PAX
* * *
“Heard you had a run-in with Presley today.”
Dash is cooking eggs. The kitchen smells like butter, chives, and toast. Somewhere upstairs, Wren is painting his next masterpiece. I figured, since he fell in love with Elodie and got all fucking happy on us (or as happy as Wren Jacobi ever gets), his work would change to reflect the shift in his life. His art is still as turbulent and dark as ever, though. The moody blues, black, white and greys still slash and swirl together to create what I’ve always thought to be depictions of the end of the fucking world.
I dig my thumbnail into the side of my index finger, pressing until the pain registers. “You know me. I could get into a fight with a brick wall.”
Once upon a time, Dash used to concoct the most reprehensible plans to fuck with the girls at the academy. He could look at a girl across a hallway and make her shrink down to half her size with nothing more than a cold, assessing glare and a narrowing of his eyes. As a distant member of the English royal family, he was born with the God-given ability to look at someone and make them feel worthless. Now that he’s with Carina, after a long stint of pining and denying his feelings, he doesn’t even have the time to look anymore. He only sees Mendoza.
Raising his eyebrows, he stirs his eggs; there’s something just plain wrong about Lord Dashiell Lovett IV being so domesticated. “She pissed you off?” he asks.
“Hell yes, she pissed me off.”
“I assume you’ll be planning on fucking with her until the end of the year, then?” he says, matter-of-factly.
“Haven’t decided yet.”
Dash nods.
There’s something judgmental about the nod that makes me want to give him a good hiding. “Let me guess. You think I should change my ways and be nice to her instead? Invite her to hang out in the courtyard and make fucking daisy chains together?”
He cracks a grin. “I’m smarter than that, man.”
“But you do think I shouldn’t fuck with her.”
He shrugs. Crossing the kitchen, he pulls some plates out of the cabinet, sets them down and begins serving up the food he’s made. “I think you’re gonna do whatever you’re gonna do, and me having an opinion about it won’t change anything. So…” When he turns around, he sets one of the plates in front of me on the marble kitchen island: scrambled eggs; thick pancake; candied bacon; buttered toast; avocado. A far better meal than the average fare we usually pick up from Screamin’ Beans.
“You mean to say,” I say, staring at the food, “that you can cook, and we’ve been living off top ramen this whole time?”
Dash slaps my shoulder. “Like I said. Not stupid. Being your live-in chef didn’t sound like a fun gig. Enjoy.”
He carries away two other plates—presumably one for him and one for Wren—heading for the stairs.
“Hey, dude,” I call after him.
He turns. “Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
The fucker staggers, his back hitting the wall behind him. “Holy shit. Did Pax Davis just thank me?”
“Pushing your luck, asshole,” I growl.
He laughs all the way up the stairs.
******
* * *
Shooting with a DSLR camera is a complicated process but shooting with film is an entirely different beast altogether. There’s no display to check your work. You can’t just fire off a dozen shots and make a series of adjustments until you get the lighting and the mood right. Trial and error with film is a bittersweet process. You have to evaluate the light by eye. You have to know your camera inside and out, and really use your mind’s eye to frame out the shot you want first. Only then can you look through the viewfinder, let out a steady, slow breath, and snap off the trigger.
Once you’ve taken the image, you have to wait until you’ve finished the roll before you can develop it. And the process of developing the film is a whole separate art form, too. There are so many steps. So many points during the process where something can go wrong.
The ritual of shooting and developing film is very calming, though. When I’m shooting, it’s as if I’m seeing my surroundings properly for the first time. Really taking in the lines and the structure of things. The beauty. The architecture of a hand, or a face, or a bird, or a sky. An object or person becomes new, discovered for the very first time, when I look at it through a viewfinder. Watching an image develop on a piece of photo paper is much like a window into another reality, emerging right before my eyes. A kind of magic.
I sit on a wheelie stool in the walk-in closet of my bedroom, holding my breath as I always do, watching the photos I’ve set in the first chemical bath develop. The cemetery down by the lake appears first—a series of crooked headstones listing drunkenly, leaning up against one another. A small bird sitting on the oldest, most worn slab of stone. Fog curls over the tops of the trees in the background—teased out wisps of smoke, breath of the gods.
The next image to surface is of Wren. I don’t like shooting people I know as a rule. A contract exists between you and someone you know. There are expectations involved. He expects me to behave or be a certain way, and I expect the same of him. If Wren were to look down the lens of my camera, he’d be thinking things about me. Remembering things. Replaying scenarios, where we interacted, or turning over the things he knows about me in his head.
I’d be doing the same from the other side of the camera, thinking things, knowing things about him. I need there to be a disconnect between me and the subject of a photograph. My role is to witness, not think, and it’s their job to just be.
I am the observer. I want nothing more than to see. Connections complicate things. Muddy the water. Distort the image. This particular shot, I took…shit, it must be over a year ago now, though. He was sprawled out on the back seat of the Charger, as usual, his head thrown back, eyes closed. One arm was resting on the back of the seat, his hand hanging loosely, fingers curled around an imaginary paintbrush. I remember the moment perfectly.
We were driving to Boston for the weekend, bored of being stuck up on the mountain. Dash had run into the store to buy road snacks, and Wren and I had been bickering. He was frowning at something I’d just said, and when I looked at him in the rearview mirror, the sunlight had slanted through the rear window of the car in such a way that all of the dust motes floating on the air were lit and golden, as if they were hovering in a thick syrup. His features were almost blurred out by the light; only the bridge of his nose and the crest of his chin had been thrown into highlight by the sun. His dark curls were wild and crazy, washed in gold.
Before I could stop myself, the camera was already in my hand, I’d already adjusted the white balance and the aperture, and my finger was hitting the button. I didn’t shoot straight back at him. I took the picture of the image that I saw—the snapshot of him in the rearview mirror, the background blurred and washed out, his reflection the only thing in focus. I remember thinking, in that split second, that I was jealous of him. Not of his looks, or his confidence, or the way he was so at ease, collapsed across the back seat. I was jealous of him purely because he wasn’t me.
I’d forgotten all about the image until now but watching the structure of it darken and take shape—perhaps a little too dark, actually, to be considered a perfect shot—the same acute pang of envy hits me right in the center of my chest. This is the way of it, isn’t it? We are observers. We look out at the world and we feel. We want what we don’t have. To be Wren, to be anyone else for that matter, even for a few short seconds, seems like it would be such a release. Because, for those brief and fleeting moments, I wouldn’t have to be me.