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The age of it troubled him. The edge was scalloped, yet he couldn’t remember owning a camera back when those borders were commonplace. Their first had been a clumsy Kodak flash camera Connie had gotten with Green Stamps, around the time of their seventh anniversary. She’d nagged him that they had no record of their daughter’s early years. He supposed that was important, it was just hard to think about, and they had so little extra money.
He examined the photograph closely: a clear shot of him in the background, his hair longer and darker then. And he had forgotten how slovenly his attire used to be. The foreground figure was quite out of focus. Pale shape of the nose, gray smudges for eyes. A darkened oval in the hazy texture of the black-and-white print where a mouth might have been. But perhaps it was a fist trapped in a black glove instead. Or perhaps it was a black kitten, jumping from the back of the great old easy chair looming nearby. The photographer hadn’t been careful, had caught the cat in mid-flight as it passed in front of the face. And maybe the photographer had been startled by the leaping cat, had jerked his hand, and that movement had blurred the face into the enigma now before him.
But who might have taken the picture? Connie had always said handling such a delicate device made her nervous. He had always taken the family pictures. Always. Once they’d actually gotten a camera, which would have been long after this picture was taken.
• • •
When he looked at the photograph again—not that he had ever intended to, he had merely picked up the old album with the fraying cloth cover and the cover had flopped over in his hand to reveal that particular page to him—he had to wonder, at first, why it had troubled him so much before. The foreground figure of his daughter Jennifer was perfectly distinct. A bit hazy, perhaps, but still easily distinguishable. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t recognized her before, unless his eyes had been tired that evening. She was singing in the picture, her eyes bright. And he himself was smiling, enjoying her performance. And his clothes weren’t really all that slovenly—he’d obviously been working in the flower garden at the side of the house, and just come in, and what was wrong with that, anyway? He used to garden quite a bit in fact, back before Jennifer was grown. He had been almost always outside, it had seemed. And Jennifer had stayed inside. There had been very few photographs of them taken together, especially since he was the only one who ever used the camera.
Jennifer appeared to be running, descending into the lower left-hand corner of the frame. The intensity of the flash had left a nimbus in the upper right-hand corner of the photo.
• • •
He’d fallen asleep, and upon waking found the album open on his lap. Jennifer seemed further left in the picture than he remembered. Her mouth wider. Eyes tilted to an uncomfortable degree. She no longer seemed to be singing. She was moving so fast! What was wrong with her?
• • •
His headache was throbbing, burning through his eyes with each pulse. Flash. Flash. Flash. The photograph seemed blurry again, Jennifer’s face a rippling sheen of gray, black, white. There was a constant movement in the background of the picture. The scene appeared highly charged, rippling with a nervous energy. Whoever had taken this photograph was a terrible photographer. Whatever his faults as a human being, he’d always been complimented on his pictures.
• • •
Looking at the photograph, he had to wonder whose it was. Even when a family shared a camera there was always one person who became the advocate for a particular picture. Maybe there was a special memory one of them wanted preserved, or something as mundane as a preference for portraits over landscape or serious pictures over humorous ones. They’d often argued over little differences like that. What was important, what was not? What was intended, what was completely accidental? What was serious and what might be safely ignored.
Who’d want to take a picture of Jennifer running away from him? And yet how could it be anyone, when he was the only one in the family who used the camera and Jennifer’s age indicated that the picture was taken before they even owned a camera? And with Jennifer and he in the picture wouldn’t it have to be Connie behind the camera, and how could that be, when she never used the camera and he would have remembered such an unusual occasion?
• • •
Jennifer was five years old in the photograph. He could remember because of the dress: small panda bears on the bodice and puffed sleeves. She’d gotten it for her birthday and had it only the one year. In fact, it occurred to him now that this photograph might have been taken the day of her birthday. In her hair was a faded red ribbon. He remembered how she had cried, inconsolable, because she’d lost it that day. And he also wasn’t sure if she’d ever worn the panda dress after that day.
Perhaps, if the photographer had stepped back a bit, other moppets—attendees at her birthday party—would have found their way into this picture. Yet by the very nature of photography they had forever been locked out of this event. The camera had frozen the two of them—him and his daughter Jennifer—into this somewhat vaguely-defined scene for all time, and any others at her party might as well never have existed.
He rubbed his eyes, and for a moment thought the wrinkles there might swallow his knuckles. He felt sick to his stomach. He looked at the picture again, and suddenly recognized the painting hanging on the wall near his head, as if seeing it there for the first time. It was a mountain range, the Grand Tetons, he’d always thought, with a dilapidated shack in the foreground.
The picture had hung on his study wall for years—it was still there, in fact. And no one, including Connie, and certainly not Jennifer, had ever been allowed into that room. After all, a man was entitled to his privacy.
• • •
Jennifer swam before him, mouth moving up and down slowly, desperate for air. The changing shadows in the picture—he found himself looking around, wondering what was altering the lighting in the room so drastically—made her figure dance, then writhe beneath the slick sheen of the paper. Her lips jerked. What had she been doing in his study? So much happened to a person during a lifetime—you couldn’t be expected to remember everything. You weren’t always in control of your own actions. Sometimes you just had no idea what you were doing.
They’d given Jennifer the dress on her fifth birthday—Connie had spent a great deal of time looking for one like it after Jennifer had pointed it out in the paper—and it had lasted only a day, as far as he could remember. But they hadn’t even owned a camera at the time of Jennifer’s fifth birthday. He could still remember the terrible argument he and Connie had had. His wife had been bitterly disappointed that they weren’t to have a picture of Jennifer in her new dress. He was selfish, a skinflint, she’d said. He could not remember whether he’d been hurt by that.
• • •
He supposed the photograph could have been accidental. That in itself would be gravely disturbing, although everyone became an accidental figure in someone else’s photographs at one time or other. It’s not that unusual to pass behind someone who is being photographed in the street, or to be in front of a monument being photographed, or to appear as part of the backdrop in some news film, documentary, home movie. It had happened only once to him that he was aware of—he’d taken the family to the Royal Gorge in Colorado, and had passed behind an elderly gentleman on the bridge before being aware that his equally elderly wife was taking a picture of her husband at the time. Once he saw the lady’s finger poised threateningly over the button he’d tried to sprint out of range, but then he’d heard the ever-so faint click of the shutter. He’d had the ridiculous urge at that instant to snatch the camera out of her hands and toss it into the canyon.
The elderly couple were certainly both dead by now, and their children—or some strangers at an estate sale—had obtained a box of photographs, including the one capturing his own image. They might wonder why he looked so surprised. They might think he must have just stolen something. That panicked look, that blurring of figure, might last generations after he was dead.
But how could this particular photograph be accidental? It had been taken in his own study. It was a record, he thought, a record of something he did not quite remember as having happened, a record of something he had completely forgotten about.
For a moment he looked up, thinking he was being spied upon. But there were no windows in here. And yet he still felt watched, fixed inside someone’s viewfinder.
The light overhead felt hotter than the sun—he’d forgotten how hot it could get. That’s why he usually illuminated his study with one floor lamp and his desk lamp instead. Had he used the wrong type of bulb? It felt as hot as a sun lamp. Or perhaps there had been a current surge, and soon every fuse in his rickety old house would blow.
He held his magnifying glass steadily over his face in the picture, as if to burn it with the light from the overhead ceiling fixture. Burn it out of the photo paper and into his consciousness. A study should be a cool, shadowed place. He couldn’t remember why he’d installed such intense bulbs.
As he studied the man’s image more closely, he really had to doubt that this person could be him. The face was too harsh, too angry. He had never felt that tense himself. He’d always been quite calm.
But if this was who they thought he was, no wonder Jennifer and Connie had always seemed so afraid of him. All he required was the right photograph to prove otherwise.
• • •
It was quite late; Connie should have called him for supper by now. He had nothing better to do in the meantime, so he continued to study the photograph. He flipped forward in the album, confirming that this was the only photograph in the entire book. But he remembered more—a multitude of images. Once Connie had finally obtained the Kodak with her saving stamps she’d asked him to take picture after picture of Jennifer growing up, and he’d complied. Pictures of her with her first bicycle, her first Brownie troop, her first dance, her first prom. Now they were all gone, vanished, and their absence left not even a pale shadow on the pages. The empty leaves breathed dust into the light from the hot lamp above his head.
He wondered what might have happened to that old Kodak camera. Perhaps Connie had taken it with her when she left.
Something had happened, something terrible had happened. Something had been misunderstood.
• • •
He stared at the photograph. Who could be so hateful as to take such a picture, an image so unexplainable, and then shove it in his face this way? Flash. He could feel the next photograph against his knuckles as he clenched the album page in his fingers. Flash. Flash. He glanced briefly at the photograph on the next page which actually should have preceded this one in sequence.
Jennifer’s eyes were blurred smudges of smoke, her mouth a wide and dark boiling hole.
He slammed the book shut. Flash. And dropped it on the table. Flash. Flash. He ran to the study door and jerked it open.
He thought he could escape the camera’s swift shutter as he ran through rooms unkempt since his wife and daughter had abandoned him, abandoned him to his own self-image the day after her fifth birthday. But the shutter was faster than memory, getting off shot after shot as it chased him down through the years. The flash squeezed and squeezed, burning his heart and leaving him in tears.
She was out west, he’d heard, remarried years ago and with several more children, brothers and sisters for Jennifer, who was now an adult and married with children of her own. But he had no confirmation of that—he didn’t have any pictures. He could not remember the last time he had seen either one of them, and there were no photographs of that event, either, to verify that it had even occurred.
He remembered when they’d first moved into the old house and found this album tucked away on top of a high shelf: crumbling, yellowed leaves, a few warped and overexposed photos pasted into its pages, showing nothing. It had been damaged and useless, and Jennifer had claimed it smelled. Since they couldn’t use it they’d put it back up on its shelf.
Now it lay on his dining room table, bulging.
He didn’t even own a camera anymore. He opened the album, and blurred bits of shiny paper spilled across the dull tablecloth bearing dark smudges and vaporous openings, flesh in soft focus, grayed heads and the shadows of desire, desperate whispers.
He could feel the photographer’s eye bearing down on him steadily. With each shutter click he could feel his own fingers clench. He looked around, and shouted out something even he did not understand. He didn’t expect the photographer to understand—he merely took photographs.
He grabbed the album again, ripping it apart in his search for the one photograph that would show him what actually happened, the concrete image that would remind him why his life had changed. But all he had was shiny bits of paper, smudged faces, and broken mouths.
Flash, and flash again. The white light exploded inside his brain.
At last sensing a direction, he stared into the invisible lens, cried, “Voyeur!” and spat into nothing.