[Issue #4, Winter 1999-2000]
For Harold Brodkey
By Marcus Gray
[Here's a story I wrote a few years ago for The New Yorker,
after Brodkey died -- so this would have been about Autumn '96. No, of course
they didn't publish it. I faxed it to a friend a couple of weeks ago, along
with a note saying how tired I was of talking. She read it as a suicide
note and all manner of panic ensued. Whatever. -- Marcus]
There are a couple of things I ought to mention right here at the outset,
before I begin to tell this proper, a couple of provisos if that's the right
word. (I just checked, and it is.) First off, I'm doing this for the money.
I am a writer, yes, and a photographer too, and I've been working
on a book for the past few years, rejection letters for which I've received
from this very periodical you hold in your hands, but that's something else
entirely. Right now, though, I'm in a desperate financial situation; my
rent's long overdue, as are the bills, and my debt threatens to move outside
of a scale I have any hope of controlling. This year I haven't just been
buying presents on credit, I've been getting my food with the plastic too.
(Last month, for the first time, I even had to withdraw cash on my credit
card to make the minimum payment back!) In short, things are dire enough
for me to lay aside whatever rules I thought I played by and finally
get this told out on paper, this time not just for the telling, but for
the money too.
The second thing you should know, and I guess if you're still reading, then
you're already aware of it, is that this is not a story. If you're in the
mood for a couple of pages of plot, a happy-ever-after, and all the contrived
shit that goes along with that, then I suggest you turn the page, because
this is not for you. Go look at some of those advertisements again. And
finally, before I get started, let me just tell you that I'm drinking as
I write; there's a dwindling half left in the Jack Daniel's bottle before
me on the desk. What can I tell you? It's cold out, I'm trying to keep my
fuel bills down, and it's very very late. (Originally I'd planned to take
a day off from work, get up real early and spend the day leisurely drafting
this whole thing out, polishing up the vocabulary and grammar and whatnot,
but not it's gone midnight and I'm still just beginning, and I know that
when I get done with this tonight that will be that. This will have to stand
or fall on what gets told tonight.)
The central fixture, the pivot of what I want to write about here is a picture
I took when I was studying photography at college. Our first assignment
when we returned for the second year: three transparencies on the theme
of "colour." Somehow, even with such a vague brief, most of the
images were pretty similar, except for one guy who I remember had switched
off all the lights in his room and held the shutter open to record the glowing
power-on LED of his stereo, the delayed exposure leaving a trail of red
light across the slide. I found my own efforts embarrassing to look at,
so I'm glad that now, almost eleven years later, try as I might I cannot
recall a single one of the shots. What I do remember though is that
I'd taken one particular photograph for the brief, and at the last minute
decided not to submit it for the class crit.
Then, towards the end of my final year, I was printing up some cibachromes
and I decided I would make myself a copy of this particular image. Describing
my work has never been a strong point, and I suppose that's why I take the
damn photographs in the first place, to sidestep that process of verbally
presenting things, but whatever: it's an upright 35mm shot of a rose in
a cemetary, and in the background and slightly out-of-focus is the statue
of a woman with her head bowed. It was shot on a winter's day pretty much
like today was, grey and overcast, and the stonework is all grey too, so
at first it looks just like a black and white print, except for the red
rose in the foreground. Hopefully they'll print a copy of it alongside this
and you'll see what I mean for yourself.
As the prints I was making were sliding out of the processing machine, people
began to ask about the picture. Where had I taken it? How had I taken
it? (and to be honest I've always favoured this type of question over that
other "Why did you take it?", because at least those two
have ready answers) and invariably they would ask if I could run them off
a copy. I had some paper to spare to I pushed off a few copies for friends
and classmates and even a couple of the lecturers who'd expressed an interest.
But when I ran out of paper and I was still being asked for copies,
I found myself in a difficult position. I've always maintained that it's
really impossible to evaluate a piece of art, or rather, to assign art a
pricetag. Whenever I'm posting work out and I have to fill in one of those
post office customs labels, I always record the value of the piece as "priceless"
and "worthless," (if I had time I'd tell you a story about
a friend of mine who submitted some of his work to a photography auction,
and about how even though his work was, to me at least, better than many
of the more collectable images available, the bidding had to come down and
down from the original bid, until another of our classmates bought it out
of sympathy. I still pray that he'll become a hugely successful and collectable
photographer, just to piss off those people who let his work get away from
them that day.) so with that in mind, I didn't want to actually charge anyone
for a copy. I went out and bought myself another box of cibachrome paper
(not cheap), deciding I'd charge only for the cost of each sheet,
and then I had this other idea; I told the people who were still after this
print that I would only give them a copy if they would give me one of their
photographs in return. An eye for an eye, in other words. (The guy who gave
me a picture of a bible with the image of his daughter projected onto it
was in Rome a few years ago, and while there he came across a statue that
also had a rose growing in front of it, of which he sent me a Polaroid.
This is what I mean about that inability to describe the visual, because
it wasn't until he got back from Italy and asked how I'd liked his homage,
that I understood the gag.)
Whatever, sometime after we'd all split up after college, I received a letter
from one of the girls who'd returned to her home in Israel. (She had "bought"
her copy of my print with a very dark and textured black and white photograph
of coiled rope.) I have that letter right here, and I quote: "Many
of my visitors have been asking me about the beautiful photograph of yours
which I have framed and hung upon the wall. I don't know whether to give
them your address and have them writing you or not, or what they could possibly
offer you in place of money." I wrote her back, asking her to say that
I wouldn't be making any more copies of the picture, because for a long
while I was sick to death of it. Really. For the last couple of weeks at
college I'd been churning out copies of this print like a factory, and with
each successive one that fell out of the machine I grew to dislike it more
and more. I thought that with this kind of repetition it would lose its
appeal entirely, in the same way that so many great paintings have been
reduced to the level of visual cliches by their reproduction in books and
as postcards and posters and God knows what. And I'd gotten tired of the
way it overshadowed the rest of my work, work which I personally felt was
far better.
This was the real crux of it, I think, that I didn't want to be tied to
this one shot. For a long time I never even gave my folks a copy of it,
even though I knew my mother really loved it, because I could not bear the
idea of them telling their visitors "Marcus took that," and having
that one image bear the weight of all the work I'd done up to that point.
That terrible notion that maybe anyone who saw that photo would think they
knew what I was about, when in reality it had a much relevance to the work
I was doing then as this piece of writing does to what I'm doing now. I'm
sure I'm repeating myself here but, you know, I told you already I was drinking,
and those advertisements aren't going anywhere if you're bored. So that
was that. Occasionally one of my old classmates would mention on the phone
or in a letter that someone else had admired the photo, but the word spread
that I wasn't interested anymore, and soon enough the requests for further
prints for friends and relatives began to dry up.
Until three years ago, just before Christmas, when I got a card from a young
woman I'd studied with, now living in Belfast and working in television.
What had happened was her grandfather had recently died, and this being
her first real experience of bereavement, she'd found it difficult to assimilate
the whole notion of mortality, of death and its obvious inevitability. You
know, if you come into contact with death in some form when you're young,
it gives you a chance to get involved in some way with it, and even if you
can't comprehend it, you at least... blah blah blah. I'm sure you know what
I'm getting at with this. I think that's reason enough to let your kid have
a pet, even just something tiny like a mouse or a gerbil, because when it
passes on, they find they have to confront that sense of life's finity,
and it's good if they can get used to that with something a little more
transient, a little less substantial than another human being, and it also
brings it into the realm of your own family dialogue in that you get to
discuss the subject with them.
Let me quote to you from her card, which I also dug out for this: "After
about a week of harbouring these really intense and awful fears about dying
and what it all means and hating myself for not coming up with any answers,
I decided last night to just go for it, which has been in real short supply
of late, as you can imagine, I'm sure. I thought it was either that or knock
myself out with a hammer. So I bought myself a bottle of vodka and bottle
of Coke and drank myself unconscious. I wasn't sick or anything, I just
eventually passed out. The weird thing about this, and why I'm writing to
you this afternoon, is that somewhere inside of that I had either a dream
or a vision or a hallucination. I didn't remember this at all until just
now, because I've spent all morning feeling like shit and I hadn't thought
about it at all, but in my dream my body was on fire. I wasn't in flames
or anything, just on fire inside, and my skin was this bright red colour.
And then this woman came to me and she laid her palm flat upon my forehead,
and her hand was cold, not uncomfortable or anything, but it was cold enough
so that its coldness spread throughout my body, and my temperature got back
to where it should have been. And that was it. She didn't say anything,
and all she did was touch me, and I was sitting at the table and I looked
up and saw your photograph, and I thought 'That's her!' The woman in my
dream was the statue in that photograph of yours." I called her up
right after I read this and we talked about it some more and also caught
up on our news and stuff, and she told me that since sending me the card
she'd been sleeping better and she wasn't so worried. I felt kind of flattered
that in a strange and indirect way I was somehow responsible for helping
her out, but I wasn't too disturbed by the incident because dreams have
a habit of making use of characters from a recently seen movie, or from
that evening's news bulletins or whatever, and she would have been familiar
with the woman in the photo from seeing her every day. Maybe she was even
looking at the picture as she was sitting getting more and more drunk. So
it was weird, but it wasn't that weird.
About two or three months after that, I had a phone call from that guy I
mentioned earlier, the one who'd been to Rome, who told me a similar thing
had happened to his wife's sister. She'd seen the photograph when she'd
been over here with her husband and daughter on vacation from Toronto. (It
wasn't just a holiday; she had recently suffered a miscarriage so her husband
decided to take the family away in an attempt to put something into
that emptiness where the baby should have been.)
Anyway, shortly after they got back to Canada, she had a dream where she
was visited by a woman who simply laid her hand upon her belly. When she
woke up, she said she felt restored. My friend said that's the very word
she used: "restored." He and his wife found out about all of this
when she called them up, asking them to fax her a copy of that picture of
the statue because she as sure it was the same woman, and of course, it
was. Even in a poorly reproduced fax of a photocopy, there was enough in
the statue's demeanour and poise that echoes back across the memory of her
visit and what she could recall of her dream to allow her that recognition.
This time I did feel a bit more concerned. I was amazed. I
was confused and to be honest, I was even a little afraid. But then, when
I thought about it, I knew the story of the first dream had been widely
discussed, and my friend had told his sister-in-law about it when
she'd said how much she liked the photograph, so maybe her dream was less
a passive thing than we all assumed. Maybe she herself had willed that statue
to come to her for her own comfort, but there was no real way of telling.
And then after that things got seriously strange. More and more of the people
who had a copy of the print began contacting me with the same story of how
either they, or someone they knew who'd seen it, had dreamed about the statue,
and suddenly the requests for copies of the print started arriving with
every other mail. I didn't want to get involved. I found myself torn between
a real curiosity about what these people thought they were getting from
the photograph, and just wanting nothing more to do with it. For a long
time I just shut myself off from all of it; I had the telephone disconnected
and I stopped even reading the letters I got, let alone answering them.
I reached a point where I was terrified of the whole bizarre situation.
When I was afforded a rational look at what was happening, I wrote it off
as plain hysteria; people were simply seeing what they wanted to see, that
anyone in an emotionally precarious state who saw this photograph and heard
of these other cases, began looking to the photo for something to help them,
looking so intensely that more often than not they found what they were
after. But all I could see was the photograph itself, an image registered
through the chemistry of recorded light. I couldn't see this, this
grace or whatever, and I think that's what really upset me,
that I was fading into the background. I'd taken a photograph, but now it
had assumed its own mission I felt redundant, I felt I was no longer needed,
and the more mail I received the more I felt this to be true. Eventually
I did what I always do when a total breakdown seems imminent; I went home
to my folks. That was just over a year ago. I went home and I tried to forget
it all; I read, I played some golf, I watched tv, anything to keep my mind
from cracking up over this other business. And then, a couple of days before
Christmas, that would be exactly a year ago tomorrow (or rather today now),
my parents were out carol-singing with a group from the church, and the
telephone rang. I thought I'd just let it ring out, but then as a sort of
test or whatever, just to see if I really could cope, I went and picked
it up. It was an old friend of the family, and at first he thought I was
my dad, but it was actually me he wanted to talk to. I didn't panic
when he told me he'd just had a curious dream. There was something reassuring
in his voice that put me completely at ease, even across the phone-line.
I had an enormous amount of, it wasn't just respect or admiration, it's
one of those inexplicable things, but I really felt for this man.
My parents had often spoken of him, how his wife had gone blind and then
been taken into hospital as her condition deteriorated, and how this man
would walk the three miles there and back to visit her every single afternoon.
He wasn't a martyr or anything, and he'd gladly accept a lift if it was
offered, but often there just was no offer, and he'd have to walk it. He'd
been an old man even when I was young, and I remembered him as always having
a smile for me, always radiant in a white arran sweater that always smelled
of lavender. And here he was on the phone telling me of how he'd come in
from walking back from the hospital that evening, tired and cold, so he'd
turned up the fire and lain down on the sofa for a rest.
If it had been anyone else, I would have screamed. I would have hung up.
But his voice seemed to be giving me something back that I'd been missing
for a long time, and I found myself almost entranced as he told me of this
dream he'd just experienced, where he was lying on the couch and he felt
someone take his hand. He looked up, and there was a woman kneeling beside
him, holding his hand. She smiled at him, and when he looked beyond her
he could see his wife holding her other hand, and she was looking at him,
and she was smiling too.
He wanted to talk to me because he recognised this woman holding onto them
both as the woman he'd seen in my parents' copy of the photograph, and I
remember he kept saying "It's a good sign isn't it Marcus? It has to
be a good sign." I didn't know what to say to him. Really, I was close
to tears, and I said something like "I hope so." What could
I say? Either this whole thing was true, or this gentle man had heard all
these stories about the photograph from my folks, and had become the latest
victim of some mass psychological delusion. I wanted to scream at him. "It's
just a fucking photograph!", but hearing him talk about the comfort
he'd taken from his dream, I couldn't do that. All I could do was say "I
hope so" and then we wished each other a happy Christmas, and that
was that.
It wasn't until the day after Christmas that we found out this man and his
wife had both died on Christmas Eve. The day after we'd spoken, he'd walked
out to the hospital and it was almost as if all that effort he'd expended
across the months and months of getting himself there and back, that ongoing
endeavor just to be with his wife for a short time each day, had finally
caught up to him. When her life began to slip away right then and there,
it was the most natural thing in the world for his to follow.
My parents both went to their funeral. I stayed home. I was thinking so
hard about this whole situation I simply had no mental capacity to spare
for anything else. I couldn't speak or eat or anything. I just sat and thought.
I spent days just sitting and thinking, and you know what I came up with?
Nothing.
A year later I still don't have a clue about all this. I've had more calls
and letters about the photograph, some are trivial, some are intense, some
worry me, but none of them make me feel the way I did when I got that call
last year. I don't understand it, I don't pretend to understand it,
but something I have learned this past year is that what I think
about all of this doesn't matter. It's out of my hands, and however long
it takes to run its course is no longer any of my business. And now, finally,
I'm okay with that.
If I were to go back over this I'm sure I'd see that there's lots of stuff
I've missed, or things I've included that I should have left out, but I'm
hoping there's someone at the magazine whose job it is to tidy up work that
comes in in this state. All I know is that from now 'til I die I'll never
get through a Christmas without thinking about what happened last year,
and I think that's probably a good thing.
Suddenly I feel really tired. I hope they print this. I really do need the
money, but it's more than that. It's more than that.
© 1999 Marcus Gray
____________________
Marcus Gray lives in the
U.K. and is the author of the novel .357, which was reviewed
in the Spring/Summer 1999 issue of the Cambridge Book Review.
CBR Home | Reviews | Excerpts
& Features | Guidelines | CBR
Press