Hard Light by Elizabeth Hand Read Free Book Online

Lance in a bit.”
    I flashed Adrian’s card. “Feel like going with me to this place first?”
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œI don’t know how to get there.”
    â€œ134 bus, or you can take the tube to Finsbury Park then catch the W3.”
    â€œYeah, but I don’t know your friends.”
    â€œI told you, not my fucking friends.”
    â€œHow about I pay you?” I pulled out two twenty-pound notes.
    Krishna snorted. “I come cheap.” She fixed me with those sarcophagus eyes and held out her hand. “Throw in some of those pills and I’ll take you.”
    I gave her a Focalin. She swallowed it, then asked, “That it?”
    â€œYou’re half my size. Come on, I’m freezing my ass off.”
    It was a long bus ride. I stared out the window while Krishna fidgeted and texted. After a while, I dug in my bag and pulled out my Konica. My father gave it to me on my seventeenth birthday; never a top-of-the-line rig but I’d done good work with it, back when I could no more think of going a day without shooting than without a drink.
    Like Uncle Lou said, those were different times. Until a few months ago, I’d barely picked up my camera in twenty years. Now there was no film in it—I’d been relieved of the last two rolls I’d shot. Not necessarily a bad thing, considering the pictures I’d taken could have incriminated me in several countries. But I still had a few rolls of Tri-X.
    I tapped Krishna’s shoulder. “Give me your coat.”
    She shrugged it off, and I folded it into a makeshift dark tent in my lap. I didn’t need to see the camera to load it: I could feel the sprocket’s tiny teeth beneath my fingertips, smell the lactose odor of the raw emulsion as I wound it. When I was done, I closed the back of the camera, dropped the empty film canister into my satchel, and returned the coat to Krishna. She stuck her mobile in a pocket and flashed me a grin.
    â€œGonna take my picture?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    The light was bad, but I was used to that. I’d made my name in underexposed black and white, shooting grainy photos of the downtown punk scene in its infancy. I loved that monochrome world, the way my viewfinder captured everything and held it in suspended animation until later, when I summoned lovers and musicians and corpses in the darkroom: gaunt faces under fluorescent bulbs; arms flailing at cheap guitars on a makeshift stage; a severed hand with strands of hair caught beneath a blackened fingernail. I’d published one book, an iconoclastic volume called Dead Girls that would have made my career, if I hadn’t been dead-set on losing my reputation before I’d gained it.
    But my eye hadn’t changed. That and my sense of damage kept me alive, even if I spent more time staring into a shotglass than a lens.
    I picked up the Konica and gazed through the viewfinder, playing with the focus while I waited for Krishna’s grin to dissolve. One Cleopatra eye twitched: self-doubt or boredom or maybe just exhaustion. I pressed the shutter release, clicked to the next frame, and set the camera on my knee. I knew I’d gotten what I wanted.
    â€œCan I see?” Krishna snatched the camera from me and turned it in her hands, frowning. “How do you turn it on?”
    â€œYou don’t. Jesus, don’t touch the lens!” I swore and grabbed it back. “That’s a real camera. Not digital.”
    â€œHow’s it work?”
    â€œMagic.” I stuck the Konica into my bag. “We almost at this place?”
    â€œSoon.” She stared past me into the rainy night, at signs advertising chicken tikka and ESL classes and bargain dentistry, a pile of children’s shoes in the window of a charity shop.
    â€œSo who’s Morven?”
    â€œThe wife.” Krishna pulled nervously at her oversized sweater. “Her husband, he’s a