October, 1859
Breath. Appetite. Hours awake and asleep.
What is a life to the person who lives it.
Any less or more real whether shared or unshared. Released, at last, from lips that speak. Pumped out of the heart like heart’s blood or heart’s poison.
Else before too long it were.
The way he listened and absorbed. The way he made himself a vessel. Leaning back in his chair with his massive legs crossed, sighting me along his nose. And when I shifted under that. Feeling too much seen by him.
William.
Who said not a word of himself while the pictures were born in the small room adjoining.
William.
Who made sure I stayed in my seat when the dead came to visit me, blowing against me.
William.
To whom I had gladly returned since that first frightened evening, the front of me bloody.
To make more pictures. Be with someone. Feel the feeling of control. We agreed it had something to do with my shadow. Reflecting the light of the dead on the lens.
The cameo necklace now missing for days. William was making it lovely again. Told mother, however, that it had been stolen. A harbour rat had crept around and snatched it from its hanging nail and though I had chased him I hadn’t caught up. Going back through the maze of our heated pursuit I had gotten myself, I told mother, quite lost. And that is why I’d come back late. My chin bloody. My hair mussed up.
By the third or fourth time that I left her to see him, I suspected she knew that a man was involved. Though never in the way she thought.
A man who heard me when I spoke. A man who called me by my name.
But never touched me. Not like that. Unless it was to set my shoulders. Brush my hair back. Gird my spine.
Conclusion the first: I could realize the dead. See them and hear them and talk to them, yes, as I had always known I could. But also manifest them with my presence, with my being. Some process in me that agreed with the camera.
Conclusion the second: unlike I’d supposed, the visitations weren’t all random
Beloved enough by the dead one in question, it would gambol and romp through your life like a puppy. Reviled enough or else supposed of having done that dead one ill, it was likely to insult you in a key you couldn’t hear. Curse your name to total strangers.
That second night. The jeweller’s rooms. The box and the screen. The developing drawers. The chemicals, secret and strange, in their phials.
Said the jeweller: “I think we will get her again.”
Said the jeweller: “Sweet Hannah. I’m glad that you’ve come.”
First things first: a glass of something. Dark as honey that has dried. Yet not at all sweet to the tongue. Splutter-worthy. Opened up a space in me.
It was the stuff that Mr. Fanshawe had been drinking, I remembered, when me and Grace had caught him dozing, sipped out of his half-filled glass.
William drank a second glassful. Moving with energy over the boards. Sipping his liquor between little tasks such as moving the screen and adjusting the stool and making sure the plates were clean and seeing that the velvet cloth fluttered evenly over the top of the box. His beard would move ahead of him like a shadow-play Satan. The swell of his stomach. What furniture the room had held marshalled off to the edges before I’d arrived. The photographic implements carried into the now empty space to replace them.
“What do you feel in this moment?” said he.
“I feel a fullness—here,” said I and touched myself below my ribs.
“And what about now, with the light on your face?”
I told him: “It’s moving. It’s travelling up.”
“Too warm?” said he.
I shook my head.
“The wooden stool agrees with you?”
“It helps me lift my spine,” said I.
“What spirit will you manifest?”
“I cannot tell you that,” said I. “They come and go just as they please.”
“That girl,” said he. “The other night. It would very much please me to see her again.”
He finished off his drink. Watched me.
“Are you going to begin taking pictures?” said I.
He poured himself another drink. Exposed a series: one, two, three.
The ken was moving in my throat. My mouth. My nose. My eyes. My brain. The room became a trembling place of light impending, breaking through. The skin backlit, the blood beneath. The blood beneath the waiting skin. So it was through the centre, the secret not-region between the membrane and the light, that the dead ones migrated. Distressed and confused. Held there a moment in darkness like amber.
A man with a toothpick and wiry red hair whose stomach had turned on a bad piece of meat.
A woman in a pretty dress who had taken a letter file, sliced up her arms.
A boy of ten-and-seven years who’d been struck on Tremont by a runaway carriage.
But never the girl from our first time together. William insisted that she was his cousin.
Cora, he’d told me that first night, who drowned.
Reminded me of someone else. Reminded me of someone loved.
Her ball gown of a bathing dress. Her slightly sad and high-pitched laugh. The hair that kept her slightly damp. As though from a washing. As though from a fever.
But it couldn’t be Grace because Grace wasn’t dead. Grace had been shipped to a girls’ school in Maine. To talk and eat with others girls. To sleep near girls who were not me.
Eventually that second night, thin-witted from too many snifters of brandy, the jeweller announced that he needed to sit. Slept like my father, his head twisted back. His arms extended on the couch.
And sitting there while Willy slept, I thought I heard the scrape of steps. Barefoot wispy quickened steps. Encompassing the little room.
A swatch of something purple, maybe.
It slipped from the darkness and then back again.
The ache—with violence!—in my lungs. Powerfully, I coughed and sneezed.
Stood up from the couch and called out: “Grace!”
In spite of all, I called her name. And I had cried that name so loud that Willy Mumler, sleeping, stirred.
But the girl had stopped circling. The shadows were silent. As suddenly silent as my soul.
Some part of me had known, of course. Grace Fanshawe, my friend, was dead.
Had always known. When we first met. Would die one day before her time. Too lovely at last to remain on this earth. Standing with her parents in the doorway of the church. Whirling away toward the sea, crying out.
Meningitis it might be. Which ate through girls of Grace’s age. Which would travel too fast through the ranks of a school. Which clogged the ears and swelled the brain. And in its grip, at last, so died. That explained why, in the picture we’d made, she’d been feverish and soaking. So thin and so pale. Would Grace’s bunkmates, unafraid, have knelt with her and held her hands. Or would they have cowered away in the corner, afraid of catching what she had.