The Sleeping and the Dead (7 page)

My apartment was the largest of six in an old converted bakery on Summer Avenue, west of Highland. All the apartments were on the second floor, with four shop bays fronting the street below, including a launderette and a tae kwon do school. My place was above a mercado on the corner. It came furnished, two rooms plus a bathroom. A Formica dinette table with four cheap wooden chairs for a kitchen, a sagging couch divided the room into a den. Avocado-green electric stove, equally ancient fridge, a drawer full of old silverware and knives, including one butcher knife sharp enough to split a hare, wood-frame bed and a dresser. Bathroom not much bigger than a linen closet. There was a big bay window in the bedroom that faced the traffic light and the Methodist church across the street.

The industrial gothic interior of the apartment begged to be photographed, but what it really needed was a model to bring out its character. It needed someone sitting at the cheap dinette table or staring out the bedroom window, dressed in panties with a white tube top and her hair wrapped in a towel, cigarette smoke curling like a rough hand across her cheek as she listened to the sinoidal honking of some distant lovesick saxophone and the tearing silk sound of wet tires on wet pavement, while George Clooney narrated the depths of her loneliness and the hard ugly carapace of horn into which she retreated, nightly, to keep from tying a rope around the closet rod and kicking over the chair.

Sure.

The Leica sat on the dresser, its dark round camera eye pointed at me as I lay in bed. I remembered lying on another bed in another town and another time while my college photography professor took roll after roll of black-and-white nudes with his Leica MP. Only 402 MPs were ever made. Being photographed by an MP was like being painted by Raphael.

Raphael had lied about his divorce.

I couldn't sleep in a room with the door open. I got up and locked the door, then wished I'd remembered to buy cigarettes. It would have been nice to lie in bed and watch the smoke hang lazily in the Christmas greens and reds of the traffic light outside my window. I liked to smoke in bed. When I was in high school and my parents were out of town, I used to smoke in their bed and watch
The Tonight Show
and fall asleep with the television on because I didn't like being alone in our old house on Schoonover Street. I didn't like being alone pretty much anywhere.

But I was tired and I had gone two nights now without a fix and no withdrawals. It was a good sign. I rolled over and pulled the covers up to my chin and tried not to think about the dead.

*   *   *

I woke up about oh-dark-thirty with a woman sitting on the end of my bed. She had short, straight dark hair and no face above the lips. Her mouth was moving as though she was trying to say something but couldn't get the words out. I rolled over and sat up and there was nobody there.

I grabbed my brother's baseball bat from under the bed. The weather had changed again and it had stopped raining. The bedroom was cold and the window panes fogged over, tinted a solid sheet of red from the traffic light. The bedroom door was still locked and there was no closet for anybody to hide in, nothing but dust and my own empty suitcases under the bed.

I tried to remember what I had been dreaming before I woke up. The woman reminded me of someone. I thought maybe one of the neighbors, maybe the Korean lady I had seen downstairs in the mercado. I always had nightmares when I slept in a new bed. I told myself this was no different. It had to be something reasonable. I was used to my special friends hanging around, haunting dark corners and stairwells and old elevators, but when they sat on the end of the bed, that was different. Seeing three in one day was also a bad sign. All the really horrible parts of my life had started this way. Or maybe when I was counting down to self-destruct, I started seeing ghosts. That's what the police counselor told me.

I rolled over facing away from the window. I could almost feel her weight still there on the end of the bed, pressing down the sheets. I didn't think I would gonk because I was shaking with the cold, but I did, with the baseball bat beside me in the bed.

The next morning, the bedroom door stood wide open. My sneakers were sprawled like a dead animal on the floor, tied together by their shoestrings.

 

Tuesday

 

7

I
T WAS ELEVEN O'CLOCK
BEFORE
I made it to Marks Camera. As usual, the door was locked so I knocked. On my way over, I bought a sausage biscuit at Mrs. Winner's. A light rain pattered on the hood of my jacket. While I waited, I ate my brunch. Sometimes it took a while for Deiter to answer his door. Sometimes you had to call and tell him you were outside because he would be out back dismantling some three-hundred-thousand-dollar lens for NASA and wouldn't hear it if a SWAT team kicked down his door. Finally, he opened it a crack and squinted out like he was afraid to get wet. I don't think he recognized me at first.

I shoved the uneaten half of my biscuit in his face. “Oh, you got the Leica!” He accepted my food offering and opened the door.

Deiter's place was a ranch-style house built around 1960 and converted, like all the other houses on his street, into retail or office space sometime in the late seventies. The front room of his shop looked like it had been recently burglarized, but it always looked like that, just as Deiter always looked like he had just crawled out of a hayloft. You half expected to see straw in his hair and sheep shit down the front of his paisley pajamas. He wore no pajama top and had tits bigger than mine, though his sagged like something out of a
National Geographic
magazine. He sported greasy blond hair and a bushy hay-colored Viking beard littered with enough yellow crumbs to reconstruct a whole Twinkie.

Once upon a time, his shop had been a dentist's office. Even with all the cameras and other equipment, I could still smell burning teeth and hear the whine of the drill. No other place in the world smells like a dentist's office.

Deiter lived in a single room off the back. The rest of the shop was given over to photography equipment, storage, computers and offices for his myriad other ventures. Sometimes you'd see police cars parked in front of his place, and sometimes you'd see other types of cars, mostly rentals, with men in dark suits and sunglasses sitting behind the wheel, whispering into their coat sleeves.

I followed him back to his workshop, which looked like a lawyer's office, except instead of stacks of filings and depositions and folders, there were piles of laundry and empty Doritos bags, as well as technical manuals and photography magazines. He was regularly published in most of the best ones. I noticed several had most of their pages ripped out. “I use them for toilet paper,” he said.

“Why?”

“They are so full of shit. Sit down.”

“Where?” Other than the chair behind his desk and a loveseat buried in garbage, there was nowhere to sit.

“OK, stand up. See if I care.”

I passed the camera strap over my head and let him take it. “So, you got the M8,” he said. He turned it over in his hands, swiftly examining it with his genius eye for detail, showing me a dent I hadn't noticed and a couple of tiny scratches I had. “How much did you pay?”

“Twenty-five.”

“It's practically brand new. Is it stolen?”

“Not that I'm aware of.”

“If you wanted a Leica, you should have asked me. I can get you a used R9 for that price and you could shoot digital or film. The R9's a good camera.”

“What's wrong with the M8?”

“Have you looked at your pictures?” He opened a drawer and removed a USB cable and a package of powdered doughnuts.

“I couldn't open the files.”

“That's the first problem with the M8. What software do you use?”

“I still have the Photoshop you gave me.”

He shook his head. Crumbs drifted down his naked belly and into his lap. “Photoshop 5.5 is a focking dinosaur. The old versions can't convert Leica DNG files.” He picked up a Powerbook laptop from a pile of laundry on the floor and opened it on his desk, then plugged my camera into it. “Leica included a copy of Capture One LE in the box. The seller didn't give you the disk?”

“He probably didn't know about it.”

“I'll give you a copy of the Adobe Lightroom.” He opened the camera files and pulled up the first picture I had taken—a self-portrait shot in the parking lot at Best Buy right after I bought the new memory card. The image was strangely surreal. My black T-shirt looked almost purple.

“There's your second problem,” Deiter said.

“What's wrong with the color?”

“It's not the color, it's the light.” He peeled the wrapper off the powdered doughnuts and shoved one into his mouth, then continued talking while he chewed. “The M8 is supersensitive to infrared. Deep blacks, especially dark fabrics, show up as magenta. Sometimes the whole image will have a magenta wash.”

He cycled through the photos of my new apartment, the intersection outside my bedroom window, the gothic church across the street, and the photo I'd taken of Michi. Each one was tinted a sickening shade of purple, and with each picture he opened, I felt just a little more like I had swallowed a wasp. I began to think that the two grand I'd given James St. Michael had been spent on a one-way ticket out of town. I'd fallen for it because he looked like a pilot and acted interested in me even though I hadn't bathed, smelled like a fireman's boot, looked like a turd on a biscuit and was probably ten years older than the oldest woman he'd ever consider dating. And didn't he get nervous last night when he found out about my connection to the police?

*   *   *

I met James St. Michael the previous Sunday. I had been at the hospital taking photographs of an old lady whose back was eaten up with bedsores. I usually took pictures of the dead. This woman should have been dead, the way they treated her.

I recognized James when he walked through the door by the leather camera case slung over his shoulder. He was younger than I'd guessed from our phone conversation, late twenties to early thirties, wearing a University of Memphis ball cap, a blue jacket, new dark blue jeans and a pair of worn out Nikes with brand-new white shoelaces tied in double knots like a kindergartener. He slid onto the stool beside me and set the camera case on the bar. “Sorry I'm late,” he said. “The rain.”

“Jackie Lyons,” I said. He shook my hand as though shaking a man's hand. He had a grip like a Norse god. There wasn't a ring on his finger, but there had been, not long ago.

“James St. Michael.”

His name was so familiar it startled me. I sat there staring at him and holding his hand, trying to remember where I'd heard his name before, and now that I looked at him I thought I recognized him from somewhere, maybe from television, but I couldn't remember. I said, “With a name like that, you should be flying helicopters.”

“I am a pilot,” he laughed, surprised, but also a little nervous. He let go of my hand. “How did you know that?”

I didn't. It just went with his face. He looked like a pilot. “Squint lines around your eyes. Young face plus old eyes equals pilot.”

“I didn't realize my eyes were old.” They were blue, hard and clear as gems, but a little sad. He looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar, examining his face from different angles. He hadn't shaved.

“I didn't mean it that way,” I said. “I mean you look like you spend a lot of time staring a long way off.”

He turned on his stool and rested an elbow on the bar. “Now it's my turn.” He rubbed his chin and looked at me. “I think you're aaaaaay … photographer.”

I smiled despite myself. “How'd you guess?”

“Squint lines.” He reached up and almost touched my right eye. “You look like you go through life with one eye shut.”

I picked up my beer and held it to my lips without drinking. My breath fogged the glass. That was a pretty accurate description, I had to admit. This guy was some kind of philosopher.

“Or maybe it's because a person wanting to take vacation photos isn't about to drop three grand on a camera.”

“Only if I like it.” I sipped my beer.

“What's not to like?” He pulled the case closer and unsnapped it. I set my beer down and lifted the camera from its leather sheath, cupping it reverently in my palms like a splinter of the true cross. When I spotted the ad for a Leica M8 in the
Memphis Flyer
, I called the number immediately and offered to pay the asking price in cash, even though I couldn't nearly afford it. I'd asked James for a few days to get it together.

I still couldn't afford this camera. But now that I had cradled it like a newborn child in my hand, I couldn't let it go. It felt heavy and solid for its size, the black parts gleamed, the silver parts shone, and when I turned it on, the little LCD image on the back was as clear and crisp as the HD television picture above the bar.

I released the locking toggle to uncover the bottom. “There's no memory card,” James said. “I didn't know that when I listed it in the paper. I'll knock fifty off the price for that.” I nodded and removed the 50mm Leica lens and looked inside the camera body. It seemed to be in perfect condition. I replaced the lens and turned the camera on again, looked through the viewfinder, caught him checking out my tits.

I turned the camera off and set it on the bar. “I'm sorry. I really wish I could, but things have changed since we talked. I got kicked out of my apartment and I have to find a new place, so I can't afford to buy this, not even at your very generous asking price.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“To what?”

“Your apartment.”

I tucked a strand of dirty blond hair behind my left ear, wincing inwardly at how filthy it felt. “I set it on fire.”