Edward Muggeridge was a hollow man. Born that way. A camera without an aperture. Closed and hoping that nobody would ever see the volume of his dark interior. He worked hard on the panelled walls that framed him, changing his when he felt it could add gravitas and solemnity. He left England to start a new life and roamed the Americas starting modest businesses, scratching a respectable living selling other people’s images of the world. Until a fateful day in 1860, when he missed the boat and instead left San Francisco by stagecoach. In mid-Texas velocity, concussion and blood changed the signature of Edward Muggeridge forever.
Before the accident he was a thirty-year-old man filled with vapor, aimless and devout, seeking a place in the world where he might gain weight and merit. When the speeding stagecoach had tripped on the unseen root, it had spun into the air and splintered, mangling and spilling all the lives it carried. He alone survived, tossed among the wrenched luggage and the broken, kicking mustangs. He had cut himself out of the canvas, a petticoat from a dead woman’s luggage staunching his head blood, swooning clear of the hooves, which were now running against the sky, trying to gain purchase on the dying clouds. He now saw horses all the time, galloping in headaches, their iron hooves sparking the dendrite fuse wire to the fire in his brain. He saw them cantering, all turning to white, eyes rolling, savage. He heard them walking, their echo mocking the vacant night streets below his hospital bed. They paced his beginning and his demise with an equal, measured step.
The aperture that had been gouged into his brain had no lens. It was permanently sick in double vision and raging in pain. After fifteen months he took the compensation from the Stage Company and set sail back to England, to find a cure or a focus.
First he changed his name to Edward Muygridge. Second he sought a doctor. Upon his return, the capital was swarming with horses; their stink and their volume made him shiver as he crossed London Bridge. His first consultation waited on the other side of the teeming river. He was early for the appointment; this was something that happened constantly. He deplored tardiness and overcompensated for it in every aspect of his life. He would rehearse the most trivial of deeds: framing the minor in advance of its time; having keys in his hands four streets away from home; talking under his breath to have a convincing answer to questions that would never be put to him. He forced himself to stop on the bridge and allow the slowness of actual time to catch up to his velocity. Placing his hands on the gritty stone, he looked down into the frantic activity of the Pool of London; cargo ships were moored three deep along its banks, their masts creaking against a spiny forest of cranes and the new verticality of the smoke from the steamers, all extending higher than the buildings that clung, crablike, to the land; dozens of barges obtusely nudged and grated one another in the restless tide and the wake of commerce; hundreds of small craft ferried to and fro, carrying pilots, passengers, and information. Every surface seethed and bristled with workingmen; stevedores and lightermen moved tons upon tons of goods and exchanged cargos in what looked like ceaseless confusion.
At times, the river could not be seen at all. The vast activity smothered it, and the detritus it bred was like a rough woven carpet, heaving over a secret turmoil. It was impossible to believe it was the same river that so gently flowed through his hometown. In Kingston, its broad ripple gave reflection and beauty; it was for fishing, idle boating, and rumination. There, you could smell its vitality. The tar, smoke, sewage, and proximity of Billingsgate gave the stretch in front of him a very different signature.
He pulled the great watch from his pocket and flipped it open. It had been the only thing he had kept of his family while on his travels; they had given it to him to ease his departure and secure at least one dimension in the distant colonies. He squinted at the Roman numerals. Time had finally caught up with him, and he started to walk briskly towards the Surrey side.
Dr. William Withey Gull was on schedule. His consulting room sat high on the brow of the building, facing the river. The spire of Southwark Cathedral and the dome of St. Paul’s could be aligned from his oriel window.
Like them, the two men were almost cartoon opposites: Gull, opulent, padded, slick; a man grounded and in possession of his life; he retained the bones of his labouring family, held them in check with fine but simple tailoring; he wore his growing eminence in saturated gravity. Muygridge, lean and dry, a longing husked in doubt; frowning himself into biblical status; nervous, darting, and ill.
They shook hands, each gauging the other. Muygridge sat and proceeded to relate his medical history: the condition of his skull since the accident, the shifts of perception. Gull stood behind him as he talked, examining the cranium of the agitated man, feeling the words reverberate beneath Muygridge’s scalp. He held the cup of the occiput and moved his hand forward, until it felt the ridge in the bregma, the overriding bone. He fingered the coronal suture, sensing its tension under his controlled pressure. The motion of his square hands under the long, matted hair made it look like a bizarre tableau of ventriloquism; he moved them farther forwards to determine the displacement or division in the nasofrontal suture. He then sat back down behind his Jurassic desk and began to make notes of his observations.
“Was it your face that took the impact of the crash?”
The patient put his hand to his face and covered his eyes and forehead. “Here,” he said.
“Tell me,” the surgeon said, “when you came to after the crash, what sensations did you feel? What sensory images do you remember?”
“I smelt cinnamon, and everything was blurred, like a double exposure, for days.” His hand fingered the scar where the bone had peeped through that terrible day. “Cinnamon and burnt leather; a numbness in my hands; and the horse. I was lying on the earth, near one of the dying horses, staring at it, as it lay on its back, a slithering superimposition of many bodies, multiple legs outstretched. I did not know which of us was upside down.”
“What is a double exposure?” asked Gull.
“Oh, it’s a term used by photographers; it’s when two images are fused together, one picture on top of another.”
Gull stared at him. “It’s an optical fixture of two different times, then?”
“Um, yes, that could be said.”
“How do you sleep?”
“Badly. Sometimes not at all.”
Unsurprised at the answer, Gull nodded and made a mark in the open book on his desk.
“Is that a bad sign?” asked Muygridge.
“No, not for you. Sleep is a complex matter; the body only needs an hour or so. But the mind requires more, and so the soul sometimes becomes involved, and greedy.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Dr. Gull.” But before Muygridge could press his confusion, Gull had sealed the matter and continued in a different direction.
The questions lasted for twenty minutes. Then the surgeon moved across the room to one of his glass-fronted cabinets and selected an instrument from within. He carefully wound its clockwork mechanisms and strapped it onto his patient’s head. It was made of brass and glass, with a delicate set of folding blinkers and mirrors, some darkened by plating. The surgeon pulled up a chair to face his patient and adjusted the metal discs, close to the sides of Muygridge’s worried eyes. Both his hands worked the device, bringing his face so close to Muygridge’s that each could smell the other’s breath. Tiny ratchet clicks announced the adjustments.
“It’s a peripherscope,” the surgeon explained. “It should interest you, being a scholar of the optic world.”
“I am no such scholar; I have only read a little and recently bought my first camera.”
Gull ignored his comments and moved his chair and physically turned the patient’s head towards the oriel window, setting a clamp on his neck and chin.
“This will be just like a photographic portrait,” he said mildly. “Now, look through the central panel of the window and focus on the dome.”
The patient wanted to correct him about the old-fashioned portraits, in which the sitter was secured in a metal frame, held still while the slow camera collected his or her deathlike image. He had already thought of a way to dispense with such artificial contrivance.
“The dome, please!” the surgeon demanded. The middle pane of glass was different from the rest, clearer, with a greenish hue. The distant dome was framed in its bright confines. The patient stared. “Now, please, do not move; just stare at the dome.”
These were the surgeon’s last words, as he paced from one side to the other, behind the patient. He touched the headset, activating spinning discs and minute reflections of light, almost out of vision, like the suns and moons of distant planets, contained in an unstable darkness inside the corners of the patient’s eyes. A night that shimmered with endless space, drawing light particles from inside his vision, from his surroundings, even from the glowing dome. Outside, time was changing and the tide of the seething river had turned back towards the sea. Something in the space between the double dome fluttered and shifted in unison.
When the motors were stopped and all movement ceased, the day had vanished. He sat in a twilit room, growing chilled as the stars rose outside in the frosting air. Dr. Gull lit a lamp and put a shawl about the patient’s shoulders, gently removing the device from his head. He sat, unclamped and stiff in the wooden chair, his attention still fixed on the oriel window.
“Please, make yourself more comfortable, Mr. Muygridge.”
The surgeon’s voice seemed far off and above him. The continual, dull pain in his head had gone, and he felt exhausted. A growing sense of euphoria was making him feel curiously weightless.
“It’s the angels,” Gull said. “The angels of silence that hide between the whispering gallery and outer dome of the cathedral. They have crossed the Thames and are fluttering in your head; it’s quite normal to feel a little dazed.”
He smiled broadly at Muygridge, who was gripping the surgeon’s words like a vertiginous handrail in the gallery of St. Paul’s.
“Your eyes are, miraculously, undamaged. The zygomorphic bones of your face conducted the impact of the accident backwards and upwards, into your brain. I surmise that the force of the shock was considerable but caused no long-term structural damage.” Gull leant back in his leather chair and looked dramatically into the photographer’s gaze. “There may be side effects,” he said, “but I think I might have alleviated or at least diluted those this afternoon. The peripheral vision and its territories of sight and sense are virtually unexplored. My device measures and takes litmus of their emotional potential, their mental humours; do you understand? I have also made some inward adjustments, without the need of the scalpel or the saw.”
He got up and made the necessary movements to conclude the meeting. As he conducted Muygridge towards the door, he said, “Are you planning to return to America?”
Muygridge nodded. “Eventually.”
“I would do it soon, if I were you. Better to be in a landscape away from people for the next few years. Use your camera to take pictures of that wilderness; force your sight and your imagination outward. It’s better for you.”
They stood on either side of the door, their handshake passing through. “Will you send your fee?” Muygridge remembered to say.
“No, I think not,” said the surgeon. “We will meet again and I might have a favour that needs your skills.” He smiled again and gave his patient a white envelope. “Read this in the future,” he said, and closed the door.
On a ship back to America, Muygridge had opened Gull’s letter and was trying to taste the time that had vanished in the high room at London Bridge. The time that had been leached had been used to cleanse the wound in his head; he had no doubt of that. Gull and his peripherscope had cured a chasm in him. He would return to America a different man. It would be another three decades before he could thank the physician and offer his services in return; in the meantime, some part of him relished the prospect of that day, and he became dedicated to catching invisible time with his own device, so that they might share their notes as equals. Little did he know that their weighty conversation might be stolen by the machine itself.
For now, the wilderness called to him, and he would become lost in its magnitude. He would head north into the Yukon, then west to roam the open plains; he would suck their essence into hand-ground lenses and encapsulate their magnificent bleakness into paper that had been eclipsed under his strengthening hands.
He knew this because he had already seen it all, in the space where the pain used to live, projected brighter than life itself. Held in a place between sleep and waking, and contained by the sides of his vision. The only disadvantage was that he sometimes shared this space with something else, something akin to an ominous, rising moon. That was why he now stood on the deck, gazing at the real moon, high above the black waves. Away from the public lighting of the ship, he opened Gull’s crumpled envelope again, in the white incandescence. The surgeon had known of this afterimage and how its blur might haunt his future clarity.
What you will see is the afterburn of my investigation and suggestive treatment. It will manifest as an absence in your mind, a glowing hollow that will sometimes disturb you, but mostly can be ignored. It is the negative of the dome that you looked on for so long in my rooms, and my joke about angels was only partially a jest.
I will not prescribe drugs to clothe its manifestations, nor to banish it. I suggest hard work at your given science, fresh air, and large quantities of solar and lunar light. After a while, the form of this genie will change, and you and it will live in unity. I wish you good health and success with all your endeavours.
W. W. GULL
The motion of the sea settled Muygridge. The moon bathed its interior other, as the written words began their transformation from diagnosis to prophecy. The ship ploughed through the darkness, a pinpoint of light skimming the great curve of water. A million beasts rolled, fled, and laughed in the vast distance beneath it, while the stars multiplied and roared in the perpetual silence above.
Upon arrival in America, he followed the doctor’s advice to the letter. He was so far removed from human society that he had almost died of starvation three times. A legend of this thin man’s endurance had begun to spread across the Great Plains, reaching as far as the Indian nations. Many such foolhardy explorers were scavenging this land, tipping themselves from famine-haunted homelands, from frozen pogroms and relentless oppression, to step into the burning sun and huge, endless spaces. They sought gold and silver, pelts and land. They had arrived to be reborn and to take everything they could with their pale, bare hands.
But he was very different. It was said that he was hunting stillness and that instead of picks or shovels, guns or maps, he carried an empty box on his back, a box with a single eye, which ate time. Some said he carried plates of glass to serve the stillness on. He would eat with a black cloth over his head, licking his plate clean in the dark.
The Europeans and the Chinese gave him a wide berth. Such behaviour was unchristian and suspicious in these new lands, where anything might propagate and swell to dangerous consequences. The other whites said his box stole the souls of all he placed before it, but how could those who had no soul to begin with ever know? The natives were intrigued by the stories and wanted to see the hunter of quiet. He had found their sacred places and stayed close to them. He had not interfered with or desecrated their energy and power. He had sat with his box in their presence for many hours, sometimes days, and then silently moved on.
He had found a race of humans that he could tolerate, and they welcomed him into many clans, even though he was a Lost One, a most-feared being in all small, tight societies. He was a man who survived outside the tribe and the family, a man turned loose and wild. But this one had understanding and silence and was dedicated to motionlessness; all qualities the Plains tribes cherished. He was allowed to photograph the great chiefs and their medicine men. Eventually, they would let him see and photograph the Ghost Dance. He sent back to England prints of lonely desolation, stunning landscapes of untouched, gigantic purity and pictures of powerful, noble men, who looked into the camera without seeing themselves. Many he sent back to the wise surgeon, to demonstrate his improvement and to reiterate his gratitude; his instinct told him that the man high in the oriel window at London Bridge would understand.
Muygridge began to feel himself healed; his growing confidence stood upright in the hollow lava beds of the flat plains of the Tule Lake. He turned his box on the Modoc War, shovelling up images of the vanquished lands and their shivering occupants. The enemy paid him well, so he became the official photographer for the U.S. Army; the stillness could wait while his plates were filled with the pumice of defeat and exile. At the end of it all, he gathered his new fame and his obsessively accumulated wages and travelled back to the city lights and the crisp linen of San Francisco, to embark on the joys of marriage, parenthood, and murder.