Quartet for the End of Time (40 page)

At no point did Alden mention that he had in fact been aware of everything to which Sutton had recently confessed. He wrote only:
The world and its workings are much vaster than any of us can even begin to imagine
. Only:
Though we may be doomed to read things always and only according to our own, very limited point of views, that does not make the singularity of that perspective any more true.
He himself (he told Sutton) was beginning, at least, to understand things this way—ever since the death of his dear friend Emmett Henderson, who had lost his life fighting for the Spanish Republic just that past spring.

It was Emmett who had urged him, Alden wrote—just shortly before his own untimely end—that
one played, even within the context of one's own life, only a limited role.
To imagine it otherwise, Emmett had argued, was an error both in judgment and scale. And (contrary to what it might seem at the outset) to
truly
understand that this was so, and act accordingly, was an exacting—if not downright impossible— task; far more difficult than any pre-Copernican formulation: each man for himself and at the center of all things. It was only—counseled the doomed Emmett Henderson—by releasing oneself from what could only be the most illusory sense of an ultimate claim over one's own life, down to its smallest and most insignificant thought or deed (a compulsion, he'd observed wryly, that—in our present day culture— had become
downright pathological
), that one might actually begin to understand one's place in the world. And become, therefore,
more
rather than
less
capable of working toward some greater good.

He himself understood, of course (Alden continued), how the feelings Sutton mentioned arose. He himself had at one time—not so long before, and as mad as it sounds!—been convinced that in some small way he had even
become
Arthur Sinclair, so deeply and earnestly had he taken him, and his fate—unknown as it was—into his heart. The audacity of this idea now simply astounded him. What a relief (Alden wrote),
more
than a relief, to be—finally—released from that delusion! To be just—what luck—
himself
again!

A
FTER THAT
, A
LDEN AND
Sutton kept up a vigorous correspondence. Sutton writing long descriptions of the towns they passed through— Waco, Shreveport, Vicksburg, Jackson—and the landscape, which, even as they left the desert behind and drove deep into the South, seemed to become (in accordance with her diminishing faith in her ability to press from, or against it, any “reality” at all) only emptier by the day. Alden returning—at her request—brief comic sketches of his life in Paris, and the people (mostly Americans, she was disappointed to learn!) he knew there. And, from time to time, a scrap of an almost indecipherable poem, which, in her next letter, she would ask him to parse (a request he could be counted on to ignore or refuse).

Still. And despite her relief that the past, in having at last been spoken, had become less the impassable object it had once been between them— and Alden's encouragement to leave it, simply and finally, behind—Sutton continued to expect, at every turn, around every bend, if not Douglas or Arthur Sinclair to actually
appear,
then … something. A hat, perhaps, she thought to herself sometimes—just to be cruel. The one distinguishing feature of either man she could, with any sort of certainty, recall.

—

L
OUIS TOOK TO TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS AT MIDDAY; BLANCHING FROM
them those details he might otherwise have captured in the milder light of the early morning or pre-dusk hours, and lending a slightly windswept quality to even the photographs that had been meticulously posed. He was particularly proud, for example, of a photograph entitled “Dust Storm,” because, in actuality, it been taken on a very still day. Southern Oklahoma: his subjects—a father and three of his sons. They had posed patiently for him all afternoon, while Louis shouted orders like a general, made endless rearrangements, and shot through four rolls of film …

Hot and tired, Sutton had asked: How much is the truth worth if you insist on sacrificing reality to it every day?
As her own faith flagged, she was, perhaps, beginning to resent Louis's continued enthusiasm. (Though even he, as time wore on, began to agree: the more they persisted in their attempt to capture the “true,” or the “real,” the further away they seemed to get from anything at all.) Still, they tried. Staged shots, candid ones. Long exposures, short ones. And still, just as Sutton suspected, each, in the end, turned out the same. Nothing more than a photograph; flimsy and alterable as a word. How could she ever have expected anything else? A photograph was only, after all, an object like any other, meaning very little on its own. In fact, it seemed to Sutton that any photograph they took, or could take now, would require not only—like a word—a complete sentence, if not a whole book, to lend to it meaning, but a whole world; that it would require the entire state of Kansas or Oklahoma to stretch itself again just as it had in the moment it had first been “captured” on the page; for the dust to blow again through the flattened landscape; for the bodies of the people in the photograph, if there were any, to, once again, take on their proper dimensions and forms; for their thoughts to reach as far as they ever did into the invisible corners of their minds.

At the beginning, though, whenever she expressed this sort of doubt to Louis, he would only grind his teeth and swear.

Well, dammit! he would say. What do you expect? You'll go mad if you think you can draw the whole world, like that, on the head of a pin.

But he was just as guilty as she was in that regard—more so. If anyone was going to go mad, Sutton told him, it was him. A reporter, she said, drew lines whenever she could between what was “visible” and what was not; an artist attempted to push past those lines. It was only a madman, she said, who attempted to eliminate them entirely.

L
OUIS HAD CONTINUED
—
MORE
and more urgently, perhaps, as the weeks and then the months began to pass—to devote himself to his study of F. W. H. Myers. At night, camped out in the back of their 1931 Willys Knight (a gift from Louis's father), he read particularly persuasive sections of
Human Personality
to Sutton out loud—making it even more impossible than usual for her to sleep.

There existed, Myers and then Louis explained, continuities between the living world and the dead that had long been overlooked. How could she not see it, Louis wondered in genuine confusion, just as clearly as he? Photography, after all—he added after further reflection, in an argument all his own—was
direct evidence of Myers's claim!
Just
think of it
, he begged. How everything we've done—all our efforts to date (here he gestured loosely toward the back of the Willys Knight, where box upon box of as-yet-undeveloped film lay jumbled together in packing crates) sit spooled in darkness. And will continue to—he said—until, one day soon, with the correct application of water and light, they—
the past itself
—will rise again to meet us!

Why is it so hard to imagine? he would ask on other occasions, when Sutton laughed outright, or—afflicted suddenly, as she often was in his mad moments, with an almost asphyxiating boredom—turned impatiently away. If they are intent, he said, on science providing the answers only to the things we already know, then it isn't of any more use to us than religion! The surrealists, Louis argued further, had not gone far enough. They pursued their investigations the way they pursued everything else—as an approach, a pose. They plumbed the unconscious only for the purposes of surface ornamentation; they skated, in this way, Louis said,
right over the truth
, which—if they had only looked a bit deeper—they would have easily found. (Incidentally—it was by this logic that Louis defended the manipulations of the photographs he took—a photograph fails, he said, as everything fails, if you depend only on what is immediately apparent to the eye.)

It was not just conjecture, either, insisted Louis. Myers supplied “hard proof”: dozens of transcripts of the communications he and his friends had conducted over the years with the dead. That this “proof” had been largely discredited or (worse) ignored by academic scientists—a fact Sutton often pointed out—did not bother Louis one bit. It was not because the research wasn't valid, he said; guided by the same principles as all modern science has been, ever since Aristotle woke up one day and discovered the universe
in particular
, and from there began to reason, then to extrapolate, and finally to dream! No, it was not science
but politics that had clamped down on Myers's research—trivializing his efforts in the same way that, once, Galileo and Copernicus had been sidelined and condemned!

Think of it
, said Louis. What Myers discovered threatens the very structure of our current state! If it were to actually get out, if we were suddenly to make
use
of these findings, in a broader and more systematic way, think what upheaval there would be; what final, total revolution! If Alexander the Great or Napoleon, say, suddenly reared up their mighty heads once more and gave counsel (or denied it) to Franco or Roosevelt! Think of it! Louis exclaimed. If Galileo came back and described for us, in detail—based
on his personal experience
beyond the grave—the music of the spheres, and Poincaré reported on relativity and the proper measure of infinity, and Goethe discussed his latest postmortal notions of the transmutation of the soul!

T
HE MORE DISTANCE THEY
covered together—north again: Rock Hill, Summerfield, Lynchburg; then east, toward home—the more certain Sutton became that the problem was not, as it seemed to Louis, that nothing succeeded in going deep enough, but just the opposite: in not being able to pause anything for long enough that what existed at the surface could be properly seen. Perhaps Alden (she thought) was right after all. There existed at any moment much more than could ever possibly be witnessed, let alone understood, but that what escaped
was not hidden.
It might indeed even be quite evident, were we not so obsessed with looking for it in the wrong places. Sometimes she would take Louis's face in her hands so he could not turn away; look at him, very squarely, like that. And she would be sure—quite sure—in those moments, that he was wrong. That it was a mistake, a madness—in art as equally as love—to assume that the truth existed somewhere beyond or beneath the surface of things. Because the harder, the deeper, she looked into Louis's eyes, the less sure she was that she was seeing anything at all. When, on the other hand, she let her gaze rest on him only lightly—letting the spray of colors around his black pupils (they were ringed like small suns) dance in the light and the shifting focus of her own eyes—she felt it. A powerful
surge of something in her, which she knew could be nothing other (as in that first moment of contact, when the two of them had burst like clouds in each other's arms) than purest love.

—

F
OR SOME REASON
,
AS THE MONTHS PASSED
,
AND THEY BEGAN
—
INCREAS
-ingly, and for very different reasons—to sense how ultimately “empty” the photographs they took were, or would soon turn out to be, they could no longer bear the thought of parting with them. They began to develop and, each month, send to Hopkins in Washington only a fraction of the film they shot over the same period. By the time, therefore— in late fall of 1937—they arrived back in New York, they'd amassed several crates' worth of “stolen” negatives. These they printed in a crumbling one-bedroom they rented on the Lower East Side before laboriously cutting each print into tiny pieces and arranging them according to light and shade on the living room floor.

When, for the first time, they stepped back to observe the result— their efforts of the last six months arranged around them in luminous abstract shapes; each appearing almost three-dimensional, as though collapsing in on itself like a dying sun—they were overcome (again, for their different reasons) with a strange mixture of devastating sadness and indescribable joy.

T
HANKS TO
H
OPKINS
,
WHO
had personally recommended her, Sutton landed a job almost immediately upon her return to New York with Federal One. They started her off with the Writers' Project—the guidebook series, in copy—but within two months she was promoted to managing editor, everything from Maine to Maryland suddenly under her domain.

Louis had declined a similar offer. He spent his time running up everyone they knew, trying to get them a private show for their work. Finally, he managed it: at a small gallery owned by the Polish artist Franz Wilhelm—an old acquaintance of Louis's, who, it was rumored, was a direct descendant of Ferdinand I. In defiance of his own extraordinary
size—he was as big as three men and had fingers like piano keys—Franz Wilhelm painted miniatures on fragments of pottery and glass, which were sometimes so small one needed a magnifying glass in order to see that anything had been painted on the surface at all.

He displayed his own work in an emptied shop front in Red Hook attached to an old factory building. There he collected art the way scientists collect rare specimens of insect or gemstone: the “factory” was a jumble of the work of every artist he had ever met, many of whom—as he bragged, unusually, when he showed Louis and Sutton the space—
no one had ever heard of.
But they didn't argue when Franz Wilhelm purchased two of their “exploding stars” to add to his collection.

Even with the patronage of Franz Wilhelm, however, and the absentminded support of Louis's father, after only a few weeks their brief career sputtered to a halt. Finally, Louis admitted that he, too, would need, at least temporarily, to support himself by other means, and shortly after landed a job at
Life
magazine—which was just then becoming famous for its glossy photo spreads.