Double Image by David Morrell Read Free Book Online Page B

and harsh. I recognized a swing, a slide, and a teeter-totter that someone had put up at the trailer park where my mother and I had lived. I recognized a trailer in the background. I studied a boy in the swing and a woman pushing him. I leaned closer, squinting at the woman’s long, windblown sand-colored hair, at her high, slender neck and delicate face, at her beaming smile. The woman wore a brown-and-white-checkered shirt with its sleeves rolled up and its bottom hanging over her jeans. The shirt and the jeans looked too big for her, emphasizing how delicately thin she was. Pushing that laughing child, she looked to be having the time of her life.
    “Slowly, I became aware that the sobbing had stopped. When I turned, I saw that my grandmother had lowered her hands and was staring at me, her face raw from tears.
    “‘That’s my mother,’ I said, the first time I’d spoken in a year. ‘That’s what she looks like. I remember now.’”
     
14
     
    “SO YOU BECAME A PHOTOGRAPHER to try to preserve the past?” Packard asked.
    “The
present
. That album, and others my grandparents had, showed my mother growing up and getting married. Then she was big with me. Then she was holding me and bathing me and raising me. Time was suspended. She existed on the page. Mercifully, I didn’t find any photos of my father. My grandmother told me that she had burned every image of him, cursing him all the while.
He
was dead. But not my mother. She was still alive in the photographs.
    “But she was more perfect in some than in others. As I studied them endlessly, I became frustrated. Some of the photos were slightly blurred. Others had too much or too little light. Some were too close, others too far. Some didn’t emphasize what I absolutely needed to see, a glint in my mother’s eyes or what she was doing with her hands. I kept imagining better images. I kept praying that they could have been
made
better.”
    “And the next step was to start learning about photography?”
    “You’ve heard the stories about photographers who go to primitive regions, where the natives won’t let the photographers take pictures of them because the natives are afraid the cameras will steal their souls. I have no idea if those stories are true, but if they are, the natives are wrong. The camera doesn’t steal anything. It
gives
: immortality. That’s what I thought when I was a young man. I wanted to take photographs of everybody I met, to memorialize them with pity and love — because one day they were going to die. But not in my photographs. As long as my photographs existed, I thought, so did those people.”
    “Wanted? Thought? You keep using the past tense.”
    “Somewhere along the line, I went wrong. I started taking pictures that didn’t celebrate living but fixated on dying. I started documenting despair instead of hope.” Coltrane shook his head sharply. “No more. I want to glorify life.”
    “Then by all means” — Packard coughed painfully — “I want you to photograph
me
.”
     
15
     
    WHEN DUNCAN BROUGHT IN A TRAY of six different kinds of caviar, translucent eggs of gold, black, gray, brown, gray-green, and greenish black, Coltrane’s already-tentative appetite deserted him. Emotion on top of the champagne had soured his stomach. Increasingly, Packard (his eyes drooping, his whisper more filled with phlegm) didn’t have the strength to continue the conversation. So, after finalizing the details of their project, Coltrane said good-bye.
    The afternoon light remained dismal. Driving back to Los Angeles, Coltrane struggled against an overwhelming exhaustion. He reached his apartment at 4:30 but still wasn’t hungry. In fact, he feared he was going to be sick. He lay on his leather sofa, tried to analyze what had just happened to him, and sank into an agitated sleep. At one point, the phone rang, but he was in too dark a place to answer or hear if anyone left a message.
     
16
     
    “DID YOU PHONE ME LAST NIGHT?”