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“I'm still pretty sure it was her. They may
have tapped in and tried to intercept our meet, but it was
her.”

In days gone by my problem-solving mind would
have pulled the thread on that, sought to consider the
possibilities and probabilities to arrive at the most likely,
optimum solution to the riddle. But I didn't care now. I didn't
deem it worth the effort. I saw it as irrelevant. Such is the case
when in the midst of the battle all clever complications boil down
to the need to survive. Or more to the point, when your sanity
won't survive unless you change the subject.

“We should probably get going,” I said. “We
don't want to miss our sunrise.”

She got up first, and I watched her put on
her cargo pants and fleece jacket. I got up and did likewise.

From my hiking pack, I extracted a couple of
granola bars. I handed her one of them.

“Breakfast,” she said.

“Just enough to power the short walk to our
photo spot. I’ll do better by you when we get back.”

She shot me a skeptical look. She’d seen the
sort of food stuffs I’d bought the day before, and she didn’t seem
impressed then either.

I handed her a head lamp. She waited for me
to put mine on, then followed suit, imitating how I'd strapped it
on. A minute later, with granola bars in my pocket, a camera bag
strapped to my back, and a tripod in my hand, we started off down
trail. Beams of light swept this way and that as our heads swayed
with each step.

I led the way, modeling for her where to
step, and providing some tour guide trivia along the way. As I’d
guessed, Bridget wasn’t much of a camper or hiker, but her thin and
fit physical shape allowed her to meet the minor challenges of
trekking in the dark. Though tempted to slow down the pace for her
sake, I soon saw I wouldn't need to.

Light began to sift in dark blue hues from
the east, and we made it to a grove of Joshua trees a few minutes
before the disk of the sun broke through the horizon. Their
illumination no longer necessary, we shut off our headlamps.

“Ah look at that,” I said as I started
setting up my tripod in front of an isolated Joshua. “It’s going to
be a good one.”

“Oh yeah?” Bridget dropped into a crouch,
arms tightly wrapped around her knees. She'd also pulled the hood
of her jacket over her head.

“Sure,” I replied. “You can come out here ten
weeks in a row and not get a sky like that.” I waved at the horizon
where clouds broke the usual blank, pattern-less Southern
California sky, coloring it with dark swaths of orange, red and
yellow against deep blue hues.

“When do you know it's time to take the
photo?”

“You just know.”

“The light?”

“The moment,” I said. “That slice of time,
that half second when it feels right.”

I finished setting up and metered the shot.
It wasn’t time yet and it woudn't be at least for a few minutes. I
stood up and went over to her and crouched next to her.

“You OK?” I asked her.

“It’s cold.”

“It builds character. It makes for the best
shots, too. I’ve never taken an outdoor shot that counted for
something that didn’t hurt at least a little.”

I stayed with her until the first of the
sun's rays poked through the horizon and intensified the shades of
yellow, orange and red. A sense of urgency came over me, not the
sort that concerns or scares you, but the pressing flow that rushes
over rocks and steep drops on the way to something good.

I went over to the camera and clicked one
shot, knowing it would render the Joshua tree in silhouette. Then I
waited.

I heard Bridget come over. She knelt beside
me, and we waited together.

“There,” I said after a couple of minutes.
“See how the needles light up?”

“Wow,” she said.

I took the shot, reviewed the LCD screen,
adjusted the exposure, and bracketed off three more shots at third
of a stop intervals. Then I grabbed the camera and tripod and ran
to my left. Bridget followed me, with less urgency, but with a good
measure of her curiosity.

I set up a wide angle shot to capture the
grove, took one shot, zoomed to recompose, and took another shot. I
stood up to see the brightening sunlight.

“Is that it?” Bridget asked.

“That
was
it. Just like that, the
moment came and went.”

“Let me see,” she said.

I unclipped the camera from the tripop mount
and handed it to her. Without my prompting or help, she pressed the
review button and used the back button to review each shot. For a
few moments I fought back the urge to ask her how she'd learned to
handle a camera like that. I'd rather watch her reaction to each
shot, I decided.

“Nice,” she said. “I like what the light does
to the needles.”

“Your eye goes right to them, doesn’t it?
Drawn by light.”

She nodded, then as she handed the camera
back said, “Will you do any touch up on these?”

“Yeah. I always post-process my shots. These
need at least a little bit of color and white balance
adjustment.”

I took the camera from her and walked around
the grove grabbing a few more shots, this time with the light to my
side. These were the sort of shots that might feel like pointless
throwaways, but from which I might turn up one or two keepers. I
tried close-ups and off-kilter angles to achieve what I hoped would
come across as unusual, somewhat abstract treatment of oft
photographed-to-death subject matter.

When I came back to her, Bridget was smiling.
“I thought the moment was gone.”

I pointed the camera at her. She laughed, and
I grabbed a few shots, mostly headshots using quirky, impromptu
viewpoints I used when I didn't think much of and about the shot I
was taking. I kept shooting as she grew more serious, and I stopped
when she waved for me to stop.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Creating a moment. Sometimes we can do
that.”

I waited for her to respond. She didn’t say
anything, so I grabbed the tripod and made back toward our campsite
for, as I told her, a more proper breakfast.

Thirty minutes later Bridget was making a
face as she sipped from her cup of instant coffee, liking little
about it except that it warmed her up. For that reason alone, she
kept drinking it until it grew cold enough that the drink’s benefit
no longer exceeded her distaste had for it. She found the instant
oatmeal I cooked a little more to her liking, rushing to consume
her bowl in its entirety before it too lost its warmth.

As I was finishing mine, she asked, “This is
good for you, isn’t it?”

“I am hoping it is for you, too.”

“It’s a nice diversion, but I don’t see how
it helps us.”

“Doesn’t it?” I asked, giving her another
chance to consider her assessment.

“It’s beautiful here, Andre. Your pictures
are beautiful. The air is pure and crisp, perhaps a bit too crisp
at the moment. And I suppose it’s good to have some distance
between us and the mess we left behind. But eventually we’ll have
to deal with it.”

“Will we?”

“I suppose there’s some charm, maybe even
comfort in being disconnected, unplugged, off the grid,” she
said.

I waved at our surroundings, rocky cliffs to
our right, flat desert floor to our left, and the grove we’d
photographed earlier rising up against snowcapped mountains in the
distance.

“Maybe we are more plugged in out here,” I
said.

She considered this for a moment and smiled.
“You love this. You’d much rather be doing this than all that
techno-crap.”

“Can you blame me?” I asked.

“Only if you’re not escaping to avoid facing
reality.”

“What reality? The one where I get to kill
people to save the world, or the damsel in distress, as the case
may be?”

“The one where people are doing nasty things
behind our backs. The one where people and organizations are
robbing us of our freedoms.”

“I’m almost inspired to action.”

“You seemed to have no problem springing into
action back there.”

“Not because I signed up for the cause. Not
more so than when I jumped into the fray in a crowded airline
terminal.”

“Doesn’t any of it bother you, even just a
little?” she asked. “Don’t you feel the slightest bit of
responsibility?”

She stopped there, though I sensed she wanted
to say more, like, for instance how this technology others were
allegedly misusing came thanks to my wicked innovation. Or maybe
she didn’t want to say that at all, but I did, or at least I wanted
someone else to say it to me.

"You do realize it's not all evil," I said.
"In this age of ours, fraught with dangers from all quarters, some
can make compelling arguments about the need for this
techno-gadgetry you want to expose. It's not a settled, black and
white matter."

"Next thing I'll know, you'll be arguing that
exposing this stuff will cause loss of life. I've heard it all,
Andre. It doesn't track."

“What is it that you're going to accomplish
with ground-breaking reporting on this stuff?” I asked her. “Think
about it. Really think about it. What evil are you really going to
expose, and when you do, what difference is it going to make? What
wrong are you going to right, and even if you manage to win the
day, how will things really change?”

“So just ignore it all? Bury your head in the
sand?”

“No. Do something beautiful instead.”

“How can you do beautiful work with so much
ugliness around you?”

“I can do it exactly because there’s so much
ugliness around me. I rather do it than keep adding to the
ugliness. I rather not dwell on the ugliness because in the end
it’s all founded on lies. I rather stop and notice the world as it
really is.” I waved at our surroundings again. “Like it is here.
Like it is in most of the world we haven’t
uglified
with all
our cleverness.”

“So just keep doing your photography,” she
said, her voice sounding almost resigned to my rant.

“I’ve seen and done some ugly stuff, Bridget.
It made me very dark inside. It broke me in the end. Maybe your
source told you about that.”

Bridget looked away. I didn’t know whether to
take her gesture as confirmation that she did know about my
psyche’s collapse, or whether she felt any measure of guilt for
pulling me into the darkness of my past deeds.

“Photography opened a door to get away from
all that. It didn't restore me, but it did give me one way to look
for light,” I said. “In fact, it literally forces you to seek it,
and not just light. It has to be good light. Light that contrasts
against darkness and shadow, and I guess in that sense you’re not
ignoring darkness altogether, are you?”

“I guess not,” she put in, still looking into
the distance.

I looked in that direction, too, and found
that grove of Joshuas standing there, framed against the San
Jacinto mountains beyond the desert valley.

“I like photography because it makes me stop
and notice the things that really matter. It forces me to avoid
ignoring beauty, so that I don't bury my head in the sand and fail
to see all that's good and lovely.”

Bridget didn’t answer and kept her eyes
focused far away.

“You know why I agreed to do your interview?”
I asked.

She turned to face me and only now did I
notice the glint of tear-filled eyes.

I said, “Because you're beautiful, and I
thought that the possibility of taking your portrait, even if you
probably need nothing of the sort, maybe that would help me uncover
more beauty, more of what's lovely in life.”

“Well, that almost worked,” she said.

“For a few fateful hours it did.”

“Come on, Andre. We can solve this, you and
I,” she pleaded, but I heard neither resolve nor conviction in her
voice.

“Some things have no solution, none that we'd
like to accept,” I replied. “I do know I want you to stay alive.” I
leaned in until my lips were no more than two inches from her ear.
She tensed up but did not withdraw. “Stay alive and free. Please,
Bridget. Alive and beautiful. You have so much going for you, and
there's so much you can do instead of this. All of it better, all
of it brighter. Find it, Bridget. Find it and bask in it.”

“Does that mean I walk away from you too?”
she whispered.

I weighed my answer and could not tell her
anything but, “Run, don’t walk.”

“What happens now?” she asked, moving away
from me.

I gave her the space she needed and said,
“Last contact they have on us, we were headed north on the 15.
They’re probably looking for us in Vegas.”

“And that helps us how?”

“We have a few days to stay lost. To be on
our own, lost but finding beauty. Just you and I. Does that sound
like something you’d like to do?”

“Sure. I’ll have to find a way to let my
network honchos know I’m not missing, kidnapped by some nut.”

“I might have to do something like it on my
end, to avoid panic.”

“What will you tell them?” she asked. “That
you have me well under control, that there has been no spill, and
that there won’t be any? All is contained. I am contained?”

Now it was my turn to look at the far away
mountains. “Are you? Contained, I mean?”

"I don't see much of a choice."

"I'll guess I go with that, then," I said.
"Let them know all is quiet on the Suarez front."

“So we still have that little bit of
ugliness. We can’t quite escape it, even out here in the midst of
all this beauty.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Shadow against light.
Light against shadow.”

Bridget took my chin in her hand to turn my
face toward her. She kissed me. When our lips parted she said, “I
guess we can go on enjoying the back-lighting a little longer.”

This time I pulled her to me. As we kissed, I
wondered whether the light we spoke about counted as good or bad
light or lighting at all. I concluded I'd dealt with enough deep
questions for one day even if that meant I ended up doing nothing
better than bask in the cool of the shadows.