Trick of Light Read online

  Photography can he thought of in numerous ways—in terms of f-stops and shutter speeds, film types and lenses, composition, content, print quality and a hundred ways more. But in the end—this was Maddy's primary lesson—photography is about the photographer's vision, her way of seeing.

  "Always ask yourself," she would say, "'What am I seeing?' and then, 'How can I convey it in the strongest possible way?'" When she found fault with work, she'd say: "I don't feel anything here, I can't see what you were looking at."

  To take pictures without encapsulating one's feelings—that, in Maddy's view, was a sin. "Nice snapshots," she'd declare, dismissing uninteresting work. Then: "Did you bring me any photographs today?"

  She could be tough. A weak student might wither before her gaze. But Maddy didn't coach weak students. When she took you on she was telling you that she knew you were strong.

  She'd say: "You can photograph anything you like. I never quarrel over content. But the intensity of your vision—that's fair game." Also: "My job is to help you see what you have seen, in your own way, the strongest way for you. All I ask is that every time you take a picture, you invest yourself completely. To do less is to cheat the art."

  This morning I think about this as I examine her shots once again, seeking the implicate order, the hidden order enfolded within them. Maddy was brilliant. She didn't take empty pictures. She knew what she was doing and didn't waste time. I can't imagine her taking shot after shot, each of them equally meaningless.

  So, I decide, there must be something embedded in these shots, something which, perhaps on account of some weakness within myself, I fail or am unwilling to see.

  At noon I take a bus to the Main Library at Civic Center, passing through Polk Gulch en route. Two years ago I did a lot of picture taking here, documenting the lives of male hustlers. Tim, the one I liked most, became my friend. Later he was brutally killed. I made a book out of his story, published last fall, Exposures. If it hadn't been for Maddy's guidance, I doubt I would have finished it.

  On the bus I think about color blindness. Could the hidden order in Maddy's pictures be invisible to me because I'm unable to distinguish its color? Maddy, of course, shot in black and white, so that doesn't make sense . . . unless she saw something in color with her naked eye which she then shot in black and white simply out of habit.

  At the library, in the open stacks, I find a copy of David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order. I take it to a table, open it, start to read. The text is difficult. My mind wanders as I skip over material about problems in quantum physics. But then, when I come upon a reference to photography, I sit up, alert.

  Bohm is describing his theory in terms of the differences between photography and holography, suggesting that a photograph is analogous to the explicate order, while a hologram is analogous to the implicate.

  With a lens, he points out, one captures and replicates on film the same spatial relationships that exist in the scene being photographed. For example, if there's a bird in the upper right corner of the viewfinder frame, it will be in the upper right corner of the negative that light reflected off the bird will fall.

  A hologram, however, is different, a three-dimensional representation in which it's possible to examine the scene from different points of view. In a hologram, created by lasers and without a lens, light reflected by the entire scene is embedded, in the form of an interference pattern, in every single portion of the picture. Thus even the tiniest part of a hologram will contain light reflected by the bird, the bird-light being enfolded within light reflected by everything else.

  The implication is clear: if the implicate order, the secret, is enfolded within every part of a hologram, then it should be possible to explicate it from every part as well. But, I'm quick to recall, Maddy didn't leave behind any holograms. She left only photographs.

  So, I think, standing in the doorway of Main Library, I'm back just where I started.

  Or am I? I wonder, as I put on wraps, then cross sun-struck Civic Center Plaza to the bus stop on Van Ness.

  I take the bus as far as Mission and Twenty-fourth, then walk over to Capp. Instead of lingering in my usual manner, I walk straight to the front of 4106, the apartment building that backs on Cypress Alley. I enter the lobby as if I know the place, and immediately inspect the building register. Opposite a series of doorbells I find a list of names embossed on plastic strips, the embossing executed in various sizes and styles, suggesting different durations of residency.

  The apartment I'm interested in is on the second floor, but the numbers on the register don't give a hint as to location. Second-floor apartments here aren't labeled in the usual way: 2-A, 2-B, 2-C and so on. Rather the apartments are numbered sequentially 1 to 11, suggesting a lack of symmetry upstairs.

  Since I don't want to be caught snooping around, I rapidly photograph the register.

  I call Joel from a grocery on the corner of Twenty-fifth, reach him on his cell phone, which he always carries in a holster suspended from his belt. When he answers he informs me he's munching a hot dog at a waterfront dive in Oakland, the Chile Pepper Lounge.

  "I keep waiting for a new tip, kiddo. Or at least a compliment on our explosion story. I know it's coming, just don't know when. This guy, whoever he is, has got me upset. Kirstin says I'm acting like a loony tune."

  I ask him how I can get hold of the floor plan of a residential building.

  "What kind?" he asks.

  "Multi-dwelling. Rental."

  "Easy," he says. "Building Inspection Department, Records Management Division. They'll let you look at plans, and if you pay a little something, make you a copy to take home." He pauses. "Wanna tell me what this is about?"

  "Not just yet."

  "Whenever, kiddo. I'll be here when you need me. Always remember that."

  "I will, Joel. Thanks."

  The Building Inspection Department, I discover, is on Mission near Civic Center, an easy stop on my way home. Even as I enter I catch the aroma of city bureaucracy—boredom, indifference, low morale, starchy food and lousy coffee all suspended in poorly recycled air.

  I fill out a form, then spend twenty minutes in line before a counter presided over by a huge black woman sporting a dashiki and the kind of huge Afro white folks used to think connoted militancy.

  When, finally, I reach the head of the line, she takes my form without bothering to look up. Failing to find fault with my application, she smiles broadly, hits the form with several stamps, then demands fifteen dollars, cash or personal check accompanied by California ID. After I pay, she glances quickly at my face.

  "Here's your receipt, sweet pea. Come back in two days. Pick up your paperwork at window six."

  Walking home, I ponder the implicate order—that which is implicit yet hidden from view. At Larkin and Greenwich I climb the steep steps that lead to the Greenwich Street cul-de-sac. From here I enter Sterling Park, the beautiful wooded area honoring the early-twentieth-century San Francisco poet George Sterling, which covers a block on the south peak of Russian Hill.

  The failing light is comfortable for me now. It also endows the park, filled with mature specimens of Monterey cypress and pine, with the shadowy feeling of an ancient wood. There's lots of deep shade and strange thick low-lying trees which undulate like giant serpents along the ground.

  Nobody's around, the park is empty. I go to a bench, sit and contemplate the view. The Marin Headlands are etched by the late-afternoon sun. The Golden Gate Bridge, so mighty close up, from here looks almost like a toy.

  How, I ask myself, can I account for Maddy's meaningless shots, which look more like failed surveillance photos than the work of an important artist/photographer?

  Suppose I've been looking at her pictures too closely, searching out details when the message is in the overall effect? Suppose Maddy wasn't trying to photograph specific action, rather was trying to capture something deeper such as a feeling or a mood?

  In that case the hidden order in her pictures woul
d be the very thing she emphasized in her tutorials: the photographer's struggle to instill emotion in her work. If so, then in a metaphorical sense, as Sasha put it, her photographs would resemble holograms.

  These thoughts excite me so much I dash out of the park, past the tennis courts, the rosebushes on Hyde, dart into my building, impatiently ride the elevator to my floor, fumble with my keys, open my door, then rush immediately into my office where I've pinned up prints of the medium-format shots I found in Maddy's lair.

  This time, rather than inspecting each print closely, I stand back and examine them as a group.

  What's there? What's the feeling? What was she trying to convey?

  It's then, that moment, in the very act of posing the question, that the answer comes to me with striking clarity. Menace, depravity, even evil—that's what's in her pictures, that's what they're all about.

  Thursday, midmorning, apartment floor plans in hand, I take the Sacramento Street bus up to the Richmond, get off at Arguello, then walk to City Stone Ground, my dad's bread bakery on Clement.

  I can smell the bread even from the street, the same fabulous mouthwatering aroma that permeated our house when I was young, when bread making was my father's hobby.

  "Hey, darlin'!" he says, spotting me as I walk in. "What a grand surprise!"

  As always when I appear, he grins with pleasure, then scoops me up in his mighty arms. Though the bread making is finished for the day, he's still in his baking whites and floppy hat, his bare forearms and cheeks spotted here and there with flour.

  He kisses the top of my head, then sets me down. He's a big blocky guy, his hair's a shaggy mop of soft gray locks, he has the grooved, weathered face of a man who's spent years living in the open, riding beneath the sun, sleeping beneath the stars. In fact, he walked a policeman's beat until he was forty, when, under pressure to resign, he decided to embrace his dream—open a bakery where he would make great-tasting honest loaves of bread with perfect shattering crusts.

  He's been successful. His pain au levain is coveted. He sells most of his production to restaurants; the remainder, reserved for walk-ins, is inevitably sold out by noon. He adores his work, the sorcery of it, making something wondrous out of the simplest things—water, flour, yeast, salt and heat.

  He leads me into his small office off the baking floor, glassed in so he can watch his Russian émigré staff at work. His desk's covered with heaps of receipts, letters, undeposited checks, telephone message slips, unwashed coffee mugs, even crumbs from the morning's sample loaves.

  "What brings you here, darlin'?" he asks, merriment in his eyes. "You don't like going out in daylight, so I know you didn't just drop by."

  He nods; he remembers. He was always a good father, happy to play with me at the odd times dictated by my achromatopsia, taking me on moonlight walks, to the beach at sunset, understanding my love of and comfort in the night. He told me bedtime stories too, stories about a little girl who couldn't see colors but could see things other normal-sighted girls couldn't—could read through color disguises, discern peripheral threats, whose night vision was so keen she would lead her friends on exciting nocturnal adventures. In his stories the heroine's apparent weakness always became her strength, and though she often had to struggle to accomplish simple tasks, her bravery, intelligence and special vision enabled her to perform great deeds, proving herself to those who'd earlier mocked her for her malady.

  They were tomboyish tales; Dad wasn't good at spinning yarns about girls in pretty dresses who played with dolls and sported curly locks. I'm sure his bedtime stories helped form my character. I know my mother disapproved, believing they encouraged my willfulness.

  "Well," Dad says, eyeing my floor plans, "let's see what you got."

  I unroll the plan of the second floor of the Capp Street building, show him the apartment that backs on Cypress Alley.

  "I want to know who rents this space," I tell him. "Then I want to know all about him."

  "Him?"

  "Him, her, whoever. Look, it's apartment 5. Carroll's the name beside the lobby buzzer. I checked the phone book. There're lots of Carrolls, none with a listed address at 4106 Capp. Of course a lot of people, me included, don't list their address, and there're plenty with unlisted phones. Anyhow, I thought maybe you can get Rusty to help."

  "Sure, I can ask him, darlin'. But you're gonna have to tell me a little first."

  He listens intently, gazing into my eyes, as I describe how I found Maddy's spy room in the deaf Chinese couple's house on Cypress, why I'm certain she rented it because she'd targeted the apartment across the way, and how the photographs she took convey a mood of menace, but say virtually nothing about why she was interested.

  "Why not take this to Kremezi?" he asks.

  "Because it doesn't really mean anything, does it, Dad?"

  He ponders. "I was a street cop, not a detective, but I guess if I was working a hit-and-run and someone brought me this, I probably wouldn't put much legwork into it." He looks at me. "What do you intend to do?"

  I shrug. "Don't know yet. I'm taking it one step at a time. Right now all I want is to find out why Maddy was so interested in that apartment."

  He nods, but I can tell he's skeptical, knows that I think there's a connection between Maddy's spying and her death and that it's my intention to link them up. On the other hand, I can tell, he likes the notion that I'm not the type to leave a mystery unsolved, perhaps because it reminds him of the brave little colorblind girl in the stories he used to regale me with before I went to sleep.

  "Gimme a couple days," he says. "I'll check with Rusty, see what he can turn up. But"—he raises his finger—"one condition."

  "Yes?"

  "You don't use what I get for you to do something stupid, like spy on people who may be dealing drugs."

  "Is that what you think's going on over there?"

  "Maybe, maybe not. I just don't want you getting hurt, darlin'. So promise me?"

  "Sure, Dad—nothing stupid, I promise."

  I'm sitting in the attic room on a simple bentwood chair, peering out the window. There're no lights on or any signs of life in the apartment across the way. I sit frozen in the cane seat, stiff and awkward, feeling as if I don't really belong here, am an intruder in someone else's space. It's not the apartment across Cypress, the object of my scrutiny, that gives me this feeling; it's this room, Maddy's lair, her spy nest. There were confidential aspects to her life which I am here to probe. She's gone, no longer able to defend her privacy. I'm here to learn her secrets, and though I don't yet know what they are, I'm certain that when I've uncovered them I will view her differently than before.

  After fifteen minutes, my eyes fully adjusted, my night vision acute, I study the little room.

  The tripod and big Pentax dominate the space. On my first visit, I immediately fixed on them, then on the processing tank and accessories laid out on the worktable beside the sink. Now, prowling the room, I come across other mementoes of Maddy's visits: her empty suitcase in the closet, along with a belted black raincoat and umbrella; a neatly folded ski sweater stored in a dresser drawer along with a pencil-beam flashlight. I remember this sweater, recall her wearing it when I came to her flat for tutorials. Holding it up, I discover a pocket-size spiral-bound notebook hidden within its folds.

  Greatly excited, I flip through the pages. About half of them contain writing. On some I find only a word or two, on others brief notes scrawled in haste.

  There's mundane stuff such as shopping lists (inevitably including yogurt and fruit), and reminders about her tutorials. I find a note referring to David Yamada: "DAVID RE CELL PHONE / EMERGENCIES? / PICKUP TIMES / SCHEDULE?" I even find a note about me: "TELL K. RE HER BOXERS / GET UNDER THEIR FEET."

  A good idea! I'd have tried it if she'd suggested it. She never did. I think she realized I was on the verge of giving up the project and for that reason didn't push her ideas.

  "DUEL / CHECK FILES" seems like a reminder to look through her negat
ive files. But what does "duel" mean? Or is the word actually "dual"?

  Some of her notes are illegible. Probably she scribbled them while sitting in the dark waiting to view some action across the way.

  There're also a couple notes written clearly enough, whose meaning I can't decipher. On three different pages she repeats the same two words: "THE GUN." The third time she underlines the words twice. On another page she writes: "THE GUN / FIND THE GUN / WHERE'S THE GUN?" In each instance the word "gun" is circled.

  Feeling dizzy, I put the notebook down, go to the sink, splash water on my face, then lie down on the daybed near the door. I can feel my heart throbbing in my chest, sweat breaking out on my forehead.

  Why? Is it the notebook? What does the notebook tell me?

  Nothing, I decide . . . nothing that I can understand.

  That, I realize, is the problem—that the deeper I look into things, the less sense they seem to make. An important photographer has been killed—my teacher, role model and heroine. In her last months, her behavior was strange and out of character. She started shooting film after she told everyone she'd given up active photography. She rented an attic room in a private house in a very bad neighborhood overlooking the back windows of an apartment. She wrote cryptic notes to herself in a notebook she concealed in the folds of a sweater. And then, one night, she was run down by a motorcyclist in front of the building she was spying on.

  It's the same enigma I've been grappling with for two full weeks, now somewhat embellished by my discovery of the notebook. But just as at each earlier discovery (the film in the Leica, the rental of the attic room), the basic impasse remains: I'm no closer to discovering what she was doing.