The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Hand
Cover design by David Litman
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Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes, translation by Richard Howard, translation copyright ©1981 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Used by permission.
ISBN 978-0-316-48592-0
LCCN 2020934680
E3-20200828-NF-DA-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE: LONDON Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
PART TWO: KALKÖ Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Other Books by Elizabeth Hand
To Henry Wessells, bibliophile and gentleman,
With love and thanks for introducing
me to an advanced philosophical artifact
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For Death must be somewhere in a society…perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life…Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print.
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
PART ONE
LONDON
Chapter 1
Much of the Tube was still shut down. Another car had plowed through a Go Happy London! tour group the day before, this time near Tower Bridge. I’d taken the night train from Penzance, nodding off between shots of Jack Daniel’s before trying to resurrect my amphetamine jag with one of the Vyvanse I’d stolen a few days earlier. I overheard news of the attack from two train staff who stood beside the door as we pulled into Paddington.
“They’ll be coming after us next.” One of the uniformed women shook her head, her face pale from exhaustion.
Her colleague nodded. “That’s what I been telling my kids. Get out while you can.”
Inside the station, I pushed my way through crowds of people who stared hypnotized at their mobiles, or gazed in dismay at the images flashing across TV news feeds. More EU trauma, domestic terrorists here and in the U.S., images of rural food shortages and disintegrating governments on both sides of the Atlantic. The few people who took notice of me veered away.
I didn’t blame them. I was gaunt and red-eyed from sleeplessness, wearing a battered black leather jacket and even more battered steel-tipped Tony Lamas, with a barely healed scar on one cheek and another scar, star shaped, beside my eye. Forty years ago, you might have thought I was a rock star after a bad night. Now I looked like what I was: an aging punk jonesing for a drink and a handful of black beauties.
Outside the station, the people around me didn’t look much better. Shuffling hordes of black-clad commuters; a displaced army of homeless people dressed in black plastic trash bags that served as makeshift rain gear. Once, I might have seen the bleak light leaking from their eyes and photographed it. Now, the thought of my camera made me clutch the satchel that no longer held it.
Despair overwhelmed me like a fever. My old Konica, a seventeenth-birthday gift from my father, was gone, along with most of the stash of Tri-X film I’d carried like a talisman for years. I’d ditched camera and film impulsively the night before, back in rural Cornwall. Now in the broken-glass light of a London morning, the enormity of what I’d done made me sick.
I hurried down the street and into Paddington Underground, grabbed a free copy of the Metro from a guy bundled up like a refugee from the Shackleton voyage. His breath misted the air as he bellowed, “Terror suspect still at large! Secret neo-Nazi rally! New China virus named.” Just in case I couldn’t read the headlines on the placard beside him.
I scanned the paper as I waited for the train. The virus was long-running news by now, source of a constant simmering dread slow to abate. There was still only speculation about whoever had rammed the van into the crowd. The main articles were about a white supremacist gathering in East London and the even more dire situation back in the U.S., where two shooters wearing MAGA caps had burst into a sanctuary-city meeting in Portland, Maine, and killed two city council members along with representatives of the refugee community.
I barely skimmed th
e piece. I’m like one of those artificial ecosystems that creates its own bad weather: I don’t need to read about the rest of the world’s.
On page 5, I finally found the headline I was looking for: CROUCH END TRIPLE MURDERER STILL ON THE LOOSE. The killings were thought to be drug and perhaps gang related. No mention of me or any other suspects, so I made my way to King’s Cross.
I wandered through the construction zone surrounding the station, until I found a side street where nondescript row houses had been converted into cheap tourist hotels with names like Hail Britannia and Windsor Arms. I settled on the Royal Garden, which was neither but cost only sixty-five quid a night.
I paid cash and went upstairs. The room was small and dank and, despite the NO SMOKING sign propped on the rickety side table, reeked of cigarettes and roach spray. I was so beat, I wouldn’t have cared if I’d caught a roach puffing away on a Marlboro. I dropped my bag, pulled off my cowboy boots and tossed them into a corner, lifted my head, and saw my face reflected in a mottled mirror above the nightstand.
Along with my camera, my straw-blond hair was gone—I’d hacked it off, then dyed it black. I was a person of interest in several countries, but the passports I carried—my own and one nicked from a Swedish junkie named Dagney, who bore a passing resemblance to me—showed a six-foot blonde.
At the moment, I needed to distance myself from both of those women. I couldn’t do anything about my height, but the rest could be dealt with, given enough makeup and a decent hairstylist. I combed my fingers through my ragged hair and shrugged out of my leather jacket.
For a few minutes I sat, trying to ignore the black sparks that spun across my vision, like specks on damaged film stock. They’d started after I first arrived in London a week before. I finally popped two Xanax from the stash of stolen pharmaceuticals in my bag, and collapsed into bed.
I woke to the sound of sirens and the brass-knuckled thump of bass from a car blasting grime in the street below. Ashen light filtered through the window. I clutched the coverlet around me as I sat up, still groggy from the Xanax. The digital clock beside the bed read 1:32 p.m. I had to keep moving. I took a shower, changed into a moth-eaten black cashmere sweater and black jeans, unpacked my bag, and took stock of its contents on the rumpled bed.
A dozen pill bottles stolen from the medicine cabinet of a small-time gangster in Crouch End, one of the three dead mentioned in the Metro. A couple of striped boatneck shirts. Socks and underwear, another worn cashmere sweater, some T-shirts, all black. Two passports, my own and Dagney Ahlstrand’s. A UK mobile phone that wasn’t mine. Finally, a wallet containing my New York driver’s license, a thousand euros, and the black-and-white photo I’d taken of the teenage Quinn O’Boyle back when “Walk on the Wild Side” first burned up the airwaves.
Even now, decades later, that photo made me shiver. Quinn had been the one constant in my life since we were lovers back in high school. He’d been my first muse, the boy whose face I still saw when I closed my eyes, the face I imagined when I stared through a camera’s lens. We’d lost touch after he went to prison in the late 1970s.
For years, I thought Quinn was dead. We had reconnected just months ago, after I tracked him down in Reykjavík. Seeing him again had broken some kind of psychic ice dam—thirty-plus years’ worth of emotions flooded me, everything I’d successfully frozen with alcohol and drugs.
And now Quinn was gone again. Three days earlier, he’d left the Canary Wharf flat where we’d briefly sought refuge, before my ill-fated excursion to Cornwall. Since then I’d had no message from him, no email, no phone call. Nothing but a two-word text message Quinn sent to someone else, after I’d last seen him:
rotherhithe darwin
Rotherhithe was in East London. Quinn had told me he knew a guy there who was supposed to help us get out of the country without running afoul of the authorities. But I’d never been to Rotherhithe, and I had no clue as to what “darwin” might mean.
I removed the old photo and stared at it, drew it to my face and inhaled, as though his scent might be imprinted there, some molecular code I could break that would help me find him. I smelled nothing but the hotel’s cheap carnation soap and the chemical tang of my own fear.
I slid the photo back into my wallet, finished dressing, and stood. I kept five hundred euros in my wallet. The rest I sealed in a ziplock bag that I shoved into the bottom of my right boot, along with my U.S. passport. I zipped up my leather jacket and headed downstairs.
Outside, the cold wind froze my damp hair into stiff spikes. As the Xanax I’d taken wore off, paranoia and anxiety filtered back into my nervous system. I walked fast, boot heels echoing along the sidewalk, turned onto a crowded street. My hand moved reflexively toward my chest, reaching for the camera that was no longer there. I fought waves of vertigo by focusing on the only other thing that had ever made me feel alive—my obsessive love for Quinn, an emotion as corrosive as battery acid.
At the corner, people swathed in overcoats and scarves waited for the light to change, mobiles glowing in their hands. I didn’t realize I was talking to myself until a woman stared at me, wide-eyed, then edged away. I cursed under my breath, elbowed my way to the curb to join the flow of commuters headed toward King’s Cross, and finally halted in front of a hair salon.
Pink LED lights blazed from behind a wall of glass. Inside, banks of mirrors created an infinity of blondes in chrome chairs, all waiting to be young again. I felt a twinge of envy that these women could let themselves believe in such a futile ritual, if only for an hour.
A skinny white guy with long platinum hair glanced at the window. His eyes flashed disgust as he clocked me, then turned back to his customer. I shoved my hand into my pocket, touching my wallet, hefted my bag, and walked in.
Vintage Daft Punk blasted from the sound system. A young woman at the reception desk looked up from her mobile, displaying a Medusa’s nest of snakes tattooed on her neck.
I said, “I’d like to get a trim.”
Medusa’s gaze flickered from me to the guy with the platinum hair. Almost imperceptibly he shook his head. The woman pursed lips glossy as pomegranate syrup and shrugged. “I’m sorry, do you have an appointment? We’re fully booked.”
I cocked my head toward the front window. “Sign says walk-ins welcome. And that looks like an empty chair over there.”
“I know, but we’re booked. Fully booked.”
As my foot tapped at the faux-marble floor, a wad of brown hair stuck to the steel tip of my cowboy boot. I bent to pluck the mouse-colored clump and held it up, peering at it intently as I raised my voice.
“Oh my god, is that what I think it is?”
Several heads swiveled to stare as I extended the hand with the offending hair, as though holding a dead rodent. A redheaded woman craned her neck, horrified.
“Todd?” The receptionist called imploringly to the platinum blond whose mouth had become a perfect O of dismay. Before he could say a word, a woman stylist darted toward me.
“I’ll take care of this.” She touched my hand with one silvery fingernail, gesturing toward the back of the salon. “I’m Troya. Did you have something in mind?”
Half an hour later my ragged hair was a more polished version of the same, Chrissie Hynde circa 1981.
“This really makes your eyes pop,” Troya said as we regarded my reflection in the mirror.
I couldn’t imagine who would think that was a good thing. Still, I tipped her fifty pounds, making sure that Medusa and Todd got an eyeful.
“Where’s the ladies’?” I asked.
Troya pointed toward the back of the room. As I headed there, I passed a counter crowded with hair products and noted a Mulberry bag gaping open to display its contents. Wallet, cosmetics bag, hairbrush, an iPad mini. In the restroom I splashed some water on my face and swallowed another Vyvanse. I only had a few left, medicinal speed similar to Ritalin. Not much kick but better than nothing. On my way back out, I nicked the cosmetics case from the Mulberry ha
ndbag, dropped it into my satchel, and headed onto the street.
A few doors down was a high-end boutique where I dropped a wad on a black cashmere hoodie and slouchy black leather bag soft as a baby’s instep. Next: Tesco, where I bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
Finally I returned to my hotel room, hurrying through streets slick with rain. I peeled off my worn sweater and replaced it with the one I’d just bought. I cracked the bottle of whiskey, did a pop, and checked out the cosmetics bag.
It was a good score—Charlotte Tilbury mascara and eyeliner, a shade of frosted lipstick called Poison Pearl, some Touche Éclat concealer, an enameled compact with a mirror and a reservoir for loose face powder. Stuff that would have cost a hundred quid if I’d bought it in Selfridges.
I don’t bother with much makeup—who’s going to believe I’m on the south side of forty, or even fifty? Still, I used the concealer on the star-shaped scar beside my eye, a reminder of a bad time I’d had three months earlier. Wincing, I took on the barely healed gash below it, sustained during my more recent, near-fatal trip to the Icelandic wilderness. When I finished touching up the scars, I made use of the eyeliner and mascara and Poison Pearl. I surveyed myself in the mirror.
I’ve spent the last thirty years looking like my own ghost. There was nothing to be done about my gaunt face and the dead, ice-gray gaze that people would cross the street to avoid. Still, if I was a living ghost, so were most of the people I saw walking the Lower East Side, filing in and out of the boutiques and high-end bars that had replaced CBGB and Brownies. If they weren’t lining up outside burnt-out tenements for a hit, it was because they no longer needed to. Their suppliers had medical degrees. Mine couldn’t afford to finish Bergen Community College.
But it’s impressive what you can do with a good haircut and concealer that costs as much as a decent bottle of cabernet. I got a towel and did what I could to clean my boots. Then I carefully transferred everything from my worn satchel to the leather bag I’d just bought, including the now-empty satchel. Last of all I knocked back another mouthful of whiskey, and put the bottle of Jack Daniel’s where I could reach it easily in the bag. I scanned the room to see if there was anything worth stealing.