Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

The protestors were the first nonpublication to use the picture. They marched across the Aurora Bridge, each wearing a single feather, poster boards proclaiming OUR BIRTHRIGHT IS TO LIVE raised high.

Then came the counterprotestors (THE SINS OF OUR FATHERS, AGAIN, The Wall Street Journal , September 19, 1992).

Then came the liberal hand wringing (PROBLEMATIC PATRIOTISM, The New York Times , October 10, 1992).

But what was there to do, really? What was there to do in a town that had itself been wrested from the Duwamish Tribe, where liberalism was cherished but most of the black population lived behind a Wonder Bread sign, where there were rumors that the university had been built on sacred burial grounds? As debate over the meaning of Bobby McCloud’s death built momentum, his figure leapt out of the photograph and onto the silkscreen, showing up like a Rorschach blot on everything from T-shirts to mugs to pins. NEVER FORGET, these items said, and THE CHOICE IS YOURS, and BEGGARS CAN’T BE BOOZERS (this last put forward by the Students for Deliberate Misinformation, a group whose “consciously confusing message” was part of a mission to “expose the unreliability of the media”).

Amina had wondered briefly at the irony of receiving the message with a morning beer in her hand before she unplugged the television and placed it on the stoop to be stolen. She had had enough. It would stop now.

And it would have stopped then had it not been for the op-ed piece written by Bobby McCloud’s aunt Susan, a comparative literature professor at UC Berkeley. It ran three weeks later in The Seattle Times for all to see:

That we even have this image says a lot about our ability to disassociate from the pain of others around us. It takes a certain lack of feeling, an internal coldness, to capture a shot like this. That it was taken by a photographer covering a Microsoft gathering is a perfect, if horribly sad, metaphor for how quickly we will trade in our humanity for financial gain.

“I’m sorry, but this passes for intellectual discourse?” Dimple fumed, raising the blinds with a rattle. “Blame the fucking photographer ? Ridiculous.”

Amina watched her cousin swoop across the bedroom to the other window, hair pulled into a tight bun, swaddled and cinched into a black drapey dress that made her look like a vampire bat.

“I mean, it’s a stupid fucking argument, you know that, right? A free press depends on photojournalists providing an unblinking account of what’s out there.”

Of course she goes straight to censorship .

“And what’s Professor Genius going to demand next?” She grabbed the ashtray on the sill and emptied it into a trash can, sending up a puff of gray. “That we put pictures of puppies and kittens on the front page so no one gets their feelings hurt?”

Jesus. She hasn’t changed a bit, has she?

“Not really.” Amina’s voice was a scratchy whisper.

Dimple wrinkled her nose at the mound of clothes by the side of the bed. “I mean, listen, is it a shocking photo? Yes. But it wasn’t taken for shock value. And it wasn’t orchestrated, for fuck’s sake! The whole idea that somehow you’re lacking empathy or even thriving on this is so—” She picked up the half-empty tumbler on the nightstand, sniffing at it. She frowned. “Wait. Really?”

Amina shrugged. “Our dads drink whiskey.”

“Exactly.” Dimple laughed uneasily. “So what, you’re going to take up the Suriani habit of drinking yourself into a nasty middle age?”

Still hating on the race, huh?

“More or less.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what did you say?”

“I’m not talking to you.”

Her cousin’s eyes blazed with some combination of anger and concern, and for a minute Amina felt the hot shame of causing it. She shut her eyes. She did not need to look around the room to see it as Dimple must have — graffitied with clothes, bottles, ashtrays, plates of uneaten food lying across the dresser.

“Ami, what the fuck? What’s happening to you?”

What does it look like?

Amina shook her head, the prick of guilt between her ribs redirecting into disdain with surprising alacrity. Because really, wasn’t it easy to be Dimple? To be able to talk about what was and what wasn’t appropriate, to sell it regardless, to live on what you made without thinking twice? To be floating in such a steady stream of self-righteousness that you never had to face the muck under you?

“I took the picture,” Amina said.

“So what?”

Don’t say it .

“I knew what I was doing.”

“Because you’re a photographer . Because it’s what you do.”

“Because I wanted it. That’s why my fingers tweaked the settings before anything even happened.”

“Amina, you didn’t make Bobby McCloud kill himself.”

“Because it would make a good picture,” she explained. “I thought the man falling would make a good picture, that it would be beautiful, like that was the important thing?” She laughed to cover up the way her mouth had begun trembling. “Can you imagine? Like he was some bird for the National Geographic , some fucking animal, some—”

“Ami, stop it.”

“Because I needed to see it . After all these years, I needed to see what it looks like to fall that far down!”

“No.”

“And did I tell you I didn’t look afterward? I didn’t even look! I heard the noise of the hit and turned and walked away because I’d already gotten what I needed.”

“Stop it!” Dimple grabbed her arm. “Enough! Stop with this shit and listen to me! You did not make this happen . It was a beautiful picture. It was a horrible moment. Both.”

Amina began to cry.

“ Both , Ami.” Dimple’s nails dug into her wrist. “That’s what you have to live with. Okay? That.”

Amina pushed her away. “Get off me.”

“Are you the photographer?”

“Who is this?” This was not good. The woman on the phone had already said her name twice. Identified the publication she was working for. The Times ? The Chronicle ? Why was the phone in her hand? Amina stared at the receiver. The little black dots looked like poppy seeds. They cooed.

“What?” she asked them.

Careful, kid .

“Careful yourself!”

“Excuse me?”

“Hi.”

“Am I speaking to Amina Eapen?”

Amina put the receiver back to her head. “You are.”

“Do you have a response to the charge that the picture you took exhibits a lack of humanity?”

Oh for the love of — it all lacks humanity! Fucking HUMANITY lacks humanity!

Amina thought about this for a while. About humanity, but also about hubris, that weird word that made her think of a compost made of human souls.

“The checks keep coming, though,” she said.

“The checks?” the woman on the phone asked.

“And I keep cashing them!” Amina said, her voice registering her surprise. “So that’s something, I guess.”

“You are talking about the reprinting fee for the picture you took of Bobby McCloud?” Amina heard the chattering of a keyboard in the background. Robots. Computers were turning humans into robots. The tongue was connected to the fingers to the keyboard. “Do you feel implicated by the money you are making from this?”

YES .

Amina looked around. She found some water, gulped half of it down. “I knew what I was doing.”

“Ms. Eapen?”

“I knew he would go.”

“What do you mean?”

What did she mean? She saw the high school parking lot, the spray of late-afternoon sun, Akhil walking toward the station wagon, his shoulders hunched under his leather jacket. The words formed loosely in her head and then rolled out her mouth like pebbles. “Hide-a-key.”