deliberate, almost sculptural quality. He found it hard to look away.
Surreptitiously, he returned his camera to his eye, moving his head a few inches to the left to compose a shot. Before he could release the shutter, though, a boy with a chain of burn blisters reaching up his arm shouted, “Hey! Dude with the camera! C’mere!”
Jason looped the strap around his neck and crossed the street, steadying himself on his crutches when he reached the shelter.
“What’s your name, man?” the boy asked him.
“Jason Williford. I’m a photojournalist for the
“Ten dollars.”
“What?”
“Ten dollars, and you can take our picture. Apiece.”
“I can’t offer you any money. I’m a journalist.”
“Ten dollars in cigarettes then. There’s a gas station over there on the corner. Call them a gift.”
He thought it over. There was a specific shot he kept envisioning, one that would allow the wounds engraved on their skin to flow across the borders of their bodies into the pocks and slashes on the bus bench, like hanging lights echoed in a polished tabletop.
“Two packs. Two packs for the lot of you. That’s the best I can do.”
“Deal,” the boy agreed. Jason was halfway to the corner when a girl perched on the backrest of the bench, her shoes beating out a two-four rhythm, called after him. “Salem Black Labels!”
As soon as he returned with the cigarettes, a boy in a red T-shirt tore the cellophane from one of the packs, knocked a cigarette loose, and replaced it upside-down. Then he tweezed a second one out with his small, knuckly fingers and lit it. “I heard these things are bad for you,” he said. “Did you know that quitting smoking now greatly reduces serious risks to your health?”
One of the other kids said, “Huh-I-did-not-know-that. Did you know that smoking by pregnant women may result in fetal injury, premature birth, and low birth weight?”
Hardly a beat had passed before someone added, “Did you know that quitting your health now greatly reduces serious risks to your smoking?” And then they were all working at it together, jockeying to extend the thread of the joke. They passed the cigarettes around with a plastic lighter. Jason took advantage of their inattention and began snapping pictures. There was a panel ad on the back of the bus shelter that kept disrupting the balance of the shots, announcing in bold black letters PERSONAL INJURY, MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE, BIG TRUCKS, and time after time he had to find a perspective that would obscure the words. Ordinarily he would have crouched or stood on his toes, maybe climbed over the bench for a better angle, but the brace on his leg had turned such maneuvers into elaborate feats of acrobatics.
In the end, though he wasn’t quite able to achieve the image he had envisioned, he found one that came close: the dazzling white stroke of the recent incision on a girl’s exposed waist beside a scythelike mark on the fiberglass bench, the one extending into the other in a perfect curve. Quickly, before the girl could move, he released the shutter.
The other girl, the lovely pale fashion-model-type sitting atop the bench, the one who had shouted for Salem Black Labels, gestured to him. “Hey, Jason Williford, photojournalist. I’ve got a picture for you. Are you ready?” She took three quick drags on her cigarette to make the emberhead glow, then, on the inside of her wrist where the blue vein beat, extinguished it. A powerful smell overtook the air, like the whiff of salt and char at a burger joint. The cigarette sizzled, and the smoke changed color, and a magnificent wave of light came bloating out of the burn. Through Jason’s camera, it resembled the great fanning loop of a solar flare. The aurora borealis was dancing over Greenland. Radios everywhere were filling with static. He couldn’t help himself: he took the shot.
Within seconds the light had subsided, throwing off a few last sparks as it fell to the surface of the girl’s wrist, where it continued to twitch and flutter. A smile was locked on her face. The bays of skin beneath her eyes were moist with tears. He took a shot of that, as well.
Enough, he decided. Laskowski and Christman be damned.
He capped the camera and returned it to his shoulder. “So all those cuts on your bodies—you guys did those to yourself?”
The kids exchanged a glance and broke up laughing.
That evening he was sorting through the pictures he had taken, selecting the ones to submit to his editor, when he realized something: during his long afternoon in the processing room, not once had he thought about Patricia. He had become lost in the familiar beaverish activity of enlarging, fixing, and scanning his photos, and his memories of her had vanished, along with his awareness of the pain in his leg. The little system of injuries that was his body and the one immense injury that was his life—he had forgotten about them both, and when he thought back on the contentment he had felt, a terrific surge of guilt passed through him. He had accepted that he would forget Patricia in his suffering sometimes, but to forget her in his pleasure? It seemed monstrous, inexcusable. He forced himself to picture her: the freckles on her back and shoulders, the soft, swelling veins that ran along her ankle, the dimple that appeared on her cheek whenever she tried not to smile, all of it swimming in the blood of the car accident.
He bore down on his knee until the joint spasmed with light. His breathing quickened, and his teeth ground together. He would not allow his pain to forsake him.
Two days later he had an appointment with his physical therapist. The routine was familiar by now. She gripped his shoulder as he executed a slow windmill with his arm—a simple matter of form, since his collarbone had already healed—then had him straighten his back and twist his torso around, inspecting his hip for signs of stiffness or discomfort. She examined his stomach as he performed a sit-up. The scar on his abdomen shone in the glare from the overhead lamp, and she had to switch it off to make sure the source was not internal. Finally she came to his leg, guiding him through a battery of stretches, lifts, and pivots that made his face break out in a hard sweat.
“I have to admit,” she said when they were finished, “I’m still concerned about your knee. We ought to have switched you over to the forearm crutches by now. You’re behind schedule. Have you been doing your leg extensions?”
He had discovered that when he removed his brace, bending his knee until the ligaments tightened, then jerking his leg rigid, the joint would pop with a violent paroxysm of light. The lacerating sensation would last for several minutes. He could not stop testing it.
“Not regularly, no.”
She jotted something down in his folder. Then, contemplatively, she asked, “Did anyone ever tell you you were dead when the paramedics brought you in?”
“No. Wait. I was?”
“You were. The doctors revived you on the operating table. It’s a miracle you’re alive today. You should have some respect for that miracle and take better care of yourself.” She clicked her pen shut with a flourish, as if punctuating the remark. “Okay. Lecture over. Like I said, I’m not ready to switch your crutches out just yet, but I think we can get rid of that brace you’ve been wearing. You have to promise me you won’t test your limits, though. If your knee flares up, you’ll lie back and rest awhile. Can you promise me that? Can you? Mr. Williford? Hello?”
So he had died, but what did that mean? Had his heart stopped beating? Had his brain shut down? Of the hours following the accident not one memory remained to him: no flash of images, no luminous white tunnel, only the sight of the bridge whirling smoothly, even elegantly, above him, like the long arm of a windmill, and then, some time later, the speckled yellow ceiling of the recovery room. His therapist wrote out a prescription for him. He left with an appointment to return in seven days. As his crutches conveyed him past the staircase and the admissions counter, past the bank of ferns twitching their fingertips in the air, it occurred to him that he had, quite literally, been resurrected. But resurrected into what? he wondered. His life had become unfamiliar to him, cold and disquieting. He felt as if time as he knew it had flickered to a close. The world had ended. The oceans had climbed their shores, the buildings had burst out of their windows, and all the old meanings had fallen away. It turned out that the world at the end of time was just like the world at the beginning: a single set of footsteps printing the grass, everything lit with its own newness, a brighter and much, much emptier place.
He was passing a newspaper box when the front section of the
