Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

She touches the pedestal, feels grit under her fingers.

A light flashes, strobes at her from above and she flinches.

Then comes Propp’s voice.

“Sit down, Sylvia.”

She looks up in the direction of the flash and is hit with another burst of light. He’s somewhere up in the balcony that rims the pavilion, up in the clubby loft where old men once drank brandy and smoked cigars while waiting for a train out of the city.

“That’s my camera,” she yells up.

Another flash.

“Yes,” he says, no yell, but his voice carries, “I seem to have misplaced mine.”

He’s moving around up there, probably on his knees, crawling under the cover of the balcony wall.

“I’m leaving,” she says, her voice slightly lower.

There’s a pause and then, “No, you’re not.”

She waits for a flash but nothing comes.

“I think,” he says, “you want to know who she is. I think you want that too badly to leave.”

They both know he’s right. She wants to know who the woman in the seven photos is. She wants to know what the woman was to Propp. She wants to know what the infant’s name was, what became of them. She needs to know why the pictures came into her life.

“Why don’t you sit down, Sylvia,” he says and she pivots to the left to follow the voice. “I want to take your picture. Do you know what some people would give to have me take their picture?”

She doesn’t like the arrogance and says, “I’m not a fan, Propp, Remember?”

He ignores her. “There are stunning similarities,” he says, almost a whisper that she has to strain to hear, “between you and she.”

This stops her and she hates the fact that he knows how to manipulate her with this kind of ease.

She says, “Similarities,” knowing, as the words come out, that he’ll let her hang. And he does.

So Sylvia does the only thing she can do. She climbs up on top of the pedestal and tries to arrange herself into the pose of the Madonna. She tilts her face upward and gives her profile to the direction of the last camera flash. She leans her body forward until half of it is cloaked in shadow. She doesn’t know what to do with her arms. There’s no baby to hold onto. So she puts her hands awkwardly on her knees and thinks, though she’s not sure, that she hears a whispered thank you from up above.

There’s a long wait and she begins to imagine that he’s gone, that simply getting her to assume the pose was enough to satisfy him. But then a single flash shoots down on her and she hears him bumping into something, the noise of clutter being scattered, a bottle rolling down an incline. She wants to squint and look up but she makes herelf stay still, wait for direction, instruction. Maybe some answers, some kind of story.

“Could I see the shoulder, Sylvia.”

She’s not sure what to do, but before she can think too much, she simply brings her hands up from the knees to the neck, unties the small silk bow and unfastens pearl buttons until she’s given herself enough room to slide the night-gown off her left shoulder — it was the Madonna’s left shoulder, wasn’t it — and bring her skin out into the cool air of the pavilion. And it feels odd but wonderful and immediately a series of flashes erupt, four or five or six in a row, and she tries to remember how many shots could be left in the camera.

“You’re perfect, Sylvia,” and flash, “You’re beautiful. You’re absolutely perfect.”

He’s moving up in the balcony. He’s jogging from spot to spot like a quirky, self-possessed dancer, dodging, with a semi-gracefulness, from one instinctual point to another, planting down, landing steady for a second, hitting the shutter, exposing a shot, taking in her body in this ragged gown, her face, her naked shoulder lit by the dusty light of the moon piercing through the gaps of the station’s roof. And he’s doing the standard, actually chichéd photographer’s patter, spieling away at her, a riff on David Hemmings in every photographer’s favorite movie. But Propp is wonderful at it and, incredibly, somehow sincere, somehow putting across to her the feeling that each moment that she sees the explosion of light that allows her image to be cemented onto film, that each of those microseconds, is inherently important to his life, to his reasons for being. His movements up in the balcony are beyond some idea of love of craft. They’re beyond any notions Sylvia’s ever had about art. It feels more like Propp is making a connection, with her and with himself, that few people ever get to live through.

“The shoulder, Sylvia, more shoulder,” and she unhitches two more buttons.

Another flash and another and suddenly Sylvia doesn’t want to leave. She doesn’t want to move off this pedestal. She doesn’t even want to talk, to ask any questions. She wants to pray he has pockets stuffed with film and enough energy to move until dawn.

Then there’s a noise, another din of junk clattering under a tripping foot. But it doesn’t come from the direction of the flash and suddenly it’s as if she senses Propp’s mood being shattered in the instant that the noise explodes into the air, a palpable flinch. And as the clatter echoes into silence, there’s this surge of ignited tension that blows down across the space between them and immediately infects her.

“All right, you little bastards,” she hears Propp say, his voice low and genuinely threatening, “I see you.”

There’s a rumble of incoherent whispering from halfway around the balcony area.

“You want to watch me work, fine. But any noise and I’ll shoot into the whole goddamn pack of you.”

She pulls the nightgown back up onto her shoulder and starts to climb down from the pedestal and Propp screams, “No, Sylvia, don’t.”

She looks up and tries to see who he was talking to but all she can make out is a cluster of shadows that wave in and out of visibility.

“They’re harmless,” Propp says, “I swear to you.”

She wants to run.

“They’re children, Sylvia,” his voice lowering but still fighting a panic. “They’re just lost children. They live here, Sylvia. We’re in their home.”

She turns her head to try and see Propp and he repeats, “They’re harmless. They only want to watch.”

And he lights them up with the beam from his penlight. Sylvia sees a dozen or more small faces, each spotlighted for a second or two, just long enough for her to realize that Propp has told the truth, that they’re exactly what he says, they’re children, ranging from maybe six years old up through the early teens. In the instant that each face is highlighted for her benefit, Sylvia can take in the horrible facts amended to their raw ages, the sunken eyes that result from too much fear and solitude, the grime-plastered hair that juts from or pastes down to the miniature skulls, the castoff, filthy, ill-fitting clothing, and more than anything else, the generic look of defeat from faces that should still be too young to know there’s a battle.

Has Propp brought her here on purpose for this singular reason? Has every other element of this nightmare — from taking the goddamn Aquinas to posing here as the stand-in Madonna — been subordinate to this image, this group portrait of inexcusable tragedy?

The children look down on her as if they were some nest of insects that share a single eye. None of them speak. None of them even move. Looking back up at them is like studying a haunting, inherently demented canvas, something slaved over by a tortured medieval monk with unlimited talent, a man whose life’s work was to depict the definition of abandonment. They’re a half-starved peasant choir, made mute by an endless destitution, angelic by way of a brutalized life rather than an unspoiled innocence.