Elizabeth Hand - Generation Loss

“I know. Toby—he told me. I saw—he showed me a couple of your pictures. Ray Provenzano too. And I saw the ones at Lucien’s place. They’re—they’re beautiful.”

“We have the eye.” He looked at the ceiling, his face everywhere, and laughed. “When I saw your pictures, that was when I knew. Aphrodite began the process, but she stopped. You and me, we carry the dead on our backs. We write on the dead. Thanatography—we invented that.”

“I don’t think I invented it,” I said. “Matthew Brady, maybe. Or, uh, Joel-Peter Witkin.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Just us, Cassandra. You and me.”

I looked around, fighting panic. Other than the single picture enshrined on that table, there were no photos anywhere.

“That girl.” I pointed at the photograph. “Who was she?”

He said nothing; just stared at me.

“Your pictures,” I said. “Don’t you have any of your other pictures?”

“Of course.” He turned and shuffled toward a door. “It’s why you’re here.”

He held the door for me, switched on a fluorescent bulb to reveal a tiny windowless room with no furniture, only a small round prayer rug on the floor. Around its circumference was a circle formed of turtle shells.

“Be careful.” Denny picked up a turtle shell, pressed it to his forehead then replaced it on the floor. He straightened. “These are what you came to see.”

Photographs covered the walls, all in handmade frames: color prints on handmade emulsion paper, worked with pen and needle and ink. They had the same eerie, highly saturated glow as Aphrodite’s archipelago sequence.

But seeing these, I knew why Aphrodite had stopped working, and maybe why she’d started drinking.

Because they weren’t just better than her photos. They were better than almost anything I’d ever seen. Every comparable artist I could think of, all those so-called transgressive photographers—the ones who pretend to push the envelope, then before you know it they’re signing a deal with Starbucks and doing the Christmas windows at Barney’s—this guy wiped the floor with them. Those photographers would take you to the edge of something.

Denny went the rest of the way, to a place you didn’t want to go. And once he got there, he jumped.

Aphrodite had pulled back from there, and from him. Wisely, I thought, now that I could see what he’d been doing all these years.

But it was too late for me. I was already falling.

I wanted to touch them, I could touch them. I could smell them too—the entire room reeked of musk and rotting fish. I gagged and covered my nose with my sleeve.

Denny seemed to have forgotten I was there. He stood in front of one picture and stared at it. I forced myself to breathe through my mouth then shoved my hands in my pockets so he wouldn’t notice how they shook.

Based on what I’d glimpsed in the tree outside, I now had a pretty solid idea as to what they were pictures of. But I might have a hard time convincing anyone else, unless they’d seen what I’d seen by the quarry. These images were so murky and strange, so tied into Denny’s own, incomprehensible mythology, that they defied any simple description. They didn’t shout out Dead Body! They shouted Beautiful, and Weird .

Beside the door hung a black-and-white photo that seemed older than the rest, the only picture that wasn’t in color. It showed the arching limbs of a leafless tree, its bark striated black and white against a gray sky. A large animal crouched in the crux of two limbs ten feet above the ground. I immediately thought of the fisher.

But when I peered at it more closely, I saw that it wasn’t crouching. It was dead.

And it wasn’t a fisher. It was a dog, a black Labrador retriever. Its front legs dangled so that I could see where the fur had been eaten away. Where its eyes had been were two coronas of bone, and a tendril that might have been an insect or a bit of tissue. The flesh had drawn away from its muzzle, giving it a snarling rictus. Its loose pelt appeared to be sliding from its body.

“That’s my dog, Moody.” I jumped as Denny breathed in my ear. “He was a good old dog.”

I stared at the words the bottom of the print: S.P.O.T 1997 and a title.

“‘Sky Burial,’” I read aloud.

“That’s what they do in Tibet,” said Denny. His eyes were huge and nearly colorless in the fluorescent light. “Excarnation. A bridge between the worlds, we carry the dead to be reborn.” He smiled, flashing blue-lined gums. “The first step.”

“Right,” I said. “Thank you for letting me see these.”

I edged toward the door, and something broke beneath my boot.

I’d stepped on one of the turtle shells. Denny looked at it then ran his tongue along his lip.

“Wait for me in the other room,” he said.

I did. The turntable had gone silent. I thought of Toby, snoring on Lucien’s chaise, and of Kenzie, God knows where. I fumbled for my Jack Daniel’s, heard myself saying Fuck fuck fuck beneath my breath.

Denny stepped back into the room. “What?”

“Nothing.” I ran a hand through my hair, stalling. “Just, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? For what?”

“The—the turtle. Your turtle shell. It seemed, they all seemed … special. The dog too.” I hesitated. “And her. The dead girl. Hannah.”

“Nothing really dies. You understand that. Cassandra. Cass .” My name came out as a soft hiss. “Your pictures—you understood. You know what happens. You’ve seen it.”

I remembered being in a car in the woods, headlights shining through trees then fading into darkness; something I saw but could never look at.

“No,” I said.

He flexed his hands, tugged the cuff of his shirt as though it irritated him. Above his wrist were three raw red lines where he’d been scratched. He glanced up and saw me staring.

“You said you had news.” He went to the woodstove, picked up a log, and shoved it inside. “What is it?”

“Aphrodite. She’s—she’s dead. Last night, there was an accident. She, it looks like she fell.”

He stood, silent, as though he hadn’t heard. Finally he whispered, “Aphrodite. She told you to come see me?”

“No—no, she’s dead. Because—”

“Because what?” His head tilted and his eyes went black. “What happened?”

“I came here to talk to her,” I stammered. “To interview her. That’s how I saw your pictures. I—”

“ I brought you here.” His voice rose hoarsely, and he lifted his hand as though to strike. Abruptly he covered his eyes. “Oh, Aphrodite, oh, oh…..”

His voice dropped so I could barely hear him. “Does the boy know?”

“Yes.”

Denny’s eyes opened.

“It was you,” he whispered.

Everything contracted to a pinprick of pure black. The room was gone, he was gone. There was nothing but the memory of light, and myself plunging into a void. My hand shot out to keep from falling. Something grabbed it, cold and horribly strong. Within a guttering streetlamp I saw an eye, the eye, turning upon itself until it swallowed everything.

“No.” I blinked and pulled away. The eye belonged to Denny, not me, green flecked, staring. “No. It was an accident. She fell. That was all.”

Denny gazed at me. At last he said, “You watched.”

“Yes,” I said. “I watched.”

He picked up a poker and looked at it contemplatively. Then he walked to the rows of records, withdrew an LP and placed it on the turntable. After a moment, vinyl hiss and pop gave way to a sound like a heartbeat. Harry Nilsson, “Jump into the Fire.”

“Such a beautiful song,” he whispered.

He stood between me and the door and ran his hand along the poker. My voice broke as I asked, “Do you—could I use your bathroom?”