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

shiny gray, cropped short. The skin was the same shade of silvery black that no
negroтАЩs skin had ever been. But that didnтАЩt mean it was her. The face might have
proved something, but he was spared the sight of her piercing white pupils staring
out of his negatives because sheтАЩd slid face down in the tub. Still, when he looked at
the spiky hair, he felt a chill he hoped wasnтАЩt wholly based on recognition.
The next few days passed with excruciating slowness as he waited for the
sense of shock to move through his system and into the past so he could get on with
a life of ordinary things. He had time off coming to him, and he took it. He went to
the Catskills with an Instamatic camera and took color snaps of waterfalls and old
bridges and empty inner tubes bobbing down the Esopus River. He didnтАЩt take any
pictures of people. He met a woman in a restaurant bar who spent the night at his
cabin; in the morning she was gone but he felt reassured because she had vanished in
the usual way, while his eyes were closed. When he got back to the city after a week,
he thought heтАЩd put it all behind him; he thought he was refreshed.
His first night back on duty, a man shot his wife through the temples, cut the
throats of his two-, three-, and four-year-olds, strangled the family Doberman (not
necessarily in that order), and sentenced himself to life as a vegetable by badly
misjudging the trajectory of his final bullet. The photography posed a number of
technical problems for Brovnik, due to the cramped conditions, but he was working
them out in a cool professional way when he happened to look through the open
window onto the dark fire escape and saw the four of them standing there. Five, if
you counted the dog. A tall silvery white woman, three little ones, and a four-legged
mass of silver mist. Silvery white, with sharp white pupils, all looking at him as if he
owed them something. It didnтАЩt make sense to him at first (and this was how his
mind worked, hooked on little bits of logic he hoped might help him understand the
larger problem) that they should all be silvery white, when the shrinking woman in the
cemetery had been so inky black.
тАЬWhat the fuck are you doing, Bravo? ThereтАЩs no pulse in that arm.тАЭ He
looked down in horror and saw that he had been posing a limp arm -- adjusting the
dead to make a better picture.
He backed off and drew the camera defensively to his eye, aiming it at the
motherтАЩs splattered skull. For the first time he noticed that she was black. The
children were black as well. So was the Doberman. All black.
Lowering the camera, he saw five white negatives watching him.
What did she do to me? he wondered.
 тАЬBravo? What is it?тАЭ
He didnтАЩt answer the other cops. He knew he wouldnтАЩt ever be able to answer
their questions. He forced his way to the window and showed his camera to the
watchers outside, let them witness him opening the back and exposing the film. He
yanked out a yard of it, unspooling the celluloid, letting it go ribboning into the night
with all the latent images burned out, never to be seen, sparing them his cameraтАЩs
bite of immortality.
As the woman in the graves had done, they shrank away to nothing. Five new
stars burned briefly in the night, a bit too low to top the horizon, then blinked out.
тАЬBrovnik, what the fuck is wrong?тАЭ Heavy steps came toward him.
тАЬI have to get out,тАЭ he said, stepping through the window. Questioning cries
followed him all the way down the fire escape to the street, where he walked away
quickly from the lights of the squad cars, his camera tugging like a bloodhound on
the trail of everything that had ever eluded him.