“Exactly,” he says with a little pound of his fist on the table.
“But I wouldn’t necessarily break into her apartment.”
“But then,” he says, “you haven’t been infected as long as I have.”
“Infected?” Sylvia repeats.
“After a time it’s more of a burden than a joy. That’s probably true about every obsession. But it’s worse with Propp.”
She comes back to the table and sits down.
“Did you ever think,” she says, “that maybe Propp wouldn’t want all this devotion?”
“Did you ever think,” he answers, his voice on the edge of a sneer, as if she’s the fool for trying to reason with a fanatic, “that perhaps that doesn’t matter?”
She lets a beat go by and then changes the subject
“So Derry’s been a link to Propp information in the past.”
He nods. “A very tentative link. But at times he’s all we had. You have to understand that there are a lot of shysters in this area. People who will lead you on, tell you they know of someone who knows of someone, that there are rumors of a print in Europe. It’s like pulling teeth and it’s always expensive. More often than not it all leads to a dead end or a forgery.”
“But that wasn’t the case with Derry?”
“It never appeared to be. Once or twice he grudgingly supplied us with a tip. A phone number. An ad in a catalog. Nothing ever materialized, but it wasn’t a case of fraud or deceit. Things just blew up in our faces. People didn’t show up for meetings. That kind of thing.”
“Do you think Derry personally knows Propp?”
“Now that,” he says, “supposes that Propp is among the living.”
“So it does.”
“What do you think, Sylvia?”
“I’m new at this, remember?”
“Tell me you’ve got some prints, Sylvia.”
The look on his face is so earnest and really almost desperate that there is this sucker part of her that wants to take him by the hand and lead him down to the darkroom and hand him the salvation or narcotic that’s hanging on the dry-line.
“I wish I could, Gaston. But I’ve got nothing. Yes, I knew a little more about the myth than I let on at Der Garten. And yes, I bought a camera from Jack Derry. But that’s all I bought. I’m more in the dark than you people.”
He looks down at his lap and says, “You know I don’t want to believe you.”
She gets up and crosses to the back door and opens it.
“I’ve got to get some sleep now.”
He sits staring at her, finally rises out of the chair with a weary effort, walks past her out to the back hall, then stops and turns back and says, “I’m sorry, Sylvia.”
She doesn’t say anything and he moves down the back stairs.
In the cellar, Sylvia sits on the step stool. Her head has started to ache again. Her eyes are so tired and dry that each blink brings a sting like a wound. But she looks out on the line of pictures. She keeps looking at the pictures. She keeps staring at this woman and this child and this cavernous ruin.
She thinks about a Friday night long ago, attending the Stations of the Cross with her mother down at St. Brendan’s. She thinks about the Stations, the carvings, hung on the walls of the cathedral, hung in a specific order, each a story unto itself, and yet, each one connected to the next, connected by a ceremony, linked by a chain of interrelated events, and telling a larger story, the sum greater than the parts. And now the drying line is like the Stations of the Cross, hung this way, seven stories, seven segments of one story: Sylvia’s Stations.
She rubs her eyes, opens them, stares at the photographs.
Here are the things she knows.
No, here are the things she believes she knows: There is nothing erotic about these photographs in front of her.
She understands how subjective a judgment that is. She realizes that there are individuals who could find the erotic in a landfill or an ad for mouthwash, people who could manage to insert some idea of eroticism into any image they happen upon. But she believes that the majority of people, confronted with these seven pictures, would not attach the adjective, the concept, of erotic to them.
There is something extraordinary about these photographs.
She knows what they aren’t. But it’s something else entirely to define what they are. They are ethereal, but at the same time rooted in an earthy, actually grimy, setting. They are tender, and yet that tenderness feels overlaid with a fear, a vague conviction that something malignant is within reach. They are tragic and yet the more she looks at each one, the more she’s convinced of this unexplainable, unjustifiable sense of endurance emanating from the mother figure. Maybe even from the infant. More than anything, she wants to say the prints are haunting, like touchstones for memories that could unseat someone’s entire sense of the world. The pictures scare her, and yet she can’t turn away from them. They sadden her, and yet she can’t get enough.
There is no way to be sure these prints were taken by Terrence Propp.
Or, for that matter, that the man she spent this evening with, the man who took her to his underground lair and the flea market and the movie theatre, the man who photographed her at Gompers Station, there is no way to know that that man is Terrence Propp. Terrence Propp could be Jack Derry. He could be Mr. Quevedo. He could be dead and buried. He could be continents away, having renounced photography and his own past. He could be an empty legend created by a slick entrepreneur with the eye of an artist.
Whoever the man was tonight, he posed me in the same manner as the Madonna in these pictures.
Which means he must know about these pictures. Which suggests that it’s likely he did take these pictures. Which suggests that the Aquinas was placed in her hands on purpose, that the events of the past several days are much more than coincidence, are likely part of a plan, a strategy, a system for manipulating where she goes and what she thinks.
Someone wanted me to have these pictures.
She gets up off the stool and unclips the last print in the series, brings it to the worktable and holds a magnifying glass over it. She bends down, peers over the print, focuses on the mother’s face, stares at the shadow that obscures her features.
Propp’s voice comes to her.
There are stunning similarities.
She drops the magnifying glass. She walks to the dryline and steps in front of each photograph. She looks at the mother. She looks at the infant. She looks back to the mother.
She doesn’t want it to hit her, but of course it does, with the kind of vengeful, crippling intensity that can only pass over you once in a life span. She sinks down on the floor below the seven pictures and she begins to weep. Her arms and shoulders start to shake slightly and her nose begins to run. She tries to stifle any noise and manages only a soft keen, like a small animal caught in an even smaller space.
Epiphanies of this nature don’t grow out of a logical progression of facts. They don’t evolve from a rational chain of deduction and analysis. They simply appear, unexpected and uninvited, like a car out of control that changes the life of every person it collides with.
She cries even though she knows that it’s a waste of energy to try to fight this kind of knowledge. This certainty. This simple but horrible idea. It comes at you with the kind of suddenness and persistence you’ve chronically feared in your dreams. It rapes you with a kind of shocking but undeniable certainty. It takes your body, without warning or explanation, and hurls you brutally across a chasm of protective doubt, across the impediment of absent proof. And it lands you with a bone-rattling crash that no amount of time will allow recovery from.