Death Valley E-Book

Susan Perly

• Herausgeber: Buckrider Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Love is complicated. It’s 2006 and Vivienne Pink, a photojournalist with an eye for war, is flying to Las Vegas to capture images of servicemen deploying for combat in Iraq. Together with her novelist husband and their housemate, an intelligence operative, Vivienne plans a side trip to Death Valley to confront an old enemy, but her scheme is soon complicated by a handsome young soldier on his way to war and a retired counterterrorism agent wearing a bird suit. Together they begin an atomic road trip through empty canyons, old film locations and the Nevada desert’s nuclear test site, where reality shifts like sand beneath their feet. This is Death Valley, and the fallout is hilarious and harrowing.

Leseprobe

About the Book

“Reading Death Valley is like going on a road trip into the hallucinatory landscape of the CIA’s repressed memories. Hypnotic and startling, with a cast of troubled artists and agents, this sensual novel is a lush fever dream of power, politics, betrayal and revenge. With scenes so vivid and unflinching and downright bizarre, this novel gets under your skin like the desert sand at its core.”

JENNIFER LOVE GROVE, author of Watch How We Walk

“Equal parts Twin Peaks and Alice in Wonderland, Susan Perly’s Death Valley is a Film-Noir-Spy-Western – hallucinogenic, thought-provoking and bizarre enough to satisfy anyone who thinks about art, nuclear fallout, classic films, conspiracies or love. It’s wild enough to be fiction, and real enough to blow your mind.”

MICHELLE BERRY, author of Interference

Love is complicated. It’s 2006 and Vivienne Pink, a photojournalist with an eye for war, is flying to Las Vegas to capture images of servicemen deploying for combat in Iraq. Together with her novelist husband and their housemate, an intelligence operative, Vivienne plans a side trip to Death Valley to confront an old enemy, but her scheme is soon complicated by a handsome young soldier on his way to war and a retired counterterrorism agent wearing a bird suit. Together they begin an atomic road trip through empty canyons, old film locations and the Nevada desert’s nuclear test site, where reality shifts like sand beneath their feet. This is Death Valley, and the fallout is hilarious and harrowing.

for Dennis

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

– JEREMIAH 8:20

In other words, through the medium of a camera, I experienced an encounter with a deeper space-time.

– DAIDŌ MORIYAMA

Contents

1: THE ATOMIC AGE

2: THE BURNING MONK

3: PINK LEATHER JACKET

4: NEON

5: THE BIRDMAN OF PARIS

6: VAN GOGH IN HIROSHIMA

7: THE MISFITS

8: OVER THE RAINBOW

9: CHEMICAL DONNY

10: KING UBU

11: AUTOPSY ON THE AIR

12: NAGASAKI, NEVADA

13: A SINGLE MUTANT SHEPHERD

14: NUCLEAR PHARAOHS

15: THE JACKRABBIT SPOKE

16: THE HAWK MOTH

17: A BETTER EDEN

18: IN THE KINGDOM OF RHYOLITE

19: ROOM 214

20: THUNDERBIRD

21: WALK, AMBLE, TROT, GALLOP AND LOPE

22: ENEMY WATER

23: FEAR FACTORIES

24: TWO VIEWS OF MANZANAR

25: THE UBEHEBE CRATER

26: DEATH VALLEY ODALISQUE

27: ARROGANT BASTARD

28: ATOMIC PYTHON TATTOO

29: THE NEW DRONES

30: SWITCHEROO

31: FALLOUT ALICE

32: LASCAUX IN CALIFORNIA

33: FIVE DAYS

34: BIGHORN

35: THE DEAD BIRD

Acknowledgements

1

THE ATOMIC AGE

THE CHILDREN WALKED with their necks set up as evolutionary magnets. Who knew that our thyroids attracted radioactive iodine? Who knew that when the iodine flew over grass, flew over cows, flew over furniture, it flew into the bodies of children, it flew into their parents? Who knew that reindeer in Norway had radioactive thyroids from Chernobyl? Who knew that cesium-137 lasts for centuries? Who knew that the rocky land we look at from a plane is not done with us yet? Who knew that the radioactive dust from 1957 was still sitting in the rocky canyons below, in 2006?

Vivienne Pink, photographer of war, sat at the window of a plane making its way west, ascending from the sea level city of Toronto on the shores of Lake Ontario. Her final destination was the northern Mojave Desert, where fighter jets began their routine flights to Iraq and Afghanistan, where airmen were trained, and tens of thousands of servicemen had worked and become atomic veterans. Military land, where unions were tough and strong and boldly Western, and the sky took up the top two-thirds of any landscape. Vivienne Pink and her Olympus OM-1, by her side for thirty-three years, were taking a forced break from conflict zones. She was on an assignment to photograph fighting men before they deployed. Men on their last night before they flew out to die. She had made the assignment herself. She had her book half-done. It was December 26, 2006. She had five days to get a bunch of keepers.

She looked down at the Earth, the eyes of the avid hunter scanning over the wing to the canyons rising and falling in their mosaics and tunnels – rust, purple manganese, pale powdery green, mica, iron, gold, silver, red rock, red earth. The skin of the nation. Vivienne got out her camera: crusty patches appeared, white crust sinking into dark cratered areas. A shiny dome popped up beside a deep cut. Maybe it was an industrial cyst. Ahead pale green liquid swirled into red earth, bumps rose in purple and the world looked like a slide under a microscope, a cell with a story. This was the thrill. This was why you sat at the window. The greatest abstract art exhibit was right down there, on the planet. Well, it was the planet itself. Inside her body, similar-looking cells came and went, galaxies floating through her bloodstream.

A neck of rock appeared. She snapped it, seeing a folded part that looked like an ear. The first ear. The last ear of a damaged man. A polished chute. Vivienne looked at her right arm at the window. There was a three-inch white patch on her pink-olive flesh, a white patch with a distinct red rim. Down below she saw the fractal of her arm passing under the wing. Our flesh is the cousin of the earth, with the illusion it is unrelated. The white patch had first appeared after she was in Iraq in 1986 at Samarra, investigating the underground mustard gas facility of Saddam Hussein. She had gone up the famous minaret and shook in the wind going round and round the narrow spire with no handrail, trying to see from the heights if any of the poison gas trucks could be spotted. Nothing. But her skin afterwards had started scaling, and her lungs became more prone to pneumonia, and the Mesopotamian sand she breathed in grated her lung passageways more than it had before. The doctors said her lungs thought they had been placed in enemy territory and so her passageways attacked her body, becoming fiery and inflamed. A cloud tower came to the window and peeked in. She loved clouds as seat companions. This, too, was why you sat at the window: clouds were swell seatmates, they kept silent.

Vivienne kept her nose pressed against the window: the earth was a homeless cell, and still it stood tall and it was a glorious ruined beauty. A billion years was a drop of water.

Nobody sat beside her in the middle seat or the aisle, but on the other side of the aisle three men sat: two with real short hair, one of them in khakis with a pressed crease on the legs. He was looking out the window. The other, in the middle, was in light grey wool pants and watching a movie on the television screen: Sean Penn and Naomi Watts in a car. Naomi’s eyes were closed, she was drunk, and Sean Penn loosened her seat belt; Sean the man with a newly transplanted heart, the heart of Naomi’s dead husband. It was 21 Grams. The first time she saw it, bootleg in Fallujah, was with her pal intelligence agent Val Gold in a windowless room in a safe house. Val said, “Imagine another man is using your husband’s heart to live. Imagine your body without water. It will weigh only twenty-one grams.”

Vivienne lifted her camera, watching the man in the middle as he moved his face close to the tiny screen. His eyes met the eyes of Sean Penn. For a moment the tender emotion the actor brought to the screen transferred to the viewer, who moved his head closer as if to solace the distressed woman in the car. Vivienne grabbed that shot.

The man in the aisle seat had greasier hair and looked too pale for his white skin, like he might smell of last night’s beer drama. He had on a harmless checked shirt in non-saturated blues, the shirttails out, giving away that he had buttoned in a hurry – one button off. He scratched his hair and the semi-permanent-looking sweat stains under his arm showed. He had a large backpack that he rested his big white sneakers on, blocking the clean-cut spit-and-polish men from getting out if the plane went down. Vivienne pictured him as a rock climber flying to the Nevada canyons, a guy in a hurry with low blood sugar. And those shoes: way too new. Average height, average weight, Caucasian, late thirties, kept that pack close, afraid to even put it up top. Why? No bombs today, please.

The drinks wagon came by. Vivienne ordered an apple juice, no ice. Never trust ice on a plane. Never trust ice, anywhere. The pleasant thin steward put ice in the plastic cup. Vivienne repeated, No ice, adding a darling, smiling and putting her eyes into the smile. The steward did not mind, he gave a mea culpa smile back, dumped the ice out, filled the cup with the apple juice and handed her the can, too. Plane and shadow flew over the empty land. Mountains rose up to meet the wings.

The plane headed right for the side of a mountain, then it tilted and banked over the last mountains hiding the surprise sparkling down in the military valley.

It was their destination, the glittering cup in the desert. Area 24. Also called by its Spanish name, Las Vegas.

Here in the northern Mojave the light was prodigious, it was the beaming of plenty, a wide-open crystal clinic showing how the desert bent objects and bent light itself, how the sky seemed stoned and nutty and bright. Fighter planes rose and fell, shuttles flew men to work at weapons testing areas and jet testing areas and nuclear waste storage areas and war rehearsal areas and explosives practice areas and counterterrorism and remote drone piloting areas. Men sat in casinos who were third- and fourth-generation locals who had worked the hard land and serviced the hard war work. This had been a military valley for half a century; it was busy and employed, for now the country was in its fourth year of a new big war. And this was a key spot.

Before there was Chernobyl wind, before there was Three Mile Island rain, there were the Nevada Nagasakis, there were the Nevada Hiroshimas. This was the nuclear valley inside the nuclear ranges. And the iodine waited for your neck, that radiation magnet. The wind sought even the birds of flight.

VIVIENNE PICKED UP her hard-shell red suitcase and waited for a cab outside the civilian terminals at McCarran airport. She had her Ray-Bans on. Cheap sunglasses were great if you did not work with your eyes, but even with polarized lenses, she was squinting.

Vivienne Pink, sniper of light, hunter of subjects, late of Baghdad and Kabul and Beirut, rolled through Godzilla Canyon. The Santa Ana winds were blowing in, bending the tall sentry palms lined up on the boulevard, rocking the cab, hurling paper cups and girlie brochures and shards of mystery items against the vehicle’s sides and windshield. Desert cities used to be horizontal with miles between short hotels that looked more motel-like and imitated the land, thin strips with tall sky around them. Now the desert burgs had grown vertical and the sky was like cut slices of blue peeking between the concrete towers and tens of thousands of glass windows taking up the space that used to be air. The metastasizing hospitality tumours galumphed across the desert land like Japanese horror movie Godzillas, eating air, eating old radiation, burping up clouds, refluxing forgotten legs and arms in dead elevator shafts, surrounding tarmacs for a showdown, eating the tiny planes, the Jeeps, the tiny soldiers leaving for wars on a map. From drought to drought.

Traffic was light. It was that lacuna between Christmas and New Year’s. A seven-minute ride from the terminal and Vivienne was checking in to the Flamingo hotel, she was up in the elevator, into her requested good-luck room 27117, and unpacking her red suitcase with clothes of pursuit, laying them out on the bed. Her clothes were part of the tools of her hunt: khakis, a tight army-green long-sleeved jersey, shiny tie-up patent-leather shoes and her lucky pink leather jacket. She checked inside the right-hand pocket. Good. That Swiss Army knife was still there.

Vivienne liked company in a hotel room so she switched on the TV: there was Humphrey Bogart, getting out of a car at Ed’s Gas Station. Vivienne changed clothes, watching Bogart. Love it, she thought, High Sierra. Bogart was talking to the gas jockey who was not young; he was telling Bogart, “That there mountain is the highest in the United States, Mount Whitney.” Bogart, the ex-con, Mad Dog Earle, on the lam into the Eastern Sierra of California, told the gas jockey he was going to the mountains for his health.

There she was in the mirror. Five-foot-four, one hundred thirty pounds, nice waist-to-hip ratio, that inward curve men liked, set off by the tight jersey, good bra with good uplift for her good breasts, khakis not too tight, black patent shoes polished before she left Toronto. Lizard earrings just limey and shiny enough to attract a man, arouse his interest. On TV, Bogart at Brown’s Auto Court was showing the girl with the club foot the stars. “It’s always like this out in the desert,” Bogart said. “Look…that’s Jupiter…that’s Venus.”

Vivienne leaned into the mirror, applied a wand of black-blue mascara to her lashes, rose gloss to her lips (it had a nice scent), a bit of gloss to her dark, carefully arched eyebrows. Eyebrows were key, eyebrows made the frame for a face. She wet her fingers, messed up her short auburn hair. Done. She left her long neck scar untouched.

She walked back to the bed, picked up the camera and in the reflection of the TV screen showing the manhunt, a white salt playa where the tiny black car of Humphrey Bogart drove up a tiny thread road, Vivienne shot a photo of herself, Baby Pink, Self-Portrait, December 26, 2006. She put the camera back on the bed, left the room and closed the door to 27117.

Down the hall, down twenty-six floors in the elevator, across the gaming floor, past roulette, slots, sports book, video poker, real poker, wheelchair men with oxygen tubes, one-eyed men, Vivienne went up the Tropical Breeze coffee shop ramp, past a group of cowboys here for the winter rodeo. A legless man alone was swinging through his crutches, his eyes dead set on Vivienne, his eyes saying Reconsider me and he passed on by.

At the entrance to the coffee shop, she scanned the room. Tables and booths full. Then her eyes caught on a white T-shirt sitting one hundred feet away. The back of a man sitting at the far counter. Her gut took a picture of the man’s back – good shoulders, nice neck, short buzzed hair. She needed to make real what she had just visualized. Her heart was pounding like a calmly paced athlete, a nice controlled emergency rate. The room of eaters became a soft blur. Her forearms felt hot. The T-shirt man looked around, as if he heard a call. She locked the photographic prey into her sight, moving to him, seeing no seat near him, moving in the steady tunnel pacing, fifty feet, seeing a couple to his right pick up their cheque, moving quickly ahead with purpose, forty feet, twenty, ten and slipping into the one vacant seat. Her hands reached for her camera between her breasts, but of course it wasn’t there. Her mind knew it, but her body reacted with muscle memory. No cameras were permitted on the gaming floor. She better work fast to get him to come with her, and pose for her in that white T-shirt. If logic came in, the photograph was gone.

The waitress appeared. DAYSEE by name tag, from San Antonio, Texas. Daysee wore the customary Culinary Workers Union button. Vegas was not only a military town deep in the mountain valley, it was a big union town. Everybody in Vegas was in service.

Mister White T had a newspaper open in front of him.

He did not look at her. He had come to be in a busy coffee shop, militantly alone. It was an urban thing. You could not do it in a small town, where everybody knew you. Urban people liked to be out, watching and ignoring each other. So he probably came from a city. He was super fit, so he worked out or he was in the service. He looked as young as twenty-two or he could be in his early thirties. His cheekbones gave off the micro-glitters of an easygoing but angry man.

He tore one sugar pack, two sugar packs and three. He let the sugar pour into his coffee cup, which was half full.

The waitress asked, “Algo a comer? Something to eat, sweetie? A drink? Café? Coffee, anything, mi reina?” Por supuesto, of course, this was Vegas, a Latino-infused town.

“No gracias, nada a comer, I’m good,” Vivienne said. “No food, maybe later, but ahora, right now, Mamita, I’d kill for a coffee, por favor. Sin azúcar, oscurito, por favor, mil gracias.” Daysee was pouring hot coffee out of the Pyrex pot into the plain white mug by the time Vivienne said por favor.

Vivienne sipped her coffee, warming her winter fingers around the mug. Good. Now the white T-shirt knew she spoke Spanish, he knew the sound of her voice, that was key.

He knew what she looked like, what she sounded like, how she talked to service people. How she liked her coffee. Very black, no sugar. Vivienne added for good measure, “Soy bastante dulce, pues no necesito azucar.” I am sweet enough as it is, I do not need sugar. Flirt woman to woman with the waitress, use the agency of the waitress to flirt with him, the stranger.

She looked down to see his shoes, because that would tell her a lot. Some intel men Vivienne knew started with the shoes, profiling the way a Spaniard dresses, from the shoes up. He had on black shoes, laced well, new laces, well-polished.

He stretched his neck, turning it around and around to get the cricks out. It was a good neck, unblemished, muscular. He was a white boy and pale. But he could have been pale in the way intelligence men or men with dodgy titles or State Department men in tropical locales or desert missions are pale. Working in the shadows of sun-drenched places, working at night, working inside, travelling in tinted windows through the revolutions they set in motion. Maybe he put a dark jacket over his white T-shirt in those circumstances. He could be the ensign or he could be a young captain. He might fly for the navy. He might be an airman. There were tens of thousands of them from way up at Fallon outside of Reno and for thousands of square miles down here to Mojave 24 environs. She needed this one. She could already feel the look of his back by a window at dusk, in that white T-shirt. How someone might see the photograph and feel what she felt, the first time she saw him.

2

THE BURNING MONK

VIVIENNE DRANK THE hot black coffee. She looked at her watch. It was fifteen minutes after one in the afternoon. It was winter in the desert. The sun would start to disappear behind the Spring Mountains outside her hotel room window by 4:20, even 4:17 p.m. How to start a conversation with the stranger?

He had a newspaper open to the weather page. “So, how are the temps for Death Valley?” Vivienne asked.

“You going out there, ma’am? Visiting Manson’s shack, I suppose.”

“Why does everybody say that?”

“Say what?” He turned his head slightly towards her.

“Say, ‘You going to see Charlie Manson?’ as soon as you say, ‘Death Valley.’”

“I don’t know, ma’am, I guess they’ve never been. You here with family? You all going out to have tea with Carla?”

Who was this guy? He was reserved but droll. He had great pale blue eyes.

“No, I’m working,” Vivienne said.

“You work in security, then.” He smiled. A smile that said, I don’t think you do, but I kind of like the idea you might. The Vegas Valley was not only a key military area, it was a global centre for security wonks. In the desert, everybody was watching. Maybe this guy had eyes in the back of his T-shirt.

“Yes, in a way,” Vivienne said. “I’m in photographs.”

“You model. Nice. Good money, I hear.”

“Only for myself. I’m the photographer.”

“Sounds interesting. So, no Manson on your agenda. Rock climbing?”

“I came to capture some soldiers,” she said.

“Ma’am, you better be careful what you say around these parts. People get in trouble.” He used his left hand to flip the paper back to the front page. “You see James Brown died yesterday?”

She hadn’t. “Oh boy, another titan bites the dust,” she said, leaning over, touching his shoulder, to get a better look at the photograph of James Brown on the front page. The Godfather of Soul in all his glory: bright fuchsia leather jacket with fringe hanging off, his right arm holding the microphone, captured singing in concert only a year ago. The life is short, the night train goes on forever. Vivienne ran her hand over the face of the master.

“I used to listen to ‘I’ll Go Crazy’ day and night in Saigon,” she said.

“You’re kidding, darling.” He swivelled around, his knees touching hers. “Not Saigon-Saigon. You must mean, ma’am, Saigon Elementary, in –”

“In Vietnam,” she said. “A lot of James Brown. You know, the bar that opened at three in the morning, in a place that wasn’t there, where everybody had conversations that didn’t happen, with people who swore on that bible stack they were never there. That bar. That turntable.”

“I personally favour ‘It’s a Man’s World,’” he said.

“You left out two ‘Man’s.’ It’s ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.’”

“So, all by your lonesome in Nevada,” the stranger said. “You have to be careful. There are all kinds of con artists around.”

“Don’t worry, honey. I cover war.”

He had swivelled back. He was watching the wait staff move in and out of the kitchen area. He was smiling that droll smile again.

Vivienne smoothed out the fold through James Brown’s pompadour. “I’d like to take a picture of you.”

“Go right ahead, ma’am. I don’t mind. I’m leaving tomorrow for another tour of Iraq. Knock yourself out.”

“You can’t use a camera on the gaming floor,” she said.

“So they caught you before? Eyes in the sky?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Once upon another war. I was actually taking pics of the ceiling. They did not like that very much. But then, I did not like how that suited gorilla manhandled my camera very much. That’s my living.”

“But they let you go.”

“I’m here.”

“Well thank God’s grace for that.”

“Will you do it?”

“Sure. Why not?” he said. “Let’s go outside. I’ve got nobody to say goodbye to me, in any case. You could take whatever you need. Then say me a proper adios on the Strip.”

“Honey, that isn’t what I had in mind. That’s not how I work. I don’t want a snap of you; I want to make a portrait.”

“Oh I see. Fancy.”

“No, the opposite. Simple. It just takes a long time to get it plain. To bring out the feeling.”

“Ma’am, I wish you all well and good in your enterprise, your artiste endeavour, but I am afraid I am not signing on for feelings. Not today.”

“Not you. It’s the feeling of a moment. I want the moment, I don’t want you.” He was laughing. “I mean, I would appreciate it if I could but I – You know what? Why not forget it.”

“I didn’t say no, ma’am.”

She put her hand out. “Vivienne. From Toronto.” They shook hands. His arms were long, his hands not large but strong.

“Andy,” he said, making eye contact. “San Diego. I’d just prefer to leave out the feelings in any picture you took of me. Can you do that?”

“I can. It’ll be lousy. It’ll be anybody’s. When I take a picture, hon, it’s another way to have a conversation. That’s all. Not scary. Just like we’re sitting here.”

“I bet you’ve got James Brown vinyl up in your room. Is that the idea? Get the boys up there and play them some ‘Bewildered’?”

“I left all my LPs in Vietnam.”

“You weren’t kidding. Was your dad in the army?”

“Canada didn’t send boys to Vietnam. I was working as a photographer.”

“In diapers?” His eyes were flashing light and dark connective tissue to his smile.

“I was fifteen years old when I started working wartime,” Vivienne said.

She was sweating. Her hands were getting the memory shakes. She felt the old roiling in her gut, from that May of ’69 in Vietnam when the US had taken Hamburger Hill, near Huê, then abandoned it to their enemy. The feeling of useless loss, of war being run by weak watery incompetents, rats with stars crazy in a commanding maze, Nixonitis and his five o’clock shadow, which began to stretch over the land from daybreak, these things had never left her. That summer of ’69, when Life magazine ran a photo spread showing every single soldier killed in Vietnam, two of the pics were Vivienne’s. Nixon on TV, Ho Chi Minh dies, William Calley is charged for My Lai, Tricky Dicky the despised one back on TV, they locate Manson in Death Valley, three days later the massive anti-war moratorium in DC. Vivienne motioned to Daysee the waitress for more hot joe. She drank it so fast it burned her lips.

Andy pulled a pack of smokes out of his Levi’s back pocket. The pack was a bright magnetic pink, with black and gold bows, brand name Pink in white letters. He took one, reached for a matchbox, flicked a stick match with the end of his thumbnail, inhaled, handed the smoke to Vivienne, kept the match going, lit one for himself and they sat there smoking. Vivienne was quitting, she had quit, she will have quit someday.

Andy got up, leaving the chair swinging. He walked around the curved counter to the end, where there was an empty seat. He stood drinking the dregs of somebody else’s coffee, dropping the cigarette into the coffee cup, looking at her with no smile, thirty, forty feet away now. Vivienne’s forearms went into a pain dance; she needed to have a camera in her hands. Andy pushed the coffee cup away. He walked back to her, rubbed her shoulders in the pink leather as if they were old pals and he was just arriving to meet her. He sat down. “Seriously, ma’am. Vivienne. How the hell did you get to Vietnam? You truly must have been in kindergarten.”

His face was dry. But his neck and his cotton neckline were soaking, like hers. “I like how you talk,” she said, unsure where she was going by saying this. “Your voice would make a good photo.” She could picture how the T-shirt would animate his upper body. How she could hone in on the secret life of an object. The T-shirt gave off an air that said, “I’ve been in fights, maybe even this morning, when I woke up in the wrong bed.” If that item of clothing was looking for trouble, it came to the right photographer.

“I’m under a little pressure right now,” Vivienne said. “I have a deadline for a book. Could you help me out? It is all servicemen on their way to war, their last night in town. It will only take twenty minutes. We could talk later.” He gave her that look: Sure it will, honey.

“Okay, one hour, tops,” she said. “You have a great face. I would love to see you in my book. I promise I will send you a copy, over to Iraq.”

“I miss shit,” he said. “You spend every day over there, ‘when will this shit end?’ and when it ends you want it more than the girl.” He was dancing around her proposition. He might want time. Time she did not have. She could eye the coffee shop, look for another subject. But she wanted him: the white T-shirt on good posture, a straight back, nice shoulders and chin held low, bright crazy-deep eyes, good indigo classic button jeans, dark lace-up shoes, short buzzed fair hair and cheekbones that could, like Elvis Presley, have some Cherokee grandmother in them.

Her sweat was cooling. Okay, the man wants to talk first. Talk to him about Vietnam. Younger men liked to hear about that gone day. The war that knocked America off true, the war that left a generation of homeless vets. The nightmare that still haunted their ancestors, their mommas and their poppas; they had grown up with Vietnam-haunted adults around them. Maybe if she told him a story about photographing in Vietnam she could entice him to come with her to the event horizon. To enter into the gravitational pull of the camera, where the only escape possible was through the lens.

“Okay,” Vivienne said. “How did I get to Vietnam? Blame it on Paris. The story: my Auntie Carole wanted to see an old flame from her gap year in Paris, so she says to me, ‘You need to see Paris.’” Vivienne held the cigarette to her mouth and inhaled. “Good thing I quit.”

Andy chuckled. Vivienne went on: “So, late May 1963, I’m fifteen. Auntie Carole has us staying at this thirty-room hotel in the old medieval quarter, the Mouffetard. Coffee in the morning at Café Delmas, then Auntie Carole takes me on a ten-minute walk to the Jardin des Plantes. She leaves me to go see her old squeeze, André, now a big gallery owner. So I walk around the Jardin and back to the street and there’s this big white low building straddling the corner and I go in.” She blew out some smoke, kept talking.

“That is it. You walk in. You decide, walk on by or walk on in. It was a mosque. There were, you know, fifty thousand French Muslim soldiers killed in World War One, the Grand Mosque of Paris was built to honour them. I was a nice Jewish girl from Forest Hill, and here I was at the Paris Mosque. I sat by myself on a rose-coloured banquette and had mint tea. The table was a round gold tray. The tea was amber in glasses, not teacups. The glasses had gold rims. They brought a small white plate, it was rectangular with sweets in paper. Things made of almond, pistachio, pale desert colours. There were paintings of the sky on the walls. I finished tea and decided ‘I want to see the Louvre.’ I was just burning up with a desire for beauty.”

Andy flexed his cheekbones.

“So now I am at the Louvre, in front of the Venus de Milo. A guy’s walking around and around Miz Venus, he asks me how I like the torso, do I like the proportions, the angles. He was an older guy, tall, desert boots, brown cords, beard. He invited me for tea – at the Mosque.”

“Did you tell him you’d just been?”

“No way,” she said. “He was too cute.”

“So you knew your way around men, at fifteen years old?” Andy said.

“I knew my way around something. I guess I was looking for its name.”

“So you go for tea with this guy who was how much older than you?”

“Maybe twice as old as me. You know, old. Like thirty-five.” They chuckled together. Her younger self was turning into a shared character in a story.

“When I walked back into the mosque courtyard with him, it all felt different. Even from an hour before. He said, ‘I want to take your picture.’ He posed me for a photograph sitting at one of the blue-and-white tile tables. I was wearing a pink oxford-cloth button-down shirt. That was my thing, then. Button-downs in every pastel. Sleeves rolled up; white jeans; black patent-leather Mary Janes on my feet. When he took my picture it was not the same as anybody ever taking my picture before. I wanted in on that.”

Andy was looking at her with listening eyes. “Tell me,” he said.

“The light went on forever in Paris in the long white nights of spring. The light felt soft in Paris. Maybe it was the Seine. We had more mint tea. He introduced himself. ‘I’m Marty,’ he said, ‘Marty Hirsch.’ So Marty tells me about his grandfather who dealt in silks and textiles, a Jew from the Shanghai Jews who had come to this very mosque café, the textile man in the 1920s. It was a city of Jews and Arabs even then, Marty said. It was Marty who told me that Paris is the city in Europe with the most Jews, and Paris is the city in Europe with the most Arabs. I never forgot that. I did not know Paris was Jewish. I knew nothing. I didn’t know North Africa was full of Jews. Who knew Casablanca was a very Jewish city?”

“Maybe Sam in Casablanca was Sammy,” Andy said.

“You know,” she said, moving her coffee cup to clink it against his, “ojalá, he could be. Maybe the first draft was: ‘Look. Do me a personal favour, Sammila, you should play it again.’” She shook her head. “Nah. You don’t have to play Jewish to be one.”

“I know,” he said. His eyes crinkled, his face was entirely subsumed by the smile.

And so she knew. Jew meets Jew in a desert café.

“So, this Marty character, we’d spent a couple of hours together, he puts his Leica down on the table, and he says, ‘Come to Vietnam with me. I’m leaving for Saigon tomorrow. Carry my equipment.’

“Next thing I know I am flying Paris to Saigon, Vivienne Pink, the photographers’ mascot. Baby Pink they called me. ‘How did you ever get to Vietnam, at that age?’ everybody asks. ‘Easy, honey, I got on a plane. Paris to Saigon, fourteen hours.’ I was not brave, I just took the free ticket.”

She put her elbow on the counter, put her chin in her hand and leaned towards him. “Look, I so knew from nothing, I did not know Saigon from sayonara.”

His nostrils flared, “Oh yeah, been there. Boot camp ain’t Baghdad. It isn’t what you think.”

“So many maps, so little time,” she said, “then you are actually standing in the actual place. How it smells, how low sewer water smells, the rains, the food, meat on the street, smoke and sweet flowers, the wet trees. The sound of rain on a tin roof, how firearms sound. My Auntie Carole said, ‘Vivila, you’ve got moxie. Follow your moxie.’ She used to call me Queen Moxie. My parents? They were old rads, they were happy. I skipped two grades so I had two years in my pocket.”

This stranger Andy got up again, walked around the counter curve, came back behind her again, holding her chair back. “So what happened to Baby Pink in-country?” he whispered into her left ear.

“It was June in Saigon. A Tuesday. What is it with Tuesdays?” She didn’t find the set-up with him odd. How could it be odd, they were in Crazytown, talking about an old Indochina psychosis. “Tuesdays and Elevens. Tuesday, June 11, 1963. I was living with Marty. He gets a call. It was about seven in the morning. ‘Come to the corner of Phan Dình Phùng and Lê Văn Duyệt Streets, there will be an event, in one hour, at eight.’ The caller did not say what it was but all the news photogs got called. You know, everyone says, The Vietnam War, but years before that, the events were going on. The Vietnamese were conducting a war against the Buddhists, the Buddhists were marching pagoda to pagoda in protest. The Roman Catholics running the show were breaking the balls of the Buddhists, but good. Marty told me something I never forgot, ‘Before they come for the Commies, they come for the Buddhists.’ They come for the religion before the politics. So down we go, Marty and me, to the corner of Phan Dình Phùng and Lê Văn Duyệt Streets. There is a crowd of monks and nuns all in white, white is their mourning colour, behind a grey car that had pulled up. It stopped at the corner. Two men exited the car, two monks.

“They took a can of gas out of the hood. Three other monks get out. Marty has his Leica in his hand, you know holding it like a baby, and a bunch of cameras around his neck as backup. One of the monks places a cushion on the street, and a different monk sits on the cushion, quiet. Marty hands me a camera, saying nothing. He nods to me. I look through the lens –

“One of the monks takes a can of gas and he pours it on the monk sitting on the cushion in the middle of the street in a lotus position in his robe, soaking his robes and his head. I took a picture just as the one monk poured gasoline on the head of the sitting monk. I did not know it was going to go that way, but I was ready. I had never felt anything like that in my life. The lotus monk was sitting in a pool of gas.

“The street filled up with more Buddhist monks who had come in their white mourning robes. I could see ahead of myself, I was elevated, focused. I thought, I want to be in the world, right now. I want to see history. I want to tell the story. I have found my life. The lens was my teacher.

“I could see there was going to be a picture of his body, that I had to be ready for that. I had been called to this. I had walked in the door of the Paris Mosque and that was why I was in Vietnam. I walked in and I did not walk by, and now a camera owned me. I was picturing where his body would fall so the camera could be there; I stepped forward. I still have the image in my head of Marty watching me move away from him, to the picture.

“The lotus monk was not yet on fire and I could see his dead body’s position. I felt the immediate future in my fingertips, my forearms were on fire. It was the monk himself, soaked in gasoline, who lit the match to his own robes. It was a sunny day. It was self-immolation.”

Still standing behind her chair, Andy reached over to the counter, took the bright Pink smokes pack, lit one, gave it to her, lit another. “Tell me about the monk,” he said, close to her ear. She sucked in a long drag of the cigarette, and went on.

“The monk’s name was Thích Quảng Dức. He lives on in the photographs of his death. One of the photogs there, Malcolm Browne of AP, took the picture that they say President John Kennedy saw the next morning in the newspaper on his desk, and that he was deeply affected by it. I had walked into one of the most famous photographs in history, sweet Jesus how small the steps, and then boom, you cannot step away from your kismet. It was like love, taking pictures. No second thoughts. What a time. It was early Vietnam days yet, for the Americans. All these handsome stateside boys just spooking around, setting things up in Southeast Asia. Guys going into Operation Rolling Thunder, guys going up the la Drang Valley, guys in their B-52s, all that was later. I was Baby Pink, pitzel photographer. I was like a ferret in the wet Asian alleys. I could smell pictures coming as dusk set in. My eyeballs were soaking up the chemistry of the complicated East. I smelled them, then I heard them: the sound of a pic coming. A wing, a clatter, a gun, a motorcycle backfiring. I was jumping out of my skin every day.

“You know what the funniest part is?” Vivienne asked, swirling around. “These new spooks came in, they’re asking around, ‘Who do we get the gen from, who knows the story on the ground?’ And my pals, my mentors, Marty and Co., they would say, ‘Ask for Baby Pink. Baby Pink can tell you.’ So these tall fit men would come knocking on Marty’s and my door – we lived behind a red door, Marty taught me, ‘Always have a red door on your house’ – and he would answer, ‘Yeah? Help you?’ in his red bandana and baggy shorts, and they would say to Marty, ‘You Baby Pink? Hear you have the word.’ ‘No, not me, hang on,’ he’d say. ‘V! Baby Pink, get your sweet ass out here, these handsome lads here want a word.’ And out from the darkroom comes me: sweet sixteen in loose thin cotton pants and an undershirt and suspenders. ‘Your Mom around, little girl?’ ‘Listen fartface, you want info or did you come into my home to insult me?’ An hour later, we were new best friends, and they were posing for pictures, two photog guys hamming it up on my pink silk bedspread. I was as young as a Viet Cong guerrilla. Everybody knew me, I was that crazy Canadian coyote with a camera.”

“Tell me more about the monk,” Andy said, taking his seat again.

“When the fire had burned him and his robe, he fell back in rigor mortis, charred, his arms stiff. They went up like rigor claws, his legs went up like rigor claws, the crowd leaned in. I took that picture, it came out in Time. By some magic, I had entered my own life. I set out unknowing. If I had known, I probably would never have gone.”

“Amen,” he said.

“I have film from that day I have never developed. I have contact sheets I have never made prints from. They talk about Vietnam protestors, they use the word hippies. Did you know the first protest against the American presence in Vietnam was organized in 1946 by merchant marines? American merchant marines in 1946? These sailors were waiting to be shipped back to the States right after World War Two, and they saw American ships being taken from the job of bringing the boys home, their US ships meant to take them – the war vets – back to the States, being used instead to help bring in arms for the French in Vietnam. Like you said, honey, it is never what you think. It is never when you thought. Come on up, let me take your picture.”

He swivelled on the stool and faced her.

“I am not going to hurt you,” Vivienne said.

“A girl like you always hurts a guy like me,” Andy said. But he sat there. The dead had cathected onto the photographic paper, their energy had pooled there. She wanted an antemortem photograph of this Andy.

“Would you like to have a picnic in my room?” she asked. Say anything to get the picture.

“You planning on smuggling in the personal vino?”

“It’s already contraband in my suitcase.” Not true, but hey.

“Sounds promising,” he said.

“So, shall we go?”

Andy held his left palm up and made the silent gesture of writing the cheque with his right hand, catching Daysee’s eye as he did it. She had the bill ready. Then he silently poured invisible coffee. Daysee brought more hot mud. What was going on? Vivienne thought. First he calls for the bill, then he calls for more coffee. “Is there a problem?” she asked. Now he was pouring three sugar packs and two petrochemical glops into his brew.

“Ma’am, I do not think I would truly be any good for you, right now. I’m on the wrong end of a hangover this morning. And the truth is I’m off to Baghdad tomorrow, so let’s say good night and call it a day.” His eyes flashed at what he just said. He grinned. But Vivienne could see that his body was rocking slightly with a new weather system coming through. An agitation causing him to shy back.

“Partying hard?” she asked. Trying to revive the moment.

“Ma’am, I –”

“Vivienne.”

“Vivienne. Okay. Vivienne, you see, well. I had a bit of a situation over the weekend. Not a good one, by any stretch. My buddy Sean and I were on the road from LA to Twentynine Palms. That wind came at us, blew us off the road. It blew down a palm and crushed our Commander.”

“You had a commanding officer with you in the accident?”

“A Studebaker Commander Starlight, 1951. Lemon yellow. A real beauty. The plan was for Sean to take it to the shop. That never happened. That beauty looked like a crashed yellow spaceship sitting under all those stars.”

He liked cars, he liked stars, he liked clothes that fit, he liked sweet white coffee, he was at ease in public, he was composed, his eyes were deadly marine blue. “It is so dark, you know, out in the desert.”

“We’re in the desert now,” he said. He had been to the still place. His face showed old geology, old worn harm.

“There’s red corpse debris out there all over the sky, you know,” she said, and when he smiled at her, she felt her right arm wanting that dear camera in it, badly. “Those stars, they are already gone from us, they are just energy cadavers.”

Andy’s eyes turned midnight black. “Ma’am, I think I’ll just ride it out until morning, thanks all the same.” He brought his hand down Vivienne’s pink leather-clad arm to her wrist, where his fingers began playing on her wrist bone. Their shoulders were touching. She moved her wrist so her palm opened. His hand did the same. They each drew their fingers back, curling, staying an inch away. He wasn’t leaving. Her camera was waiting in the room.

“It could be a quiet spot, upstairs. Quiet conversation,” she said.

“Possibly.”

She spoke in a low voice, “So, listen, Andy, if you’re not doing anything for the next hour or so…”

Andy’s eyes had gone off with the ghosts. His body was still there beside her at the counter, but his eyes had travelled to the solo place. Vivienne knew about those micro-blackouts that came after too many shock waves. Temporarily, even without your conscious knowledge, you speak from the grave while being alive.

Andy reached into the back pocket of his Levi’s again. He pulled out something crumpled, so old the creases were white. He unfolded it. It was a picture from a magazine, originally in colour. “This is my baby,” he said.

Vivienne looked at her watch. 1:35 p.m. Less than three hours to sundown.

Andy pressed the cracked paper with his hand like it was money. “This is my Ford Mustang I have back home in San Diego. It’s the prettiest blue you ever saw, some people call it sky blue, some call it robin’s egg. You look at that Mustang when it’s parked, you can feel the wind blowing through a pretty girl’s hair.” The talk of being photographed had put him in his own photograph already. “I’d like to redo the interior in a cream channeling. I’m thinking I’ll get around to getting it detailed when I get back from over there. I bet you’d like to tool on out to Death Valley in a pale blue Mustang convertible.”

“I would,” Vivienne said.

“That red hair of yours would get crazy going at speed, real Medusa.”

“It grows like weeds.”

“Mighty fine weeds, ma’am.” He began to stroke her pink leather jacket, her animal hide. That move was okay now, because she could just smooth it along to the elevator, the room, the lens, the shot. Get the man by a window, before sunset.

“The Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon,” she said.

Andy was framing her in that pretty blue Mustang on an open grey road under blue sky. The model was picturing how he could be the artist. This made him the perfect model. The dark kingdom of light was awaiting, the land of light that came after the end of Eden and snakes, the wild light that ran up into mountains through the wind horns of the endemic bighorn sheep and blew down the hard notes of awe into the beds of salt, deep into their ancient cracks. Nothing was settled, nothing stayed in place where the wind ruled the land.

Andy held the salt-white channels of the clipping up to his face. “I’d be sitting with sand right up my ass crack over there in the desert, I’d pull out a picture I used to have of my wife in this very Mustang. I’d stare at that picture the whole night, trying to remember what she looked like.”

“And you get home to where she is,” Vivienne said, “and there she is, right in front of you and you still can’t remember what she looks like. The photograph knows, but you don’t.”

Andy squinted his eyes like How do you know what’s in my head?

“It won’t take long, honey, I promise. We can be in and out of my room in twenty minutes. Fifteen. How ’bout fifteen?”

“You ever see that movie Wings of Desire? Berlin before the wall fell?” Andy asked.

“Black and white; the angels in the archives,” said Vivienne. He had taken her to a car crash, a car love and now he was talking Wim Wenders.

“The very one,” he said. “One night my wife, Caroline, and I head out to see Wings of Desire, but we never made it. A drunk comes out of nowhere and broadsides us. Caroline dies on the way to the hospital. I was blessed I have to say. I walked away with two broken legs.” He smiled at the tender idiocy he had just uttered. “Right here,” tapping the creased photo of the blue Mustang, “is the car we were in. I got it rebuilt afterwards. One night, honestly, I can’t tell you what channel I was watching on TV. I was back stateside. There’s Peter Falk on the screen, at some hot dog stand talking to a guy with wings. It’s black and white. How the hell did I know it was the movie Caroline and I had set out to see and never saw? So it’s looking a lot like Berlin. The angel’s taking a tour of his former life, walking past the Berlin Wall and all. I felt sick with happiness watching it, and I did not know why. This angel goes into a club. Oh yeah, I been there, some sort of German punk band on stage.” He drank down the whole cup of sugary white coffee. “But he’s invisible. He’s back home, but no one can see him. He’s listening in on a woman talking Chinese, which he can’t understand a word of. He’s cracking up with joy at nothing. He’s just glad to be back. He’s dead and he’s glad to be alive. Jesus, ma’am, I’m in bad need of a drink.”

Vivienne extended her hand to his forearm. His skin was warm, the hair blond. She stroked his skin lightly. “Let me take your picture.”

Andy looked at her, his blue eyes going dark. “You know what, Vivienne, why the hell not? I might not have a face next week. I went to a wedding last year where the groom, a buddy of mine, had half a face. I don’t know why I have a face, ma’am. Sure. Take my picture. If it’s twenty minutes, what’s twenty minutes?” He took her hands. “Baby Pink, you sure are some –”

“Hello, gorgeous, que tal?” A tall man with silver hair sat down to Vivienne’s right, where there was an empty chair. He pulled at her swivel chair’s bottom and swung her to face him. “Having fun, Vivi?” It was Val Gold, who lived with her and Johnny. He kissed her right hand. “How’s it going, my darling Vivi? Stepping out on me again, are you?” Val held the seat of her counter stool so her back was to Andy, then let it swing around. “Don’t let me interrupt. Go on, rob the cradle, I’ll just watch.”

Vivienne gave Val a dead-eyed look. “Piss off, you spook buzzard. Piss off, Val, I am working. Can you men ever let a woman get her work done?” Andy looked down into his coffee cup and sucked up the moment. He motioned to Daysee the waitress, and made that writing-out-the-bill pantomime.

“Ain’t she cute,” Val said. “Oh, I remember now, you used to take pictures, didn’t you, Vivi? She used to be a big deal once upon a time, son.” Vivienne watched Andy push away from the coffee counter.

Andy gave her a nod and departed. Vivienne swivelled the seat and watched him walk across the room. Her brain was banging around in its skull jelly. The one who got away. Her eyelashes flickered a thousand white T-shirts in one second.