Ethan Chatagnier: Warnings from the Future

She felt a thrill as the fog surrounded the car, no bumps, no force pushing back at her, none of the resistance the bank of dull white seemed to suggest from outside. She loved the way it dematerialized in front of her as if opening a secret pathway, and without thinking she pressed her foot down a little more on the gas pedal. Without landmarks to gauge her speed, she’d have thought that the fog would have made everything seem slower, but instead it felt like the most furious racing. She looked at her speedometer, the same 70 mph. Her breakfast lurched in her stomach and the skin of her face cooled as she asked herself how long would it take her to use up her fifty feet of visibility going that speed? How many feet would it take to stop the jeep? She pulled to the shoulder, slamming her foot to the brake, and the jeep rocked violently as a big rig she hadn’t seen behind her shot by, erupting with a foghorn so loud the sound seemed to originate within her own head. She laid her head down on the top of the steering wheel and heard a crunch at the same time she felt prongs dig into the bridge of her nose. Her sunglasses: she’d forgotten she was wearing them. She took them off, and the fog—bright and pearly—seemed lit from within.

This is what she remembers, what she tries to remember first, what she tries to keep her mind on later, when she looks at the photo that’s framed on the wall of her home office. It’s a simple frame, taking no attention away from its subject. She’d originally hung it above the mantle, and Alice had made her take it down. You want our guests to look at this? You want our friends to be in discomfort every moment they are in our house? Do you want Dean to grow up under this? She’d agreed to move it, and Alice had replaced it with a family portrait Carmen had taken with a timer. That was the problem with war photography, and with the disaster-chasing it had turned into here at home: trying to show people things they preferred not to see. No, that was only one of the problems, for Carmen herself, even years later, was filled with conflict when looking at the photo.

The fog was so complete that the jeep itself seemed not to exist. Every so often she opened her door to see the yellow median dashes crawl by and confirm she was still on the right side of the road. If Alice knew the type of soup Carmen was driving in, she’d settle for nothing less than Carmen reversing time to avoid having left LA in the first place. They’d argued enough about Carmen’s work, about her running to places others were running from. That was what Alice had fallen in love with, though she wouldn’t admit it now—the life Alice had admired before being shackled to it. Dean had changed everything for Alice; for Carmen, Dean had changed some things. Without Dean toddling around in her memory, she wouldn’t have been crawling along at ten miles an hour, no matter the visibility. But she could never not go .

She didn’t know what towns she was between when the fog thinned out suddenly. After a moment she could see the wind funneling it into a deep river bed. Gusts of the thick mist seemed to be not blown but sucked into the channel as if in one ceaseless inhale. The river of fog ran east, which is to say backwards, against instinct. The flares caught her eye a moment too late as the wreck ahead impressed its meaning on her consciousness in one powerful stamp. She swung the wheel to the right and flew across the shoulder and onto the steep embankment. Tire treads bit at the loose dirt, and she slid for several feet before they grabbed and halted the jeep.

She left it there, out of the way of the road, unbuckling her camera bag from the passenger seat and slinging it over her shoulder. She grabbed a first aid kit from the glove box and slid it into the mesh pouch of the camera bag. While she charged up the embankment, she got her camera strap around her neck and affixed a lens, outlining the situation as best she could: no lights or sirens, no aid yet; flares, at least on this side of the wreck. She called 911 and told them about the pileup. Where was it? “Between Bakersfield and Fresno,” she said. “I don’t fucking know.” As she got level with the bridge the wreck was on the far side of, she saw a scattering of people against the guardrail, heads in hands, in postures of mourning. There were doubtless some people imprisoned or crushed in those accordioned cars. A man leaned against his smashed Corolla, uselessly banging on its roof. She knew the red cover on the ground could not be blood, must have been tomatoes or cherries or berries, but they made for a grisly sight.

She was framing shots in her mind at the same time she was doing a medical triage. It would help no one to bang on the side of the car with that man, but she could see the angle from which it would make a compelling image. The survivors against the guardrail could use a neuro check that she was marginally equipped to perform, but it wouldn’t do any good until ambulances arrived anyway. There were a thousand ways she could help, of course. She could find things. The dictum in foreign countries was to be strictly hands off: there were soldiers for soldiering and medics for medicine. That policy was harder to maintain on the domestic front.

As she walked into the scene, she felt the crimson bursting of the strawberries beneath her feet. She took several shots of the people hunched over in front of the guardrail, between the rough wet asphalt below them and the backdrop of fog swirling down into the basin. She took some of the man banging on the car, cautiously out of his sightlines at first, in case he was demented enough to attack her, but then closer, toward the shot she really wanted. His face snapped up at her, but it was broken by grief, and he went back to beating the car. She retreated from him, and that was when she saw the boy.

He had walked around the far edge of the produce truck from the other side of the wreck, and was approaching her. He was not screaming, but he was not swaying his arms as he walked either. A thin line of dried blood went from his hair past his ear and down his neck. There is something about a person who is in true need of help, something that creates a beacon, even if they say nothing.

The story she tells herself—that she saw the boy and took the picture by instinct before she even thought about it. It sounds so natural and true that sometimes she almost forgets it didn’t happen that way. But she did have that thought: this will make a great photograph. She put the box to her eye to snap it, just a single exposure that imprinted itself in her memory immediately. Sometimes you didn’t know what you had until you saw it in the darkroom, but this was not one of those times. She took it and then rushed to help: throwing her windbreaker around him, picking him up, talking to him, and taking him over to the group by the guardrail.

She took it knowing she would feel guilty. Those were the taxes of the job. What was war photography but choosing the ghosts that would haunt you? She is stuck too with remembering wanting to be in a darkroom more than wanting to help the dumbstruck victims, given what she had in her film compartment. Already the image was a conduit to Dean, who was sleeping placidly in his bed a hundred miles south. Dean was three or four years younger, but it was close enough for that thing to happen, the thing that happens to every parent, the thing by which any suffering child looks at you with the eyes of your own child. She’ll remember too trying to wipe sweat from her forehead afterward and realizing she was still wearing the cowboy hat she’d been driving in. The poor boy must have felt he’d been visited by a tourist.

How many times has she wondered, standing in front of the photograph, whether she had taken something from the boy? A part of her thought she had stolen every expression from him except the one in the picture. But that was just a photographer’s vanity. Even the word capture was a photographer’s vanity. You created a duplicate of one instant, and then the instant went on. The ambulances and fire trucks arrived. An EMT took the boy. Others hovered their fingers in front of the eyes of the victims on the shoulder. They used machines to pry the doors off the Corolla and remove part of the bewildered man’s wife. Carmen had left after that, but she knew that the tow trucks would be next, peeling the cars apart and carting them two at time to some mechanic’s yard in a nearby town where they’d wait on an insurance assessment. She didn’t know how they’d handle the big rig and its trailer. It would likely take a few tow trucks working together to get it righted. And what would they do with the strawberries? Would they send a street sweeper to clean them up, or leave them to the slower fate of the birds?