The car
parked and ready within the vicinity of the airport, deleted name sits listening to that irregular rhythm of
spring rain descending incessant upon its roof, the vehicle infused with the
scent of his long wax jacket discarded damp across the back seats.
His whole face feels weirdly new, the until now daily-shaved flesh seemingly
conscious of its having been subject to the last razor it will suffer for the
next ten days, inducing a certain sense of rawness to the skin, peeled back to
reveal a mask beneath, unwilling to endure its own reflection.
He is in rehearsal for his imminent visitor, running his lines worried there
may be no words, and wondering what others he might conjure to deploy in that
exact absence should this indeed prove the case.
deleted name (speaking aloud to
himself): Is there anything so pedestrian as seeing a photograph that looks
exactly like what you saw when you took it? You already saw that.
trying to focus, and starting over
deleted name: You know that...
You... know...
and again
deleted name: You already know what the subject looks like, what it
looked like when you photographed it.
as both index fingers delineate a rectangle in the air before him
deleted name: but
now marking out another alongside
deleted name: the actual photograph
itself should become a sort of um, a collaboration between the
photographer and the camera.
He reaches across to tip down the passenger side sunshade, dislodging the
year-long secreted piece of Bazooka gum and unpeeling it from its greasy and
distinctive red, white and blue wrapper: that initial effort requisite to its
chewing makes him cough hard enough that his both eyes water.
deleted name (chewing, his words
finding their way out and around the gum): The photograph is the thing, by
which, the original photograph, the actual artefact is what I mean.
speaking now just that little louder to hear himself over a sudden increased
intensity of rainfall
deleted name: And if it didn’t come
out how you wanted,
sighing
deleted name: how you pictured it
would come out, well, that clearly wasn’t the photograph. What you
imagined wasn’t it, and what you now hold in your hand is. The colour
might be off, maybe there’s something wrong with the film itself, or the
processing chemistry, any number of random unforeseen elements to give you
something you did not expect
his eyes wrinkle, wincing at the banality
deleted name: but that’s it, and
any subsequent attempt to improve it would just be a... a reshoot.
curiosity now prompting him to uncurl and unfold the little Bazooka Joe comic
strip still held in his fingers
deleted name: You begin the
photograph and it's the camera as completes it.
which surprisingly turns out to be blank, a white wax paper nothing, though in
his thinking on how many of these comics were being printed at any given time
he understands it as less actual surprise that one might indeed slip through a
momentary absence of quality control.
Holding it up against the albeit muted daylight beyond the car window he hopes
to see some residual print, a trace of what it might have been; apart from a
single tiny black square top left it is completely void.
He looks back across the car’s interior, thinking for the first time
deleted name: Christ he will sit in
that exact same seat in which she sat.
and then, some whole minutes subsequent, after angling the rearview mirror to
confront himself for that final time for ten days,
deleted name (quietly): “Le
cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau."
before lowering the car window to spit the lukewarm and now tasteless wad
of gum from out his mouth, the rain making its concurrent and opportune ingress
so that with the window once again closed it will descend in slow drips down
this side of the glass.
deleted name (watching, waiting):
Heeltaps.
