He was walking ten blocks behind her. Though he didn’t want to run and create a scene, he didn’t want to lose sight of her either. It had been a long time since he’d seen her react this way. This is ridiculous, he thought. He called her name, but only a few times – if he kept at it, he’d draw attention to them and raise a red flag. And that was something he couldn’t let happen. He was acutely aware of the route they were taking, saw it sharply as he imagined the aerial view: two red spots on the grid, on the map, and in this way, visualizing it perfectly, he kept the targets under control and felt he could avoid any excessive display of emotions. They were already far from the cineplex; she’d left the theatre right after the movie began (her sudden silhouette had blocked the screen). And he went after her. They walked along the main road, then turned, one after the other, onto their street. At this point, she sped up; always aware of the aerial view – that of a vulture, of God – he followed suit, making sure to maintain the distance between them: neither chasing her nor losing her. He loved his wife. Now he could barely see her: a distant spot, almost a target to shoot at, a duck. How long had it been since he’d had so perfect an image of her, so tiny and panoramic, no more than lines?
He saw her go into their house and stopped. Then he slowly moved towards it. The door was half-open. He went into the living room and saw her sitting on the sofa. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, but the urgency of her hatred was gone. On her left, sitting so calmly that he blended in with the furniture, was their son, holding his tablet. The boy was their buffer zone. The confirmation that they had long lost the right to become exasperated over trivialities. The child was surprised to see them home from the movies so soon. But he didn’t ask for an explanation. He went back to what he was doing on the screen with fingers that were long, dexterous, elastic. Suddenly, he seemed to remember something.
‘My homework, Mum … Your photos!’
His mother nodded, as though to show she was already on top of things. ‘I’ll take care of it now,’ she said.
The boy’s father hung up his jacket. He was about to leave the room but what he heard had caught his attention. ‘Photos?’
She was still silent, more out of annoyance than any desire to be secretive. Eventually, she answered. ‘His teacher. She asked him to bring in photos … of me.’
‘From when you were twenty-three, Mum,’ said the boy.
‘His art teacher,’ she added. ‘She’s turning twenty-three tomorrow and has asked them to bring in photos of their mums at her age as a way of working her birthday into the class. Sweet girl, don’t you think? To remind me of how I looked two decades ago.’
‘Sounds like fun homework,’ the boy’s father said.
‘Really? I think so too. But there’s a problem.’
‘What’s that?’
‘There are 7,441 photos.’
They both raised their eyebrows.
He thought about the number and pretended it didn’t matter much. ‘So what’s the problem? We have enough access, don’t we?’
‘We have ten minutes of access, that’s all. It’s what you get per month without a plan. Ten minutes for more than seven thousand photos.’
The boy continued to watch them.
His father smiled. ‘That’s more than enough, isn’t it?’
She replied in a hurry. ‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘That won’t be nearly enough time to choose. His teacher asked for a selection of photos and I’ll have to include the first ones that appear. How will I look in those shots? Which ones will come up? I’ve had a lot of stupid photos taken. It’s so little time.’
He understood what was going on. The teacher was young and beautiful. At five foot eight, she was a babe with perky breasts and a huge rear end without a millimetre of cellulite – he knew this because he’d snooped around her profile – and his wife, the boy’s mother, was someone whose best days were behind her.
‘Well,’ he said, as though blaming her, ‘you told me you didn’t want to—’
‘I don’t want to,’ she said right away. ‘I don’t want to give them another cent. You know there’s no end to this. You pay for one package, then another. And another. It’s a vice. I’ve seen people go into debt.’
‘So what do you want to do?’
She looked tiredly out of the window.
‘Well,’ he went on, lowering his voice, ‘there’s also the other option.’
The other option was shady. Friends of theirs could get them the name of a good ‘astronomer’. These were adept blokes who knew how to track down photos containing your face, those stored in networks over the course of your life, in your city and in the whole world: high-school trips, concerts as a teenager, vacations when you were young, images consolidated in distant server farms. Astronomers could recover, copy and upload the images to a secure cloud that was difficult to locate.
‘Forget about it. I’ve heard awful stories.’
He made a face, mocking her. ‘What stories?’
‘The pictures they send you … I’ve heard things.’
‘Oh, please. You can’t possibly believe they keep private photos. Don’t act like a child.’
‘No, it’s not that. I’ve heard they play with the photos – change their order, make up stories, rearrange them.’
‘They rearrange photos? Make things up? Who? Why?’
She wasn’t sure, but she’d heard stories on more than one occasion. It had happened to a friend of hers. An astronomer had compiled photographs from all of her teenage years, two thousand of them had been organized to create a sort of comic strip, an entertaining book. No one ever found out what she saw inside it, what horrible story those snapshots or vignettes told, what plot, what lesson, but the fact is that overnight, she packed up all her things and went away, far away, never to return.
He started to laugh. ‘Someone’s been watching a lot of movies,’ he said.
‘That’s not true.’
‘So then let’s just pay for a package. We don’t have to spend a lot. The premium option is on sale and it includes aerial shots now.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ she said. ‘My sister was sent one that had been taken from the sky when she was at the pyramids in Egypt years ago. She was still thin and looked amazing. She was happy to see herself like that, the muppet.’
‘It’s an option,’ he said. ‘Not a bad one.’
‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘We don’t need the package. I’ll deal with it.’
The next day he awoke more tired than usual. She got up first, to make breakfast for the boy. He stayed in bed: he felt their steps, the bustle that broke apart the world of sleep. He got up. When he walked downstairs he discovered his wife grumbling into the landline.
‘I’ve already told you I’m not interested in your offer.’
The boy was using his tablet with one hand and bringing pieces of omelette to his mouth with the other. He did this skilfully. His fingers were so long and nimble. He looked like a card shark shuffling a deck in Las Vegas.
‘I understand,’ she continued. ‘It’s your right, but it’s my life. I want to speak with your supervisor this minute! Hello … hello?’ She threw down the phone.
‘What happened?’
She held out her mobile phone and showed him what was on it: a horizontal photo filled the screen. When she touched a button, the same image appeared on the television. The three of them turned around to look.
They’d sent her an aerial image. It began as a wide shot and then moved in close. The boy was clearly fascinated with the way the screen zoomed in. Suddenly, the frame closed up around an image that was a little blurry at first, then very sharp.
The boy’s father recognized the location in a few seconds. He smiled. It was the Bow Bridge, a pretty arched walkway that crossed the Lake in Central Park. The image was from the second trip they had taken to New York City together, the last before they were married. Both of them were in it, on the south side. He remembered the bridge’s wooden deck, so solid that the planks barely vibrated under his feet. He remembered the balustrade of sculpted stone, a row of circles, each with a hole in its centre. He remembered the pots of lilac flowers at each end of the bridge. He remembered the wind in her hair, and her face, which radiated confusion more than happiness, and behind them, the imposing sight of the San Remo building, with its two orange towers. On the screen, those towers were now charmless rectangles, devoid of all their splendour because of the picture’s perspective. She had on a turquoise dress that set off her black hair. He was wearing a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The filter’s effect had brightened the green of the broccoli-like trees surrounding them and lit up the turquoise of her dress, and their faces: hers appeared salmon pink, his milky white. They stood very close to each other.
Had the photo been taken before or after? he asked himself. If he looked at her closely and discovered a gesture, something revealing in her behaviour, he’d know. He’d always enjoyed the challenge of trying to guess someone’s emotional state with only an aerial view of their body. There were times, during his paragliding years, that he thought he could do it: arms and shoulders, if one looked carefully, revealed two men to be arguing instead of just talking, even made it possible to distinguish a chat between friends from one between business partners, or to be relatively confident that a teenager was dying of love for the girl walking by his side (tiny, almost imperceptible jumps gave him away). It was all a question of concentrating on the right lines.
They’d just arrived in New York. He’d planned on proposing to her in the Empire State Building, with the city below their feet, but when they got to 34th Street in Manhattan, an announcement informed them that the observation deck was under maintenance. Unexpected events completely rattled him and he began to panic. He grabbed his mobile phone; he didn’t want to do it, but he had no choice. Desperately, he looked for unique locations where a man could give his girlfriend a ring. The search engine came up with the Bow Bridge and four other options, but he’d have to pay to see them, so he went with the quickest solution. He looked at the map, reading testimonials on the fly to see what couples who had professed their love on the bridge had to say, and figured it would work. They walked on.
Now he knew. The photograph captured the moment right before he’d proposed: the ring hadn’t yet been taken out, but it was about to happen – he knew because his wife’s youthful body was upright, haughty, mocking. She hadn’t been surprised. Instead, her gestures revealed the banality of the scene. This is the best you could come up with? The Bow Bridge? It’s so run-of-the-mill. So cheap. She didn’t say this out loud, but her face made it clear. So did her rigid back (which was visible even now, in the picture). But seconds later her eyelids relaxed: she looked at the ring closely, saw him getting down on his knees. Below, in the lake, a couple of blokes in a boat whooped, gringo-style. In the aerial shot, the rowboat was still off in the distance, towards the south (above them).
A message appeared on the screen: ‘Click now and you’ll get 189 photographs from this day. We know it’s a special one.’ The premium package.
Angrily, she picked up the phone again.
There was no need to waste time asking themselves how the company knew it had been a special day. It was obvious. Both of them had taken a ton of photos. And minutes after she’d said yes, they’d announced the news. The congratulations poured in. The vibrations on their mobile phones came faster and faster, like a heartbeat gone wild. New status: engaged.
On the phone, she asked to speak with an operator. When he saw her like this, furious as she clutched the receiver, he approached her and tried to calm her down.
‘Look, it’s not that bad,’ he said, pointing to the screen.
‘No? Well, I’m not okay with it. Who do they think they are? We’re having breakfast.’
‘It’s a good photo, don’t exaggerate.’
‘And what makes them think I want to see it right now?’
‘They haven’t done anything wrong. It’s exactly what they’re going for – the surprise factor. Besides, they’re careful about which photos they send. We’re not going to get any old shot, you know that. They won’t choose something that’ll upset us. A lot of money is invested to prevent that from happening.’
It was true. They had several means of preventing the system from sending, for example, images of their wedding to a couple who had recently separated. Or from suddenly bringing up someone who’d caused pain. Sons or daughters who’d died as young children. Sleazy blokes on trial for sexual abuse.
‘That’s exactly what that idiot told me,’ she said. ‘But it’s beside the point.’
The boy had taken the mobile phone and was zooming the image in and out with his index finger and thumb. With his other hand, nimble-fingered, he searched for the Bow Bridge on his own tablet and the screen filled with photos. Hundreds of photos of men on their knees, proposing.
‘Your father, a true original,’ said his mother. The boy opened his eyes wide like plates. She dialled the number again.
‘You’re going to keep trying?’ the boy’s father asked.
‘I’ll send them a formal complaint.’
‘Forget it, that’ll take months,’ he responded, annoyed. Did it bother her that much? This party-pooper attitude was beginning to bug him. He had an idea. Something stopped him for a second, but then he went for it. ‘Look, if this is really bothering you, why don’t you register yourself as an “at-risk subject”? That way they’ll leave you in peace on the spot.’
‘At risk? What are you talking about?’
‘You register and then—’
‘Do you think I’m crazy?’
‘That’s not what I said.’
‘Why would I do that? I haven’t been traumatized. I don’t take pills. That’s for people who are disturbed by their past. I’m not one of those.’
‘Okay, okay, calm down, don’t attack me. It was just an idea.’
A tense silence set in. She looked at the time. In a hurry, she told the boy to grab his things for school, then went into the kitchen to get the keys. And when he thought she’d leave without saying another word, he saw her stop.
‘One hundred and eighty-nine photos. Did they say one hundred and eighty-nine photos? How much did we even do that day? Doesn’t it seem like a lot?’
She closed the door, leaving the question in the air. He thought the promotional message had been an intriguing way to advertise: it was like giving you a gift wrapped up in a bow – the black box from a flight you took with your wife, but one that contains nothing shocking. The black box is what’s shocking. He got ready for work. From ten to seven, five days a week, he was a productive man.
From the short story ‘Valentina in the Clouds’