Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

The past — that darkroom — was illusion. It was possible for me to believe that because it had so completely vanished it had never existed. I was a particle of light streaking through space, leaving no light in my track. In removing my pictures, Frank had taken away my past and tidied the evidence away. I had no life — perhaps I had never had one. The feeling I got in strange hotel rooms, that I didn’t exist, came upon me here on the broad lawn.

He had detached my pictures from me. With the pictures I was two people, the photographer, the person. Without them, I was no one.

Panic sent me back to the house — that sense of exposure woken by the hoot You! , that seeks the reassuring noises of habitation, the clunk of floors and hubbub in pipes. I did not pause. I went straight to his room.

Months before, I had been bored and curious and had poked in his room and felt justified. Wasn’t he doing the very same thing to me? Today I sought refuge there. I wanted to see — what? — another of his mother’s letters; read my name, satisfy myself that I was real. And my excuse, and part of my intention, was that there were pictures I had not seen, incidents bleached on the tide-wrack of memory, years I could not account for. The pictures must have been somewhere: Marilyn, Move Along, Mailman’s Shoes , and more — if I saw them I would be able to continue.

The door was open. After my first intrusion, his threats, my promises, he trusted me. Thank God for that. If he hadn’t trusted me I would not have been able to betray his trust. But what betrayal? My bed, my bureau, my table and lamp, his shoes in my closet, his comb on my dresser, his fusty bachelor smell in the drawers, his calendars—

No, not calendars, but sheets of paper tacked to the wall, just as he had explained to me, his method of writing. Six of them worked over with a felt-tip, “bodies of thought.”

“If people aren’t’thinking it’s impossible to get a good likeness.”

Maude says every picture contains its complete history, past and future. “The majestic echo of image.”

Tape, lettering guides, bird calls, hooks, wallets, stiff cardboard. Extruded mountings. Bus ticket, bank, P.O., Bufferin.

First with golf-ball grain, high contrast, halation, negative prints, available light, etc. Abandoned them when others used them.

“The Bible is in error — in the beginning was the picture or Image.” Photography: “Matter over mind.”

In fifty years of photography, no self-portrait. Why?

Seeing these notations and mottos made me feel better, though I was tempted to pick up the pen and scribble additions to these bodies of thought, meddle with posterity. I resisted. I went over and sat on our friend’s bed — my bed — and felt a queer sensation in my body, the bed’s memory of its occupant’s restless sleep. A residue of heat, his sad story seeping through the blankets. He was weak and lonely, stifled by his own grim company.

The bedside table stood handily by. I recalled my first excursion here, the pictures of Kenny and Doris. Oh, well. Let’s bring ourselves up to date. Did pornography freaks outgrow their infatuation with one sequence of sticky pictures, get tired of leering at the same set of views and move on to fresh batches, as philanderers sought new conquests?

The drawer was shallow. A few photography magazines as before, and seeing them reminded me how for years it was the photography magazines which had printed the nudie shots, all the solemn camera jargon ( 1/10th, f-8, slight haze ) under a pair of tits or a dimpled bum. At the back of the drawer was a chunk of prints with nicked edges: Doris kneeling, twatty; Kenny plugged into Doris; Doris in boots; Doris looking for something on her person; Doris with a grip on Kenny’s joystick; Kenny nibbling; Doris tooting his clarinet; Kenny straining; Doris going woof-woof; Kenny riding Doris; Doris athwart Kenny; Kenny bug-eyed; Doris bespattered. Yuck.

And Marilyn , and two Pig Dinners, and my half-dozen erotic ones, done — I now remembered — not for a “man’s magazine” but for a photography annual which, because it was for professionals, could get away with murder: strawberry licker, cello torso, sprawler, squatter, nipple examiner, and the leggy nude climbing a pole — the buttocky boy.

There was one more picture, of two people, neither Kenny nor Doris. Nor was it deliberately erotic. I tried to put it away. I brought it near my face, and it brimmed like a rising tide of light.

He was on his knees, the veins standing out on his forehead, marble and blood, in a posture of furious pagan prayer, his mouth fixed in demand. There were clawmarks on his shoulders. He might have been swooning, dying in a fit, he looked so tormented. His reflection blazed on the floor, a white shadow struggling under him. his double heaving at him. It was a dream I had dreamed: the two bodies creased, light on light, in a spasm of completion, nearly one.

The photograph matched my memory perfectly, but how had it occurred?

The day was not so dark through the far window, though the room was small and that flywheel like the intimation of eclipse. God, they looked so young! Hurry was implied on their faces, but they were caught in a penetrating embrace, eternally coupled in thought and body, like a pair of lovers on the weedy sea-floor where they had fallen.

No , I gulped. But I had started to go under.

AFTER the first shock of bright airless matter slapped my mouth and masked my eyes and flushed me in sudden liquid, I stopped fighting for breath and bobbed like a cork. Then I fell again. I plummeted through a pipe of watery laughter and as I sank became lighter and the curvature around me more luminous and expressive. I was clearly drowning.

As I surrendered to this silly descent I slowed down. It was easy for me to see the jets of turbulent zeros bubbling past my face. This clouded cream-soda gave way to foam, to parcels of color, green and yellow-blue, like silks tossing a little way off, striping me as they moved. I made a fishy motion and the formless pressure of the fountain wrung me apart, scale by scale, and I glittered, sifting down in pieces like sequins from a torn gown.

If I had not known better I should have said I was flying. But I had been here before, drowning in the wayward magic of the eye, stricken by glory — long ago, when I had still believed in the power of the photograph to drag the victim into its depths. Now I was ashamed of my helplessness at having pitched forward into one of my own photographs. I plunged toward a whimper of light.

It was a drunken experience of dying — separation and the sucked-down sensation of finality — like someone stretching me out of my tights. Shapes were clarifying below me, but I was conscious that the vision that was animating me would destroy me — I was being tickled to death. I knew that it was too late to do anything but endure it. I would not have a second chance.

The photograph (once through the floodgate I scarcely remembered what it was) had worked. It had defied and drowned me, and for those first instants upside down I thought damn , because I was learning the hard way what I had always known. And the deeper I went the more convinced I was that beyond this fatal blinding light there was only darkness and no one to tell.

My ears roared with the racketing laughter of the torrential water. This decreased in volume, but I was still aware of sound — of sound fading — as if I were being deafened by it. Then the silence was perfect. There was a room down here, and bodies, and voices — marine whispers.

— I was supposed to guard it with my life .

— She’s in London. She’ll never know .