When the next crash of thunder came, I was in the garage. I carefully set the snapshot down, aligning it with the edge of my worktable. I switched on my Luxo lamp and twisted its hinged arm to nail the picture down in a hot circle of white light. Finally, and with a kind of nasty pleasure, I stuck a pushpin through the top, to hold it in place. I felt better then. It was in my operational theater now, fastened to my autopsy table. This was where I pried things apart and made them tell me everything, all their powers and vulnerabilities.
To add to my feeling of confidence and control, I unbuttoned my pants and let them fall around my ankles and stepped out of them. I had discovered some time ago that nothing frees the mind like dropping the pants. Try it if you doubt me. American productivity would, I believe, nearly double if everyone were free to work pantsless.
Just to show the photo who was boss, I ignored it and worked on the party gun. I squeezed the trigger to hear the fan whir inside the casing. I unbolted the side and lifted out the circuit board, picked and prodded at it. At first I was distracted. I kept looking at the picture that had no right to exist, and then, when I turned back to my new toy, I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing. After a while, though, I settled into my own capsule of focus, and the Phoenician, Shelly Beukes, the Solarid, all of it went gray—like a Polaroid developing in reverse, returning to unmixed blank chemicals.
I soldered and wired. It was warm in the garage and fragrant with that smell I still love: melted rubber and hot copper and oil. I had oil on one of my hands, a little WD-40, and I wiped it with a rag, to expose pink skin. I studied the rag, watched the way the ink stain spread, leeching into the fabric. Sponged away. Absorbed.
I had snapped a picture of Mobil Station Mat, Yoshi Matsuzaka, but what the Solarid captured was something in his head, a picture he held in his mind—of me. It soaked it up, like the rag in my fist, absorbing oil.
Blue light flashbulbed outside the windows.
I was not alarmed. The idea, when it came to me, was no shock. I suppose, down below the level of my conscious mind, I already knew. I believe that our subconscious often finishes ideas hours, days, weeks, even years before it decides to present them to the higher reaches of the brain. And after all, Shelly had already explained everything to me.
Don’t let him take a picture of you. Don’t let him start taking things away.
It’s odd that when I knew—when I understood—I wasn’t more afraid. That I didn’t go clammy and shivery and try to tell myself I was being crazy. Instead I was almost serene. I remember I calmly turned a shoulder to the photo and bent back to the party gun, screwing it together again and then shaking a packet of glitter down into the barrel, loading it like a musket. I behaved as if I had solved a math problem of no particular import.
The last part of the gun was the flash, which could be snapped into the top, where a sharpshooter might put his scope. I had in fact swiped the disposable flash from our own Polaroid for this purpose. I held the flash in my hand, as if I were weighing it, and thought of the camera going off in Mat’s face, that hot, white snap of light, and how he had staggered away, blinking rapidly.
I thought of Shelly Beukes, casting her baffled stare around the neighborhood she’d lived in for at least two decades, looking as dazed as if a flash had just gone off in her face. I thought about the black photo albums in the back of the Phoenician’s Caddy. I thought about the photo I’d seen in one of them, a photo that was almost certainly of Shelly’s own son.
There was a long rolling peal of thunder that seemed to cause the whole garage to shudder, and afterward the air rang strangely. Then I decided I was the one shuddering, and abruptly I stood up, feeling dizzy. I switched off the Luxo and stood in the dark, taking deep breaths of the coppery-smelling air. I wondered if I was going to be sick.
The ringing sound in my ears went on and on, and all at once it came to me that I wasn’t hearing an aftershock from the thunder. Someone was leaning on the doorbell.
I was afraid to answer it. By some thirteen-year-old logic, I felt sure it had to be the Phoenician, who somehow knew I had solved the riddle of his Solarid and was here to shut me up forever. I looked around for something I could use as a weapon, considered the screwdriver, then took the party gun instead. I had the wild idea that in the shadows of the foyer it might look like a real gun.
As I approached the front door, the storm clouds launched a fresh salvo of house-shaking thunder, and I heard a whispered curse in a heavy South African brogue. My anxiety drained away, leaving my legs loosey-goosey and my head light.
I cracked the door and said, “Hi, Mr. Beukes.”
His Rock Hudson features were haggard, deeply lined, and his lips were discolored, as if he’d been walking for a long time in the cold. He might’ve aged ten years since I’d last seen him.
For all the crashing and flaring lights, it still wasn’t raining. The wind, though, lashed at his trench coat, so it flapped frantically around his massive torso and narrow hips. It was the same coat Shelly had been wearing that morning. It looked better on him. The gale flung his silver hair across his seamed, bold forehead.
“Michael,” he said, “I did not eggspect I would have need of you so soon or on a night like this. I am so sorry. I am just— Oh, Gott. What a day. I am sure you must be busy. Doing something with your friends. I hate—on such short notice—”
Under other circumstances this would’ve sounded like the setup for a punch line. I was less a social butterfly than a social death’s-head moth. But in the rushing darkness of that storm that refused to break, I hardly registered his line about how I must be doing something with my friends.
The storm, the feeling of electric charge in the air, Mr. Beukes’s strained, raspy breath, and all the strangeness of the day had me keyed up, almost quivering with tension. Yet for all that, I wasn’t surprised to see him on the front step. Some part of me had been expecting him all afternoon . . . had been waiting for the third act of today’s performance to begin, the conclusion to an absurdist drama in which I was both the lead and the audience.
“What’s up, Mr. Beukes? Is Shelly all right?”
“Is she . . . ? Yes. No.” He laughed bitterly. “You know how she is. At the moment she is asleep. I hoff to go out. Something has happened. Today I am a man in a sinking boot, trying to bail out the water with a spoon.” It took me a moment to realize that “sinking boot” was Larry Beukesese for “sinking boat.”
“What happened?”
“Do you remember what I tolt you about my gyms, how there is always a fire to put out?” He laughed again, bleakly. “I shoot watch my metaphors. My gym, the one next to the Microcenter? There has been a fire—an actual fire. No one is hurt, thank Gott for his blessings. It was closed. The fire department eggstinguished the blaze, but I must go inspegg the damage.”
“What kind of fire?”
He wasn’t expecting that question, and it took him a beat to process it. I don’t blame him for being surprised. I was surprised, too. I didn’t know I was going to ask him that until I heard the question come out of my mouth.