Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (22 page)

“You’re a feeling human being, Ish.”

“And that if I ever see you in the general vicinity of Penelope again, I’ll kill you.”

“Whatever blows your hair back.”

“It’d make me happy, you little bagga shit.”

With this, he straightened off the tree and, watching me like a mailman watches a dog, walked across the yard, hopped the little fence in one graceful motion and moved toward his car.

I watched him drive off before letting myself into the house.

Melinda’s note was taped to the hardwood floor just inside our front door:

Dear Terry,

I’m looking for a way to believe in you. Maybe I’ll find one, because I love and respect you. I don’t see any way that your being here would be good for any of us. I have Penny to consider. Take whatever you’ll need and go. I’ll be here for you. I’ll be there for you. If you’re the man I think you are maybe we’ll laugh about this someday, after we sue the shit out of somebody. If you’re not, you must get the help you need. I’ll explain this to Penelope as best I can. God be with you, with all of us.

Mel

I packed a few things. Then I went to the liquor store, drove to the little apartment in the metro district, let myself in, opened the windows. I sat at a table in the dining nook and looked out. The Performing Arts Center was lit up like a shrine. The bean field was an empty black rectangle. Beyond it flowed a river of headlights, and the big hotels rose into the night and the palm trees stood erect and motionless. The dark glass of the business towers caught the lesser lights below, wearing them like medals. Tonello’s glowed with self-importance, and I could see the valets standing just under the awning in their red vests and bow ties.

I got out a notepad and made a list of the people I thought might have the opportunity to do this to me. Included were Jordan Ishmael, Jim Wade, Frances White, Johnny Escobedo and Louis Briar. I added Ardith Naughton, Melinda Vickers and Donna Mason. I added Burns, Woolton and Vega. But who knew about the cave, or could have found out about it? I hadn’t told Wade, Ish or either of the undersheriffs directly, but any one of them could conceivably have learned about it, located it and salted it. Right? I added three fat question marks, for the people who might have been told about the cave by the people
I
had told. They could be anybody. Then I put the names together in various combinations, like cards in a poker hand. Even with knowledge of the cave, who had the opportunity to slip the falsified photos into Chet’s den? That eliminated Ardith and Donna. And even with knowledge and opportunity, who had the technical skill to create such documents? That eliminated only Melinda, positively, because I truly didn’t know what secret skills my co-workers might possess. Anything was possible. But even with knowledge, opportunity and technical capacity, who had a motive to see my career, my relationships—perhaps my life—destroyed? I could only write down one name for certain: Ishmael.

Strange, I thought, the way that name comes off the tongue:
Ishmael.

I drank swiftly and earnestly.

I remember a cab ride through the metro district. I remember standing amid the fragrant furrowed earth of the bean field to behold the quarter moon. I remember part of a movie, a long hot shower that didn’t slow the cold shivers of my body, the tequila and beer vanishing, a late-night taxi stop to get more, words with two men as I got back into the cab, the way the floor of the apartment seemed to pivot steeply in alternate directions as I navigated my way across it. I remember fast-food wrappers flying out the window of a car I wasn’t driving. I remember a phone booth. I remember vivid dreams—I can only assume they were dreams—of caves and girls and women and various methods of execution, my body always on the verge of something either deadly or pleasureful, neither of which was consummated, and swirling planes of bright stars in a blue night, and smells. I remember the smells of damp stone, blood and sagebrush, female sweat. I remember dreaming that Donna crawled into bed with me and held my naked, clammy form and tried to reassure me. That morning when I awoke she was in fact there, splendidly fresh and dressed for work, running her fingers through my damp hair.

I felt like I’d returned from death itself. But I didn’t know how to feel about it.

I looked up at her.

“You said some crazy things last night,” she said. Her expression was more interested than accusatory.

“Bad. Dreams.”

“No. You were awake still. Lots of talk about the pictures. What pictures?”

“Hm?” There was a riot of pain, an insurrection of agony led by my soul.

“The pictures. Don’t you remember anything you said?”

“Uh-uh.”

“You kept saying the pictures had followed you. The pictures had caught you. Someone was trying to get you. What were you talking about?”

“Beats me,” I managed.

She brought me a cup of coffee, sat on the bed beside me and put her cool hand on my head. I closed my eyes. I could tell by the turn of her wrist that she looked at her watch.

“You and Melinda had a fight. You did tell me that much. I’m sorry for that. It brought us together for a night, but I’m still sorry.”

I looked at her. “No. I am. Sorry. About last night. About everything.”

“You don’t have to be, Terry. But you really ought to come clean with me. I can live with half of you for now, but that half’s got to be all there.”

“Yeah. I’m trying.”

“What’s happening?”

“Not sure yet. Special duty. I really can’t tell you about it. You know—regulations.”

She looked down at me with frank suspicion. Even through the throbbing fog in my brain I could tell she was vetting my stories. I was dully aware that that’s what she did for a living. She looked at her watch again. She leaned down and wrapped my head in her arms and whispered in my ear,
Terry, I got to be at the newsroom in thirty-five minutes. It’s a half-hour drive this time of morning. That leaves five minutes to spare and I’m going to use that time to tell you something you might not understand.

I watched her make some adjustments in her underthings, then climb over me. She looked like she might on TV, the upper half of her a thing of beauty and intelligence, the lower half of her unseen. But that lower half was connected to me in a way that made me want to stay right there with her forever. It was like being plugged straight into heaven. Like a live feed from an angel. She closed her eyes. Her bangs dangled and cast moving shadows on her forehead. I heard the bathroom water running. Before she left she kissed me on the lips, then cheek, then stood there looking down at me.

She touched my face with her fingers. “I hate mysteries. I hate all the things you don’t tell me, all the mysteries you hold back. I like the truth. And I like things I can see and touch and hold—things that prove the truth. I love you, too, Terry Naughton. But you sure don’t make it easy.”

D
arien Aftergood was an old acquaintance of mine from high school. We were both second-string guards for the freshman basketball team, the Laguna Artists, and we went 3-14 that year. I couldn’t really handle the ball and he couldn’t really shoot, but we had the boundless hustle of second stringers everywhere. We were skinny kids who rarely had our heads in the game. We left the hoops after that first year. He started running with the art-theater crowd and I spent my afternoon surfing Brooks Street. Darien must have taken our mascot name literally. Now he’s an artist and gallery owner in Laguna, with a studio/gallery/apartment downtown on Ocean Avenue. Darien is plugged into the art world at a hundred different sockets. He guest-curates for the Orange County Art Museum; he organizes shows at his own space; he is a critic for two national magazines and his work has been collected and shown around the world. He’s a photographer who manipulates his images in the lab. The results are images that sometimes look like photographs, but aren’t photographs at all.

He tried to explain to me, through the painful haze of my hangover, how he manages to create pictures that look so real but aren’t.

“We have to define ‘reality’ if we’re going to get anywhere, Terry. The reality of the image is what you see. It doesn’t exist until the artist creates it. To say it isn’t real misses a large part of the whole point. For instance, how can you say that this image isn’t a reality?”

I looked at the picture on the wall in front of us. We were standing in the main room of his little gallery. The art was done by a New York compatriot of Darien’s, and it depicted a huge can of tuna fish, upright on its side in the middle of an expansive American prairie. Two photographically “real” people stood in the foreground and looked upward at the can. The photographically “real” tuna fish can was about sixty feet tall.

“But that scene never took place,” I said. “It might be a real image, but it’s based on a false event.”

“No, not really, Terry. It’s not based on an event at all. The event
is
the image. The event doesn’t take place until the artist brings it into being.”

“But there’s no reality there.”

“Literal visual truth—as you’re referring to it—died decades ago. We photographers killed it. Even
National Geographic
was reworking its photographs for the magazine, I mean taking some pretty big liberties by the standards of journalism. Look at any supermarket tabloid. You can see the splices quite easily. But on a work like this, you can’t. It’s a matter of degree.”

“How did he do it?”

Darien explained the process: a combination of digital imaging and an Iris printer, which uses continual ink-jet technology to apply colored ink to paper or canvas; photographs altered with painted passages, combined with monoprints of video footage of computer-generated images; enlarged Polaroid prints; and images drawn from a digital file. You just scan in an image, he said, then go to work on it with the Adobe Photoshop program on your computer and hurl 129 megabytes of power at it.

“I’ve been working on some traditional, labor-intensive processes too,” he said. “That involves producing photographic prints using pigment transfer and platinum printing. The pigment transfer is suspending the pigment in gelatin or gum Arabic, then building up layers of the color. The interesting thing about the older process is that the color will be stable on the paper for five hundred years. It’s time consuming and expensive.”

I nodded. The price tag for the giant tuna can was $1,400.

“Is it one of a kind?”

“It is now, but we can pull prints. It’s up to the artist, how many copies he wants out there.”

I thought. “What about … what if … what if the artist had certain images to begin with? Say, photographs. Pictures of a background, and pictures of a subject. Could he manipulate those to create an image that looked like this certain person was doing something in this certain place?”

Darien smiled and glanced at the work on the wall. “The guy on the left there, that’s me. And I guarantee you I never stood on a Nebraska prairie and stared up at a monster can of tuna fish.”

“Then it’s easy.”

“No. It’s complicated. There are new tools now. That’s what all this technology is—it’s just tools. They’re powerful tools and you have to know how to use them. They’re expensive. No, it’s not easy, but a lot of things are possible now that used to be impossible. Most of these artists might tell you that making it look easy is part of the art. Others, well, they like to let the technology show. Two different aesthetics, really.”

“If I showed that tuna fish picture to an expert in photography at the FBI, would he be able to tell it’s fake?”

“Wouldn’t take the FBI to see that it’s fake, Terry! In the way you mean ‘fake,’ that is.”

“Okay. Say it was just a can of tuna fish on a table. And the tools behind the image were digital processing and the Iris printer. Then, could that expert tell by examining the picture that it was done without a real can of tuna fish?”

“It
was
done with a real can of tuna fish. The real can of tuna fish was reproduced and stored by the digital file. It’s as ‘real’ a can of tuna fish in the file as it is in a picture. You know?”

“But a photograph is supposed to capture an image.”

“Wrong. A photograph
creates
an image. That’s the difference now. That’s where it’s all changing. Madison Avenue has been working on it for decades. But right now, the explosion in tools has made things possible that weren’t possible just three years ago. Three years from now … who knows?”

We toured the gallery and looked at other works.

Some were obviously “created”—like the tuna can; others—like a portrait of a woman with her cat—were absolutely convincing as plain old photographs.

“Why’s that one so special?” I asked. “There’s millions of cats like that.”

“The cat’s real. The woman doesn’t exist. She was created on a computer.”

I stepped up close to look at the lines on her face, the singular expression in her eyes, the details of her hands. You could see the wrinkles in her skin, the underlying veins, the blemishes and hairs.

“You can make anything,” I said.

“Almost.”

“What can’t you make?”

Darien crossed his arms and raised a hand to his face. He set his chin into the little cradle of thumb and curled forefinger. “I’m not sure. But why don’t you tell me what you
want.
And I’ll tell you if it’s makeable.”

“All right. I want five-by-seven photographs of a woman bathing her son. I want the woman to be a real woman, and I’ve got photographs of her face you can work with. The boy is real, and I can give you pictures of his face, also. But he’s never actually been bathed by this woman. They’ve never actually seen each other. And I want the bathroom to be a certain bathroom, and I’ve got pictures of that to give you, too. And when you’ve created an image of this woman bathing a kid she’s never seen in a genuine bathtub, I’m going to send the thing off to the FBI’s best scientists and I don’t want them to be able to say it was staged, retouched, enhanced, created, digitally manufactured or Iris ink-jet printed. I want them to say, yeah, that’s a picture of a woman giving a boy a bath. It’s real. It’s genuine. It happened. It’s evidence.”

“Color or black and white?”

“Color.”

“What’s your budget?”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Consider it done. There will be some limitations on it. If the image required visual information that wasn’t in the photographs you supplied, it would have to be generated by computer, by an artist who could extrapolate, who could imagine what was missing. Say he needed the inside of her left hand, but you didn’t have it on film. He’d have to create it.”

“Then the FBI guys would see a fake hand?”

“They’d have to compare it to the real one for that. There’d be no way—just based on the image—for them to know that it was created,
if it
was created skillfully. And Terry, that document he’d create, that picture you’d finally show the FBI, it would be totally, 100 percent
genuine.
It would be—or could be—finally, after all the work was done, just a simple, authentic photograph.”

“Even though the event depicted never happened.”

“It didn’t happen until the artist created it.”

“It never
happened,
Darien. What you
see
in the
picture
did not fucking
happen.
Did it? The woman never gave the kid a bath. Did she?”

“Okay. It never happened.”

“Good Christ, no wonder we could never run a simple pick and roll.”

Silence for a moment, my anger waning.

“We were bad basketball players, weren’t we?” he asked.

“Didn’t you get ten against Newport Harbor?”

“Eight. I never got double digits my whole career.”

“Me neither.”

We sat in his office for a while and talked about the old days, the new days, some of the days in between. Then the conversation got thin.

“What are you working on, Terry? Can I ask?”

I considered my reply for a moment. “Darien, there’s a mudbath pending for a very close friend of mine. We’re talking about somebody getting royally screwed by pictures of something he didn’t do.”

“That’s bad.”

“It’s worse than bad. It’s a career, a life, maybe a prison term. This guy didn’t do what they say he did. What the pictures say he did.”

“They’d have to have more than just pictures, wouldn’t they?”

“For a court of law, maybe. For everything else, the pictures will do quite nicely. They’ll ruin him.”

“Blackmail?”

“No. The cops are sending the pictures to the FBI and the alleged perp is trying to save his ass.”

Darien sat back, fiddling with a pencil on his desktop. “The anomaly would have to be in the image, then—not in the medium.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean, if portions of the image are unique, the way a person is unique, a fingerprint is unique, then anything digitally created could be shown to be inaccurate.”

“But you’d need the real thing to prove it.”

“Right. You’d need the mother, or the boy, or the bathroom.”

I thought about this. Me. The cave. The girl.

Who has pictures of me?

Ardith, the enthused amateur: many. Melinda, an occasional snapshooter: a few. Louis, Johnny and Frances, from our frequent socializing: maybe. Donna, via file footage: some.

And everyone else at the Sheriff’s Department, through my personnel file: left side, right side, straight on.

I got Johnny by phone just before lunch. I shamed him into faxing me a copy of Amanda’s sketch of The Horridus, as described by Brittany Elder. I had to go to a pharmacy in Laguna with a fax service to receive the thing, banished as I was from my home. I asked about the real estate listings and Johnny said they were down to three male sellers of detached-unit homes.

“If the male sellers don’t pan out, try the women,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment. It was my first whiff of actual day-to-day banishment, and it weighed my heart like a death in the family. I was putting Johnny Escobedo in an impossible jam.

“Shit, Johnny, I’m sorry,” I said.

“I understand, man. I really do.”

He didn’t rush to hang up on me, for which I loved him dearly.

“The worst part, Johnny, is I’m out. The Horridus is planning number four, we’ve got kids in ditches, infants in file cabinets and pervs all over the place and I’m sitting here with my thumb up my ass.”

“If it didn’t happen it didn’t happen. I know it didn’t happen.”

A desperate heart is a soft one. Mine practically melted. “I love you, man. And I don’t even want your beer. Though I could use one right now.”

“I should go.”

“What’s Reilly got on the Elder scene?”

“Still working. Nothing yet. The news here is the park ranger out at Caspers.”

He told me about a ranger named Bret Stefanic who was found murdered the evening before.

“Way out in the woods off the Ortega,” said Johnny. “Guy cut his throat wide open. Didn’t really grab my interest until the ME said he’d been bitten three times by a venomous snake—probably a rattlesnake.”

I thought a moment.

“It looked like Stefanic stopped somebody out there. His citation book was out, found it in the weeds. The last three tickets were ripped out of the book. We think the perp was written up, surprised him somehow. Reilly said he died from the slashing. The snake bites were premortem. Very strange, uh … Frank.”

Reduced to Frank. It was what I had left.

“
Crotalus horridus?
”

“We’re sending out some of Stefanic’s blood to a toxicologist over at Irvine and a herpetologist in Chicago. They both told me already there’d be no way to differentiate one rattlesnake venom from another, once it’s in the blood. That’s if the bites even
were
from a rattler. The ME said venomous snake. There’s lots of those.”