WIP (Flowers for Elizabeth)

There is a photograph taken over a hundred years ago by a Hungarian who later left for Paris to become famous. Two men racing bare chested down a country road. One of them the photographer’s elder brother. The road near water though the water is beyond the frame…but we know it’s there because of cattails and rushes. Theirs is a black-and-white world but the feeling they radiate is emphatic and breathless: they’re forever running toward the moment, instead of lying back passively to be carried downstream. They’re fleeing the pull of their own obscurity to the contemporary online minute second by second. It would be the easiest thing to consult a search engine and revive them, image files by the dozen. But the summer afternoon that first sent them running is more vibrantly savored on paper. Two young men chased into the minds of the unborn by no one. 

*

Be forewarned: this won’t be about photography. You’d be forgiven if you’d begun to form that expectation. More informed actual practitioners of the craft have provided tours of black-and-white hinterlands, naming and describing species of life to be found grazing there. To be honest, I’m not sure what this will be about, but I can assure you, it won’t be a history lesson, or an arm chair exegesis on technique or aesthetics. This is really just about two boys running. 
A few years ago a friend called my attention to something that I hadn’t known existed until he’d shown me: online there were YouTube channels of workout videos posted by men serving life sentences in U.S. federal prisons. Prison workout videos. Fill a pillowcase with books then swing them around your head. Burpies on the floor of your cell. Step exercises on a toilet. My friend told me for the price of a paid subscription you could cultivate the physique of an inmate without the inconvenience of serving time. One channel, maintained by a guy who posted under the handle Bullmaster Herc, had several hundred thousand subscribers. A video was clicked on and there was Bullmaster Herc, ranting into the camera with clever entrepreneurial panache. His neck, shoulders, triceps, biceps: hours and minutes and years of devoted focused labor have sculpted a simple human man into a fascicle of enthusiastically engorged hard-ons. His body was proof he took his own advice, and anyone watching could win similar results, if only they’d get off their ass and listen. 
What does it mean for a person to become famous in prison? To be a famous body? Prison workout videos might be solid proof we’re all that much closer to a future when amateur prison porn videos might be posted and viewed for free or for a small fee on an easily accessible website, if they aren’t already. The real thing, not fiction. Verite copulation in the raw. From anywhere on the planet where there’s a computer connected to internet, they can be searched for and found and viewed as make-believe sucking and smacking. What, you might ask, does this have to do with two Hungarian boys running down a country road toward the eternal present? Not much. But a little: both gain a measure of mystique and charisma as we try and fail to traverse vast distances between their pasts and our present. Bullmaster Herc knows considerably more about the nature of that present, is cunning enough to make sure he earns some coin from our fascination. The boys are lost at play in an analog prehistory. One frame. One still frame is all we have of them. Sole evidence they existed. Beyond the finish line, where the photographer stands, oblivion waits to mulch them and spray them wide across the sweeping advance of a collective history. They were a bit skinny, but they were beautiful too. Not an ounce of fat on them. Sinews and ribs, all limbs and barefoot. No doubt Bullmaster Herc would have opinions on how they might bulk up and get to work. 

*

I’ll leave this to you to determine whether this is true or not. Either way, I hope you’ll believe me. I once met a woman who had worked in porn. In porn it helps if you have a niche, she explained, and hers was easy to find since she’d been born with it. She’d been blind since birth and had grown up in California, in Encinitas, a surfing town. Those were two great advantages to her professional future, it turned out, because her older brother was a surfer and taught her how to paddle out and feel the swells and ride them belly-down on a board until a wave strong enough and big enough came along; hop up, catch a balance; it’s all a matter of core strength. She was a minor legend around SoCal by the time she graduated high school: the blind girl who could thread herself through tubes and come clear with perfect balance, following the flow of the energies beneath and around her. After high school she moved to L.A. with her friend Tina and not long after, while surfing decent pockets of coast there, a girl approached her with a proposition. Had she ever thought of acting? Working in movies? They walked to a smoothie stand and talked about it in more detail. 
The girl was direct, didn’t massage the suggesting with euphemism: she was an actress in adult films, had been doing it four years now, and really enjoyed it. She got to make a pretty good living and most of the people she worked with were nice and fun to be around. Did she have anything against being filmed having sex for money? The girl thought about it and said no, not really. It just hadn’t really occurred to her as an option. Of course years earlier when in high school like a few of her friends she’d sent occasional nudes of herself to a boyfriend by text. Apparently, according to the boyfriends, she had quite the body! When they broke up, as was bound to happen, the photos got sent around and because of this some of her friends had been angry for her, but surprisingly she discovered she wasn’t. What was there to be ashamed of? There were theories among friends and family, which she found unfair, that attributed her lack of shame to her blindness. She couldn’t see the looks that the other boys and girls around school, not to mention the teachers and parents, gave her. Did she care, when this was described to her? She did not. She didn’t quite see how other people’s morals had anything to do with boobs or buttocks. Maybe their morals were disturbed by how excited their eyes were by the sight of them.
The girl’s name was Shawna. She worked mostly with a production company on films that tried to be “body positive” and “ethical”. The scare quotes were emphasized by tone of voice and if she could’ve seen her might have enjoyed the sight of the girl’s pointer and middle fingers quoting the air before her as she spoke them. Not to say their ethical aspirations were mere branding: they really were a good crew to work with. They were currently casting for a five-part series and the requirements were a little unusual. Working title, “The Five Senses”. The director Coco had come up with the idea. Pretty unique, actually. Each installment would focus on one of the senses, hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell, but in the negative: would feature actors and actresses who lacked the ability to enjoy the particular sense in question. So the installment focused on smell would be called “Ansomnia” and would star an actor or actress who lacked a sense of smell. “Anaphia” would be the name of the one focused on touch and would feature someone who lacked a feel for touch. The star of each film would share a name with its title. Coco had found her Anaphia and Ansomnia and Ageusia but was still looking for her Aphantasia, technically not the right name for a complete loss of vision, but definitely more screen-ready, so they went with it. What did she think? Complete transparency, Shawna was asking because there would be a bonus coming her way for prospective finds. How much could she make, she asked. A few thousand dollars for a day or a couple days’ work, Shawna told her. Why not, she thought. She was young only once but blind for the rest of her life, so what could she lose that she hadn’t lost already? Shawna tried to pitch it as possibly affirming, since that was the approach the director was hoping to take. 
The irony, the girl told me, no longer a girl really but a nearly middle-aged woman. She would never be able to see the thing. She’d only be able to hear it. Wince-worthy, the phony staginess of her moans and breathy beg-lines and wails. She could describe the experience of making the thing but what would it matter, since she was certain I’d probably hunt for clips online after talking with her? She was more embarrassed by the terrible acting than the invasion of her orifices by tongues, penises, and fingers. Surfing never left her so regretful of the quality of skills she brought to a craft. So after finishing filming, she retired from the screen before she’d even been edited and uploaded for the world’s enjoyment. It was play-acting with real bodies. She much preferred sculpting momentum from an ocean. She supposed she was like most people in that way. Luckily she’d honed this instinct under the ocean’s tutelage and after a lifetime of repetition and practice she could glide along the surface of an intelligence much larger than her, confident she could find her way back if she lost her footing and was dragged under. Weird to think an afternoon of play-acting, though, could outlast that. 

*

Thinking here of other photos, other women met without consequence. I suppose remembering them after the fact provides a dash of consequence: doubled by a mind they had no knowledge of. A book inherited from the elder brother of a woman I’d once dated. One among many in a box formerly housing bottles of vodka. He’d been a bartender in four U.S. states, most recently in Anchorage, Alaska, but not much of a reader. Flipping through the books, majority of them political science nonfiction or spy thrillers, out fell a photo. Picking it up, studying it, I unlearned in an instant more about the brother than I’d assumed I knew. 
A darkened bedroom. A blonde woman sitting on an unmade bed in the foreground, royal blue dress unzipped down the back and dropped off the shoulders and around the hips either side of her. Arms crossed over chest but from behind breasts visible, the line of her back catching light and lean shadow, neck to buttocks. Her head was turned to the left with chin lowered, suggesting classy demureness or bashfulness. Her hair cut in a bob and naturally blonde, catching light from a lamp or window elsewhere, beyond the frame. 
The man’s sister, the woman I’d been dating at the time, saw me sitting at bed’s edge and asked: what was that? Before she could take a seat next to me I tried slipping the photo back into its book, but as was usually the case, attempts to disguise some small misstep on my part only won more scrutiny. Disturbed. Disgusted. She couldn’t bring herself to hold the scene. There was a digital time stamp in the bottom right hand corner of the moment, almost tattooed across one of the woman’s buttocks. No one cares to be surprised by unwelcome reminders of their brother’s sex life or lurid hobbies. Surely it was no attempt at art. More a memento to power future masturbation fantasies. Get rid of it, she told me. I tried lightening the mood by noting the meta-nature of the moment, us sitting bedside as a couple in echo of the woman sitting bedside alone. But not alone entirely in the room, because someone most likely but not verifiably her brother sat or stood across the bed to doppelganger her with a camera. 
It looks posed, I said. The camera’s sister, my girlfriend, agreed. She’s been asked to sit there and unzip, like a banana half-shed of its peel. Who was she? Never had he mentioned a woman of any type, lonely as he was, perpetually un-partnered. For him, photographs were girlfriends, apparently. 

*

This was over two decades ago, before the launch of smart phones. Flip phones could commit to memory a woman undressing but could mass-distribute her only by text. If I remember correctly, the time stamp glowing in the bottom corner of the book photo, the brotherly photo, located the instant of its nude’s transubstantiation from flesh to paper somewhere in the mid-nineties. The camera had been digital, so she was spared a rebirth by antiquated methods: she’d been printed, instead of sloshed about in chemicals. Did I do as asked, tear her into pieces to more convincingly blend with other trash in a wastebasket? Or did I slip her back into the book then donate the book to a box in a basement or to Goodwill? Can’t recall. One overcast day or late afternoon in a bedroom or motel in Alaska or elsewhere, exact location wholly beyond confirmation, she sat on a bed as asked or on a whim, and posed for a very private camera. Had she been in the middle of dressing or undressing and the camera asked for a moment to admire her and commit her to memory? Profile obscured by hair and shoulder, impossible to read suggestions about her degree of willingness or the relative youth she brought to the camera: she could be anywhere between late teen to late forties. The lights are off; the room is dim; white curtains are drawn at the windows and curtains are dully glowing. 
It’s not a far reach to question whether this is the last of her. Almost thirty years ago, no guarantee she’s still anonymous but counted among the living. If she’s with us still, she could be anywhere there are rooms and bed and windows obscured from within by curtains. She could have children of her own, girls old enough to be haunted by cameras in a similar way, and it’s worth wondering, if so, how she might feel about that. She had a beautiful body, but one savored by a most intimate beholder: was the dress still in her possession, in a closet, and could she still fit in it? The body she was, the girl or woman she was, best fit in books for a while, either hidden or taken for granted and so used as a bookmark. 
Thinking back on her afternoon on a bed, would she feel embarrassment? Indifference? Vague unease or defiant unapologetic pride? Or had she forgotten about it entirely, one afternoon among dozens of other similar afternoons, when someone eager to see her become fully herself and nude, requested she unzip her back and hold a pose in the faint light of a room? She remains a mystery but not an important one, a nude for other people. In a later age, emerging from the currently passing moment, she might have been uploaded and celebrated then trolled by several hundred thousand strangers, praised for her perfect ass voluminously in a comments section. To her ass’ chagrin, it had been laid bare in the wrong era. A modest secret kept for no one’s benefit except a random voyeur discovered by accident: hiding in a book for years or decades, it’d gone looking for him and found him. 

*

I was wrong. Even while describing my second-hand Hungarian vision, I could sense the details recalled were merely catering to an impression the photograph had left on me. I held out for as long as I could before a book had to be slipped from its shelf and opened to a page early in its photographer’s career, the black-and-white life before he left home and fame overtook him. “Self-Portrait with My Brother,” the title, dated 1919. Wrong to describe the photographer as the one holding the camera: here he was, in frame, running beside his brother, naked except for some very loosely fitting underwear. Was the camera arranged on a tripod? Set to a timer? This isn’t a history lesson so my ignorance of the technology possible can’t confirm: could cameras count on their own that early in their youth? I misremembered the water, the cattails and rushes. The brothers running toward me are fleeing a simple meadow with bushes and smallish trees in the distance. They’re racing along a road of sorts, twin lines of wagon tracks worn into grass. Each brother sprints along a make-shift lane of wagon track, feet blurred by speed. Youth and health and one brother with lips parted in an attitude of slight bemusement and the other broadly grinning. I’m not going to violate the moment flipping through the book’s front matter to search for dates of birth or names. The brother is running nameless and both are neck-and-neck near the finish line, lives ahead and behind them. Standing next to the other, one of them is older, one is taller. But running they’re equals and faster than facts that would limit and claim them. If I didn't have brothers of my own, and especially one barely a year younger, would this summer afternoon have left as strong of an impression? Summertime I’ve also assumed, I realize. Noting how short the grass is still, the wheel-tracks not earthen yet, marked by grass pressed flat. In the wake of a weight several thousand times their own, some sprigs spring back to stand again, creased or broken. But alive still.

*

I have my own pet versions of The Old Land, country roads that have been with me since childhood. There’s also that to consider: why, when I first looked at this photograph of running brothers, I felt something, and still do. In a book written by a physicist and amateur horticulturalist, on the adaptive strategies of plants, a passage on the otherness of plant life, copied out by a hand I once had and still do: “…we see what we understand, and we understand only what is similar to us.” That resonant stillness that seems to radiate from every direction, when I stand, for example, at the crossing of two one-lane roads leading from nowhere to nowhere miles from where I’d once lived in West Kentucky. Farmland wherever the eye turns and cattle in the distance and a high-pitched glitchy sound of telephone wires when a strong wind cuts across them. Other than that, an absence of human activity that doesn’t exactly pass for silence. 
These were miles to be taken slowly, unmeasured by odometer. A crossroads to be reached only by running or walking. Culverts flush with long grasses and crawdad mounds of record height and fencing so rotten and old it could barely uphold the cat’s cradle of its barbed wire. 
In the high heat of summer I’d jog to leave a few miles behind me but mostly to reach a place where I could be purely alone. On one of those runs, the beginning of one of those roads had been chosen at random and I’d followed it, and found a break in trees and houses, a spread of open land. Past those crossroads I came across a string of makeshift memorials along the fence  line to the right of my running, staggered every ten feet it seemed. Jumped the culvert to investigate one arranged at the foot of a telephone pole leaning slightly over its morning shadow. Photos laminated for preservation against the elements. Plastic flowers in a ceramic vase and glass jar, necklaces and bracelets. Notes and letters in a varnished wooden box. The name and face of the girl in the photo, I knew: grew up with her. Carol Royster. At that very place, against some earlier version of that telephone pole, she’d died in a car accident and every spring on the day of her passing the family came to leave trinkets and notes and talk to her maybe, have a moment. Ten feet down the way, near the next pole on the line, was a memorial for someone else I knew, Shane Thompson. More keepsakes and notes and flowers and photos. Another car accident and end of a life not long after I ceased knowing him. Both young when they met the end of the dates listed on their memorials, and both, as it would happen, within arm’s reach of me in home room sophomore year of high school, before I left the small town north to Cleveland, to become a different kind of person, someone who could look at photos of city streets and feel something. I’m middle aged and they’re still young. Hidden where very few people come walking, among tall grasses near a decrepit fence line, road so lean and straight it would be indecent to drive slowly down it. 

*

I’m navel-gazing, admiring the empty socket through which my umbilical cord once fed me. Luckily it’s a very deep navel, as most are, too dark after a certain point to view the bottom. Tie several old umbilicals together as rope, tie that to a bucket, lower it to the dark then draw it back up. Filled to the brim with salty water, a gallon or so. Dip a finger, taste. Test the theory: a person’s body will not react with revulsion, should it be made to savor its own products. In this case, tears.
There are two kinds of tears, the body has read, differentiated by function: those that well up to clear irritants away from the cornea of the eye, and those that accompany and express swells of emotion. These latter are called “limbic tears” and differ in chemical composition from their more functional brethren: contain traces of a hormone that facilitates self-soothing. 
Another theory. Each navel-well contains more limbic water than could rightly be produced in a single lifetime, even one spent locked in a state of upset, years and decades of crying. Look: they even produce their own Kleenex. Little wisps of lint that can be dug from their tucks and folds, to dab the eye and blow the nose. It’d be understandable to believe anyone with a navel has a birthright to free-range lamentation and despondency. Proof of our screaming separation from a mother. So the theory is this: beneath human generations there runs a great single limbic underground river, and to mark each new birth a well is dug, each to a depth particular to it, and as the infant grows into a child and the child into an adult, the well expands its depth through patient and persistent digging, until the river is reached and can be drawn from. 
This bucket here, my reflection looking up at me from the still surface of its water.  Not the sole product of my own collected weepings. Maybe not even a drop of it. From other eyes and lives, generations upriver. Bloodlines branching and fanning out to expand beyond the typical number of relationships it’s said a single life can manage or keep track of. Lost chronologies that could streak down a cheek as well as a window pane: they blend in the distant past and then flow forward, to feed countless buckets lowered into them from the future, some lacking awareness of what means to take more than their share, others hesitant to take a portion properly due to them. 

*

A lone well in the countryside. What I picture: emerging from my own navel back into the shared present again, looking around. Realized while thinking of buckets and wells, I was calling to mind a specific well from a specific photograph, found several pages earlier in the book of my photographer’s Hungarian period.
A favorite of mine, more for the familiarity of the feeling it evokes than the relevance of its subject matter. Must have first come across it nearly thirty years ago yet on random occasions I’ll close my eyes and there it’ll be: a photograph of well in Szigetbecse, dated 1914. 
Let me lean over the page here, spit on it ekphrastically. Rub the saliva like so much developer over these sentences as they’re written, so the images they delineate carry the proper mood and feeling. 
A open field with closely-cropped grasses. Flat along the horizon but marked by dips and swells in the middle distance. Not a far cry from a golf course. In the foreground and framed in the center, a make-shift stand and lever: a lean tree stripped of its branches and split in two at the top, with a length of branch placed in the wedge, serving as an arm or lever. Attached to the end of this is a chain and rope, lowered into a concrete well. A wooden trough has been built against the edge of the well’s rim: easy to imagine the bucket, as it’s brought to surface, tipping to spill its contents down the slight downward grade of the trough, sheep or cattle lowering their heads to sip from it. There are black trees either side of the horizon, in the far distance. Upper half of the photo is scuffed with gray, broody clouds. It could rain in an hour or so. No people to be seen, nor animals. Peacefulness undisturbed by preoccupations with relevance or consequence. Middle of nowhere, but with feeling: the eye that rests here is savored. 
A hundred years could pass and the field and well could remain or vanish under a parking lot, disassemble to recombine as a house or office building. If they weren’t black-and-white, if they were full color, it’s worth questioning whether I’d even think this. Which in turn begs the question: if color blind, would I walk around bowled over by the poignancy and melancholy of things? Would each minute feel past its prime, as I was living it? Goes a good distance towards explaining: often when things are made to mean less, they’re more interesting. 

*

Once lived in Section 8 housing, an apartment complex on Virginia Avenue, down the road from a horse track. Could feed oneself for a week raiding the all-you-can-eat buffet at the steak house across the street, open all day each Sunday. Sneak Tupperware containers in by backpack, fill them with country fried steak and mashed potatoes and gravy. Do so with skill and subtly, to evade scrutiny by wait staff. In the complex parking lot the walk back home, spare a biscuit to the old vet sitting on the curb, sharing cigarettes with phantoms generated by psychosis. He was harmless but the kids around the way made sport of him. 
On either side of the road ran picket fences of the less-than-charming variety. They let nothing in and no one out, but followed the road from one stretch of poorly populated desolation to another, stitching together the seams of a place where nothing particularly interesting or important ever happens, despite the fact real people lived and died there daily. My brother and I would cast ourselves out along those roads in the evening, walking where they led. A gas station lit like a manger scene. Horses whinnying from barns on the other side of darkness. Outside the Winn Dixie sitting alone on a bench, watching people come and go, an old man with an alarming feature to his baldness: a massive growth, a kind of skull-goiter, birthing from the shine of his head. Dubbed him The Watermelon Man, and yes, in hindsight judge that cruel. The loneliest look of a person I’ve seen before or since: him tracking our passage from the corner of his eye. A decade and a half later and in a completely different part of the country, winter in New Hampshire, I would come across a dog tied to a tree on the coldest day of the year, whimpering and begging for a hand to pet it, hind legs shivering so hard they seemed spasmed by electric currents. Sidelong despairing look from a dog, and I was reminded of a man sitting alone, bereft of human company, pity but gladness I would never be either of them. Until maybe some turn of fortune made me so. 
One nightwalk in the direction of open country, my brother and I came across a whole bedroom dresser tossed roadside in a ditch. Fallen from the back of a truck, we assumed. But no, how could that be the case, we figured, noting the drawers all still in place and no sign of damage. Looked almost as if it’d been carried and placed there, leaning face-up sixty degrees to moonlight. Cheap wood, brass handles. Two parallel rows of drawers, vertically arranged three per row. Scavengers that we were, drawers were opened and rifled through. Inside each, to our surprise and saprotrophic delight, hundreds of photographs, some professionally developed, some Polaroids. There were keys as well, and ID badges and handwritten notes. From what little we could discern in the lights of passing cars, most of the photos repeated in different scenes and arrangements the same two people, a boy and a girl, and we agreed from frequent evidence of their kissing and snuggling close for poses, they were a couple and as a couple were no more. 
We removed the drawers and carried them stacked, three each, miles back to our apartment, to spill onto the living room floor for further inspection and categorization. Full documentation of a relationship from beginning to end, prom pictures and graduation and beyond. In none did either boy or girl appear old or older, but various versions of young. I was young and only slightly dumber than I am now, so decorated the living room wall with them. Color photos arranged in the shape of a giant heart, private memorial for a relationship that died and was tossed like so much trash in a ditch by the side of a road. Many an afternoon was passed sipping beer and admiring them from a couch. Beginnings and endings mixed messily beyond chronology, dozens of lovers watching me from a wall. 

*

In an interview, print or video I can’t remember, Roddy Müller talked about his approach to hunting and finding landscapes to serve as backdrops for Jarmusch’s first and only Western, Dead Man. Find a dramatic view of classic American wilderness, then turn yourself one hundred eighty degrees, your back to it. Whatever you see in the opposite direction of beauty will often be more subtle, more charmlessly naturalistic. There’s where you should set the camera.
Jarmusch shot it in black-and-white, a road movie in daguerrotype. Scraps of Colorado in the background, extras that remain where they were scouted and conscripted into a story, if you can retrace the film crew’s steps and find them. Two summers ago while casting myself into similar wilderness on long mountain hikes, when pausing to admire the vistas before me, I made a point of turning to consider the lesser vistas behind. Those required more careful scrutiny before they released little packets of resonance within me. A clump of boulders. Some ragged evergreens. Underbrush resistant to framing and composition. Un-photogenic profiles of Colorado never before immortalized by a camera. 
Bresson’s Notes On The Cinematograph agrees: “Your film’s beauty will not be in the images (postcardism) but in the ineffable they will disengage.” Translation: fight a strong prejudice in oneself towards beauty. But also: not to be an atheist towards it, glorifying the horrible and willfully ugly. Between two memorable extremes, walk the middle path of the mundane and harvest nuances from the unmemorable. This is what I hear; not sure it’s what either, Müller-Bresson, are encouraging. 
In a footnote pages earlier he recounts an experience with the effect he describes and is after any time he blends make-believe and mundanity with a camera: “The other day I was walking through the gardens by Notre-Dame and saw approaching a man whose eyes caught something behind me, which I could not see: at once they lit up. If, at the same time as I saw the man, I had perceived the young woman and the child towards whom he now began running, that happy face of his would not have struck me so; indeed I might not have noticed it.” 
To walk through life with one’s back turned to unseen families: difficult to accomplish, but a noble goal. But impossible to pull off, I imagine, if self-portraiture is your default mode.

*

First I was wrong and now I’m a liar. I promised no maunderings about technique or aesthetics, then pages later I’m quoting cinematographers. It’s hot outside. The brothers in a dead sprint towards me. Crickets in full color around them but silenced by black-and-white. Turn heel: what’s behind me? If they were to finally reach me, speed past either side of me, how much farther would they have to go before they came back from the other direction, down the same road? 
In a public waste basket near a bus stop, I once found three plastic grocery bags filled with photographs, this time almost all Polaroids. This one a shocker: dozens and dozens of nudes. Same as the previous find, seemingly the unabridged history of a couple discarded after a breakup. This time the couple was middle aged and from the many candid shots of people playing volleyball and cards at picnic tables, committed nudists. Nudes of her talking on the telephone in the kitchen. Nudes of him standing by a propellor plane wearing nothing but aviators. And many, many more lurid nudes poorly lit in bedrooms, red marks mottling buttocks in the wake of a slap or paddle. I brought these home, laid them on the kitchen table, but the outrageousness and novelty of the nude-play on display wore off quickly. There was a blankness to the woman’s face that could only be seen because her partner remained unseen, holding the camera. My wife felt sorry for her; at how unhappy she appeared with her body. It had to be her, she decided. Between stops she’d stepped off a bus and dumped these, then got back on another bus and gained distance from the past, literally. Then you came by, she said, with your eye for trash. And of course, proud of your find you just had to bring it back, to show me. 

*

Nudes in black-and-white versus nudes in full color. One for art, the other pornography, with occasional exchanges between. When we were very young and easily intimidated by beauty, my brother devised a visualization exercise to humanize a woman and rescue her from idealization and thusly render her approachable: imagine her on the toilet squeezing out a nasty shit. If beauty was her public face, there was a long fall towards such common concerns that include us all. Film and photography had invented such women, shaping their allure and stylishness in our fantasies, so only fantasy could return them to their proper condition: bodies with gastrointestinal tracts and immune systems. There were monkish exercises, we’d heard, which involved the visualization of and meditation upon one’s own rotting corpse, to achieve a felt appreciation of one’s mortality and the brevity of life. His was monkish also: devolving the opposite sex from an alien perfection, so they might endure the many trials of the flesh more realistically, be it food poisoning or flu. Similar to switching filters from dichromatism to full color: to see the girl standing at the other end of the bar lose the false authority she’s assumed or you’ve forced on her, to become by turns goofy and awkward and mortal. She’s not a corpse yet, but if she’s aging she’s rotting, and so are you. 

*

I had a friend from a previous life in Cleveland who was so worshipful of the pristine technique of his forefathers, he had their motto, the strict requirements of their ethos, tattooed on his right bicep: f64. Ansel Adams was deathless to him, fixed scenes of American landscape in black and white and with such sharp focus, their trees and rivers and mountains would never be touched by age or rot, reified as they were as prints. f64 was an aperture setting, he explained, but also an article of faith: that, by framing a thing and committing it to a camera’s memory, it could remain. It could resist become a metaphor or symbol and simply represent itself, some stretch of wild land unchanged by having its photograph taken. 
He lived in a wrecked house in the Slavic Village, a long drive in any direction from the nearest forest. The one nearby river was infamous for having caught fire in the Seventies. No Yosemite or High Sierras or Death Valley or Yellowstone for him; his camera had to make due with what passed for nature in Cleveland. Illegal midnight excursions into half-abandoned industrial parks, photographing abandoned factory buildings and railway lines. He’d slip into these places like a cat burglar, dressed in black, tease the security guards who’d come chasing him in little utility vehicles no larger or faster than golf carts. He was extending a tradition, he said, or maybe didn’t say, but might have: maybe it was the beauty of the long exposure prints developed from such rolls that gave me that impression. If I knew anything about photography at the time, I would have told him: he was documenting the return of nature in his own way, weeds bursting from rubble and factory floors, young trees sprouting improbably from rooftops. He was immortalizing uncelebrated vistas by merely noticing them. Stand before one of Ansel Adam’s more well-known shots, of, say, El Cap in high contrast against the ground and sky, then turn heel one hundred eighty degrees, survey what Ansel had turned his back on. Hold a camera to eye, look through viewfinder: piles of old slag in the abandoned lot of an iron forge, or lengths of chains hanging from a ceiling. 

*

Another friend from another previous life (I’ve had several). A prime example of what can become of a person if they stay in the small town where they’d been raised, longer than was appropriate or necessary. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He didn’t know he had a life waiting for him elsewhere, so he stayed and studied the avolitional, anhedonial arts of major depressive disorder (recurrent episode, severe). Worried, his parents scheduled an appointment for him with a counselor in the town across the river. The counselor, a middle-aged version of himself, he thought, beard and glasses and a habit of crossing left leg over right, ankle on knee, received his weekly reports from the other side of self-loathing with casual actuarial calmness. He’d heard such loathings before, they were regrettable but they were standard. 
He met with this counselor for years and slowly, imperceptibly, he felt a faint portion of the life force return to him. It ran through him like a current, from the bottoms of his feet through his legs and torso, grounded in the increasing quiet of his head. Sorting through his troubles in company of a discerning audience helped. But so did the meds. 
One day late into their partnership, the therapist told him of another client he had worked with some time before. This friend of mine couldn’t recall what had prompted the sudden urge for disclosure; it was very unlike him. This client was the wife of a not-so-prominent state politician at the time, later elected a House representative. She was in her late-thirties or early forties, tall and beautiful. Throughout the entire time they met she rarely offered more than brief responses to his questions. Also, rain or shine, summer or winter, she always arrived wearing the same calf-length raincoat and declined when he would offer a place for her to hang it. For the better part of a year, she sat across from him dressed for rain and it had become such a standard feature of their meetings he admitted to my friend he eventually ceased noticing the oddness of her wearing it. Until, that was, the day she announced, without much preparation or warning, that she thought it was time and would be good for her, to show him. Show him what, he asked. But by then she was already standing and untying the belt of the coat. The belt then the buttons. Then held the coat open to show him what she’d been hiding: the nothing she’d been wearing underneath. 
In all his years practicing, this still stood as the most shocking disclosure. She held the coat open only a few seconds before retying the belt, to sit again, a naked woman in raincoat, to savor his awkwardness or welcome the questions sure to come. Certain diagnoses trail behind such gestures, attached to their person like shadows, but he brushed past these to ask her why it was necessary to show him. She explained that while she had been married for half her life and a limited sort of life at that, she’d felt a solution growing inside her for a while, which had gradually refined itself into a secret habit: meeting with men whom she met for one evening and one evening only, anonymously. This was a dangerous habit, the counselor told her, and she agreed. There was tone of flat resolution to the agreement. Already she had been subject to encounters that were unsafe. It was only a matter of time before someone harmed her. It had happened to a certain degree already. 
Her habit followed a set pattern. She placed an ad in a magazine, with description of her interests for a meeting and a phone number. Men would call the number and together they would make arrangements. Always she would meet them at a motel room or their house or apartment. She would arrive in the raincoat, unbuckle, then let the men do what they wished with her. The moderately unsafe thing that had happened to her had happened recently. She had met a man who lived in a apartment in a suburb on the southwestern part of town across the river. She had undressed and laid on his bed, at his request, and he had handcuffed each of her hands to the headboard, then spread her legs and tied her ankles to the grill of the baseboard. Splayed naked into an X on the bed, she was made to lay there listening to him move through the dark of the apartment to the kitchen, where sounds of metal cutting metal could be heard faintly. She laid numb and terrified as the man returned with several cans of wet dog food. This he informed her of, before emptying the cans onto her and with his hands smearing it across her breasts and stomach, thighs and calves, up her arms and across her forehead, her cheeks, lips. There she lay numb and disgusted and still terrified while the man returned to the kitchen, sounds of cans dropped into a wastebasket, hands washed at a sink. There was a dog in the house, she remembered, could hear it begging through the door of an adjoining room. Before the man stepped out the front door, he freed the dog into the room, left her there. For hours she’d laid there alone while the dog licked the food off her. She had begun to think the man might not return. But he did. Wordlessly stepped through the door, untied her, uncuffed her, handed her the raincoat and let her leave. On the car ride home she examined the quality of numbness that had bloomed within her, unmoved by her own weeping. 

*

This was first told to me nearly thirty years ago, in the mid-Nineties. It had been told to my friend several years before that, a case history refined into an allegory, no moral: how a person might dramatize self-abuse through others. The woman had met with the therapist for a year or two in the Eighties. Had my friend breached the woman’s confidentiality, retelling what his counselor had described? Am I breaching it now? If so, those were echoes from an initial violation of trust: how a person’s secrets could be employed as an example, to illustrate the ugly likely outcome of persisting in certain unhealthy habits. A ghost in the echo, she lives in triplicate at a distance from her problems, forever the story she told. 
Like the girl whose photo was found in a book, if she’s lucky she’s old now. A photo keeps one of them young; an imaginary movie in a stranger’s memory keeps the other so. Occasionally when I’m reminded of the latter, and the movie replays, the dark apartment, the bed, the man, the kitchen, I’ll picture my friend and the therapist sitting in the room also, on a couch and chair, one recalling the events while the other listens, while the events transpire before them; almost as if the man and woman were following instructions from a narrative, rather than inventing it action by action so later it might be told. She’d been wise to keep such evenings a secret, because look what’s happened to them: they’ve been sprinkled like seasoning onto commonplaces of shared imagination, his and his and mine and yours. 
I remember my friend also relayed another recollection made by the therapist, equally sensational, which over time blended with the woman’s story, tempting to become part of it. Once he had as a patient a woman who was in the process of divorcing an abusive, jealous husband. After a day’s work, during which he’d met with the woman, he’d driven to a grocery. After shopping, after having placing bags in his trunk, rolled cart to its catch in the parking lot, taken a seat behind the wheel, inserted keys into the ignition, he was startled by a splashing sound, flecks of glass spitting across his hands and lap. Looking up, he saw a neat quick hole in the windshield. Instinct yanked him sideways laying across the passenger’s seat. Delayed explanation reached him seconds later: a bullet, head-level. Across the lot someone had taken aim and shot at him. 
The therapist had survived the wrath of many an enraged husband, my friend said, but only once had he been nearly killed by one. The man was arrested, of course. The therapist carried his luck forward to share it with other clients, my friend included. If he’s alive still, I imagine, he’s probably nearing the end of that luck. It was good while it was useful. 

*

I’ve never walked the gardens of Notre Dame, but often I’ve had the occasion to stroll through quiet public spaces in towns and cities foreign to Paris. These locales could be named but in doing so their quiets would remain un-described, for they are native solely to those who walk among them. The people articulate the spaces between quiets by talking and coughing and merely looking around. On many a paved or gravel path I have come upon them, alone or as a pair, at most three or four, and for a while we walk towards each other. The expressions on their faces vary but I know my role is to look past them to what continues, the path that is extended by their leave-taking. Like ambulatory snails, routes are marked by subtle glistening in their wake. These might easily be mistaken for sunlight reflecting brightly upon edges of gravel or minerals trapped within pavement. Similarly, it is their duty to look past my shoulder, undistracted by the expression on my face. Therein lies a tension, difficult to resolve except by walking past each other: between two worthy subjects upon which we might train our attention—the face of an oncoming walker, or what awaits encounter beyond them—we must choose one to favor, despite temptation to look from one to the other. Once the distance between us has been closed and we nod and walk past, continuing our way, a third option presents itself. To stop, turn the opposite direction, stand and observe the sight of them leaving. Smaller by the slightest grade with each step. In five short minutes, an even walking pace renders them tiny. 

*

Over my left shoulder, one life; over my right, another. Through habit I usually favor my right, so for this occasion I choose the unnatural option and go left. Head turns on its neck, bringing the shoulder then whole body with it. Time slows to a pause then reverses, accelerates until it reaches seventeen years into a past whose boundaries are marked by three rooms—a bathroom, bedroom, and a kitchen. A cheap apartment in a city I’d returned to, freshly divorced, to save money and keep near family, and lick my wounds. 
I returned at the beginning of summer, jobless but with not rushed for employment. My ex had bought out my portion of the house. A new man, foreigner in my own life, I had nothing but days so made the most of my time: I walked. 
In lieu of a purpose, I carved a schedule from the hours and held to it. Woke in pre-dawn dark, brewed coffee. Fixed a breakfast of toast and eggs. Dressed and pulled on shoes and in the commuter hours of morning left the apartment without direction, and wandered. From walking I invented a direction: a left and right and left, chosen according to the demands of the moment, at the intersection of one street or alley and another. I would wander until I was lost then sort through the innards of lostness until I’d come upon a street or sight that was somewhat familiar; from there I’d follow the reclaimed familiar until I was on a path toward home again. It was a kind of fishing, without any metaphysical implications to the metaphor. With a very sharp hook, I speared myself, then with my own hand cast myself far out onto surfaces beyond myself. For a while I was left to bob and drift. Now and then a mouth would appear from below to nip and thrash at me. No takers, I’d reel myself in. That was a day for me: a casting and reeling in. Luring forms of life through walking. 
Weakened, I hadn’t gained enough strength to raise my head. Most of those early months were spent walking with eyes lowered. The one benefit of this was heightened awareness of what lay about the ground before me. Litter freely divulging its secrets to whoever stopped to notice. Post-it notes, photos, jewelry, toys—these I gathered and pocketed and brought back to the apartment, taped to the one windowless wall of its tiny kitchen. After months of walking the wall was transformed into an organized museum of clutter. Standing with back to the counter, studying it, the kitchen grew in complexity, three times its original size. Evenings alone I’d return from a walk and after having taped a new find to some spare blank on the wall would take a seat at the table and appreciate how this one small addition sent out subtle ripples of change through the whole. Each were enigmatic and had arrived in my hand and pocket and apartment by chance, abandoned by a life to be gathered by a stranger and integrated into his own. 
The most memorable find I gathered near the end of my travels, an evening walk on a sharp cold night at the beginning of winter. Wisps of snow were expressing wide loose circuits around me, most visible under streetlights. A left off Frankfort onto Pope. Past the bar on the corner half a block, found shreds of lined paper blown across a sidewalk and snared in stiff grasses at edge of a yard. These I chased down as they feathered along, and pocketed. At the kitchen table back the apartment, spread them out and puzzled them painstakingly into pages again. Three pages handwritten in lavender ink, in loopy neat cursive—a letter addressed to God, written by a woman requesting guidance about her relationship with a physically abusive but supposedly loving boyfriend. The letter was sad as it as pathetic, and naive in its belief both ways: in the god and in the boyfriend. I felt sorry for her but also for the letter—that it was torn by a hand and tossed from the window of a moving car, most likely. By who, it was worth asking: the girl, her god, or boyfriend? These scraps I taped into horror-show wholes again, then folded into a fresh envelope, which I taped to the upper leftmost corner of the wall. There it hung for a three years until I moved from the apartment, into a shared place with an actual living breathing woman. When she first visited the place, I’d shown her the letter and she’d read it and remarked it was one of the saddest things she’d ever seen. Why would I keep such a thing, why would I hand it to her? It could have easily gone unnoticed, I told her—that’s why. A reward and a modest one, for walking and walking aimlessly. 

*

A magpie nature—humans become birds through certain habits. For as long as people not me can remember, I’ve collected and accumulated souvenirs from the Void-made-visible, and made nests from them. I couldn’t hope to pick a magpie from a given avian line-up except by guessing: two wings, a beak, legs, claws, a tail, what else? A better chance at birdwatching standing before a bathroom mirror, shaving feathers off my face to examine more carefully the face I give and lose to the world. 
The magpie is one of the few nonmammalian species that can recognize itself in a mirror, data-gatherers and researchers assert. There may be speculations on what purpose this self-awareness serves, but the light from such stars have yet to reach me. It is intelligent, supposedly, and borrows from everywhere, and carries in its beak and claws whatever isn’t too heavy to lift with the efforts of its slight body. It is a builder and an accidental magician. It scavenges evidence of a nearby human presence no longer apparent, then binds scraps into places of habitation. How these characteristics differentiate the creature from others of its kind, I can’t say. To my knowledge, such tendencies are common to birds in general. 
Here. Here’s another. In a second’s passing I’ve flown from my hiding place and returned, a line of poetry written by an old friend in my beak: “That there is no turn from nothing/ is not the saddest thing.” He lives in Michigan with his brother and father. His songs are peculiar; of a sort that gains alien instincts due to English being an acquired language. It had been born singing one way, then fate and circumstance brought it across an ocean, and there it flew to a perch and listened and practiced the songs particular to the region. 
This morning I’ve brought back two other shiny scraps from my searches. One twist of twine from a letter written between brothers: “What the aristocrats take for granted, we pay for with our youth.” Next to this a tuft of used cotton swab from a troubadour well into middle-age, without much left to prove. With my beak I pinch and tug it apart, so it breathes again, provides material to be woven more easily among other finds: “Kind of give them a little puzzle, almost. Mix things up a little bit so they have to figure out what it is. It’s more internal. They undo the puzzle, and it’s inside them.” Pieces found at random and gathered, fitted meticulously together. Bird takes flight and nest scatters, to reappear on a branch that can only be felt or imagined. 

*

“No turn from nothing”—but try it. Turn heel, face the opposite direction, see what’s leaving or coming. No surprise to find it’s the same view all around. Like standing dead center of a salt flat once a thriving lake—a mean and strictly even horizon whichever way you turn. Alone. Alone even with yourself. And that’s not the saddest thing? Depends on the person and where they’re standing in themselves, facing inwards or outwards. A life spent walking towards oneself, gauging the meaning and suggestion of a face’s expression growing larger and clearer as it approaches. A life spent walking away from it, in the direction of others. Sorry, friend, to tweak your line of melody; despite the labor you surely spent perfecting it, I’m hearing an opportunity for it to be inflected from a different angle, more in line with what I’m thinking: “That there is no turn from no one/ is not the saddest thing.” Having thought then sung it, I’m not sure what it means, but it sounds true, so I’ll keep it. 

*

Just because a sentence sounds pretty, certain of itself, doesn’t mean it can bend to tie your shoes. That could be why our man long ago decided to become a photographer. If he sat in grass, pencil and notebook, attempted to speed-write a portrait of his brother running towards him, the moment would be over before he’d finished the first sentence. No, life was quick, he decided, so he’d choose a camera instead; would set it on a tripod stand, set the timer; would strip to his underwear as well, challenge his brother to a footrace. A prose-less sprint, so barefoot. 
My own brother can barely walk without pain, his right knee filled with scar tissue. Bone scraping on bone each footstep. Leg propped up in a straightened position, he laments his running days are over. Flowing beneath the trees on a summer morning was for him one of life’s basic goods. I run nearly every morning, but don’t mention it. To do so would remind him of a sad thing; even walking side by side next to his brother would cause him pain. Later, leg propped up and iced, would cause him suffering. Pain in the knee; suffering in the mind that can’t stop running. 
Given his injury, out of love I choose slower methods. Any portrait of him should be written slowly—a camera would never see him. At most it would show a man sitting with leg extended onto a vacant chair, talking. It wouldn’t hear what he was explaining: the loneliness he feels when he sits on a bench at the park watching people of all ages fly past him. This is a man who walked through Turkey to the Black Sea. Who traversed the Andes to Macchu Picchu. Who crossed into Cambodia and Vietnam and Laos on foot and fell into a sewage-filled waist-high pothole in the middle of a Mumbai street. The knee is telling him his youth is over. How to express this? A camera is too paradoxical—quick yet geared toward immortality. A pen or pencil, more appropriate. Both move slowly and diminish with use. Of the two, a pencil’s better. To continue working, it must be ground down. Shaved away from itself like a spur from bone. Until only a stub is left, and the hand cramps to hold it. 

*

The past is trash. Mementos are expendable. Only so much can be archived, so specialists trained in discernment are needed. To hold articles to the light, one by one, to scrutinize their features and determine their value. 
I had no idea how little was required of a person to become an archivist. Two working eyes and a general feel for an object’s importance or irrelevance. Paperclips: trash. Photographs of a dean: important. Thirty-year-old meeting minutes from a science department: trash. Forty-year-old certificates of excellence: important. The job paid very little but the hours were flexible, and the assignment would last as long as it took to comb through the dozens of boxes sent to the archives room in the library from the community college’s many departments. Shelves had been cleared and closets had been emptied. Paperwork hoarded for decades under administrative order, too much to be scanned and uploaded. Picture it: stacks of boxes on one side of a table, two large plastic trash cans on the other, one for recycling, the other for a dumpster. The refinement of the college’s history left to the likes of me, an underpaid magpie. Box emptied, paperwork on table. Snap judgments, page by page: keep or toss. The keepers I organized by topic or department and organized into folders then boxes, arranged in alphabetical order on a row of slim shelves. 
I threw away lives. I mulched decades. Savored formally issued letters of complaint against English instructors. Ninety percent of what I emptied from boxes I passed into the afterlife. 
A week into the work a cart from the nursing school was rolled in. I went about my efforts as instructed. Remove paperclips for later reuse; remove staples for discarding. Before the college had existed, I’d been told, it had been a nursing school. The nursing school had become so popular, I’d grown to include other departments, and these had gelled into a college, one which catered to the futures of less advantaged families. Among the school’s affects were several photo albums, leather-bound with photographs glued onto pages. In finely rendered calligraphy descriptions were written beneath each photo. Each album was dated by year, the earliest from 1967. Each documented the training of its graduating class: nurses in hospitals and in classrooms and at banquets. 
These, I was told, were trash and to be discarded. Following my supervisor’s instructions, I discarded them into my pockets. Several dozen photos chosen for their strangeness or accidental artfulness of composition. A few I have on hand at the moment, artifacts of lost immortality and quickness. Nurses of years past torn from their pages. Tossed into a bowl atop a cabinet. To reach them, I have to stand and walk over. To free them, dump them from their bowl onto a desk or table. Each are worthy of reanimation, the slow treatment. A pen’s life’s blood or pencil’s graphite spine. Since it’s a sunny morning outside, I chose one appropriate to the weather and expand upon it, dissolving ancient developed print into scribbling.

*

A summer day anywhere. The kind of summer made eternal by photographs. But black and white, colored by a spirit of winter. Several unknowns under the guise of people, one in the foreground, four others in the background. There’s a park bench and a tall lean tree in the middle distance and beneath the tree several women dressed in white, two standing, two sitting on the grass. Beyond the lone tree is a flat field of short neat grass and beyond that a line of trees in the distance. The point of focus is the man standing in the foreground, a few feet from the person holding the camera. The women and the lone tree and its leaves and the grasses of the field and the far trees beyond are blurred and therefore left half-formed. The women are all looking in the man’s direction but he has his back turned toward them. He’s occupied by something the camera has asked of him, or so it seems, since the pose he’s assumed seems either highly incidental to the passing moment or staged. The women behind him are dressed in white because they are nurses and the man himself is dressed in a white button-down short-sleeved shirt, tucked into white trousers, black belt and black sunglasses tucked into front shirt pocket. He has long thick fingers and wears a wedding ring. It would safe to assume he’s a porter or orderly. It might be natural to assume behind the person holding the camera there is a hospital and these people caught in the light and passing moment are employees on their break, sitting to eat their lunches on the lawn and standing to smoke their cigarettes. But the man in the foreground conforms to none of these natural explanations because his eyes are lowered and his lips are parted and blurry, suggesting he is in the middle of talking, perhaps to the person holding the camera or to himself. But his eyes are lowered as if examining the thing he holds in both hands, lifted to chest-height before him: a smallish doll, a boy-child. 
Three of the nurses are black women and one of the nurses is white and the man himself is white and very lean and balding strongly past the initial boundaries of a natural widow’s peak. The doll is white as well, and dressed in white clothing. It’s depicted in a realist fashion, not with stylized features, as is common with many other dolls. Its hair is shorn close to the scalp on the sides and the back and less so near the top and bangs. It’s held in such a way and at such an angle as to face the man’s downcast gaze. The doll might be a second away from being lifted to be kissed on the forehead or lips or it might be in the middle of receiving a lecture or an admonishment from its father. Of course living grown men can’t be fathers to dolls, but the photograph seems us to ask future viewers to consider otherwise. There’s not quite a quality of gentleness in the man’s regard for the doll, nor is there any element of caution or threat. The man appears to converse with it much the way he might converse with a dog, with an awareness tone of voice communicates more than the words themselves. 
What do the women make of this? How did the doll come to be held by the man? Had he found it lying on the ground or on a nearby bench? The hospital might be a children’s hospital and the doll a comfort and a toy provided by the staff, to keep children company or distract them from their own predicament by tasking them with the responsibility of tending to the needs of someone smaller and even more helpless than them. There are no children in view, only adults and a doll. There are no buildings in view either, only trees and a field. It is bright above and around them and timeless except for the date written on the back of the photograph, 1967. The man appears well into his forties, but at that time people seemed to age faster than they do now. He might be in his late twenties or thirties. Only the doll retains its youth in the world of the photograph and even beyond it. Dolls may age in their style and might be dated by their clothing and haircuts, but other than these variables they remain young forever. It seems unlikely, given the amount of time that has passed between the taking of the photograph and its current viewing and description, the man is alive still. Most likely he’s blended somewhere into a field of grass studded with headstones. Not ash in an urn, a more contemporary preference; a coffin in the ground. And the women? Maybe them as well, though since they’re blurs it’s difficult to study their features enough to place their ages. 
Maybe he’s telling the doll of his life, this man, describing who he was and how he’d come to stand here, holding it, the names and qualities of the people he loved and admired as well as the names and qualities of those he feared and resented. Maybe he’s hocked to spit in its face; that’s not beyond the realm of possibility. Maybe he’s answering questions that only he can hear, posed by a figure sculpted from porcelain or plastic. The moment between is private and consensual and held aloft on a slight breeze the way dandelion or milkweed seeds are carried beyond their originators elsewhere to places where they might take hold and receive nurture, rooted to become full-grown plants of their own devising. The women, though. What do the women make of it? Standing and watching, one with arms crossed, another with arms hanging awkwardly half-splayed by her sides, the others watching from vantage points lower to the grass. A man’s seemingly private moment with a doll either found or given to him, and the undying no-one standing to document both with a camera. Doll and man, man and camera.

*

That is one past life; here’s another. Another enigmatic nurse watching me from black and white. 
Begin on the flip side. Back of the photo, written in blue cursive: Edna R. Jones. Mar. 1970. Turn her around, a hundred eighty degrees, there she is. Darkly complected for a white lady or lightly for a black one. Relevant to mention since photos from the earliest albums showed me: for the times and given the place, the nursing school was uncharacteristically integrated. Most photos, though, depicted women sorting themselves by race, at separate tables. Edna R. Jones sits alone, curtain at her back. Frontally facing the camera, central to its composition. A portrait in waiting. 
Over her right shoulder, her shadow is cast onto the curtain. Almost standing back-to-back to it, a Janus-Edna. Her shadow self facing the past that brought her here. 
The lighting’s unflattering. Dark heavy circles under her eyes. The eyebrows, neatly cropped and arched, counteract an impression of haggardness. Arched eyebrows, dark circles beneath; together they parenthesize a most watchful pair of eyes. DaVinci would approve of her smile. Of the slightest pedigree, curling upwards at the edges. Not unlike the smiling face of a man walking towards a person on the grounds of Notre Dame, it’s worth asking: who’s waiting or approaching from behind me, that she’s assessing or greeting with such a smile? “Much as you want to know, you never will,” the eyes and smile seem to tell me. The style of her blouse dates her and disorients any attempt to guess her age. A thirty-year-old dressed as if she were eighty? 
A young lady rendered a grandmother by changes in fashion? Thrift stores now would sell her blouse for a quarter, but at the time she might have spent an entire paycheck to take it home with her. Only the expression on her face is beyond time, looking past me. 

*

The most esteemed photographers in the history of the craft live and work now, documenting by the minute and hour the strenuously maintained lusciousness of their asses. Asses never go out of fashion, it would seem, unless they age or fail to maintain an immaculate tightness. The vast majority of humanity sits on theirs, admiring images uploaded by phone to a cloud: there is a girl in a gym in Los Angeles or Atlanta or Sao Paulo who angles her butt towards a mirror, then holds the camera phone just so, to immortalize herself and it for collective envy or ejaculation. Two brothers racing down a country road pass her on the way towards oblivion. 
All that can be offered is the same ass from different angles, in different attire or lack thereof, under various sources of lighting. Like koi rushing upwards from the depths of a pond, nipping in competition for the same sprig of bread tossed to water—eyes race from everywhere to feed from its amplitude, its generosity. Like Christ, it accepts all comers, low of birth or aristocratic. It shines like the sun, brightening all lives equally, be they flesh-blessed or grubby and unwelcome. This ass, perfected by its distance from the hand that would slap it. Cloven reincarnation of the Madonna. Inexhaustible as metaphor, but less fatty. The plush honed thing-in-itself. No turning from it—untouchable except by touch screen. One light tap to reward perfection. Another to share it through an algorithm. 

*

This too could join them—belatedly a photo welcomed into a phone. Another nurse-souvenir before me, dated 1968. Black and white because life was pre-trichromatic at the time, though given the partisanship and polarization currently, things would seem to be returning to a simpler palate these days. A hospital corridor. Nurses walking down the length of it and back, crutches tucked into armpits. Four of them, each looking down, an instructor nearby pointing toward the floor, directing them. Practicing how to walk with aid of crutches, so as to better guide those under their care on how to use a pair. Two nurses are crutching towards the camera, two away from it. In the foreground is one with back to turned to nowhere; it must be chilly; she wears a cardigan; woven onto its back a design: two horses trotting on a field of cardigan. The horse-legs, spindly and long, rhyme with the crutches and nurse-legs below them. This equivalency surely unintended. A hospital hallway rendered resonant and memorable through an accident of skillful composition. 
Hold a camera phone over them; frame them so edges align cleanly. Tap screen, absorb them. Data endures another history lesson. It would be that easy, that simple. To rob the local for the wasteful benefit of the collective. A photograph of a photograph of a moment that flowed past itself, five women unregarded by the future, who may not have survived its many successive arrivals, until it became a man sitting and holding the last bit of evidence of their existence by the edges, at his desk. This was something I used to do, and often, and regret it. Once a soul has been prized from flesh or paper to be recombined as data, it can’t be conjugated back to an original privacy. Privacy broken, it’s a secret freely told by anybody. 
*
More proclamations from on high from The Cinematographer: “What has passed through one art and is still marked by it can no longer enter another.” So certain on the matter, a bit pompous. Is it even true? Nurses can travel from paper to phone, holding their breaths for decades, until they surface in memory like teenagers breaking the surface of a lake on a night swim. They’re skinny-dipping, no longer nurses. They’re women clothed in nothing but lake water. 
Just as breathing can be both voluntary and involuntary, photographs can be both art and otherwise—does it matter? A girl-once-a-nurse inhales deeply and theatrically then plunges herself back down into the inner skirt-worlds of water. With arms and legs, she works the fluid element, jetting herself forward in pulses. The longer the breath is held, the more pressure she feels in her chest, until the need is unbearable: bursting back through the surface, she exhales the stale remainders to inhale double lungfuls of broad warmish night air. While she was invisible to the others and swimming below them, she was art. While she was gracelessly gasping, she was otherwise. What does it matter? Both belong to the same woman and rotate accordingly. 
When I was a boy I came across my first vision of a nude while hacking brambles through a forest. A friend, one my earliest, brought me there, to a Secret Hiding Place. A tree had fallen from its height and under many rains had begun to rot. This, my friend explained, was the Hiding Place. From beneath the log he fished a soggy, tattered pornographic magazine. He did not explain how this luck had found him. In my uninformed state just then, he might have said it had fallen from the sky, gifted from the porno-gods, and I would’ve believed him. Pages and pages of women and women, presenting themselves as so many gourmet dishes to peasants such as us raised on comfort food. Their bodies were absurdly ripe. Hips and breasts and asses and legs of smooth muscularity and fullness. Their faces met the camera with a hunger and eagerness but also somewhat with an air of challenge; the camera would have us believe this was inspired and candid and natural. Unlike us, they saw no reason to hide. A great disservice we did them tucking them incognito beneath a log. If discovered by an adult, we would be shamed for admiring them. Their gifts of flesh would be confiscated and destroyed. Nudes plus lust, faked or not, equals pornography. Subtract the lust, they’re reduced to art. As breath is to nurses, nudes are to boys struck by the lightning of puberty: they remain constant for survival, intended or not. 

*

Some are not so secret. Some hide themselves in public, can be found with the turn of a head. New York City—where friends go for gradual re-conjugation back into strangerhood. An old friend of mine moved there and took one of the usual forms of employment and conformed to a routine that resulted in a family. Two beautiful children who from their mother were born nude. In a cramped apartment in a high-rise apartment in West Manhattan, he and his wife raised them. She was a copyrights lawyer. He commuted five days a week to New Jersey to teach high school. 
One rare evening away from the family he attended an opening at an art gallery with his cousin. Working normals, they arrived early, hardly no one else in attendance. His cousin knew the curator, so they made small talk while waiting for people to show. At one point there was a phone call through the gallery number so the curator excused herself. When she returned, she informed them: brace themselves, because The Nudist was coming. Who? my friend asked so she explained. 
In a city of New York’s size, inevitably there will be a slew of local figures, fixtures of eccentricity and predictable disturbance. For the past several years around the smaller and mid-sized galleries in Manhattan and Brooklyn, a man had begun attending openings in the nude. He was not a nudist only on such occasions; he was nude all the time. After some complications with the law about such appearances, he’d begun calling ahead to events to alert them of his immanent arrival. If there were children present, would they please inform him by text when they and their parents had left? My friend, due home in an hour, refilled his drink, called his wife to tell her he’d be coming home late. A novel experience in his life was ten to fifteen minutes from walking through the front door, naked. 
When the man arrived, people scattered with great subtlety and sophistication. He was shockingly unlike as my friend pictured: not a model physique in the least. Heavyset, every available surface of his body except forehead and neck swarmed by hairiness. The penis was an uncut shriveled wreck. Made all the easier to look past by the ruddy enflamed pumpkin patch of his testicles. An untreated hernia, my friend’s cousin guessed. Cancer, maybe, or some horrific exotic infection? With a casualness bordering on the insincere, the man introduced himself to the gallerist, who took and shook his hand with superhuman pleasant professionalism, before limp-shuffling over to the drink table. Soon after he was enjoying time alone before a series of wholly forgettable abstract paintings. Before them he stood his ground, avenging representation’s loss of cache with blithe and utter forcefulness. Later my friend’s cousin told him the evening’s artist was furious, feeling she’d been upstaged. 
My friend, a difficult person to shock, found the man in a corner perusing a program and introduced himself. By the end of the evening they’d traded phone numbers. My friend’s cousin was a documentary film maker and my friend a writer in his spare time. They were wondering whether the nudist would be interested in having his adventures documented? It was an usual question many people would be curious to hear and see answered over the span of an hour and a half or two hours: how does a nudist negotiate his way through a day in New York City? The man, unsurprised by the offer, accepted. So began a three year partnership, in which my friend and his cousin and a small crew were made to follow with camera and microphone and lightning a middle-aged man uncooperative with social norms about clothing a human body not deemed conventionally appetizing, much less beautiful. 

*

Three years. A long time to shadow a nude, hoping it might lead to a story worth telling. The man was a slob, my friend told me, barely took care of himself. He rarely showered, claiming the most natural and hygienic way to clean oneself was to stand exposed on a sidewalk for ten solid minutes in a rainstorm. They followed him to his favorite restaurants, to nudist colonies in the country, one of which he’d been banned from. They interviewed him making sandwiches backlit by a kitchen window or scarfing bowls of ice cream on a barcalounger. He raided a ballroom dancing convention for seniors, twenty square feet of dance floor clearing to make room for him to waltz alone. Camera and boom mike rendered him famous in his own mind wherever he went, his lack of shame wielded like a weapon: people wearing clothes were forced to witness him writhe within a birthday suit ten sizes too large for him. 
He was vulgar, my friend decided. Charmless, pushy, crass, selfish, petty. All routes leading to other people had to first run through him. The Sloppy Nudist, he and his cousin fell into calling him. What they each knew after six months trailing him, they could barely bring to admit to one another after three solid years of documenting him. There was nothing remotely interesting or redeemable about the man; the ugliest conclusion to be made also the most likely: only his nudity distinguished him. And even that he managed poorly. 
Nothing they filmed could be shaped into a portrait anyone would want to mix with. Worst of all was how their persistent, long-suffering attentions spoiled him. Somewhere along through the years he had maybe sensed the sunk-cost fallacy take hold of them, and so, amateur grifter that he was, began to take full advantage, asking for loans, payment for meals. He began pestering them with his own ideas about where they should go next, what they should be filming. Texts through the night, undeterred by lack of a response. Phone calls back to back until they answered. One morning dressing for work and glad for it, my friend blocked the Sloppy Nudist’s number then texted his cousin to tell him he was done, it was over. His cousin, relieved, suggested they meet at his walk-up that weekend to share a bottle of bourbon, take turns deleting and dumping all sound and video files. Evidence destroyed, the man remained, my friend complained. Rest of his days, anywhere he stood the man was waiting: closing his eyes for rest or sleep, the nudist would step from the dark and begin silently berating him. He was a father; he had a daughter. He was a teacher, a vice principal. What did it say about him, that daily he brought this kind of person into their company? Even if just scraps of memory. Even if a regrettable fascination he quickly outgrew. 

*

Memories of the perfect bodies of girls admired out of the corner of the eye, days when I was continually burned alive by the fires of puberty. A theory: these are imprinted most deeply, and remain, long after the girls age or vanish and the boy I was has also. With the same eyes that were helpless to catch glances, I can still see them. Close eyelids and call them back by name. Grown man that I am, if I looked their way in a worshipful manner, it would indicate an ugliness in me. But the remembering mind is perpetually thirteen, fourteen years old, age appropriate to its visions. 
Legendary as they are to this mind formed by eyes, no surprise I can still name them when they appear, replayed from actual interactions in middle school or high school. Sara Jane Stevenson. Leslie Stagg. Mistie Spurlock. Tanned from laying out in their swimsuits on back patios through an endless summer, crossing their legs or gossiping with friends, tucking hair behind an ear before shouldering a backpack nine months pregnant with books. Ask them as I imagine them or as they are now, middle-aged wives and mothers, “Who’s this here, calling you to mind?” They wouldn’t recognize the boy or man by name, or recall his sitting two chairs back, one row over, in history class, or chemistry. It’s the way of fate and nature that two wouldn’t even hear the question, since they’ve since died of unnatural causes and brought their once-perfect bodies with them. Sara Jane and her mother struck dead by a semi while riding a scooter in Florida on spring vacation. One day in class I saw her, the next day I didn’t—a disorienting situation, to be beset by sexual fantasies of a girl who no longer existed. I tried to dissuade that by encouraging myself to feel guilty; didn’t work: her tight brown girls were forever drawing my imaginary hands into them, drawing her mouth towards mine for a kiss. After a thirty-five year absence, Leslie Stagg’s actual face was returned to me as an obituary, cause of death unmentioned. This still young older mother’s face—to think it once terrified me with direct unchallenging regard, when she would and catch me looking her way. At the time a friend of a friend informed me she was interested in me, but I was too cowardly. What would a goddess such as her want with an inept voyeur like me? Far as I know, one of my three eternals is still with us: a girl who no longer exists but who persists as an actual live woman named Mistie. Since she’s alive, it feels indecent to talk of her. But if she wasn’t, somehow that would be more permissible. 

*

In his little book, the Cinematographer provided a title for a tale to be told in one mere sentence: On two deaths and three births. Translated from the French (which may constitute a fourth birth, or a third death, depending on who is asked), it reads like this: “My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.” Like flowers in water: these women once girls, in the brain. The brain and really the whole body. It would be ridiculous to apologize to flowers for reviving them; especially if you weren’t responsible for snipping their stems, though perhaps for picking them up where you once came upon them, cast aside, newly damaged; so carried them into memory, drying them for preservation. A fresh occasion to relive one of them looking over their shoulder past the boy I was, standing off to the side on a sidewalk or in a hallway. Watching a friend or another boy they had a crush on smile or nod or wave hello, which to a back turned such as mine is reversed in its intent and flourishes as goodbye. 
Of two brothers running, one is a photographer. They’re fleeing their youth or racing towards independent manhood, as if such a thing existed. It would be nice to believe the photographer will lose the race. It would be only natural, seeing as he carried extra weight: an eye for framing three-hundred-sixty degrees of life into squares and rectangles, black-and-white. While running, there is some hope for him still; for it’s rumored he’s infatuated with a girl who will sit waiting for him to arrive, wherever he’s made to chase himself. Birth name Erzsebet Salamon, later Elizabeth Saly. In the history of his collected visions, she can be found at every age of her passage from girl to young woman to woman, no modifier necessary. 
Here she lays on her side in grass, under shade of many branches meshing above her. It is 1921 and this is Hungary. Head propped on hand, elbow on grass, white dress with black sash around waist, long dark hair over shoulder. Her gaze is direct, come-hither, and the camera meets it. Charge of pre-coital rurality to this Elizabeth, unafraid of privacy. 
Elsewhere she is in Paris and sitting on a bed next to our photographer, both immortalized by 1931. They are finely dressed; his right arm around her, head bowed, doting, smiling. Arm hanging over crossed legs skirt-hidden, she leans forward with an air of casualness, eyes equally direct meeting the camera’s focus. Age shows itself in the lack of bemusement, her composure: confident and quiet. 
Last we see her absent, in New York, as baskets of flowers arranged around an empty chair, glasses and open magazine on its seat and shirt draped about its shoulders. The title of the picture tells us these flowers are for Elizabeth, having bloomed and been freshly cut in 1976. A year before she will vanish, taken to a place where cameras won’t find her. One woman many flowers—daisies or black-eyes Susans—widening for the light though cut from roots and dying. 
Fifty-five years from one Elizabeth to another. Transmigrating through a round of births and deaths as I flip pages to admire her. 

*

These same eyes that mark three stages of Elizabeth—girl to woman to bouquet—have followed other photographs elsewhere, to uglier places. They have returned from faces they would rather have not seen. It’s what we choose to spare our eyes, I think, that allows us to favor certain Elizabeths. Cinematographer in my waking life, the beautiful and horrible, unfortunately, are integrated and made to resolve into a single view of my surroundings, by grace of ingrained stereoscopy. Left or right: I can’t choose which eye, and keep the other closed for all occasions. Left for the beautiful; right for horrible; or vice versa. After a lifetime of saccades and blinks, I think their orientation changes by the minute. Seeing has rewired thinking, and thinking has trained them to favor ambiguity. 
This morning, I take my seat in double sunlight, a pair of windows that open onto slightly different angled views of the same yard. I type into a search engine and a web page is clicked on. The National Sex Offender Registry. Enter street address and city, specify square mile radius of search. What was until moments ago a matter of secrecy and abstraction becomes digital pinpoints on a map of a city. Within two miles of where I write this are thirty faces, of varying ages and race, categorized by crime and degree. Possession of child pornography. Rape 1st degree. Sodomy 1st degree. Incest. Sexual abuse 2nd degree. Scroll the profiles, note the addresses of current residence. Feel how your stomach sours, turns, a heavy unease in the chest, the head—as if looking through the camera into these faces were enough to render you complicit. These destroyers of children and flowers. Twenty-eight men and two women. Public for anyone who wishes to disturb the mind with the simple work of eyes, as they remark how ruined and cornered the camera has them appear. “What has passed through one art is still marked by it,” our sage Cinematographer tells us: “it can no longer enter another.” How kind and clean that would be, if it were true. Server closed, history deleted, faces remain in mind. Reach for a book, open it: there is one of many Elizabeths lying on bi-chromatic grass in an innocent and eternal summertime. The camera’s affection for her is palpable. But the feeling I’m carrying is different. Mixed. Dissonant. Eyes open, there’s Elizabeth; closed, the faces of sex offenders in full color. One open, one closed: they blend but refuse to resolve. It’s not in their nature to do so. 

*

I’m feeling now what my good friend meant, when he threaded that one fine sentence through himself, breaking into two separate lines mid-way: “That there is no turn from nothing,/ is not the saddest thing.” No turn from anything—even what’s not apparent, unless we think of it, a sickness that dreams of one day feeding on a body. 
Since this is a place where many friends have chosen to meet, let me permit entrance to another, a shy wit much skilled with his hands, freelance carpenter and mechanic. For a time while the housing market favored such ventures, he took to buying ruined houses on auction, to refurbish and sell. Introvert on an epic scale, he attempted the work solo: tearing walls to the studs, ripping down staircases, rebuilding both from scratch into interiors middle-class and homey. It took a solid year to resurrect his first house but having learned as he went, teaching himself what he didn’t know by watching online videos, the pace picked up from project to project. In his final summer devoted to drinking, before he became sober and even better with a tape measure, he bought a house off auction that came with a story. Retelling it now, I can almost taste the watery beer I was drinking when he sat back in his plastic lawn chair on the bar’s back patio to describe the history he had purchased and was in the process of destroying. 
An elderly couple had lived in the house with their adult son. The son had worked as a lifer for AT&T. Very little was known about their shared world together; the son left for work early in the morning and returned in the afternoon, uninterested in returning waves from his neighbors. First the father became ill, was carried from the house by paramedics, never to return; shortly after, the mother did the same. Gossip from house to house speculated that, in grief, the man had taken early retirement, never again to leave. Groceries delivered to doorstep. Curtains and blinds drawn before windows. A good decade passed without sight of him. Until one day the groceries stopped arriving and the neighbors, taking notice, became concerned. A wellness check was issued and an officer came knocking. Once the door was forced open, the smell hit them, confirmed all suspicion. Biohazard cleaners arrived no longer after; worst soup case they’d ever seen. Dead at least three weeks; bio film on all the windows; all soft building material penetrated with death smell. Neighbors stood watching like it was television—workers in full PPE walking sealed buckets and bags filled with refuse from the place. 
This was only the beginning, my friend said. Having cleared death from the place, they were left with the rest to examine. No will, no executor, no living relatives—ownership of the house would be assumed by the city, who would turn a cheap profit on it through auction. Once the crime scene tape was taken down, another crew arrived to clear out the house. My friend knew a guy on the crew, so heard his version of what happened. That first day, each took a separate room—bedroom, kitchen, bathroom—tossing everything junk-worthy into garbage bags. The son had been a junior varsity level hoarder, not so extreme the rooms were choked with piles of junk; but he’d done a fine job of collecting what he’d received the past decade through the mail. While clearing the shelves of a medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom, my friend’s acquaintance noticed a hole in the wall; curious, he fished around in it with a pair of gloved fingers; out came a small metal box; popping it open he found rubber-banded rolls of ones and fives and ten dollar bills. Roughly a thousand dollars’ worth, he figured. This news he spread about the house by walkie-talkie, causing others to pick through junk more carefully. What they found deserved a fresh beer, my friend told me, so there paused to stand and walk back into the bar to order one. When he returned, he’d brought two more for himself and one for me, to sip or drop dried flowers into, to empower a blooming from beyond their afterlife. 

*

In the fridge, stuffed into long-expired boxes of butter. In the bedroom, tucked behind a loose length of floorboard. Hidden behind a removable brick in the fireplace. Nuzzled in garbage bags filled with unmatched socks and winter clothes outgrown, stacked in a utility closet in the washroom. There was free money hidden everywhere, so it was difficult for them to determine when they’d finish finding all there was to be found. Though the dead son was unknowable, my friend said, he’d left the entire house behind as his diary. He didn’t maintain a bank account. Week by week he took thirty years of paychecks, apparently, and cashed them, then hid what he didn’t immediately need about the house. Evidence of paranoia in how he managed his coinage: dimes and quarters, torn from their rolls, were stacked along the ledges of each windowsill. Should a window be lifted or softly broken by an intruder, precariously high stacks would be toppled, spray into chittering spare change across the floor; too cheap to pay for a proper security system, this would do. In the basement they found both the most flamboyant and most subtle of his subterfuges—some two dozen desiccated Christmas trees left on their stands, a brittle forest decorated with money clips on their branches. Old newspapers were stacked by the thousands, arranged by date and year. In these they found also, tucked in the back sections behind headlines announcing the first moon landing or assassination of Kennedy. 
After half a week of digging, the hunt wasn’t so much concluded as it was abandoned. Not counting was pocketed on the sly by crew members, the total amount found exceeded one hundred forty-two thousand dollars. What became of it, I asked. That was the saddest thing, my friend told me, shaking his head until the beer can found his mouth. Some bean-counter for the city made extra efforts to dig through the family records, then follow a few presumed-dead leads on the Internet. A distant, distant cousin—third, once removed; so very removed as to pump through a different bloodline entirely. Lived in Germany somewhere. Dusseldorf, Munich. By email they were informed of an inheritance the deceased hadn’t intended to give them, and they took it. Imagine the look on their face when they read that email, my friend asked me. I couldn’t; I could only imagine my own, breaking a yawn to smile between sips of coffee in the morning. 
The money was theirs, but the house was auctioned by the city. It went for cheap, given the odor molecules of decomposing flesh that still circulated despite weeks of open window aeration. This was the place my friend was tearing down from the insides, the current mausoleum he was renovating. Earliest weeks he was there, he smoked weed throughout the day to keep from vomiting. The smell—it was in his hair, his eyebrows, his clothes. As biohazard guys told him when he called for clearance, decomp odors can cling to hair follicles and even ear wax for up to seven days. He stank so bad those first evenings coming home, his lady made him sleep on a plastic tarp on the spare bed. Once he knocked all non-load-bearing walls out and dragged them to a dumpster, he said, the stench left and let him be. First and last soup case house he’d buy on auction, even if they offered it for free. 

*

For twelve years, the photographer later recalled, between the ages of six and eighteen, when he’d finally earned enough to purchase his first camera, he’d had to make do taking photographs without one. Studying pictures he would find in magazines, he would take what he learned there then turn to the life around him, train his eye to frame the passing moment. 
“I discovered in my aunt’s attic old newspapers and illustrated magazines,” he told an interviewer eager to hear what life before fame had been like. “I can even remember the title of one of these newspapers: die Garetnlaube (The Gazebo)…I remember clearly that, even by that time, I had the feeling that one day I would too maybe do something like this…Then I perceived the events around me in a spontaneous or reflective manner, saying to myself that later, when I had a camera, I would take this and that and, almost instinctively, I composed photographs…” 
Checking the dates and by his own account, that would mean twenty years of preparation preceded that bright afternoon when he mounted a camera on a tripod and challenged his brother to race him towards it. So thoroughly honed was his eye by that time, he could compose a perfect shot while sprinting toward the eternal end of a viewfinder. What does it say about this instinct that it outlasted him? Remained young while he aged? A few weeds in the foreground in flower, ripe for clipping. I balance a few on the backs of my hands, hold them before me. Which will fall first: those on the left or the right? A quick recovery is art, in this case. Speed of the hand flipping to swoop and catch its flower before it touches ground again. The work is art but shouldn’t be mistaken for saving them. 

Saint Ginther

 

The convenience store is a holy site for the wishful and the lucky, famous first across Texas then beyond it. A highway gas station a hundred miles in every direction from any city, on the outskirts of a town the size of a urinal cake, across twenty-three years one woman won the lottery four times buying her tickets across its counter. They grow quiet around here, and cotton. Storefronts downtown are boarded up, the spirits of past modest affluence have left for Dallas or Houston or Austin. Their descendants remain behind and frequent the Times Market owned by Ms. Bae, purchase their coffee and beer there, their cigarettes, their scratch-offs. Not the kind of place anyone would have any reason to know existed, unless something unusual occurred there. 

Three scratch-offs, one lottery draw. Nearly a quarter century between the first and the last. The woman who had mastered luck and brought it down to a human level had been born in Bishop, had left decades before to attend Stanford, a doctorate in applied statistics. She had been exceptional by the town’s standards long before she had become legendary, unmarried, friendly, shy around people she didn’t know, warmer with people she’d grown up among. Her mother had died in the early years of her luck, leaving her father yet another widower in the town’s untended history. Rumors circulated beyond town that she lived in Las Vegas but travelled home several times a year to visit her father and buy more tickets. Since she had come good four times at one store, it was assumed the Times Market was the only place where she worked the lottery. She didn’t own a cell phone nor did she dresss like a lucky person. She drove a Nissan sedan that blended impeccably among traffic or cars parked in a lot beside it. Photographs of the woman were few, all decades old, depicting a young woman with a beehive hairdo outdated even at the time of their taking. No one could blame her for valuing her privacy yet few besides the townspeople felt inspired to honor it. Asked by well-heeled auslanders with cameras and microphones whether they might sit or stand for an interview, they politely declined: they would walk. The woman was one of their own and they were country people, careful to uphold common manners. It was their right to gossip among their own, and they would protect it, serene in their knowledge that finally the larger world sought something from them it couldn’t have. Such was the close nature of relations between woman and town that even after the woman’s father died some years earlier, she continued to visit, make the rounds among locals, helping out in small ways and before leaving purchasing a clutch of tickets second-hand through a friend. It had long ago ceased being possible for her to visit the Town Market without harassment by out-of-towners seeking a better life on the other side of a winning ticket. 

Her generous works were kept private but the town attributed her graciousness to her upbringing and so in a roundabout way paid itself a partial compliment. She bought the town’s one Baptist church a van. She gave money loan-free to the family that ran the Days Inn a mile outside of town. After her father passed, she donated her childhood home to charity. She purchased reams of lotto tickets for others and once bought a Cadillac for the son of one of her father’s close friends. She had no need for mystique because among the few thousand of a small Texas town she had an upstanding reputation. None there begrudged her the better life she’d devised for herself, gaming the numbers in a way no expert analyst could quite yet accurately identify. After her second win she had been investigated by the state and cleared of suspicion of wrongdoing, and almost as a comment on their efforts not long after won ten million dollars off a fifty dollar scratch-off. The investigation may have verified her innocence but it made her famous, and old photographs were found and broadcast on local then national television. Ms. Bae was pleased with the free advertising, but apologetic about the woman’s loss of privacy. In the one interview she granted, brief and conducted while she stood beside a bin of cheap Mexican movie DVDs, clear plastic dispensers of scratch-offs behind her, she expressed amazement at the distances some of her newer customers would travel to purchase tickets, but acknowledged this meant it was no longer a welcoming place for her luckiest customer. If she travelled home, she would have to do so in secret. One couple from Arkansas moved to town and attempted to buy the woman’s childhood home, thinking this would court a winning number. Others filled the rooms of motels, staying for as long as it took them to realize it was more expensive than they could afford, pouring their meager savings into the state of Texas in hopes it would return the favor. 

They came from nearby towns at first then from Oklahoma and New Mexico. They arrived by bus or car, a trickle of true believers lining up to be blessed by the ATM. A whole town economy flourished from a rumor verified as fact by state investigation. Ms. Bae, her son Tren, her daughter Loula, the waitresses at the Lodestar Cafe or Denny’s, were treated as privileged representatives of cosmic powers channelling through the unremarkable but very real portal of the Town Market: here is where luck grew like weeds or wildflowers. The longer these visitor stayed in town, the longer they loitered within the vicinity of Ms. Bae’s convenience store, they more they breathed it and became it. Powerball, Mega Millions, Pick 3, Daily 4, Cash Five, All or Nothing, payable by annuity or one-time payout. Some, before they stepped in line at the Town Market in the morning, drove by the woman’s childhood home to tear a handful of grass, fill their pockets with it. Others carried photos of her in their purses or wallets. Joan Ginther, patron saint of sudden affluence. All left poorer than they arrived, but contrived explanations for why they had not been graced with good fortune, solid errors on their part which could be righted with a little effort on their part, next time. An unlikely reversal of the common pattern, as if ticks attached themselves to a host body for the privilege of being drained. Having drawn a tick’s-worth of blood into itself, the body shed them, husks brittle and dry, freshly infused with what little they had to offer. Elsewhere Texas’ most famous mystery sips her morning coffee in the modestly-sized kitchen of a home in southwest Las Vegas, on Paradise Drive. 

Halfway across the world, at Lourdes, the infirm and hopeful wait in lines dressed in white cloth robes. They have travelled from across oceans and over clouds to be healed of their maladies, as advertised. Belief has brought them there, to be laid in baths of mountain spring water, which apparently have restored hearing to the deaf, sight to the blind, dissolved cancers instantly. The story goes: once there was a country girl who was beset upon by visions of the Virgin Mary and these visions led her to discover a mountain spring. This spring, virgin itself, just as the girl was, proved a healer of anyone who dipped a hand in it, to sip its waters. Within a century or so the legend became an industry for the religion that sold it. The desperate and unwell sought supernatural treatment there and received a bath instead. Some well-known exceptions were cured of their illness, displayed their bodies as evidence: the impossible could happen, look at them. These outliers were hope incarnate and could hardly be doubted. To doubt them would be to give up on oneself.

Disappearer

I have to disappear again, within me a discerning voice is saying. Whenever I hear it, it’s as if I’m overhearing. I’m not the one it’s talking to per se; it’s conversing with itself but I'm the ear. I know: confusing. But maybe you have a similar companion, a voice that rides along within you through your days and nights. Some evenings it keeps me up when I’d rather sleep. Some nights it even wakes me. Then I have to lay awake listening to it sort through its various concerns, deliberating. 

This is what it’s been saying lately: I have to disappear again. Implying I’ve disappeared at least once before, if not many times before. Implying each time I returned from hiding and resumed the course of a life unchanged. 

Hushed. But not purposefully conspiratorial. Casual, unbothered, like a person confiding their most private thoughts at a volume common to a regular speaking voice, drowned out by the loud chaotic conversation of a crowded room. Now that I’m describing it, I can almost remember: of course I’ve heard this before, of course I’ve overheard directives issued between one unseen part of myself and another. It’s true, I’ve been visible for too long, I’ve grown too accustomed to being counted among people of a crowd. If they could hear me, the voice that’s talking and the ear that’s listening, I would try and interject. I’d ask questions. Why? And what would happen if I didn’t? It’s a scary prospect to not know what might transpire if you don’t disappear and soon, as some voice within you suggests. 

It seems in the very nature of voices and ears they’re immune to interventions by their host consciousness. That could be a good thing, I don’t know. It means I always have someone else to listen to, someone secretly myself I don't quite identify with. They talk and talk and listen and listen and usually they’re camouflaged by distraction or my interest in louder, more outward conversations. Just because I’m their privileged audience, doesn’t mean what’s said is accurate or insightful or wise. The voice sometimes seems caught up in playing with phrases, testing slight but semantically expansive variations on simple themes. “The hand that feeds can starve the dog.” “The dog that bites feeds the hand.” Dog and hand and biting and feeding, basic elements of a conceit shuffled until they return to their original cliché, the dog that bites the hand. Listen long enough to that kind of talk, it leaves you feeling like you’re chasing a tail you didn’t know you had in the first place. But there’s the sense that ignoring the voice would invite misfortune. It speaks from a hidden place and weathers many a change undergone by human imagination. It is not holy, nor is it prophetic, of this I’m certain, but don’t ask me how. It’s as mortal as any mole in the ground, tending its tunnels. It’s a fellow traveller to selfhood, not quite its shadow. As you see, the nearer I draw towards it, the more descriptions break down. 

There was a woman once, books now tell us of her, the quality of her mind and the grave tragedy of her life. She starved herself in solidarity with the suffering of commoners, thinking it would somehow stall the hand of fate, which was always busy, it seemed to her, undoing lives at a far distance from her own comfort. It was not fair, it was not kind. An ecstatic horror, this was, living and breathing. Since she could not control the whims of worldly punishment, she controlled what passed from hand to mouth, food and water. The more malnourished and skinny she became, the more her skull glowed with righteousness. Throughout all that, who knows what the voice in her head was saying. The books tell us she perished and maybe it was a blessing her consciousness didn’t outlast her body, for then it might glean final proof that her death changed nothing the woman and her voice had been most concerned about. Removing herself from living company, nothing was brought back to an even and moral level. The voice, though, survived. Shedding itself of a woman, it endured as a prose style and an ethical meander, losing track of a few core themes in one book so later in another it might once again find them. I mention this because not too infrequently, hearing my own voice within me ramble on about this or that, it seems to catch a rhythm that resembles this woman at her most even-keeled or metaphysically pragmatic. Don’t mistake what I’m describing, she’s in no way within me, nor has her voice leapt bodies like a flea, to ensure further feeding and survival. My suspicion is my voice, and maybe anyone’s voice, is a skilled mimic and entertains itself by striking up small instances of otherness within itself. Anything for the ear that has been assigned to it, anything to confuse the host consciousness cursed with the task of overhearing it. In the case of this starved woman and her voice and its books and of my voice pleasuring itself through the adoption of tones unnatural to it, those of a resolute ascetic sternness, their differences have blended over time until they’ve achieved an ambiguous sameness. I’m at an equal distance from each of them and can affect none of them. For better or worse, I’m their shared habitat, one that can’t withhold nutrients or fair weather from them. And when I pause for a long while to listen, this is what they tell each other: it’s time to disappear again. Me first, the rest of them along with me. 

Head still, body still. Room quiet and expansive as a house around me. I’m listening. I’m in preparation for the beginning of a disappearance. As always, it will take more than hours, well more than a day or two. I’m not so skilled at self-effacement it can happen instantaneously. A wandering mind is a luxury I can’t enjoy when concentrating on achieving incremental, part-by-part removal from collective awareness, beginning first with me, the most immediate surveyor of my present intersubjective fleshiness, this personhood chained to the culture that feeds it. The less cluttered my surroundings, the more cleanly I hear voice and ear conversing. They’re in imitation mode currently, reciting from memory a passage from the long-gone woman’s oeuvre. Familiar. Heard it before. Heard it many times. Each pass through it rendering it differently, variations in phrasing and pauses. But voice to ear, the gist of its descriptions are roughly the same no matter how old I am, regardless who I am or where I am when I'm made to listen.  

Like this. 

The condition in which one person and another find themselves, no matter which people and what condition, are not unlike those of prisoners isolated in separate cells. There are walls between them and they are real. Such is the thickness of the walls that no speaking or even shouting can travel through them without losing clarity of words. So to communicate with one another prisoners must be satisfied with mere tapping, tap-tapping in code through iron or concrete. Without walls there would be no medium through which vibrations might travel, no hard surfaces against which taps might be conjured. The very obstructions that secure their isolation from one another are means of communication. Or, as the woman’s voice had expressed once quite memorably, “Every separation is a link.” On many an occasion while working hard to achieve and maintain a disappearance, I’ve questioned the universality of this sentiment. I’ve wondered whether it was intended to be true in all cases. Between people and their voices, I can see. Between many people and their own unique arrays of strangers and acquaintances, maybe. Maybe, but always? From a wholly disappeared position, when I look around, I see plenty of evidence to the contrary. I see adjoining cells uninterested in their walls, prisoners content to tap their own foreheads. I see these and am unhappy with the implications, phrased often as a single chastened question, Is this me? 

To be a model prisoner, or a troublemaker. To celebrate the appearance of a guard at the door, or to protest their presence with sullenness and a refusal to converse. The door is opened, the cafeteria is waiting. An hour in the yard or in the gym is available for the agreeable. How necessary are walls if simple compliance can lead a person to a room full of faces? Few are trustworthy. Few are honestly smiling. Behind each there is another voice, a covert fellow traveller talking. There is an ear that doesn’t require bending. They are equal to your own predicament, I tell myself, having vanished after long effort into full immersion with my surroundings. It’s me who’s telling this to myself, not a voice within but separate from how I feel and think. Beneath registers of witness or regard, voice and ear have edged near enough to become indistinguishable from the person I am, who rarely knows much for certain and certainly can’t speak for others who can’t see or hear him. Prisoners beyond their cells tend to bring the cells with them and the silences between them are a kind of tapping. Each disappear into themselves at their peril. If they leave, they might never return. If they come back after a long absence, there might not be much to come back to. I would do well to follow their example. Silence in the head affirms this is wisdom: it can be broken.

A Maker

There are very few written accounts of it by our most accomplished practitioners, joy. Joy or simple contentment. From my observations about their words on the matter, it seems these are taken as suspect, evidence of soft-headedness, tender-heartedness, so many indulgences. For the longest while I considered myself among the chastened. Was this me? I was but a humble maker, my name never quite aspiring to be writ among their own. Was I a dim-wit, naive for thinking these were among the more difficult, hard-to-reach corners of shared experience, the rarest, most fugitive of our natural resources? I have met and known people without these reservations. Their resolute faith in the primacy of happiness or joy did not seem to me willful ignorance on their part, unearned. Usually these were people who had felt the full press of fate’s weight upon them. They seemed to me to have every right to employ bitterness as a compass, to navigate the twists and turns of a life. But these people were rare exceptions, they held to a discipline more steadfast than ego could provide. They would not allow their enjoyment of what little was left of them to be taken away, for it seemed even the thieves would not benefit from such deprivation.

As I’ve grown older and subtly more deaf and blinder, I’ve become more inclined to listen to myself on the matter, less awed by ones who exercise authority through dismissiveness or the polishing of harsh absolutes. I have seen pits where the bodies of my fellow travelers have been thrown, decapitated, disemboweled. I have heard the testimonies, first-hand, of children forcibly disrobed and violated by elders they had every right to assume were their protectors. To my surprise I’ve even become immune to the dogmatism of self-styled decadents, the way they require valuation of pleasure above all other concerns, implying whosoever balks at following their lead into the next thrill must be a wallflower, unworthy of serious consideration. These are loud and busy times. Strong poorly-formulated opinions come from every direction, needle-sharp. Any single exposed consciousness first becomes a pin-cushion then an effigy, a comment-doll. The doll a smaller version of ourselves, though we’re the ones holding it. We’re the ones who orchestrate a chill from fence-sitters and passersby, who taste sharp and lasting pain when needle slips into mind. We can’t help ourselves; if handed a needle, we can hardly deny it a resting place in the head or leg or groin or torso.

Of course, of course. Horrors are plentiful as fruits in the produce section of a supermarket. I buy and eat my share. I do so knowing, yes, I’m no different. I feed my health consuming them. Moreover, I’m not so green as to disbelieve these arrived here in organized fashion of their own accord. They were seeded, nurtured, harvested. They were boxed and those boxes were stacked in trucks and in cargo holds of airplanes or ships, were transported from faraway locales to be unpacked by grocers, stacked, arranged in alluring poses that please and tempt the eye. The bright arrays of color, supple diversity of forms... 

Cursed with such a banquet, it’s not enough to attempt a fast, I’ve learned. To selectively starve oneself among abundance harms the abundance not at all. Nor does it cease toxic plentitude from arriving each day, accumulating and proliferating. 

To commit oneself in the opposite direction, then, to gorge oneself. Does that work? I’ve found this option even less useful. A distended abdomen, nausea, long nights of regurgitation: these are usually the outcome.  

Both options have been investigated at length by the more confident wholesale disparagers among my peers, and the efforts have only left them more resentful, more certain in their dim estimations of the herd. They sound uncomfortably similar to the religious fanatics of my youth, who I was raised among. Their view of human nature would seem to align with the rigid logic of original sin: we are damned and unworthy from the outset and must earn our way free from the ugly gravity of our inherent fallenness. More certainty. More pushiness. More reduction of messily contradictory phenomena such as people into concepts, tools for self-aggrandizement at the expense of others. Maybe this is an unfair characterization. Maybe I am illustrating the very habits I am warning myself against perpetuating unconsciously. If that is the case, very well then. I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself counted among the un-flawless. 

Like certain species of mushroom or plankton, it seems some people give off light; light that requires a consistently dark environment to be rendered visible. What evolutionary purpose does it serve? The attraction of mates? Protection from predators? Is it selfish if it’s written into genetic awareness that giving off light ensures a longer life and a more diverse, numerous family line? It’s what they know by habit, isn’t necessarily even something they consciously will or choose. They survive not by singling out or punishing others, though this is not to say many of their kind are not ruinous. Some release ruination into the world like spores, as if it were the most natural thing, as if it were written into their cells, an expression of evolutionary fitness no less elementary and clever than bio-luminescence. To take root in their vicinity is to suffer a temperament helpless before the demands of its own greediness. Ignoring them is no reliable tactic for surviving them. Though it might be for a time. Hiding is not full-proof either. Unsatisfied with themselves, often they will come looking. 

Dolls, fruit, bio-luminescent mushrooms. The round of forms and transformations that drive the issue bring me no closer to the main point, which I have held onto, kept to myself, thinking secrecy would protect me. Now that I’m free and present and held in confidence by the passing moment, it seems I’ve forgotten what once had seemed of such importance I had no choice but to express it. Take this, maybe, as a comment on the value of expressiveness in general. It is not what is said about what is done, so much as what is done in lieu of saying. Talkers such as myself have for the longest while flattered themselves with the presumption that utterance was akin to action. I think here of certain people who have made a place for small kindnesses without need for commentary. The commentary would have called attention to the kindness instead of how it had brought together, briefly, two people who could have easily continued along on separate ways without witnessing a part of themselves in the other. Witnessing this, appreciating it, both are honored by a gesture of modest decency. It is less important they describe the exchange than they carry it along through the next moment. 

Now and then I have forgotten to count myself among them. In my foolishness, in my enthusiasm at coining yet another fine phrase, I mistook self-inflation for an honest measure of my size and suffered, as I should have, a string of embarrassments as a result; when I caught sight of the shadow beneath me and was ashamed: how shamelessly it aspired to be larger than what it purportedly cared for. Every youth should be allowed its indiscretions. Embarrassment was useful, it served me well. But since youth is over I’ve found it equally useful to set it aside. My instincts have been educated; behaviors are somewhat clairvoyant; before potential mistakes can reach me, now I can anticipate them, sidestep them not with grace or pride but with observant carefulness. These mistakes arrive equally from the past as from the future. I apologize for indiscretions by not committing them. The rest is given over to common life, like rotting banana peels and used coffee grounds to a compost pile. Something unforeseen might grow from it, months from now. If it does, it would be improper for me to take credit. Consider me a man without a mouth who can still muster a disarming smile. What I lack lays the foundation for what I can offer. This being the defining quality of a maker who blends himself into an upwelling of lasting or impermanent forms through self-effacement. It’s not the name I have, or the name I could become, but the distance between the name and what transpires beneath the ice of its fixedness. It’s my hope one day children will take their parents out on it for a skate. The ice is firm, the flow below now solid. Here is a safe place to carve curlicues from movement and free play. What’s a name worth if it can’t provide that? 

This last transformation has brought me back, I see, to my original point. The underrepresented dangers of joy and contentment, even among the comfortably embittered. Is it the case what a maker gives must inevitably be taken from others? If I made myself, then, what does that make me? To come good on what I have borrowed, to ensure foremost it has been borrowed and not stolen. Is it skillfully made? Does it unsettle expectations? Does it please the mind? Does it break confidence in the mind’s make-believe sovereignty? Does it move it to be less than certain? Does it move it beyond what it aspires to control and account for, towards a generosity that frightens it slightly for leaving it at the foot of others slightly more vulnerable and informed than it was before? Who would come along, if it did? Who would pick it up? Would they be a person of quality, trustworthy? They wouldn’t know until they were taken in hand and carried along. Until they felt with a certain helplessness what kind of purpose they were put towards. What they brought into the lives of others, as servants of their whims or tools. This is if they are lucky and are picked up at all. The rest will be abandoned where they are waiting. Half-fearful at who might come along and admire them, the remainder fearful of who might not come along, leaving them to question whether they are worthy of being noticed or ignored. Joy is not caring. Contentment is freedom from not wondering why it would matter. There is a difference between the two, rendered subtle so it can later become obvious, then once discerned, available to be forgotten once again, returned to its native subtlety. Like grass given meaning by its near vicinity to a headstone. Mowed by groundskeepers, it sheds its symbolism and takes flight briefly, then lands elsewhere where its brethren lay equally shredded. One blade keeps another company, drying in the sun. Crickets nearby sing without knowing.