David Morrell - Double Image

When Coltrane lifted his glass to his lips, he realized that it was empty once more. “They told me I didn’t speak for a year.”

COLTRANE BRACED HIMSELF TO CONTINUE. Packard’s intensely sympathetic gaze was eerily compelling, urging him on.

“After my grandparents flew to Los Angeles to get me, after they packed up the clothes and things that my mother and I had in the trailer, after they took care of the bills and arranged for the bodies to be transported back to Connecticut, after all the legal technicalities were out of the way and I went to live with them in New Haven, I couldn’t remember what my mother looked like. I used to spend hours at a stretch, hiding in the basement, trying to remember her face, but all that came to me was the image of her blood splattering when my father’s bullet hit her. I desperately wanted to remember her voice, but all I heard in my mind was the sound of the shot. That was my reality, not what was going on around me in my grandparents’ house. I must have eaten and slept, bathed and dressed and watched television and gone to school, but the images and sounds I actually experienced were in my memory.

“I had no idea of time passing. Eventually I found out it was a year later when I heard someone crying in a room above me while I hid in the cellar. A fog seemed to clear as I crawled from behind the furnace and made my way upstairs, following the sobs through the kitchen to the living room, discovering that they belonged to my grandmother. She was hunched forward on a chair, her face in her hands, sobbing so hard that tears dripped through her fingers and landed on the clear plastic sheets that protected photographs in an album lying open on the coffee table.

“I came around her chair and peered down at the photographs. One of them had been taken in blazing sunlight that made everything overbright and harsh. I recognized a swing, a slide, and a teeter-totter that someone had put up at the trailer park where my mother and I had lived. I recognized a trailer in the background. I studied a boy in the swing and a woman pushing him. I leaned closer, squinting at the woman’s long, windblown sand-colored hair, at her high, slender neck and delicate face, at her beaming smile. The woman wore a brown-and-white-checkered shirt with its sleeves rolled up and its bottom hanging over her jeans. The shirt and the jeans looked too big for her, emphasizing how delicately thin she was. Pushing that laughing child, she looked to be having the time of her life.

“Slowly, I became aware that the sobbing had stopped. When I turned, I saw that my grandmother had lowered her hands and was staring at me, her face raw from tears.

“‘That’s my mother,’ I said, the first time I’d spoken in a year. ‘That’s what she looks like. I remember now.’”

“SO YOU BECAME A PHOTOGRAPHER to try to preserve the past?” Packard asked.

“The present . That album, and others my grandparents had, showed my mother growing up and getting married. Then she was big with me. Then she was holding me and bathing me and raising me. Time was suspended. She existed on the page. Mercifully, I didn’t find any photos of my father. My grandmother told me that she had burned every image of him, cursing him all the while. He was dead. But not my mother. She was still alive in the photographs.

“But she was more perfect in some than in others. As I studied them endlessly, I became frustrated. Some of the photos were slightly blurred. Others had too much or too little light. Some were too close, others too far. Some didn’t emphasize what I absolutely needed to see, a glint in my mother’s eyes or what she was doing with her hands. I kept imagining better images. I kept praying that they could have been made better.”

“And the next step was to start learning about photography?”

“You’ve heard the stories about photographers who go to primitive regions, where the natives won’t let the photographers take pictures of them because the natives are afraid the cameras will steal their souls. I have no idea if those stories are true, but if they are, the natives are wrong. The camera doesn’t steal anything. It gives : immortality. That’s what I thought when I was a young man. I wanted to take photographs of everybody I met, to memorialize them with pity and love – because one day they were going to die. But not in my photographs. As long as my photographs existed, I thought, so did those people.”

“Wanted? Thought? You keep using the past tense.”

“Somewhere along the line, I went wrong. I started taking pictures that didn’t celebrate living but fixated on dying. I started documenting despair instead of hope.” Coltrane shook his head sharply. “No more. I want to glorify life.”

“Then by all means” – Packard coughed painfully – “I want you to photograph me .”

WHEN DUNCAN BROUGHT IN A TRAY of six different kinds of caviar, translucent eggs of gold, black, gray, brown, gray-green, and greenish black, Coltrane’s already-tentative appetite deserted him. Emotion on top of the champagne had soured his stomach. Increasingly, Packard (his eyes drooping, his whisper more filled with phlegm) didn’t have the strength to continue the conversation. So, after finalizing the details of their project, Coltrane said good-bye.

The afternoon light remained dismal. Driving back to Los Angeles, Coltrane struggled against an overwhelming exhaustion. He reached his apartment at 4:30 but still wasn’t hungry. In fact, he feared he was going to be sick. He lay on his leather sofa, tried to analyze what had just happened to him, and sank into an agitated sleep. At one point, the phone rang, but he was in too dark a place to answer or hear if anyone left a message.

“DID YOU PHONE ME LAST NIGHT?” Coltrane asked.

It was eleven Sunday morning. He sat with Jennifer on the narrow balcony of her condominium overlooking the harbor in Marina del Rey. The clouds continued to be gray. The breeze was cool; even wearing a sweater, Coltrane felt slightly shivery. But he couldn’t shake the sensation of being hungover and told himself that all he needed was fresh air to perk him up.

Jennifer shook her head. “We agreed you were going to find out how you managed on your own.”

“So you didn’t?”

Jennifer looked amused. “There was a time when I called you a little too often, remember?”

“I was just wondering. Last night while I was asleep, somebody phoned but didn’t leave a message. When I checked the machine this morning, its light was flashing. I had plenty of messages from earlier in the day – more reporters and TV talk shows wanting an interview about those Bosnia photographs. But then at the end, all I got was fifteen seconds of some kind of classical music and then click.”

“Wasn’t me,” Jennifer said.

Coltrane rubbed his forehead and fortified himself with a sip of steaming French-roast coffee. “A reporter wouldn’t have been shy about leaving a message.”

“You wonder if it was Packard?”

“The thought occurred to me.” Despite Coltrane’s sunglasses, the light seemed awfully intense. He squinted toward a sailboat, its motor chugging, as it made its way along the crowded harbor toward the exit from the marina.

“Maybe it’s my Virgo personality,” Jennifer said.

“What do you mean?”

“This is definitely a done deal, right? You and Packard are going to collaborate for the magazine?”

“Packard promised he’d FedEx you the prints and the signed permission forms tomorrow,” Coltrane said.

“But if it was Packard who phoned you last night, do you suppose he was planning to tell you he’d changed his mind? Maybe you should phone him today and confirm the arrangement.”