Photographic (2 page)

The road was coming to an end and he hadn’t gotten to the best part of his reminiscences. He was having such a good time thinking about the trip they’d taken years ago right after they were married, and reliving moments on a different moped, different island, he kept right on past the trees and followed the coast road down the peninsula. 

Being away, it was strange; sometimes he wondered if the woman he was with in his mind existed at all. He remembered and relived parts of their history together. It was his way of staying connected to her. Maybe it wasn’t a realistic idea of their love he projected into his mind. Once she’d told him that. The woman he imagined was the one who visited him in his dreams, night and day. If it wasn’t Jane, who was she?

His wife today, well, she wasn’t quite the woman he’d married. She didn’t seem to consider him quite the same man, either. Things had changed. A child. The months and months apart when he was working. He fed himself with memories. The present was too sere to yield much fruit. 

After the replay of vivid memory, including the part after the dismount, he turned back around and found the spot he figured he was meant to find. Hiking though the brush he found some promising scrubby trees and set to on the first one. It was tougher stuff than he anticipated, his axe striking thin chips away. Shrugging loose his shoulders he dug his feet in and hacked into the wood rhythmically, swinging up and around, using the full arc of his shoulders to cut into the same spot each time. At last he was through and the dense little tree fell over slowly, as if it had to think about it first. He stood breathing, his shirt dampening with sweat. He wiped his face with dry shirttail and went on to the next.

It was the work of the morning to cut enough. He figured he would build the structure and then cover the roof with a waterproof tarp and lay more branches on top of that. He had thought about transporting the trees the old island way, with a burro. The shopkeepers doubtless knew someone who had one. But while the verisimilitude was tempting, it would take too long, and he wanted to sleep out tonight. He rode the moped back to the small, family-run hotel where he was staying and asked the owner if he could borrow his small truck. Mr. Stanos offered to drive.

“I am happy to do. I take you where you want. The caves,” he made a specific expression with his mouth that Ian took to indicate quality. “Very good.”

It took some convincing for the man to consider lending Ian the truck outright, which was what he wanted, to keep his hidden spot secret a little longer. He was sure an island of this size, a village of this sides, had very few secrets for long.

“
Ohi
,
ohi
…” Mr. Stanos spoke in rapid Greek.

Ian dug through his wallet and slid out his International and US licenses. “I’ll pay you for the time, the fuel.”

“Wait one moments.” Mr. Stanos walked back behind his standing reception desk into the family apartment on the ground floor of the hotel. He was back in a couple of minutes with a small stack of magazines which he placed on the tall desk between them. Mr. Stanos regarded the magazines with apparent distaste. 

“These, my daughter’s. She likes you in those movies. Big movie star. Right? This here.” He looked through his reading glasses at the picture on the cover of one of the magazines and back at Ian to compare. He shrugged. 

“Eh. She is away at school. She is a very smart girl. She will go to University.” This with a piercing gaze to discourage any designs Ian might have on a good girl’s infatuation with him.

Ian watched Mr. Stanos struggle with his next move. As a proud man, he didn’t want to ask another man to sign his name to silly magazines he didn’t approve of. He may have had other reasons for disliking Ian. Who knew what he’d heard. Ian took the stack of magazines and a pen and began signing, his own face staring up at him from a variety of angles and poses. 

Everyone he met, so many who had been exposed to the global media contagion, as he liked to think of it, had caught the virus; they had been exposed to him, again and again and again, over and over until he had split in two: himself and his image. 

At first there were just the two, he thought, he and his image, as he dug the pen into the shiny, almost fluorescently bright covers of the teen magazines. They were heartthrob covers, embarrassing but no more so than some of the more sophisticated fashion magazines which always chose the poutiest photo for the cover out of a hundred images shot in a session. Publicists and stylists had manipulated his image, kicked it up into the air and twirled it with their feet, kept it spinning, pop, spin, reverse, pedal pedal pedal, boot, until--splat, he was reborn. The manufactured movie icon. Movicon. 

They weren’t satisfied with that. It was no longer just he, Ian, the real person, and Ian Reilly, the movie star and cultural icon; the identity of Mr. I. Reilly had fractured and multiplied countless times due to the media outlets disseminating images, every one slightly different. Each one as real or unreal as the last. None of them quite correct, but could he say any of them weren’t he? It was his face, his name. Wherever they chose to show his face, a price would be charged, the dollar sign attached. He had signed up for this. Would anyone in his right mind do the same, if he knew? If he had known, would he still have followed this path? 

Most days lately, the answer plagued his waking thoughts. Not being able to climb out of his skin and exist, without notice, often without harassment, cost more than he could bear to pay, lately. Was it really worth it? At least here, on this island, he would be left in relative peace. This was nothing. He scrawled his name on his faces, covering as much of each picture as he could with the black mark of his signature, obliterating his image as he autographed it. Ian finished the stack and pushed it toward Mr. Stanos. Now he’d have the truck to himself, and sold only a small part of himself for it. 

Evening come, transport of trees concluded, Mr. Stanos got behind the wheel and dropped Ian off at a nearby, false location so even the hotel proprietor would be in the dark for the time being. Ian worked on preparing limbs in the cove after the short hike and descent into his little realm. He propped a tree up on two boulders and chopped it in half. A fire flickered off to one side. 

The last rays of the sun had not yet retreated fully into the horizon. Long shadows stretched across the sand, darkening the scooped indentations of his footsteps. A scrambling sound warned him of someone scrambling down the rocks into the cove.

CHAPTER THREE

C
LUTCHING
THE
PAPER
, Jane ran off the drive, into the avenue. She crouched behind one of the wide protective oaks, and thought. What if it was someone deranged, someone after Ian, who hadn’t seen him here, so now was taking potshots—or stranger still, someone after her? She tried to focus on where the noise had come from. It had definitely been the cluster of trees by the gate. Close to where the birds had taken flight. She got her breathing under control and stuck her head out, squinting into the trees. 

She argued with herself for an uncomfortable thirty seconds. She was damned if a phantom noise was going to scare her to ground on her own property. Was she going to start going around armed next, or hire a patrol? In seven years they’d never had a problem. That time when they first moved in hardly counted. This was ridiculous. Depositing the paper at the foot of the tree, she crept forward, darting from tree to tree in the avenue, closer to the gate. She still didn’t see anything. Was she crazy? What the hell was it? At last she was almost to the small grove of trees. She hid behind a bush near the beginning of the copse, parted some foliage, and looked up. Someone was perched, high up, in one of the old oaks. Electricity flashed through her, scalp to fingertips. She put her hand over her mouth.

A gleam of light flashed from the tree, reflecting off a round, mirrored surface. Jane felt a click of recognition. Her shoulders dropped and she let her head fall forward. It was one of
them
. The moment of release was short-lived as she thought of confronting a stranger, throwing him off the property. He didn’t have the kind of weapon that shot holes in you. No. He had an entirely different device in his arsenal. There was no way out of it now. 

She got up out of the bush and strode over to the big oak. She stood at the base of the trunk gazing up at the trespasser. Although he wore what looked like camouflage, his shape was ill-concealed once she knew where to look: the open, wide-reaching branches of the oak proffered few lower leaf clusters to disguise him, the cloud of leaves all concentrated at the ends of the great spreading branches. Sprawled lengthwise like a sunning Chilean jaguar, he must have snapped one of the branches while scrambling for a foothold on his limb. He wasn’t moving an inch. She stood staring up at him. He made a small grunt and gave up the pretense, starting a hesitant descent from his position twenty-five feet in the air. It was a huge-trunked, lofty tree, with comfortable forking branches at considerable height but without any footholds for climbing. Jane didn’t see how he’d got up there without equipment. Maybe he’d brought equipment. Unbelievable.

As he shimmied further down the tree, the front of his jacket snagged on something and hampered his progress. He wasn’t a very big man. Then Jane got a good look and realized she’d been mistaken; it was a woman, rigged up in a camouflage hat and jacket. The woman struggled to free herself, flailing like a fish on a hook, but couldn’t maneuver because of the backpack and the camera, the one with the tell-tale lens gleam, hanging off one shoulder. She was still a good twenty feet up.

Jane moved to stand beneath her. "Who are you?"

A brief silence. "Marta." 

“Drop your stuff.” 

"So you can stomp it."

"I might." She held her arms out, as winded as if she’d run for miles, having burned through all the adrenalin her body had to spare.

“No way.” The woman panted from her struggle. 

Jane gaped up at her. “You’re not in a position to argue, are you?”

Marta clung to the tree, muttering. She shrugged one arm out of a strap of the backpack and transferred the heavy camera from one shoulder to the other. There was a rustle and the flap of material and something dark and huge plunged down. Jane lurched away from the trajectory of Marta’s body, now in a heap at her feet. Everything was frozen and still.

Marta rolled on the ground. She made a sound like an animal.

Jane crouched down next to her. “Are you okay?”

“Damn, damn, damn.” 

She saw Marta’s camera on the ground next to her, the overgrown lens in one piece, broken from the body of the camera. Jane almost said, “Sorry,” but thought better of it. 

Marta wore a cap with flaps over the ears and a kerchief around her neck. Out for a day of hunting. Her heart-shaped face was the only uncovered part of her body. We’re the prey, Jane thought, looking at her get-up. A foreign and insidious predator. This had never happened when Ian was gone. They seemed to know when Ian wasn’t there, so they didn’t bother coming.

She sat huddled on the ground, holding the two pieces of the camera together as if they were whole.

“Are you hurt?”

“This can’t be fixed.” Marta cradled the camera. She darted a look at Jane. Her dark, slanting eyebrows were drawn close together. “My ankle.”

Jane eyed the camera. She took a breath and looked through the gate, out at the road. “How’d you get here?” 

“I drove. It’s the only way to get to the boonies.”

“Can you get yourself back out?”

“I don’t know. It’s my right foot.”

Jane looked back up the drive, to the house peeping through the trees. “I thought you might have a gun.”

Marta set the pieces on the ground. “Why would I have a gun?”

“Why would you have a camera?”

Marta shrugged and fiddled with her lens. “I think you know.”

“What am I supposed to do with you?”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

“I can imagine. We’ll have to go back to the house.” Jane picked up the backpack. She unzipped it and held it open. Marta put the parts inside. Jane slung the pack over her shoulder and held out her hand. Marta took it and pulled herself up. She put her arm over Jane’s shoulder, and they started up the drive.

Getting out of the truck, up the steps, and into the house was a painstaking business. Anything that touched her ankle or leg sent spasms through her. They hobbled through the front hall and living room into the kitchen. Jane pulled out a couple of chairs. Marta sat down with a sigh and propped up her leg.

Jane untied the black tennis shoe, removing it and her sock with care. "Your ankle might be broken. You need an X-ray.” Jane turned away to get ice from the freezer, turning the cubes upside down over the plastic ice bin, where they rested whole and interconnected until she tapped them with the ice scoop. They shattered, the sound cacophonous in the silent kitchen. Once she had corralled the cubes into a plastic bag, she wrapped a thin tea towel around it and draped the pack over Marta’s ankle. “I don’t know if that’s going to stay.”

“It’s fine.”

“I know." She ducked into the front hall. As she hunted for a wrapping for Marta’s foot, she felt a light-heartedness bubble up inside, a pleasure at doing something different, helping someone. She stood for a moment in the shadows of the hallway, her hand on the silken fabric she was looking for. She pulled the scarf out from a stack of other scarves, gloves and hats, and wound it around her hand. Was even a tabloid photographer company? Returning to the kitchen, more subdued, she knelt by Marta. 

“Here.” Jane tied the pale yellow scarf around the ice pack and ankle so it would stay in place.

“That’s very pretty.”

“Thanks.” She smoothed it and got up, leaning on the chair. “I’ll take you to the urgent care. You’ll need that looked at. You can’t drive.”

Marta shook her head. “You know what? I’m so tired right now. If you don’t mind, I’d really rather stay for a little while and rest with my foot up. I’ve got the ice. I’m okay. If you don’t mind.”