Help me, I’m in agony, he wrote.
I’m experiencing shortness of breath. There is some numbness in my limbs.
He looked at what he’d written. He read it aloud, and struck out the last sentence.
I can’t feel my hands! he wrote.
He ran through the dialogue a few times, found his address on the Journal ’s delivery label, jotted it down, practiced the dialogue once more.
That sound again, barely audible, from far away. He recognized it this time. He knew exactly what it was. The river.
25.
My photographs of Vik are medleys of smudge and blur, thumbs effecting solar eclipse, plan views of shoelaces. When I managed to align focus and f-stop, I was a mug-shot artist. Videos, same: catalogues of a wide range of ground cover species, off-camera directions that always end with, Okay, ready? and as the frame swings up to capture the subject … blackout—or worse, when I captured him standing uneasily at the edge of a swimming pool, stage-mothering him to Do something, do something! Move around or, like, dance!, and he would, saggy trunks dripping all over the place, tentatively bouncing on one leg then the other as if testing their structural integrity, his mouth a rictus of mortal embarrassment.
Vik was director of our tripod-assisted sex tapes, all of them either metronomed by low-light warnings (though the audio has been, in years since, an effective enough lubricant if mixed with vodka; melancholy, sure, but what’s the brain doing during masturbation, anyway, but pining after an absent set of hands, mouth, body, way of life?) or, when well lit, comedies starring a Parkinsonian ghost writhing abstractly about our mattress, disgorging here and there a foot or arm before redevouring the escapee; sexy snapshots, likewise, were lightning flashes of bleached landscape and shadow, a cloud of saltpeter storming on our affections, carving into the foreground horrors of cleft and gap.
It was if we’d undergone a training program for photographers of industrial flange and pipe-fitting catalogues, steeped in an objectivist approach that treated every bolt, bushing, and return bend equally, everything shot under the same flat illumination, a triumph of truth over perspective.
A person viewing our collected works could be forgiven for thinking it was all an intentional, if not quite realized, project, some hyper-ironic thrift shop approach to the saccharine naïveté of the knock-kneed, blepharoplastied Japanese hipster. But nope. Just bad composition and shyness, a headshot collection for the jacket flap of an anti-anagraphist manifesto.
Look at me. What a drag, a sullen mug mouthing the words at the back of a group sing-along. Stiff as a board at the Pantheon, exhibiting lifelessness on the Spanish Steps, idling uncomfortably in a gondola, tonguing a plasticine gelato. Wait, there’s more! Here Comrade Hazel refuses to strike pose at Bolshoi! Look there, poor madam impersonates a wilting rhododendron in the Yumthang Valley. Vik: There he stands, hands in pockets, shallow smile, a wax figurine, a chroma-key shot, an action figure propped against a rock.
If not for his friends, I would have no proof that he ever smiled. Their donations came in manila envelopes, email attachments, on CDs with accompanying thumbnails helpfully preprinted on glossy photo stock. Most are from the days before we were together, when our pasts ran parallel, back when my history didn’t require a revision quite so desperately as it does now. Eventually our timelines merge and in some of those photos we stand together looking not entirely bloodless. Enough of them, at least, to assure me that we lived not quite so statutory a life as our portraits of each other suggest.
I’d sent the blanket request in advance of the funeral, and his friends, being competent and thoughtful types, top-notch custodians of their pasts, had responded with an archive, every shot suitable for framing, the deluge a long-overdue spring clean. I suppose his friends welcomed the invitation to initiate an act of catharsis. Dear man had been in hiding for fifteen years, what could they do? What could I do? Keep on stroking the organ responsible for pain, whichever one that is. The brain? The heart? An electric finger on the dorsal posterior insula, prodding mercilessly until it was a swollen, pulsing mass of signals, throwing off cyclones of barbed wire and hailstones?
The Pavlovian compact by which all Americans live, the promise that anguish is eventually terminated by an endorphin release, took a rain check on this one. Someone forgot to pay the electric on the effervescent promise that as long as I worked through my pain it would all pay off in the end, because anything that pays off is worth it, worth it because we are made stronger by our suffering.
Fifteen years they couldn’t find Vik. He was everywhere and nowhere, scattered across Lower Manhattan in an untidy Bayesian distribution, no easier to locate for the blanketing effect of his disintegration, but eventually he emerged, and I have placed that artifact, the first and only, once a shard of bone, now a white powder reconstituted by a Fisher Scientific Sonic Dismembrator, treated to Bode Technology patented DNA-extraction procedures, the full arsenal of forensic science available to the New York City medical examiner’s office, in an oak coffin, and I performed the ritual of mourning and remembrance. Correction: I put seventy-five percent of his remains, by weight, into the coffin. The other twenty-five percent I placed on my tongue.
Sure, he was a little late to the party, but we all remembered the steps, we being the widows, by then having put parts of thirty-six of Vik’s colleagues in the ground. Vik had been elusive, that
