ISSN 1758-6488
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Sudan Fiction |
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The next morning he was hung over, but he popped a pill and it helped. He had a meeting at the New York Times where they offered him a story in Sierra Leone. People were fighting over diamonds there, the warlords recruiting children to do their killing. He would accompany Sebastian Junger, who had requested him personally. A young photographer asked for an autograph, which Brady gave willingly, his hand shaking a bit as he signed the ‘y’ of his name.
A limousine picked him up at the hotel and through the darkened window he watched the city, all wet and glittery from the night’s rain, disappear across the river. He wanted to sleep, but the zing in his head wouldn’t let him.
There he was on the dais, clean-shaven, his tie a little crooked, a smile on his face. It wasn’t a good picture. The photographer had tried to capture him standing in front of his shot, but the angle left the child out and revealed only the bird, hovering in some pixelated distance. It was on page 24 of the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times, followed by a story which he read somewhere thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic.
Hugh Brady’s photograph blurs the line between photojournalism and art, taking the visceral elements of the journalistic vocabulary and merging them with the highly conceptualized compositions of studio work. It is a cold, unflinching look into a world few people choose to consider. The child and the vulture act as metaphors for the slow wasting away of Africa while the international community looks on. This photograph does what good art does—forces the viewer to meditate on himself, to consider his role in the darkest results of apathy and inaction. Mr. Brady is to be commended for his steely, uncompromising ability to capture such unnecessary pain.
He ordered a drink, a double, which the flight attendant brought with a smile. His throat was dry and the whiskey didn’t help.
He read the lines again and then again, this time using a pen to underline the words. International community looks on. Apathy. Unnecessary. He glanced back at the picture, and decided it wasn’t a half-bad composition. Out the window all was blue, the blue of sky and the darker blue of water. So much space out there, so deep and empty. He heard the snap of a newspaper being opened and watched a man two seats in front of him fold over the sports page. The smiling flight attendant brought him another drink, and somewhere after the third the edge came off and he slept.
A doctor lay on the white tile with a hole in his chest, talking, the blood pouring out with each breath, talking, but speaking in a language Brady couldn’t understand. In a dark wood of ferns and towering pine, five blue toes stuck out of the ground. A severed limb on a burned out bus. A young girl collapsed in a field stared at him, her eyes like coal rocks in her head.
When he snapped awake the plane was coming over Greenland. Blue gave way to white cliffs, fissures, and plateaus rising into mountains of ice. The glare was so sharp that he felt little explosions in his head, and something seemed to break loose from him, some buttressing emotion that believed in sunsets and sunrises, truths and lies, love. He lowered the window shade a bit, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the view.
London enjoyed a spring heat wave, all pleated shorts and kids dancing in public fountains. The grass in the parks hinted brown, and he imagined the green going out of the trees. When he arrived home there were twelve messages on his machine. He listened to them, but none were his daughter.
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