“I’ll talk to my mother. She knows the right people.”
She hesitated and tried to think clearly. But she no longer knew how. She no longer knew the difference between a promise and a coercion.
“Please do.”
“She’ll need payment, though.”
She reached into her satchel and withdrew the canister of film.
“She’ll find this interesting.”
He took the canister and gave it a little shake.
“And for you?” she asked.
“I don’t need anything.”
“I insist.”
He thought for a moment and then glanced in the direction of the hill.
“One last portrait,” he said.
And it was the last one, she told herself as they entered his father’s sickroom, as Tino climbed into bed alongside him. After this, she would never put pencil to paper ever again. She would never create a single thing. Because what was the point? What was the point in the face of such sadness: Tino curled up against the one man who might have shown him a different way to be, his father so drunk on pain and the medication that was supposed to relieve it that, despite the presence of an audience, he was visibly terrified at having been left to die alone.
An hour later, she found herself standing outside the lab.
The door was locked for once, so she let herself in through the bedroom window. Inside, she listened for a while to make sure no one else was there, and then she sat on the bed. Then she wandered into the front room and lowered herself into the chair behind the desk. She pushed her hands against her ears, but the voices were too loud to silence, too big to suppress, so she went back to the bedroom. She lay flat on the bed and watched as night achieved its full expression, as the day’s mute circus packed up and set off for parts darker and unknown. She watched the shadows on the street stamp a changing, conjoined pattern against the green curtains, the shapes heavy and absolute. There was an unfamiliar feeling between her legs that reminded her of the blank, breathtaking millisecond that occurs between pain’s infliction on the body and pain’s registration by the brain, and she tried to rub the feeling away, but to no avail. At dusk, she heard the sound of an automobile engine and went to the window to see if it was the Buick, but it was not. And although the prominent feeling was one of queasiness—that of having accidentally bathed in something other than water—there was also a sense of weird expansiveness. It was almost as if she could see everything from above, the entire town laid bare in all its segments, everyone confined to borders that had more to do with the quality of the light and air than the presence of any real boundaries, everyone holding down their territories as if armies would rise from the water and rob them of everything save the dense comfort of their own kind.
At around midnight, she heard the front door crash open. She set her jaw and didn’t move, even when her father appeared in the bedroom doorway, his suit rumpled, his face bent with rage.
“Get up,” he said.
“No.”
He approached the bed. He grabbed her by the wrist.
“Where did you get those photographs? Why did you give them to her?”
He yanked her to her feet. She fought, gripping the mattress and pulling herself back down.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he pleaded.
She spit at him. His palm collided with one side of her face and then the other. When her nose began to bleed, he stepped away from the bed, his face frozen in fear and amazement.
“How could you?” he said, quietly this time, almost gently. “You were my life’s work.”
“No, I wasn’t,” she replied. “I was the thing that happened in spite of it.”
21
1998
THE OCTOPUS’S SUCCOR IS FLEETING.