The Small Backs of Children Page 3

  As I drove away between rows of ice plants on I-5, I thought, Take photos. It’s all you’ve got.

  When you try to slow down and rest inside the life of a regular American woman, you fail. And you fatten up like a hog. Just leave it. There is no other life for a woman like you. So I took the assignment. And now they’re telling me I’ve won the prize of all prizes. Perfect.

  Am sending you my notes. You’re the writer—please figure out how we can “do” something with them? Will send framed photo when I can. I don’t know what it means any longer.

  All my love.

  Notes—War Zone—Eastern Europe—Day 23

  The night is cold as fuck and the color of ash and soot . . . even with all this snow. Ironic: newspaper colored. The town has already been shot to shit, and the soldiers look to me like jack-booted thugs from some B-rated movie, really, ignorant killing machines with ill-fitting uniforms and contorted loyalties. Only their boots and rifles look lethal. Every corner of every building is shot away, making the little village look like pieces of itself . . . ghost structures. There’s no telling rubble from real here. None of this has made the news, it’s just gone on and on for years without end, the supposed end of one war giving way to the endless micro-violences of forever. Nobody even knows where I am or what I’m doing or why. Not even me. The ground stinks of blood and shit. Domesticated animals—horses, sheep, pigs, dogs, and cats—wander around or stand like idiots in the paths and streets. There is a commotion up ahead—they want something—badly—and they are yanking people from homes like snatching tissues from a box. They want something—or someone—and they are moving as one entity of brute force against these small families. I don’t know these Baltic languages in any real sense—just bits and pieces enough to stay mobile. I’m only able to be this close because I’m dressed as a garbage man, as my interpreter and guide told me to. We’ve been given the duty of clearing corpses from the street. It’s easy to snap shots from this distance, in this grayed-out light, smoke and dirt and night’s falling covering my hands and sound being swallowed up like it is, though my guide looks angry with every shot I take. He doesn’t think it’s worth it. A photo, he says when we are in the cave of his house—what use is that against what is happening here? Do you even know where “here” is? Do you even know what our story is? How long this fight? I know why you are here. You are here to catch the soldiers committing atrocities. But only because you are American. You want to shame them, to make a big story of their brutality. Where were you when we needed you? During your so-called Cold War, with your promises of nuclear attack—your threat to obliterate them—we counted on you. After the war, we hid in the woods for years waiting for you. You offered us guns and money, and we accepted them. But you did not attack. And so we have been left to fight alone for all of these years.

  Sometimes I think my guide wants to kill me. But he merely hands me bread and hot tea with something that helps me to sleep at night. The look he gives me is one of dismissal. I am nothing, or less than nothing, so it costs him little to help me or kill me.

  We move closer and closer to the edge of this hulled-out village, its people overexposed and dead with fatigue. We pass through the rubble of some kind of town center building. We pass what was once some kind of café or bar, its windows as black as the eyes of a corpse. We pass something—a schoolhouse, maybe, its doors boarded up like a shut mouth. We are some ways behind them, and more or less part of the detritus. Soon they are at a house that is barely in the village at all. We are able to approach mostly because of our giant, horse-drawn wagon, full of rotting bodies—it seems part of the mise-en-scène.

  What I see next doesn’t seem possible, but the first form to emerge from the house is a girl. She looks to be about ten or so. Her hair spreads in waves of nested coils around her face, down her shoulders. Unbelievably, she walks straight toward them. She is wearing the clothes of a boy—and soon a second self, her brother, and her father and mother, come rushing out like blood after her. There is some yelling back and forth, and then it happens—a blast from I don’t know where disintegrates the father, mother, and brother just at the edge of the girl’s body, missing her in some terrifying accident of a fraction. They blow up right before her eyes, her hair lifting for a moment, so that she looks as if she may float skyward, her arms up and out, her face glowing so white that her eyes look like blue-steel bullets, her mouth open in the shape of an O.

  I remember how the ground shook.

  I remember the camera going off. Shooting before I fell.

  I remember her hands—palms white—fingers spread.

  The light from the explosion must have acted . . . like a flash. A perfect flash.

  There is yelling and a lot of smoke. Not all the soldiers are there any longer. No one even looks at us as we hobble away, fear bringing bile into my mouth, my guide so angry he nearly fractures my arm pulling me away, and when I turn my head back to the action, I think I see a girl running toward the woods.

  The girl—she disappears. She fucking fades to black, and in our rush and fear all we try is to stay alive, to make it out of that scene without more bloodshed. Back at my guide’s claustrophobic home, after my body quits shivering and my heart stops fuck-whacking and my lungs act like air sacks again—I mean, JESUS, how much closer can one be to an explosion and not be inside it—instead of thinking about what I just witnessed, I am seized by a random memory. It’s you. It’s the photos I shot of you the one week we were lovers. A random flashback like a bulb exploding.

  Your skin. The mound of your sex. How you were right when you said I’d leave, how I was mad at you, and all I could see even while I tried to kill your quiet with my tongue was the image of your face against my leaving—against the image of me, a naked woman getting into a car and flooring it at dusk, leaving a dust swirl and tracks like an open wound with no hope of suture—doing anything she can to get the fuck out of the story. The image of your mouth. My leaving.

  And then I feel some kind of back of the head WHOP and you are gone, your image, and I’m in this war zone again, and a random family comes tumbling through the door. The only word for their fear is their faces. Bread and hot beef broth appear. We all sit there in the silence of our traumas and eat. So bread and broth can save your life. And memory has no syntax.

  For a long time, no one says much of anything. The mother hums to her children—two boys and a very young girl. The father stands in front of the fire with the look of a father. He and my guide share cigarettes with god knows what rolled up in them. Finally I walk over and they let me share—thank fucking baby jesus there is something LARGE and hallucinogenic in the cigarettes. Things get swirly like smoke and my skin stops revolting against me.

  The mother keeps looking at me like I want to eat her children but she doesn’t stop me. The only one who will talk to me is the oldest boy. Most of what he says is a runaway train. I can only understand him in bits. First I try to take notes, but then I give up. What the fuck am I writing down? I can barely understand him. His life is ten of mine. He is maybe twelve. Fuck.

  What I am able to understand is this: this family is going into the woods. The father is a schoolteacher and the mother is afraid to live in her own house, having just watched her beloved neighbors disintegrate. I ask him, Won’t they simply chase you into the woods? “No,” he says, and he is vehement with it. I think he tells me, The rebels are in the woods. They have camps. They will not chase us there. I think he tells me, If they chase us they will be cut into pieces and fed to the wolves, and we will watch, and we will laugh and sing and dance and spit on their souls by firelight.

  I begin to cry. The mother puts her hand on my arm but doesn’t look at me. In this house, in this village no one in America knows the name of, in this war no one in America gives a flying fuck about, I am at home. I want to stay. Inside the danger, in front of a fire in a tiny space with people I can barely understand. This is the quick of history. This is a reason to be alive, inside the fear o
f being dead every second. I look at each of them one at a time. They have no love or care for me. But each of them meets my gaze. When I bring my camera out between my hands, small and without drama, they let me.

  It is enough.

  I don’t want any part of my former life. I want whatever is inside this small mechanical box to kill whoever I ever was. These words, the only trace left of me— I give them to you.

  The Photograph

  The photo of the girl is nascent.

  At the moment of the blast, light through the lens hit the film like a fist of electricity. Silver halides swam frantically in their chaos, unstable as history waiting for someone to point a finger and give a name to it. In the calm thereafter, the image was invisible, latent, hidden on a roll of black-and-white Kodak film inside a Mamiya camera.

  She, alone among her peers, has resisted other ways of capturing images. Even when it meant bidding for film and cameras in foreign countries.

  At night, in a house, in a lull between villages and violences, that roll of film—the only one she cares about—is removed from the camera, shoved quickly inside a condom, and crammed into the photographer’s sports bra. There it sits all night, inside a prophylactic against flesh and moisture and dirt, against the ever-twitching chest of the photographer, who monkey-paws it now and again until sunrise.

  The next day, this roll and several others are handed over to a journalist who is making for a bigger city with better phones and digital processing and fax machines and, thankfully, bars. Lots of bars. The roll of film in the condom jostles around with its siblings in an oblong athletic bag with a great white swoosh sewn on the side. Inside the bag it is dark and smells of chemicals, paper, sweat, and coffee. The journalist drives the Saab with one hand and scratches a scab on his driving hand with the other. The scab chips off the flesh—success—and a blood mouth the size of a peanut opens on his hand. He sucks it. He hopes he has the number of the woman he wants to bed tonight. He pictures it in his wallet between dollars. He tries to remember if she has a television.

  When the car stops in a city, many hours later, the journalist dumps the bag of mismatched and varied media onto the desk of a foreign correspondent. With hands like Michelangelo, the correspondent organizes the media for their various journeys. His eyes ache. When he exhales there is a kind of moan. He’s getting too old for this. They’re giving him less and less face time and more and more makeup. His hangover sits with pickled wrath somewhere between his gut and his throat. He rubs his temples—ice picks to the brain. He stares at the roll of film. Who still processes film? What kind of prima donna is she? His hands carry the strain of his life in their tremors as he packages the film roll, lumbers onto a moped, and transports it to the last processor around.

  A great white processing machine eats the film. In a space as dark as death, the film slides into its emulsions. The silver halides reduce; the first trace of the girl’s image makes its shadow self. Then the film is fixed and washed and dried, all inside the belly of the machine. A worker supervises the mass production of image after image, but the day the girl’s image emerges out of the mouth of the machine the worker is eating a sandwich and absentmindedly stroking himself in the back room and misses it. Thinking mostly about his semi-boner and wishing he had another sandwich or ten, he packs it up with the negatives after his break and shoves it all into a prepaid FedEx envelope.

  The FedEx guy on the sending end is on speed. His eyes are darts.

  The FedEx dude on the receiving end is stoned. He chuckles a little stoner laugh as he heads out in his magical white truck.

  In America, the editorial assistant in charge of going through the daily photo deliveries every four hours moves a pile of black-and-white photos around on a desk, and the picture of the girl emerges. The editorial assistant pulls her hand back. The girl is farther in the foreground than she should be. It is because she has been blown forward, away from the explosion and toward the camera. She looks as if she is coming out of fire, her eyes bullets headed for the lens. Behind her, fire and smoke, and an arm and hand reaching out. At first, the editorial assistant doesn’t want to touch the photo. She notices that she’s holding her breath. Then she snaps out of it and carries it quickly to the editors. It feels weirdly hot in her hands. She thinks she maybe feels the warmth of blood between her legs. On the desk of the editors, the photo glows with potential. Men eye it and analyze it and judge its merits relative to other pictures. The curation happens quickly, however. There is only one image that matters.

  All of this happens without the photographer. The photo, after all, is out of her hands. Later, it will be professionally and lovingly developed again—this time by hand, not machine.

  Calling from a crackling phone in some hole-in-the-wall, she does give the editorial assistant one direction: Make sure the writer gets a copy of the photo. Send it right away. Write “this is the girl” on a scrap piece of paper. Then she hangs up, smiling, thinking of the writer. Hoping for her intimacy.

  And so, the first time the girl comes to the house, the writer is at work on her novel.

  She takes the package into her living room.

  She pulls the cardboard strip that slits the belly of the package open.

  Briefly she pictures the photographer’s hands.

  She reaches inside and pulls the framed photo out.

  It is wrapped in brown paper.

  Scrawled across the front of the paper in some stranger’s hand: This is the girl.

  A whisper of star-cluster emotions move briefly through her heart. She stares at the handwriting.

  She unwraps the photo.

  She looks.

  Her pupils dilate, as they do in the dark, or when we shift focus from something far to something near, or when we are very much attracted to something, or when we enter an altered state.

  Yes. This is the girl.

  The Hands of a Boy

  Once, when her husband was out of town at a film festival where his work was appearing, the writer took their son on a photo shoot. She bought two Kodak Instamatic cameras. She drove to the edge of the big river running through their city. It was a gray day—the kind of gray sky where the clouds look like they are holding the rain in their arms. They ran alongside the river along the river rocks, brushed their bodies inside patches of river reeds, examined a dead seagull drawn inland, collected little shells and stones. She showed him how to use the Kodak camera. His hands more adept at making things than he had language for. His cheeks two blooms.

  They took photos for hours.

  When she had the film developed, she took joy in his images—barely focused close-ups of rocks and sand and detritus. Odd-angled images of water and broken glass. The big gray of the sky that day. The eye of the dead seagull. And then she saw an image of herself that he’d taken. Her blond hair blowing across her face, her too-red winter wool coat, her arms so outstretched for him that they look as if they are about to pull off and away. It may be the truest image of herself she’s ever seen.

  She makes a promise to herself: Remember to let go. When the time comes. Remember that you must.

  Part Two

  The Widow’s Watch

  The widow hears the girl make noises in her sleep. One night, when she hears the girl moaning, she pulls a blanket around her own shoulders and pads her way to the girl’s bed to rub her back, to take her from nightmare to otherwhere, but when she arrives at the body of the girl she realizes she is not moaning.

  She is laughing.

  Another night, the widow is again pulled from sleep by the sound of the girl—she is walking toward the front door. Is she sleepwalking? The widow believes it: Whatever this girl has been through, it must have lodged in her subconscious forever. Likely this girl will be haunted the rest of her life. But again, when she reaches the girl, when she extends her arm out to wake her or stop her from leaving the house, she sees that the girl is not opening the door.

  She is instead placing her cheek against it. She is ki
ssing the door. She is smiling. Then the girl curls up on the floor at the base of the door and sleeps deeper.

  Then there is the night the widow hears singing. Is it singing? Again she rises from her bed and moves toward the girl’s bed, but the girl is not there. The widow moves silently toward the front door, but the girl is not there either. The widow’s heart makes a small tightening fist in her chest. But then she looks toward the kitchen window and there the girl stands, looking up and out, the moon lighting up her face. Eased by the sight of her, the widow listens.

  The girl is not singing. In her hands is a tiny brown owl. The owl chirps and trills in small rhythms between the girl’s palms.

  The Photographer

  The night the photographer won the prize, she called the writer. From the bar where her colleagues took her to celebrate. A very prestigious bar in the country of the war zone, in a city big enough to be untouched by the violence, at least not visibly. One of those cities of money and bars and galleries and governments and five-star hotels, all over the world, that sit next to human atrocity. Later, she would send each of their friends their own framed print of the black-and-white photo. But that night the writer was the only person she wanted to tell. In a phone booth inside the bar. A phone booth with strange faux gold paneling all over the door and walls. A little golden box. And she was drunk as a monkey. Little bleating voice of an operator. Little buzzings and ringings. Crackling. Then, hello from America, voice mail.

  Later, they would argue, the photographer and the writer, about the girl in the photo. What about her? the writer demanded. What became of her? How could you leave her to fate? The words would sting the photographer’s eyes and throat.