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Endowment Arts & Letters Editorial Staff Learn about the MFA Program
at GCSU |
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The Vanity of Open
Spaces
By: Stephen
Graham Jones |
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In his late thirties, Owen took up the daguerreotype. Sheila was
thirty-two then, still a nude model. Owen pictured her in ovals of tin
between another woman’s powdered breasts. But first he had to call her. “Owen,” she said into her end, her
blouse rustling through the line. They were both divorced, once from
each other, once from the people they’d left each other for. “Yes,” Owen said, “me.” His camera was bulky and
inconvenient. It required five hundred times more light than a modern camera.
As if it were drawing all the light in a place to it. Owen explained
all this to Sheila. Sheila unfocused her eyes and listened. There was always
a group of people studying her. She was used to standing still for hours. One
minute for a daguerreotype should be no problem. “I feel like a turtle under that
shroud, though,” Owen confessed, “like a pornographer.” “Can’t you make the tripod
taller?” Sheila asked. Owen looked for it across the
room. The telescoping legs were wooden, the feet brass. It was an authentic
reproduction, from a kit. He shook his head no, he didn’t think it could go
any taller. “Well then,” Sheila said. Six
years ago she would have punctuated it by tapping a cigarette onto the edge
of the counter. Her hand still remembered. There were aborted sketches of her
in trashcans all over the city. Owen clinked a cough drop against
the back of his teeth. It was shaped like an almond, or a peach pit. It had
taken him three days to make this call. “Guess I could use that other one,”
he said, “the one for the video camera.” “Still have that black powder
gun?” Sheila asked. It was late November. Owen almost
cried. The title of the shot he wanted of Sheila was going to be something
about undigesting the sun. He told her the flashpan of the camera wasn’t like
that, wasn’t like the gun. “Didn’t it come with a tripod too,
though?” she asked. Owen closed his eyes. None of this
mattered. The first line of the article he’d been reading lately was the
background repeats itself. He’d found it in a bus on the way to Michael.
The article had been underlined in red in the table of contents. He’d
believed in far less. “It’s not going to steal your soul,”
he told her. Sheila narrowed her eyes at the
television by the sink. The flashing banner promised she would be able to
read through a tomato in thirty days or her money back. She laughed about the
camera, though: the aboriginal part of her had been stolen long ago. “Owen,” she said, pointing his
name at him. “I know,” Owen said back. “It’s
just that it’s November.” “I’ll stand however you want,”
Sheila said. “Maybe the sun was brighter back
then,” Owen said, “in the nineteenth century. Maybe the daguerreotype was
perfect for then.” Sheila’s eyes were closed now. “Maybe,” she said, “yes.” Her
father’s name had been Michael too. Owen had never met him, but the name had
been perfect, he had said. Perfect. Over lunch
before the shoot, Owen guessed to Sheila that mirror technology hadn’t
significantly advanced in five hundred years. It was a Saturday. She wasn’t
letting him pay her. The last line of the article Owen had been reading was the
world is the world. It was more of an essay than an article, really. The first daguerreotype he’d taken
was the night he put it together. He’d stood in the subway until a man with a
drug habit approached in fits and starts. The picture was The Arm with a
Thousand Holes. It was a close-up. Sheila leaned back in her chair.
She was smoking again, until Christmas. She exhaled to the side and hated
herself some more, just for being here. But it was Owen. All around him were
the trappings of the nineteenth century—his delicate plates, his bottles of
chemicals. The wooden tripod. Their coffee was in styrofoam
cups, so they could take it with them. Sheila was naked under her
overcoat and boots and sunglasses. She was thinking about what it would have
been like to have left Michael with some last-minute friend for the day once,
then to have picked him up at dinner only to find a small tattoo on the back
of his hand. A real, permanent one. “What is it?” Owen asked, peeling
the lid of his coffee up to see if it was his. “Look,” Sheila said. A young man had led his two-year
in out of the cold. They were standing three people back in the to-go line.
The father was leaned down to the son, adjusting his jacket but lining it
too, with compacts discs from the impulse rack by the register. He paid for his coffee then lifted
his son onto his shoulders, walked out with the compacts discs just above the
security pillars. Owen smiled. “I wonder why he needs so many?”
he asked. Sheila watched the son’s hooded
head fade up the street. “Someday that kid’s going to grow
up,” Sheila said, as if she were being spoken through, as if she were
in the nineteenth century, “he’s going to grow up and be watching television
and see some father in bad traffic with his son on his shoulders, and a car
will hit the father and the father who saw it coming an instant too late will
push the child up into the air, saving him, and he’ll understand.” She still
wasn’t looking at Owen. “The one watching the television, I mean.” Owen tried explaining to her how
the chemicals on his plates were so fine that it was like dust on a moth’s
wing. That he’d been up since four dipping them, getting them just right. “I am naked under here,” Sheila
said, touching the collar of her coat. It was fur-lined. “Sorry,” Owen said, gathering. In his real life he was a physical
therapist. Or an adjustor for an insurance company. It was hard to tell. At
the pay-out line, Sheila pushed something into his hand. It was one of the
compact discs. “Forgot my wallet,” she explained. Owen understood. He had had a ham
sandwich toasted on both sides. Sheila had ordered a tuna salad but not eaten
it, just pushed the tomatoes around with her fork. He was planning on telling
her before they left the diner that she was still beautiful, but then told
her instead about this woman he knew who built a log cabin with her new
husband, only they couldn’t wait, moved in before it was all done, and then,
sleeping on blankets in the loft where they meant to put rails the next
morning, she rolled off into space, woke on the first floor, paralyzed from
the waist down. Her name was Kelly. “Kelly,” Sheila repeated, looking
through the plate glass still, her hands deep in her pockets, “is this a
joke?” Owen shook his head no, and it
came to him that the powder on the breasts he was picturing Sheila’s
daguerreotype between was that dry milk you buy. Just add water. He hunched
his shoulders around a cough and followed her to the rental car. Their divorce
had been an amicable thing of signatures and boxes of records and apologies
neither wanted to accept. It was like they were the only two people on Earth
anymore, and fairy-tale tall but standing on different continents, drifting
away, from a hug to a handshake to a fingertip to a wave. This was before
boats or scuba gear. Owen was the one who still went to see Michael. Sheila
just saw him everywhere. At the end of the day, her compact
disc would still be in Owen’s pocket. “The last time she had sex,” she
said, figuring it out. The road was coming up to meet the radials. It was
violent and loud and she didn’t know how they didn’t burst into flames. Owen looked at her. All the
buttons of her overcoat were snug. “Who?” he asked. “Kelly,” Sheila said. “That girl
from the half-built cabin.” The ashtray still had some of her
cigarette ashes in it, Sheila’s. If you poured water into it, they would scum
the surface grey. It would be like how the spent silver of the halide rises
to the surface of the developing tray when you’ve done it wrong. Owen had
taken a picture of a cinderblock wall the second night he had the camera. For
now he was calling it Looking at a Man Through a Glass-Bottomed Spoon at
Midnight. It was supposed to be a self-portrait. “I didn’t think you were
listening,” he said, about Kelly. Sheila shrugged. “How do you want
me to stand?” she asked. “I don’t know the name for it,”
Owen said. Disassembled in the trunk was a
cast-iron brace. Owen explained how it had little padded rests for the base
of the skull, the wrists. There was even a kind of seat you could lean
against. From the right angle, the support was supposed to disappear. “It’s for dead people,” Sheila
said. Owen shook his head no. “The
exposure’s just so long,” he said, “most people can’t—” Sheila leaned forward suddenly,
straining against her seatbelt, and for a moment Owen thought they were
crashing, that he had hit something, but then she just held onto the armrest,
guided herself back into the cup of her seat again. “Where are we going?” she
asked. Owen told her not to
worry. And that she was beautiful. She cried. He had been thinking about
mirrors because in that article that was underlined like he was supposed to
read it, there was a follow-up interview with a man who had submitted himself
to a psychological experiment for fifty dollars. The experiment was to play
ten games of chess against the same opponent, only there was a wall between
the two players, so they had to go by a mirror on the ceiling. For the second
five games they’d somehow made the mirror true, so that the image wasn’t
reversed. It was to test whether conceptual abilities were tied to left or
right-handedness. The intricacy of chess was supposed to be a distraction. Owen had read that part over and
over. His new camera was so complicated. “I saw him in June,” Sheila said,
quietly. Owen stared straight ahead. “He was sitting at nine o’clock,”
Sheila said—nine o’clock to her,
nude on her pedestal in the middle of the art room. And I wasn’t ashamed,
either, she didn’t say. And I didn’t stay after to see what I looked like to
him, she lied in her head. Wasn’t bent naked over the trashcan, didn’t walk
among the aluminum easels clutching my robe to my sternum. “You would have been at twelve for
him, then,” Owen said. “Right?” Sheila didn’t say the obvious
back: that she was twelve o’clock for all
of them. Owen heard it anyway. Maybe a deer would jump in front
of them. Please. “They split up too,” Owen said
finally, at the city limits, “Kelly and her husband.” He hadn’t meant to say
it like that, though. “Was that him in the store?”
Sheila asked. “Kelly’s ex?” Owen asked, making
sure. “With the boy,” Sheila said. “I don’t know,” Owen said. “I
don’t think so.” “Will you make me a copy of
this…daguerreotype?” “I’ll take a picture of it for
you,” Owen said, “black and white.” Sheila nodded. That would be good
enough, yes, thank you. And she would remember what it felt like anyway, all
the light being drained from her. She was already planning on holding her
breath. ■ It was an
exotic animal preserve. Owen paid six dollars for each of them and braked
over the cattle guard one pipe at a time, letting his bottles in the backseat
settle in each trough before climbing the next. He told Sheila there weren’t any
trains out here. That it was like “It’s so big,” Sheila said. They weren’t supposed to feed the
animals. “This isn’t going to make it
better, is it?” Sheila said. Owen just drove. Another thing he
was going to do was leave the article in Sheila’s purse. It would give her
something to read in those three hours between nine o’clock and midnight,
between her and Michael. “Did he look like me?” Owen asked. This didn’t happen to Sheila, but
she knew about it, which was almost the same thing for her: a girl’s father
kills himself when she’s young, two or three, and he does it nice and neat so
nobody has to see or hear, any of that. Only years later, when the girl is in
junior high getting ready for a science project (‘Optics Week’), she digs
through the garage for their old video camera—the one with the big, bulky
tapes—and is the first one to find it in years and years. Since the funeral.
And when she gets the battery charged, in the viewer it’s her in the one-inch
backyard, the day her father killed himself. He’s just watching her for
hours, all the tape he had. She keeps waiting for him to say something, but
he never does. Sheila nodded her head for Owen:
yes, a little. He looked like you a little. A llama was passing in front of
them, its eyes lidded heavy like drugs, or some South American version of
heaven. “Do herbivores preen?” Owen asked. They were the only two people in
the world again. One of the pamphlets they got at
the booth had said that you don’t know how human a gorilla is until you see
it wheeled past on a gurney. Owen watched the llama step away through the
high grass as if it were walking on the moon. The only childhood that made
sense to him anymore was from the fifties: all the boys in their small town
with the Japanese swords their fathers had mailed back, instead of
themselves. In the summer they run through the trees holding the swords over
their heads, killing everything. Sheila placed her hand on Owen’s.
“Come back,” she said. The ex-wife to the ex-husband. Owen renamed her daguerreotype Available
Light, then changed it again two minutes later. They pushed out of the
trees onto the mock-Caroline savannah, and under a chain blocking a smaller,
service road. The chain scraped over the hood then climbed the antenna,
sloughed down the back window and off the trunk. “Don’t worry,” Owen said. “They
want us to do this.” Sheila made her eyebrows into an
upside-down V. It pulled her mouth open some, like she wanted to ask a
question. Instead she tried to come up with an answer for the ranger that had
to be following them, asking why she didn’t have any clothes on. Owen slowed the car. “This would
be better if we were on horses,” he said, “or a buggy.” “My legs wouldn’t be shaved,
then,” Sheila said, extending one out the door. Owen wanted to take her picture
right then, one bare leg parting the grass, but that’s not the way
daguerreotypy works. You don’t get the moment, but whatever moment you arrange.
And even then. Sheila walked out of her jacket
into the cold. Owen left his sunglasses on the dashboard. It was so bright
out here. He felt like a mole, blinking. It made Sheila a hazy angel. She was
talking to him, not bothering to cover her breasts. Owen pretended he was
used to them, but his hands were making the wooden tripod tremble. “I saw him too,” he said. He could feel Sheila standing
behind him. “Let’s not do this,” she was
saying. After the camera, he cradled the
brace from the trunk. Sheila shook her head no, that she
wasn’t dead; Owen told her just to let him put it together, so she’d know the
posture, the shot he wanted. “It’s so big out here,” Sheila
said again, hugging herself, scanning the horizon. “You can sit in the car if it’s
better,” Owen told her. She shook her head no. “Kelly,”
she said, just aloud. “I handled her taxes,” Owen lied.
Maybe he’d given her foam balls to squeeze, or told her what her homeowner’s
policy was going to cover, what it wasn’t. Maybe he’d just told her about
Michael, even. He wing-nutted the brace together.
It wasn’t adjustable. You had to adjust yourself to it. “People were shorter back then,”
Sheila said, standing beside him. It could have been for kids, Owen
didn’t say; couldn’t. He thumbed another cough drop in.
Sheila still didn’t have any tan lines, or red marks from a bra or panties.
The reason they’d given for the divorce had been a pit they were standing by,
looking in. Together, they would hold hands and step over. Apart, someone
else might hold them back. But here they were again. Owen didn’t know how
many tripods he had, really. Enough. He guided Sheila into what she was
already calling the Rack. The iron would have been cold without the felt
padding. It was cold anyway. “I’m not going to use them,” she
said. “You don’t have to,” Owen told
her. Her right wrist hovered a touch
over the felt. She looked down at it before finding the headrest with the
base of her skull, leaning forward out it the slightest bit, and then the
image of her wrist—the back of her hand—caught up with her: it was the end of
the story she’d started about leaving Michael with someone for the day,
finding him with a tattoo later on that wouldn’t wash off. What was it? She couldn’t tell yet. Probably
the same thing his father had on the back of his hand, whoever his father was
supposed to be in the story. Owen was at the kitchen table, though, hands
palm-down on either side of his glass. She had betrayed him. He was waiting
for the corn in the microwave. Sheila closed her eyes in pain. “Ready?” Owen said from under his
pornographer’s shroud. “Just take it,” Sheila said, and
Owen had the wrong angle to hide the black iron tracing her spine, her arms,
but somehow that was right, too, the artifice. It did make her look dead. He
opened the shutter and started counting to himself—the steps to the bus to
Michael; the steps down to the water fountain of wherever he worked in his
real life, whatever he did; the months without Sheila, where every meal was a
formal meal, since the fine china in the attic was all he’d had left—and
while he was counting, the sky edged in around Sheila and it was so big, so
empty. So right. “We’re not going back, are we?”
she asked, her lips blurring in the dust on the plate. Under the shroud the turtle Owen had become shook his head no, no, he didn’t think so, and then the magnesium in the pan lit many seconds too late and the silver flashed in their retinas and one of them smiled at the other, and for an instant they were negatives of themselves, brief particles in the shape of parents, and then they were simply gone. |
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