Eames (plagiaristic) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-08-15 19:55:00 |
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Saint hadn’t looked for an apartment when he picked his story and (as a byproduct) Las Vegas. He had thought first of the cameras, of bathrooms without windows that could be rigged as temporary darkrooms and of space for a backdrop and lights. He had picked a rental agent out of the first newspaper he had found at random and thoroughly irritated her with his aimless walk through empty apartments, his hands worked deep into his pockets and a pleasant, uninterested smile for all the patter on floor plans and bijou dining areas, or even areas of nightlife. The apartment he’d picked was in an area enthusiastically called up-and-coming which meant a lot of young people and a lot of noise and sound and movement outside, and Saint didn’t care or he didn’t notice that up-and-coming also meant riddled with less significant crime and petty thefts. There was nothing in the apartment worth stealing, besides the cameras and if he was out, so were they. It was a mess just then, Saint careless with anything that wasn’t needed or necessary and there wasn’t a clock on the walls to say that he was late. The mattress shoved close to the wall was a mess of rumpled, plain-colored covers and a half-pulled out screen almost hid it from view but not quite, woven bamboo stained sober-dark. There were plates and empty mugs, all the cheap and unimaginative plain white that was a box at a store scattered around, and a rucksack lay kicked into a corner, one leg of a pair of jeans trailing out of the edge. There was a kitchenette, all bare spot of tile floor and a sink and something that called itself an oven tucked to the right just inside the door, but that was all the living there was in the place. The central living room with its wide windows onto the street below and the bar sign that glared neon into the room that the agent had optimistically called ‘spacious and roomy’, was white sheets laid carefully and with painstaking neatness over the carpet and tacked down to smooth out any wrinkles. It was white sheets taped to the walls and a large, industrial-looking lamp, shiny chrome and wide, unlit bulb and a shade at the window that glinted white and reflective. It was five, ten minutes past the point at which he’d agreed to meet Wren in the street below when Saint dropped the day-old takeout in its white, waxy box onto the counter and ran, socked-feet and jeans riding low on hips and the threadbare pale of a shirt that had been washed too much over a vest that looked packet-creased, to the door. “I forgot,” he said, and he smiled as if that were impossible to do, “I don’t have a phone. Or a watch. Or a clock, actually. But I will.” Wren was on time. She liked being on time, even if it meant multiple bus transfers and leaving her volunteer job at TAPS early. Sometimes, she drove, but gas was expensive, and she was being very, very careful about money now. Luke's police cruiser got filled by the police department, and it was cheaper for her to use her transit card than waste on gasoline in the old, used car Luke had acquired when Gus had come to live with him. And so, Wren was on time. She was standing outside the building in a yellow sundress that was older than the dress she'd worn to meet him at the teahouse. It was flared and soft, and she had put on weight since she'd seen him for tea, the weeks in a tent behind her. She filled the dress out almost too snugly these days, even with the thin cardigan she wore overtop. Her blonde hair was pulled back, and she looked bright and healthy, despite the faded clothing. Her feet were tucked in worn flats, and she had the old camera he'd given her tucked into a large bag that hung from one shoulder. "It's okay," she said easily, moving forward when he stepped out onto the sidewalk. "I was just people watching." Which wasn't precisely true. She was worrying her lower lip and thinking, with a little people watching thrown in. But her smile was genuine, even as she squinted up and blocked the sun with her hand. Someone else might have thought it was strange, him not having a way to tell time, but Wren had lived a nomadic life until recently, and she wasn't actually dependant on any of those things. She needed other things, sentimental things that she kept tucked away and ready to move in a moment. And she'd been doing more of that lately, packing things away, her own version of safety in the easiness of fleeing, even though she didn't think she could actually do it anymore. She twirled the ring on her finger unthinkingly, and she looked up at the building. "There's some film in the camera," she told him. She'd snapped thoughtless pictures of Gus and the dogs, of children in the park, of the girls at TAPS, bruised and worn down by life and men and sex. It was an odd collection of images, but she figured he'd want something to develop. And she'd checked on the internet first, checked about how safe the developing solutions were, about whether or not she should stay away from them. "Is this where you work?" Saint was not a tall man; he was lanky as tall men might be and the muscle on his body was thin and hard but he was not tall particularly and when his chin tipped down to consider her, his eyes were almost on the same level as Wren’s own. They were friendly, an obvious pleasure in seeing her that was small and quiet but no less there and he brushed a hand over the edge of her wrist, the skim of warm palm brief but affectionate. She looked vibrant, strong colors and solid lines where Wren had once (and he had thought at the teahouse, still) been the soft carbon flicks of a pencil, uncertain. He was not a doctor and he was not an expert, but he looked. Whatever he thought he kept quiet, and he smiled at her instead, peacefully. “I’m sorry,” he said with a shrug of the shoulders that managed to convey both shame at his lacking and mild dismay that time was so very important, “Anyone interesting to look at?” He thought the street full of people was very much interesting but perhaps Wren, in her soft dress and her sunshine hair and her way of pulling the eye, would not wish to linger overlong and he turned back through the narrow corridor that ran down the side of the barfront on the street, and up the thin flight of stairs. “It’s where I live,” he said, pausing, and he grinned, “And where I work. What kind of photos?” His voice filtered back; Saint moved quickly, when he had decided to do so, with the kind of speed that was contained energy let loose. "I don't know. I thought so, but I don't think it always translates right," she said of the camera's square finder and the people she liked to put inside it. She'd been playing with a digital camera she'd gotten for free on craigslist for weeks, and she'd learned a few things. Small things, like the fact that pictures weren't as striking when the subject was in the middle, not if there were other things there, and a little off-center was generally best. She'd learned she liked tight shots of faces, unpretty things, especially with the girls at the safehouse. And she found she liked Gus best when he didn't know she was looking at him, when he was just a little boy that wasn't trying to give her a special smile for the camera. Children and passersby, those she liked best in movement, blur and bright colors that refused to wash in the Las Vegas sun. But on the digital camera, she could snap and snap and snap, never stopping until she found just the right picture. With this camera, she had to wait, and she had no idea how the things on the film would be. She followed him into the narrow corridor, and it was a sign of trust that she did. She wasn't very good at new people, all wide greys and distrust that was mirrored perfectly by the little boy captured on the film. But she'd known Saint when she was low, and time made her trusting in a way nothing else ever did. So, she followed without worry, and the thin walk earned all of her attention. Her hand slid along the wall that abutted the thin staircase, and her fingertips slid along bumps and dividers with tiny catches that made the place feel real to her. She was slower than him, and she didn't rush, even when his longer legs lead him well ahead of her. "Some of my son, some of the girls where I work, some of children at the park. I just snapped at whatever looked interesting," she admitted. "How do you decide?" she asked, and the curiosity in her voice was genuine. She'd stopped going to school before middle-school even became a thought, and her education had been at the hands of men and etiquette books and her maman's strange notions about the kind of deportment schooling that a girl needed to become a rich man's mistress - pianos and waltzes and Lolita. This was something new, something with rules, and she wanted to learn them. "How have you been?" she asked belatedly, in a rush, remembering her manners as she reached the landing. Saint was not an artist who had been schooled anywhere in what looked well and what did not; he had not been to school where they spoke of color theory and compositions nor had he read much in the intervening years between beginning to learn and beginning to earn. He had read a great deal since, but he didn’t agree at all with the notion that there were things you photographed and things you did not. He had paused at the top of the stairs to wait for her, all creased denim that managed to look well-worn but also somehow clean, and crumpled shirt pushed up to the elbows and he smiled as she came past the last five stairs to the top of the landing. The door was ajar and the studio (he thought of it as a studio, not as an apartment, and it showed) lay beyond, the warm gold haze of the light through the windows against all that white. He did not look as if he minded, her slower journey; his eyes had caught on where her fingers trailed the wall and his eyebrows drew upward and together, a sharp flicker of interest. He did not care overmuch about manners; once she was at the top of the steps, he stepped through into the place itself and he did not fuss with greetings. Wren had always looked as if touching her might shatter what was left of her and so he did not; Saint was by nature hands and cheeks and the surprisingly solid warmth of his arm rolled over a shoulder briefly but present, but he was careful now, and he looked at her in the new and clear light of the studio where the space was stripped down to make looking easier, to enable a lens to look just as closely. He saw the hollows in her cheeks had filled and he saw the way the dress clung, the way she had acquired health as rapidly and surprisingly as she had everywhere else. Saint’s gaze was soft and brief and sweeping as the strokes of a paintbrush, quick and light and without obvious invasion; he thought he knew, but he said nothing to the girl who had once been a muse but was now something else. “I don’t,” he said now of decisions, and he leaned against the counter with an ease in the space that would have been the same if he’d lived there a decade. “I pick up the camera. I look. It decides.” His shoulder lifted, dropped; it was that simple. But he watched her; “Not everyone does it. Like that. There are books. Rules.” Saint’s mouth tugged upward at one corner, it managed to express in a small but very clear way how little he thought of rules in art. “Fine,” he said easily, his hands in his pockets as he tilted his hips back against the counter. His big toe was working a hole in the toe of his left sock, he hadn’t noticed. Saint was always fine. She looked around his space with the same interest that she had given to the staircase. She didn't go many new places now. Her life had become something steady and grounded in a way she'd never expected it, and there was a pleasure and safety in that which showed on her cheeks. Once, there had been absolutely no assurances from day to day, and now there were. There was fear that was nearly constant, but it was a different fear. It was fear of loss, fear of change, fear of things falling apart and crumbling to pieces at her feet. It was a different kind of fear than the numb and resigned fear from when he'd known her. After looking around the eclectic studio, she looked back at him. Away from the sun and its washing brightness, other things were visible. Blood dotted the corner of her mouth, a recent remnant of Selina's life through the door. Bruises were visible at her clavicle, beyond the soft pallor of the cardigan she wore, fingers and a thumb, things from Luke holding on too tight. Her lips were gloss and worry-bitten, and there was still something of unraveling to her, even with the smile and the fullness to her features and body. She didn't know if she let the camera decide anything, or if she tried to make decisions for it, and she cocked her head to the side as she considered. Pale blonde slid along one shoulder, and she finally shook her head a little. "I'm not sure which way I do it," she admitted. "When you look at the pictures, will you be able to tell?" she asked, and she reached into her bag and retrieved the camera. She held it out to him with a steady hand and long, pale fingers, an offering that she had been hoarding for days. She'd never had something she liked to do for herself, and she was protective of the film and the images captured there. She glanced down at his feet, the color of flesh against that white of his sock making her smile. Before he had a chance to do anything, she pulled the camera back from him, and she quirked a brow before pointing it at him. It was a request for permission, and she bit her lower lip as she waited. "You can't say you're fine. You have to pick another word. Fine is what people say when they're being asked out of politeness. It's not a real answer. Not really, oui?" He looked straight at the camera, suddenly the shoulders lifted and the points of his elbows sharpened, and the limbs seemed ill-fitted and both too long and too short all at once in an awkward conglomeration that did not look well on film. Saint was utterly relaxed with the lens turned the other way, but he looked patient despite the suddenly gawky and slightly pained way he bore under its examination, as though it were a known but disliked side-effect that could be lived through temporarily. The statement however alleviated things. He gave it thought, and his teeth curled over his lower lip; he enjoyed new viewpoints and he considered this one now, slowly, carefully. It was a shuttered thing, Saint’s thinking, it was closed off and impossible to tell what exactly was ticking over but the faint impression that he was doing so - he looked at her, solemn in brown eyes and when he spoke it was seriousness, the care of something one is trying to do right. “I was late and I don’t like being late. When other people care. About time,” the staccato skipped and stuttered; Saint’s voice was softer than perhaps it was expected to be with the smoky indistinction of cigarettes, quiet watching and the chemical murk of the dark-room (bathroom) just beyond the edge of the counter. “I’m healthy. I’m at peace,” I-statements, disjointed and as awkward as the way the man appeared through the viewfinder of the camera, notched themselves together like a child’s necklace, familiar but at once awkward. Saint didn’t think he needed to be much other than either one to be ‘fine’ and it was apparent along with the surprise that she wished to know in the first place. Wren’s hesitancy over the right way of doing things or that there needed to be a way at all reminded him of the girl in Boston, of cups of tea bought so that he could study the way her angles worked, and he reached for the camera with blunt fingertips and soft care, examining the lens with the routine thoughtlessness of one who was considered about equipment by rote. “Possibly. I don’t know. Not until I see them. It’s done in the dark. Bag. Pocket sometimes.” She snapped a picture of his feet, toe and sock, the camera pointing down slowly, and she smiled at him after the click, as she handed the camera out again, the expression on her face the slightest bit shy at having asked to take the picture. "I don't really mind time. I never cared about it at all. I would wake up whenever I felt like it, and I would work until I was done and tired and couldn't think anymore. But having a little boy means I look at my watch now. It was hard to get used to at first, and I was late a lot, but he gets scared when he thinks we've forgotten him. I pay attention now," she admitted, and it was a lot of words strung together for her. "He's at preschool, so it's okay." She added, not wanting him to worry. She had nowhere to go just then. Luke would pick Gus up after work. But it was a very, very different life from her previously nomadic existence, and she was still growing accustomed to it a little. She considered being healthy. She considered being at peace. There was something old in her eyes, something too knowing in the grey, something that said she knew that wasn't the same as happy. And maybe it was better not to know happy, because that was where the fear came from, from the knowing. You had to understand something to fear losing it, she thought, and she understood. Maybe Saint didn't understand. Or, maybe he understood what it looked like through a lens, but not what it felt like against his skin. "Can we see?" she asked of the pictures, nodding toward the camera again and wiping that smudge of blood from the corner of her mouth. He wanted the camera just then, he wanted to take the picture that was the bruises that mapped her throat like a painting done in water on silk, or the bead of blood that had been a ruby at her mouth. Saint wasn’t violent and he didn’t know violence well other than taking pictures but he thought perhaps the traceries of it on Wren were worn like veins beneath the skin, like something that shouldn’t be natural but was there all the same. The blood smeared away into nothing beneath her thumb, and he wanted that picture too, in the old familiar itch that was the camera and Wren and the way he knew her best, in black and white and gray, the way he knew best to translate people to make sense of them. He listened instead, to an explanation of a life transposed up a key, a different language and he listened to the spaces between the words. He heard her voice lilt in a way he hadn’t heard before when she spoke of the little boy, and he heard the concern, the care and consideration as she explained why he shouldn’t worry over time before he’d thought about where the little boy was just then. His eyes crinkled at the corners, “You’re happy,” he translated, and he sounded as if he were thinking that over, what pieces and photographs filled the track between the woman he’d first met who had been a girl and fear so thick it was a taste on the tongue, and the woman who was so strongly living that she stood on that white like a beacon. He sounded pleased, he sounded as though her happiness were a present he liked very much. And then he peeled away from the counter and toward the little bathroom. It was small and he’d changed the yellow bulb out for one all red. There was a board over the sink, a board on which stood the enlarger and a hose ran from the faucet down to a pan of water and three empty pans propped against the wall, on the floor. The toilet was an afterthought, and the shower rail had been re-appropriated, a long string of photographs pinned up with care to dry. There were all subjects and all places in Saint’s photographs, the top-heavy trees and the hemmed-in wild of New England recognizable in some and the spread-apart abandon of Nevada and California in others. There were women; the corner of a face, the flash of a rimmed eye and a tattoo that spread across her cheek pinned up next to a picture of two old, carefully-dressed men playing backgammon outside what looked to be a general store, the windows filled with notices and advertisements and posters, in deckchairs. He paid them no notice, he reached instead for a bundle of black cloth from the cupboard beneath the sink, and a plastic lidded-pot, and when he was satisfied they were arrayed in front of him, he produced a dead film cannister from his pocket. “It takes practice,” he said, by way of explanation. “Have to see. With your fingers. Or it can go wrong. I’ll show you. But don’t want to ruin them. Let me this time?” He held out his hand for the camera. "I am," she said quickly, easily, as if the answer might change if she didn't say it really fast. And she was happy. And she was sure. She could tell he was thinking, and it made her smile, the fact that she'd surprised him somehow or given him something unexpected. "I didn't think it would happen either," she admitted. Because how could either of them have expected something like this? Him with his stark pictures of her, homeless and pregnant and sick? And she'd never expected any kind of life. Her maman had told her that lives were for other people, and not for them, and she'd believed the teenage girl who had burned through everything by thirteen. "Have you ever been?" she asked as he peeled away, and she followed him toward the bathroom. "Not content. Not healthy. Happy." Curious questions, yes, but she'd wondered even then. And, now that she'd been talking to him again, she still wondered. He didn't sound like a disaster. He didn't sound like the world had treated him ill, or like he'd broken into shards that had never been set quite right again. But she didn't hear happy, and maybe happy was just different for everyone. He'd told her, once, that he'd had people in his life. She wondered if he still did, or if this was his life entirely. And she knew her own life was so very, very tiny. She was pancakes in the morning and sticky fingers in the syrup and walking the dogs. And she was waiting by windows at night and listening to the news obsessively, knowing the person she couldn't live without was out there with a gun and Death on his shoulder. Her life was small, and it was selfish, and he would probably win a thousand awards and do amazing things. He'd see things she never would, and she wondered if that was happy. She handed him the camera absently, once they reached the converted bathroom, too caught up in the images hanging to pay attention to the fall of his fingers. She stepped close to them, and she examined in the odd light. Her nose almost touched the flat surfaces, and she had to stretch, and she barely heard his indication of things requiring practice. She wondered how he caught expressions just right. How he caught feelings, even with inanimate things. These weren't pictures; this was art and truth. The photographs captivated her the way the old postcards she still kept wrapped away in a chest did. They spoke, and she adored them. Saint liked definitions as often as he liked things that lacked it. Definitions could be pried apart and the pieces examined and put back together like clockwork and the secret of how they moved and operated learned and reapplied. He did not know exactly what ‘happy’ was but he knew that she looked it, the animus of her eyes very light and the care with which her body moved through air like a sail belled out precisely as it should. Wren was no longer apologetic for existing, elbows sharp and collarbone knotted with the burden of knowing what it was to be unwanted or inconvenient and he liked that very much in a simple way that did not require additional examination. He knew that healthy and at peace remained components of happiness, and that he was both those things and he knew that they were striven for long after happiness was won by others; he’d seen restlessness and discontentment and ill-health from people who avowed happiness in a way that made him mistrust the word. His hands were firm on the camera and sure, he looked as confident as a doctor with a patient as he flicked upward the small silver lever that wound forward the film and wound it on again until the film cannister clicked closed. The back of the camera opened, and the cannister slid out as smoothly as butter into his hand; the black bag contraption rustled as Saint put his hands, the small container and the cannister inside and his elbows moved as his hands began to work beneath the cloth. “I’m not unhappy,” a lock or two of the mussed, dark hair fell across his forehead as he looked back over his shoulder at her, with a small, darting smile that more than indicated he knew that was not the answer she sought out. The string of photographs was in front of another, and another, places and people a jumble like a jigsaw box tossed upon the floor and muddled. “What does happiness mean to you?” A neat sideways stepping of the question but he did not look sly, when he looked up once again, the film now apparently inside the cannister and the black bag bundled away like a magic trick now completed. He looked distracted but the brown eyes were somehow at once soft and warm and willing to understand, to learn her truth from her if she gave it. She gave up her perusal of the hanging pictures once he took the camera into his hands with purpose. She swayed toward him, and then she moved closer, hip near his and the smell of Vegas sunlight on her skin. She watched his hands as they flicked the lever, and she held her breath in order to hear the film wind. She looked at him when the click indicated the film was back where it had begun, and she looked down again when the cannister slid into his palm. Her attention was all for the cloth then, for what he was doing, her own memorization in an already planned attempt at emulation. If Jack was really going, she could use his room, she thought. She wasn't thinking ahead to December, when they'd need that room for something different. Well, if she managed to keep from fleeing, camera in hand and more failures in her wake. She feared that. She feared herself, and her happiness didn't change it. She remembered illness and fear and pain, and she screwed her eyes shut a moment and closed it out in favor of what he was doing. "I thought it was a lie once," she said of happiness, not bothering to fib as she might to other people. He'd known her when she'd believed that, and there was no point in not saying it. "I thought it was security. I thought it was a roof, and safety, and a belly that didn't grumble. Before that, I thought it was my maman and an old white house on Duval Street, but I knew that wasn't the happiness people talked about in books or songs. I thought that kind of happiness wasn't real. And, then, I thought I just couldn't feel it like other people do. Maybe I can't. Maybe what I feel isn't the same, but I wake up and I look forward to things, and that's stronger than the fear for the first time in my life." She had her head cocked to the side, and she was looking at his face now, regarding him like he was every bit as interesting as the hanging pictures and the film beneath his fingers. "I think unhappy is different. I don't think you look unhappy. You look like you exist," she explained. It was the best word she had for it. Lies were their own kind of truth. People told them when they meant something else, they told their truths in the way their eyes slanted away and down, a flicker of nerves or mendacity or something closer to satisfaction in the way they held their hands, their shoulders, the way they told their stories. The world had been built on the back of truths and lies, black and white, shadows and negatives and shades between. Saint heard Wren’s breath fall into silence for the heartbeat that was the lever twisting and his head was bent over the camera and the container but his smile was in his shoulders, in the stilling, slowing of his hands until she could see exactly how it went, exactly how it should be. He bent to the cabinet beneath the sink and a plastic measuring jug innocuous as kitchen equipment appeared like a magic trick, and a bottle of something liquid that he began to mix with water from the faucet of the bath. It was a dance; Saint knew precisely where it was Wren stood without looking, despite the smallest of spaces, he did not touch her but the warmth of his body, his skin briefly passed over hers as he reached around her, careful as courtiers. “You said. What it was,” he looked up, and his eyes on hers were brief, searching, “Is that what it is? Looking forward?” Saint thought he looked neither forward nor back but rather around, the moment observed for what it was. He knew happiness was real, he’d seen it in too many faces to count and he’d captured it in print and exhibitions, small blurred newsprint beside a story or a photograph blown up to fill a room. She did not look as though fear owned her, chased her with teeth through her dreams any longer, she was not thin and wan and timid and she spoke as if she knew things and was certain of her own knowing. Saint looked at her seriously, his attention intent and silvery-keen like a blade, “I think happiness is different. Different people. Happinesses. Or is it just one?” He looked as though he wanted her answer, as though it was as precious as something old, something valuable. The container swished between his palms, “Developing,” he explained. “Developer. Then water. Water again. Dry the film. Then we print.” A grin, shy and quick; “Takes time. It’s not quick. Not digital.” She watched him like a student would watch a respected scholar, all seriousness on her features and the kind of screwed-up attentiveness that said she had to work at remembering. She'd never been smart, and even the few years she'd been at school had been hard ones for her. Math didn't come easy, and science was gibberish. She didn't like reading very much, preferring things she could see and touch, over things she couldn't. She liked some books, but they were old and French with old bindings and older words. She liked the promise of them, not the content. She loved old movies and old music and old postcards with stamps from hundreds of places she would never see. She liked letters, because those words weren't fiction, even when they were. But rules and lessons, those were hard-won battles, and she was quiet as he worked, not wanting to miss even the slightest twitch of his fingers. "I think it's a feeling, and looking forward is part of it. I don't think unhappy people look forward to things much, unless it's not being unhappy anymore. Do you?" she asked curiously. "I think I understand unhappy better, still. Unhappy tastes like hunger gnawing at your ribs, even when you're very full. Unhappy is knowing you've lost things you can never get back. Unhappy is after, when there's nothing you can do but remember. I think unhappy remembers a lot, but not in the good way that you remember sunny days in the park where everyone was smiling. Existing is different. Maybe it doesn't hurt, but I think it's absence. You tell me?" she asked him, because she thought he lived there, in that place. She looked back at the swishing container between his hands. "How do I know how long it should take?" she asked, leaning close to see if she could make out anything on the print. Saint had never been schoolbooks and learning. He had sat at the back of a classroom and itched to be elsewhere, he had been quiet but dreamy, the disinterest in serious brown eyes had been polite but it had been present and he liked to know things a great deal but he didn’t reach for learning in books first. The weight of her gaze was at once solemn and soft and Saint moved beneath it like a knife sliding through butter, as if thought were required to slow a process that was now thoughtless. His hands were deft but they moved slower; the container swished, a flick of his wrist and the frothy mix of developer fluid and water ran down the sink and the water ran once more to refill it. “Cleans it,” he said without looking over his shoulder, “Keeps it turning dark. Can’t make contrast when it’s dark. Under-develop if you can’t get it.” He knew unhappy the way a man might read something on a page, it was there in too many faces for him not to know it at all. He knew it was fear and he thought it was anger and pain and doubt in equal measure. Anger was scrawled red ink over thin paper, that tore up rules if it could and lived jealously for itself. He contemplated existence, absence and he stood still, his hip tilted toward the sink and his mouth stilling, his eyebrows pulling down into a line and the eyes beneath quietly full. It was a minute before the shoulders moved, up-down, an apology fractured. “I think I’m happy in a different shade,” he said, as though it made perfect sense to think of happiness like a color spectrum, a wheel ticking over, “I remember things.” He smiled - kind, it curled at the edges of his eyes, a crinkle of lines there - and he poured out the water once again. “Want to?” He held it out to her to undo, to pull out the film like a conjurer’s trick, images in black and silver from a camera now pinioned onto silky film like butterflies forever fluttering instead of pinned. “Takes minutes,” he said now, in answer to her question, his hands butted against hers to push the container toward her fingers, “Three. Estimate. No rule.” He grinned again, it was in the slant of his shoulders, the tilt of his elbows; Saint smiled like it was a secret his whole body held. She nodded attentively, grey eyes fixed on the process and not looking up until he took a breath that indicated pause, a shift in the conversation that didn't require her to memorize things. "What do you remember?" she asked him, and she didn't try to keep the quiet skepticism out of her voice. She'd lived a numb life, and while she didn't think that was precisely what he carried on his shoulders, she thought it might be close. Quiet and numb, and maybe she'd become addicted to loud and messy along the way. It had been easy to be numb in the years without Luke and Gus, and she'd tried to find that sweet spot again here, in Las Vegas. But she'd learned that she couldn't burn and not care at the same time. Burning was terrifying, but she didn't think there was anything like it. And maybe that was a life of neglect talking. She knew she wasn't like normal people, and maybe he was. Maybe he was perfectly ordinary with his calm and quiet. It wouldn't have surprised her even a tiny bit. She nodded when he asked if she wanted to. She wanted to. She wanted to see the images come to life. She didn't even care if they were terrible, because they were real things, and that was all that mattered. Two of Gus at the park, eyes too old for his years and the beginnings of a tentative smile on his lips at a passing puppy. One of Luke asleep on the couch, still in his rookie browns and stubble on his cheek from a long double. Three of the girls at TAPS, crying and hugging and looking like they hated every single man in the world at the same time, for all their youth. A broken tooth in sharp close-up, a split lip. The door at the hotel, smooth and sleek for once, a Penthouse door and not one of Selina's normal slums, the opulent contrast to the dilapidated Passages hallway a stark, stark thing. Soup, a pot of it, bubbling on an inexpensive kitchen stove, the brown mussy hair of a little boy's head as he clung to a woman's leg as she stirred. The container was a ratchet of a lid with a spout in its center, to allow the water or developer to swish around its contents without exposing them to the light. Photographs, Saint thought, were like secrets; they could be ruined if they were told too early, they had to be kept in cupped hands, in darkness, they had to be kept from ruin the way secrets ruined people. He let her open it and he didn’t need to look past her shoulder to know what she would see; the spool that held the film in a spiral, twined around plastic to keep it in place. It would shimmer, oily with the drips of water that remained but now it would be light-proof, it would be possible to see. The red light was like a held breath, like the moment before you spoke aloud after a dream; Saint reached past, body angled so that his arm was a polite glance past her rather than intimacy of small places, and he pushed open the door so that the white true light of the room beyond spilled into the bathroom. “There,” he said, when he remembered. Saint drew quiet like iron drawn close in to a magnet, little pieces of it stilled around him. He had been that way since he was small, the considering look of a too-still boy who fell into thought in between the games other small boys played and who could be found looking for the seams by which his existence was pulled together. He remembered things in pictures; he remembered his mother’s lipstick, waxy on his fingers as he’d taken one of his first photographs of her becoming something other, sleeker, scent hanging around her like a cloud as she became something other than a mother at the seat before her dressing table. He remembered the faces of his friends, breath drawn in front of them like a gasp of stream above snow, laughter wrapped in wool. He remembered contentment, a little boy in a Buddhist garden who had a ball made of orange plastic, and who had wide eyes at all the quiet. He remembered tears, the pieces of a person as they drew themselves back into jagged partial-wholeness, eyes limned with smeared black. “I remember people,” he said as he watched the film uncurl like a ribbon, like a fish shivering on a line, “Faces. Places.” He looked unconcerned by her distinctions, the lines she drew in sand, gentle smile as he stepped across them, straddled just long enough to look back and see what shapes her face made when he did. “I take pictures. I like memory.” But he remembered graveyards carved out of fields, of bones spattered with mud, of a woman keening, hollow and hard, her skin tight to her face like desperation. Life was balance, happiness came with its own shadow. Saint reached, quiet fingers, and he pulled the corner of the film taut. “Got an eye.” It sounded approving. She watched, and she listened to him say what he remembered, and she tried to line it all up in her head. The process was messy in her mind, too absolute to easily catch and take. But she was good at rote, and she'd go home and ruin rolls upon rolls of film until she knew what the entire thing felt like between her fingertips, start to end. It was how she learned things. It was how she'd always learned things. From her maman's knee, while she sat on the floor in an old kitchen and twisted her maman's hem between her fingertips, to the feel of death beneath her fingers when she killed a man to protect something she couldn't bear to lose. Touch was, had always been, her teacher, and it would serve her well here, too. "I remember feelings. I remember how things felt when I touched them," she said, and it was clear she wasn't really thinking, too caught up in the pictures coming to life beneath his hands. "I always wanted to know what they felt like inside, but I never knew, so I tried to imagine. That's what I remember." It was, possibly, the most telling thing she'd ever said in her life. It stunk of sociopathy, even if she didn't realize it. It screamed of bad things before the age of three, when normal things finish forming in a child's mind. And she had no idea. She smiled at him, partially repaired and oblivious, despite having looked it all up once, after the party. Her smile turned into bright light when he said she had a good eye, and the serious ponderings of remembering were gone from her face. "Really?" she asked hopefully. She'd never been good at anything that wasn't sex, not really. He had learned by losing photographs he had loved, where only memory remained and where Saint let go of things by unclasping fingers, allowing things to leave it was a lesson learned and an acquired skill rather than nonchalance at doing so. He had lost pictures he had wished to keep in the glazed gray of a film spoiled by a careless movement, and there were rolls of dead film tucked into a side-pocket to be handed over later, one lesson Wren did not need to learn. He watched her face as the film unspooled, he looked for the knowing inside the words. You could say all kinds of things with language, you could shape words to mean what you wished, but the knowing, that was a truth you couldn’t pry apart, you couldn’t mean any differently even if you wanted to. “How things felt?” he said, as if he were slow to read along beside her, as if he wished to know, “What kind of things?” His voice was warm, it had the rough edges of cigarettes but a pleasant absence of urgency that loaned the question some carelessness that concealed the concern beneath it. Saint knew enough of sociopathology with the man imprisoned between the walls of his mind, restless and pacing and unwilling to be kept at all. Saint had never been interested in the girls that stood in the frigidity of Boston winter and shuddered with dead eyes and disinterested mouths and for all the photographs, the black and white pieces of a broken doll that were printed on glossy paper, he had never been interested in learning about Wren and sex in a personal way. He had sat, and he had sought out the bruises on her throat, on her wrists, his camera had looked at them impersonally as Saint himself had silently handed over handkerchiefs, little plastic cups of coffee or tea, painkillers without obvious comment. His eye was practiced enough to see contrast where it would be, the composition as it would be when the enlarger blew the frame up to a photograph rather than the silver-black of a negative, and he nodded as he pushed hair out of his eyes to better look. “Wouldn’t say it.” His smile was uncautious, was true. “If it wasn’t there.” "Things other people feel," she said, though she knew better than to expect him to understand. She didn't perceive him as especially emotive, and she didn't see him happy, but she didn't expect him to understand her mind. Most people didn't, and she knew that whatever was wrong inside her made it harder for her to deal with other people's emotions. She bit her lip, gaze upon the film a few seconds longer as she decided whether to continue on, or whether to leave it. But there was something about him that lent itself to candor. Maybe it was the way he didn't actually react. It was almost like talking to a lens, and it made her a little sad. But she found herself speaking when she didn't actually mean to. Lip freed from between her teeth, red and swollen and new pink at the corner. "I have a friend. She was hurt really badly last year. She broke apart from it. She's still breaking. I had the same thing happen before, and I didn't break. I didn't feel it like she did." She was a small no helpless shrug. "Everything like that is like watching it happen to someone else. I know it doesn't make any sense," she said of disassociation. She'd never actually been to a doctor. She'd never actually talked to anyone. She'd patched herself up in her own way, and she'd managed to layer happiness atop the scars. "When I go back and try myself, can I show you? So you can tell me what I did wrong?" She asked, already expecting errors along the way when it came to developing the film. But there was no impatience in it, her asking. She was slow and lazy, almost too slow, too lazy in her movements, and she wouldn't feel the need to rush this, not any more than she felt the need to rush anything else. There had been warzones, along the way. Every photographer who liked fear to lick in their blood, their heart-beat to beat faster, went for warzones. There had been warzones for Saint because he liked to take pictures of humanity in odd places and because he had been sent and he had learned he liked the pictures he could take, the stories he could find, like hope pushing up and taking root in a field sown with salt. There had been too many of them, too many of stories with similar weight told in dull voices with deadened eyes for him not to know disassociation for what it was. His head had canted, to see the film better but also to listen and his eyes were quiet and they were untroubled but focused, pulling apart the words. He did not react, he would not; that he could was questionable, he had not for a long time and the memory of doing so was forgotten. “It makes sense,” he said now in the small bathroom, because it did, because it always made sense even if it was not right, not how things ought to heal. She was like those he had met, who had bones broken long past in their youth, who had walked on it, or jarred it and it had healed but differently, until they were used to it being out of alignment, wrong had become notionally right. “I feel things,” he said now, slowly like tasting each word before he spoke, the shape of it on his tongue, “Things other people feel. I think. I don’t know how they feel,” and he smiled, the sketch of it awkward, acknowledging; things he did not know, the caveats. “I think,” and it sounded careful but it didn’t edge around her like broken glass, it was careful the way all things Saint said were thoughtful, “Not feeling. It’s borrowed strength. Temporary. Should be. There’s comfort, in silence. In not feeling. For a little while.” His eyes were kind when he looked at her, when he hung the film to dry in a long curling ribbon from the same tape line that the photos hung from, “But if it’s forever. Time to heal. Again.” Photography was small increments and errors along the way. Playing with light was like playing at God and the paper and the film would tell you the minute balance was lost. He knew this, he knew mistakes would happen as often as they did not, and he nodded now, as he reached into the back of the bathroom cabinet and handed her a plastic box, loose cannisters of dead film, and a wing of black material neatly folded, one of the bags with arms to it, to develop film in darkness. “I’m here.” Simply, Saint thought that was enough; he was here, he would help. She wasn't sure if it made sense, but she'd stopped fighting the tide at thirteen, when her maman had crawled home to die on their living room couch. She'd wrapped herself around the girl who had brough her into the world then, and she'd held her while she bled, died, and for days after, until the stench brought the police and life became an even bleaker hell. She learned, then, that fighting only made her tired. And it never changed things. So, while it might not make sense for everyone, it made sense for her. That was enough, and it had been for years. "I'm healed," she said a moment later, sure. She didn't feel the need to talk, share, cry. She wouldn't know what to do on a therapist's couch. She was break that had been set wrong, and maybe she had healed stronger for it in some odd way. She didn't break. MK broke. Luke broke. She didn't break. She wasn't sure which of them was luckier. She looked at him. She wondered what he felt, and she wondered if she would understand if he told her. No, she didn't feel bad things, but oh, Dieu, did she know what love felt like. She knew what that unhealthy, all-encompassing, dangerous love felt like. The kind that could burn alive, and the kind that made her so scared that she couldn't breathe whenever she thought of losing it. That was the kind of feeling she knew, and she wasn't sure she saw the possibility of it in his eyes, even the smallest sliver of it. She thought that made him very normal. She took the dead film to practice on, the box and the photographs. She took it all with reverence, like he'd given her something very precious. And, really, he had. He'd given her something she felt interest in, something outside herself and the people she loved. "Thank you, Saint." He was quiet when he looked back at her, eyes open and a readiness to see that was frank photographer and the boy who had wanted to know things before he knew what they were. And perhaps he saw a little, of her looking for things in him that were not there, that his feeling was small and careful and quiet, that despite the willingness to let go and to live and to breathe in life the way it wanted to be, he was controlled in other ways. He didn’t see a healed woman but he saw a whole one. The old man he had met, in the Ukraine, he had walked for years on his leg, it caused him no discomfort at all. Saint’s smile settled comfortably on his face like a worn piece of paper folded along the same creases as it had always been, and he shrugged, simply, as if to say as you say it is. Saint knew love like a candle caught in a draft, inevitably extinguished but no less lovely for having burned briefly. “You’ll come back,” he said, certain. “If I’m here. If I’m out. Remind me. I’ll give you a key.” He had learned to lock doors again, after Java and never needing to, after doors that were made without locks. He took down the film, almost completely dry now and he curled it carefully into his palm, and slid it into the box along with the rest. He thought she’d come. He thought that Wren might think it imposition when it wouldn’t be but he thought the glimmer in her eyes when she’d looked at her own photographs lined up in a row on celluloid would keep her from letting it be. Saint put his hands into his pockets and he shrugged once again, the movement all elbows tugged out at his sides. “You’re welcome.” |