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  COMBAT CAMERA

  COMBAT

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  A NOVEL

  A.J. Somerset

  BIBLIOASIS

  Copyright © A.J. Somerset, 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Somerset, A. J., 1969-

  Combat camera / A. J. Somerset.

  ISBN 978-1-897231-92-0

  I. Title.

  PS8637.O449C66 2010 C813’.6 C2010-904591-2

  Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through The Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP); and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

  for Vicky

  Contents

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  The most alarming development now confronting Zane was his suddenly frangible reality. Even his routine moments had become fraught with risk. Suppose, for example, a glint of sunlight was to catch the crack traversing his grime-smeared windshield; a disturbance as trivial as this could inexplicably fracture the entire tableau, could set fragments of his past tilting and sliding through his mind like pieces of coloured glass in a broken kaleidoscope. Things finally come to rest in a jagged landscape of unwelcome memories, and then where in hell are you?

  On checking his rear-view mirror, Zane might find his back seat now occupied by Liberian child soldiers, their eyes glassy with drugs, their small hands grasping hand-me-down Russian assault rifles approximately four sizes too large. A West African horizon might replace outer Mississauga’s industrial wasteland, under the same dissipated sun. A dead man, installing himself uninvited in the passenger seat, might speak. Panic rushes in, sweat popping from cold pores, the sour taste of bile and adrenalin, pain in the gut.

  It was getting so he couldn’t even drive to work.

  Above all, it was essential to remain grounded. This demanded continuous attention to detail. Pavement humming under the tires, afternoon sun flaring in the film of grime covering his windshield, and the breathy clatter of valves from the cylinder heads, heralds of an impending catastrophic engine failure: these things belonged indisputably to the here and now. These things provided fixed reference points from which Zane could triangulate his position. Mississauga vice Freetown, in this particular case: he was on his way to a shoot. For now, Zane remained safe in the present.

  The main thing was to deal in facts. Valve clatter was a fact. The rest did not bear considering. The mind, allowed to wander, can easily stray into a bad neighbourhood. Then you’re calling missing persons, handing out recent photos, sitting up late, fearing the worst. You wonder where you went wrong when all the while, in your heart, you already know.

  Zane kept his eyes on the road. It didn’t pay to look back. Neither did it pay to aim high in steering.

  In the studio, bare fluorescent tubes hung suspended amidst loops and garlands of wiring, illuminating two thirds of a motel room: three walls painted a nondescript beige, a door that opened to nowhere, a window blocked by threadbare curtains. The curtains opened not onto glass but to a plain white sheet, the face of an improvised lightbox that, when illuminated, created the illusion of sunlight falling through the non-existent glass to set the curtains aglow. A faded yellow carpet, a double bed without blankets, and an old floor lamp completed the set.

  Richard Barker sat at a desk in the corner of the studio, considering the display of flesh on his computer monitor. He possessed the confident air of a one-time all-star high-school quarterback, twenty years after the fact, who had moved from the gridiron to the sales floor without ever failing to make himself the centre of attention. Barker was the kind of man who crushed your hand to shake it, gripping your arm with his free hand while his gold watch and class ring glittered hard and cold, his eyes pinning you to the mat all the while. He had clearly never felt uncomfortable in his own skin.

  He looked up from the monitor as Zane walked in, and pushed back his chair and leaned back and knit his hands behind his head.

  “You look like death warmed over.”

  “I don’t feel much better.”

  “Seriously, you look sick.”

  “I just didn’t sleep well last night.”

  Zane felt no pressing need to elaborate. What’s to say? Your ghosts get bored haunting your dreams, they start dropping by uninvited in prime time. We interrupt your regular programming to bring you this brief and disconcerting hallucination: Christine, freshly exhumed, with pale crumbs of clay in her hair. Christine was quite dead, and had been for over twenty years, but she had recently started to visit, and Zane had come to resent her disrespect for propriety. It isn’t decent, to ignore the conscious divide. He’d had enough of her long, freighted silences, her reproachful stare. Christine was getting on his nerves.

  He told her to get lost.

  She offered no reply. He closed his eyes and waited, and when he reopened them, she had left. Nevertheless, sleep had remained a difficult prospect.

  This sort of thing, Zane thought, would be difficult to explain to a man like Richard Barker.

  Explaining Christine would require that he first explain certain background matters, matters that he had glossed over rapidly during his perfunctory job interview. On that occasion, to Zane’s relief, Barker had done most of the talking; Zane had yet to discover that this was entirely in character.

  Zane had gone to such lengths as donning a tie and dusting off his portfolio for the occasion, not that it revealed much in the way of applicable experience, but Barker did not even glance at it. He simply asked Zane what experience he had as a photographer.

  Zane said, I did some journalism.

  Some journalism: twenty-two years in El Salvador, in Nicaragua, in Honduras and Guatemala and Panama, in Beirut and Lebanon, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in Northern Ireland and in South Africa, in Angola, in Ethiopia and Eritrea and Somalia and Sudan, in Romania, in the fractured remains of Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan and Chechnya, in Sierra Leone and in Liberia. One hell of a list, yes sir, and I’m sure I’ve left several out. Eventually, all places merge into one. Who can keep it all straight? Iraq, I skipped. I was on vacation.

  None of this did Richard Barker need to know. Details such as these can lead only to still more details, and ultimately into conversational territory best avoided. If pressed, Zane would say he had no more interest in discussing his twenty years on the job than would a man who spent his life in the manufacture of light switches. He had no interest in war stories.

  So he said, I did some journalism.

  Barker looked at Zane askance, said, you’re not doing some exposé, are you?

  I’m not doing some exposé, he said. I’m through with all that bullshit. And he was.

  Barker returned to the task at hand, a review of the pictures from their last shoot. It had no
t gone well.

  The girl looked young and her face seemed oddly ill-proportioned, her cheekbones too wide, her mouth too small, her eyes too close together; a hint, perhaps, of fetal alcohol syndrome. She showed little enthusiasm or interest in proceedings. Half-way through the scene, she declined to participate further.

  Show business is not without its challenges: Bill, cast in the role of the leading lady’s love interest, complained that these interruptions made it difficult to stay in character.

  I’m losing my hard-on, he said. What am I, a fucking machine?

  You’re a pro, said Barker. And Bill did, indeed, move with mechanical precision, a steam engine reduced to its simplest elements, piston and wheel.

  That’s right: I’m a pro, said Bill. And I can’t work under these conditions.

  They took ten, while Barker discussed with her the elements of contract, standards of professional conduct, and the problem of getting paid. The girl returned to work with renewed commitment, but soon began to cry. The shoot continued, heedless. The show must go on. Afterwards, Bill got badly drunk.

  And Bill, who had just arrived for work, didn’t want to see the pictures now. Worthless, he said. Why’re you lookin’ at that shit? Waste of time. Bitch looks like a deer in the fucking headlights.

  “You’re wrong,” said Barker. “This is good stuff. What we got here is a work of genius.”

  The photograph in question is flesh and eyes, the blur of a shark tattoo, all ink and teeth, and masculine fingers indenting flesh. The girl’s name now escapes recollection but the whites of her eyes pull bad memories out of the depths of Zane’s mind, a hospital in Beirut, blood on the floor. And the eyes, the way that all the pleading faded out of them, the way they faded into exhaustion and hopelessness, like lights going out.

  Zane looked down at his camera bag, pushed the images from his mind. Barker’s voice went on, an immortal drone, while he mechanically checked his camera’s myriad switches.

  “Only you could do it, Zane. Only you could give me this. You are a certifiable genius.”

  Zane busied himself with his camera gear, with his ritual of cleaning and inventory. Something in Barker’s manner had always reminded him of his high-school Phys-Ed teacher, the football coach, the basketball coach, the coach of all things organized; perhaps his forced bonhomie, his optimism, and the volume of his voice were responsible, or the breadth of his shoulders, his physical presence. The cause was immaterial. Zane hated team sports and harboured a long-term aversion toward their coaches.

  “Bitch is about to start crying,” said Bill.

  “Your problem is, you don’t think about this business in terms of audience. Diamond Blue Productions is consistently profitable because we bring diverse product offerings to the marketplace. In other words, to translate, not everyone wants to jack off to some boob-job porn star who can suck a golf ball through a garden hose.”

  “We better hope not.”

  “You can’t buy acting like this.”

  Bill announced that he had to take a leak, and, having adequately articulated his point of view on the matter, left.

  “This is why you’re a genius,” said Barker, indicating the computer screen like a museum tour guide introducing his group to the centrepiece of an exhibit.

  Voila: the girl in close-up, choking, Bill’s hand gripping her skull and pulling her face to his crotch. Veins and tendons stood out from the back of his hand, muscle and sinew, her one visible eye turned to the camera, pleading, wide, panicked; the iris stands out in a striking, pale blue, tiny red blood vessels snaking across the white. Good lighting.

  The fear in her eyes dredged his subconscious, muck-flowers blooming in dark waters, something shapeless stirring below. Zane looked away.

  “That,” said Barker, “is genius.”

  Light falls from the sun, or from artificial lights ultimately powered thereby, and, directly or indirectly, illuminates the subject. Part is absorbed, but certain wavelengths reflect, bend within the extra-low dispersion glass of the camera lens, within fourteen glass elements in eleven groups; thus channelled, the light bounces upwards off the reflex mirror and passes through the focusing screen into the pentaprism, where it ricochets around wildly until it rights itself again. The resulting image flies out through the eyepiece, through the cornea, the aqueous humour, the lens of the eye itself, through the vitreous humour, and then falls against the retina like a wad of wet toilet paper hitting the locker room wall: splat. The impact trembles along the optic nerve, vibrates within the thalamus, through synapse and neuron, resonates within the visual cortex. The mind is a camera; you might as well blame the sun. What I’m saying is, don’t look at me. I didn’t do it.

  Zane removed the battery pack from his camera, snapped in a new set of rechargeables and slid the battery pack into place, and then turned the camera on and checked the status display. He had already done this, but it bore repeating.

  “Why d’you think I wanted to hire a real photographer?”

  “I never really thought about it.”

  “I mean, it’s not like I went to film school.”

  The job interview: what we’re doing here, you got to understand, this is not Los Angeles. What we are is a niche producer. We serve a niche market. We aren’t doing, you know, high production values. We don’t do, you know, stories. We got no plots and storylines. We don’t set up all kinds of lights and, you know, camera angles. We just get the girl in a room and then Bill fucks her. You got to get your pictures when you can.

  “You know what the genius of this is?” Barker waved his hand at the screen and leaned forward to tap his index finger repeatedly on the girl’s left eyeball. “Just like they say, the eyes are the window to the soul.”

  Zane did not believe in souls, or in that particular photographic cliché. The eyes, in his view, were the window to diddly-squat.

  “I’m serious, here. Our man, he’s after a certain thrill. You know what he wants?” Barker’s index finger continually sought new targets: the computer screen, Barker’s temple, the heavens; now it stabbed at Zane.

  “I never really thought about it.”

  “Let’s not be modest. You know the look, man.”

  Zane didn’t.

  “Our man wants to feel confidence. These boob-job porn stars, they scare him. He knows he’s not getting any of that. He knows that’s out of his league. Our man, he doesn’t do well with women.”

  Zane sat fixed and staring in the jacklight of Barker’s eyes.

  “He wants the girl next door who isn’t getting any. He wants her desperate. He wants to be in control.”

  Barker pointed at the monitor again. Zane did his best to ignore the eyes imploring him from the photograph.

  “What I’m saying is it’s the eyes. It’s not the skin that gets our man going, it’s the eyes. That’s where he gets off, man.” Barker stabbed his finger at him again. “The genius here is the humanity. It’s the humanity.”

  “You missed your calling.”

  “How so?”

  “You should have been a shrink.”

  “It’s all upstairs in this biz.” The index finger tapped his temple. “You got to know what makes people tick. Take you.”

  A disconcerting vision: Zane lies back on the couch while Barker, with goatee, sucks a pipe. Barker frowns profoundly and writes in his notebook, repressed this, suppressed that, the redirected rage is channelled etcetera. And why do you think this deceased woman, this Christine, visits you? You say she is “reproachful.” Why do you feel she is disappointed in you? Yes, very interesting. I see. Yes, very interesting, indeed.

  “You’re all about the money,” said Barker.

  This will not look good on a headstone. But on balance, it’s probably fair. And there’s at least some risk that it’s true.

  Jade Barker stood with her arms crossed, weight on one leg, one high-heeled toe tapping the linoleum, her clothes and manner pulled directly from the cover of one of the trashier women’s magazines
, those that advertise more and better sex to the supermarket checkout line. All that she missed to complete the effect were tag lines, floating in the glaring, fluorescent air: Look Sexy! (Ten Tips That Actually Work), Twenty New Sex Tricks To Drive Him Wild, Guys Confess: What Men Really Want. But what men really want, Jade already knew.

  “She’s late again,” she said.

  Bill stared off into space. Zane fiddled with his camera.

  “A couple of minutes,” said Barker.

  “Fifteen minutes, to be precise.”

  Barker said nothing.

  “It’s the second time in a row.”

  “I know.”

  “What I’m saying is, you better talk to her.”

  “We need Melissa,” said Barker. “That girl is money in the bank.”

  “She’s just another girl.”

  “No, she’s not. This girl can act.”

  Jade rolled her eyes back, and her head followed.

  “I mean it,” said Barker.

  “She’s got you fooled, anyway.”

  “Melissa, I can build a site around. This girl is a product line all on her own.”

  “This girl,” said Jade, “is a mishap in the offing.”

  “I’ll deal with Melissa. I got a plan.”

  “You better. We’re all on the clock here.”

  Zane fussed at an imaginary spot on his lens. It was like finding yourself trapped in a room with a married couple, trying not to pay attention to their marital spat. And that was probably because that’s exactly what it was.

  At first glance, Melissa didn’t much look like money in the bank, or a product line all her own. She looked, in most respects, fairly ordinary: young, modestly pretty, and too short to be a model. Dark hair, eyebrows a touch heavy, one of them continually cocked, and something in her smile that suggested she was sizing you up and had discovered some flaw that amused her.

  To Barker, she gushed an apology; she had missed the bus. Public transit and its frustrations threatened to overwhelm her. Her performance appeared to nullify Barker’s index finger from the outset, and his manner quickly softened.