Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

“Person must really need the cash,” Sylvia says, trying to sound sympathetic.

“Well, no,” he says, blurting it out, like he can’t decide whether to explain or not. “That’s the thing. That’s the tragedy, really. It’s just awful.”

“It’s awful,” she repeats, trying to keep him going.

“It’s just one of those horrible ironies. You know, like that pitcher, that baseball pitcher who lost the arm to cancer. You know, that arm. The pitching arm.”

“Horrible,” she says, frowning, shaking her head along with him.

“It’s one of those stories you hear and you just think, you think to yourself, you know, nature can just be absolutely cruel. Deliberately cruel.”

She doesn’t know what to do but nod.

“I don’t know him well,” he says and gestures to the camera.

“Something happened to the owner?” she says, looking at the camera, not making eye contact.

“He had a fairly well-established little business. Did the weddings. Graduation shots. And he freelanced on and off. Talented eyes. Until they went …”

There’s a long, dry pause while both of them take a breath and in that moment the shop seems to darken a little, as if the bulbs in the hanging light fixture were losing power gradually. Finally, Sylvia puts her hand on top of the camera and say, “What was his name?”

The man pulls his head into his neck; a six foot, badly dressed turtle. She’s confused him.

“The man who owned this camera,” Sylvia says. “Would I know his name?”

“I doubt that,” he says and then his tongue darts out of his mouth and moistens his lips.

“Well, what was it?” she says, trying not to sound too persistent.

He gives up a practiced smile. “I really can’t give out that information.”

Sylvia thinks about this. “Well, can you tell me, you know, I’m just kind of curious here, what was the story with his eyes? What exactly went wrong with the eyes?”

“That,” he says, “I wouldn’t know.”

“Did he go blind?” she asks. “Did he lose the sight altogether?”

“I just don’t have the details,” he says.

“But if this guy’s been around for twenty-five years—”

But he cuts her off and says, “You know, I really have to start locking this place up.”

“It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Our fall hours.”

“Fall hours?” she repeats.

“I’ll tell you what,” he says. “Do you have a driver’s license on you? Some identification?”

She nods.

“All right, I’ll tell you what. Let me just copy down your name and address and you can take the camera home and try it out. See how you like it.”

She puts her hands in her jacket pockets. “You’re going to let me take this camera home? An Aquinas?”

He nods and smiles. “With this big a purchase,” he says, “you should know what you’re getting into.”

Sylvia shakes her head, digs out her license. “When do you need to know if I’m buying?”

“You try it out,” he says, taking the license and looking around for a piece of scrap paper. “Shoot a roll. See how it feels. If you still want it in a week or so, we can do all the paperwork then.”

“Don’t you want a deposit, at least?” she asks.

“I know where you live,” he says, crouches down to the floor and starts rooting through a pile of used cardboard boxes. “And you don’t look like the transient type.”

He finds a box he likes, brings it up on the counter, packs the Aquinas and the accessories into the leather case, then loads the case into the carton.

He lifts the carton over the counter and places it in her arms.

“This is really trusting of you,” Sylvia says.

He comes around the corner and takes her arm, starts to lead her to the door.

“Store policy,” he says. “That’s how we’ve stayed in business for so long.”

He pulls open the door, pokes his head out a bit and looks into the street.

“I’ll be back in a few days,” she says. “I’ll be trying it out tomorrow at the latest.”

He doesn’t seem to hear her, just keeps nodding, his eyes darting from Sylvia’s face out to the sidewalk.

“I’m sure you’ll find it does everything you’ve heard,” he says.

She steps outside and says, “Thanks for your help.”

But he’s already bolted the door. She’s not sure what the hell has just happened. But suddenly it occurs to her that she’s standing on the edge of Bangkok Park with a fifteen-hundred-dollar camera in her arms. She starts to hurry down Waldstein. At the corner, as she begins to cross Goulden, she looks back to Jack Derry’s in time to see the lights go out.

The Cadillac is a 1966 Fleetwood Seventy-five sedan, a huge, black, box of a car with seating for nine and a V-8 under the hood that on a good day could launch you to Mars. This particular model has a few customized features installed by a manic-depressive mechanic named Jimmy Clifton. There’s a thirty-gallon gas tank, bulletproof glass and four Sturmgewehr MP44 submachine guns mounted in the trunk. The Caddy is registered to Castle K Enterprises, a privately held corporation whose entire board of directors is currently seated inside the vehicle. So, pragmatic as always, Gustav Weltsch, the treasurer and comptroller of Castle K, decides to use the drive time for their annual meeting.

Felix, though secretary of the company, resents his chronic dual status as wheelman. He loves the car, but he’d rather be enjoying it from the backseat, like his cousin Jakob, an individual upon whom status and comfort are utterly wasted. Felix glances in the rearview, tilts the mirror until he can see Jakob, the eternal putz, a schlemiel who never grew out of his schoolboy imaginings, who thinks all of life is story-time. Jakob doesn’t even hear Weltsch droning on about the size of the loss Castle K will have to eat due to that firebombing over on Diskant Way. Look at the little weasel, turned sideways in the seat, away from the old man, his back to the old man for Christ sake, staring out the window at the lights of the Canal Zone, every now and then bringing his hands up near his face, thumbs out at right angles pointing to each other, fingers pressed together and straight up in the air. What is that crap? Poor Uncle Hermann, Felix thinks, it must be so humiliating.

Jakob is scouting locations, looking into the mouth of every alley they roll past and making judgments about the light and the shadows. When the Caddy drives by a pack of teen hookers on the corner of Edeson, he tries to capture each face, see if there might be some raw talent he could build on, a pair of eyes that would be loved by the camera, a pair of legs that would look captivating in flight, some composite quality that could be made to look six or eight years younger.

There are times when he’s made uncomfortable by this chronic reflexive impulse, this need to objectify, to mutate real life, as it’s happening around him, into manipulated images on a finite screen. It’s anti-life, he admits, in his most honest moments, it’s cannibalism. But it’s also a compulsion. So he lets himself wonder what the small-boned redhead might look like in black and white.

He thinks suddenly about the article in this morning’s paper, the update on the search for the missing child, Jenny Ellis. He remembers something Felice Fabri once said to him back in Maisel, as they exited the Kierling Theatre: Nothing is safe in this life, Jako, and sometimes people disappear.

And now he’s lost his appetite for scouting locations and actresses. And Gustav Weltsch’s babble is giving him another headache. So he closes his eyes and thinks back to the old country and his days with Felice.