The Sleeping and the Dead Read online

  Sitting in the parking lot, seeing my burned-out apartment and thinking about how easily I could have died and the innocent people I might have taken with me, I suddenly wanted more than I had in a long time to push a big fat needle in my arm and be done with it, ride that magic carpet so far away I could never find my way home. Sayonara, you fucked-up old world, y’all are better off without me. Instead, I turned around and drove out of the apartment complex before the landlord spotted me sitting there feeling sorry for myself, mooning over my miserable life. He used to watch out the windows. He never caught a single burglar or car thief, but he always knew you were home when you were behind on your rent.

  Money was going to be tight after tonight. I had probably ruined my relationship with Michi. Not that I particularly cared for him. I never was convinced the old perv wasn’t a pedophile, no matter what the DA thought. I had busted Michi for buying a book of photos of nude boys. Art, they said, but what kind of art was that? If Michi wanted art, couldn’t he find something that didn’t skate along the edge of kiddie porn? And what about his boizu—those college-age young men who lived out of his house like gypsies and alley cats? He gave them money and a place to stay in exchange for their participation in his rites. Being physically incapable of engaging in a sexual act didn’t stop him from entertaining the most profound sexual perversions. The least of these, to my knowledge, involved his infamous Monday-night bukkake parties with eleven young men dressed up in football uniforms. That’s what we had interrupted tonight.

  But Michi’s boizu were adults, if only just, and they were willing participants, so who was I to judge them or, for that matter, him? They probably needed Michi’s money as much as I needed it. I hated my need, but maybe they hated it, too. For several years now, Michi had been buying my photos of the dead. He always paid more for violent deaths. He paid best for suicides, especially hangings, and especially if they were still hanging. I don’t know what he got out of it, but in some way I could almost understand—he had seen too much and hurt too much and now the only things he could feel through the numb calluses on his perverted heart would blast the eyes of any ordinary mortal. It wasn’t sex. It was far deeper, darker, gone beyond simple fetishism or even carnal depravity, down to a place where the acts performed in the conjuring chambers of his seven-gabled house might actually summon The Devil Himself to watch and sing along. Or so I sometimes imagined. Honestly, I didn’t know what he did, and I didn’t want to know. But I needed his money just to keep my head above water, so I catered to his death fetish and sold him the graven images for his midnight sabbaths, even if it damned my soul.

  It was all too easy to forget the people I had photographed, all the bodies and parts of bodies, the human wreckage of so many lives thrown away. I had become numb to them, except the Playhouse Killer victims. For most of the others, it was a job. I took the pictures and sold them to Chief Billet, to insurance companies, to people with lawsuits and personal injury lawyers, and to Michi Mori. Meanwhile, every drowned baby and every bloody smeer on the road chipped away at me until almost nothing remained but a cold lizard brain, flicking its tongue and tasting an opportunity to make a buck. The money took the pain away for an hour or two. I couldn’t stand to see a dead dog on the side of the road but it was nothing to shoot photographs of some bum cut in half on a train track, because I knew Michi would write me a fat check. But no matter how I tried to kill the horror—with drugs, sex, oblivion—it never went away.

  They never went away, either, but sometimes they weren’t so bad. Sometimes they were bad. Sometimes very bad. November never was a good month for me.

  There was this thirteen-year-old girl who hung herself. I couldn’t remember her name, not even if I wanted to. I had cut her name out of my memory with a heroin needle, but I couldn’t forget her face. I couldn’t forget her parents, who wanted a photo of their dead daughter to print on posters, because after the funeral they were traveling to Washington to demonstrate in front of the FDA who approved the antidepressant that had driven their baby girl to suicide. I still woke up nights thinking about those people and the enormity of their grief. They had sent their daughter to the doctor to help her, they had forced her to continue taking her meds even though she told them something was wrong and begged them to let her quit. They had killed her trying to save her from being a normal, dysfunctional teenager.

  With the murder victims and the car crashes, a corpse was just an object to me. There was a purpose to my work then—to record the event, to provide evidence for the trial or the settlement. But that girl and her parents, furiously determined that her death should have some meaning, haunted me like no other. They lived on Central Avenue near the Pink Palace Museum, and I used to drive past their house on my way to Preston’s office, where I sold most of my accident pictures. I would see her sometimes, standing in her yard beneath the elm tree where she hung herself. She wasn’t looking at anything. I don’t even know if she was real or just something left over from another time, like a photograph.

  She wasn’t the only one who still haunted me. There were others, plenty of others, some whose corpses I had photographed, others I had never seen before. And there were some I wanted to see again but never could. On bad days the bad ones would crowd around so, it got hard to tell people apart, who you could talk to and who you couldn’t. I could photograph the dead all day long, because they’re just meat, but I couldn’t deal with the grief of the dead. They brought the grave near enough to see myself in it. It was too much. But without grief, you aren’t human. That’s what separates people from monsters.

  Tonight, as I was driving home, Adam was headed to Whitehaven to tell Chris Hendricks’s parents their son was dead. I didn’t allow myself to imagine that scene. I didn’t need to imagine it because I had lived it. Instead, I drove home to my new apartment and unlocked the door. It was a heavy, solid door with stout bolts and brass screws driven into real wood, not plywood, not some flimsy fifty-dollar piece of cardboard and glue that some crackhead could kick in. This building, old as it was, had good bones.

  I unstrapped my cameras, hung up my jacket and peeled off my wet clothes. My socks were still soaked. There was an old steam radiator in one corner, no longer hooked up to steam but it made a good place to to dry my jeans. I was still hungry but what I really wanted was a fix.

  I resisted. To take my mind off it, I downloaded the photos from the Orpheum and burned them to a CD. I didn’t examine them except to make sure I wasn’t sending crappy pictures to Chief Billet. While the CD was burning, I opened my last quart can of Tecate beer. I put the finished CD in a brown envelope, addressed it to Chief Billet and set it on the kitchen counter. It was too late to call a courier.

  I plugged the Leica into my laptop and opened Photoshop to view the pictures, but the camera’s brand-new memory card appeared empty. I unplugged the camera and checked the review feature. The photos were there. I plugged it back into my laptop and examined the memory card. The files were there, but my computer wasn’t able to recognize the Leica image file format.

  Luckily, I knew where I could get the right software. I had already planned to drop the camera off at Marks Camera Repair to make sure everything was working before I took full possession. Deiter Marks was one the best camera gurus in the country. His shop wasn’t even open to the general public. He catered almost exclusively to professional photographers, numbering the top pros among his select clientele.

  I shut down my computer, took a quick shower, checked the door and climbed into bed. I always slept commando. It was only a little after midnight—an early night for me. I lay in bed and watched the lights play across the ceiling and the brick wall, getting the feel of the place. It was my first night there.

  My apartment was the largest of six in an old converted bakery on Summer Avenue, west of Highland. All the apartments were on the second floor, with four shop bays fronting the street below, including a launderette and a tae kwon do school. My place was above a mercado on the corner. It cam
e furnished, two rooms plus a bathroom. A Formica dinette table with four cheap wooden chairs for a kitchen, a sagging couch divided the room into a den. Avocado-green electric stove, equally ancient fridge, a drawer full of old silverware and knives, including one butcher knife sharp enough to split a hare, wood-frame bed and a dresser. Bathroom not much bigger than a linen closet. There was a big bay window in the bedroom that faced the traffic light and the Methodist church across the street.

  The industrial gothic interior of the apartment begged to be photographed, but what it really needed was a model to bring out its character. It needed someone sitting at the cheap dinette table or staring out the bedroom window, dressed in panties with a white tube top and her hair wrapped in a towel, cigarette smoke curling like a rough hand across her cheek as she listened to the sinoidal honking of some distant lovesick saxophone and the tearing silk sound of wet tires on wet pavement, while George Clooney narrated the depths of her loneliness and the hard ugly carapace of horn into which she retreated, nightly, to keep from tying a rope around the closet rod and kicking over the chair.

  Sure.

  The Leica sat on the dresser, its dark round camera eye pointed at me as I lay in bed. I remembered lying on another bed in another town and another time while my college photography professor took roll after roll of black-and-white nudes with his Leica MP. Only 402 MPs were ever made. Being photographed by an MP was like being painted by Raphael.

  Raphael had lied about his divorce.

  I couldn’t sleep in a room with the door open. I got up and locked the door, then wished I’d remembered to buy cigarettes. It would have been nice to lie in bed and watch the smoke hang lazily in the Christmas greens and reds of the traffic light outside my window. I liked to smoke in bed. When I was in high school and my parents were out of town, I used to smoke in their bed and watch The Tonight Show and fall asleep with the television on because I didn’t like being alone in our old house on Schoonover Street. I didn’t like being alone pretty much anywhere.

  But I was tired and I had gone two nights now without a fix and no withdrawals. It was a good sign. I rolled over and pulled the covers up to my chin and tried not to think about the dead.

  * * *

  I woke up about oh-dark-thirty with a woman sitting on the end of my bed. She had short, straight dark hair and no face above the lips. Her mouth was moving as though she was trying to say something but couldn’t get the words out. I rolled over and sat up and there was nobody there.

  I grabbed my brother’s baseball bat from under the bed. The weather had changed again and it had stopped raining. The bedroom was cold and the window panes fogged over, tinted a solid sheet of red from the traffic light. The bedroom door was still locked and there was no closet for anybody to hide in, nothing but dust and my own empty suitcases under the bed.

  I tried to remember what I had been dreaming before I woke up. The woman reminded me of someone. I thought maybe one of the neighbors, maybe the Korean lady I had seen downstairs in the mercado. I always had nightmares when I slept in a new bed. I told myself this was no different. It had to be something reasonable. I was used to my special friends hanging around, haunting dark corners and stairwells and old elevators, but when they sat on the end of the bed, that was different. Seeing three in one day was also a bad sign. All the really horrible parts of my life had started this way. Or maybe when I was counting down to self-destruct, I started seeing ghosts. That’s what the police counselor told me.

  I rolled over facing away from the window. I could almost feel her weight still there on the end of the bed, pressing down the sheets. I didn’t think I would gonk because I was shaking with the cold, but I did, with the baseball bat beside me in the bed.

  The next morning, the bedroom door stood wide open. My sneakers were sprawled like a dead animal on the floor, tied together by their shoestrings.

  Tuesday

  7

  IT WAS ELEVEN O’CLOCK BEFORE I made it to Marks Camera. As usual, the door was locked so I knocked. On my way over, I bought a sausage biscuit at Mrs. Winner’s. A light rain pattered on the hood of my jacket. While I waited, I ate my brunch. Sometimes it took a while for Deiter to answer his door. Sometimes you had to call and tell him you were outside because he would be out back dismantling some three-hundred-thousand-dollar lens for NASA and wouldn’t hear it if a SWAT team kicked down his door. Finally, he opened it a crack and squinted out like he was afraid to get wet. I don’t think he recognized me at first.

  I shoved the uneaten half of my biscuit in his face. “Oh, you got the Leica!” He accepted my food offering and opened the door.

  Deiter’s place was a ranch-style house built around 1960 and converted, like all the other houses on his street, into retail or office space sometime in the late seventies. The front room of his shop looked like it had been recently burglarized, but it always looked like that, just as Deiter always looked like he had just crawled out of a hayloft. You half expected to see straw in his hair and sheep shit down the front of his paisley pajamas. He wore no pajama top and had tits bigger than mine, though his sagged like something out of a National Geographic magazine. He sported greasy blond hair and a bushy hay-colored Viking beard littered with enough yellow crumbs to reconstruct a whole Twinkie.

  Once upon a time, his shop had been a dentist’s office. Even with all the cameras and other equipment, I could still smell burning teeth and hear the whine of the drill. No other place in the world smells like a dentist’s office.

  Deiter lived in a single room off the back. The rest of the shop was given over to photography equipment, storage, computers and offices for his myriad other ventures. Sometimes you’d see police cars parked in front of his place, and sometimes you’d see other types of cars, mostly rentals, with men in dark suits and sunglasses sitting behind the wheel, whispering into their coat sleeves.

  I followed him back to his workshop, which looked like a lawyer’s office, except instead of stacks of filings and depositions and folders, there were piles of laundry and empty Doritos bags, as well as technical manuals and photography magazines. He was regularly published in most of the best ones. I noticed several had most of their pages ripped out. “I use them for toilet paper,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “They are so full of shit. Sit down.”

  “Where?” Other than the chair behind his desk and a loveseat buried in garbage, there was nowhere to sit.

  “OK, stand up. See if I care.”

  I passed the camera strap over my head and let him take it. “So, you got the M8,” he said. He turned it over in his hands, swiftly examining it with his genius eye for detail, showing me a dent I hadn’t noticed and a couple of tiny scratches I had. “How much did you pay?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “It’s practically brand new. Is it stolen?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “If you wanted a Leica, you should have asked me. I can get you a used R9 for that price and you could shoot digital or film. The R9’s a good camera.”

  “What’s wrong with the M8?”

  “Have you looked at your pictures?” He opened a drawer and removed a USB cable and a package of powdered doughnuts.

  “I couldn’t open the files.”

  “That’s the first problem with the M8. What software do you use?”

  “I still have the Photoshop you gave me.”

  He shook his head. Crumbs drifted down his naked belly and into his lap. “Photoshop 5.5 is a focking dinosaur. The old versions can’t convert Leica DNG files.” He picked up a Powerbook laptop from a pile of laundry on the floor and opened it on his desk, then plugged my camera into it. “Leica included a copy of Capture One LE in the box. The seller didn’t give you the disk?”

  “He probably didn’t know about it.”

  “I’ll give you a copy of the Adobe Lightroom.” He opened the camera files and pulled up the first picture I had taken—a self-portrait shot in the parking lot at Best Buy right
after I bought the new memory card. The image was strangely surreal. My black T-shirt looked almost purple.

  “There’s your second problem,” Deiter said.

  “What’s wrong with the color?”

  “It’s not the color, it’s the light.” He peeled the wrapper off the powdered doughnuts and shoved one into his mouth, then continued talking while he chewed. “The M8 is supersensitive to infrared. Deep blacks, especially dark fabrics, show up as magenta. Sometimes the whole image will have a magenta wash.”

  He cycled through the photos of my new apartment, the intersection outside my bedroom window, the gothic church across the street, and the photo I’d taken of Michi. Each one was tinted a sickening shade of purple, and with each picture he opened, I felt just a little more like I had swallowed a wasp. I began to think that the two grand I’d given James St. Michael had been spent on a one-way ticket out of town. I’d fallen for it because he looked like a pilot and acted interested in me even though I hadn’t bathed, smelled like a fireman’s boot, looked like a turd on a biscuit and was probably ten years older than the oldest woman he’d ever consider dating. And didn’t he get nervous last night when he found out about my connection to the police?

  * * *

  I met James St. Michael the previous Sunday. I had been at the hospital taking photographs of an old lady whose back was eaten up with bedsores. I usually took pictures of the dead. This woman should have been dead, the way they treated her.