ISSN 1758-6488
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Sudan Fiction |
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In a moment of peace, he took a solitary breath in front of the donors plaque: the Altria Group, Shell Corporation, Marcus Farber, the developer, and two-dozen more names at which he only glanced before the reporter found him.
“How’d you get that shot?” the man said. No ‘hellos’, no introductions.
Brady turned around, a bit drunk and eager to answer.
He explained while the reporter took notes on a pad of paper. Brady embellished the trip a little—the soldiers searched his bag and the truck, a rebel group took a pot shot at them on the highway—but the rest, the details out the picture, Brady told straight.
“Twenty minutes to get the frame?” the reporter said, apparently checking facts.
“Fifteen, twenty, something like that.”
“How can you do that?” There was something in the tone Brady didn’t like. “I mean, how can you just sit there with that happening right in front of you?”
“Because I want it happening right in front of people over their morning coffee.” He spoke without passion, but he was seething inside.“You think most people give a damn about what happens in some far away country in Africa? They only care if they see it, if they have to face it.”
The reporter took notes and underlined something three times. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’m supposed to put a positive spin on this thing, talk you up, you know. The new star photographer and all that. But I think it’s shit you just left that kid there.” He paused. “I’m not the only one, either.”
“You ever worked in the zone, man?” Brady said, but the reporter had already turned away.
“It’s shit,” the reporter said under his breath as he walked away.
Brady watched him go and threw back the rest of his drink, but it didn’t help. He needed another.
On a table next to the bar, propped on an easel, was an 18x36 of the shot. Various relief organizations were accepting donations, and the picture was being used as the pitch, the sell. People wrote checks, signed petitions, not knowing that the fruits of their good will would be locked up in warehouses. A man explained the proportions of the frame to his wife, and Brady stood behind him and listened. “Look at the lines,” he said. “It’s brilliant. The thirds of space, that emptiness between the bird and the child.”
“Sad,” she said.
“But a fantastic shot.”
The picture looked so unreal, like a studio shot, that it was difficult for Brady to believe he had taken it. The lines were brilliant, the composition worthy of reward, but as he stared at it he noticed, for the first time it seemed, the curvature of the child’s pelvic bone. How had he missed it before? He remembered a mass grave on the outskirts of Skopje and how the pelvic bones had looked like whale bones. Beneath the skin of the child, he could see that curve, the bump where the ligaments just held the femur in place.
“Congrats, Hugh,” a man said.
He didn’t know the man, but he was glad to take his hand all the same.
Late that night he called Cleveland to speak to his mother.
“I swear I got the most applause of anybody,” he said.
Outside it was raining, a spring thunderstorm that amplified all the lights of the city. In the center of it, though, was the park, dark and deep and stretching like a gash all the way to Harlem.
“Hughie, you’re drunk. You know what time it is?”
“They all stood for me,” he said.
“That’s good, son,” she said. “It’s two AM.”
7
