Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

Maybe that is how it has really been from the beginning, of course.

Maybe the rest of your story is simply about what your story has always been about: what the camera does not know.

There is a reason, in other words, that most paintings are signed while most photographs are not.

Most photographs are not signed because they are about the thing itself, the incident or person being photographed, and not about the photographer.

Photographs, particularly documentary photographs, which comprise most specimens (family and scientific, military and journalistic, police and industrial), are about replicating the world, not creating a new one.

To the extent they imagine, they do not get it.

They are about neutralizing the photographer while recording, informing, chronicling, summarizing.

They are not about the summarizer except to the extent that the summarizer happens to exist on a specific day at a specific address.

He or she cannot help that, needless to say, but there you have it.

Rather, they are about the event being summarized.

Photographs are about incident.

Whoever said this originally, assuming someone in fact did say this originally, said it much better than you, presumably.

The photographer exists within photographs only as a vestige, an unavoidable afterimage.

More personality than that, and the thing being witnessed comes to feel impure, contaminated by a gangling act of selfhood.

Photographs are not about vision, though that is what they purport to be about.

They are not about seeing, to put it another way.

They are about copying.

They are not about production.

They are about reproduction.

They are not acts of dreaming, but of insomnia, about the inability to shut your eyes year after year.

And then naturally there is this one, all Andi, all the time, a twenty-four-hour non-stop Andi channel — yet almost unintelligible because your wife’s eyes are missing.

Her eyes are missing and so Andi is missing.

The focus that defines her mood, her age, her intelligence, her everything.

It is impossible to tell whether she is happy or sad.

Whether she is six or sixteen, bored or apprehensive, thinking or daydreaming, cute or lewd, angry or in love.

And that, it strikes you, is Andi’s voice precisely.

That is Andi all over.

Because some narratives simply stop and because on the far side of Moses Lake you simply veer into a Best Western and get a room.

It is after nine o’clock.

It is after nine o’clock and after ten o’clock.

Three times on the way here you had to pull over onto the shoulder and sit behind the wheel, just sit behind it, eating a Snaggy Scree bar, engine idling, U2 playing on the cassette deck, U2 or Garbage, eating another Snaggy Scree, traffic hurling past, then ease back onto the highway and continue your night ride, windows down and the cold desert wind rushing through the cabin like time itself, suspecting you might be the only couple left on earth.

Which is what your father did as well, you imagine, sitting there, it almost goes without saying.

But not quite.

Crunching to the roadside over crab shells, crab shells or frog backbones, it remains unclear which, sitting behind the wheel, smoking, everyone facing forward, rain beating down on the roof.

You, your mother, your father in a rich cloud of particulate matter.

In the middle of the night.

Just like his son.

Just like you.

Rain thundering down on the roof.

Many vehicles in the parking lot display bumper stickers bought in Wenatchee either yesterday or early this morning announcing they attended The Swarming.

Because you simply turned around at some point.

Because you simply eased out of traffic, bumped by the semaphoring state troopers on the median, and pulled into the eastbound lane.

Because the viewer of a photograph almost always has a privileged perspective.

He or she almost always knows how things will turn out.

J.F.K.’s head will snap forward in another second, snap forward and then snap back, and Jackie will clamber onto the trunk of the black limo.

Baryshnikov will lose to gravity.

Again and again.

Again and again and again.

Men and women in Anya Sanchez t-shirts roam the lobby purposelessly like protagonists in a B-film about voodoo.

The t-shirts salsa-sauce red with two bold vanilla-white fingers raised in a peace sign surrounded by a jagged vanilla-white cartoon aura.

Below the bold vanilla-white fingers and bold vanilla-white cartoon aura the bold vanilla-white letters spelling out: BE THERE.

How would you know? you wondered nearly thirty-five years ago in the backseat of that car, car or Land Rover, staring at the nape of your father’s neck, rain hammering the roof, he perhaps thinking along similar lines.

Thirty-five or forty.

You forget which.

Four elderly women dressed like Easter morning perching in a row on the couch in the lobby, staring at the tiled floor.

Driving at night, you cannot make out individuals behind windshields, everything being glare and dark shapes.

Headlights sweeping across landscape.

Every car could be empty.

This is one possibility.

Another is that every car could be full, but not with people.

Every car could be full, for instance, with entities that look like people but are not people.

This being a difficult proposition to prove one way or the other.

You ask for a complimentary tube of toothpaste and two toothbrushes at the front desk.

Because your sister, you see, was there beside you on the beach late one afternoon.

Your sister was there beside you on the beach in Caracas late one afternoon and then she was not there beside you late one afternoon.

Did you mention you had a sister?

Did you mention to your wife you had a sister?

You had a sister.

She was out in the ocean, waving.

Waving being what you thought at first she was doing, naturally, like a student at the back of the room wanting to ask a question.

Then you corrected your misapprehension.

The instant of correction lasting one lifetime long, precisely.

You cannot believe what poor readers some people are.

Your sister waving to you, apparently waving to you, as the tide hurried her away from today among a field of lilac jellyfish bladders bobbing on the glittering surface.

Your father sitting behind the wheel, smoking.

Smoking and thinking while trying not to think, apparently.

On your way back from the police station.

What passed for a police station.

His cells already beginning to misfire, one could in retrospect and with some leeway conclude.

Everyone facing forward as if in front of the family TV.

In your hotel bed, bedspread still taut, you and Andi lying side by side, fully clothed.

Your mouths tasting peppermint fresh.

Because where a particular photograph is viewed will determine how it is viewed.

She never screamed.

You remember this detail — actually, this lack of a detail — perhaps more than any other.

Your sister just waved.

Waved and floated away, to be sure.

Her head the size of the tip of your pinkie if you were to hold it up in front of you at arm’s length.

Surprised as everyone else by what was happening to her.

There being no lifeguards on this particular beach, it perhaps being important to underscore.

Your father frantically splashing into the surf in his baggy swimsuit.

Your mother and father.

How would you know if you were the last people on earth?

Her name was Rieña.

Your sister’s name, that is.

Whose body never returned.

You imagining it swollen with seawater and jellyfish stings.