The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Read online

  Beaufrey preferred to specialize in the surgical fantasy movies, but those customers generally had other kinks, and Beaufrey was there ‘’ to please,” he used to tell them, with a smile.

  The real weirdos became even more obsessed with the “real thing”—they claimed they could detect fakes—an utter lie since Beaufrey had yet to sell an actual “snuff” film. Beaufrey had got a good laugh out of the “real thing” freaks who had paid him hundreds and even thousands of dollars. The queers couldn’t get enough of those flicks of the steel scalpel skating down the slope of the penis tip, a scarlet trail spreading behind it. Asian faces under white surgical masks and caps glisten with sweat as the penis is peeled like a banana and is turned inside out like a surgical glove, so that the penis skin becomes the lining of the artificial vagina. A companion sequence in which a woman got implants of balls and a dildo sewn inside to folds of specifically prepared skin had been a distribution failure, which had convinced Beaufrey he knew far more about the market than his Argentine business partners. The demand for films of ritual circumcisions of six-year-old virgins had doubled itself every year. There were waiting lists of creeps who got weak at the mention of hairless twats and tight little buds. Massaged and teased into its first and also its last erection, the little girl’s clitoris in close-up looked like a miniature penis. It was a great relief to see the dark, thick fingers of the operator pressing the wet, quivering organ into full extension for the blade of the razor. The offending organ was removed and the wound was washed, then packed in gauze and bandages that were changed repeatedly as they became soaked with blood.

  SUICIDE

  BEAUFREY HAD AWAKENED HER. Seese had slept all night outside on a chaise lounge. A wind had come up. The sky was overcast with storm clouds. The skin on her upper thighs had goose bumps. She sat up on the chaise lounge next to the pool and rubbed her legs and arms, without looking up. Seese asked where everyone was. Beaufrey had given a strange little laugh. The hairs on her thighs and the top of her head prickled; she felt icy drops of sweat down her back. Beaufrey had not bothered to warn her sheriff’s deputies and the coroner were completing their reports inside. Seese started to look for another towel or robe to cover the bikini. But Beaufrey had already pushed her firmly through the sliding glass door into the living room. The deputies stared at her and for an instant Seese thought this had to be one of those dreams where everyone else is wearing clothing, but you are naked. But in her dreams she was the only one who had noticed her nudity. This was crazy: she was wearing a bathing suit by a pool but still they were staring at her. The faces of the deputies made it clear the blame had been pinned on Seese. She tried to remember everything they’d done earlier that day. All the places she and Eric had piloted the “Big Blue Bedroom” car. Seese tried to remember if there had been any accidents. “What?” She repeated the word, looking from face to face until finally she came to David, who refused to look at her or answer; he pretended to read the statement the deputies had asked him to sign.

  She did not feel drunk or high, but she was shivering and sweating. She pushed past Beaufrey and went into the hall bathroom. Seese wrapped herself in a terry cloth robe she pulled out of the laundry closet. The robe smelled sour. Seese sat on the edge of the big sunken tub and stared out the window at the swimming pool. No one stopped her when she went outside again and dived in the pool.

  She wasn’t feeling anything. She wasn’t feeling that Eric was dead. She was feeling that he had gone back to Lubbock to visit his mother. She was feeling that this was what was true. It had to feel true or it wasn’t; even if another part of her consciousness told her she had heard the doorbell and then voices. Eric was dead. She knew it was a fact. But what was a fact? Eric was gone, but did that mean he was dead? Eric had gone to Texas for two weeks when his grandmother died. The other voice persisted. “Dead” meant he wasn’t coming back in two weeks. Seese lay on her back and floated in the pool with her eyes closed until the police and the others had gone. She still didn’t feel anything. The cocaine had dried out her mouth. Her tongue felt thick enough to choke her. She tried to catch her upper lip between her teeth, but teeth and lips seemed a long, cool distance from her throat. The first place David had ever taken her was the gallery where his photographs had just been hung. She had met Eric there. He knew everything and she knew nothing. But Eric had liked her, and in the weeks when she had gradually figured out that Eric and David had been lovers, she felt calm because she liked Eric so much. David never showed any particular affection for her or for Eric. With both of them he acted the same. He had always been offhand and aloof with her. Now she saw him do the same to Eric.

  Then Eric blew his head off. Just like that. Still that might have been bearable except for what David had done. There were many things he’d done, to all of them. Seese realized that she and Eric were what David “had done” to Beaufrey. Aha! Of course!

  The next day Seese could still feel the buzz from all the champagne she had drunk. David was not in the apartment. Seese went to find David at the darkroom. Seese had knocked, but the only sounds were clattering pipes in the wall—water running to the darkroom sink—print washing. David was not there, but he had not gone far because the door was not locked. She wandered through the snarl of extension cords, reflectors, scrims, and rolls of background paper. She felt like a cartoon figure with a human body, but with a camera where her head should be. For a face she had a wide, glassy lens that brought all she saw into focus so cold and clear she could not stop the shiver. None of it could be real. This had to be a drug hallucination or a long dream. The walls were all painted flat soot-black, which gave them a strange quality of undulating velvet in shades of midnight blue and black. Eric’s last pull at the trigger must have felt like this: Seese hesitated then dove into the darkness, past the long, black curtain dense with odors of acid and chemicals. The darkroom was warm. The murky orange-red safelights were soothing. Seese felt hidden and safe in the darkroom. Eric used to tease David. Eric said the darkroom was clearly a womb and the best photographers never grew beyond the earliest stages of personality development.

  Seese was so high her head swayed like an under-ocean flower. She watched the rushing water and let her eyes follow the colored spirals of the prints swirling in the stainless steel wash tank. The color prints moved like fish of the deep; all the colors glowed phosphorescent in the orange safelight. Seese held the edge of the sink with both hands and let her head hang back, rolling it slowly shoulder to shoulder with her eyes closed. Where was David? Eric was dead, but David had been developing film and color prints all night. Probably he had gone out for coffee. David worked in the darkroom when he was too upset to sleep.

  Seese cupped a hand under the cold-water spout next to the stainless steel tank. She swallowed the water and felt the spinning and swaying subside. She stared down at the eight-by-ten color prints in the rinse tank. Among the spatters of bright reds and deeper purples, reddish browns and blacks, over a pure white, Seese caught a glimpse of the whole image. David had been playing with double exposures again. In the center of the field of peonies and poppies—cherry, ruby, deep purple, black—there was a human figure. Seese could make out feet and legs. She thought it was a great idea—the nude nearly buried in blossoms of bright reds and purples. The nude human body innocent and lovely as a field of flowers. Seese reached in and caught a print at one corner the way David had taught her.

  She didn’t know if it was the shock or if somehow the champagne and dope had lasted that long but she had been able to look at the color photographs of Eric’s suicide without flinching. She could see how his body had fallen across the double bed with his long legs angled at the pillows. Death had not been any more peaceful for Eric than his life had. The extreme angles of Eric’s limbs outlined the geometry of his despair. The clenched muscles guarded divisions and secrets locked within him until one day the gridwork of lies had exploded bright, wet red all over. Only a few weeks earlier Eric had helped David carry the roll of
glossy-white backdrop paper into the studio. David had wanted the backdrop for an “all-white” series in the bedroom. “But white shows everything, darling,” Eric had teased. David had stared back silently. “Shows all the dirt, shows all the nasty!” Eric had laughed until there were tears in his eyes. David had not smiled. Later Seese had realized the warning had been out in front for her to see, only she had not recognized Eric’s despair.

  David had probably not called the authorities for three or four hours to be sure both the color and black-and-white film had turned out. David had photographed Eric’s corpse Police Gazette style. The black-and-white prints David had made were all high contrast: the blood thick, black tar pooled and spattered across the bright white of the chenille bedspread. Was that why she didn’t feel anything, not after she’d realized David had photographed Eric’s body? David had focused with clinical detachment, close up on the .44 revolver flung down to the foot of the bed, and on the position of the victim’s hands on the revolver. Or did she feel no horror because she had already been filled with it, and no photographs of brains, bone, and blood would ever add up to Eric? Eric who loved her and whom she loved was not the corpse in the photographs. Eric would have been the first one to have pointed that out to both her and David. How many times did he have to tell them? The photograph was just a photograph. The photograph was only itself. No photograph could ever be him, be Eric. That was when Eric was drunk that he lectured her and David. David was a year or two older than Eric, but David had never got over Eric’s graduate degree from Columbia. The worst fights Seese had seen between them had started because David thought Eric looked down on him. David had studied art and photography in a community college in Indiana, but Eric had an MFA in art history from Columbia. Eric always said art history was what you did when you weren’t good enough to paint.

  David had always denied that Eric had made a last-minute call to him. But how else to account for David’s arriving at Eric’s apartment so soon after the suicide?

  White on white: the pure white background of glossy paper; white cat in a snowstorm, white Texas fag boy naked on white chenille. “Feverish with love and need” was a part of Eric’s letter Seese would never forget. The cops and the coroner had even joked about the length of Eric’s letter. The “three-page suicide note” had been Beaufrey’s big laugh for weeks afterward.

  Beaufrey was drunk, snorting gram after gram, and rambling on, so witty, so rich, but noticeably oder than his glamour photos due to all the scotch and cocaine and all the young boys in Rio de Janeiro. Beaufrey complained when Serlo forgot and bought harsh white light bulbs instead of the soft rose bulbs. Days before the show was to open, David was still clutching the proof sheets of Eric’s suicide. David could hardly bear to look at the prints for his show, so G. and his gallery assistants worked closely with the color lab technicians who printed all David’s work. Beaufrey had stayed drunk since Eric’s suicide. He was obsessed with Eric’s secret life with David and Seese. Beaufrey accused David of being there. Of watching Eric do it.

  David had left the room after Beaufrey said that. Seese followed David outside to the pool. There was a hot, wet wind off the bay, and the city lights were blurry in the mist. David pressed his fist against his chest. David had lied at first about Eric. David told Seese they had been friends since grade school. A lie. Later Eric had told Seese when and how they had become friends. After Eric was dead, Seese had found out he had lied to her too. He and David had not stopped being lovers when Seese first moved in.

  Eric had lied. Under the corpse, speckled with bloodstains, the coroner’s assistant had found the envelope. “All those afternoons you didn’t call, I cried,” the letter to David began.

  ART

  AFTER DISCOVERING Eric’s body, David didn’t just snap a few pictures. He had moved reflectors around and got the light so Eric’s blood appeared as bright and glossy as enamel paint.

  Later the critics dwelled on the richness and intensity of the color. One critic wrote of the “pictorial irony of a field of red shapes which might be peonies—cherry, ruby, deep purple, black—and the nude human figure nearly buried in these ‘blossoms’ of bright red.”

  The core photograph was a close-up of the face or what remained of it. By and large, the critical as well as the public reaction was one of outrage. “Photographs that belong in the Coroner’s Office and the police file.” “Punk comes to photography.”

  A steady parade of buyers had filled the gallery a week before the opening. Everyone wanted to see. Private collectors expressed concern over the lawsuit. If the negatives were later awarded to the family or destroyed, the prints would increase in value. G. was blunt. David’s success was assured. Influential international critics agreed; at last David “had found a subject to fit his style of clinical detachment and relentless exposure of what lies hidden in flesh.”

  A critic at the opening noted the crowd stood a peculiar distance from the photographs “as if they had arrived within a few minutes of the suicide.” G. knew how to sell it. He had issued a press release when Eric’s family went to court for the injunction. The lawsuit had erased any doubt there had been theatrics with greasepaint or beef blood. Eric had been David’s model for three years. The modeling agreement was not written, the attorney for the gallery explained delicately; nonetheless, the terms of the agreement had been well-known to friends and “intimates” of Eric’s. Of course, any agreement or contract had died with Eric, but arguably, the family was obliged to honor the contract.

  The tabloids on the East Coast had caught wind of it and had called it “The Last Picture Session” and “The Modeling Job From the Grave.”

  When the district court refused to delay the opening of David’s show, Eric’s family had dropped the lawsuit. Beaufrey had taken credit for the press coverage that had softened up those hick Texans.

  Seese did not remember much about the weeks before or after David’s show. She did not care if she was pregnant, she just wanted to die. She used cocaine and champagne every day to float herself above the chrome and glass rooms where conversation was perfectly charming but Beaufrey and Serlo looked past her as if she had never existed.

  Beaufrey blamed Seese for Eric’s death. He blamed her pregnancy. Their situation would have worked if she had not come along. Men could manage arrangements and accommodations. Seese had not been surprised by Beaufrey’s accusation.

  Seese should have known right then that Beaufrey was out to get her and the baby. But he had to play by special rules. David gave him no choice. Seese always understood both David and Beaufrey used others—such as Eric or her—to taunt and to tantalize. David had wanted to break Eric’s heart. But she knew David had fallen in love with her after all.

  Seese had thought about it again and again; she had gone over each hour, each minute, before they took Monte. Why had she stayed in the same apartment after David left? Beaufrey had no ex-employees. You were in or you were out. You were alive or you were dead. But Seese had stayed in the penthouse after David left. She had not even bothered to change the locks.

  KIDNAPPED

  SEESE WOULD NEVER FORGET the instant she had seen the playpen was empty. Her confusion had caused her to stumble. Stupidly she had crawled on her hands and knees, from room to room searching for him, crying out his name. He was gone. Monte was gone. Her heart had pounded loudly and she felt icy sweat all over her body. She had argued with herself: David would not take a baby still in diapers, a child Beaufrey could not tolerate.

  The first few hours after she discovered her baby was missing, Seese had been so high and so scared the police detectives would find the kilo of coke that she had not told them about the other motives. Beaufrey had double-crossed Argentines as well as Colombians. The Argentines might have taken the child in retaliation.

  The police had lost interest once they determined the baby’s disappearance was merely a domestic incident. Child-snatching by a bitter father. Police saw it all the time.

  Seese could not t
ell the detectives where David was. Photographic assignments; the only one she can remember is the rum ad he went to Puerto Rico to shoot. Beaufrey and Serlo had arranged to meet him later in Cartagena. But that had been weeks ago.

  As long as Seese remains at the apartment, Beaufrey’s lawyer “looks in” each week. Beaufrey’s lawyer locates a medical doctor who is not averse to prescribing barbiturates for emotional collapse. The lawyer brings hashish with him, and two rubbers so he won’t catch anything. He is anxious to comfort her. He promises they will hear very soon from David. The child is all right. Seese raises her voice until the dry membranes in the throat choke her. She feels something terrible has happened to her baby. Not just David stealing the child. But that her baby is in terrible danger. The lawyer spouts words; he assures her all mothers of lost children have the same feelings.

  The lawyer was pissing in the toilet and casually asked if she had told the cops anything about the “import-export business.” He got no reply. Seese was lying in the center of the bright white sheet of the king-size bed. All feelings, all sensations, had gone from her skin and the surface layers of her body. Her eyelids were open and motionless. She was floating free of gravity. The child was gone as if he had never been born. If you simply looked at the everyday surroundings—palm trees outlining the beach at Mission Bay—nothing had changed.

  Seese had been numb since Monte disappeared. Seese is still numb ten nights later as the lawyer punches his cock into her. She would have killed herself the first night, but she does not want to die until she knows for certain Monte is dead. The lawyer pumps above her as if he is doing push-ups, a brief down-curve and thrust before he rises back up, and all Seese can imagine is being fucked by a strange machine. Seese remembered it had all happened as if on cue: David’s phone call before the lawyer had rolled off her. David shouting. He demands to see the baby. Seese shouts back; she is in tears. If David doesn’t have Monte, then he is lost. Her baby is lost.