Elizabeth Hand - Generation Loss

I cradled the old Konica against my chest. It wasn’t even that late—a little past midnight. The drugstore speed would keep me going for a few more hours.

I felt pretty good, in between spasms of speedy paranoia. Kenzie Libby’s face, an outboard engine droning into voices that whispered my name. I wondered what Kenzie had said about me when she’d been online with Robert. I remembered what Toby had said about the islanders.

Every couple of years you get a witch hunt.

I pushed the thoughts aside. Time to move.

“Hey ho,” I croaked.

I went to the bathroom and drank from the tap then stared at my reflection in the mirror.

I looked like I’d crawled here from the city. I popped the lens cap from my camera and took a picture of myself. A great photographer could make something of all this, night and speed and that raw face in the mirror, shaky hands holding a cheap camera and a black T-shirt riding up to reveal a faded tattoo. A great photographer would see past that, all the way back to shadows in an alley and a car wreck in the woods.

I thought of Aphrodite.

Our gaze changes all that it falls upon .

I needed to talk to her again. I needed to make her see me; I needed to tell her how her photos had changed me all those years ago. I needed her to understand that I’d come here now hoping they would change me back.

The door to her room was open and a light was on. I listened for the television, the sound of voices, or dogs.

But the TV was off. If any dog was in there, it was asleep.

And Aphrodite? I peeked inside.

No dogs. No drunk. The rumpled bed was empty, still strewn with photography books. A lamp cast a piss yellow glow across the floor. I stood in the doorway and listened in case she was just out of sight, in a closet maybe.

But everything was silent. I went inside, stepping around a pile of black tights and underwear, a shapeless cardigan felted with dog fur, an empty bottle of Courvoisier. The cast-iron woodstove was cold, but the space heater worked overtime, cooking the room’s scents to a stew of dogs and brandy and unwashed laundry.

I stepped around heaps of clothes until I reached a wall of photos. Aphrodite when she was young and beautiful, a hybrid of Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Liz Taylor. A faded photo of a tall bearded guy, very handsome, glancing at the camera through lowered eyelashes. He held a toddler on his knee, the little boy’s head turned from the camera. Gryffin and his father.

Steve Haselton looked different from the photo I’d seen on that New Directions paperback: edgier, less blandly patrician. I guessed it was the long hair and beard and manic smile. He looked kind of like Hunter Thompson, right before or right after the drugs kicked in. There was a picture of Gryffin too, standing on the rocks by the ocean; maybe ten years old, gawky and wildhaired, holding up a starfish. Unsmiling. A somber kid.

And there were photos of the Oakwind commune at what I guessed must be a clambake. It looked more like the down east version of an acid trip. Long-haired people in gypsy clothes gamboled on the beach. It was raining. Smoke rose from a pile of stones covered with black gunk—seaweed? Mushrooms? In one photo, a naked little boy poked grimly at smoking rubble with a stick. Gryffin again.

It was less Summer of Love than it was Lord of the Flies. The photos were underexposed and out of focus, like the negs I’d processed downstairs. The kind of artsy stuff an ambitious high school photographer might shoot.

But each bore Aphrodite’s signature in the lower right corner. I turned away.

It was true. Something had been stolen from her. She’d had it, and she fucking lost it.

My foot nudged an empty bottle. It rolled beneath the bed, and I noticed something beside it, a stack of three oversized portfolios, expensive black leather Bokara cases.

They didn’t seem to have been moved for a while. The leather had a dull green bloom of mildew. I gingerly picked up the first portfolio, sat on the bed and opened it.

Inside were clear vinyl sleeves. Not the kind any serious artist would use today—chlorine gas leaches from the vinyl and turns your photos yellow.

But these pictures were old. More middle-class hippies playing at a freakshow; a sad photo of Aphrodite with her arms around her younger husband, his head turned from her, long hair covering his face. I replaced the portfolio and pulled out the next one.

This was more interesting. The vinyl sleeves held color landscapes, not the hand-worked images of Deceptio Visus or Mors but stark views of distant islands. With these photos she was almost onto something, but the pictures were all too literal: a stormy sea, some jagged rocks, forbidding clouds. There wasn’t the imminence that irradiated her earlier work, the sense that she’d witnessed something unearthly and terrible yet lovely, something that had only revealed itself for that hundredth of a second and would never be glimpsed again, except here, now, in this image. There were so many photos crammed into this second portfolio—not just photos but contact sheets, negs, even faded Polaroids—that I could almost imagine her desperation, shooting hundreds of frames in hopes of nailing just that one .

From what I could see, she never did. I reached for the last portfolio.

These photos were different.

For starters, they were all shot on SX-70, the famous One-Step film developed by Polaroid in the early 1970s. The SX-70 camera was a huge innovation, and the first model, the Alpha, was hugely expensive—three hundred dollars, which these days would equal almost fourteen hundred bucks. SX-70 film came in individual sheets, each containing its own pod of developer, covered by a layer of transparent polyester. After the film was exposed, it would slide between little rollers inside the camera, like the wringers of an old-fashioned washing machine. These rollers burst the pod and spread the developing chemicals across the film. Once it developed inside the camera, you had what Polaroid called an integral print.

But the SX-70 had a feature that the folks at Polaroid hadn’t counted on. The exposed film took a long time to fix. So you could use your finger or a pencil or just about anything you wanted, as long as it wasn’t too pointed or sharp, and manipulate the developing chemicals in their polyester sheath. This produced cool, if simple, special effects—halos, silver and black dots, penumbras like solar flares. They looked like those blotches you see when you hold a piece of Mylar up to the sun. If you really wanted to work with an image, you could extend the time it took to fix by warming then cooling the print, over and over again.

It was like a very primitive form of Photoshop. Some people played with the chemicals on purpose and declared the results a new art form. Most people, of course, did so by accident, made a mess of their snapshots, and complained. Almost immediately Polaroid rushed to make cheaper versions of the Alpha, “improving” the film to something called Time-Zero, so that the problem wouldn’t exist in later camera models.

Some artists still use SX-70s—you can buy the film through Fuji. But these weren’t recent photos. I’d guess they’d been taken around the time that the cameras first appeared, in the early 1970s, roughly the same time as the Magic Clambake. I recognized some of the people, commune members I assumed: a couple of skinny guys in overalls and flannel shirts; Aphrodite, looking far too imperious to be hanging out with a bunch of longhairs ten years younger than she was; little Gryffin.

And then, a series of pictures that made my neck prickle. They showed a pretty, freckled girl with long hair—the same girl in the 8x10 I’d processed in Aphrodite’s darkroom. In the SX-70 photos, she was sleeping, or pretending to. The pictures were in extreme closeup, and the film had been manipulated so that little wiggly shadows ran across her face, giving the images a spooky, submarine quality. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or shut. Someone had gone over them with a needle-sized stylus, so that in some photos it looked as though they were covered by silvery green coins. In others her eyes seemed wide open with amazement.