All the photos Frank took contained ghosts. They came in all sexes and sizes. Reflected in the eye of a bent-over girlfriend was a ghost standing and smiling and holding a hammer and dressed in white but the hammer was black. Reflected in the eye of the ghost was a bent-over girlfriend smiling and dressed in nothing. A picture contains a thousand words but nobody except for Frank took the time to read them all. He learned that you cannot steal the souls of the living but you can capture the souls of the damned.
Every tree in the forest along the Thames had the faces of the dead carved into their bark; all of the little children who had drowned while fishing. You could see your friends and family and neighbours in his photographs and they looked just as they did when you last kissed them or hugged them or shook their hands. It was eerie and creepy and yet you could not look away. A picture is dead but it shows you life.
So let’s be Frank and learn how to cope with this.
‘Huh? Hey, wait – what am I looking at?’ Nancy asked Frank, curled up on the floor of his apartment as thin black smoke twisted around them, the scent of burning incense hanging sweet in the air. ‘What am I looking at? I see a skinny . . . and its skin is so, so see-through and I get goose bumps when I look at it. Didn’t you take this at my aunt’s?’
Frank nodded. ‘This is the supreme cool,’ he said. ‘This is the ultimate cool.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s Jean-Luc Godard.’
‘But Jean-Luc Godard isn’t dead.’
‘Yes, he is. He died in 1967. Didn’t you know that?’
Nancy shrugged and looked more closely at the photograph. The ghost was holding thick black sunglasses between its fingers. Around it was a gay parade.
‘Do you know how cool this is?’ Frank asked.
Nancy nodded nonchalantly, not paying him any mind as she went through his collection of photographs. Then she came across a photo of him and his friends in a hot air balloon. ‘Hey, where’s the ghost in this one?’ she asked.
Frank paused for a second and then looked at the photograph while furrowing his brow. ‘Oh, there aren’t any. That photo was taken by someone else, which is why you can see me in it,’ he explained.
‘Who took the photo?’
‘I think Steve did.’
‘You’ve never mentioned Steve to me before.’
Frank shrugged. Nancy shrugged. She continued looking through the numerous envelopes of photographs while Frank polished a wooden sword. In the corner of his room was a small forest of wooden swords that he used for a weapons class. In another corner was a vast library of unread books on Japanese fighting techniques and Japanese history. He had a black computer on the floor which hummed along and filled the room with steady background noise. An acoustic guitar and a borrowed bass were by the balcony. When he was finished polishing the sword he picked up the guitar and played a song that he had been practicing for so long that he had forgotten the name of it. Nancy hummed along and the computer hummed along and the apartment was filled with sound and pictures.
‘Will I be photogenic when I’m dead?’ Nancy asked once the performance had ended.
‘You’ll be dead so it won’t matter,’ Frank said.
‘Why do ghosts show up in your photos, Frank?’
‘Because,’ Frank said, and then showed her a photograph to finish his sentence. In the photograph was a teenage Frank wielding a sword on the grassy lawn of his old high school; above Frank, above the school, above everything but the sky was a glowing white light, too white to be glare and too perfect to be faked. He tapped the light with the long fingernail on his index finger.
‘I don’t get it,’ Nancy said. ‘What is this?’
‘This,’ Frank declared, smiling triumphantly, ‘is the penultimate cool, the before-cool. This is what happens before everything else.’
‘A glowing white light?’
Frank nodded. Nancy sighed, shrugged, and then continued looking through the photographs. When she looked up again Frank was holding his camera, the lens zoomed out.
‘Do you even know how to use that thing?’ she asked.
Frank laughed and said it was cool and then there was a flash. And Nancy was filled with emotion and she didn’t know why, maybe it was because she knew there would be a ghost in the photo with her when it came out. Or maybe it was because Frank had been Frank and she had been Nancy. What did she want out of this relationship? Her heart beat. And when her heart beat it bate until it hurt.
But in the end all that really happened was Frank went back to polishing his swords and Nancy went back to looking through all of those envelopes filled with photos; there were so many of them and she kept looking through them. The dead stared back with hollow eyes – all of them held different objects in their hands, from a rusted iron to the misshapen tire from a bicycle. In one photo Frank held a sword and in another Nancy held a photo.
‘The dead can’t speak but they can try,’ Nancy murmured, flipping through shot after shot after shot. Then she paused. She looked up at the empty wall in front of her and smiled.
She had looked up at the empty wall in front of her and smiled, and then the incense burned out.
Paper-Thin Punks
This Pretty Mountain
Paper-Thin Caspar
No Thanks to Godard
Let's Be Frank