From what I could see, she never did. I reached for the last portfolio.
These photos were different.
For starters, they were all shot on SX-70, the famous One-Step film developed by Polaroid in the early 1970s. The SX-70 camera was a huge innovation, and the first model, the Alpha, was hugely expensive—three hundred dollars, which these days would equal almost fourteen hundred bucks. SX-70 film came in individual sheets, each containing its own pod of developer, covered by a layer of transparent polyester. After the film was exposed, it would slide between little rollers inside the camera, like the wringers of an old-fashioned washing machine. These rollers burst the pod and spread the developing chemicals across the film. Once it developed inside the camera, you had what Polaroid called an integral print.
But the SX-70 had a feature that the folks at Polaroid hadn’t counted on. The exposed film took a long time to fix. So you could use your finger or a pencil or just about anything you wanted, as long as it wasn’t too pointed or sharp, and manipulate the developing chemicals in their polyester sheath. This produced cool, if simple, special effects—halos, silver and black dots, penumbras like solar flares. They looked like those blotches you see when you hold a piece of Mylar up to the sun. If you really wanted to work with an image, you could extend the time it took to fix by warming then cooling the print, over and over again.
It was like a very primitive form of Photoshop. Some people played with the chemicals on purpose and declared the results a new art form. Most people, of course, did so by accident, made a mess of their snapshots, and complained. Almost immediately Polaroid rushed to make cheaper versions of the Alpha, “improving” the film to something called Time-Zero, so that the problem wouldn’t exist in later camera models.
Some artists still use SX-70s—you can buy the film through Fuji. But these weren’t recent photos. I’d guess they’d been taken around the time that the cameras first appeared, in the early 1970s, roughly the same time as the Magic Clambake. I recognized some of the people, commune members I assumed: a couple of skinny guys in overalls and flannel shirts; Aphrodite, looking far too imperious to be hanging out with a bunch of longhairs ten years younger than she was; little Gryffin.
And then, a series of pictures that made my neck prickle. They showed a pretty, freckled girl with long hair—the same girl in the 8x10 I’d processed in Aphrodite’s darkroom. In the SX-70 photos, she was sleeping, or pretending to. The pictures were in extreme closeup, and the film had been manipulated so that little wiggly shadows ran across her face, giving the images a spooky, submarine quality. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or shut. Someone had gone over them with a needle-sized stylus, so that in some photos it looked as though they were covered by silvery green coins. In others her eyes seemed wide open with amazement.
Same deal with her mouth—the chemicals had been moved around so that her lips were distorted and discolored. It looked as though something were protruding from them, a snake’s head, or maybe a finger.
This will make the pictures sound grotesque, and they were. But they weren’t just grotesque. Small as they were, they seemed outsized and even kind of funny, the way R. Crumb drawings are, their creepiness outpaced by audacity. Why would someone do that to a Polaroid picture?
Someone wanted to do it a lot. There were dozens of photos, most of the same girl, her face altered so that she resembled a broken statue, mottled green and black. But a few pictures seemed to be clumsy self-portraits. One showed a mirror and the flashlit reflection of a figure holding the SX-70. The others showed portions of a face, badly out of focus. A scalp, a nose or ear, a toothy grin. Someone had gone to the trouble of taking these photos. And someone else had taken the trouble to save them.
None of these photos were signed. They didn’t need to be. I knew it was him.
Denny Ahearn.
Those Polaroids pumped out damage the way that little space heater cranked out BTUs. I could taste it, a tang like biting into an old penny, like the taste you get from speed that hasn’t been cooked enough. I wanted to recoil, but the images drew me on. I looked at one after another, impelled by the eye behind that camera, a presence so strong it was like it was in the room with me.
And then, there really was an eye, staring out at me from the last page. It was the only photo that hadn’t been manipulated. A single amber eye, gleaming as though it had been coated with glycerin. The cornea wasn’t white, but a custardy yellow, threaded with red filaments. I could see the pale reflected outline of a camera in the iris.
That was creepy enough. What made it worse was a blotch of green pigment like the one in Gryffin’s eye. Only this was a bigger flaw, and it was in a different place, just below the pupil.
I couldn’t look away from it. It was like staring at a painting where the canvas has been torn: if you could only rip away the ruined canvas, another painting would be revealed: the real painting. I felt the same vertiginous horror I’d experienced as a girl, looking into the sky to see a great eye gazing down at me.
Now I felt that jagged bit of pigment was the real eye, the realest eye I’d ever seen. I brought the photo to my face to get a better look, and grimaced.
It stank. Not the musty, doggy smell of Aphrodite’s room, but the smell I’d detected on the photo back at Ray Provenzano’s house, a reek like someone had dumped rotting fish on top of a dead skunk.
It was faint, but unmistakable. And it was coming from the Polaroid. I held it under my nose and sniffed.
I replaced the photo, sat on the floor and stared at the unmade bed, soiled sheets, dog fur, all those expensive photo books, Roberto Schezen, Rudy Burckhardt…
“Shit,” I whispered.
I stood and grabbed a book, the familiar RUNWAY colophon on its spine beneath the title and photographer’s name.
DEAD GIRLS CASSANDRA NEARY
On the title page was an inscription.
’ONE BECOMES HUMAN BY IMITATING THE GODS’
FOR A WITH LOVE
D
“What are you doing?” For a second I thought I’d imagined the voice. “What are you doing?”
I looked up.
It was Aphrodite, the deerhounds at her sides. A twig was stuck to her leggings; her lipstick was faded and her silvery hair flattened as though she’d just woken up.
But by the way she swayed back and forth, red eyed, I figured that she’d been up—though maybe not upright—for a while, and keeping the same kind of company I had; no speed, maybe, but plenty of cognac or whatever it was that made her look like a skeletal marionette.
“Aphrodite.” I blinked. “Wow. I—”
Before I could move she was on top of me. I fell back as she yanked the book from my hands and smashed it against my head. I cried out and fell backward, struggling.
“Hey!” I gasped. “Stop, I was just—”
A dog whined as she smashed the book against my face again. I kicked out violently and struck her shoulder. She staggered backward and the dogs growled, as though this was a game they’d played before.
“Get—out—” The book dropped to the floor. Aphrodite beat at the air as though there were another, invisible assailant between us. “Get—out—get—out—”
I crouched on the bed as the dogs pawed at each other and Aphrodite swiped madly at nothing, like someone practicing a deranged form of Tai Chi.