Little Doors (16 page)

Weegee can’t bring himself to take Tara to his cheap apartment. Instead, he drags this ghost of his own sick mind to this cellar, where a friendly building superintendent frequently lets jazz musicians hold a jam.

He tries to rationalize what he’s doing by reminding himself that she’s only a phantom.

But the hot touch of her hand rips this last defense away.

Under her skirt the girl wears white cotton panties hand-embroidered with pink roses around the waist. Weegee worries they’ll get dirty when they hit the floor, especially when the kitten curls up on them.

She kneels on the mattress in front of him.

Weegee pauses behind her momentarily, his own wool pants around his knees.

“You’re not real,” he whispers. “You aren’t, are you?”

Tara looks backwards over her shoulder. “No. But you aren’t either.”

“You got things mixed up, kid. I’m Weegee. I’m famous.”

“You’re the ‘alleged’ Weegee. You’re only supposed to be him.” She turns toward him. “Take that off.”

He looks down. He’s still got the camera slung over his shoulder, bumping against his bare waist. She moves to touch it, but he stops her hands. “No.”

“You have to. Please.”

He relaxes slightly, helps her lift the thing, her small hands moving under his own. They set it gently on the floor, and at the last moment she turns it so it faces away from them, the lens looking into a corner, oddly forlorn for an inanimate object. Weegee feels guilty relief. He’s tempted to reach out, to stroke it again—but she catches his hand and brings it toward her, placing it on her breast. Her lips tremble and her eyes lock onto his, young again, innocent.

“I—I can’t do this,” he whispers. “You’re young enough to be my daughter.”

She moves closer, pressing against him, her lips against his ear. “I am your daughter.”

Weegee struggles, but his ankles are caught in his pants, he can’t move away. Her arms lock around him, holding with a gentle pressure.

“And your sister. And yourself,” she says. “We’re the same stuff. I had to get close enough to tell you, without the camera between us.”

“Tell me …” he gasps.

“You’re safe—this is all we have to do. We’re neither of us whole, alleged Weegee.”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“Because you’re not the real Weegee, no more than I’m a real girl, or this is the real New York. We’re both photographs, don’t you see? We’re pictures the real Weegee, whoever he was, took. This is his city.”

“You’re crazy!” he says.

“Don’t be afraid of me. Don’t be ashamed. It wasn’t you who caught me sleeping—it was Weegee. He caught you, too! None of this is our fault, but we’re stuck here until somehow we undo it.”

“Photographs! This is insane! I don’t know what you are, but I’m alive. I’ve got things to do, pictures to take, unfinished business—”

“You think it’s the camera driving you, Weegee, but really it’s you. You’re the one with the power. The one full of need. Have you looked at yourself, Weegee? Have you ever really looked at yourself?”

She lets go of him now, and he stumbles back, grabbing for his clothes, his camera. She snatches up a chipped piece of mirror lying in a corner, and holds it out to him.

“Look!” she says.

“Get away from me!”

But he’s already seen.…

A face bent and bubbling like a Coke bottle melted in a bonfire, the left eye huge and endlessly gaping, the other forever squinting as if through a viewfinder; his nose squashed and flattened. It’s not a horrible distortion, but it’s undeniable. He snatches the mirror from her fingers, hoping it’s the fault of the glass. Smashes it down on the bare floor. Staring down into the shards, he sees the same thing. He’s a twisted joke, a self-portrait taken in a carnival mirror.…

Cool small fingers slide in among his own.

“Now you’ve met yourself, you’re ready to meet him,” she says. “He’s one of us, too. Part of you and me. Something incomplete we need to finish with.”

Weegee—the “alleged” Weegee —can’t argue with her. He knows all too well who she’s talking about:

That evil, out there in the night. The one with a practical joker’s name.

“Where?” he says numbly.

“Not far. Right down here in the Bowery, under our noses. Up on the El.”

9

The Best People Go to Heaven

There’s no rearview mirror in the coupe, and now he knows why. He must have glimpsed himself once, long ago, and torn it out, starting in on the hard, steady labor of denial.

He speeds along a black and almost empty street, past boarded-up liquor and Optimo cigar stores, decrepit brick tenements, shuffling figures wrapped is rags, a few startled souls picked out in his headlamps as if his is the first light they’ve ever seen, blinding them like cave creatures.

Suddenly, Tara issues an order.

“Turn here.”

He throws the wheel hard to the right into a sharp, spiraling turn that takes him down some impossible concrete chute, his headlights scraping down and down over a dead gray wall that looks like raw dirt, with twisted strands of roots or maybe frayed electric cable poking out of it. After an implausibly long time the spiral straightens out, depositing him on a long dark avenue, and he finally spots something he recognizes.

Skeletal metal rises ahead of him, black columns lining the avenue, joining overhead.

The El.

Odd, there’s no moon or stars tonight, only a weird light the likes of which he’s never seen. The whole city seems to be melting, shimmering beneath the humid sky that’s like the moist ceiling of an underwater cavern pressing down.

In the morning, he knows, the sun will shine through these tracks in beautiful black and gold patterns, giving meaning to the lives of forgotten men. He’ll be asleep then, in the morning, but it means something to him to know that others will see it.

If that morning ever comes. …

Now he’s zooming through the aisle of metal columns; they’re like corroded iron trees lining the avenues of an eerie, broken-down industrial estate. The complicated ironwork seems to continue overhead and on either side for an infinite distance.

The police radio has been dead for a while, though Tara is guide enough. But suddenly the classical station, barely a whisper anyway, dies out too. The signal is lost under so much metal, so much earth. Ugly static pours from the speakers till Tara turns it off. He finds her movement reassuring, because it has occurred to him that he might lose her too.

“Just up ahead.” Weegee spots a staircase, iron treads rising up to the level where the trains ride the trestles.

He brakes the car alongside the stairs, still in the shadows of the girders.

He quickly loads the Speed Graphic. Then he gets out.

Tara follows silently.

There are no cars, no people. Where are the inevitable spectators he’s so used to? Nowhere to be seen. He longs for the vapid parties he occasionally covers, socialites and dancers, smiles and fast friends, quick kisses in the dark, the simultaneous pop of the flash and the cork, as the champagne spills from the stem of the bottle, spills like the light from his bulbs, or the flood of images pouring through his mind as he slows his step and hesitates at the foot of the staircase with its switchbacks.

The camera draws him upward.

At the first switchback, Weegee looks down. A column blocks his sight of the car. The street seems wreathed in a newly risen mist. Weegee grows dizzy on the stairs. Gravity always claims you in the end. The dead fall down, death doesn’t move, it lies down forever while other crimes scurry off into shadows, fugitive, leading to pursuit and threatening shouts, guns fired, all that busy activity of life. That’s how he knows he’s alive, that whatever this long night is, it isn’t death. Maybe Tara’s right after all. Maybe this place is just a photograph or a heap of them, collaged together, linked only by the eye that took them. Wherever that eye may be now, the images live on.

“Go on,” chides Tara. “Up.”

Yes, up. Don’t pause to look back. Up to the open air, the stars, the bustle of trains and life. Leave the car behind, catch a homeward train and be out of here, recover the disguises and the rubber boots another time.…

At last, after many turns, he gains the platform.

It’s dark, striped with shadows, empty. Except for something pink resting on a bench.

Weegee moves closer.

The focus is always six or ten feet, even for close-ups.…

The pink object resolves itself into an innocuous cakebox. That’s all. An innocent thing, tied up with a string, left behind by a sleepy purchaser. Just a cakebox, whether forgotten or abandoned. Weegee’s curious about what it contains. Maybe it’s canoli or creampuffs or crunchy chruscik. Anything but a human head.

Approaching the box, Weegee imagines calling the cops to announce his find, without telling them of its innocence.

How they’ll laugh, opening the box to share the pastry right here on the tracks in the dark! Now that’ll be a picture, a bunch of cops with crumbs and frosting, or powdered sugar on their faces and fingers, caught in his flash like guilty kids raiding an icebox.

At the box, Weegee defiantly, resolutely snaps the string and lifts the lid.

It’s empty.

The weighted wooden shaft catches him slantwise across the neck and skull and sends him crashing down.

The Speed Graphic—his talisman, his demon, his identity—skitters away, across the platform. He feels all his power going with it.

Despite the immense pain lighting up the inside of his skull like God’s own flashbulb, Weegee manages to crawl a few feet and turn, but he’s never felt so vulnerable, so lost. Without his camera, what can he do? He’s nothing without it. Sights come and go in the darkness—he illuminates none of them, understands and communicates nothing.

It is his time to die, isn’t it? He’s outlived his usefulness.

His right eye is swimming in blood, the left one bulging as if ready to pop from the socket. He looks up to see how it will end.

Evil stands at the edge of a shadow, half in darkness, half in light. There’s something of each of them in the figure and something that just looks wrong.

The Cakebox Murderer wears a fantastic suit contrived of mismatched odds and ends. On his head is an air-raid warden’s metal helmet fastened under the chin. His face is swathed in thin muslin. His eyes are covered with welder’s goggles. His torso is bulked out with layers of cloth, canvas, and rubber. Several pairs of pants balloon around his legs. Strapped to his shoes are blocks of wood wrapped in cloth to make him look taller and to soften his steps. But none of this is the strangest part.

In one rubber-gloved hand he holds his nail-studded bludgeon.

In the other, a crusted hacksaw.

But those are easy enough to believe in.

It’s something else that mystifies Weegee.

He struggles to rise, but slumps back, dizzied and weak.

The Cakebox Murderer slowly advances. As he separates fully from the shadows, Weegee figures out what it is that looks so damn strange about him.

Everything about him is reversed. Where his hacksaw should reflect highlights of the platform lamps, it throws off black sparks. Where the folds of his absurd costume should gather in shadow, instead they envelop faint dustings of light. He drinks in the light and turns it to darkness, and casts back darkness like another kind of light. This is a creature that vanishes in daylight—a monster that glows in the dark.

The sort of thing that would haunt a photograph.

Weegee murmurs helplessly, “Tara.…” He looks painfully around for her form—

There she is.

The Speed Graphic is in her hands.

Somehow he can tell that the stupid kid has the focus set on infinity.

Tara’s expression is invisible beneath the camera poised expertly in front of her face. But Weegee knows she’s smiling for the first time that night.

“Say cheese!”

The Cakebox Murderer spins and hurls himself at her, a blur of reversed edges, moving faster than she’s prepared for. Weegee cries out, but too late. The bar crashes down, crunching into the camera, shattering the bulb and the metal reflector, totaling the case, turning the lens to crushed ice, wrecking the film inside. The twisted metal drops from Tara’s bleeding hands. She stares down at it, her face blank with terror, absorbed in the loss. He remembers her saying,
I came out of it.
And now that God is dead.…

But the Human Head Cakebox Murderer lives. He raises his bar again, covering her in his luminous shadow. She stares up in paralyzed submission —

And Weegee screams. Not with his mouth, but with his eyes.

Searing white light pours over the monster. Shadows leap into sudden intensity, seeming to set the platform on fire. The murderer’s hue shifts from light to dark, dark to light, searing in places. The creature turns, throwing up its arm to ward off the flash that comes pouring out of Weegee’s eyes. But the light ignites the smoked-glass lenses; they focus the rays inward, cooking out the sick brain, cauterizing whatever vile impulses drive him—