She hears her throat and her tongue form the word out of the remains of her crying.
Mother.
The last things she’s sure of are the most awful of all.
Terrence Propp is my father.
The Madonna in the pictures is my mother.
And I am the infant at her breast.
reel three
The visual is essentially pornographic …
27
The sound of a dog barking wakes Sylvia sometime before dawn. She gets up off the cellar floor and locks up the darkroom without looking at the pictures. She goes back up to the apartment, climbs into bed and falls asleep for another three hours, then showers and gets dressed and walks to the Snapshot Shack.
Now, sitting in the tiny booth with a half hour till opening, there’s no way to stop thinking. The radio is no distraction and Cora’s crossword magazines are all filled in. So she stares out the bubble window at the plaza in front of her, at the whitewashed glass and the realtor’s rental signs and the trash that’s collected on the walkway.
There is no reason to believe that twenty-five years ago, her mother bundled her in a blanket and took her down to an already abandoned and decayed train station. That her mother took a seat on a broken marble pillar and tilted her face toward the man who was her husband and Sylvia’s father. That her mother posed for seven photographs as Sylvia fed at her breast. That the man with the camera deserted them. And that for the next twenty years, up to the time of her death, mother never told daughter a word about any of these events.
There is not a single fact to suggest the validity of this particular story. And yet, Sylvia knows it’s the truth. She knows that this is exactly what took place. She knows the real fiction is comprised of the few details her mother did tell — that her father died before Sylvia was born, that the father was a milkman for a local dairy, that Sylvia had no family to speak of beyond her mother.
“And so what does she do with this knowledge? She thinks about Propp fleeing the Ballard last night and cringes at how close she came to violating the oldest taboo in the world. But should she seek him out now? Go back to Gompers or the Canal Zone cellars and try to find her way to St. Benedict’s?”
On the walk to work, low clouds rolled in and it’s been threatening to rain for the past hour. The air almost has that pre-tornado feel to it, a false stillness, as if this lack of breeze was just an ambush tactic. Sylvia looks at the strip of connected stores again and tries to picture what would happen if a tornado did touch down here. She can imagine the Snapshot Shack itself being torn off its slab and spun into flight, spiraling above Quinsigmond, just like Dorothy Gale’s farmhouse. She can imagine her head stuck out the bubble window, seeing people blown past her — Perry doing an off-balance air-swim, losing all the papers from his monogrammed briefcase, Leni Pauline bumping and grinding into the yonder, tassels revolving with the force of the twister, Hugo Schick maniacally grinning at this spectacle of nature, a hand-held camera filming the flight path of his own demise. And Terrence Propp just letting the winds take him, an ambiguous look on his face, neither terror nor contentment, just a nod in Sylvia’s direction as he passes.
She kills the fantasy and realizes she’s staring at Mrs. Ellis, Jenny’s tormented, agonized mother. The woman has her ever present “Missing” posters tucked under her arm. She’s dressed in the same clothes she was wearing when Sylvia saw her at the Halloween block party. The woman’s hair sticks out in every direction. She’s walking slowly past the plaza’s empty stores, trying to peer inside each one through the whitewashed windows, as if her daughter sits inside some bankrupt footwear shop, playing with abandoned laces and shoeboxes, just waiting for her mother to find the correct location and take her home again.
Mrs. Ellis walks up to an old man sitting on a slatted wooden bench at the end of the walkway. She begins to go into what must by now be an automatic spiel, the incomprehensible story of how random evil came to her door one day. The old man nods sympathetically and takes one of the flyers, studies Jenny’s picture. Then he gestures to the Snapshot Shack and, after some discussion, leaves Mrs. Ellis and begins to move across the parking lot toward Sylvia. He walks with a slight limp, leaning down on a cane. Halfway across the asphalt, Sylvia realizes that the figure is Mr. Quevedo from Brody’s Adult Books.
She slides the bubble open and waits for him to approach.
“You’re a long way from your shop,” she says before he can speak.
He comes to a stop directly in front of the window and stands formally with both his hands on the top of his cane and his milky eyes staring out at nothing in particular. He’s dressed in a slightly worn and very dated brown suit with a yellow and brown paisley tie.
“I decide to take a stroll,” he says, “before the weather turns.”
“I think you’ll get caught on your way back.”
“I won’t melt,” he says, then both of them are quiet for a few seconds and the awkwardness blooms. She should have expected to see Quevedo, sooner or later.
“I went to see Rory Gaston,” she says. “He swears he doesn’t know you.”
Quevedo seems to think for a minute. He blinks a few times and then says, “I don’t believe I’ve ever been introduced to Mr. Gaston.”
“You’re the one who told me to go see him.”
“I provided you with a name, Miss Krafft. I never said I knew any of the Proppists personally.”
A small, annoying smile comes over his face and prompts her to say, “What is it I can do for you, Mr. Quevedo? Do you have some film to drop off? We’re running a sensational price on Snapshot Shack brand when you drop off an exposed roll for processing.”
“I don’t take pictures, Sylvia,” he says.
“Well then,” she says, “it was good seeing you. I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.”
“My child,” he says and she flinches. “This is no way to treat an old man.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m having a very tough day. And the morning shipment is due any minute.”
He shifts his stance and looks up at the darkening sky and she wonders just how much he can see.
“I’m not your enemy, Sylvia. Out of all the men in your life, I’m not the one you should fear.”
Before she can think she says, “There’s only one man in my life.”
“Would that be Mr. Schick or Mr. Propp?”
“That would be Mr. Leroux.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head and pushing his pale, cracked lips out as if he was trying to whistle, “no it wouldn’t.”
So far, she’s more angry than fearful. She yells, “Who the hell are you, asshole?”
“Vulgarity doesn’t flatter you, child.”
“All right, just knock it off with the child shit. Jesus.”
She wants to climb out of the booth and knock the blind old bastard on his ass. He remains unfazed. He touches the small knot of his tie and says, “I’m not here to anger or annoy you, Sylvia.”
“So why are you here?”
“Very simply,” he says, “to be of assistance. I know you currently feel that there’s no one you can trust. And I know what a horrible feeling that can be, Sylvia. Please believe me.”
“And why,” she asks, coming back to control, “would you want to help me?”