"Marc Laidlaw - The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laidlaw Marc)

duplicate set of the suicide photos, taking more care in the darkroom than ever
before. He managed to burn some detail into the glare of flash on the bath water,
enough so that he could see one of her hands with the fingers gently splayed beneath
the surface, as if bathed in mercury. He worked long past his regular hours. Her
curled prints were always tacked up in his memory, examples of an ideal heтАЩd never
known to strive for until now. He found himself working to extract subtle qualities of
mood and tone from the negatives, fluttering his fingers beneath the enlarger lens,
controlling contrast with split-bath developers--things heтАЩd never bothered with
before, except when making bad negatives into acceptable prints. Gradually he
found the glossy bright snaps of death becoming utterly strange to him, unlike his
other photographs which became more commonplace as he worked them over.
These were beautiful, like paintings done in silver; morbid but alive in the way only
photographs are alive. Finally he stood back from his handiwork and shook his head
in disbelief, because he had made her poor drowned corpse immortal.
It was an awful responsibility. That night, late, the phone rang and he came
awake to the reek of sulfur. It was on his hands and made his eyes sting when he
wiped away tears. What had he been dreaming?
тАЬItтАЩs me,тАЭ said the raspy little voice, and that was when he realized why it
sounded so odd. It was a dwarf voice; gruff with age and tribulation, not squeaky
but still small. This was one of ArbusтАЩs weird women.
тАЬSo it is,тАЭ he said. тАЬBut itтАЩs the middle of the night.тАЭ
тАЬI thought youтАЩd be more likely to come alone that way.тАЭ
тАЬWhat, now?тАЭ
тАЬHave you got a pencil?тАЭ
He thought of telling her he didnтАЩt have the prints with him, but he found
himself grabbing a pen and pad instead. He wrote down an address and agreed to
meet her in half an hour. He was backing his car out of the driveway when he came
fully awake and wondered what the fuck he was-doing. Was this police procedure?
He decided this didnтАЩt have anything to do with the department. This was for the
sake of something else--call it moonlighting, like his work in the darkroom. He had to
have something in his life besides a job, didnтАЩt he? Like Arbus, whoтАЩd shot models
for a living and in her spare time went looking for freaks. Maybe she needed that,
after overdosing on glamour all day. Maybe in his case, after the brutal repetitive
ugliness of his day-today--dead junkies and hold-up victims who were a bit too slow
(or low) with the cash--he needed something a little fantastic, something beautiful,
like that silver glow heтАЩd glimpsed on the surface of ArbusтАЩs bath, like the first rays
of a silver sun about to rise, a hint of imminent revelation. He saw clues to that light
hanging over the marble crypts of Brooklyn which spread away beneath him as he
took the bridge; it was more explicit on the waters of the East River, increasingly
lovely and plentiful as crushed jewels scattered over the black tombs of the
Manhattan skyline. Then he drove down into the tunnel where the glare of
fluorescents rubbed his eyes raw, dispelling all magic except for the sense of humid
evil evoked by the sight of so much seeping greenish tile lining the tunnel walls. In his
mind, water continued to drip from a mirror long after blood had ceased dripping
from her dangling arm.
The address the dwarf gave him wasnтАЩt really an address. There were
buildings on either side of it, in an alley, but the number itself did not exist. All he
saw was a low wall of old brick topped by a spiked wrought-iron fence; an iron gate
opened in the midst of it. Might have been a vacant lot behind that wall, anything.
Shattered windows looked down from three sides, as if the rendezvous were nothing