Hard Light (17 page)

We walked on, hunched against the cold. The whirling snow smelled of gasoline. A few people hurried past us, businessmen and women ill-prepared for the storm. Belstaff overcoats stained with slush, spines poking through broken umbrellas like the vestigial fingers of bats. Overhead, helicopters droned as distant sirens echoed through the financial canyons. From the corner of my eye I glimpsed flashing blue and red lights that never materialized into a police car. It was like Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
filtered through a Lexus commercial.

After several blocks Quinn turned and headed toward a shimmering skyscraper, its roofline fan-shaped. Rows of phenyl-blue LEDs cascaded down its facade like rain.

“I have a bolt hole here,” he said as we approached the entrance. Behind its glass walls stretched a lobby that might have been a screenshot from a computer game, with floors, walls, and ceiling all the same shade of azure. Quinn withdrew a key card and slid it into a glowing blue slot. He withdrew the card, touched the glass door, and we entered.

 

20

Inside, the illusion of being inside a gigantic video game gave way to one of freefall. A young security guard sat behind a stainless steel desk that reflected the enveloping blue. He glanced up from a monitor as we headed toward the elevators. I thought he'd stop us, but he only nodded.

“Evening, Ron,” called Quinn.

“Good evening, Mr. Bogart.”

The guard turned back to his screen. Once inside the elevator, I looked at Quinn and laughed. “Mr. Bogart?”

“Trust me, he's never heard of him.”

We got out of the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor. Quinn hurried down the empty corridor, stopped at a door, and fumbled with a keycard. A green light flashed: He quickly punched numbers into a keypad, opened the door, and pulled me inside.

For an instant the room around us was dark. Then hidden lights slowly brightened, revealing chrome-and-glass furniture, a black leather modular couch, a glossy black marble floor, and cement-colored walls. Windows overlooked Canary Wharf, that silver tower looming above it all like a rocket poised for launch. The flat's gray walls were empty, except for a single small drawing that looked like it might be a Mike Kelley. I stepped toward the windows and heard the almost subliminal hum of an air purification system. Otherwise it was deathly quiet.

“Who lives here?”

“My son,” Quinn said, and walked behind a stainless steel kitchen island.

“Your
son
?”

“He works for Clearstream. That's in One Canada Square, so he really
is
insane. He spends most of his time in Italy. This is his crash pad when he's in London.”

I continued to stare at him. “You have a son?”

Quinn removed two glasses from a cabinet, opened a bottle of Scotch, and filled each of them, then returned to the living room and handed one to me. “Cheers.”

He swallowed most of his Scotch and gazed out at the fractured skyline. Helicopters buzzed between neon towers and steel canyons, searchlights igniting the falling snow so it looked like embers.

“This always reminds me of
Blade Runner
, you know? I keep looking for the blimps advertising the Offworld Colonies.” He turned to me and sighed. “Christ, Cass. Yeah, I have a son.”

“How old is he?”

“Thirty-two. No, wait—thirty-three.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“What, during one of those heart-to-hearts we had over the last thirty years?” He stared at me, his pale eyes gin-clear. “You dropped off the map when I did time, Cass. It never crossed my mind to tell you anything.”

I wrenched my gaze from his and stared out the window. “I never stopped thinking of you.”

I heard him walk back to the kitchen and refill his glass. When he returned he stood beside me, his gaze fixed on the snow-filled sky.

“I was only with her for a summer. In Berlin, before I went to Oslo to work with Anton. She didn't tell me till after he was born.” He took a swig of his drink. “Europeans.”

“Did you care?”

“That she didn't tell me? No. That I had a kid?” He shrugged. “I saw him a few times when he was growing up. Tossed some money to them when I could. It's not like I was a role model, you know? I've spent more time with him now that he's grown. He's good with money. He bought this place a couple years ago and gave me a key when he visited me in Reykjavík.”

I said nothing. After a long silence he downed his Scotch. “I'll see if I can rustle up some grub.”

I drank while he rummaged through the kitchen. The place was small but probably cost a thousand pounds a square foot to build and furnish. Big flatscreen TV, expensive speakers hooked up to an iPod dock. A silver-framed photograph of a young man and an attractive Asian woman standing on the Millennium Bridge. The young man looked shorter than Quinn and more compact, but he had his father's pale eyes and the same grim set to his mouth. The spartan bedroom had a vertiginous view of the financial canyon; also a painting of
Star Trek
's Sulu by Mr. Brainwash.

I didn't see a single book anywhere, not even a magazine. The flat looked like a carefully appointed residence designed for the dead: a twenty-first-century tomb in a glass-and-steel pyramid. Millennia from now, an excavation would suggest that the Isle of Dogs had been a necropolis.

Back in the kitchen, Quinn had cobbled together a meal from spaghetti, some olives, and a tin of anchovies. He'd also found a good bottle of 2005 Medoc.

“Bruno got a deal on a case,” Quinn said as he refilled my glass.

“Your son's name is Bruno?”

“Nothing to do with me.”

We ate without talking much. The truth was, we'd never talked much. Quinn had never been what you'd call a conversationalist. I'd always sensed him as something subcutaneous, a tremor just beneath my skin; less a real person than the distillation of an emotion I couldn't put a name to. Photographing him obsessively was almost like having sex with him: It replaced the need for words, or maybe it just was another way for us both to avoid them.

After we ate, I cleaned up while he opened his laptop on the couch and scrolled through local news.

“No mention of Poppy showing up dead.” He closed the computer and stood. “Which doesn't necessarily mean anything.”

“Maybe no one'll report her missing till Sunday.”

“Maybe.” He took out his mobile and headed into the bedroom. “I have to make a few calls.”

I briefly debated whether I should try to eavesdrop on his conversation. Whatever Quinn was up to, I probably didn't want to know. After a few minutes, he came back into the living room.

“C'mon,” he said, and put his arm around me.

We went to bed. With the lamp off, ghostly bluish spiders seemed to crawl across our skin, the wash of searchlights from helicopters that droned above Canary Wharf.

“What's this?” Quinn touched one of the bone discs that nestled between my breasts. “Bad luck charm?”

He pulled me to him, the map of scars across his chest cool beneath my fingertips. I pressed my palm against the raised imprint left by a brand, three interlocking skeletal hands with a death's head between them: the Gripping Beast. When he came, it tasted like bitter almond.

“Cassie,” he whispered, and drew me to him till our foreheads touched. “I love you.”

“Quinn,” I whispered back, and held him so tightly my arms ached.

I watched him sleep, arms crossed upon his chest and head half turned, listening for some dreaded sound even while dreaming. In the snow-splintered light, his scars and tattoos and scarifications rendered him into something not quite human, a white clay effigy or a mummy, beautiful and unearthly. I slipped from bed and got my Konica and reloaded it, removed the lens cap and adjusted the settings without looking down. My fingers knew the camera as well as they knew the topography of Quinn's flesh.

I crouched beside the bed and shot the entire roll of film. My last two rolls had been lost to misadventure. I still had a small stash of Tri-X in the freezer back in New York, but that was it. Black-and-white film is as antiquated as daguerreotype now. You can buy it online, but it's difficult to process unless you have your own darkroom or mail it off somewhere. I didn't know how these photos would come out under such low light, using a long exposure. But I was spooked at the thought of losing all my film, and even more spooked at the thought of losing a chance to shoot Quinn.

I had just settled onto the floor when the window erupted into a milky blue flash as another searchlight strobed past. Quinn's mouth parted; his eyes fluttered open then closed. I hit the shutter release.

The room plunged back into near-darkness. I heard the helicopter's engine, barely louder than the hum of the air exchange system. Quinn sighed and turned onto his side, fists pressed against his chest. I set my camera on the nightstand, stood and watched him sleep, the pulse of blood beneath his temple and the fleeting play of light across his face.

A flicker of the same despair I'd felt outside Poppy's flat overcame me. The world I knew was dying, and nothing I could do with a battered camera and some grains of silver nitrate would keep it from crumbling into ash and bone. No photograph of Quinn, no matter how perfectly timed to capture light and shadow, the intake of a silent breath, would ever bring back the damaged boy I'd known before prison—and whatever came after—had devoured him.

Tears stung my eyes. I raked my nails across my thigh, let the pain flood my thoughts until nothing else remained. I pulled on Quinn's worn flannel shirt, walked into the kitchen, and poured myself a glass of Scotch. I got my bag and settled on the couch, took out the copy of
Monsters and Madonnas
and opened it to the frontispiece. Someone had written an inscription in faded blue fountain-pen ink.

For my dearest Papaver, something to haunt your dreams. Lovingly, Leith

I took a swallow of Scotch, read the inscription again.

Lovingly, Leith

A hail of fragmented memories across my mind's eye: the image of a teenage Morven, the brutal light scraping youth from her face. She might have been carved from sandstone. Adrian Carlisle. Poppy's husky voice, singing.

“The wind, the wind, the wind blows high

Ash comes falling from the sky

And all the children say they'll die

For want of the Golden City.

I pulled out the photograph I'd found in Poppy's office and stared at the wreckage of Kethelwite Manor.

Of course Mallo and Leith were like brothers.

I grabbed Quinn's laptop, typed in
kethelwite leith thaumatrope,
and stared at what popped onto the screen.

Leith Carlisle, British cinematographer best known for his sole directorial effort, experimental film
Thanatrope
[1974], and the disastrous fire that claimed the lives of several of the movie's cast and crew members.

“Gotcha,” I said.

 

21

I leaned back and sipped my Scotch. I remembered
Thanatrope
. It had tanked on its initial UK release, and played in the U.S. for about fifteen minutes before it was yanked from theaters. Even art houses refused to show it, after viewers vomited during the film and demanded their money back.

I first saw it at the Thalia in 1978.
Thanatrope
owed a lot to Kenneth Anger's wacked-out occult flicks, also to Jack Smith's
Flaming Creatures,
the movie that gave Poppy and her groupie friends their nickname.

Most of all,
Thanatrope
owed a lot to LSD. The movie was shot at that confluence of counterculture, cinema, and hallucinogenics when a lot of really bad ideas looked like harbingers of a new age in human consciousness. For every
El Topo,
you'd get
Manos: The Hands of Fate,
or
Invasion of the Blood Farmers,
a flick that cost twenty-five grand to make and has yet to earn back its advance.

Leith Carlisle's bad idea had been to re-create, on film, what he imagined the ebbing consciousness of a dying person would look and sound like. He'd read a
Scientific American
article stating that human brain cells continued to fire for forty-five minutes after death and decided to replicate the experience on film. You can see how this might have been difficult to pitch to a major studio, though perhaps not to a roomful of tripping film school grads.

But Carlisle had worked as a cinematographer with guys like Carol Reed and Nicolas Roeg. He was friends with Donald Cammell, who got funding for
Performance,
a movie famously pitched to Warner Bros. as a Swinging London comedy like
A Hard Day's Night.
Carlisle couldn't get backing for his own movie, but he'd filmed some of Pink Floyd's early shows at the Marquee and hung out with a lot of rock stars, including the members of Lavender Rage. He was good-looking, confident in the rakish way of someone who has a safety net.

That would be his wife: the eccentric aristo Tamsin Gregollan, who claimed she'd been deflowered by Salvador Dali and carried a stuffed badger in a fire-engine-red Kelly bag. Leith and Tamsin met at a party at Cotchford Farm, just weeks before Brian Jones drowned in the swimming pool there. She was the only daughter of minor gentry who'd made their fortune in tin, thirty-four years old to Leith's twenty-eight. They married just a few weeks later, and after a long honeymoon in Tangiers, split their time between Tamsin's digs in Kensington and Kethelwite Manor, an Elizabethan manor house in Cornwall.

A statuesque redhead who once punched out Eric Clapton for being mean to Pattie Boyd, Tamsin was an early 1970s figure who had an even shorter shelf life than the Flaming Creatures. I scrolled through Leith Carlisle's Wiki and found only a brief mention of her. Same when I trolled the 'net. There were interviews and photos of Leith, a handsome, tanned white man who showed a lot of teeth when he smiled.