And here is an opportunity to test the thesis of my article. I swap thumb drives and search the computer’s file formats for the signal, which is a simple ASCII string, 256 characters long. Right away, John’s porn directories light up with the beacon. I sort the pictures by date and see that the first set he bought, over a year ago, was a legendary set of scanned Polaroids nicknamed Summer Poppies, which means that whoever is tracking these images has been doing so for a while.
John and I fall silent, staring at Poppie in her makeup and fake eyelashes, with the look on her face that made her famous. This is a series I find especially disturbing. I understand that humans are deeply corrupted and that over the course of life, each of us comes to understand the depth of our species’ sexual depravity. But in Summer Poppies, the worst perversions are candy-coated with false innocence, with bunny slippers and lollipops and Snoopy bedspreads. Here, even pearls of semen hover and catch the light.
“There is a signal coming from this picture,” I tell John. “It’s like a Trojan horse. When you download the picture, you download the beacon. And when you connect to the Internet, the beacon goes ping .”
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
“Here’s the beauty of it,” I tell him. “The beacon’s not in the image but in the file format, as metadata, so you can alter the image, crop it, whatever, but the beacon is still there. No matter what you do to the picture, it can still call home, and that’s how they know.”
“Know what?”
“That the pictures are here, John. On your hard drive.”
Then I notice an image that doesn’t emit the signal. It’s of a girl I haven’t seen before. And she is a girl — not a teen, not a tween, but a child. She is alone, captured from the waist up, and she wears a small yellow T-shirt. There is nothing sexualized about the picture, not even a pigtail, and she’s not on a set — there are no Hello Kitty curtains, no tripods or floodlights. No, this is a girl and she’s in someone’s kitchen and this is not a “shoot” but a normal day from her actual life, one that finds her standing next to a screen door, the diffused light from which casts a pale pattern across her skin. On her face is fear, and the wide-eyed uncertainty of what will happen next, laced with perhaps a glint of hope that she can spare herself in some way from the unknown bad thing that is about to begin. Then I see her arm is blurred, that it’s lifting — to fend something off, to latch on to an adult for security, or is the arm lifting on its own, the way arms lift involuntarily when something horrible is encountered.
“Where did you get this picture?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I traded for it. I forget.”
“Do you know this girl?”
“Of course not,” he says. “Look, I just want my computer fixed.”
I understand that whether a child is hurt under the bright lights of a highly produced shoot or atop the dingy linoleum of a family friend’s home, the damage is the same. But the illusion is that the latter is happening right now, not long ago, that if the right series of actions were taken, taken by anyone, even someone like me, it could be stopped.
I copy the picture of the girl and eject my thumb drive.
“You’ve got a bad pin on a RAM card,” I tell John. “It only fails in heavy data cascades. It’s an easy fix, but don’t bother. You need to pull those drives out of their bays and take them out back and break them with a hammer. The spindles must crack to ensure the data cannot be retrieved. Tell your boss the computer was stolen and then crack the drives. Understand?”
He nods, but I can tell it hasn’t sunk in.
“And don’t try to save those pictures. They know you have them.”
“Who knows?” he asks.
I take the cash from his hand. “Who do you think?”
—
At home, I walk right past my rosebushes. Inside, I turn on all the lights and pace the small rooms. The image of that girl has me completely fucked up. Everywhere I look, there she is. I am racked by the little blur of her arm. It lifts, but there’s nothing she can do to stop what will happen. Innocence is on that face, as well as knowledge of what’s to come. And the arm lifts. The past, the present and the future all exist at once. And the most fucked-up and wrong and horrible part is that I activate. It kills me to masturbate, to stand there at the bathroom sink and jerk off into the basin — when I close my eyes, I see her; when I open them, there in the mirror is myself — but it’s the only thing that will make it stop.
I start crying while I do it, I really do, because she knows what’s going to happen, she knows it can’t be stopped, and even though you know what’s ahead, it still comes as a surprise when, after a day of sailing, after the Skipper has doled out performance ribbons to your Sea Scouts troop, and you’ve been having fun and there’s a sense of wonder and achievement after rounding the tip of Catalina Island, and despite all the times it has happened before, it takes you by surprise when the Skipper comes for you in the dark and you’re taken down to the storage cabin, with the musty smell of sail canvas and the petroleum bite of foul-weather gear. Atop a mound of the other boys’ dirty laundry is where he forces you facedown. The anchor chain pulls taut against the hull, and there is no light beyond the pale glow of the bilge-pump sensor, no sound beyond the scratch of his razor stubble against the back of your neck and the cinch of his hands as he grips the straps of your life vest.
—
For the next couple nights, I ignore my gardening and instead initialize my computer. Here is where I keep a library of images. The pictures activate, strongly, like a muscle capable of folding you in half. There is nothing erotic about them. They are actually quite troubling. But they activate. I view before-and-after pictures, hundreds at a time, just before and just after. It helps to modify the pictures, to make a big one into little ones — focusing on a small hand, defiant, clenching the sheets, or a hand open and limp, fully relented. A single look can tell an entire story, so I often crop pictures down to the eyes — eyes fallen, eyes without focus, eyes closed, the pinwheel of an eye that’s seeing something far different than what’s before it, or a single, daring upward glance.
When you view these pictures, the best way to handle what you must confront is to view a picture series backward: something awful is happening to a child, it becomes less bad, and less bad, then the child and the adult separate, and after talking a brief moment, they exit through different doors.
At my computer, I do not masturbate, because that ends the sessions too soon. I can only say that in pushing me to the edge, the pictures help me find center again. I feel purged somehow. For a couple of days, I’m just like everybody else.
I’ve read a couple of books on the topic. This One Doctor Lady writes that by watching the scenario, the victim revictimizes himself. This Other Doctor Guy’s book says that emotional development is arrested at the time of abuse, which makes you incapable of a relationship beyond the level of an adolescent. There’s only one thing I’m sure about: these experts have never been victimized — they have never even seen it. They couldn’t stand a single image. Not for a minute, not for sixty measly seconds, could they direct their gaze at a video portraying the brutalization of an innocent.
—
A knock at the door wakes me. It is midday. Since I sleep fully clothed, I’m able to answer right away. By sleeping with your clothes on, you don’t need to climb under the sheets. You don’t need to disturb a perfectly made bed or even fold the bed back into the couch.
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