In the drawers of his desk lay hundreds of contact sheets—Kosovo, South Africa, the West Bank. He pulled them out, spread them across the floor of the office, and stood there looking down. When he found the picture he was looking for, he placed the others back into their files, and set this one on his desk. It was one of twenty-four shots, not a particularly stunning composition, so it had never been published.
    Brady came upon the scene just after the hospital had been hit, a smart bomb gone off-target the coalition forces would later report. He was a young doctor, working for a French NGO, and Brady found him bleeding from a massive shrapnel wound to the chest. When Brady pointed the camera to get the shot, the doctor screamed at him, but there was screaming everywhere and Brady didn’t understand French. He snapped the picture and was ready to take another when a nurse knocked the camera away. “Doesn’t want his picture taken,” she yelled at him in English. “Tu comprends?” Then she was down on the ground, working at the man, trying to get the bleeding to stop.
    At his desk he stared at the man’s face. The doctor’s eyes were dilated with anger. His hands, which a few moments before had been attending to patients, sewing up wounds, administering medication, perhaps setting broken bones—Brady didn’t know—were thrown to his side, soon to be helpless. Brady remembered standing there, winding the film, pushing the button, using his fingers to detach one lens and replace it with another, while others frantically attended to the injured. He circled the shot with permanent marker and left it sitting on the desk.
    Above the desk hung a world map. Red thumb tacks marked assignments he had shot, each place imploding with its own brutalities. He placed a new tack in the L of Leone and stared at the shape of the country. People were about to die and he would be there for it. He chased death, but always stayed, purposely, one step behind. An accomplice. He thought of the Dinka girl trying to stand. It was shit, Brady thought, but it was shit because the pictures didn’t change anything; they didn’t rally a cause or make people take action, no one picture of death had a greater effect on the world than the death itself. That was shit justification. The picture made you believe you cared, simply because you were witness, it allowed you cheap sympathy, as if recognition was action enough.
    Sober now, he felt that familiar urge, that coming down that demanded a coming up. He thought he would rather sit and grind his teeth away than have that feeling grow, but he didn’t want a drink, he wasn’t going for the pills.
    He unpacked and folded all his clothes back into his drawers, wrapped the tuxedo, hung it in the closet, and used a soft cloth to dust the camera lenses. He cleaned the .45, cocked it and pulled the trigger, cocked it and pulled the trigger again, then filled the chamber. Using bleach he scoured the bathroom and kitchen, getting at the rings of mildew in the drains. He swept the hardwood floors and made the bed, making sure to crease the sheet over the top of the comforter.
    He drove to a spot in Richmond, right on the Thames, where the trees were tall and the undergrowth wild. At night kids escaped into the woods to make-out, drink wine, or smoke a few, but during the day it was left deserted.
    He parked the car in sight of the river, the gray water, like melted metal going around the bend. The gun sat next to him on the passenger seat. It would only take a second, a bright flash, he thought, and then nothing—just a clean flatline that he imagined would feel smooth and clean, like blank paper before the agitator develops the image. He could almost taste the relief; it sat like cool water on the tongue. He picked up the gun and held it in his lap, curling his finger around the trigger.

9

  

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