Chapter 311: Photograph
CASSIAN
I paid the man before Julian could even ask.
By the time I handed over the money, Julian had already walked out onto the stone steps.
He lifted the heavy black box to his face, pointed it across the narrow alley at an old green door with peeling paint, and pressed the button.
Click.
When he pulled the camera down, his face had that same bare, clean look from the day we arrived.
He looked like he’d just pulled off a trick no one thought he could do.
After that, he photographed everything.
I mean everything. He spent half a roll of film just trying to catch the way the morning light hit the ripples in our water jug.
He took pictures of the grey cat on the wall, the blue rim of his coffee cup, the old wooden crates at the market, the way the shutters threw long black lines across our bedroom floor at three in the afternoon, and the small wooden boats tied up at the stone pier.
But mostly, he pointed the thing at me.
I hated it at first. Every time I heard the strap rattle, I’d turn my head or put a hand up.
"Stop it," I’d tell him, looking away from the glass lens.
He’d follow me around the table, his boots clicking on the tiles. "Hold still for five seconds, Cassian. Just five."
"I don’t want to be in your pictures, Julian."
"Too bad," he said.
Click.
"Got you anyway."
"Julian—"
He was already moving the wheel with his thumb, preparing for the next one, his eye stuck to the little glass viewfinder.
"You have a good face," he said, his voice dropping into that flat, simple way he used when he was stating a fact about the world.
"It’s dark and you look like you’re about to kill someone, but it’s a good face. It’s not my fault the light likes it."
He took pictures of me when I wasn’t paying attention.
I’d be reading the local paper at the small table, or looking out the window at the rain, or carrying the milk up from the shop at the bottom of the hill.
He caught me once while I was just standing by the stove waiting for the water to boil, my eyes fixed on his back while he was out on the terrace. I didn’t even know he had the camera near his hand.
One afternoon, he turned the small windowless bathroom into a darkroom.
He bought some black paper from the town and taped it over the cracks in the door until the room was pitch black, save for a small red bulb he’d screwed into the wall fixture.
The whole place smelled like sour vinegar and heavy salt from the chemicals he’d bought.
I stood in the doorway, my shoulder against the frame, watching him work in the red glow.
His hands were steady now, completely steady, as he used a pair of plastic tongs to move a square of paper through a shallow plastic tray filled with clear liquid.
Slowly, the white paper started to change. A dark line appeared, then the shape of a shoulder, then the outline of a window frame.
It was me, standing by the glass with the light cutting across my chest.
Julian lifted the wet paper out of the chemical bath with the tongs, holding it up by the corner so the wetness dripped back into the tray. He looked at it through the red light, then turned his head to look at me in the doorway.
"See?" he whispered, his voice warm in the small, stinking room. "Good face."
It was a Sunday, and the beach at the bottom of the cliff was completely empty except for a couple of old men mending nets near the rocks.
It was that time between seasons when the summer people hadn’t arrived yet and the winter wind hadn’t started to bite. The sand was cool and damp from the high tide.
I had my boots off. That was Julian’s idea, and I had fought him on it for ten minutes before we left the house.
I hadn’t gone bare-foot since I was seven years old; it felt wrong to have nothing between my skin and the ground, like I was leaving myself open to whatever was crawling under the dirt.
But the sand felt heavy and cold between my toes, and after a few minutes, I stopped looking down.
Julian was walking ahead of me, the camera swinging from his neck by its leather strap.
He kept stopping to take pictures of the way the foam ran back down the slope of the beach, timing the button press so he caught the water just as it turned into white lace on the dark stones.
He had that patient, quiet look on him again, his mouth slightly open as he watched the rhythm of the sea.
An old man with skin like wrinkled leather and a thick blue wool sweater came walking toward us from the pier.
He had an old pipe in his mouth that wasn’t lit, and he was watching Julian with a faint, amused look.
Julian stopped as the man got close.
He didn’t have the language down yet, he only knew about three words that didn’t involve ordering food... but he stepped right up to the local and pointed at the camera, then pointed at me, then made a wide gesture with his hands that covered the two of us and the ocean behind us.
It was the same way he used to deal with people back in the city when he didn’t want to use words; his hands did the talking, easy and natural, making the old man understand without a single scrap of proper grammar.
The local let out a dry cough that might have been a chuckle, took the heavy black box from Julian’s hands, and lifted it to his eye.
Julian turned and jogged back to where I was standing near the water’s edge. He didn’t ask before he did it, he just reached out and wrapped his arm right around my waist, pulling his side hard against mine.
His hip was tucked against my thigh, his shoulder wedged under mine, and I could feel the heat of his skin right through his shirt.
It was the way he did things now, without checking to see if it was safe first, like he finally believed no one was going to shoot him for touching me.
I looked at the old man with the camera, then I forgot about him completely. I turned my head to look down at Julian instead.
Click.
