It was if we’d undergone a training program for photographers of industrial flange and pipe-fitting catalogues, steeped in an objectivist approach that treated every bolt, bushing, and return bend equally, everything shot under the same flat illumination, a triumph of truth over perspective.
A person viewing our collected works could be forgiven for thinking it was all an intentional, if not quite realized, project, some hyper-ironic thrift shop approach to the saccharine naïveté of the knock-kneed, blepharoplastied Japanese hipster. But nope. Just bad composition and shyness, a headshot collection for the jacket flap of an anti-anagraphist manifesto.
Look at me. What a drag, a sullen mug mouthing the words at the back of a group sing-along. Stiff as a board at the Pantheon, exhibiting lifelessness on the Spanish Steps, idling uncomfortably in a gondola, tonguing a plasticine gelato. Wait, there’s more! Here Comrade Hazel refuses to strike pose at Bolshoi! классический! Look there, poor madam impersonates a wilting rhododendron in the Yumthang Valley. Vik: There he stands, hands in pockets, shallow smile, a wax figurine, a chroma-key shot, an action figure propped against a rock.
If not for his friends, I would have no proof that he ever smiled. Their donations came in manila envelopes, email attachments, on CDs with accompanying thumbnails helpfully preprinted on glossy photo stock. Most are from the days before we were together, when our pasts ran parallel, back when my history didn’t require a revision quite so desperately as it does now. Eventually our timelines merge and in some of those photos we stand together looking not entirely bloodless. Enough of them, at least, to assure me that we lived not quite so statutory a life as our portraits of each other suggest.
I’d sent the blanket request in advance of the funeral, and his friends, being competent and thoughtful types, top-notch custodians of their pasts, had responded with an archive, every shot suitable for framing, the deluge a long-overdue spring clean. I suppose his friends welcomed the invitation to initiate an act of catharsis. Dear man had been in hiding for fifteen years, what could they do? What could I do? Keep on stroking the organ responsible for pain, whichever one that is. The brain? The heart? An electric finger on the dorsal posterior insula, prodding mercilessly until it was a swollen, pulsing mass of signals, throwing off cyclones of barbed wire and hailstones?
The Pavlovian compact by which all Americans live, the promise that anguish is eventually terminated by an endorphin release, took a rain check on this one. Someone forgot to pay the electric on the effervescent promise that as long as I worked through my pain it would all pay off in the end, because anything that pays off is worth it, worth it because we are made stronger by our suffering.
Fifteen years they couldn’t find Vik. He was everywhere and nowhere, scattered across Lower Manhattan in an untidy Bayesian distribution, no easier to locate for the blanketing effect of his disintegration, but eventually he emerged, and I have placed that artifact, the first and only, once a shard of bone, now a white powder reconstituted by a Fisher Scientific Sonic Dismembrator, treated to Bode Technology patented DNA-extraction procedures, the full arsenal of forensic science available to the New York City medical examiner’s office, in an oak coffin, and I performed the ritual of mourning and remembrance. Correction: I put seventy-five percent of his remains, by weight, into the coffin. The other twenty-five percent I placed on my tongue.
Sure, he was a little late to the party, but we all remembered the steps, we being the widows, by then having put parts of thirty-six of Vik’s colleagues in the ground. Vik had been elusive, that old fox, doping around in the shadows while I stood on the dance floor swaying to the dirge. Fifteen years.
In 2001, I had offered up personal item reference samples and bio samples, per instructions from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. I’d expected his blood relatives’ spiral lattices to do the heavy lifting, but I obliged with the trinity of hairbrush, comb, razor, and a river card: the panties I wore Monday, the day before he was killed, and the spermatic deposits thereupon. Later, I discovered a fork in the dishwasher. I delivered it to OCME. A few weeks later I found hairs in the bed, bagged and delivered those. In December, a fingernail clipping revealed itself from within the padded confines of a ball of dust behind the toilet. I bagged it. I gave away every tangible piece of Vik I could find.
I was told that he, like his colleagues, was pulverized, reduced infinitesimally, reduced to dust. A finely sifted flour. Particulate matter. A single particle. A speck floating among motes. He was made so small that photons in a sunbeam struck him like waves breaking over the bow of a ship. He was inhaled, expelled in a mass of phlegm, transported by Kleenex to waste bin, to garbage truck, entombed in a landfill to await the next millennium’s archaeologists. Arguably, he still existed in some microscopic sense. What constituted him? Two molecules retaining their bond? A single molecule once associated with his cellular structure? And after his dust degraded and he was split into the component atomic elements, where was he then? When did he cease to be?
Elusive Vik. At first I forced myself to believe these things, to believe that he’d vanished into the mound of rubble, been pestled by the concrete slabs and plummeting I-beams. I forced myself to believe he’d been incinerated, his carbonized particles elevated in the pillar of black smoke, absorbed into the mesosphere. In the absence of a body, paperwork became his corpse. I had the DX certificate, official pronouncement of death by judicial decree. But what I wanted—what we all wanted—was the DM, the physical remains certificate. Eventually all the other girls got theirs. Goddamnit, Vik, where was mine?
Were they my friends, the other widows? If we’d been friendly before, cocktail party cohorts, left-hand partners at dinners requiring the presence of a full contingent, the smiling soft-serve ice cream our husbands brought around to please potential investors, now we were comrades, veterans of a flash battle that had wiped out half our battalion.
For everyone else, for the DMs, the problem wasn’t that their husbands had vanished, but that they kept coming back. There was a white tent on 30th Street overlooking the East River, a high-quality aluminum frame shrink-wrapped in slick polyester. The remains were stored there until the memorial park was finished and they were relocated to subterranean shelf space beneath the plaza’s selfie zone. Officers of the state tested and retested the remains, turning an infinite row of prayer wheels while chanting the mantras of forensic tech. When the universe granted a hit, they’d call. They’d call every time until you couldn’t handle any more and signed the form begging them to stop.
I never saw the blue glow of the caller ID: OCME MTTN. But they kept pushing the prayer wheels, retesting, retesting—thousands of unidentified tissue remains, thousands of bone fragments. And there were millions more out there in the world, too small to detect. I kept up with the literature. I knew the technology was advancing toward infinite sensitivity. It was only a matter of time before they’d point a spectrometer wand at the sky and transmit me the coordinates of Vik’s atomic remnants. There he is, hovering over Germany today, tomorrow Sweden, drifting Arcticward, catching a lift on the polar jet, circumnavigating the world’s crown. There he is, parting the seas from atop a plankton’s rostrum. Look there, in yonder deer gut, amongst the honeycomb of the reticulum. In a volcano, in a carburetor, under my fingernail. Everywhere, nowhere.