The house was empty and wanted to be. It thought it had completed its business with full-time occupancy many years before. A trained, tight-lipped servant would visit it mechanically to attend to its upkeep. He, like his father before him, would use and maintain the stables and horses and lock its existence behind him each time he left. The bright, heavy keys were polished from daily use.
4 Kühler Brunnen contained no people in the balanced and poised hollowness of its rooms above ground. In its basement was a well of astonishing depth – if it were ever given sky, it would reflect the most distant galaxies in its sightless water. But it remained hugged, contained and blinkered by the solid house. In other rooms below, there were crated machines and stagnant presses, boxed carboys and empty, stained vessels. The quietness here had an agreement with dust; neither settled. The old, dark house was always alert and guarding what occurred beneath it.
The cave was lightless, out of focus and red. Its proportions were shunted into afterimage by a scarlet lamp which did not illuminate, but swallowed any traces of normal white light or perspective.
Water flowed ceaselessly, and the occupant moved with determination in the thick, urine-scented air. He soaked his hands and the glass plates in blind tanks of warm fluids. Sealing them, he counted aloud as he rocked them into waking under the hollow red of the mournful light. When complete, he released them and set them aside, the glass dripping dry while he prepared the next batch of chemicals. Once cured, he gently inserted them into the projector, and opened them out as light and shadow on the flat screen below. Peering sideways into the focused surface, his eyes almost touched the image, seeking errors and imperfections: none were there. It was another immaculate work. Every grain of dust and spit of flying blood could be seen – sharp, white sparks against the inverted black of the horse’s skin. He quickly blocked the flow of light and, with something close to glee, slid the sensitive paper beneath it, unsheathing the glow from the lamp once more. He set a loud clock ticking and adjusted the preciously kept temperature of the bloods. When the alarm bell sounded, he gathered up the paper and drowned it in the floating tray of liquid chemicals, lulling it back and forth until gradually, under his moving hands, a shadow appeared, a shadow darker than anything else in this bolted chapel, a shadow grown to become a space around the screaming void of a horse.
Muybridge lifted the image of the spilling animal from one tank to another, where it floated with more of its kind in a circulation of fixatives. He dried his hands and pulled his long white beard out from his shirt collar – it had been tucked in so as not to stir the chemicals and spoil the process. He stepped back, straightening into a position of satisfaction and unbolting the door to the intensity of the world.
An hour later, he laid out the sequence of photographic prints on a long, narrow table in his temporary study which adjoined the barn. Four men moved together towards the images as Muybridge stepped aside to give them space around his pride.
The running horse had been delineated, flattened to silhouette on a scaled grid. The cameras had erased the noise and the sickening third dimension. Now it could be studied, uncluttered by the stink of actuality. Great beauty strode across the dense chemical papers. The horse had become classical and otherworldly as it charged, buckled and collapsed in a dignity of aestheticism.
The men were delighted as they pored over the prints. Theirs was a world of mechanical precision, and this gridded slaughter had proved the value of its latest device. They packed away the evidence that would lead to manufacture and thanked Muybridge on the doorstep of his domain, shaking his hand enthusiastically.
He closed the door on their departure. For a moment, in the narrow corridor between rooms, he mused on the effect that monstrous gun would have had on the anatomy of the despicable Major Larkyns, and how his last expression of stunned surprise and pain would have been so much greater. Even after all these years, he would have liked that. He would have liked his treacherous young wife to witness her lover being cut in two. She had died from his silence months after he dispatched the Major. A stroke they said, some said grief, but Muybridge knew it was the granite hush he had sealed in her: even after she left their home, he had known it would harden and split her head.
It was a moment of delightful speculation before returning to the serious business of the negatives. His military clients had their prints, but he had the negatives, and he had his own plans for the images. He had been at the pinnacle of a life’s achievement when he decided to chase another quality in his work: an allusive ghost that permeated everything he photographed. It had led him into deep speculation and personal violation, but still he could not put it aside. He was an artist, photographer and inventor of prodigious importance – that was all secured, acquired against all the odds. The last few experiments were his, and they would answer the questions. He pictured a horse that never touched the ground, or one that charged under it, or another that stalked his sleep like a bed sheet ghost. Process thrown over anxiety to flap in the corridors of then and his few remaining tomorrows. A movement he had only caught from the corner of the camera’s eye.
Ishmael was becoming a man. His docile white body was beginning to toughen and shape itself for a different purpose, though it would never be as hard as the brown ones who so carefully nurtured him. Their bodies were all very different, perfect in their gleam and the depth of their polished surfaces. Each was a unique, beautiful variation of form and appointment – he forever marvelled at their splendour, while examining the flabby imprecision of his own shell.
Over time, he had become more and more intrigued by Luluwa; she was unlike the others. Not because she was female. That had been explained to him before. There were four kinds of things like him in this world: men, women, animals and ghosts. He was a man, like Abel and Seth. Luluwa was a woman, like Aklia. He was just a different kind. Men had tubes and strength, women had pouches and gentleness. He had a little of all.
He had first felt heat for Luluwa when she killed an animal for him. Snapping it in her long, shiny fingers, she had opened it for him to taste and smell, and explained that its insides were a copy of his, made in the same materials, unlike her own, which were modelled from a different substance. She had described how the thick, soft covering kept the animal warm and that, in time, he too would have such, and that if he looked carefully near the lamp he might see tiny traces of growth already there on his pliant skin. She had extended her smooth, graceful arm and shown him the absence of ‘hair’. He had flushed, felt ashamed and badly made. He’d wanted to hold his breath and suck all the traces of animal back into his shell, wanted every hair to shrivel and glaze over, towards her perfection.
She had explained before that he was too soft to grow, to expand from the inside out, to puff up. She was fully formed and inflexible. This made no sense to him – why would he have to grow into something while she was already there, immaculate? She tapped her brown shell and said that her skin was stiff and brittle while his was pliant and cuttable, that they were both vulnerable in different ways. He was made of flesh, like the animals, and she was made of Bakelite, like the furniture.