How many times has she wondered, standing in front of the photograph, whether she had taken something from the boy? A part of her thought she had stolen every expression from him except the one in the picture. But that was just a photographer’s vanity. Even the word capture was a photographer’s vanity. You created a duplicate of one instant, and then the instant went on. The ambulances and fire trucks arrived. An EMT took the boy. Others hovered their fingers in front of the eyes of the victims on the shoulder. They used machines to pry the doors off the Corolla and remove part of the bewildered man’s wife. Carmen had left after that, but she knew that the tow trucks would be next, peeling the cars apart and carting them two at time to some mechanic’s yard in a nearby town where they’d wait on an insurance assessment. She didn’t know how they’d handle the big rig and its trailer. It would likely take a few tow trucks working together to get it righted. And what would they do with the strawberries? Would they send a street sweeper to clean them up, or leave them to the slower fate of the birds?
Either way, systems were already in action erasing the whole scene.
War was the same. It buried the memory of itself as it went. That’s why recording it was important. But disasters and accidents? There was no horror of human conflict to illuminate, no peace to protect. It could be argued that the sum of the good this photograph could do was as a PSA: Be Careful Driving in the Fog. One could argue as well for the importance of witness. This accident that deconstructed the lives of thirteen people happened on a day that had made their suffering quotidian. Without a record, the fact of the wreck would simply diffuse into the higher buzz of the quake’s aftermath. And yet standing there, or even looking at the picture, the greater tragedy in the Bay Area was wholly separate for her, abstract and irreconcilable.
Carmen had been listening to the radio on the drive. The retrofitting of the bridges and buildings in San Francisco had done its job, but a section of the north bore of the Caldecott Tunnel had caved in, potentially on some early morning commuters, and a twelve-story brick building in downtown Oakland had collapsed. The reporters hadn’t yet ascertained whether the structure was commercial or residential, but with their voices raw they hoped that it was commercial, as a commercial building would be nearly empty at 6 a.m., while a residential one—they didn’t finish their sentences. The woman they’d pull out of the rubble two days later, who would go on to write a memoir and do the morning-show circuit, had been trapped beneath the building at the same time that boy had wandered out of the wreckage, and yet in those moments the two mattered nothing to one another.
Witness: did the boy want this moment in his life to be seen, documented? Did anyone but Carmen want to witness it?
Alice would not look at the picture. She barely came into the office after it went up, not because she didn’t care about the boy but because she cared too much. It was in a museum as well, where tourists could stand in front of it, feel a whiff of sympathy, then move on to a whiff of the next thing.
You took something that stuck with you. You hoped it stuck with other people. You could tell a good photograph when looking at it felt like trying to find a key locked inside the box that the key opens. The low wisps of fog mimicking smoke, the strawberries mimicking blood. They didn’t mean anything. They didn’t mean nothing either.
Back in the jeep, she imagined driving up to the 580 and taking it west to I-80, telling herself that whatever picture most defined the earthquake would be not only in the New York Times and on the Today show but in history books and stock reels for the rest of time. It was a sales pitch to herself. She remembered taking I-80 east all the way from San Francisco to New York after she’d graduated college, documenting refugee communities along the way. And now she felt with a desire that was primal, almost sexual, an impulse to take her shameful, exhilarated, independent self across the country once more.
But when she thought of the image that she’d taken—when she developed it she’d find her recollection of it was almost perfect—there was the boy’s suffering staring out at her with Dean’s eyes, and it was undeniable that she existed tied to others. It felt like a kind of defeat. She turned around and took the 99 back to Los Angeles.
When she came into the city she went straight to the darkroom co-op. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d been so impatient waiting for negatives to develop, or for a print in its developer bath. She made a 24×36, though larger ones would come later. For the moment she wanted something she could hold with her arms angled out, the boy close enough to her size that he could look her in the eyes. She held him awhile like that, not conversing.
At home, Alice and Dean were still in their pajamas, sitting next to each other on the couch. Alice was working on her laptop while Dean recited a library book from memory. Later in life, when she wanted to remember the two of them, she remembered this afternoon, coming in on them so innocent and undisturbed.
“What are you doing back?” Alice asked. Dean glanced up from his book and went back to reading it.
“I got what I needed.”
Seeing the skepticism on Alice’s face, she put on a movie for Dean and poured two glasses of the Bordeaux they’d opened last night—hard to believe they’d been home having a normal dinner less than a day ago—and the two of them sat together at the kitchen table. It was the sort of conversation that should happen as the night stretches late, their faint doubles reflected in the window glass, but here they were having it in the midafternoon, with daylight on the patio ferns and the kitchen still smelling like coffee as they drank their leftover wine. She told Alice about the fog, omitting her near miss with the semi, and about coming upon the accident, how instinct guided her as she documented the scene. And then about the boy, how he walked out of the wreck toward her, how his blankness was a scream. She told Alice too about the guilt she felt when she took the picture, which she usually would not have shared. It was the sharing that came naturally to early dates and first years, but was so rare now, in the marriage years, with pleasantness overwhelming everything.
Then Carmen showed her the photograph, and was once again so entranced by the image that she paid no attention to Alice’s response. By the time Carmen looked over, Alice was looking away. Knowing she was being watched, Alice looked at the photo again, and the discomfort that washed over her was as obvious as if she were being forced to look at a sucking chest wound or a gnarly infection. Such different responses to the same thing, like something from an absurdist play. This is a fracture, Carmen thought. Though such fractures could be necessary to a relationship, the way fire is to a forest.
Within a few days the photo was matted and framed. Then it went on the mantel, briefly, before it was banished to the office. It watched over the rest of her life. Even when she was in her late middle years, when she and Alice were divorced and Alice had remarried, when Dean was off in college deciding whether he still liked them, the picture added new threads to the web of memories strung to it. And so the picture began to mean many things that were not presented by its image. Take it as an artifact unhitched from time, and see the many Carmens at many ages, in many circumstances, many moods, gazing into it. It teaches her this now: moments of your life can be tethered to one another. In looking at the photograph, she saw Dean when he was five, like when she took the photo, and as he was when he was nine and looked so much like the boy in the picture that her fears of him maimed or terrified were brought to life, and she saw herself walking out of the office to find him a teenager eating a bowl of cereal in the breakfast nook, walking out of the office to see him as an undergraduate—poorly shaven, electrically sullen, captivating—and she saw that strange boy as he was in a moment of suffering that had long passed, and she saw all the suffering of the world, and she saw herself able to detach from it.