The
theft shocked & hurt, embarrassed her, but what could she do? Her daughter was out there in the world, five months pregnant — no way would she call the police. Even though her small circle of friends said she should. “On Intervention,” said Albie, “they always tell the parents to call the police. They say if you don’t, you’re just helping your kid to stay sick.” There was still no way.
After the initial shock, Jacquie had a good cry over the loss of the cameras themselves. She pictured them in her mind, saw them, felt them, the reaching for & the picking up, the straps even, the cold compact steely heft of their bodies, the exquisiteness of the machines, saw herself screwing/swiveling the lenses, the battery packs, the armatures as a soldier assembles his rifle, with love & respect, pride of ownership & mastery, stuffing their guts with film, attuned to each’s quirks & hiccups, each its own idiosyncrasies, how she watched over them, like a good mother paying closer attention when they got subtle bugs or technical fevers & if it lasted or grew worse, bringing them to the camera doc, leaving them overnight or even for a week in CCU (camera care unit) to be healed, always worried she might never see whichever baby again, not due to failure or impossibility of repair, but fire in the camera hospital, or… theft. They were part of her & she, part of them, for better & worse; each helped carry her through chapters of her life. Yes, they were her children as well, & the irony was not lost.
She knew that Jerilynn felt
why had it been impossible to call her Reeyonna? She practically begged me & I wouldn’t, I thought it was silly, to say ‘Reeyonna,’ + I didn’t like her changing the name I had given her, even though it was a terrible slight to her father because the root was Jerry/Jerome, I named her as if she belonged to the Professor, & now, to not call her by her ‘tween’ name seems so utterly hurtful, sadistic, insane
betrayed not just by her mother but by them, treasure chest of cameras, tireless, ostensible instruments of Reeyonna’s putative wealth & liberation, cheated by the mechanical eyes that had probed & proposed to her whorls of underage skin, she allowed them to with the innocence and capitulation of a child she let them in, she gave herself to them and they failed to protect. Reeyonna once told her that she read in school how the Indians wouldn’t let their pictures be taken because they thought the camera stole their soul, & it had all come true all of it———
In her loneliest late afternoon Mt. Olympus moments, palm of hand resting on the melon covered by the very same stretchedskin so thoroughly ogled by her mother’s 1,000-eyed beastie battlework battalions, Reeyonna felt her young girl’s soul still trapped within those leathery, hardbodied, unforgivingly stylish, monumentally indifferent machines. Well. She would not let that stand, no, not now, could not let it stand to have been cheated & disrespected, could no longer let that stand now that she was carrying her own camera in her belly, hatching her own witness/assassin/co-conspirator, could those cameras have been so arrogant not to conceive that by doing the bidding of their mistress they had doomed themselves to chattel? disposable robot trash pawed & pawned to/by strangers for a fraction of their worth? Reeyonna went on www.DigitalPawnshop.com & laughed as she brought them to market, Brothers Collateral Loans, right down there off the hill in W Hollywood, she goofed and chortled as the abducted children click-clanked in the cotton laundry bag they’d been carelessly thrown into, with no regard for their beauty, thrown in with a vandal’s high-spirited abandon, now and then she opened the neck of the bag to literally spit inside it, she’d have handed out all perfectly engineered specimens on Skid Row or set each on a rail to iFilm a traincrush and put it on youtube for Thiefbitch to see, yes she would certainly have done that if she didn’t need the money, she’d have drowned them in the water like in that Eminem song & recorded them screaming and pounding on the trunk of the car and dying, and sent the sounds to her mother & when you dream I hope you can’t sleep & scream about it you could never EVER put a price on them, not for Bitchthief, for Bitchthief their worth was inestimable, incalculable, though they had ultimately failed to give Bitchthief her fortune either, still, Bitchthief had fetishized them, all that worn leather with the little rents here and there, the nicks and dents and whatnot just like or close enough to the vintage guitars of famous old rockers, each one’s metal casings infinitesimally eroded by her mother’s fingers, the cells of her mother’s fingers, how could you how could you put a price on the metal of the ruggedly beautiful armatures each polished by exfoliation, the very cells her mother shed in their handling, the armatures protecting the sacred calibrated innerworkings that allowed Jacquie to memorialize Time itself! — no — one could not put a price on how they’d been prized, adored, ecstatically enlisted in erotic career worship, in sacrifice, human sacrifice! of she, Reeyonna! — all Reeyonna could do was hope that her mother’s soul had been captured too, stolen by ReeRee’s theft, & that Jacquie would die a little each day, each hour, each moment, that she would feel it in her heart & stomach feel the rape each time they were handled by uncouth foreign hands.
. .
Jacquie cried—————. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ….
The wash of memories.
The Rolleiflex the Professor gave her — her first — that stolen too, out of smashwindowed car while she sat with his dying body. (Dad’s fry cook venues & childhood loneliness.) Her joy & dismay that an older, educated, married man would be interested in her, find her alluring. The rented bungalow, to her, then, the height of luxury — at first — a lovenest — and then — the baby screaming it never stopped screaming, & the adult loneliness. Punctuation of scary illicit rapturously screaming sex. Being pregnant with Jerry. The fear/joy of baby coming, illicit baby, boy baby, scary baby enraptured, screaming. Her useless mother. The kindness of the Professor’s wife, ushering her to the hospital room, Jerome’s hospital room, Jerome who insisted on being Jerry, everyone has a secret name, everyone wants to be called by something else. Real widow leaving fake widow alone to say her goodbyes. A religious act, a saintly act. The Mary Magdelenity of it all, of the 2 women. But Jacquie never thanked her, never thanked the Professor’s widow, never said a word, never even thought a word, too shellshocked by her life.
. .
She was all right after taking the pictures of the stillborn in the manger. The manger at Little Company of Mary Hospital. She was OK in fact for two whole days, on a kind of strange eleemosynary high. Energized. Everything was more vivid, colors, sounds, dreams. Accession of long abandoned hope. Albie said don’t come in but she insisted she was fine, work was good for her. She was grateful to him. The experience left her feeling back in the art game as well. Ah. Hmm. So this is what the mysterious Sears thing was all about.
Then she crashed.
She couldn’t get out of bed and didn’t realize she couldn’t or that she hadn’t until Albie called to ask if she was okay — not because she didn’t show at work but because she didn’t speak after picking up — not because she had nothing to say but because in that instant she did not know who or where she was. When he was 16 he answered phones on a teen suicide hotline & the training handily came back. He assessed whether Jacquie was a threat to herself or others and determined she wasn’t.