Photograph

I’m grateful to Linda for being there for me after her mom died. It probably should have been the other way around but I had loved her mom too. Besides, I was the last one to see her alive. 

We had a big art project coming up and most of the kids stayed back since Linda’s mom offered extra help after school. She was our art teacher. Linda herself went home early, saying that art was half talent and half pain and that it was a pain to stay back after school. Linda was a natural; her mind could see things clearly and her hands portrayed them on a canvas without a second thought. She was pretty too; straight dark hair that grew to her shoulders, brown eyes, and a wide smile that lifted her sharp cheekbones gently like waves that never crashed. The only thing she lacked for art back then was the pain, but not anymore. Nobody got through life without getting hurt. 

I have never been good with faces; I have an easier time remembering names. It has been so long since I have even looked at a picture of Linda that I have trouble placing all her features correctly. In my mind she turns into a surreal picture done by the likes of a Picasso with all her features stacked on her face like pizza toppings. All those times I had gazed at her face did nothing to help me recall. 

I was the last kid with Linda’s mom and we walked home together; our houses were across one another. The neighborhood smelled of old paint and trash. Snowflakes rocked above us, fighting gravity to stay off the dirty, cracked pavement. 

I heard footsteps behind us. Linda’s mom didn’t turn around so I didn’t either. Maybe we should have. Who knows if looking back ever really saves anyone? 

A pale bony hand shot between us and latched onto Linda’s mom’s purse like a wild animal. That hand, long and thin, was burned into my memory in an instant. It was the only image I could ever recall in perfect detail. 

The hand yanked the purse so hard Linda’s mom slipped on the icy pavement. Somehow she was still holding onto the purse. Why? The man had bent over Linda’s mom, hand still on her purse like it was a handcuff binding them together. He produced a knife seemingly out of air and stuck it into her chest all the way up to the hilt. I heard a slight cracking noise and realized that humans really do have bones in them. Linda’s mom was left on the ground arm still outstretched but holding onto nothing. She took my hand and looked up at me like a young child looking at her mother. 

I didn’t know where the hospital was back then. I didn’t even know where my own house was. I just wanted to get back before dark. 

She stood up and I thought she was the strongest woman in the world. I thought that she wasn’t hurt at all and that she would never die. A dark puddle was growing on her shirt. I remember thinking how nervous she must have been to be sweating that much. 

This was before I learned about blood and adrenaline. 

She walked me back to my house and collapsed in the snowy driveway. I shook her a few times for good measure before running in and getting my mom and dad. Why hadn’t I told her to go to the emergency room immediately? I shook her. I must as well have poked her with a stick like she was a dead animal on the side of the road.

That pale hand started it all and since I hadn’t seen his face it was all I had. I saw it stretched out in the darkness of my dreams. 

My parents saved up to send me to a decent college. Linda’s dad didn’t talk to me or anyone else throughout the whole funeral process and as far as I know, Linda never went to college. 

I spent my free time, the few hours I lay awake every night, thinking about Linda. She had begun doing art on the side; painting and photography. The two looked almost identical; her paintings had an uncanny realism and her photographs had an undeniable dreaminess. She never left town even though I reckoned she had the money. 

I stayed here too. I figured I might as well be buried here one day with my dad and Linda’s mom and there was no point in making someone drag my dead body back, even if I was getting pretty skinny. My mom was still alive but she had no plans of leaving town, either. The two of us lived our own lives in this little town. Once or twice we even ran into each other in the grocery store like strangers. 

I set up my own office and practiced therapy. I had some competition at first but in time I found a small but dedicated, maybe crazy but who wasn’t, collection of clients. If I saw my clients outside the office I ignored them unless they said hello first. I was the model therapist if there ever was one. 

Maybe there wasn’t, after all, because when Linda called and asked if she could schedule an appointment with me I had stammered that the first session would be free in case she did not find me a good fit. A good fit. Like some shoes. Is that all I was, after all? A shoe for people to walk on until they feel better. To rub the dirtiest part of themselves on, whether that be their sole or their soul. 

My practice had amounted to listening; it was all I was good for. I quit typing Linda’s name into google a few years after I started the practice. When I searched her up again, hunched over my computer in my apartment, I found that she had managed to hold a few exhibits for her art. She was gaining traction for her art and had just opened a new exhibition.

The next morning she paced into my office like a child entering the darkest part of a forest alone. She greedily absorbed every detail of the office with glowing brown eyes before she even glanced at me. I could hardly take my eyes off her. 

My palms had been sweating all morning and I wondered if the gray sweater I’d chosen was a little thick. I started the session with a smile I had practiced in the mirror since my grad school days. I understood actual therapy wasn’t something I could memorize. I could review my notes from each patient, not that I really bothered with detailed notes since I could remember pretty much any information my clients disclosed to me. The only thing I memorized was the smile I began my sessions with; I offered it to Linda when she entered and when she didn’t return it I wondered if, like the sweater, it might just be too thick. 

I told Linda to make herself comfortable on the beige couch I’d installed in front of my chair in the office and asked her how she was doing. 

“You designed this office nicely,” she said.

“Thanks,” I laughed, “that means quite a lot coming from you.”

“Did you do it yourself?”

I nodded. 

“Very professional but also kinda comfortable.”

She sounded so…normal. I guess I wasn’t sure what kind of person I expected my childhood friend to turn into, but surely not the kind that sat around and talked about interior decoration or the weather or weekend plans all the time. I took a deep breath. I had seen her on my computer all these years and forgotten that really we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Small talk was only natural. 

I chuckled to ease the sudden silence we’d slipped into. I had no kids, and no steady girlfriend, either, so there was nothing particularly unprofessional to hang in my office. I had designed the office with three large windows, covering the entire top half of the three walls behind and on either side of the beige couch. This way when I sat in my chair I had a view of the endless gray sky outside, which had a calming effect on the retinas and matched nicely with my favorite gray sweater. 

“Can I show you something I’ve been working on?” She asked, “It’s from my newest exhibit. I know having me as a client is conflict-of-interest but I really wanted to show you.”

I blushed when she mentioned the conflict of interest, praying Linda hadn’t told my secretary about our former friendship. For the longest time, Linda had been the only friend I could make and I had been the only friend she would have. 

“Of course,” I said. 

Linda reached into the pocket of her thick black Northface jacket, which she had unzipped but never taken off. She pulled out a photograph that was all dark, with only an odd pale circle near the center. I felt the heat drain from my face, leaving behind a cold, hard porcelain mask as if all my features had stiffened into stone. 

“It’s from an exhibit called Linda’s Nightmare. Critics are praising it for Chiaroscuro, can you believe that shit?” Linda laughed. I paled further. Her laugh hadn’t changed. Neither did her attitude towards art. What had she always said; half luck and half bullshit. 

“What is it?” I asked. 

“Here’s where it gets weird. But I don’t want to scare you,” she said, a small smile playing on her lips. 

“You can talk about anything you’d like in here,” I said slowly, working to control my voice. 

“Remember when you were a kid how you were scared of everything,” she kept laughing. 

I had been scared of stray cats, the dark, snowstorms, slippery roads, and leafless trees. Unfortunate fears for someone living in a small city in the middle of Canada. 

“I’m not scared anymore,” I said, surprised at how high my voice came out. 

“Alright. Here’s the thing I haven’t told anyone, but I’ll tell you as my old friend. I’ve been getting these nightmares for the longest time. I wake up in bed, and there’s a tall, pale man standing over me, just the way you described him. His features are hard to make out but I can almost fill them in for myself…in my own mind, I mean. He stands there looking at me and then he grabs my ankle, his hand’s freezing by the way, and drags me off the bed.”

He drags me off the bed and he has a purse around his shoulder. The one he took from Linda’s mom. He picks me up and drops me into the purse and closes it. It’s so dark and cramped in there and all I can do is sit and wait to wake up. 

It was the same nightmare I used to have. All the details were perfect. 

“You must think I’m crazy,” Linda finished. 

“What’s the picture?” I asked. 

Linda smiled. 

“Right. I just wanted to make sure you had the real context. I managed to get a photograph of him.”

“What?”

“I had gone to sleep with a camera on my nightstand. I needed a new exhibit and inspiration wasn’t coming so I’d started sleeping with it next to me. Then when I had the nightmare I looked around and I managed to snap a picture of the bastard before he put me in the bag. I don’t think it would do well if I wasn’t famous already, honestly, but the exhibit’s doing alright.”

“You took a real picture from your nightmare.”

Linda just nodded.

“How’d you do it?”

“I don’t know. But I guess nightmares have a positive side, after all.”

I asked if I could see the picture again. It was a polaroid. I could just make out his face hovering at the edge of the frame. His features blended in with the darkness around him so that I could only see their outlines. 

“I think I’m having these nightmares because of you,” she laughed, “the way you described the man that killed my mom all those years ago. I don’t know if you remember but you had a way with words. Do you ever dream about him?”

“No, never,” I said. 

I felt the urge to stand up and leave the room. Linda was watching me closely, guarding me almost. 

“I’m sorry,” I said, “would you like to talk over a cup of coffee? I don’t think I can be your therapist, it was my mistake setting this up in the first place. There’s a conflict of interest.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re having nightmares because of an event we both experienced.”

“My mother was killed.”

“I just don’t think I can help you as an objective therapist.”

“Because you were there and I wasn’t?”

I swallowed and sat in silence as if waiting for some sinister creature to pass us by. 

“We both feel a deep emotional pain from this,” I said.

“I was her daughter.”

“I’m not arguing with that,” I smiled. Forced myself to smile in the hopes Linda might copy me. 

What rested on her face was more of a scowl. Her eyes glowed as if illuminated by something in her head. The smile she had been wearing before had been taken off. 

When she finally smiled again it was different; I could see her teeth. She had taken care to polish them to a brilliant luster like fresh snow. She gave me the same smile in the next few sessions. She just kept booking appointments and showing up no matter how many times I asked her to stop. Why had she come into my life all of a sudden? Three sessions later I decided I had enough. 

I told the secretary not to let her in and refused to see her. That was when she barged into my office, sat on the couch and asked me a simple question. The girl in reception ran after her and apologized for letting her in. 

“It’s not your fault,” said Linda, “I barged in.”

“Couldn’t agree more. It’s alright Susan, you can go back, I’ll escort Linda out myself.”

The receptionist, Susan, nodded and scurried out of the room. I heard her hurried footsteps before she plunked on her chair and stayed there. 

I looked at Linda with what I hoped was a stern expression while I racked my mind for something to say. 

“Why won’t you help me?” She asked. 

I studied her face and hoped I would remember it for a long time. She was still so pretty. 

The next few weeks she showed up outside my office. When Susan quit without reason she applied for her job. Sometimes when I drove home I would see her walking near my house and I would circle the neighborhood until I thought I lost her. At home, I kept looking at pictures of her. I wondered if she was looking up my name, too. 

Sometimes when the house was too quiet my hand reached towards the phone in my pocket to call Linda. But then what would I say? What could I really do for her? The quiet in my home mocked me. It turned every noise against me, magnifying the creaking of the floorboards into monstrous shrieks and the chiming of the clock in the kitchen to gunshots. 

One time as I drove past her walking around my street I took a picture of her on my phone and that night held it in front of my eyes until I fell asleep on the couch. 

I awoke in my bed without feeling any part of my body. It must be a dream. It had been so long since I had one. Somehow after all my study and seeking my own therapy I had managed not only to rid myself of the pale man nightmares but of dreams altogether. Not having nightmares every night felt strange at first, as if I lost a portion of my life, but without dreams, it was a lot easier for me to wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night. Nothing to dread and nothing to get excited about. 

I looked up through the darkness and saw a silhouette standing in front of me with its long arms placid by its sides. The pale man had returned. There was something on his head now. Hair. Long straight hair just past his shoulders. It grabbed my ankle and I felt a chilling cold spread to my chest and fill my lungs with ice. I felt such intense fear I exhaled frost. The pale man, or whatever it was, held up a rectangular object and I saw it flash for a moment in the complete darkness. It must have been his knife. I screamed for help but hollow men made no noise. Instead, the scream reverberated in my own body and tore apart my organs like a violent storm. 

I had not been able to help Linda nor her mom. I would not be able to help anyone least of all myself. The object in its hand flashed again and then it said something:

Say cheese, Tommy.

Linda’s next exhibit was simply called His Nightmare. Critics praised it for its raw emotion. The critics loved to see real pain. Half pain and half bullshit and half luck and half talent. Give it two hundred percent.