I turned to her. I expected she’d be standing there in her blue-and-white dress laughing with a smile that wasn’t nearly goofy enough to make it funny. But she wasn’t laughing at all, she wasn’t even looking at me. She was studying her pictures, stepping up to one or another to check it out closely, looking from one black spot to another in comparison. She shook her head. Some aren’t as good as the others, she said again.
She took, from the third row from the bottom, the fourth black spot from the right. She handed it to me. I told you it was her, she said, looking at it as I held it in my hand, while I looked at her. That same strange feeling ran up my back again.
Is this a joke, I whispered.
She barely betrayed consternation at the question. But something jumped in her eyes when she said to me, You mean it’s not her? She looked at me suspiciously. Are you sure?
I stared at the black spot in my hand and swallowed. I kept trying to think what to say. There’s nothing in these pictures, I told her quietly.
She flinched a little. She took the picture from my hand and dropped it on the floor like an abandoned bride dropping a dead bouquet.
It was dark when I took them, she said coolly. It was hard to sec. But I can see these pictures and it’s not my fault if you can’t. She went over to the wall and ran her hands along all the pictures. What is it? I said as she gazed at the black blurs. She stopped and stood back from the wall. What are you looking for, I said. After a moment she answered, What I’m looking for isn’t here. The picture I’m looking for isn’t here.
She said, There was a tree on a hill, it was back east. In the no-man’s-land between Manhattan and the Maritime annex. There was a tree on the hill, and a fence behind it where he lived with the others. The branches of the tree curved into the sky like roads, and the leaves were intricate and patterned like subdivisions of houses and buildings. The bark was white. His hair mixed with the leaves perfectly in the wind. The hills in back were very white and the edge of their tops was only a line. It ran into the profile of his brow as though his face was the horizon.
I took his picture, she said, one day when he didn’t know I was there or who I was. Actually I had seen him many times before, from the other side of the fence of course, when I went to shoot the tree. He just blended the way some people blend. But I lost the picture. I don’t know how, it was just gone one morning. I went to see him the next day during visiting hours to tell him I had taken his picture and now it was gone. He came into the visitors’ room and sat behind this glass that divided us. Everything was dark and his face was like the white shadows of men’s faces you see in limousines with black windows. He kept saying Who are you, over and over, even when I’d told him. I don’t know you, he kept saying. You do now, I said. He jumped up behind the glass and ran through the door in back, and the guard looked at me. When I tried to see him again they told me he’d been transferred to another place, but that was a lie. I waited for him to get out.
He’s coming soon, she said to me, turning from the black pictures. When I hear the sound from the ground, I know he’s already here.
The thing about him, she said, raising a finger intently, was that when I took his picture that afternoon on the hill by the prison, it was without a flash in the very late afternoon. I knew I didn’t need a flash, the light was in his face. And I’ve been looking ever since for the picture that doesn’t need a flash and that has its own light. I know if I keep taking pictures in the night, his face will show up like a fire.
I crossed the three feet between us and I took her by her wrist: she jerked in my grasp. You’re lying, I said. She looked up at me frightened, and when I pressed her against the wall she seemed to sink into it. Her face was inches from mine and she was watching the hollow of my neck, not my eyes. You’re lying, I said again. Are you trying to tell me you took all these pictures without a flash? What about the pictures in that back room of the library, what about that night with all the cops and all the blood? Are you trying to tell me you took all those pictures in the dark? She shook her head a little, then nodded a little. I shook her by her wrist and behind her on the wall some pictures loosened and fell; she stepped on them, trying to move with me when I turned her by the wrist. If, standing this close to her, I should close my eyes, I wondered if she could speak Spanish, I wondered if her hair would turn black; now she wasn’t looking at the hollow of my neck but at my eyes. With her free hand she fingered the top button of her dress. Is that what you’re trying to tell me, I said, that you took all those pictures in the dark? But I saw you that night, remember. I saw you because the flash of your
