Warnings from the Future Page 3

  She left it there, out of the way of the road, unbuckling her camera bag from the passenger seat and slinging it over her shoulder. She grabbed a first aid kit from the glove box and slid it into the mesh pouch of the camera bag. While she charged up the embankment, she got her camera strap around her neck and affixed a lens, outlining the situation as best she could: no lights or sirens, no aid yet; flares, at least on this side of the wreck. She called 911 and told them about the pileup. Where was it? “Between Bakersfield and Fresno,” she said. “I don’t fucking know.” As she got level with the bridge the wreck was on the far side of, she saw a scattering of people against the guardrail, heads in hands, in postures of mourning. There were doubtless some people imprisoned or crushed in those accordioned cars. A man leaned against his smashed Corolla, uselessly banging on its roof. She knew the red cover on the ground could not be blood, must have been tomatoes or cherries or berries, but they made for a grisly sight.

  She was framing shots in her mind at the same time she was doing a medical triage. It would help no one to bang on the side of the car with that man, but she could see the angle from which it would make a compelling image. The survivors against the guardrail could use a neuro check that she was marginally equipped to perform, but it wouldn’t do any good until ambulances arrived anyway. There were a thousand ways she could help, of course. She could find things. The dictum in foreign countries was to be strictly hands off: there were soldiers for soldiering and medics for medicine. That policy was harder to maintain on the domestic front.

  As she walked into the scene, she felt the crimson bursting of the strawberries beneath her feet. She took several shots of the people hunched over in front of the guardrail, between the rough wet asphalt below them and the backdrop of fog swirling down into the basin. She took some of the man banging on the car, cautiously out of his sightlines at first, in case he was demented enough to attack her, but then closer, toward the shot she really wanted. His face snapped up at her, but it was broken by grief, and he went back to beating the car. She retreated from him, and that was when she saw the boy.

  He had walked around the far edge of the produce truck from the other side of the wreck, and was approaching her. He was not screaming, but he was not swaying his arms as he walked either. A thin line of dried blood went from his hair past his ear and down his neck. There is something about a person who is in true need of help, something that creates a beacon, even if they say nothing.

  The story she tells herself—that she saw the boy and took the picture by instinct before she even thought about it. It sounds so natural and true that sometimes she almost forgets it didn’t happen that way. But she did have that thought: this will make a great photograph. She put the box to her eye to snap it, just a single exposure that imprinted itself in her memory immediately. Sometimes you didn’t know what you had until you saw it in the darkroom, but this was not one of those times. She took it and then rushed to help: throwing her windbreaker around him, picking him up, talking to him, and taking him over to the group by the guardrail.

  She took it knowing she would feel guilty. Those were the taxes of the job. What was war photography but choosing the ghosts that would haunt you? She is stuck too with remembering wanting to be in a darkroom more than wanting to help the dumbstruck victims, given what she had in her film compartment. Already the image was a conduit to Dean, who was sleeping placidly in his bed a hundred miles south. Dean was three or four years younger, but it was close enough for that thing to happen, the thing that happens to every parent, the thing by which any suffering child looks at you with the eyes of your own child. She’ll remember too trying to wipe sweat from her forehead afterward and realizing she was still wearing the cowboy hat she’d been driving in. The poor boy must have felt he’d been visited by a tourist.

  How many times has she wondered, standing in front of the photograph, whether she had taken something from the boy? A part of her thought she had stolen every expression from him except the one in the picture. But that was just a photographer’s vanity. Even the word capture was a photographer’s vanity. You created a duplicate of one instant, and then the instant went on. The ambulances and fire trucks arrived. An EMT took the boy. Others hovered their fingers in front of the eyes of the victims on the shoulder. They used machines to pry the doors off the Corolla and remove part of the bewildered man’s wife. Carmen had left after that, but she knew that the tow trucks would be next, peeling the cars apart and carting them two at time to some mechanic’s yard in a nearby town where they’d wait on an insurance assessment. She didn’t know how they’d handle the big rig and its trailer. It would likely take a few tow trucks working together to get it righted. And what would they do with the strawberries? Would they send a street sweeper to clean them up, or leave them to the slower fate of the birds?

  Either way, systems were already in action erasing the whole scene.

  War was the same. It buried the memory of itself as it went. That’s why recording it was important. But disasters and accidents? There was no horror of human conflict to illuminate, no peace to protect. It could be argued that the sum of the good this photograph could do was as a PSA: Be Careful Driving in the Fog. One could argue as well for the importance of witness. This accident that deconstructed the lives of thirteen people happened on a day that had made their suffering quotidian. Without a record, the fact of the wreck would simply diffuse into the higher buzz of the quake’s aftermath. And yet standing there, or even looking at the picture, the greater tragedy in the Bay Area was wholly separate for her, abstract and irreconcilable.

  Carmen had been listening to the radio on the drive. The retrofitting of the bridges and buildings in San Francisco had done its job, but a section of the north bore of the Caldecott Tunnel had caved in, potentially on some early morning commuters, and a twelve-story brick building in downtown Oakland had collapsed. The reporters hadn’t yet ascertained whether the structure was commercial or residential, but with their voices raw they hoped that it was commercial, as a commercial building would be nearly empty at 6 a.m., while a residential one—they didn’t finish their sentences. The woman they’d pull out of the rubble two days later, who would go on to write a memoir and do the morning-show circuit, had been trapped beneath the building at the same time that boy had wandered out of the wreckage, and yet in those moments the two mattered nothing to one another.

  Witness: did the boy want this moment in his life to be seen, documented? Did anyone but Carmen want to witness it?

  Alice would not look at the picture. She barely came into the office after it went up, not because she didn’t care about the boy but because she cared too much. It was in a museum as well, where tourists could stand in front of it, feel a whiff of sympathy, then move on to a whiff of the next thing.

  You took something that stuck with you. You hoped it stuck with other people. You could tell a good photograph when looking at it felt like trying to find a key locked inside the box that the key opens. The low wisps of fog mimicking smoke, the strawberries mimicking blood. They didn’t mean anything. They didn’t mean nothing either.

  Back in the jeep, she imagined driving up to the 580 and taking it west to I-80, telling herself that whatever picture most defined the earthquake would be not only in the New York Times and on the Today show but in history books and stock reels for the rest of time. It was a sales pitch to herself. She remembered taking I-80 east all the way from San Francisco to New York after she’d graduated college, documenting refugee communities along the way. And now she felt with a desire that was primal, almost sexual, an impulse to take her shameful, exhilarated, independent self across the country once more.

  But when she thought of the image that she’d taken—when she developed it she’d find her recollection of it was almost perfect—there was the boy’s suffering staring out at her with Dean’s eyes, and it was undeniable that she existed tied to others. It felt like a kind of defeat. She turned around and took the 99 back to Los Angele
s.

  When she came into the city she went straight to the darkroom co-op. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d been so impatient waiting for negatives to develop, or for a print in its developer bath. She made a 24×36, though larger ones would come later. For the moment she wanted something she could hold with her arms angled out, the boy close enough to her size that he could look her in the eyes. She held him awhile like that, not conversing.

  At home, Alice and Dean were still in their pajamas, sitting next to each other on the couch. Alice was working on her laptop while Dean recited a library book from memory. Later in life, when she wanted to remember the two of them, she remembered this afternoon, coming in on them so innocent and undisturbed.

  “What are you doing back?” Alice asked. Dean glanced up from his book and went back to reading it.

  “I got what I needed.”

  Seeing the skepticism on Alice’s face, she put on a movie for Dean and poured two glasses of the Bordeaux they’d opened last night—hard to believe they’d been home having a normal dinner less than a day ago—and the two of them sat together at the kitchen table. It was the sort of conversation that should happen as the night stretches late, their faint doubles reflected in the window glass, but here they were having it in the midafternoon, with daylight on the patio ferns and the kitchen still smelling like coffee as they drank their leftover wine. She told Alice about the fog, omitting her near miss with the semi, and about coming upon the accident, how instinct guided her as she documented the scene. And then about the boy, how he walked out of the wreck toward her, how his blankness was a scream. She told Alice too about the guilt she felt when she took the picture, which she usually would not have shared. It was the sharing that came naturally to early dates and first years, but was so rare now, in the marriage years, with pleasantness overwhelming everything.

  Then Carmen showed her the photograph, and was once again so entranced by the image that she paid no attention to Alice’s response. By the time Carmen looked over, Alice was looking away. Knowing she was being watched, Alice looked at the photo again, and the discomfort that washed over her was as obvious as if she were being forced to look at a sucking chest wound or a gnarly infection. Such different responses to the same thing, like something from an absurdist play. This is a fracture, Carmen thought. Though such fractures could be necessary to a relationship, the way fire is to a forest.

  Within a few days the photo was matted and framed. Then it went on the mantel, briefly, before it was banished to the office. It watched over the rest of her life. Even when she was in her late middle years, when she and Alice were divorced and Alice had remarried, when Dean was off in college deciding whether he still liked them, the picture added new threads to the web of memories strung to it. And so the picture began to mean many things that were not presented by its image. Take it as an artifact unhitched from time, and see the many Carmens at many ages, in many circumstances, many moods, gazing into it. It teaches her this now: moments of your life can be tethered to one another. In looking at the photograph, she saw Dean when he was five, like when she took the photo, and as he was when he was nine and looked so much like the boy in the picture that her fears of him maimed or terrified were brought to life, and she saw herself walking out of the office to find him a teenager eating a bowl of cereal in the breakfast nook, walking out of the office to see him as an undergraduate—poorly shaven, electrically sullen, captivating—and she saw that strange boy as he was in a moment of suffering that had long passed, and she saw all the suffering of the world, and she saw herself able to detach from it.

  The night she came home with the photo, she’d hugged Dean with a love fueled by the shame of not helping a boy like him. She held him so long he grew bored with the hug. The year he was three he’d climbed into her lap every time they hugged, and held the embrace until she stood up. He was still a sweet boy, so sweet that she worried about him, but his eyes had an adult tiredness to them sometimes. He’d looked like he could use some coffee. Only five, but already burnt a little more each year by the wildness of the world. When Carmen showed him the image the next morning, he took half a step backward but did not look away as Alice had. He stared at it with such a raw concern that Carmen thought he might speak to it, but the questions he asked were practical in nature: Where were the boy’s parents? Did the police and the ambulances come? Were you in the crash? Where would that boy go?

  RETROGRADE MOUNTAIN TIME

  Do voices age? I don’t mean the thickening of puberty or the weak wind of old age, but within one phase of a man’s life—say, from thirtyfour to forty-three? I was asking myself this question as I quietly stepped down the hallway past the girls’ rooms, taking a call in the dark from a Tahoe area code, which meant someone from the past. In the bedroom, it was a voice whose familiarity could not be matched to memory. In the hallway I was fairly certain it belonged to my brother Rick, though the voice was babbling, and Rick was not one to babble. In the kitchen, turning on the little light under the microwave that usually only Denise used, that she sometimes forgot to turn off when we closed up the house for bed, I was sure—both because I’d heard enough that I could filter out what I thought was a little extra graveliness—a little more suggestion of beef or Skoal—to turn it into the voice I used to know, and because now he was saying, It’s Shasta, Bill. It’s Shasta. Shasta was my niece. Shasta was his daughter.

  Through his hysterics I gathered she’d been stabbed in a bar and he was rushing her to Barton Memorial down in South Lake. As soon as he said this, it was like I was watching a live feed. I knew those roads so well I could see his truck weaving down them, his headlights making the trunks of the conifers real in the night. The lake just made an empty blackness at this hour, except where the lights of Reno glimmered off the far side of it like a smear of Impressionist paint. I knew exactly how fast you could take those turns without veering across the narrow shoulder and tumbling down the mountain into the lake, though this was more a memory of a knowledge than a knowledge in earnest. I could see his truck, the shade of matte grape blue that could only be produced by age, its brake lights flashing red when he felt he’d hit a turn too fast. He likely had a new truck by now, but what could I see other than what I knew? I saw my brother as he was nine years ago. Had he shaved his beard in the interim, or trimmed it, or done anything to demonstrate that he, rather than it, was in charge?

  I’d seen Shasta six years earlier at her eighth-grade graduation. She was fourteen, and I still imagined her that way, which managed not to chafe my mental image of the ride too much, because her breasts and hips were already exploding at a rate any father of daughters could only describe as dangerous. My own girls were developing more patiently, and into more refined silhouettes, and I’ve never been able to rid myself of the silly notion that choices I’d made had influenced this: the mortgage, the life insurance, the college funds. But buttoned-up uncles have a special affection for their wild-hearted nieces, just as wild-hearted uncles have a soft spot for their honor-roll nieces. I’d felt I could talk to Shasta as an adult. She had the bearing of one; she spoke to me as if she were one, as if her education in all things, abbreviated though it might be, was completed. I had expected to hear about some boy with a skateboard or a guitar or hair in his eyes. Instead she told me that she wasn’t a mountain girl. She wouldn’t do what her dad had done, wouldn’t stay. She was a beach girl, she said, and she would be a beach woman once she had her diploma.

  “You can stay with us in Sacramento,” I said. “Still a ways from the beach, but close enough to the Delta.”

  She scoffed. “I’m talking Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara.”

  “Santa something.”

  “Exactly.”

  She didn’t realize that in her choker, in her too-tight t-shirt and heavy eyeliner and sturdy shoes, she looked like the very picture of a mountain girl, and that by claiming to be destined for the beach, she was only cleaving tighter to norms of the girls who stayed. She’d spoken her in
tention so confidently I believed her in the moment, though driving back down into the valley, I knew better. If I had thought of her in the past few years, I would have been able to predict she’d spend her Saturday nights in one of those washout bars that served anyone over eighteen. But I would not have predicted any bloodshed.

  “What happened?” I asked Rick.

  “I’m applying pressure. What else should I do?”

  “Is the knife still in the wound?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think it might have hit a major organ?”

  “Can you listen, Bill? It’s four or five slices, high up on her thighs.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Where was he trying to stab her?”

  He let silence be his answer, the first moment of quiet since I’d picked up the phone. For a moment I was back at the kitchen table, my eyes fixed to the microwave in a way I hadn’t realized, taking in the little circle of light, the oven’s control console, and the ceramic cooktop that bounced some extra light back up to the ceiling, where it nested, light blue, in the recesses of the kitchen’s main lights.

  “How do I know if he got the femoral?”

  “Is she still alive?” I asked. “Then he didn’t get the femoral.”

  Talking down to him was the best way to ease his worry. I won’t say it didn’t also feel good, won’t say I didn’t want him to be thinking that his daughter would have been better off if it were me in the cab with her instead of him, that I had the skills to properly assess the wounds, that if I had concerns about her bleeding out on the drive I could have put in some emergency sutures with the fishing line in his tackle box and some sterile alcohol. In truth, so long as no major arteries were cut and they were doing a decent job applying pressure, I was more concerned about her going septic from whatever might have been on the blade, whatever might be on the towels or rags that were handy in Rick’s truck. Doubtless he knew without asking that my own daughters were sleeping soundly in their beds, that if they’d stayed up past ten at all it would be to read surreptitiously under the covers, that even when they reached Shasta’s age there was no way they’d spend their Saturday nights downing piss beer at bars populated by middle-aged men trying to drink enough to crack themselves open.