Generation Loss (33 page)

I
put the book back on the shelf and stood. Denny stared at me. His eyes shone,
childlike.

"I'm
a photographer too," he said.

"I
know. Toby—he told me. I saw—he showed me a couple of your pictures. Ray
Provenzano too. And I saw the ones at Lucien's place. They're—they're
beautiful."

"We
have the eye." He looked at the ceiling, his face everywhere, and laughed.
"When I saw your pictures, that was when I knew. Aphrodite began the
process, but she stopped. You and me, we carry the dead on our backs. We write
on the dead. Thanatography—we invented that."

"I
don't think I invented it," I said. "Matthew Brady, maybe. Or, uh,
Joel-Peter Witkin."

"No."
He shook his head. "Just us, Cassandra. You and me."

I
looked around, fighting panic. Other than the single picture enshrined on that
table, there were no photos anywhere.

"That
girl." I pointed at the photograph. "Who was she?"

He
said nothing; just stared at me.

"Your
pictures," I said. "Don't you have any of your other pictures?"

"Of
course." He turned and shuffled toward a door. "It's why you're
here."

He
held the door for me, switched on a fluorescent bulb to reveal a tiny
windowless room with no furniture, only a small round prayer rug on the floor.
Around its circumference was a circle formed of turtle shells.

"Be
careful." Denny picked up a turtle shell, pressed it to his forehead then
replaced it on the floor. He straightened. "These are what you came to
see."

Photographs
covered the walls, all in handmade frames: color prints on handmade emulsion
paper, worked with pen and needle and ink. They had the same eerie, highly
saturated glow as Aphrodite's archipelago sequence.

But
seeing these, I knew why Aphrodite had stopped working, and maybe why she'd
started drinking.

Because
they weren't just better than her photos. They were better than almost anything
I'd ever seen. Every comparable artist I could think of, all those so-called
transgressive photographers—the ones who pretend to push the envelope, then
before you know it they're signing a deal with Starbucks and doing the
Christmas windows at Barney's—this guy wiped the floor with them. Those
photographers would take you to the edge of something.

Denny
went the rest of the way, to a place you didn't want to go. And once he got
there, he jumped.

Aphrodite
had pulled back from there, and from him. Wisely, I thought, now that I could
see what he'd been doing all these years.

But
it was too late for me. I was already falling.

I
wanted to touch them, I
could
touch them. I could smell them too— the
entire room reeked of musk and rotting fish. I gagged and covered my nose with
my sleeve.

Denny
seemed to have forgotten I was there. He stood in front of one picture and
stared at it. I forced myself to breathe through my mouth then shoved my hands
in my pockets so he wouldn't notice how they shook.

Based
on what I'd glimpsed in the tree outside, I now had a pretty solid idea as to
what they were pictures of. But I might have a hard time convincing anyone
else, unless they'd seen what I'd seen by the quarry. These images were so
murky and strange, so tied into Denny's own, incomprehensible mythology, that
they defied any simple description. They didn't shout out
Dead Body!
They
shouted
Beautiful,
and
Weird.

Beside
the door hung a black-and-white photo that seemed older than the rest, the only
picture that wasn't in color. It showed the arching limbs of a leafless tree,
its bark striated black and white against a gray sky. A large animal crouched
in the crux of two limbs ten feet above the ground. I immediately thought of
the fisher.

But
when I peered at it more closely, I saw that it wasn't crouching. It was dead.

And
it wasn't a fisher. It was a dog, a black Labrador retriever. Its front legs
dangled so that I could see where the fur had been eaten away. Where its eyes
had been were two coronas of bone, and a tendril that might have been an insect
or a bit of tissue. The flesh had drawn away from its muzzle, giving it a
snarling rictus. Its loose pelt appeared to be sliding from its body.

"That's
my dog, Moody." I jumped as Denny breathed in my ear. "He was a good
old dog."

I
stared at the words the bottom of the print: S.P.O.T 1997 and a title.

'"Sky
Burial,'" I read aloud.

"That's
what they do in Tibet," said Denny. His eyes were huge and nearly
colorless in the fluorescent light. "Excarnation. A bridge between the
worlds, we carry the dead to be reborn." He smiled, flashing blue-lined
gums. "The first step."

"Right,"
I said. "Thank you for letting me see these."

I
edged toward the door, and something broke beneath my boot.

I'd
stepped on one of the turtle shells. Denny looked at it then ran his tongue
along his lip.

"Wait
for me in the other room," he said.

I
did. The turntable had gone silent. I thought of Toby, snoring on Lucien's
chaise, and of Kenzie, God knows where. I fumbled for my Jack Daniel's, heard
myself saying
Fuck fuck fuck
beneath my breath.

Denny
stepped back into the room. "What?"

"Nothing."
I ran a hand through my hair, stalling. "Just, I'm sorry."

"Sorry?
For what?"

"The—the
turtle. Your turtle shell. It seemed, they all seemed ... special. The dog
too." I hesitated. "And her. The dead girl. Hannah."

"Nothing
really dies. You understand that. Cassandra.
Cass!'
My name came out as
a soft hiss. "Your pictures—you understood. You know what happens. You've
seen it."

I
remembered being in a car in the woods, headlights shining through trees then
fading into darkness; something I saw but could never look at.

"No,"
I said.

He
flexed his hands, tugged the cuff of his shirt as though it irritated him.
Above his wrist were three raw red lines where he'd been scratched. He glanced
up and saw me staring.

"You
said you had news." He went to the woodstove, picked up a log, and shoved
it inside. "What is it?"

"Aphrodite.
She's—she's dead. Last night, there was an accident. She, it looks like she
fell."

He
stood, silent, as though he hadn't heard. Finally he whispered, Aphrodite. She
told you to come see me?"

"No—no,
she's dead. Because—"

"Because
what?" His head tilted and his eyes went black. "What happened?"

"I
came here to talk to her," I stammered. "To interview her. That's how
I saw your pictures. I—"

"I
brought you here." His voice rose hoarsely, and he lifted his hand as
though to strike. Abruptly he covered his eyes. "Oh, Aphrodite, oh,
oh..."

His
voice dropped so I could barely hear him. "Does the boy know?"

"Yes."

Denny's
eyes opened.

"It
was you," he whispered.

Everything
contracted to a pinprick of pure black. The room was gone, he was gone. There
was nothing but the memory of light, and myself plunging into a void. My hand
shot out to keep from falling. Something grabbed it, cold and horribly strong.
Within a guttering streetlamp I saw an eye, the eye, turning upon itself until it
swallowed everything.

"No."
I blinked and pulled away. The eye belonged to Denny, not me, green flecked,
staring. "No. It was an accident. She fell. That was all."

Denny
gazed at me. At last he said, "You watched."

"Yes,"
I said. "I watched."

He
picked up a poker and looked at it contemplatively. Then he walked to the rows
of records, withdrew an LP and placed it on the turntable. After a moment,
vinyl hiss and pop gave way to a sound like a heartbeat. Harry Nilsson,
"Jump into the Fire."

"Such
a beautiful song," he whispered.

He
stood between me and the door and ran his hand along the poker. My voice broke
as I asked, "Do you—could I use your bathroom?"

"It's
right in there." He gestured toward the back of the room. "It's a
composting toilet."

He
walked to the front door and stared outside.

The
composting toilet reeked of fresh sawdust, shit, spoiled meat, and musk. There
was no lock inside the bathroom, no window, no sink. Just a plastic bucket on
the floor and a metal shower stall with a heavy canvas curtain.

But
there was a second door with shiny new brass hardware.
The addition: the new darkroom that Toby had built. I slipped inside and closed
the door behind me.

It
was pitch black and smelled of sulfur and almonds. I trailed my hand along the
wall until I found a switch that bathed the room in red safelight.

Shelves
held bottles of pigment, processing chemicals, sheaves of watercolor stock; a
five-pound bag of granulated sugar. A table with three sinks was recessed into
the wall alongside a plastic water barrel and foot-pump, a metal garbage can
with a lid.

A
second table looked as though it had been set for a macabre dinner. Feathers
and dead leaves surrounded a single large sheet of paper. Fanned around it were
locks of hair arranged by color—black, gray, pale gold—and what appeared to be
slivers of dried fungus.

And
something else. An oversized scrapbook, its cover made of much-patched and
heavily embroidered denim, its title picked out in ransom-note lettering.

EYE

AM

WITH
_IN

DENNIS AHEARN, S.P.O.T.

Photos
spiraled around the title, fragments of snapshots, SX-70 Polaroids, pictures
ripped from magazines and newspapers. Every one was an eye.

I
touched the raised medallion that surmounted Denny's name. It was a snapping
turtle carapace no bigger than a quarter. Where its head should have been was a
minute braid of human hair.

The
book was so heavy, I needed both hands to open it. The pages were crowded with
Denny's handwriting and Denny's photographs, retouched with paint and decorated
with dried leaves and flowers, dead insects, feathers, scraps of fur, and human
hair, a toenail. There were pictures of a girl with long brown hair, mugging
for the camera with a spotted turtle shell in each hand: covering her breasts
with the shells, covering her face, laughing. I turned to a Polaroid of Denny
and Hannah Meadows, naked and lying side by side, a caption inked beneath in
painstaking blue letters.

Sacred
and Profane Order of the Turtle

I
thought of the awful irony, to play at ritual then have your rites become
horribly real, when you discovered your lover's decomposing body attended by
your totems.

When
I found her they had been at her already for a week.

I
thought of lying facedown on the backseat of a car in the dark; of kneeling in
an empty street beneath a broken lamp as another car sped away; of erasing a
voice from an answering machine a few
hours before the sky filled with
ash.

You
and me, we carry the dead on our hacks.

I
stared at the pictures before me, photographs of the dead and collages made of
hair and human skin, a fringe of pale eyelashes like a tiny feathered wing,
fingerbones and teeth strung on a length of silver cord.

I
shivered. Not because I was afraid.

Because
it was beautiful. And because I recognized it.

It
was like neurons firing inside my own skull, like something Id dreamed in
childhood. I have no idea how long I stood there, turning those pages, but for
those moments nothing else mattered. There was only me and a book of photos
illustrating rites only I would ever understand, heroes and heroines only I
knew. A girl in a white nurse's uniform, a brave black dog, a schoolbus like a
tortoiseshell palace. Lovers dressed in carapaces of bone and dried flesh and
hummingbird pelts. A trapdoor had opened in the world and I'd fallen through,
onto a bridge built of bone and flayed skin and eyes, the wings of dragonflies
and a snapping turtle's shell. I couldn’t look away.

I
turned the final page. A piece of crumpled paper dropped to the floor.

HAVE
YOU SEEN MARTIN GRAVES?

I
closed the book. Music still swirled from the living room. I went to the
shelves above the sink, grabbed a packet covered with brown paper and ripped
away one corner.

Sheets
of plate glass.

I
covered my nose then pried open the metal garbage can. It was filled with
eggshells and a putrid syrup of rotting yolks. I shoved the lid back in place.

Albumen:
egg white. It's what the earliest photographers used to create a glass
negative. It was low-tech, perfect for someone living off the grid. Perfect for
someone with time on his hands. You take egg whites and sugar—that's' what the
sugar was for—water and potassium iodide, beat them to a froth and decant them.
You pour this over a glass plate, then fix it by suspending it above a heat
source. A woodstove would be ideal. Afterward you soak each plate in a bath of
silver nitrate and gallic acid, rinse off the excess silver, repeat the entire
process and let them dry.