Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

Sylvia sits inside this overgrown camera and starts to cry. And immediately she gets furious with herself. But the anger doesn’t stop the tears, doesn’t stop the feeling that floods into her stomach and lungs.

She throws the pictures and they rain down around her until the whole of the booth is filled with odd-angled glimpses of two people in various stages of copulation.

I left my mother’s couch for this. I pulled myself out of a world that was confined to the corner convenience store and the sound track from Rita Hayworth movies so I could be assaulted from every possible direction, so I could be confused and betrayed and paranoid. So I could sit in the vault of film and batteries and disposable cameras with my ankles covered by glossy images of my lover lying down with someone else.

And then the thought occurs to her that there’s no way the lab would have developed these prints. There are strict guidelines for this kind of thing. They’ll print an exposed breast or behind, but no full-frontal nudity and absolutely no sexual activity of any kind.

She fishes around on the floor, picking up and discarding envelopes till she comes to the Jones’s package. She turns it over and looks at the order blank where instructions for developing and pricing are located. But the order boxes are blank. The only thing written on the envelope is Mr and Mrs Jones. And it’s not in any handwriting she recognizes.

So the package didn’t come from the normal lab. Schick managed to include it with the regular delivery.

Maybe these pictures are what Leni wants to warn her about tonight. And maybe Leni can explain why Schick wants to do this.

The phone starts to ring again and Sylvia starts to cry again. She turns out the light in the booth and lets herself sob. She misses her mother with an intensity that feels like it will take over, like it will become the only emotion, the only sensation she’ll ever feel. She thinks of Ma, alone on that first night, realizing her husband is not coming back, that he’s dead or that he’s run off, whichever story is correct, it doesn’t matter. And for the first time Sylvia understands the true weight of that kind of realization, the possibility that in the instant that fact of loss takes hold of you and lodges, permanently, intractably, into the deepest marrow of your bones, you could turn against life and movement. You could turn against yourself. She can picture her mother, she can see her, so brutally clearly, twenty-five years ago, looking in on the daughter, in bed, in the dimness of that tiny room, Ma staring at the form beneath the quilting, Ma in the doorjamb, framed, backlit, motionless, a definitive picture of a woman alone, fighting a kind of half-apprehended terror that she senses might never go away, looking down on the responsibility of a child, of Sylvia, in front of her, filling her vision. And all of Ma’s innocence, her sense of promise and hope, just dead, just petrified in the emptiness of the rooms behind her. How did she go on for the rest of this imagined night?

And now Sylvia’s crying more for her mother than herself. Because she knows that she doesn’t love Perry. She’s not sure she ever loved Perry. He was a way to move from one point to another. He was someone she needed badly at one time. Maybe desperately. And she’s crying because she doesn’t know if she’ll ever forgive herself for that.

She reaches down and picks up the razor knife she uses to open supply boxes. She lifts up the ringing telephone and puts it in her lap on top of the pictures of Perry and Candice. She grabs the phone cord in her left hand, makes a small loop. She cuts through the cord and the ringing stops, then she opens the bubble window and heaves the freed phone into the parking lot.

This will be Sylvia’s last day at the Snapshot Shack.

On the walk home, she keeps expecting to see Mr. Quevedo in the distance ahead, walking like the risen dead, an awkward zombie in a fraying suit. But she doesn’t see anyone. The storm has gotten worse and she’s completely soaked after the first block.

When she finally gets back to the apartment, she stands inside the entry and just shakes her shoulders and head like big long-haired dog. Then she un-Velcros the pouch on her anorak and takes out the pictures of Perry and Candice. She thinks about leaving them on the stairway, one on each stair, each picture getting progressively more explicit as you climb to the apartment. A trail of sleazy crumbs leading back to one more boring primal image— the wronged woman.

She puts the pictures back in the pouch and runs up to the back door, takes the spare key, lets herself into the kitchen, goes straight to the bedroom closet and pulls it open. And, thankfully, no one’s inside this time, so she starts pulling off sopping clothes and dropping them into a laundry pile. The plan is to collect all her dirty clothes, grab a bottle of wine, head down to the cellar, toss everything in the washer, pour the first drink of the day and go into the darkroom. She wants to pin the Perry-Candice pictures on the dry-line. She wants to study them the way a bride studies the proofs from her wedding package. She wants to pick the seven most hurtful poses, the seven most insulting and degrading postures. She wants to clip them alternatively next to the Propp photos. Madonna and Child followed by Perry and Candice followed by Madonna and Child. She wants to see what the positioning will do to her. What it might tell her. She wants to see if the combination of alternating images will have some reaction, like chemicals thrown together in some impulsive and radical experiment.

She slides into her mother’s slippers and is belting her robe when she hears a knock on the back door. She puts the pictures in the pocket of the robe, walks out, pulls the door open and sees Mrs. Acker, the landlady standing in her red sneakers and housedress covered by her dead husband’s old canvas fishing jacket, feathery lures still pinned to the lapels. The jacket has a detailed picture of a trout embroidered on the back, a huge hook through its mouth and the words this one’s a keeper written in script underneath.

Mrs. Acker smiles and tries to look into the kitchen. This morning she’s wearing her standard schmear of heavy makeup, layers of some rust-colored rouge from below her eyes to her chin and a bluish, purplish eye shadow that wars with a fire-engine red lipstick that Sylvia has never seen her go without. Last year there was a car crash out in front of the church at three in the morning. Perry and Sylvia ran outside and there was Mrs. A in housecoat and sneakers and full makeup. Someday Sylvia wants to get up the nerve to ask her where she buys her cosmetics.

“Wonderful,” Mrs. Acker says, “you’re home.”

“The Shack’s closed. Problems with the phone system.”

The landlady’s hands go to her hips. “Listen, Sylvia, I wonder if you could do me a little favor.”

Sylvia indicates her dripping hair. “I just got out of the rain, Mrs. A, could you give me about fifteen minutes.”

“This’ll just take you a second, honey. Honest to God. I’ve got some of Begelman’s coffee cake heating,” and she’s got Sylvia by the arm and is leading her down the stairs.

Sylvia doesn’t fight it. She moves to sit at the kitchen table, but Mrs. Acker says, “No, no, the papers are in the living room.”

For all her money, Mrs. A hasn’t redecorated her apartment since Mr. Acker died in 1969— we were up late, watching that moonwalk, and I say, Louie, don’t those big suits they wear look uncomfortable and he doesn’t answer. He’s had a coronary right in front of me and the astronauts …

The walls are covered with heavy flock wallpaper but the paper is mostly hidden by plaque after plaque bearing mounted, shellacked fish and the inscribed date of their demise. Mrs. A shoos a half dozen cats off the couch and they jump and run in a blur of different shades of brown and grey.