Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

“It is now, but we can pull prints. It’s up to the artist, how many copies he wants out there.”

I thought. “What about... what if... what if the artist had certain images to begin with? Say, photographs. Pictures of a background, and pictures of a subject. Could he manipulate those to create an image that looked like this certain person was doing something in this certain place?”

Darien smiled and glanced at the work on the wall. “The guy on the left there, that’s me. And I guarantee you I never stood on a Nebraska prairie and stared up at a monster can of tuna fish.”

“Then it’s easy.”

“No. It’s complicated. There are new tools now. That’s what all this technology is — it’s just tools. They’re powerful tools and you have to know how to use them. They’re expensive. No, it’s not easy, but a lot of things are possible now that used to be impossible. Most of these artists might tell you that making it look easy is part of the art. Others, well, they like to let the technology show. Two different aesthetics, really.”

“If I showed that tuna fish picture to an expert in photography at the FBI, would he be able to tell it’s fake?”

“Wouldn’t take the FBI to see that it’s fake, Terry! In the way you mean ‘fake,’ that is.”

“Okay. Say it was just a can of tuna fish on a table. And the tools behind the image were digital processing and the Iris printer. Then, could that expert tell by examining the picture that it was done without a real can of tuna fish?”

“It was done with a real can of tuna fish. The real can of tuna fish was reproduced and stored by the digital file. It’s as ‘real’ a can of tuna fish in the file as it is in a picture. You know?”

“But a photograph is supposed to capture an image.”

“Wrong. A photograph creates an image. That’s the difference now. That’s where it’s all changing. Madison Avenue has been working on it for decades. But right now, the explosion in tools has made things possible that weren’t possible just three years ago. Three years from now... who knows?”

We toured the gallery and looked at other works.

Some were obviously “created” — like the tuna can; others — like a portrait of a woman with her cat — were absolutely convincing as plain old photographs.

“Why’s that one so special?” I asked. “There’s millions of cats like that.”

“The cat’s real. The woman doesn’t exist. She was created on a computer.”

I stepped up close to look at the lines on her face, the singular expression in her eyes, the details of her hands. You could see the wrinkles in her skin, the underlying veins, the blemishes and hairs.

“You can make anything,” I said.

“Almost.”

“What can’t you make?”

Darien crossed his arms and raised a hand to his face. He set his chin into the little cradle of thumb and curled forefinger. “I’m not sure. But why don’t you tell me what you want. And I’ll tell you if it’s makeable.”

“All right. I want five-by-seven photographs of a woman bathing her son. I want the woman to be a real woman, and I’ve got photographs of her face you can work with. The boy is real, and I can give you pictures of his face, also. But he’s never actually been bathed by this woman. They’ve never actually seen each other. And I want the bathroom to be a certain bathroom, and I’ve got pictures of that to give you, too. And when you’ve created an image of this woman bathing a kid she’s never seen in a genuine bathtub, I’m going to send the thing off to the FBI’s best scientists and I don’t want them to be able to say it was staged, retouched, enhanced, created, digitally manufactured or Iris ink-jet printed. I want them to say, yeah, that’s a picture of a woman giving a boy a bath. It’s real. It’s genuine. It happened. It’s evidence.”

“Color or black and white?”

“Color.”

“What’s your budget?”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Consider it done. There will be some limitations on it. If the image required visual information that wasn’t in the photographs you supplied, it would have to be generated by computer, by an artist who could extrapolate, who could imagine what was missing. Say he needed the inside of her left hand, but you didn’t have it on film. He’d have to create it.”

“Then the FBI guys would see a fake hand?”

“They’d have to compare it to the real one for that. There’d be no way — just based on the image — for them to know that it was created, if it was created skillfully. And Terry, that document he’d create, that picture you’d finally show the FBI, it would be totally, 100 percent genuine. It would be — or could be — finally, after all the work was done, just a simple, authentic photograph.”

“Even though the event depicted never happened.”

“It didn’t happen until the artist created it.”

“It never happened, Darien. What you see in the picture did not fucking happen. Did it? The woman never gave the kid a bath. Did she?”

“Okay. It never happened.”

“Good Christ, no wonder we could never run a simple pick and roll.”

Silence for a moment, my anger waning.

“We were bad basketball players, weren’t we?” he asked.

“Didn’t you get ten against Newport Harbor?”

“Eight. I never got double digits my whole career.”

“Me neither.”

We sat in his office for a while and talked about the old days, the new days, some of the days in between. Then the conversation got thin.

“What are you working on, Terry? Can I ask?”

I considered my reply for a moment. “Darien, there’s a mudbath pending for a very close friend of mine. We’re talking about somebody getting royally screwed by pictures of something he didn’t do.”

“That’s bad.”

“It’s worse than bad. It’s a career, a life, maybe a prison term. This guy didn’t do what they say he did. What the pictures say he did.”

“They’d have to have more than just pictures, wouldn’t they?”

“For a court of law, maybe. For everything else, the pictures will do quite nicely. They’ll ruin him.”

“Blackmail?”

“No. The cops are sending the pictures to the FBI and the alleged perp is trying to save his ass.”

Darien sat back, fiddling with a pencil on his desktop. “The anomaly would have to be in the image, then — not in the medium.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean, if portions of the image are unique, the way a person is unique, a fingerprint is unique, then anything digitally created could be shown to be inaccurate.”

“But you’d need the real thing to prove it.”

“Right. You’d need the mother, or the boy, or the bathroom.”

I thought about this. Me. The cave. The girl.

Who has pictures of me?

Ardith, the enthused amateur: many. Melinda, an occasional snapshooter: a few. Louis, Johnny and Frances, from our frequent socializing: maybe. Donna, via file footage: some.

And everyone else at the Sheriff’s Department, through my personnel file: left side, right side, straight on.

I got Johnny by phone just before lunch. I shamed him into faxing me a copy of Amanda’s sketch of The Horridus, as described by Brittany Elder. I had to go to a pharmacy in Laguna with a fax service to receive the thing, banished as I was from my home. I asked about the real estate listings and Johnny said they were down to three male sellers of detached-unit homes.

“If the male sellers don’t pan out, try the women,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment. It was my first whiff of actual day-to-day banishment, and it weighed my heart like a death in the family. I was putting Johnny Escobedo in an impossible jam.