Generation Loss (5 page)

The
thought of seeing those original photographs is what set my heart pumping. More
than the thought of money or escaping the city. More even than the notion that
Aphrodite Kamestos had asked specifically for me, or that if I went up there, I
might shoot some decent work myself again.

Though
I'll admit, I was curious—more than curious—about what the hell had happened to
her. A nervous breakdown? Failure of nerve? Failed marriage? Her husband had
been a minor poet, a kind of fringe person in the Beat movement, and my
understanding was that he'd been gay. Kamestos met Haselton in 1955, and they
married just a few weeks later. As a wedding gift, his wealthy father gave the
couple a house on an island off the coast of Maine.

And
that is where I was now headed: Paswegas Island.

I'd
never known its name before. The thought gave me a weird feeling. It was like I
was going off on some strange, creepy pilgrimage; like a Nabokov fan setting
out to find the motels where Humbert Humbert slept with Lolita.

Because
Paswegas was where Aphrodite shot the dreamscapes in
Deceptio Visus.
It
was a place I'd thought and dreamed about for almost thirty years, a place I'd
never quite believed was real. You know how you can look at a painting or
picture and wish you could walk into it and just disappear? That's what I'd
always wanted to do with those photos. Now I'd have my chance.

The
night after I ran into Phil, I called my father. We hadn't spoken for a while,
and as always, I could tell he was relieved to hear my voice: I wasn't dead.

"Cassandra.
Good to hear from you. Everything all right?"

I
told him about my conversation with Phil. "Didn't you used to go up
there?" I asked. "Fishing or something?"

"Sure.
Fishing and hunting. Up in the Allagash. I used to go with your grandfather.
We'd stop in Freeport in the middle of the night and ring the bell at the
little L.L. Bean store, and they'd let us in so we could buy our gear.
Beautiful place, Maine. I haven't been since your mother and I made a few trips
down east," he said, his voice suddenly sad. "That was before you
were born."

"Do
you know how to get there? I'm renting a car."

"Maine?"
I heard the rattle of ice in his highball glass. "Sure. Drive to the New
Hampshire border. Then turn right."

We
spoke a little longer, catching up. Catching up with him, I mean. I had nothing
else to report.

"Well,
Cassandra, I wish you luck," he said at last. "Anything comes up,
call Ken Wilburn. He's in South Salem now. Here, I'll give you his
number—"

I
wrote it down then said good-bye. Two days later I received a check for a
thousand dollars, along with a note.

BUY
YOURSELF SOME GUM BOOTS. LOVE, DAD

I
blew a big chunk of the money on a pair of Hedi Slimane drainpipe jeans. I do
have my little luxuries, and I figured the investment would pay off if I
actually sold a story. The rest I stashed in my wallet.

That
night I took out my copies of
Deceptio Visus
and
Mors.
I'd bought
them cheap in a used bookstore in the city in 1978, when Kamestos's reputation
was in deep decline. Now I thumbed through
Deceptio Visus,
hoping to
find some hint as to what the island might be like in real life, or where.

It
was like trying to get a compass reading from a postcard. So I went back
online, poking around till I hit
www.maineaway.com
, Your News for The
Paswegas Peninsula And Beyond!
The site banner showed a scroll of cloudless
sky and a windjammer racing across a cobalt sea. There were lots of pictures of
romping Labrador retrievers, autumn foliage, children eating corn on the cob
and lobster, snow-dusted spruce, healthy-looking couples in canoes, loons and
moose.

The
headlines told a different story. A rash of teen suicides; support groups for
people addicted to Oxy-C and vicodin; two big heroin busts. Another bomb scare
at the high school. Another confirmed case of West Nile Virus. A missing
persons alert for someone named Martin Graves, last seen August 29th. The
police log listed three arrests for domestic assault and another for possession
of crack cocaine. A body washed up in Burnt Harbor had been identified as a
fisherman lost at sea the previous winter. More bodies were missing from
another boat presumed lost in a recent storm. There was also a feature,
"The Facts About Bear Baiting," and notice of a Benefit Bean Supper
for the Prout family, who had just lost their home to a fire. Someone was still
looking for her husband, last seen driving home to Machias after work at
Wal-Mart a month before.

So
much for Vacationland,
I thought, and
went to bed.

7

It
was the second week of November; the beginning of the Maine winter. I was naive
enough to think it was still fall.

For
a couple of months I'd saved a small stash of crystal meth. Becoming an addict
takes a certain amount of organization to dedicate yourself to your need to get
high. In this as in other matters I'd lacked ambition. Crank was intermittently
fun and useful, but I never could make a serious commitment to it. The
afternoon before I left, I picked up my Rent-a-Wreck then went home and packed
a map, the directions Phil had given me, a few
clothes and my copies of
Deceptio
Visus
and
Mors,
my old Konica, a few cassette tapes. I went to the
fridge and opened the freezer, took out the small Ziploc bag of crystal and
another, larger bag. In this was a piece of paper with blurred writing on it—July
2001—along with two plastic canisters of Tri-X film. The date was when I'd
bought them; it was also the last time I'd done any serious shooting. They went
alongside my camera in the chewed-up leather satchel I'd had since high school.

Even
traveling light, there was room for more. Problem was, I didn't have much more.
I had an old computer, but no laptop, no cell phone. No digital camera or iPod.
I never had much spare cash, plus I just hated the stuff on principle: it made
everything too easy.

"You're
a fucking Luddite Looney Tune," Phil said once. "You got a microwave
in that dump of yours?"

I
shook my head. "I don't eat."

Now
I went over to my old vinyl records and pulled out a portfolio wedged between
The
Idiot
and
Fear And Whiskey.
It was filled with plastic sleeves
holding dozens of black-and-white 8x10s. Not the pictures from
Dead Girls;
the
stuff I'd been working on after that, the photos Linda Kalman had turned down.
I still couldn't bring myself to look at any of them, just stared at the cover
sheet, a white page with my name typed on it and the title I'd given the
collection:
Hard To Be Human Again.
I put it back, turned and found my
bottle of Jack Daniel's. Very early the next morning, while it was still dark
and I was still drunk, I began to drive north.

The
buzz from the Jack Daniel's got me about an hour out of the city before it wore
off. Just past the wooded exurban badlands where I'd grown up, I pulled over
and snorted the remaining blue-white crystals from my stash, then shot back
onto the interstate.

At
some point I must've stopped for gas, but I didn't have another fully conscious
thought until I looked up, blinking, and saw brilliant sun, the span of a
bridge before me and a broad, glittering blue sheet of water below. A sign at
the highway's edge read leaving new Hampshire. I was halfway over the bridge,
reading another sign—WELCOME TO MAINE, THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE—before I began to
wonder what had happened to Connecticut and Massachusetts.

That
was my crossing into Maine. What little thought I'd ever given to the place was
faintly contemptuous: Vacationland, snow. I didn't understand yet how this
place works on you, how it splinters your sensorium. All I knew was that it was
midmorning of a November day, and I was fucking freezing.

Somehow
it had never crossed my mind that it might be cold. Back in the city it was
Indian summer. Here it felt like midwinter. Even with the heat cranked, the
little Ford Taurus exuded only a thread of warmth that smelled of antifreeze.
The rear windows wouldn't close completely, and frigid air whistled through.

By
the time I was fifty miles north of Portland my hands were numb. I pulled over
and rummaged through my bag, pulled on a long-sleeved T-shirt, a moth-eaten
black cashmere sweater, my battered motorcycle jacket. I replaced my sneakers
with my old black cowboy boots. This was my entire wardrobe, except for socks
and underwear, another T-shirt, and a backup pair of black jeans nearly
indistinguishable from the ones I'd blown a small fortune on.

I
had no gloves, no boots save my ancient Tony Lamas, no winter coat. Over the
years, I'd spent a few Thanksgivings with my aunt's family in Boston, chilly
days, nights warmed by firelight and Irish Mist. I figured Maine would be like
that. I was wrong.

I
drove for another hour before forcing myself to stop and eat at a convenience
store. A table full of old men in flannel shirts and Carhart jackets glanced up
when I entered then returned to low conversation. There was a sheet of orange
poster board behind the cash register, two columns neatly written in Magic
Marker:

"Hunting
season?" I asked as I handed over my money. The girl behind the counter
stared at me. "That's right." I bought a pair of heavy yellow work
gloves. They made my hands feel clumsy and thumbless, and they weren't even
very warm. But they were better than nothing. I bought a beer, too, then
started for the door. There were a bunch of notices tacked to it: snowplowing,
firewood, Little Munchkins childcare, along with numerous photocopies for Lost
Cats. Beneath the missing cats, someone had taped another photocopy, of a young
man in a Nike T-shirt and woolen watch cap.

HAVE
YOU SEEN MARTIN GRAVES? LAST SEEN AUGUST 29 SHAKER HARBOR REWARD FOR INFORMATION
PLEASE CALL 247-9141

I
returned to the car, sat inside and drank my beer, watching as two guys in
orange vests wrestled a buck from their pickup and weighed it on a hook outside
the store.

"Supposed
to have snow up to Calais," said one of them.

His
friend lit a cigarette. "Good place for it."

I
set my empty bottle on the ground and drove off.

The
road began to veer east. After two wrong turns, I realized the MapQuest
directions Phil had given me were useless. I pulled over and opened my map.

On
the page, the road appeared to hug the coast. In reality the sea seemed distant
and ghostly, hoving in and out of sight like mist. Now and then I saw the raw
wood scaffolding of a McMansion-in-progress, its mammoth exoskeleton dwarfing
the trailers and modular homes beside it, or mobile-home churches with signs
reading DON'T WAIT FOR 6 STRONG MEN TO TAKE YOU TO CHURCH. TO BE ALMOST SAVED
IS TO BE TOTALLY LOST.

But
after a while, even these reminders of the encroaching world disappeared. I
finally found the turnoff and passed through a town consisting of a general
store with a single gas pump, a shuttered antique shop, and an abandoned gas
station. Two boys in baggy pants and T-shirts were riding a Toro lawn mower
down the middle of the street. The boys pulled over to let me by, and I turned
onto a pocked road with a sign that said PASWEGAS COUNTY LINE and another
marked BURNT HARBOR.

That
was when I really began to feel like I was driving off the end of the earth.
Now, at last, there was the ocean. The coast fell away and the sea opened like
a huge blue eye, lashed with black islands and rocky outcrop-pings. I switched
the car radio on and picked up a weak signal that seemed to come and go with
the waves, an alternative station playing snatches of odd music, requests, pleas
for information about lost pets.

And
that light! It gave a merciless clarity to everything, clapboards the color of
dirty snow, trailers banked with trash bags, pyramids of lobster traps hauled
out for the winter. Spruce and pines that looked like they'd been knapped from
flint. The orange flare of a hunter on the horizon, the woods behind him black,
endless.

It
was as if layers of ash had been blown away until the true sky was revealed, a
sky so pure a blue that it no longer seemed a color at all but an emotion, a
desolation that tipped over into joy. The cold was like that too, the numbness
in my gloved hands no longer something I felt but something I was, a character
trait like stubbornness or generosity. I could see the peninsula before me, a
ragged, four-fingered hand thrusting into the Atlantic. I hunched over the
steering wheel, frozen but exhilarated, and headed toward the sea.

It
was nearly four by now; nightfall. Burnt Harbor, the village at the tip of the
peninsula—that was where I was supposed to find the guy who would bring me over
to Paswegas Island. Everett Moss, the harbormaster. I didn't own a cell phone,
so I drove until I found a gas station with an ancient pay phone outside. I
hunched against the peeling vinyl siding and tried to keep my teeth from
chattering as I fed coins into the slot.