A very special camera that gives you a second chance -- to live.
Pain – like nothing I’d experienced before. After the blue flash, my head was in vice clamps and about to explode. So this is what death is really like, I thought. Maybe I landed in hell. The agony dissipated along with heat from the flash, quickly but not quick enough.
My eyes opened on their own volition. I was sitting. Hard, wooden chair. A young, blond-haired cop leaned over me, his hands clamped on the arms of the chair. “Am I in hell?” I heard the question come out of my mouth.
“That’s funny,” the cop said, still leaning in, his face two inches from mine. “I ask myself that some days.” He stood up straight then, backing away from me. “Come on.” He cocked his head to the left. “That’s the way out.”
I was able to breathe at that point. Could I stand? But stand I did. The single fluorescent bulb humming over us threw out a limited circle of light.
Four other men were with us in the bare, basement-like room. Three of them wore police uniforms. The other, a tall, thin, balding man had on a white shirt with black suspenders and a bow tie. Only the young, smiling cop paid any attention to or even acknowledged me. The others all seemed to be intensely into their own space, preoccupied with the rearranging of chairs or scribbling on yellow legal pads.
The young cop led the way toward a scarred, brown-painted, wooden door in the back of the room. Like a cripple, I limped after him. “What is this place?” I said to his back. Ignoring my question, he pointed to the door.
“Through there, down the hall and out to the parking lot.” It was all he said before hurrying away from me and back into the small circle of light.
Just reaching for the door knob turned into an all out test of strength and coordination, which I failed. I rested my shoulder against the wall to regroup and breathe. What I first thought were tables in the semi-dark beyond me were actually gurneys with irregular, sheet-draped forms on them.
None of the men were looking at me, but I could hear bits of their low-voiced, muffled conversation: “That one worked.”
“Three more?”
“I think so . . .”
“Not much time . . .”
I shuffled across the shadowed space to the first gurney and lifted the edge of the sheet. I felt I had to look. An old woman in a flowered house dress. Her gnarled, calloused feet were twisted to an impossible angle. Her hands were clamped at her throat as if even then she was fighting for breath. Under the second sheet, a heavy-set black man, naked and lying on his side. Why are they here in this place? I’m pretty sure it’s not a hospital or a morgue.
On the remaining gurney was a young woman, a girl really. She startled me more than the others. Even in death she seemed unperturbed. I would describe her as almost demure. One of her green flats was missing but the one remaining complimented her wool suit. Her light brown hair was still fairly neat in a bun behind her head. Her skin though, was beyond pale. I touched her wrist – like a cold plate just out of the refrigerator. A bent note card lay beside her. HIT BY CAR had been scrawled on it in shaky black marker.
Dropping the sheet back onto her I wondered if she’d been hit by accident or if she’d tried to end it all herself, like I had. My choice was the third rail. “Just get down on the tracks and touch it,” they’d said. “You won’t know what hit you.” They were right. I didn’t.
Quick, heavy steps coming toward me. I managed to lean back into the shadows a second before the young cop, along with a huge new cop, stood by the girl. The young cop wasn’t all that small, but he seemed small compared to the other one. The big one had shoulders as wide as a doorway and a chest that strained hard against the buttons of his dark blue shirt. Each of them grabbed a side of the gurney and rammed it, like two exhausted movers at the end of a work-day across the floor and into the circle of light.
I watched as the big cop ripped off the sheet and, together, they picked up her body and put it in that wooden chair. The body drooped like an oversized marionette. None of them took any interest in her. All eyes were on the tall man in the white shirt. He now had on white gloves as well. In those gloved hands was nestled an old camera, one of those big, black, intricate looking flash cameras from the 1950s. Even from where I was, I could see that the camera was pristine. It could have been just out of the box.
Sudden total silence as suspenders man reverently raised and aimed the camera at the unmoving puppet in the chair. Click. A pop, and for long seconds the whole room was awash in blue-white light. The entire scene became like an old photograph, all movement locked in time. One of the girl’s fingers seemed to tremble, then it moved for real. Her closed eyes, they blinked. Cries, but cries that were muffled, subdued, awed.
“Oh, goddamn.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Holy Christ.”
“Did I tell you? The Lazarus shot.”
“Works every time.”
In that same instant big cop spotted me. With three giant steps he was across the room and in front of me. “Why are you still here?”
“I saw.”
“You saw what?”
“That girl . . .” I didn’t know where to start. I just let the words fall out of my mouth. “The camera. The flashbulb. And she came back.”
“Sure,” big cop said. “She was asleep and we woke her up.”
“Oh no.” I stepped closer to him. I still had to look up to see his face, but I was closer. “She was dead. I touched her skin. It was like touching ice. That woman was dead!”
Big cop’s hands shot under my armpits. He lifted me and banged me twice against the wall. My head flew back into the painted cinder block hard enough to make me black out again for a second. “Where do you live?” he hissed. “Do you even know?”
“Sixth Street. I live at 1800 Sixth Street.”
“Go back to Sixth Street. And don’t babble to anybody about dead girls and magic cameras.” He pulled back his hands and let me slide down the wall. “I swear to God they’ll put you in an institution. Do you want that?”
I managed to shake my head.
The younger, and now smiling, cop came over to us. My insides froze when I saw the woman with him, and walking. She tentatively supported herself on smiling cop’s shoulder, but she was upright, green flats now on both of her feet. “Out,” big cop said, “both of them.”
Young cop began to chuckle as he led the two of us through the brown door and down a long, dimly lit hall. His laughter and the click of three pairs of shoes on ancient, cracking linoleum were the only sounds. “Did you really say that shit?” the cop asked as we approached a heavy, locked door with sun coming through the crack around it. “Don’t say that outside cause they will put you away – seriously.”
The two of us waited while the still chuckling cop found his keys and opened the pad lock. “You were dead,” I whispered to the girl. “Do you know that?” She leaned back from me and stared as if I had slapped her.
Her reply was barely audible. “I believe I was dead.” She crossed her arms and gently squeezed her own shoulders. “Alive is better,” she whispered back.
Laughing cop pushed us through the now open door, out onto a single wooden step. The young woman stepped off of it and walked away, not even a glance back. She adjusted her tweed skirt as she walked. Her hair was barely mussed.
But the sun blinded me. I looked down. The right leg of my jeans had a ragged gash from knee to ankle, burned like a lightning strike. More surprising, the side of my right work boot had been obliterated. I could see my bare foot.
I heard the heavy door being pulled closed behind me. Tin covered and painted brown, the door had no handle on the outside. It was still open just wide enough for me to glimpse, one last time, the face of the laughing cop. He was no longer laughing.
Tasked by his Goddess to find, relocate, and then quicken, the last three Heart Tree gem-seeds, Vanx the bard, and his motley crew of adventurers, set out to do just that.
