“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe you’ve got a reason to be upset. I don’t pretend to understand everything about these people I photograph. I just wanted to help them feel special.”
Special is my least favorite word. Too many insidious meanings hidden within the term. A word carted out so often and for so many different purposes it has lost all relevance. Who’d want to be special, anyway? I’ve always longed to be normal.
Perhaps isolation has made me a paranoid cynic, but I wonder if she’s fishing by accepting my apology. Opening up so that I’ll unload my own sorrows about Angela Carver. I glance to the laptop screen, then stare at her like a kid initiating a contest. She smiles, a little puzzled by the way I’ve locked eyes. I smile back, wishing I were the sort of man who always received shy grins from beautiful women.
“What’s he writing?” I ask, pointing to the armless man on the computer screen.
“He’s just practicing his Chinese in this shot, or is it Mandarin? Are they the same thing?” She laughs. “He’s been writing his memoirs, too. The whole manuscript is in this elaborate calligraphy. He said that the words should be as unique as his body.”
“He’s writing his memoirs in Mandarin?”
“Of course not!” She laughs again. “In English. He’s still learning Mandarin.”
“He said all this in the interview?” I ask. I point to the screen. “Can we read it?”
“Not here,” she says, her voice bright as she begins to explain the project. “This feature of the website works as a slideshow.” She turns the computer toward me and scrolls to the next image. “Just images of the interviewees. It’s my favorite feature. No words. Only bodies as text.”
Bodies as text. The phrase has a philosophical ring that I enjoy. I look at the armless man’s elegant writing. If my body is a text, what does that say for its diction? The run-on sentence of a humped back, the broken and inarticulate divot in my chest. If I’m a text, is the meaning indecipherable because of the fallibility of my language?
“Turn it a little more?” I ask.
I’m not just being polite because she’s in my home. The burned blonde invaded my thoughts in a way I thought only songs could. Lying in bed on the edge of sleep with the pills coursing through me, I imagined her body dipping into a steaming pool. The clear water running down goose-pimpled flesh in tiny rivulets. There was a desire to track those imagined rivers down the different varieties of scar. Follow each drop and see where it lingered. I need to see if other bodies will have a similar effect.
“Push this to scroll through,” Rosita says. “You can look at the whole series or shuffle randomly.”
I push the button, and the man who appears has half a face. His lower jaw is absent, leaving the whole of his throat open and exposed. I wonder if there is some apparatus that allows him to eat and drink. If so, he’s removed it from the photo shoot. Now it is only a ragged maw leading into darkness. In the next photo, the camera is pulled back. The man sits with his legs apart, limp penis and scrotum sagging between his thighs. Somehow these hairy legs and shrunken prick look perfect compared to the rest of him.
“Why do they need to be naked?” I ask. There are secret parts of me that only Angela and Caroline have seen. Usually, I feel separated from myself. Not a body, but a brain trapped inside a broken vessel. I wonder if I could let strangers see those parts of me. Rosita opens her mouth and looks ready to launch into a speech prepared for critics who’ve considered her work pornographic or the acts of a provocateur, but she just shrugs instead of unscrolling the diatribe.
“Because they’re beautiful,” Rosita says. “Don’t you think they’re beautiful?”
Something shines through in the isolated areas. The man with no jaw has a sculpted stomach, the burned blonde from last night the toned legs of an Olympian. These pieces of the whole have the fickle spark of conventional beauty, but I know that isn’t what Rosita meant. She’s referring to something else we can’t quite name. Something in the fact that such malformed things persist. A man continuing to breath even if the oxygen must travel through a gaping hole. Skin still warm with life despite being scorched dead by a long-extinguished fire.
“How do you convince them to undress?” I ask.
“I do it with them. That way things are equal.”
Looking at Rosita next to any picture in this collection proves nothing in life is ever equal. I imagine her setting the camera aside and sliding out of her shirt. Her body looks delicate lounging in my booth, but without clothes I think she would be all muscle, like a skinned squirrel. If I agreed to the photo shoot, would she undress for me and would I be able to keep the act in perspective?
We’re interrupted by the sound of tires crunching gravel. As Rosita pulls back the window blinds, a green Jeep Cherokee with a light bar mounted on the roof pulls into the drive. COOPERSVILLE COUNTY SHERIFF is painted down the vehicle’s side in gold lettering. I exhale slowly through my nose as the driver steps out and try to swallow down the fear that always accompanies meeting outsiders.
Sheriff Elizabeth Saunders is a small black woman, barely five-foot-three in her low-heeled boots. Her uniform is poorly tailored, puffy at the sleeves and chest—she looks like a child playing dress-up. Only the hat, a wide-brimmed drill sergeant lid favored by the state police, rests on her head with the proper air of authority. The angle covers her eyes, but I see her face is clean of any makeup. Sheriff Saunders takes off her hat and rests it on the handle of the collapsible baton on her utility belt. Rosita opens the door.
“Mr. Bragg,” Sheriff Saunders says. “May I come in? I’d like a word with you.”
I can tell she’s prepared herself before arrival. There is only a moment of shock when she looks at me. If I wasn’t used to it, the microscopic furrow of brow wouldn’t even register. I wave her inside, and the sheriff follows us into the kitchen. I sit in the booth beside Rosita, but Sheriff Saunders remains standing. She looks surprised that my kitchen is so domestic. The cherrywood cabinets and new appliances don’t fit with the mountain hermit narrative.
I’ve heard plenty of stories about the sheriff. She took over after Sheriff Thompson was murdered, then she won reelection by a landslide despite being a woman in a county where the most important qualification for a lawman is his dick. She shot an armed robber who tried to knife a teller at Coopersville Bank and Trust last November. Some called her quick with the gun, but I think that’s just the kind of criticism country men are likely to level at a woman with authority.
Sheriff Saunders turns to Rosita. “You must be the young lady that called,” she says. “I sent a patrol car to the Watson residence. It’s currently a crime scene.”
“What about Caroline?” I ask. “Caroline Stephens?”