The Murals Read online

  Full coverage would take time. My head lamp didn’t throw off much light, but it helped that the walls were pale and the images were painted in shades of grays and blacks. Assured by Tally that no light was leaking out, I went downstairs to fetch my equipment. Back in the gazebo, I set up my master lights and set to work on the first wall.

  The air in that attic was close. As I made exposure after exposure, standing very still so as not to shake my tripod and blur the images, I noticed that some of the murals were more finished than others. Looking closely, I saw that the figures on one wall and on a portion of another were drawn in a combination of charcoal and black crayon, while the rest were painted with black acrylic. This told me that whoever had drawn them had left behind a work-in-progress – as did a box of charcoal stubs and crayons, several cans of black paint and a vase of brushes I found stashed against one of the walls.

  I didn’t notice the bedrolls scrunched in a corner until I finished documenting two of the walls. Had the artist been so obsessed that he’d slept up here inside his work? Had he been awakened by someone in the middle of the night, forced to make a hurried departure? Who was he? What had he been trying to say? And how could he have left such a powerful work unfinished?

  At first I thought that the figures on each wall were staring across the room at the figures on the wall opposite. But standing in the center of the gazebo while shooting sections, it occurred to me that just as I was staring through my lens at the people painted on the walls, they in turn were staring back at me. This, I realized, could account for the powerful effect of the murals: that it had been the intention of the artist, whoever he was, to draw the people on the walls as watchers, turning viewers who entered the attic room into objects of their inspection.

  The eyes! There was no escaping them. They were sharp, hard, and all focused on whomever stood before them. Whenever I moved, the eyes uncannily seemed to follow me.

  They were so strange, those people, frozen in space, their postures oddly angular, gestures exaggerated, bodies surmounted by slightly oversized heads. They were posed weirdly too: some in the foreground; others, darker, hovering just behind. And then I saw that in many cases the figures were doubled – the ones perched behind drawn as shadow doubles of the ones in front. The expressions on the faces of the front figures were stern but otherwise without affect, while the expressions on their shadowed doubles smirked, some showing unguarded cruelty, ferocity and deceit.

  This, I gathered, had been the artist’s intention: to show the two-faced character of his subjects, the false blank faces they showed the world and their true faces, Janus faces they kept concealed.

  And then there was the little girl with the puppy crouching in the far right just behind one of the women’s legs.

  Who was she? And what was she doing there? Had she been asleep, heard something, come downstairs to see what was going on, and then snuck with her dog into a corner of the room, from which she peered out fascinated and unnoticed, a witness to the scene?

  Sensing the power of these markings, I realized something strongly felt was being expressed, perhaps some sort of malevolent violation. I also knew this wasn’t the time to try to decode the murals.

  Concentrate, document, analyze them when I get home.

  Tally texted: Cops just passed a second time. Time to get out!

  Almost done. Gimme ten minutes, I texted back.

  Half an hour later I knew it was time to go. The room had grown hot, I was sweating, my lungs ached, the musty air I’d been breathing was bad and my eyes were swelling with fatigue. I was starting to feel light-headed too.

  Checking the walls to make certain I’d photographed every inch of them, I noticed for the first time something that should have been obvious from the start: the windows of the turret room weren’t just boarded up on the outside; they’d been boarded on the interior as well. This told me the walls had been prepped, a smooth surface created on which to paint. It was only after I was back down in the third-floor hallway, pulling the rope that closed the attic trapdoor, that it occurred to me that this might make it possible to detach the murals from the walls if someone wanted to remove them from the house.

  ‘Man, you were up there four hours!’ Tally whispered as I wriggled through the cellar window.

  Once outside, I took deep breaths. I was glad to be out in open air.

  ‘Worth it. You’ll see,’ I told him, as we replaced the boards that covered the window.

  We walked in silence back to Tally’s car. It was two a.m. An owl hooted in the distance. My nostrils caught a feint aroma of smoke. The air buzzed with the sounds of insects. We didn’t see a single soul or passing vehicle.

  Tally drove toward the city. When we reached a deserted shopping strip, I asked him to pull into the parking lot. There I pulled out my camera, accessed my last card of photos, passed it to Tally and watched him as he examined them.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Painted on the walls?’ I nodded. ‘They look big.’

  ‘Life-size.’

  ‘Holy shit!’ He turned to me. ‘Who are these people?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘There’s no background? They’re just standing there like they’re in limbo or something.’

  ‘No need for a background. They’re right there in the room.’

  ‘Spectacular!’

  ‘Yeah!’

  Again he turned to me. ‘You wanna find out who made this art?’

  ‘More than anything,’ I told him.

  Downtown Calista loomed as we approached on the interstate. It’s generally considered to be an ugly city, but sometimes, approaching from the east, I’m moved by the buildings clustered against the sky. At this hour it was silent except for the distant sound of sirens.

  ‘Fire engines,’ Tally murmured. His ear could tell the difference between police and fire.

  The city was dark except for streetlights, an occasional car, and Calista’s signature twin office buildings, Tower of the Great Lakes and Tower of the Great Plains, lit inside for the night cleaning crews.

  Tally drove along Calista River to the Capehart Building, a hundred-year-old six-story redbrick structure in the old warehouse district converted into live/work lofts. Several CAI teachers lived there. To buy into the Capehart you had to prove you were an artist, a rule that infuriated rich folks who longed to live in urban lofts with downtown views. They retaliated by calling it ‘the artsy-fartsy complex,’ and those of us qualified to live there ‘pretentious assholes who couldn’t make it in New York.’ Fine with us! We laughed off their contempt. Calista might not be the Athens of America, but if you worked in the arts, you could live there reasonably well for not much money.

  ‘Get some sleep,’ I told Tally. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow. We gotta find out everything we can about that house.’

  Tally nodded. ‘Those people on the walls, Jase – they’re not real, they’re nightmare people, right?’

  ‘Sometimes nightmare people can be more real than real people,’ I told him as I stepped out of the car.

  I know quite a bit about nightmares, have had my share, always based on a horrible experience in Aleppo. I lived in that hellhole for two months, documenting its bombardment and destruction, the agony of its inhabitants. I became close to a particular family, the Daouds – Ayman, Rasha and their four kids.

  Ayman was a doctor who worked in a secret basement hospital, treating people wounded in the bombardment. I spent a lot of time with him and the injured he was tending to. They would look at me and then at my lens, and it was at these moments of eye/lens contact that I’d trip the shutter. The result was my exhibition and later my book, The Eyes of Aleppo, in which every image is of a person whose eyes express his/her perplexity, courage or suffering, and sometimes all three, as they meet the eyes of the beholder.

  The Daouds were terrific people, educated and surprisingly optimistic considering the terrible conditions in which they lived. Wh
ile Ayman treated the wounded, Rasha home-schooled the kids. All four were graceful and full of life, laughing as they played in the rubble on those rare occasions they were allowed outside.

  One day, just before the end of my stay, I gathered them in a courtyard for a family group photograph. I arranged them, went back to my tripod, instructed them all to look directly at my lens, then started clicking off images. At first the kids forced themselves to peer at me with gravity, then they’d break into giggles. I got so involved trying to catch the family in different moods that I didn’t hear the screech of the barrel bomb until just a couple of seconds before it hit. Soon as I heard it, I dove for the ground and covered up. The Daoud family took a direct hit. When I finally looked up, I saw their broken bodies, limbs scattered about. All six were dead. The roar of the explosion was so loud I went deaf. I went into shock and then, on auto-pilot, stumbled around trying to photograph what was left of them.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but the explosion had broken my camera. Perhaps it was a blessing that none of my images, of the family portrait session and its macabre aftermath, were recorded.

  The next day I left Aleppo resolving never to go to war again. My ‘I’ll go anywhere there’s a fight’ reputation, which I’d so carefully nurtured, was blown up by that barrel bomb. I’d gone to Aleppo to be a witness. That was how I always saw my role. I left the city broken, burned out on empathy, finished with conflict photography.

  Those unrecorded images of the Daoud family were etched into my brain. They still come to me sometimes while I sleep. It’s always the sound of the kids’ giggles that wakes me. Then I lie in bed, coated with sweat, gasping at images I can’t shake off. The doctors called it PTSD, gave me pills, sent me to psychiatrists. I even went on my own to a hypnotist for help. It’s been ten years since I last worked a war. The flashbacks come less often now. But still they come, nightmares, more intense and more real, sometimes, than the reality of my daily life.

  I’d been what they call ‘a war lover’ – a hard-drinking guy in a safari jacket and a bunch of cameras specializing in pictures of carnage and conflict. I’d worked wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya; street riots in Cairo and Kiev; endless chaos in Mogadishu. I was the fearless London-based freelancer, packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice, the guy they called whenever a fight broke out. My JPOE byline on a photo was a seal of authenticity. I took a statement of the great Robert Capa and had it printed on the backs of my business cards: ‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, it’s because you aren’t close enough. You must be part of the event.’

  Aleppo was the turning point. I’d gotten too close too many times, and suddenly couldn’t do it anymore. My hands shook. I could no longer hold my camera steady. Maybe it was burnout, or, more likely, loss of nerve. Whatever the reason, I knew it was time to close the heroic photojournalist act with which I’d made my name. My agency offered me a photo-editing job. I tried it, didn’t like it. A friend mentioned an opening in the photography department at Calista Art Institute. I applied, got the job, have been at it now for ten years. These nights the nightmares come less often, and during the day I get to play the grizzled ex-war shutterbug star, teaching kids the photojournalism trade. It’s a good life, and I have my personal projects, the latest being Leavings.

  Home from our Locust Street run, I slept a couple of hours, woke at five, sat down at my laptop, downloaded my photos, then started going through them. They were clean. The artwork on the walls showed clear. Reviewing the images, I asked myself: Were these murals really as powerful as I’d first thought, or had coming upon them unexpectedly clouded my judgment? Were they really, as I’d thought, some species of masterpiece, or merely a primitive effort by an unschooled artist? Were the people in them made-up ‘nightmare people,’ as Tally said, or, as I now viewed them, a cathartic vision of actual people the artist may have known or met in some kind of traumatic encounter, which he had then worked to exorcize by drawing them vividly in shades of black on the interior gazebo walls?

  I waited until seven thirty to phone Hannah. We’d become lovers shortly after I moved to Calista, were now colleagues and best friends, occasionally ‘friends with benefits’ too. That’s how Hannah sometimes chooses to describe our current relations, though depending on her mood she sometimes calls us, with ironic vulgarity, ‘hook-up mates.’ She knows I hate that expression, which, I suppose, is why she uses it, as in: ‘Hey, Jase! I’m lying up here horny as hell. Mind if I come down for a mercy fuck?’

  But aside from these diversions, we remain close. She teaches weaving and textile art at CAI, and is, as I’ve assured her numerous times, among the smartest of my friends. I know her habits, that she likes to get up early, go out for a run along Riverwalk above the Calista River, then return home for a light breakfast before heading over to the Institute.

  ‘Getting you at a bad time?’ I asked.

  ‘Been up since six,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’d like to come up and show you something, if you got time.’

  ‘Sure. Come up. We’ll have coffee. I don’t have class until eleven.’

  Carrying my laptop, I took the elevator to the penthouse floor. Hers was the only loft up there, surrounded by terraces on three sides. It was the most luxurious residence at the Capehart, not part of the original building but added by the developer. I once overheard people in the cafeteria at CAI wondering aloud how an art teacher could afford such a place. Hannah didn’t reveal much to colleagues about her background, but I knew, because she’d told me, that her grandfather, a local industrialist, had left her and her brother a pile of money. She was a Calista native who, after years of working in textile design in New York, returned home to receive her inheritance, then decided to stay on to teach.

  At fifty-two, she was eight years older than me, a difference that never bothered either of us. I’d been attracted to her from the first time we met at a start-of-school faculty meeting at CAI. Our three-year affair, I liked to tell her, had made it possible for me to adapt to a city I hadn’t started out liking very much … not to mention the fact, as I also liked to tell her, that she was the best lover I’d ever had.

  ‘Better than all those dyed-blond TV news girls you hooked up with in exotic hotel bars?’

  ‘Yeah, because they were always in a hurry, and you’re a woman who likes to take her time.’

  She liked hearing that, but then she asked, ‘Why aren’t we still together?’

  ‘I think we are,’ I answered, ‘in our own way.’

  ‘You mean like fuck buddies, Jase?’

  I scowled. ‘I prefer “romantic friends.”’

  ‘Oh, I know you prefer genteel language,’ she said, ‘but I like the expression on your face when I go vulgar. You always look so shocked!’

  She enjoyed that kind of banter, and so did I. We felt it was the best part of our friendship.

  She’s looking really good, I thought, as she embraced me that morning at her penthouse door. Her hair was still wet from her shower. She pulled back and gazed at me.

  ‘Wow, you look like crap, Jase. Been up all night? What’s so important you’ve got to show it to me now?’

  Hannah Sachs

  I loved Jason, always will … but I won’t claim I loved his Leavings project. I liked it at first. He had a point of view and he came up with some great images. But a lot of serious photographers had worked that ruined-buildings-in-decaying-rust-belt-towns trope. I’d seen beautifully produced oversized books devoted to abandoned hospitals, schools and movie theaters in cities like Detroit. And even though Jason’s obsessive pursuit of stuff left behind in abandoned houses was unique, I didn’t see it leading anywhere. I also found it overly melancholic. He wasn’t looking for beauty in the ruins and mold like the other ‘lust-for-rust’ guys. He seemed intent on straight documentation. I guess I thought he was trying to say something that people already knew.

  I think the stuff he found in those houses meant something special to him
, something he couldn’t explain. He had a tenderness toward people who lacked privilege and struggled to get by. Who wouldn’t love a guy like that?

  He told me many times that his conflict photographer days had burned him out on photographing people under stress. He’d decided, he told me, to devote himself to still-life work – not, he emphasized, beautifully lit arrangements of objects with different and intriguing shapes, but, as he put it, ‘stills that tell a story.’ But there was plenty of risk, physical as well as legal, breaking into abandoned houses. That’s why he partnered up with Tally; he needed someone to watch his back. So in a sense, I thought, his exploration into the artifacts of ruined lives was akin to his former career – pursuit of danger, adventure and the high he got from not knowing what might happen next.

  He knew I felt this way. We frequently exchanged critiques, while always respecting each other’s intentions. And even when our comments were less than fully enthusiastic, we always listened carefully to what the other had to say.

  My personal opinion: there was a storehouse of hurt in Jason, a sadness in his background that made left-behind stuff meaningful to him. I don’t know where that came from. Maybe it was his feeling that when his mom abandoned the family, he had been the ‘stuff’ that had been left. When I asked him one time if this was true, he shrugged, but didn’t deny it. Still, no question he believed in his project, which made me think that his conviction would make it work. So even if I didn’t adore what he was doing, I never tried to discourage him.

  When he called early that Friday morning, asking to come up and show me some images, I figured they’d be from his Leavings series, and that maybe he felt he’d made a breakthrough. But when I opened my door and saw the glow in his eyes, I was pretty sure this visit was about something else. And then when he showed me the images and told me how he’d discovered them, I understood his excitement … for I felt it too.

  I think ‘enraptured’ would be a better word. Or ravished. Or in thrall. And his tale, the way he told it, added extra heat to his discovery.