. I held it under my nose and sniffed.

  I replaced the photo, sat on the floor and stared at the unmade bed, soiled sheets, dog fur, all those expensive photo books, Roberto Schezen, Rudy Burckhardt…

  “Shit,” I whispered.

  I stood and grabbed a book, the familiar RUNWAY colophon on its spine beneath the title and photographer’s name.

  DEAD GIRLS CASSANDRA NEARY

  On the title page was an inscription.

  ’ONE BECOMES HUMAN BY IMITATING THE GODS’

  FOR A WITH LOVE

  D

  “What are you doing?” For a second I thought I’d imagined the voice. “What are you doing?”

  I looked up.

  It was Aphrodite, the deerhounds at her sides. A twig was stuck to her leggings; her lipstick was faded and her silvery hair flattened as though she’d just woken up.

  But by the way she swayed back and forth, red eyed, I figured that she’d been up—though maybe not upright—for a while, and keeping the same kind of company I had; no speed, maybe, but plenty of cognac or whatever it was that made her look like a skeletal marionette.

  “Aphrodite.” I blinked. “Wow. I—”

  Before I could move she was on top of me. I fell back as she yanked the book from my hands and smashed it against my head. I cried out and fell backward, struggling.

  “Hey!” I gasped. “Stop, I was just—”

  A dog whined as she smashed the book against my face again. I kicked out violently and struck her shoulder. She staggered backward and the dogs growled, as though this was a game they’d played before.

  “Get—out—” The book dropped to the floor. Aphrodite beat at the air as though there were another, invisible assailant between us. “Get—out—get—out—”

  I crouched on the bed as the dogs pawed at each other and Aphrodite swiped madly at nothing, like someone practicing a deranged form of Tai Chi.

  “Get out, get out…”

  Whoever, whatever, she was fighting seemed to have nothing to do with me. She didn’t even seem to remember I was there. I edged off the bed.

  “Get—out!” Aphrodite’s voice rose to a strangled cry. Abruptly she grew silent. She lowered her hands, panting, and looked around.

  Now she did see me.

  No, not me: my camera. She gazed at it then lifted her head and stared right at me. When she spoke, her voice was calm.

  “Amateur. Thief.” She smiled a horrible broken doll’s smile. “You’re nothing but a little amateur. Both of you—nothing. You think I didn’t know? You thought I wouldn’t know who you were? You—”

  She lunged and grabbed at my camera. “You’re nothing…”

  I covered the Konica with one arm and pushed her away. She reeled back, the dogs dancing around her as though this, too, were part of the game. One of them leaped up, its paws grazing her shoulders. Aphrodite gasped, still staring at me, then fell.

  I had no time to stop her, only watched as her head struck the corner of the woodstove. I heard a snap. Not like a dry stick breaking, more the sound of something green that doesn’t want to give way.

  Her body hit the floor. The deerhound backed away and slunk toward the bed. The other two dogs surged forward, tails wagging, and nosed at her crotch.

  I clutched my camera and held my breath, listened for the sound of footsteps and Gryffin’s voice: sirens, shouting, God knows what.

  But there was nothing. The room was still, except for the snuffling dogs and the hum of the space heater. I drew a breath and ran my hand protectively across my camera.

  “Go,” I whispered. I swatted at the dogs. “Go, go on—”

  They backed off, mouths split in white grins.

  “Lie down.” I gestured toward the bed. “Go on, lie down.”

  They leaped onto the bed, padded across the covers, and settled down, long gray muzzles on their paws. I made sure there was still no sound from the hall then went to the body.

  Her head lolled to one side. A skein of spit ran from the corner of her mouth to the floor, mingled with blood from a deep cut in her temple. The cut formed a shape like a tiny inverted pyramid, glistening pink at the sides, deep indigo at the deepest point. I glanced at the woodstove. A small chunk of flesh was impaled on one corner, a few hairs protruding from it, like a daddy longlegs snagged in a bit of bloody Kleenex.

  I looked down again. One of Aphrodite’s eyes was fixed on me. A pinkish glaze sheathed the cornea, like a welling tear. As I stared, the eyelid dropped in a wink then slowly rose, the tear darkening to scarlet as it spilled onto her cheek. A red bubble appeared in one nostril and popped. Tiny red specks appeared across her cheeks, a flush.

  She was still alive. I took a step toward the door.

  And stopped. I turned back, got onto one knee, popped the lens cap from my Konica, and began to shoot.

  I had shit for light, but I didn’t care. There was enough for an exposure. That’s all I needed. Tri-X doesn’t pick up as many details in the gray area as something like T-Max. It doesn’t have as fine a grain, it’s a colder film, it can be raw. It’s perfect for what I do. It was perfect now.

  What mattered was what was in front of me at that moment: the matte bulk of the woodstove, ash on the floor; the macabre doll with her head twisted. She was beautiful, it was all beautiful, her spill of silver hair and the play of blood beneath her skin.

  I got a series of close-ups. At one point I worried that her breath might fog my lens. But by then she hardly seemed to be breathing at all.

  I don’t know at what point she actually died. But gradually the flush on her cheeks took on a violet tinge. A st
rand of hair fell across her face, obscuring one eye. I moved it aside, shot two more frames before checking the camera.

  I only had four shots left. I stopped, suddenly aware of my body clammy with sweat. I looked at the bedroom door then scrambled to my feet.

  On Aphrodite’s bed, the dogs slept. A body lay on the floor, and a leather portfolio.

  Otherwise nothing was out of place. It looked like an accidental death. To me, anyway. Even kind of a natural death, all things considered. I tugged at my T-shirt so it covered my hand, grabbed the copy of Dead Girls and stuck it on a bookshelf, lining it up so it looked as inconspicuous as possible. Then I got the portfolio, did my best to clean it with my T-shirt, and shoved it back under the bed.

  Would that be enough? My fingerprints were probably all over it, and the other two as well. But I couldn’t waste time trying to clean up. I’d have to hope no one would bother with it. I glanced around the room for any hint I’d been there.

  All seemed as untidy and forlorn as when I’d entered. I used my T-shirt to polish the doorknobs, swiped the fabric across the doorjamb for good measure. I felt surprisingly calm, as though I were cleaning up from a party.

  Had I touched anything else?

  Nada.

  I was safe. Maybe.

  16

  Phil used to say my motto should be Born to Lose. At that moment, Nothing to Lose seemed just as good. I gave one last look at Aphrodite’s room. Would she have left the door ajar? The light on?

  I decided yeah, sure, if she didn’t know she was going to be dead. I headed for Gryffin’s bedroom.

  His door was shut. I stood and tried to get my nerve up.

  I was wasted, but I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened back there in Aphrodite’s room—did she fall or was she pushed?—but I knew it didn’t look good.

  I needed to cover my ass. Getting rid of the film in my camera would be a start, but I didn’t want to do that. Those pictures … maybe no one else could ever see them, but I wanted to see them. I needed to see them, to prove that I wasn’t like her, not yet. To prove that I hadn’t lost it.