They went for a long walk in the woods beyond the road, single-file along a path and then out into a glade of lady fern. She told Scott she'd brought the pictures with her, the contact sheets of Brita's photographs of Bill. He said nothing but felt an ease, a redress, the partial payment for damage suffered. She said Brita would not publish the pictures without Bill's, or Scott's, consent.
They held each other much of the night, or lay in wettish touch, haphazard, one prone and the other supine, two legs engaged, and talked and did not, or fell away to clear and periodic sleep, or made choppy laboring love, made heaving breath, converged at some steep insidedness, or Karen talked and Scott laughed, delighted at her imitations of the New York speech machine, they blat and cram, they champ and smash, or Scott told her how the lines of her face were printed in his vision so that he saw her sometimes in the middle of a meal, afloat in her own hair like a laser image of some Botticelli modern.
In the morning they drove twenty-two miles to buy a lightbox and magnifier, and twenty-two miles back.
In the afternoon they cleared the desk in the attic and spread out the contacts. There were twelve sheets, each containing thirty-six black-and-white exposures-six strips, six frames per strip. The sheets were eight and a half by eleven inches and each frame was one and a half inches long and one inch high.
Scott and Karen stood at different ends of the desk. They bent over, careful where they put their fingers, and looked at the strips of developed film but not thoroughly or analytically. It was too soon for that.
Karen's hands were clasped behind her back and after a while Scott put his hands in his pockets and this was how they scanned, leaning deeply toward the desk, moving around each other to exchange positions.
In the evening, after early dinner, Scott carried the telephone table up to the attic. He set it at one end of the desk and placed the lightbox on top.
They took turns looking at the sheets. Because the frames followed each other in the original order of exposure, they were able to see how Brita had established rhythms and themes, catching a signal, tracking some small business in Bill's face and working to enlarge it or explain it, make it true, make it him. The pictures of Bill were glimpses of Brita thinking, a little anatomy of mind and eye. Scott thought she wanted something undesigned and casually come-upon, a familiar colloquial Bill. He took the magnifier to frame after frame and saw a photographer who was trying to deliver her subject from every mystery that hovered over his chosen life. She wanted to do pictures that erased his seclusion, made it never happen and made him over and gave him a face we've known all our lives.
But maybe not. Scott didn't want to move too soon into a theory of how much meaning a photograph can bear.
First came the great work of cataloguing the pictures, making lists based on camera angle, subject's expression, part of room, degree of shadow, head shot, head and chest, hands showing or not showing, visible background and so on. What we have in front of us represents one thing. How we analyze and describe and codify it is something else completely.
Although in a way, and at a glance, the differences frame to frame were so extraordinarily slight that all twelve sheets might easily be one picture repeated, like mass visual litter that occupies a blink.
All the more reason to analyze. Because there really were differences of course-position of hands, placement of cigarette-and it would require time to do a comprehensive survey.
At breakfast Scott said, "There's something I haven't wanted to think about."
"I know what you're going to say."
"We have to be prepared for the possibility that Bill won't return, that we won't ever hear from him again. But I'm not going to be puzzled or resentful."
"Neither am I."
"We can't let our own feelings define his behavior."
"We can't use normal standards."
"Whatever he's done, we have to understand it's something he was preparing for, something he's been carrying all these years."
"He needed to do it."
"And we are absolutely the last people on earth to require an explanation."
"Can we still live here?" Karen said.
"The house is paid for. And he'd want us to live here. And I have money saved from the salary he paid me and this money goes automatically from his account to mine every month and if he didn't want me to keep getting it he would have advised the bank when he went away."
"I can get a job waitressing."
"I think we'll be all right. We're in Bill's house. His books and papers are all around us. It depends on his family. When they find out the situation, they may try to sell the house out from under us. They may try to sell his papers, get the new book published. Every scenario of total disaster I've ever imagined. And there's the question of royalties from the other two books."
"We won't worry now," she said.
"There's the complex question of who's entitled."
"He lived with us, not them."
"He left no instructions."
"We're the ones who made it possible for Bill to devote his whole time to writing."
"We removed every obstacle. It's true."
"So shouldn't they let us live here if we promise to keep things just as they are and do Bill's work?"
Scott laughed.
"The night of the lawyers is approaching. The long knives are coming out. Blood and slogans on all the walls."
"They can own the house," Karen said. "But they should let us live here. And we keep the manuscript and we keep the pictures."
Scott leaned toward her to sing a bit of old Beatles, a line about carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.
Then he sat in the attic alone through the rainy morning, hunched over the lightbox, making notes.
He had the secret of Bill's real name.
He had the photographs, the great work of describing and cataloguing.
He had the manuscript of Bill's new novel, the entire house filled with pages, pages spilling into the shed that abutted the back of the house, a whole basement containing pages.
The manuscript would sit. He might talk to Charles Everson, just a word concerning the fact that it was finished. The manuscript would sit, and word would get out, and the manuscript would not go anywhere. After a time he might take the photographs to New York and meet with Brita and choose the pictures that would appear. But the manuscript would sit, and word would travel, and the pictures would appear, a small and deft selection, one time only, and word would build and spread, and the novel would stay right here, collecting aura and force, deepening old Bill's legend, undyingly.
The nice thing about life is that it's filled with second chances. Quoting Bill.
IN BEIRUT
Her driver tells her three stories. First one, people are burning tires. In the midst of car bombs and street skirmishes and the smash of long-range field guns and buildings coming down and whole areas lost in smoke, people are burning tires to drive away mosquitoes and flies.
Second, a pair of local militias are firing at portraits of each other's leader. These are large photographs pasted to walls or hanging from awning poles in the vegetable souks and they are shot up and ripped apart, some pictures large enough to swing from a wire strung over the street, and they are shot up and quickly replaced and then ripped apart again. There is a new exuberance in these particular streets, based on this latest form of fighting.
Last, they are making bombs that contain flooring nails and roofing nails. The police are finding quantities of common nails, nails sprayed and dashed and driven into the bodies of victims of random blasts.
Brita waits for the point of story number three. Isn't there supposed to be an irony, some grim humor, some sense of the peculiar human insistence on seeing past the larger madness into small and skewed practicalities, into off-shaded moments that help us consider a narrow hope? This business about the nails doesn't do a thing for her. And she's not so crazy about the other stones either. She has come here already tired of these stories, including the ones she has never heard. They're all the same and all true and it is sad that they are necessary. And they almost always exasperate her, especially the stories about terror groups that issue press credentials.