He has to be home, Itzal, she said. We have a session tomorrow. He has a daughter.
I told her there had been no answer.
He needs to help me, she said. Itzal, he needs to help me.
Let me help you, I said, but she only repeated herself. He needs to help me. He needs to help me.
You are tired. You are just very tired, Jessica. Everything will be better in the morning, I said, aware only that these were the words I had said, again and again, to Miriam, my daughter, when her spells took hold of her.
Yes, she said finally. She made a little laugh. Everything will be better in the morning. I’m sorry, Itzal. I’m going home now.
I followed her out, catching up to her a little way down the sidewalk. I told her I was worried for her, that I would call her, that if I didn’t reach her I would come and check on her. I made her tell me her address, and she watched me write it down.
—
At two in the morning, the night shift ended. Her building was only six blocks away. It would have been about 2:10 or 2:15 when I arrived. I rang her bell, but there was no response. I waited to see if anyone arrived or left. No one came. Finally, I pressed my hand along all the buttons on the panel. Someone, expecting someone else, tripped the buzzer and I was inside.
I knocked on her door, though I knew she would not respond. It was unlocked. I opened it and stepped into the darkness of her apartment. From the bathroom came the sound of water. I sat on the edge of her bed. Behind the closed door, the water kept running, just a trickle, and that was the only noise. In the room I breathed the smell of paint, of linseed oil and turpentine.
What looked like heavy blankets had been hung over the windows. When my vision adapted to the shadows I could make out sheets of paper or photographs clipped to a string stretched across the corner of the room, alongside thinner strips suspended like ribbons, negatives, I decided. Her apartment must also be her darkroom. How long did I wait there, and for what? I was aware that someone, anyone, having observed an intruder standing outside the apartment of a single woman, could have called the police. Perhaps I was waiting for the police. Perhaps, on the other hand, there would be the noise of splashing water, and Jessica Burke, having risen from her bath, would appear in the bathroom doorway, naked or wrapped in a towel. But no police arrived, and the only noise was the uninterrupted trickle from the bathroom.
—
The needle still hung from her vein. When I touched her fingers they were cold. Her pulse was nearly undetectable, and her skin had darkened as though tarnished. Beside the bathtub, a candle had burnt down nearly to the floor. Under her sink, I located a stash of plastic sacks stuffed into an emptied tin. I removed one, and after searching a little longer, found a roll of masking tape next to her developing chemicals. I had to hold her upright to keep her from slipping down into the bathwater as I positioned the sack over her head, drawing the edges down and securing them with tape around her neck. Where the sack molded to her face, two little patches of mist, no bigger than bee’s wings, appeared against the plastic beneath her nostrils.
The camera I found was a Leica, with a flat lens and no flash. It was already loaded with slow film, so I pulled down the blanket from her bathroom window, hoping to bring in the glare of a streetlight. I was amazed to discover instead that day had broken. First light streamed through the window onto her body. The patches of mist inside the plastic bag had now disappeared. Click went the shutter. Then once, twice again. I shot the entire roll, then removed the plastic sack and put it along with the camera in my pocket. I listened from behind her door for any sounds in the hallway. Hearing none, I slipped out into the hallway, down the stairs, and out onto the street.
Later, when I walked by on my lunch break, there were two police cars and an ambulance outside the building, their strobe lights off, some uniformed officers standing on the sidewalk, drinking coffee. I waited until the paramedics had brought her down, face covered, on a stretcher, and watched as they loaded her into a low and windowless white van. The other vehicles dispersed. The police did not notice me. No one asked what I was doing there. Nothing happened.
I rented a darkroom by the hour downtown and developed roll after roll of film—hundreds of pictures I had taken for practice of the wall or the window—until I was confident enough to develop the roll of film I had taken in Jessica Burke’s bathroom. When I saw it, finally, the image of her body in the bathtub, I knew what I had and what in time I would do with it. Even before I sent it to David Oppen, before I saw on his face what he had seen in the envelope, I knew that the hook was set. From that moment on, even when I was doing nothing but watching, standing behind the grille of your building’s door waiting for him to appear, I could feel it, the weight and tension on my line, the force of his struggle, and the strength with which he exhausted his strength.
For three years my only care was that the line would not break. You grew into a teenager. Your beauty settled on you, whether you liked it or not, and
