"So
what's up?" I asked.
"So
I think I got a job for you. I know this guy, editor for
Mojo.
That's a
London music magazine. Print mag, not a webzine. He wants to do a story with
photos. I thought of you, Cass. It's perfect for you, a real Scary Neary
story."
"I
know what
Mojo
is," I said. "Perfect for me? As in,
'Underemployed Losers and the People Who Hate Them?'"
"That's
my girl! Close, very close! You know Aphrodite Kamestos?'"
"Do
I know her? Or do I know who she is?"
"Well,
either." Phil's eyes widened. "You don't actually know her, do you?
No, of course not," he said and quickly went on. "This editor, he
wants to do some kind of old-time photography feature. 1950s, '60s . . . you
know, Avedon, Diane Arbus, that kind of shit. I was telling him how I'd
actually been up at Aphrodite Kamestos's place once. It was wild. So he wants a
piece on her."
"So?
You know her, you do it."
"I
don't really know her," Phil admitted. "This guy she was involved
with, he and I did a little business, back in the day. I still hear from him
every couple of years. So I emailed him and asked could he maybe get me an in
with Aphrodite Kamestos."
"Is
she even still alive? She must be, what? A hundred?"
"Nah.
Maybe seventy. But well preserved. She's got this place up in Maine, an island.
There was a little commune there, that's how I got involved. I was their
private dope peddler for a couple months. So I told this editor I have a
contact, I could probably get someone up there again. The money's pretty good.
Plus you'd be paid in pounds—good exchange rate."
I
stared at my coffee and considered throwing it in his face. "Why didn't
you suggest he do a story on me, Phil?"
"He
said the fucking 1960s, Cass!" Phil looked hurt. "Christ, I'm trying
to do you a favor!"
"Oh,
right. A Phil Cohen favor—I almost forgot."
"I
pitched you big time to this guy, Cass. I told him no one else on earth is as
well qualified for this particular job as you are."
"Why
the fuck would you say that?" I finished my coffee and pitched the cup
into a trash can. "Again: why aren't you doing it?"
"I'm
not a photographer!"
"So
why doesn't this guy send a staff photographer?"
"Because
I guess Aphrodite wanted someone they've never heard of. She's, like, crazy or
paranoid or something. She wants an unknown."
He
pinched his lower lip between thumb and forefinger. I started to laugh.
"An
unknown? What'd she say? 'I need a total unknown—I know, let's get Cassandra
Neary!'"
"Pretty
much."
"Shit."
I
sat and said nothing. After a moment, Phil shrugged. "Look, I was just
trying to help you out some. I mean, she specifically asked for you, God knows
why. But it could be an interesting gig. Remember how they used to say if you
tipped the country on its side, everything loose would roll into California?
Well, it's like they tipped it up again, only now everything that was
still
loose
rolled back up into Maine. And these islands—Cass, it's your kind of place.
'The old weird America'—this is, like, the new weird America. You oughta think
about it."
I
sighed, then looked at him. "Really? She really asked for me?"
Phil
shifted in his seat, staring at his cell phone. "Yeah," he said after
a moment. "She did. Go figure."
"Okay.
I'll think about it."
Phil
glanced at his watch. "You've got, uh, five minutes."
"What?"
"I
told the editor I'd call him back by three—three his time. Five hour
difference. And it's almost ten."
"But
I can't—I mean, how'd you even know you'd run into me?"
"I
didn't. I was gonna call you—hey, I swear it!"
"But—Jesus,
Phil. What, has this editor told her I'm coming?"
He
shook his head. "No. I did. I promised I'd send you. Listen, don't think
about it, okay? Just say yes, I can set it up. You got a license, right? A
credit card? You're not a total fucking Luddite, right? You can still rent a
car and drive?"
"Yeah."
I gazed brooding out at the street. The rain had turned fallen leaves and blown
newspapers to gray sludge. "Shit. Can they give me an advance?"
Phil
looked as though Id asked him to cook a baby.
"Well,
is there a kill fee?"
"I'll
get you a kill fee. If it doesn't go down, Cass, I'll pay your kill fee out of
my own goddam pocket, how's that?"
"Tell
me again why you're doing this?"
Phil
ran a hand across his stubbled scalp. "Aw, man. You know, Cass, you are so
fucking hardassed, you know that? I really did think it would be a great gig
for you. The legendary Aphrodite Kamestos, the semilegendary Cassandra Neary—I
mean, you could get close to her, you know that? I saw her place, that island.
What you always used to talk about, all that bleak shit you like? Well, this is
it. All these rocks, and the ocean, the sky."
He
sighed. "And, I dunno, there was something about her. When I met you—you
reminded me of her. You know?"
"The
forgotten Cassandra Neary," I said. "The never-fucking-happened
Cassandra Neary."
"Forget
it." He glared at me, then said, "You know, I should know better by
now. To try and do you a fucking favor." He picked up his phone.
"I'll find someone else."
I
shook my head. "I'll do it, I'll do it. I need the money. I need to get
out of town." I glanced outside again. "So are you going to call me,
or what?"
He
opened the cell phone. "I'll call this editor. Then I'll call this other
guy in Maine. I'll get him to set stuff up, bring you out in a boat or
something. Then I'll call you."
"Well,
that's suitably vague." I stood. "So I guess I'll wait for you to
call me, or for some guy to do some stuff, or something."
Phil
nodded. "Great. Hey, aren't you going to thank me?"
"I'll
thank you when I get paid, how's that? I'll take you to dinner."
I
leaned over to kiss his unkempt scalp.
"Thanks,
Phil," I said, and walked home.
5
You'll
think I was leaving the city because I needed to escape from grief, or guilt,
or fear: all the reasons people fled in those years, and a lot of them escaped
to the same place I was heading.
But
the truth is that when Christine had called me that morning, it had been almost
two years since we'd last spoken. She couldn't bear the sound of my voice,
she'd told me: it was like talking to a dead person. Or no, she went on, it was
like that nickname Phil Cohen had given me. It was like talking to an android,
something that mimicked human speech and affect but wasn't actually alive.
"The
terrible thing is, I really loved you, Cass," she'd said on that last
message. "I love you now."
I
knew she wanted me to meet her, to say I loved her too. I knew she was giving
me a chance to save her—to save myself, she would have said— but I couldn't
lie. I can't lie about that kind of stuff. This isn't a virtue. It's a flaw,
just as my seeing the true world is not a gift but a terrible thing. I've lived
my entire life expecting the worst, knowing it will happen, seeing it happen.
Making it happen, people used to think, then photographing it and making other
people see it too.
People
think they want the truth. But the truth is that people want to be reassured
that it's only
there
that the horror lies,
there
on the other
side of the television, the computer screen, the world. No one wants to look on
the charred remains of a human corpse lying at their feet. No one wants to look
on unalloyed grief and horror and loss. I don't always want to myself, but I
won't deny that I do, and I won't deny that my photos show you what's really
there. I can't look away.
6
I
had vacation time saved up at the Strand, so I gave notice that I'd be gone for
a few weeks. They were surprised, but they also seemed relieved that I was
doing something normal—it was the first time I'd taken off in about five years.
I spent most of my last days there ferreting through the stacks, looking for
anything on Kamestos.
I
didn't find anything, except for that one iconic photograph of her in an
Aperture volume on 20th century photographers, a black-and-white portrait taken
by her husband, the poet Stephen Haselton, shortly after their marriage. I knew
there were other images: a pencil drawing by Jean Cocteau that was on the
dustjacket of the original edition of
Mors,
a sketch by Brion Gysin that
looked like Jean-Paul Marat's death mask.
I
assumed that when I googled her, I'd learn more. There was some stuff online,
including Susan Sontag's repudiation of
Mors,
but little in the way of
biographical information except for a thumbnail entry on Wikipedia. Despite her
name, Aphrodite was as American as I was, a third-generation Greek who'd grown
up in Chicago. But there were no details about her childhood, and only a
fleeting mention of her marriage to Haselton.
I
don't know anyone who looked less like her namesake. Aphrodite Kamestos was
beautiful in the way a violent storm is beautiful, if you're watching it from a
safe distance. In his photo, Haselton must have caught her unawares. Her head
is half-turned, her dark hair falling back from her race, her lips parted and
eyebrows slightly raised. Her eyes are startlingly black against her white
skin, and the light glances off her cheekbones. The gaze she shoots at the
camera is direct yet impenetrable. She looks unafraid, but also unguarded,
caught in that fraction of a second before she could compose her face into
welcome or annoyance or desire or attack.
It
was a strikingly beautiful face, but it didn't make me think of the Goddess of
Love. It made me think of Medusa, someone whose beauty would be turned upon
anyone stupid enough to mess with her. That was the power of the photograph. It
didn't make you wonder what happened to her. It made you wonder what happened
to the guy who took the picture. It's almost anticlimactic to know that he
killed himself in 1976.
My
Google search turned up some of her own images as well, but that was such a
depressing experience I wished I hadn't bothered. I hate looking at bad
reproductions of great photographs, and these online images were uniformly
lousy. Generation loss—that’s what happens when you endlessly reproduce a
photographic image. You lose authenticity, the quality deteriorates in each
subsequent generation that's copied from the original negative, and the
original itself decays with time, so that every new image is a more degraded
version of what you started with. Same thing with analog recordings. After
endless reproduction, you end up with nothing but static and hiss.
This
doesn't happen so much with digital imaging, but what I found online had been
scanned from a 1970 pirate reprint of Kamestos's only two books,
Mors
and
Deceptio Visus,
first published in the late 1950s. Anyone who picked up
that pirate volume could be forgiven for wondering how Aphrodite's photos ever
saw the light of day. Unfortunately, those horrible reproductions were what had
filtered onto the web. They were nothing like the images in the original
editions of
Mors
and
Deceptio Visus
—I knew that because I owned
both books—and those, of course, would be nothing like the original prints.
Her
greatest images were vistas—islands, mountains. Highly saturated blues and
violets and magentas detailing an impossibly beautiful, distant archipelago
that resembled a landscape by Magritte: elusive, irrecoverable. I couldn't
imagine those places were real.
Only
of course they were—the pictures were taken in 1956, decades before computers
made it possible to twist the world into a pretty shape.
That
was the year Kodak started hyping the Type C color process. Type C enabled
photographers to produce their own color negs without relying so heavily on a
lab, and there was some interesting color work done then by people like Nina
Leen and Brian Brake. I don't know if Kamestos was using Type C, but she would
have been picking up on some of the press it was generating. You can see in her
husband's photo how those eyes still burned, though her hands looked as though
they could handle a garrote as easily as a camera.
It
was a suspicion fed when
Mors
appeared: a catalog of places where
terrible things had happened. Suicide, a murder, sexual torture. These weren't
like Weegee's crime scenes, or Bourke-White's photos of Buchenwald. Kamestos's
pictures lacked immediacy or historical import; their sense of transgression
was visceral because it was so detached. When it first appeared,
Mors
was
dismissed as a form of malign spirit photography, and the 1970 pirate volume
only made things worse, with its over-the-top intro by Kenneth Anger. It would
be decades before that book's influence was acknowledged by people like Sally
Mann or Joel-Peter Witkin. And me, of course. But no one was listening to me.