Bathing the Lion by Jonathan Carroll Read Free Book Online

in a chemical bath was like a woman undressing in front of you—slowly, slowly, you got to see everything.
    Except for this little girl. As soon as he saw her up on that roof, the man snapped off seven pictures of her in quick succession. On the last one she looked down at him and smiled. Then she turned around and walked back toward the middle of the building and disappeared. He assumed a door was there for her to use to get back into the station again.
    He spent the rest of the morning taking pictures of the town. It was his first visit there. He was delighted with the combination of hip but at the same time pastoral feel of the place. He shot three rolls of film over the weekend. When he got home to Hartford Sunday afternoon, he went straight to his darkroom and developed half of them. In that batch were the seven pictures he’d taken of the girl on the roof. But he could not find them. In their place were photographs of seven different vegetables: beautiful, stunning pictures—of vegetables. Butternut squash, lima beans, bell peppers … none of a little girl standing on a roof. He had never in his life taken a single photograph of a vegetable, but there they were in his developing tray—spectacular images that looked like the still lifes of Georgia O’Keeffe or Robert Mapplethorpe. They were the best photographs he had ever taken. Only he hadn’t taken them. All seven were in black-and-white. The striking combination of dramatic shadows and tones made those banal objects transcendently beautiful.
    But he never used black-and-white film in any of his cameras.
    *   *   *
     
    This morning the child looked down from a roof and saw Kaspar Benn standing and smoking a cigarette in the doorway of his store across the street. His mind was still galloping in panicked circles around the news of the Corbins’ breakup. Staring straight ahead, he wondered what to do next. He was worried at any minute impulsive Vanessa would show up in tears or even hysterics demanding his help, his advice, his home to hide in, or something else to cause his comfortable status quo to drop dead on the spot. How would he handle her if she asked him for something really extreme?
    And how would he handle his business partner and friend when Dean inevitably learned Kaspar had been diddling his wife? He knew Dean and Vanessa had been having problems recently, but all married couples did at one point or another. You could not live intimately with someone day in and day out for years without knocking heads occasionally. But his affair with Vanessa had nothing to do with the Corbins’ problems. It had to do with the fact that when both Kaspar and Vanessa wanted something, they took it.
    “My name is Josephine.”
    Kaspar was so caught up in his concerns he did not hear the child’s voice until she repeated the sentence a second time.
    “My name is Josephine.”
    He looked down. The girl from the roof was standing by his side and staring up at him. He flicked his cigarette away and gave her a thin false smile. “Hello, Josephine. You have a lovely name.” Kaspar didn’t like children but was always civil to them. He spoke to them as little as possible but always in the voice of an equal; if a kid didn’t like it, too bad.
    Josephine said, “Today is my last day.”
    “Your last day for what?”
    “After today I go away forever. I don’t know how or when, but today for sure. It’s the last day I can help you.”
    Kaspar scratched his cheek and looked at a silver Porsche Cayman driving slowly down the street. “How do you know? You’re pretty young to go away forever.”
    The girl cupped her hands and blew on them. “And you, Muba? How do you feel today?”
    He reran the ridiculous name in his mind and closed one eye. “ Muba ? Or did you say ‘mover’? What do you mean?” Kaspar now had a sinking feeling this was about to turn into one of those loony conversations you have with children after they’ve eaten too much sugar.
    The