And Sons. David Gilbert
head, like the war photo of all war photos. It was taken by this guy Eddie Adams and he captured the exact moment the trigger was pulled. Boom. These two men, one in profile, in uniform, middle-aged, the other in full view, in casual wear, young—it’s almost like a wayward son meeting his disappointed father—anyway, those two men are forever connected by that bullet. An absolutely iconic image, almost beautiful in its true expression of horror. But do you know there’s a video as well? An NBC News crew filmed the whole thing, from almost the same exact angle, but there’s nothing iconic about that fucking footage, nothing artful about that man getting shot in the head, no innate drama, no archetypal story, just a cap-gun-like snap followed by the guy falling to the ground, a brief fountain of blood spraying from his head. Whatever sense of timelessness is destroyed in four seconds flat. It’s just plain horrible.” Jamie lit the pipe, the act carrying a certain native intensity, as though the smoke told the story of prehistoric man. “Look,” he said, after exhaling, “my goal is to fight that easy art-making instinct. People die. People suffer. This is how they die. This is how they suffer. It’s unspeakably small yet unspeakably big.”
“But the ‘art’ of that photograph is pretty effective,” I offered.
Jamie disagreed. “The ‘art’ of that photograph plays into our voyeuristic inhumanity, to artistically empathize with the horror, to transfer all our own dread into the image, turning a person’s death into a personal metaphor.”
Despite the college-worn earnestness, I did understand the motivation: the almost incandescent urge for the dreadful thing. When you are a decent person and you have grown up safe and comfortable, with parents who themselves have grown up safe and comfortable, in New York, no less, the Upper East Side of New York, no less, you often find yourself admiring the poor and desperate as if they are somehow more honest, more legitimate, than your tribe, Buddhists to your Capitalists, and you want to prove yourself conscious with a capital C by dipping into hardship—lower—into degradation—lower—into self-abasement. There is liberal guilt and there is liberal sin, where you go slumming, the most cheerful of vagrants. I know I was guilty of this. The stories I wrote in my creative writing classes always gravitated toward seedy locales, dive bars and trailer parks, with low-down folk in the dirtiest of circumstances. Ugliness seemed to signify emotional authenticity. Half of my characters had problems with heroin, and I had never seen heroin before but please give me a hit of that tragedy so I might swim in more human waters. This desire thankfully passed after graduation, when genuineness was no longer an issue for debate. The concrete had hardened. But Jamie, he became worse, turning into a tourist with forensic intent. He started to travel to ridiculously dangerous places and videotape whatever he came across. The siege of Sarajevo. The redlight district of Mumbai. The civil wars in Algeria and Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone. The everything in Palestine. Why did he do this? Maybe he was rebelling against his father. This, right here, this is the real world, Dad. This is true tragedy. Or maybe he was rebelling against his own artistic tendencies, which tended toward the glib and too clever by half. Nobody was sure what the point was, least of all Jamie. He didn’t work for the press; he didn’t ask questions; he didn’t pursue stories; he just shot video like he was on vacation in Venice, hours and hours of video, animals, children, women and men, trees on fire, houses in ruin. Every few months a box of videotapes arrived in New York and his roommates added it to the stack in his otherwise empty room, Jamie Dyer growing in cardboard form. What are you going to do with all this stuff? was a regular question, and Jamie would just shrug. He had no plans to expose these miseries to the less miserable. He even turned down a few news agencies that were interested in his Darfur footage. His mother begged him to stop. You’re thirty … thirty-four … thirty-eight … forty-one, enough of this lunacy. What could he tell her, that it made him feel something in his gut, as though feelings were a rare substance formed only in places of high pressure and heat?
A rap-rap-rap on the minivan’s window.
Jamie startled, then smiled. It was Myron.
“You almost scared me to death.”
“Just trying to drum up business,” Myron said. “Me late?”
“Not really.”
“I feel late.” Myron slid into the passenger seat and proceeded to remove his gloves, his hat, his left shoe, his left sock, his hands enclosing his left foot, his toes like a nest of deformed baby mice. “Once you get frostbite you always got frostbite,” he said.
“When did you get frostbite?”
“Shit, I don’t have frostbite, thank Christ, but you gotta stay on top of it.” Myron Doty was a twice-divorced, thrice-incarcerated father of three who carried a certain nobility of failure that seemed passed down from a long line of disreputable Doty men, probably all the way back to the Mayflower.
“How’re things?” Jamie asked.
“Fine, as in fine print, as in always read the.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not privy to all the details yet.”
“Good winter though?”
“Winter is winter. You been running through the high grasses?”
Jamie handed over his half-smoked joint.
Myron cleared a path in his beard. “I will tell you I’m ready for the living to return to the dead. Don’t need to see another fucking skier, with his hollering and his whooping. It’s like I’m stuck on an assembly line manufacturing kick-ass fun.” Myron took five quick hits, pinkie splayed like he was sipping hot tea, then he put his sock and shoe back on. “You think your project worked?”
“Hope so. Reminds me.” Jamie handed over an envelope, the other half of the agreed-upon sum, which Myron counted, smiling like the cash was a real lifesaver, though his eyes twinkled with the opposite impulse. “You ready?” Jamie asked.
“Yup.”
Back outside, into air made material by breath, they crossed the road and stopped by Myron’s truck, where Myron handed Jamie a flashlight and a shovel and grabbed for himself a bigger flashlight and a better shovel. They started up the unplowed road, aptly named Cemetery Road. The earth seemed lit by the television moon and tonight’s episode was a doozy about the wackiest kind of grave robbers. Every footfall broke through a crust of melt and freeze. Only the taller headstones poked through the snow like something forgotten, and Jamie had the sensation of apocalyptic doom, of backyard archeology below his feet, tricycles and soccer balls, Frisbees lost, a place where everybody was once a child.
“That strong pot?” Myron asked.
Jamie nodded.
“Guess I’m really fucking stoned then.”
Jamie gave vapory shape to an uncertain sigh. Then he heard the opening riff of “Whole Lotta Love”—one of his all-time favorites—and after a pause where Robert Plant seemed to whisper in his ear You need coolin’, baby, I’m not foolin’ Jamie snapped back and recognized his ringtone. “Just my phone,” he confirmed out loud, in case Myron was in danger of floating away. It was Richard, and he was on a tear. “Like you said he called and asked me to come home, like my home isn’t my home, like I’m living a make-believe life or something. Come home. What an asshole. I should have hung up right then. Why do I have to be the better person? I know, I know, it’s not about him, right, it’s about me, about what’s healthy for me in the long run, but to make that kind of phone call when he’s an old man and it’s too late for anything, you know, too late for me to scream at him, to be functionally pissed, it doesn’t seem fair.”
Jamie was accustomed to these rants. His brother was most comfortable when angry, preferring those depths where the world squeezed. God forbid if you were stuck in line with him; then again, he moved things along nicely. Jamie only half-listened as he trudged through the snow and admired the stars above. A random line of poetry dropped into his head—The stars are mansions built by nature’s hand—its origin unknown. Regardless of these distractions, he could hear the hurt his brother could never hide. Sometimes Jamie wondered whether his own happy