Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“Will you cut it out?” I finally said.

Umlah caught my tetchy tone and started to fawn. He said, “How does it feel to be famous?”

It was what Orlando had asked me. I had said, “Remarkable.” But I wanted to give Umlah something to chew on, so I faced him and said, “How does it feel? Very exposed. It makes me feel incompetent and ugly — uglier than I am. It’s a lesson in modesty. It’s lonelier than failure. It’s — say, is this city rather fraught today, or is it just my imagination?”

“Must be your imagination,” said Umlah. “It’s an average day in New York — frenetic, but who cares?”

“No,” I said. “That sound.”

“Which one!” screamed Randy, and he laughed: Yaw! Yaw!

“That. Sort of crackling — burning. Smell it? And those people yelling. Hear them?”

“It’s just an average—”

“Wait a sec — fire engines,” I said. “They’re headed this way.”

“What did I tell you?” said Umlah, in that nibbling and self-satisfied way that patronizing people digest their admiration. “Doesn’t she have an amazing mind?”

“I’m not imagining it,” I said. “I can hear them. And the fire’s somewhere around here.”

We were, by my reckoning, near the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, and having stopped on the sidewalk we were noticed. A crowd had begun to collect around us. I heard the mutters: Some crazy dame, What’s up? and Search me .

“Shall we move on?” said Umlah in a whisper, clearly worried by the size of the crowd.

“I’m telling you, I smell smoke.”

Someone said, “It’s the dame with the glasses. She smells smoke.”

And I heard a weird chattering in the crowd, a chuckle in one man’s throat, an arsonist’s lunacy: Hoo-hoo .

The engines were louder, but neither Umlah nor Randy — nor anyone in the crowd — appeared to hear them. I could tell they were watching me closely, as if I were going to throw a fit. I was the center of attention; no one heard or saw the confusion that was so close by.

Umlah said, “We’ll be late.”

But I stood my ground. My face was heating, my nose was full of greasy smoke, there were panicky screams in my ears. I whirled around and pointed: “ Fire! ”

There was a hush, a moment of curiosity — faces peering at mine — and then I heard, “There it is!” and “She’s right!” and Randy said, “Hot dog!” and fumbled with his camera.

“Fire engines!” someone cried. The clanging was a block away.

Hoo-hoo .

“I’ve got to get a picture of this,” said Randy.

“Hurry up,” said Umlah.

Smoke was now pouring from the windows of the building across the street and filling the sky and turning the sun into a purple Necco wafer. I could hear glass shattering and whoops of excitement, but clearest of all was that solitary hoo of the goofball in the crowd. I listened and heard him sniffing and swallowing as he went snark and hoicked up the glue in his nose and gulped it down. Because this was so different from the cries of woe around me, it was amplified. I was able to make him out from his sinuses: the old black pea-jacket stinking of kerosene, the whiskery face, the tar on his teeth, the wild eyes goggling in thick glasses: a firebug.

“Let’s go,” said Umlah. “For God’s sake!”

Randy was doing the arrival of the engines, the traffic jam, and now, as the ladder trucks were wheeled into position, the helmeted men in raincoats and floppy boots chopping the windows apart with axes. The jets of water had no effect on the fountains of flame — there was a splendid picture in the way the hoses seemed to feed the fire.

“There’s some people up there!” said a man next to Umlah.

“Where?” said Randy, still jamming plates into his camera.

“Third floor,” I said.

Still the firebug chuckled and snarked, and he pressed forward to the rope that had been put up to contain the crowd. Hoo-hoo .

“Give me that thing,” I said, and snatched Randy’s camera.

Randy said, “I’ll hold your glasses.”

I had forgotten I was wearing my pair of opaque sunglasses. I pushed him aside before he could grab them. “I need them,” I said. “Get out of my way.”

Hoo .

“What’s she doing?” said Umlah.

Randy said, “She’s shooting in the wrong direction, for one thing.”

The chuckling firebug was three feet away and he was so interested in the blaze I was almost certain he had started it. He was breathing hard with pleasure; he did not see me. His mouth was open, he was thrilled, watching the action on tiptoe. I knew exactly how he felt: this, for him, was fame. He had stopped traffic and brought out five fire trucks; people were screaming and fainting; and the city was dark — he had blotted out the sun! It didn’t matter to him that no one knew his name — if anything, his anonymity was part of his achievement. His face was dappled by fire, his hair was alight, and on his glasses were the reflections of crisscrossed ladders and men in rubber capes swaying on them, making their way to the flaming waffle-iron of windows. This laughing face in the grim crowd was my picture. He went snark-snark, hoo-hoo .

I took three shots of the firebug, and each time, the instant I clicked, I saw in a flash, literally that, the whole bright picture, in a sudden spurt, as if the irises of my dead eyes had opened and shut and admitted a jet of light that singed my mind and left a black burn-spot there. In this fleeting cusp of vision the man with the map of fire on his face, snarking. It startled me and I repeated it until three black stars danced in my eyes. It was what my sight had once been — creakily pictorial, like a child’s scrawl — but so much less vivid than what my blindness had shown me, I gave it no further thought.

“YOU’RE DOING a land-office business,” I said, after we arrived at the Camera Club. There was a mob on the stairs and more people inside, rattling their catalogues and shuffling around the room where the pictures were hung. The usual gallery phonies — horny old men in berets hugging tragically pretty young girls — plus students, housewives, shoppers, joy-riders, mumblers, lens-lice. And in the air that din of appreciation you hear at parties, the noise that seems a special form of heat.

“They’re all here for your show,” said Umlah. “It’s been like this ever since we opened.”

“Cash customers?”

“There’s no entrance fee,” he said.

“I mean, are they buying the pictures?”

Umlah said, “I suppose they would, if they were for sale.”

“Of course they are!” I snapped. “Don’t tell me you’re not selling them.”

“I had no idea,” he said disgustedly, “no idea you were doing this for the money.”

“I do it for my health. It’s expensive.”

“I understood you enjoyed taking pictures.”

“Back up,” I said. “That’s the oldest trick in the book for exploiting artists — capitalizing on their sense of fun. Anyway, what’s it got to do with paying the rent, wear and tear, overheads?”

Randy said, “We thought you were on a Guggenheim.”

“Fuck you, Jack — don’t patronize me.”

“Please,” said Umlah. “What is it you want us to do?”

“You,” I said, poking my finger at Randy, “you’re playing with yourself. Lay off the pocket pool and go over and put price tags on them.”

“I’ll take care of that,” said Umlah, sounding pretty shattered by my outburst.

“Yeah,” said Randy. “I want to go upstairs and process these plates of the fire.”

“We’d better price them together,” said Umlah.