We move closer and closer to the edge of this hulled-out village, its people overexposed and dead with fatigue. We pass through the rubble of some kind of town center building. We pass what was once some kind of café or bar, its windows as black as the eyes of a corpse. We pass something — a schoolhouse, maybe, its doors boarded up like a shut mouth. We are some ways behind them, and more or less part of the detritus. Soon they are at a house that is barely in the village at all. We are able to approach mostly because of our giant, horse-drawn wagon, full of rotting bodies — it seems part of the mise-en-scène.
What I see next doesn’t seem possible, but the first form to emerge from the house is a girl. She looks to be about ten or so. Her hair spreads in waves of nested coils around her face, down her shoulders. Unbelievably, she walks straight toward them. She is wearing the clothes of a boy — and soon a second self, her brother, and her father and mother, come rushing out like blood after her. There is some yelling back and forth, and then it happens — a blast from I don’t know where disintegrates the father, mother, and brother just at the edge of the girl’s body, missing her in some terrifying accident of a fraction. They blow up right before her eyes, her hair lifting for a moment, so that she looks as if she may float skyward, her arms up and out, her face glowing so white that her eyes look like blue-steel bullets, her mouth open in the shape of an O.
I remember how the ground shook.
I remember the camera going off. Shooting before I fell.
I remember her hands — palms white — fingers spread.
The light from the explosion must have acted. . like a flash. A perfect flash.
There is yelling and a lot of smoke. Not all the soldiers are there any longer. No one even looks at us as we hobble away, fear bringing bile into my mouth, my guide so angry he nearly fractures my arm pulling me away, and when I turn my head back to the action, I think I see a girl running toward the woods.
The girl — she disappears. She fucking fades to black, and in our rush and fear all we try is to stay alive, to make it out of that scene without more bloodshed. Back at my guide’s claustrophobic home, after my body quits shivering and my heart stops fuck-whacking and my lungs act like air sacks again — I mean, JESUS, how much closer can one be to an explosion and not be inside it — instead of thinking about what I just witnessed, I am seized by a random memory. It’s you. It’s the photos I shot of you the one week we were lovers. A random flashback like a bulb exploding.
Your skin. The mound of your sex. How you were right when you said I’d leave, how I was mad at you, and all I could see even while I tried to kill your quiet with my tongue was the image of your face against my leaving — against the image of me, a naked woman getting into a car and flooring it at dusk, leaving a dust swirl and tracks like an open wound with no hope of suture — doing anything she can to get the fuck out of the story. The image of your mouth. My leaving.
And then I feel some kind of back of the head WHOP and you are gone, your image, and I’m in this war zone again, and a random family comes tumbling through the door. The only word for their fear is their faces. Bread and hot beef broth appear. We all sit there in the silence of our traumas and eat. So bread and broth can save your life. And memory has no syntax.
For a long time, no one says much of anything. The mother hums to her children — two boys and a very young girl. The father stands in front of the fire with the look of a father. He and my guide share cigarettes with god knows what rolled up in them. Finally I walk over and they let me share — thank fucking baby jesus there is something LARGE and hallucinogenic in the cigarettes. Things get swirly like smoke and my skin stops revolting against me.
The mother keeps looking at me like I want to eat her children but she doesn’t stop me. The only one who will talk to me is the oldest boy. Most of what he says is a runaway train. I can only understand him in bits. First I try to take notes, but then I give up. What the fuck am I writing down? I can barely understand him. His life is ten of mine. He is maybe twelve. Fuck.
What I am able to understand is this: this family is going into the woods. The father is a schoolteacher and the mother is afraid to live in her own house, having just watched her beloved neighbors disintegrate. I ask him, Won’t they simply chase you into the woods? “No,” he says, and he is vehement with it. I think he tells me, The rebels are in the woods. They have camps. They will not chase us there. I think he tells me, If they chase us they will be cut into pieces and fed to the wolves, and we will watch, and we will laugh and sing and dance and spit on their souls by firelight.
I begin to cry. The mother puts her hand on my arm but doesn’t look at me. In this house, in this village no one in America knows the name of, in this war no one in America gives a flying fuck about, I am at home. I want to stay. Inside the danger, in front of a fire in a tiny space with people I can barely understand. This is the quick of history. This is a reason to be alive, inside the fear of being dead every second. I look at each of them one at a time. They have no love or care for me. But each of them meets my gaze. When I bring my camera out between my hands, small and without drama, they let me.
It is enough.
I don’t want any part of my former life. I want whatever is inside this small mechanical box to kill whoever I ever was. These words, the only trace left of me— I give them to you.
The Photograph
The photo of the girl is nascent.
At the moment of the blast, light through the lens hit the film like a fist of electricity. Silver halides swam frantically in their chaos, unstable as history waiting for someone to point a finger and give a name to it. In the calm thereafter, the image was invisible, latent, hidden on a roll of black-and-white Kodak film inside a Mamiya camera.
She, alone among her peers, has resisted other ways of capturing images. Even when it meant bidding for film and cameras in foreign countries.
At night, in a house, in a lull between villages and violences, that roll of film — the only one she cares about — is removed from the camera, shoved quickly inside a condom, and crammed into the photographer’s sports bra. There it sits all night, inside a prophylactic against flesh and moisture and dirt, against the ever-twitching chest of the photographer, who monkey-paws it now and again until sunrise.
The next day, this roll and several others are handed over to a journalist who is making for a bigger city with better phones and digital processing and fax machines and, thankfully, bars. Lots of bars. The roll of film in the condom jostles around with its siblings in an oblong athletic bag with a great white swoosh sewn on the side. Inside the bag it is dark and smells of chemicals, paper, sweat, and coffee. The journalist drives the Saab with one hand and scratches a scab on his driving hand with the other. The scab chips off the flesh—success—and a blood mouth the size of a peanut opens on his hand. He sucks it. He hopes he has the number of the woman he wants to bed tonight. He pictures it in his wallet between dollars. He tries to remember if she has a television.
When the car stops in a city, many hours later, the journalist dumps the bag of mismatched and varied media onto the desk of a foreign correspondent. With hands like Michelangelo, the correspondent organizes the media for their various journeys. His eyes ache. When he exhales there is a kind of moan. He’s getting too old for this. They’re giving him less and less face time and more and more makeup. His hangover sits with pickled wrath somewhere between his gut and his throat. He rubs his temples — ice picks to the brain. He stares at the roll of film. Who still processes film? What kind of prima donna is she? His hands carry the strain of his life in their tremors as he packages the film roll, lumbers onto a moped, and transports it to the last processor around.