Celestial Inventories (19 page)

But the seven brothers were already out the door and on the staircase, their strings trailing along behind them. Otto leapt up and ran after them, bellowing. He stepped on one, then another of the trailing strings. Pierre and Maurice screamed and tumbled down the stairs. Otto lost his balance and followed hard upon them. Auntie suddenly appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and, startled by the naked, bleeding children tumbling down her staircase, she went up after them, only to watch helplessly as they wheeled past her, and her husband Otto, Otto the Butcher, Otto the Cannibal, crashed into her.

The seven brothers gathered what they could find in the litter and rot of the house: mostly jewelry and clothing from Otto’s past victims, and all manner of cutting instruments and devices of torture. They dressed in the cleanest rags they could find, and when daylight finally came, Little Poucet led them home with all their loot.

Their parents were of course overjoyed to see them, especially with all the items they had taken from Otto and Auntie’s house. They were puzzled by the fact that both Pierre and Maurice had become girls while away on the journey, but this fact was of very little importance to them. “After all,” their father would say, “children are children.”

But the world of his mother’s bed was never the same for Little Poucet again. He stayed awake nights. He listened for voices in the distant, dark walls. And sometimes when his parents were unusually noisy, when their cursings and crashings and complaints about how many mouths they had to feed became almost too much to bear, he would reach into his pillow and take comfort in the knife and the hook, the club and the razor, and dream of their readiness.

“So, have you been doing this a while now?”

“A few years.”

“Sorry for asking, and tell me if I’m out of line, but you can’t possibly be making a full time living doing this can you?”

I actually almost say, “It’s a hobby,” which would be disastrous. But I don’t. I look at the fellow: sandy-haired, a beard whose final length appears to be forever undecided. He looks terrible in the suit—either long outgrown or borrowed for the occasion. And it is an occasion—a grim occasion but an occasion none the less. He watches me as I set up, without a glance for his child. The young wife fusses with her to make ready for this picture, this family portrait.

I’m used to this. Who could blame him.

“I’m a volunteer. They reimburse me for film and lab costs. It’s a way . . . of being of service.”

He glances down, gazes at his wife rearranging the baby in her arms, glances away again, with no place to look.

Me, I have only one place to look. I peer through the lens, musing on composition issues, the light, the shadows, the angles of their arms. “Could you move her a little to the left?” The husband and father stares at me, puzzled, then bends to move his wife’s chair. She blushes.

“No, sorry. You, ma’am.” I straighten up behind the camera. “Could you move the baby a little to the left?” Notice how I said “the” baby, not “your.” I try to avoid upsetting words. These are family portraits, after all. Just like all families have. Most parents don’t want to be crying. I have folders full of photographs of mothers and fathers wailing, faces split in the middle. Believe me, they don’t want to keep those. Sometimes I have taken roll after roll until there is sufficient calm for me to make the picture that will go into some leather bound matte, slipped into some nondescript manila folder, or, if they’re so inclined, up on the living room mantel in a place of honour, there, oh so much
there
, for the whole world to see.

I’ve been doing this for years. But still I find that hard to imagine.

I feel bad that I haven’t found the right words for this father, the words that will soothe, or at least minimize his discomfort and embarrassment. But sometimes there are just no right words. At least I can’t always find them.

“I’ll be taking the shot in a few minutes,” I say. “Just make yourself comfortable. This isn’t going to be flash flash flash and me telling you to smile each time. The most important thing is to try to make yourselves comfortable. Try to relax and ease into this shared moment.”

This shared moment. Whatever words I say to my subjects, I always include these. Even though I’ve never been sure they were accurate, or fair. The moment is shared in that it happens to both of them. But most of the time, I think, the experience is so personal and large it will soon split the marriage apart if they’re not careful.

I’ve seen it happen so much. I’ve seen so much.

“Okay, then,” I say in warning and again I move behind the camera, almost as if I expect it to protect me from what is to come. As I peer into the electronic viewfinder, so like a small computer screen, so distancing in that same way, I see the mother’s smile, and it is miraculous in its authenticity. I’ve seen it before in my portraits, this miraculous mother’s smile, and it never fails to surprise me.

And I see the father at last look down upon his dead baby girl and reach out two fingers, so large against the plump, pale arm, and he lets them linger, a brief time but longer than I would have expected, and I realize this touch is for the first, and last, time.

I again shift my focus to the light, to the shadows and the play of shadows, and ready myself to shoot. The father attempts a dignified smile, but of course goes too broadly with it. The mother holds the child a bit too tightly. And I trigger the camera once, then twice, the baby looking as if she were merely sleeping. The baby looking. Then I take a shot for the photographer, a shot I will never show the parents, an image to add to the growing collection I keep hidden in a file drawer at home, the one in which the baby opens its eyes and fixes its gaze upon me.

I should explain, I suppose, that I’ve never had much talent for photography. I have the interest, sometimes I’ve had the enthusiasm, but I’ve never had the eye. I got this volunteer position because my next door neighbour is a nurse, and she used to see me in my back yard with camera and tripod shooting birds, trash, leaves, whatever happened to land in front of me. Inconsequential subjects, but I was afraid I’d screw up a more significant one, which would have broken my heart, maybe even have prevented me from ever taking another photograph. I didn’t want to risk that.

Not that I wanted to risk taking such an important photograph in a family’s life, either. But Liz had talked about how temporary this was, how they just needed someone to man the camera now, and every time I tried to tell her I really wasn’t that good at it, she said I didn’t have to be—the families just wanted the photograph—having it was the idea and they wouldn’t care how good it was, technically.

But I told her no anyway. Even unpaid, I would have felt like an imposter. Not only was I not that good as a photographer, but I wasn’t that good with kids.

Maybe that sounds terrible under the circumstances. It seemed to me at the time that the appropriate person for this kind of sensitive task would be someone with a strong empathy and dedication to and involvement with children. And I didn’t have that. Of course I used to be a child, and my sister Janice and I had pretty good parents, but I don’t remember childhood as being a particularly happy time. I could hardly wait for it to be over so I could be out on my own. And I can’t say that I’ve ever
enjoyed
children. I’ve never particularly liked spending time with them. My nephews are okay—I’ve taken them to ball games and movies and such and I think they’re great kids now that they’re older. When they were little I didn’t know what to say to them and, frankly, they scared me a little. They seemed so needy and fragile and that was pretty much the extent of their personalities.

As far as other kids go, I’d have to say I’ve basically ignored them. Their concerns are not my concerns. Most of the time I haven’t even been aware they were there.

That weekend I was in the city park taking bad pictures. I tried shooting couples, failing—everything looked fuzzy and poorly-framed. Composition was eccentric at best, whatever I tried. A number of families were barbecuing. I noticed one small group in particular: really young parents, kids themselves, with a huge, dish-shaped barbecue looking hundreds of years old.

Suddenly there was an explosion of shouts, barking, shapes racing through the crowd. Then several large dogs burst from the wall of people to my right, followed by a half dozen teenage boys, red-faced, barking like hyenas, and all of them converging on that young family.

I shouted a warning, but too late. One of the dogs knocked the unwieldy barbecue over, and several others a few feet away. The little kids started screaming, the mother and father running toward them, but the air was full of thick, white, choking smoke. The mother grabbed up two of their kids and folded them into her. But the little one, “Jose!” the young father screamed. “Jose!”

I could not breathe in the smoke, but I could not close my eyes. And almost as if to protect my eyes I raised my camera in front of my face and started taking pictures of the turmoil and the panic, the father gesturing as if mad, and I’m wondering how could this be, all this over some kids and their pets, but these poor people, their lives changing forever. And then the little boy appears out of the smoke like some apparition from the mists, some ghost back to rejoin his family because the taking of him had been a mistake, arms reaching up for his daddy, crying and sobbing and the father sobbing as well.

It was at that moment I decided to say yes to my neighbour, and became the hospital’s bereavement photographer. Even before I saw the photographs I had taken: the looks on the young couple’s faces on their rapid descent into despair, and that small boy appearing out of the clouds like a tragedy retrieved from the fierce and unforgiving eddies of time.

“Oh, Johnny, those poor people!” Janice is my older sister, my confessor, and, I’m a little embarrassed to say, my barometer as to what’s normal or abnormal, what’s okay and what’s not okay.

The day after I’d made that decision to volunteer my photographic services (Would I have changed my mind if she’d responded negatively? I still don’t know.) she had a barbecue of her own. I was invited, of course. With no family or even regular girlfriend, I usually ate at her house three, four times a week. Tom didn’t seem to mind, but of course you never really know when you visit married couples. They might have been fighting for hours before you got there, but when they open the front door they’re like a glossy advertisement for the connubial life.

“Sounds like pretty sad work to me,” Tom said morosely.

“Tom!”

“I’m not criticizing him, Janice. It just sounds like it’d be pretty grim stuff, and he’s not even being paid to do it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be doing it every day,” I said, somewhat off the point. I just wanted them both to believe that, contrary to appearances, I lead a pretty balanced life. Despite the fact that I had no girlfriend, spent most of my spare time at their house, and obsessively took photographs even
I
didn’t think were very good.

Janice snorted. “Don’t listen to him, Johnny. It’s a noble way to spend your time. We should
all
do at least one activity like that.”

The subject mercifully disappeared into a conversational salad of new movies, music, old friends recently seen, what my twin nephews were doing (now fifteen, athletic, and a deadly combination with an alarmingly broad age range of females), and, of course, the pregnancy.

“You should have one of your own, sometime,” Janice said, smiling and rubbing her belly as if it were silk.

“Wrong equipment, sis.”

“I meant with a
girl
.”

“Oh, duh, I didn’t understand.”

“You guys.” Tom, an only child, didn’t get it.

“Actually I think I would, even have it myself, if it made me half as happy as you look every time you’re pregnant.”

“Every time? Two times, little brother.”

“Could be more,” Tom said, and ducked when she tossed the ketchup squeeze-bottle at his head.

I looked around. The angle of the light had changed, deepening some colours, brightening others. There had always been an intensity and vividness about my sister’s life. It was almost unnatural the way the environment shifted its spectrum to suit her. The bright blue stucco house, the grass green as Astroturf, the red- and white-checkered cloth over the redwood table, laden with matching yellow plates and cups and a rainbow of food. A few feet away the tanned blond boys passing the football through the jeweled spray from the sprinkler. Unexpectedly, the sight made me hold my breath. My beautiful nephews. I could have been a better uncle. But perhaps for the first time, their connection to me seemed sharp and undeniable, and it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t understand them most of the time.

All of it like one of those Kodachrome photographs from the sixties: colours so intensely unrealistic, so vividly assaultive, they dazzled the eyes.

The job was meant to be only temporary. That actually increased my stress over the whole affair, because I felt I didn’t have that much time to figure out how to do things right. I’d spend a long time with the camera, framing the shot, then suddenly I’d feel everything was wrong, that I’d be leaving this family with nothing to remember their dead child by. So I’d compulsively start all over again adjusting, readjusting, my fingers shaking and sliding off the controls.

Invariably I’d take too long and the family’s understandable nervousness would increase tenfold. They’d suddenly be anxious to let go of this child or they would slip over some invisible line and would act as if they might hold onto this child forever. The mothers, mostly. The fathers would usually just be irritated, but most of them started out irritated, angry. They were being asked or pressured into doing something they weren’t really sure they could do.

Liz could see what was happening. She let me struggle a little at first, scoping out the boundaries of my difficulty, and then she finally stepped in, talking to these parents, letting them know what to expect, helping me set up, letting
me
know what to expect, by example teaching me what to say, what to look out for, how to pace things so the experience wasn’t too much, wasn’t too little.

Despite all my worries, I never took a bad picture for any of these people. Oh, some shots were better than others, certainly, but I don’t think I ever took a really
bad
shot. As morbid as it sounds, I had found my subject.

And my subject had found me.

Taking pictures of dead children—well, as I’ve said the work generated the expected tension in both the families and the photographer. I’d spend so much time trying to get a pose that looked natural. Sometimes I’d be working so hard to make everything look just right I’d forget why these people were looking so sad and I’d catch myself hoping that the baby would wake up and look at the camera.

And when one of them finally did, I went on with what I was doing and took the shot without a thought about what had just occurred.

Then minutes later—I stood up and looked over the camera at the couple and their tiny, tiny baby. Dead baby—I could not have imagined a creature so small who looked so like a miniature human being could have survived our comparatively brutal, everyday air.

The couple looked at me uneasily. Finally the man said, “Are we done here? Something wrong?”

Everything’s wrong
, I wanted to say.
Your baby is dead. How much wronger could things possibly get
?

“No,” I said. “No.” And I looked closely at this child, hoping to see that it was sleeping, but immediately knew it was not.

Dead children, at least the really small ones, have an unformed, stylized quality even though there may be nothing missing anatomically. Their tiny bodies recall some unusual piece of art, perhaps of an animal that’s never been seen before, some part-human, part-bird thing, or some new breed of feral pig or rodent. They are like remnants of the long, involved dream you just had, mysteriously conveyed to our waking world. They are like hope petrified and now you have no idea where to put the thing.