Mark Doten - The Infernal

I made a dash for it, parked myself in the mathematical center of the room, Jack up front and straight ahead, an explosion of laughter and Jack turned, I got caught in that stare, you know the stare, I mean have you ever seen Jack just stare at something …

He stared me down, laughter built, he was saying something, saying it to me, at me, over and over, a 1929 Rolls-Royce roared right through the soundstage and shrieked to a halt between us …

I went to find Condi …

Poor Condi …

Here’s where Condi’s skill set was and here’s where this job was, way up above it, is what I was thinking …

Apparatus, lackeys, Jack and Faye, oh boy this’d be good, my little Condi, the accidental photographer, the tagalong …

Pop me some corn, brother, because any second now she’d be found out for sure …

They’d find her out , my Condi …

She wasn’t up to it, uh-uh, and she’d be found out …

Any minute now she’d be found out …

No, wrong …

Wrong …

I saw how wrong I’d be D6Y6BSL2WC RF

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Fact , total pro, cool as the pillow’s other side, my Condi …

Fact , stars, lackeys, apparatus, props, two shakes and it was all in order …

She moved all that apparatus and personnel, or orchestrated its movement, the pro, the master, two shakes …

And soon they were shutting down the soundstage, the apparatus was dispersing, hugs from Jack and Faye, hugs for Condi, a hug for me would have been nice, but hey …

I’d doubted her, my foundling, my Condi, and I’d been wrong to doubt her …

What was wrong with me, that I’d never dreamed that for my sister …

To never dream like that for her, when we’d been foundlings together, when we’d fought side by side, fought and clawed against the whole world …

Driving home, Condi at the wheel, I asked her, So how’d it feel, hugging Jack like that …

The highway, the cliff side, the moon in the sky and a second moon busting itself in black water, she didn’t speak …

The guardrail still busted up there, still unrepaired since the accident, we sped right by it …

I’d been driving them, Mom and Dad and Condi, the night before, and I’d swerved into the rail …

The night before the shoot, after the call from Faye, we’d been driving as a family to Five Easy Pieces …

Five Easy Pieces , we said we’d see it as a family to celebrate Condi’s job, catch one with Jack in it, give her a taste of Jack, give the whole family a taste …

We’d been driving to see that one, and I’d hit the railing …

But I hadn’t broken through …

I was drunk, but I wasn’t blackout stinking drunk , and so I pulled the wheel at the last moment …

One day I’d break through, but then, no …

Maybe that’s what Condi was thinking about on the ride back from the shoot …

How I hadn’t broken through that night, but one day I would …

Back home, the vineyards, she parked beneath the porte cochere, tires crunching on the macadamized driveway, she killed the engine and we just sat there …

Her hands folded in her lap, I took one of those hands in my own … How’d that feel, taking those photos, I said …

It felt good, Jerry, Condi said …

I bet it did, sure looked like it did …

Well, it did …

Inside I poured us drinks, no, she didn’t want a drink, she said I’m going down, second basement, don’t disturb me …

She said, Don’t touch me! Don’t you touch me …

She locked herself in the second basement, the dark room, came out a week later, hair wild, eyes and teeth wild, wreathed in the solder-like stink of developer, of her own sweat and filth, she handed me a sheaf of photos …

Look what I’ve done, Jerry …

They were all new, I told Donny as he unpacked my things.

They were classics, I told Donny as he unpacked my things.

These were the new classics, I told Donny, and how often does it happen, a classic no one’s seen before gets put in your hand …

Art History with a Special Photographic Emphasis , that’s one of my Harvard degrees, or I mean Yale, I’ve curated exhibitions in São Paolo, Stuttgart, Beijing, and Sydney, written monographs and articles, I’m a foremost world expert on the photographic arts, no exaggeration, and these were great photos, they were the very greatest …

I’d foreseen failure, humiliation …

What we had on our hands was some world-historical art …

Diane Ladd, Faye, those photos of the two of them …

That final photo, how they just cling to each other, two women, one young, one old, clinging to each other in a photo like that …

Diane, Faye, a backlit window, two women clinging, it’s right up among the greatest photos ever …

Diane, Faye, how they crouch within a circle of light that seems to expand then slowly turn as you try to make sense of it, that embrace, those arms encircling and also repelling, a radiance by now almost blinding, it can’t touch them …

Faye stares past Diane Ladd, Diane Ladd stares past Faye …

If only Diane Ladd would look up a fraction of an inch, or Faye down, their eyes would meet, but their eyes can never meet, they burn with the same spell …

Brady and Curtis, Gardner and Riis, this photo surpassed them all as world-historical art …

It’s why they had to be destroyed …

The studio and Polanski, even Jack, they all agreed, eliminate them, do so at all costs, they’d only make the movie ridiculou1JHD0R0X

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Chinatown was a fine movie, the best that year, but by no means a great movie, and the photos would undo it, tug a thread and it’d fall to pieces, a cheap joke …

Faye and Diane Ladd didn’t want the photos destroyed, but who listens to Faye or Diane Ladd …

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studio men came, confiscated photos, negatives, men in dark suits with earpieces, Mom and Dad let them right in, pointed out for them the likeliest hiding places, under the hate-puckered eye of our housemaid, Hattie …

My sister, my Condi, watched from her window, fourth floor, as her great work burned, then hurled her camera by the strap, she hurled it out and down …

It landed bang in the barrel where the photos burned, damn good shot, sparks flared up …

After that, we would both move on, me and Condi, though not yet …

Condi had thrown out her camera, she hadn’t moved to Harlowton …

I’d decided on public service, I hadn’t entered public service …

Our parents still alive, Mom and Dad, who’d scooped us up …

In another year it would be public service for me, for Condi, Harlowton, our parents dead, but for now we were suspended between our old lives and what was coming, we hadn’t yet broken through , I told Donny as he unpacked my suitcases …

The old life, it wasn’t over …

And yet it was …

My sister hurled her camera into the burning barrel in the macadamized driveway, and the old life was over, I told Donny as he unpacked my suitcases, Hume Horan and Clay McManaway scouring the Green Zone for boots.

It’s all these little nods going person to person, these smiles, these — pardon my language — these pert little shit-eating grins. The tension in those smiles, something almost giddy. When the news came, they still had us out in the hallway — us that would be fuchsias and them that would be yellows and greens — the news came, traveling one to the next, and as it did so a magnificent buzzing happiness swelled in that dim, mahoganied corridor. It was like November all over again, but this time out of a clear blue sky. If just one of us had started to applaud, we all would have joined in — I’m sure of that. I think we were afraid to break the spell. You see, we were all children in that moment. We had been grown-ups mustered for a grown-up event in a venerable midtown hotel, then the news came and we were children standing under an open sky in the summertime, blue light falling all around us.