Night has come and she can’t sleep. Once again, her son is the matter — either that or she ate too much chocolate before going to bed. Shabby, the cat, refused to come inside and the foot of the bed is abnormally cold. Toward midnight, Madeleine slips into the doorway and calls it once more. She smiles in the shadows when she discerns its little gallop in the distance. It arrives from where the willow stands, its tattered ears pointed in her direction, and rubs its patchy fur against her terrycloth robe. “Come on, in you go.” A few hours later, the ring of the telephone wrenches her out of sleep. Madeleine grabs the receiver only to be met with silence yet again. These mute calls have been recurrent; she utters a few hoarse “hellos” as a matter of form and hangs up. Her ears are humming as though filled with a sudden gust of wind and she hears something creaking, apparently on the ground floor. “Is someone there?” No answer. The house breathes, and dreams come and go.
Despite the persistent pain, the first night in the Monte Carlo was far more comfortable than he had imagined. The back seat is wide and firm and still recalls the four or five kids who would pile in on Sunday with the scent of soil and rhubarb trailing behind them; it remembers the crates of okra hauled to the market and the honey seeping out of the jar on the bumpy roads. The young man woke at six, left the tree-lined backroad where he had pulled over to sleep, and found a truck stop where could clean up and order a coffee. A stupid idea given his condition, but there are only two more days to go.
In the late morning he stops for a hitchhiker and takes fifteen seconds to study the man’s face. It’s furrowed in the wrong places, but he has good eyes. The young man swings the car door open for him.
“Quite the boat, your car! Where are you headed?”
“North. Across the border. You?”
“I’m going home, near Memphis.”
“That’s on my way.”
The passenger twiddles the radio dials but to no avail, and he clucks his tongue in frustration. Then he pulls a bottle of soda out of his backpack and offers some to the driver. After a few minutes he begins to hum a popular song, a bubblegum tune that grows soulful and solemn between his lips. The temperature seems suddenly to rise three degrees and the pain in the driver’s body recedes. Then the melody stops.
“What sort of guy are you? You give a Black man a ride a few miles from the federal prison without asking the slightest question — you some sort of psychopath? Going to chop me up into little pieces and eat my liver?”
The young man burst out laughing.
“I’m the sort of guy who doesn’t let a man rot by the side of the road.”
The passenger nods and takes another gulp.
“My name’s Lloyd. I did seven years for theft and possession of stolen goods.”
“What did you steal?”
“Cars. Don’t worry, yours doesn’t interest me. Anyway, I’m done with that foolishness. I’m keeping on the straight and narrow, with the help of God.”
“In the eyes of God, no one deserves to go to jail. In the eyes of men, everyone’s got a good reason to be locked up.”
A bump jolts the car, and the pain returns like a needle burrowing into the muscles. The driver’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel.
“It must be strange to be out, all at once.”
“If it weren’t so hot I’d swear it was a dream. At night, I constantly dreamed I was free. But if you want to know if it’s real, there’s a trick: you never sweat in dreams. Whereas today…”
“We’re melting away.”
“It’s nicer than every second spent inside.”
Late in the afternoon the young man insists on going out of his way and takes the exit pointed out by his passenger. He knows very well Lloyd is right: a Black man can wait with his thumb in the air for hours on the side of the road before someone stops to pick him up, if the police don’t come along first. He drives Lloyd to his mother’s place but doesn’t turn around immediately. He waits to see the front door open, to see an arm reach out, to see Lloyd stepping toward the one who had waited steadfastly for seven years. The scene is both familiar and incomprehensible. He averts his eyes just as mother and son embrace each other and then continues on his way, clinging to Lloyd’s last words, which still hover inside the car. God bless you.
Madeleine is especially pleased with the last set of photos. In the developer tray, a nascent storm emerges where the roiling of the clouds melds with that of the water so that the horizon can barely be made out and it is hard, amid the mirages and reflections, to separate what belongs to the sky from what belongs to the sea. This is the sole subject of Madeleine’s work: the horizon, the boundary between the two worlds, and what manages, unbeknown to scientists and the gods, to travel from one to the other.
Her interest in photography began backwards: she learned to develop before ever touching a lens. Micha was the one who handled the camera. After he died she mastered the darkroom he had set up in the basement in order to find out what the kilometres of film that he’d left behind contained. What they contained for the most part were insects. Micha could spend hours photographing them with a macro lens that captured the minute details of a wing, an iridescent shell or a globular eye. He loathed those tiny creatures, all of which he identified as pillbugs, but season after season he forced himself to recognize them, to magnify them, to fix his eyes on them one by one without blinking. “I hate them because they will end up eating us. I study them for the same reason,” he would say.
Once she had gone through the four hundred and thirty-two posthumous pictures, Madeleine turned her attention to the camera. Her first subject was travellers’ faces, red-eyed and blurry-mouthed. As the months passed, she honed her technique and their features became more sharply defined, until they deserved to be framed. They multiplied: youths, unadorned, their gaze hard and dreamy, their bodies tattooed, glorious, or beaten, weary and suntanned, posing in front of the sea or the willow, their hair windblown. Madeleine hangs them on the corridor wall among the portraits of persecuted ancestors and pictures of her son as a child, never as an adult. Each time he passes through, Madeleine promises herself she will photograph him. He goes away without leaving a trace on the plastic film.
She gradually lost interest in people, perhaps because it is more acceptable to fail when tackling a landscape than when facing a human being. Or perhaps because she recognizes herself more readily in the unstable symmetry of the sky and the sea than in another’s face.
Night comes on with a ruddy breath that gilds the road and lends an ochre tinge to the sign held up by the girl, which bears one word: FAR. The driver pulls over for the second time today. The girl hurries to the car towing a dust-covered trolley case utterly unsuited to her chosen mode of transportation. With a superhuman effort, she hoists the beast onto the back seat before climbing into the front. Her name is Yun and her goal is to reach the extremities of the hemisphere: the Maritimes, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego. The young man tells her they can travel part of the way together. Delighted to hear this, she relaxes. Silence sets in, and she makes no attempt to switch on the radio. She leans her head out the window and breathes in the cool evening air. An hour later she asks: