At two in the morning, he awoke suddenly, mildly surprised to find that he had fallen asleep during the movie. A light glowed from his desk, and seated in his chair Muybridge leafed through Theo’s translation. He was shabbily dressed, his jacket threadbare at the elbows, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, the collar frayed. A corona of white hair framed his great head, and he seemed oblivious to everything but the book in hand. Theo rolled off the couch and approached him, but the ghost did not look up. Taking a fountain pen from his breast pocket, Muybridge crossed through an entire page and then recapped the top with a click that echoed in the silence.
“Not at all how it was,” he said to himself. “The bastard Leland Stanford took all the acclaim for the pictures of that horse Sallie Gardner. As if it was his idea in the first place. Treated me like a hired hand. Me. An artist.”
“Treachery,” Theo said.
Muybridge looked at him, an aching sadness in his eyes. “Do you know Stanford published The Horse in Motion under his own auspices? Didn’t give me the slightest credit. I had been to Paris and London and was about to present my own paper to the Royal Society. I called it Attitudes of Animals in Motion, and do you know what they called me? A fraud. All because of Stanford’s claims. They’ll believe a rich man over a poor one every time. One day you are a sensation, the next a failure. It was embarrassing, humiliating. My reputation was ruined. I should have sailed back that day and shot that son of a bitch.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Theo said, and then clamped his fingers over his mouth.
Muybridge scowled. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“My apologies.”
“Harry Larkyns was keeping private with my missus. He had it coming.”
“My remark was uncalled for. I’m sorry.”
Pulling at his prodigious white beard with his dark-stained fingers, Muybridge considered whether to forgive him. “Have you ever been married, se?or? Maybe you would not be so quick to judge.”
Theo rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “I was married. Am married. But my wife is missing. One day she was here, and the next she was gone. Some people think she might be dead. Maybe you have seen her on the other side.”
“The other side?”
“Heaven … or wherever people go after they die.” He tried not to sound too optimistic. “I thought since you were dead—”
“Dead? Who said? What gave you the idea I was dead?”
“I didn’t mean anything by it, but you died in 1904 while you were creating a scale model of the Great Lakes in your garden on Liverpool Road. You were seventy-four. A nice long life. I wrote the book on you. Translated it, anyhow.”
Muybridge sat back in the chair and folded his hands across his belly. “Of all the eccentric theories. You think I’m some sort of spirit, a ghost? My good man, have you considered that I might be a figment of your overwrought imagination? A hallucination brought about by a spot of indigestion. You haven’t exactly been eating well since Kay disappeared, and that ham sandwich you had for your dinner—really, sir, you should always check the expiration dates.”
Theo was deeply distressed by Muybridge’s reasoning. He sat back on the couch and stared at his own feet, ghostly white in the darkness, but every time he looked up, the apparition was still there.
“You need to find someone to talk to,” he said at last. “Do you have anyone with whom you are especially close?”
The question drilled into him and punched a hole in his stomach. “Just Kay.”
“Obviously she’s out of the question. What about your old pal Egon up in Québec? What about this Dr. Mitchell who seems to have taken an unusual interest?”
“You and I could talk.…”
Muybridge shook his mane. “That would be like talking to yourself.”
“That’s all I ever do, really. It feels like I’m talking with her, most of the time. Constructing the monologue as though it is a dialogue, but part of me knows that the whole internal conversation is one-sided. She really can’t hear what’s going on inside my head, but I talk to her just the same, as if she somehow can hear what’s on my mind. In my heart. I would be crazy to be talking to myself.”
As Theo spoke he watched Muybridge fade away, a photograph reversing the process of development. Dark areas became shades of gray, then mere shapes, outlines, and finally nothing. He was alone again. If she was out there, waiting for him to come find her, Kay would be different from the digital images in the archive, in the picture he carried around in his head, the face he saw when he talked to her. She would have changed. He went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. Many of her things were just as she had left them. Bottles and jars and creams and brushes. The yellow towels she had chosen. A red silk robe hanging from a hook on the back of the door. Looking into the mirror, he thought he would start again in the morning. Reach out and find someone with whom he might talk. Surely there was another person left in the world.