“I’m going to bounce light off this wall and then you can go stand over there and I’ll get my camera and stand over here and that’s all there is to it.”

“Sounds ominous.”

There was a typewriter on a desk and sheets of oversized sketch paper taped to the walls and the lower half of one of the windows. These were charts, master plans evidently, the maps of his work-in-progress, and the sheets were covered with scrawled words, boxes, lines connecting words, tiny writing in the boxes. There were circled numbers, crossed-out names, a cluster of stick-figure drawings, a dozen other cryptic markings. She saw notebooks stacked on the radiator cover. There were drifts of paper on the desk, a mound of crumpled butts in the ashtray.

“There’s something about writers. I don’t know why but I feel I ought to know the person as well as the work and so ordinarily I try to schedule a walk beforehand, just to chat with the person, talk about books, family, anything at all. But I understand you’d rather not go on and on with this, so we’ll work quickly.”

“We can talk.”

“Are you interested in cameras? This is an eighty-five-millimeter lens.”

“I used to take pictures. I don’t know why I stopped. One day it just ended forever.”

“I guess it’s true to say that something else is ending forever.”

“You mean the writer comes out of hiding.”

“Am I right that it’s thirty years since your picture has appeared anywhere?”

“Scott would know.”

“And together you decided the time has come.”

“Well it’s a weariness really, to know that people make so much of this. When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.”

“But this is intriguing to many people.”

“It’s also taken as an awful sort of arrogance.”

“But we’re all drawn to the idea of remoteness. A hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful, I think. Beautiful and a little sacred maybe. And a person who becomes inaccessible has a grace and a wholeness the rest of us envy.”

“The image world is corrupt, here is a man who hides his face.”

“Yes,” she said.

“People may be intrigued by this figure but they also resent him and mock him and want to dirty him up and watch his face distort in shock and fear when the concealed photographer leaps out of the trees. In a mosque, no images. In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too. The writer who won’t show his face is encroaching on holy turf. He’s playing God’s own trick.”

“Maybe he’s just shy, Bill.”

Through the viewfinder she watched him smile. He looked clearer in the camera. He had an intentness of gaze, an economy, and his face was handsomely lined and worked, embroidered across the forehead and at the corners of the eyes. So often in her work the human shambles was remade by the energy of her seeing, by the pure will that the camera uncovered in her, the will to see deeply.

“Shall I tell you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m afraid to talk to writers about their work. It’s so easy to say something stupid. Don’t drop your chin. Good, that’s better, I like that. There’s a secret language I haven’t learned to speak. I spend a great deal of time with writers. I love writers. But this gift you have, which for me is total delight, makes me feel that I’m an outsider, not able to converse in the private language, the language that will mean something to you.”

“The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I’ve grown a second self in this room. It’s the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation. The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself. If the pain is real, why do I inflate it? Maybe this is the only pleasure I’m allowed.”

“Raise your chin.”

“Raise my chin.”

“Frankly I didn’t expect such speeches.”

“I’ve been saving it up.”

“I expected you to stand here a few minutes and then get restless and walk off.”

“One of my failings is that I say things to strangers, women passing by, that I’ve never said to a wife or child, a close friend.”

“You talk candidly to Scott.”

“I talk to Scott. But it becomes less necessary all the time. He already knows. He’s at my brainstem like a surgeon with a bright knife.”

She finished the roll and went to her case for another. Bill stood by the desk shaking a cigarette out of the pack. There was mud crust and bent weed stuck to his shoes. He didn’t seem to be putting across his own picture, his idea of what he wanted to look like or who he wanted to be for the next hour or two. It was clear he hadn’t bothered to think it out. She liked the feel of the room with him in it. It was his room in a way in which this wasn’t his house. She asked him to stand near one of the wall charts and when he didn’t object she moved the lamp and adjusted focus and started shooting. He smoked and talked. He thought he was suffering like the rest of them. They all thought they were bungling and desolate and tormented but none of them ever wanted to do anything else but write and each believed that the only person who might possibly be worse off was another writer somewhere and when one of them mixed too many brandies and little violet pills or placed the nozzle of a revolver just behind the ear, the others felt both sorry and acknowledged.

“I’ll tell you what I don’t exaggerate. The doubt. Every minute of every day. It’s what I smell in my bed. Loss of faith. That’s what this is all about.”

Space was closing in the way it did when a session went well. Time and light were narrowed to automatic choices. Bill stood before the odd notations on his chart and she knew she had everything she might want or need. Here was the old, marked and melancholy head, the lost man of letters, and there was the early alphabet on the wall, the plan of his missing book in the form of lopsided boxes and felt-tipped scrawls and sets of directional signs like arrows scratched out by a child with a pencil in his fist. And he was animated, leaning and jabbing as he talked. His hands were blunt and nicked. There was a doggedness to him, a sense of all the limits he’d needed to exceed, getting on top of work that always came hard. She was trying to place him in context, fit the voice and body to the books. The first thing she’d thought, entering the room, was wait a minute, no, this can’t be him. She’d expected someone lean and drawn, with eyes like hex signs on an Amish barn. But Bill was slowly beginning to make sense to her, to look reasonably like his work.

“I’m forced to steal one of your cigarettes,” she said. “I’ve been giving up cigarettes for twenty-five years and I’ve made a lot of progress in that time. Okay? But then I see the little glisten of the package.”

“Tell me about New York,” he said. “I don’t get there anymore. When I think of cities where I lived, I see great cubist paintings.”

“I’ll tell you what I see.”

“That edginess and density and those old brownish tones and how cities age and stain in the mind like Roman walls.”

“Where I live, okay, there’s a rooftop chaos, a jumble, four, five, six, seven storeys, and it’s water tanks, laundry lines, antennas, belfries, pigeon lofts, chimney pots, everything human about the lower island—little crouched gardens, statuary, painted signs. And I wake up to this and love it and depend on it. But it’s all being flattened and hauled away so they can build their towers. ”

“Eventually the towers will seem human and local and quirky. Give them time.”

“I’ll go and hit my head against the wall. You tell me when to stop.”

“You’ll wonder what made you mad.”

“I already have the World Trade Center.”

“And it’s already harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking. And think how much worse.”

“What?” she said.

“If there was only one tower instead of two.”

“You mean they interact. There is a play of light.”

“Wouldn’t a single tower be much worse?”

“No, because my big complaint is only partly size. The size is deadly. But having two of them is like a comment, it’s like a dialogue, only I don’t know what they’re saying.”

“They’re saying, ‘Have a nice day.’ ”

“Someday, go walk those streets,” she said. “Sick and dying people with nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside. Am I exaggerating?”

“I’m the one who exaggerates.”

“This is strange but I feel I know you.”

“It is strange, isn’t it? We’re managing to have a real talk while you bob and weave with a camera and I stand here looking stiff and cloddish.”

“I don’t usually talk, you see. I ask a question and let the writer talk, let the tension drain out a little.”

“Let the fool babble on.”

“All right if you put it that way. And I listen only vaguely as a rule because I’m working. I’m detached, I’m working, I’m listening at the edges.”

“And you travel all the time. You seek us out.”

“You’re dropping your chin,” she said.

“You cross continents and oceans to take pictures of ordinary faces, to make a record of a thousand faces, ten thousand faces.”

“It’s crazy. I’m devoting my life to a gesture. Yes, I travel. Which means there is no moment on certain days when I’m not thinking terror. They have us in their power. In boarding areas I never sit near windows in case of flying glass. I carry a Swedish passport so that’s okay unless you believe that terrorists killed the prime minister. Then maybe it’s not so good. And I use codes in my address book for names and addresses of writers because how can you tell if the name of a certain writer is dangerous to carry, some dissident, some Jew or blasphemer. I’m careful about reading matter. Nothing religious comes with me, no books with religious symbols on the jacket and no pictures of guns or sexy women. That’s on the one hand. On the other hand I know in my heart I’m going to die of some dreadful slow disease so you’re safe with me on a plane.”

She inserted another roll. She was sure she already had what she’d come for but a hundred times in her life she thought she had the cluster of shots she wanted and then found better work deep in the contact sheets. She liked working past the feeling of this is it. Important to keep going, obliterate the sure thing and come upon a moment of stealthy blessing.

“Do you ask your writers how it feels to be painted dummies?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got me talking, Brita.”

“Anything that’s animated I love it.”

“You don’t care what I say.”

“Speak Swahili.”

“There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”

“Keep going. I like your anger.”

“But you know all this. This is why you travel a million miles photographing writers. Because we’re giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before—what? I don’t know. But you’re smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear.”

“I’m the one they’re trying to kill. You’re sitting in a room making theories.”

“Put us in a museum and charge admission.”

“Writers will always write. Are you crazy? Writers have long-range influence. You can’t talk about these gunmen in the same breath. I have to steal another cigarette. You’re no good for me, this is obvious. You have a look on your face, I don’t know, like a bad actor doing weariness of the spirit.”

“I am a bad actor.”

“Not for me or my camera. I see the person, not some idea he wants to make himself into.”

“I’m all idea today.”

“I definitely don’t see it.”

“I’m playing the idea of death. Look closely,” he said.

She didn’t know whether she was supposed to find this funny.

He said, “Something about the occasion makes me think I’m at my own wake. Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn’t begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We’re doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in the decades to come. It’s their past, their history we’re inventing here. And it’s not how I look now that matters. It’s how I’ll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It’s like a wake. And I’m the actor made up for the laying-out. ”

“Close your mouth.”

“Remember they used to say, This is the first day of the rest of your life. It struck me just last night these pictures are the announcement of my dying.”

“Close your mouth. Good, good, good, good.”

She finished the roll, reloaded, reached for her cigarette, took a drag, put it down, then moved toward him and touched a hand to his face, tilting it slightly left.

“Stay now. Don’t move. I like that.”

“See, anything you want. I do it at once.”

“Touching Bill Gray.”

“Do you realize what an intimate thing we’re doing?”

“It’s in my memoirs, guaranteed. And you’re not cloddish by the way.”

“We’re alone in a room involved in this mysterious exchange. What am I giving up to you? And what are you investing me with, or stealing from me? How are you changing me? I can feel the change like some current just under the skin. Are you making me up as you go along? Am I mimicking myself? And when did women start photographing men in the first place?”

“I’ll look it up when I get home.”

“We’re getting on extremely well.”

“Now that we’ve changed the subject.”

“I’m losing a morning’s work without remorse.”

“That’s not the only thing you’re losing. Don’t forget, from the moment your picture appears you’ll be expected to look just like it. And if you meet people somewhere, they will absolutely question your right to look different from your picture.”

“I’ve become someone’s material. Yours, Brita. There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it’s consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut. All the material in every life is channeled into the glow. Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed.”

“And you may think of yourself differently as well. It’s interesting how deep a picture takes you. You may see something you thought you’d kept hidden. Or some aspect of your mother or father or children. There it is. You pick up a snapshot and there’s your face in half shadow but it’s really your father looking back at you.”

“You’re preparing the body all right.”

“Chemicals and paper, that’s all it is.”

“Rouging my cheeks. Waxing my hands and lips. But when I’m really dead, they’ll think of me as living in your picture.”

“I was in Chile last year and I met an editor who’d been sent to prison after his magazine did caricatures of General Pinochet. The charge was assassinating the image of the general.”

“Sounds perfectly reasonable.”

“Are you losing interest? Because I sometimes don’t realize the way a session becomes mine. I get very possessive at a certain point. I’m easy and agreeable on the edges of the operation. But at the heart, in the frame, it’s mine.”

“I think I need these pictures more than you do. To break down the monolith I’ve built. I’m afraid to go anywhere, even the seedy diner in the nearest little crossroads town. I’m convinced the serious trackers are moving in with their mobile phones and zoom lenses. Once you choose this life, you understand what it’s like to exist in a state of constant religious observance. There are no halfway measures. All the movements we make are ritual movements. Everything we do that isn’t directly centered on work revolves around concealment, seclusion, ways of evasion. Scott works out the routes of simple trips I occasionally make, like doctor’s visits. There are procedures for people coming to the house. Repairmen, deliverymen. It’s an irrational way of life that has a powerful inner logic. The way religion takes over a life. The way disease takes over a life. There’s a force that’s totally independent of my conscious choices. And it’s an angry grudging force. Maybe I don’t want to feel the things other people feel. I have my own cosmology of pain. Leave me alone with it. Don’t stare at me, don’t ask me to sign copies of my books, don’t point me out on the street, don’t creep up on me with a tape recorder clipped to your belt. Most of all don’t take my picture. I’ve paid a terrible price for this wretched hiding. And I’m sick of it finally. ”

He spoke quietly, looking away from her. He gave the impression he was learning these things for the first time, hearing them at last. How strange they sounded. He couldn’t understand how any of it had happened, how a young man, inexperienced, wary of the machinery of gloss and distortion, protective of his work and very shy and slightly self-romanticizing, could find himself all these years later trapped in his own massive stillness.

“Are you fading at all?”

“No.”

“I forget how weary all this concentrated effort can make a person. I have no conscience when it comes to work. I expect the subject to be as single-minded as I am.”

“This isn’t work for me.”

“We make pictures together after all.”

“Work is what I do to feel bad.”

“Why should anyone feel good?”

“Exactly. When I was a kid I used to announce ballgames to myself. I sat in a room and made up the games and described the play-by-play out loud. I was the players, the announcer, the crowd, the listening audience and the radio. There hasn’t been a moment since those days when I’ve felt nearly so good.”

He had a smoker’s laugh, cracked and graveled.

“I remember the names of all those players, the positions they played, their spots in the batting order. I do batting orders in my head all the time. And I’ve been trying to write toward that kind of innocence ever since. The pure game of making up. You sit there suspended in a perfect clarity of invention. There’s no separation between you and the players and the room and the field. Everything is seamless and transparent. And it’s completely spontaneous. It’s the lost game of self, without doubt or fear.”

“I don’t know, Bill.”

“I don’t know, either.”

“It sounds like mental illness to me.”

He laughed again. She took pictures of him laughing until the roll was finished. Then she loaded the camera and moved him away from the quartz lamp and started shooting again, using window light now.

“Incidentally. I bring a message from Charles Everson.”

Bill hitched up his pants. He seemed to look past her, frisking himself for signs of cigarettes.

“I ran into him at a publishing dinner somewhere. He asked how my work was going. I told him I’d probably be seeing you.”

“No reason you shouldn’t mention it.”

“I hope it’s all right.”

“The pictures will be out one day.”

“Actually the only message I bring is that Charles wants to talk to you. He wouldn’t tell me what it’s all about. I told him to write you a letter. He said you don’t read your mail.”

“Scott reads my mail.”

“He said that what he had to tell you couldn’t be seen or heard by anyone else. Far too delicate. He also said he used to be your editor and good, good friend. And he said it was distressing not to be able to get in touch with you directly.”

Bill looked for matches now, clearing papers off the desktop.

“How’s old Charlie then?”

“The same. Soft, pink and happy.”

“Always new writers, you see. They sit in their corner offices and never have to worry about surviving the failed books because there’s always a new one coming along, a hot new excitement. They live, we die. A perfectly balanced state.”

“He told me you’d say something like that.”

“And you waited to tell me about him. Didn’t want to spring it on me prematurely.”

“I wanted my pictures first. I didn’t know how you’d react to news from out there.”

He struck the match and then forgot it.

“Do you know what they like to do best? Run those black-border ads for dead writers. It makes them feel they’re part of an august tradition.”

“He simply wants you to call him. He says it’s a matter of some importance.”

He swiveled his head until the cigarette at the corner of his mouth came into contact with the flame.

“The more books they publish, the weaker we become. The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless.”

“You like being a little bit fanatical. I know the feeling, believe me. But what is more harmless than the pure game of making up? You want to do baseball in your room. Maybe it’s just a metaphor, an innocence, but isn’t this what makes your books popular? You call it a lost game that you’ve been trying to recover as a writer. Maybe it’s not so lost. What you say you’re writing toward, isn’t this what people see in your work?”

“I only know what I see. Or what I don’t see.”

“Tell me what that means.”

He dropped the match in an ashtray on the desk.

“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself. I’ve worked the sentences of this book long and hard but not long and hard enough because I no longer see myself in the language. The running picture is gone, the code of being that pushed me on and made me trust the world. This book and these years have worn me down. I’ve forgotten what it means to write. Forgotten my own first rule. Keep it simple, Bill. I’ve lacked courage and perseverance. Exhausted. Sick of struggling. I’ve let good enough be good enough. This is someone else’s book. It feels all forced and wrong. I’ve tricked myself into going on, into believing. Can you understand how that can happen? I’m sitting on a book that’s dead.”

“Does Scott know you feel this way?”

“Scott. Scott’s way ahead of me. Scott doesn’t want me to publish.”

“But this is completely crazy.”

“No, it’s not. There’s something to be said.”

“When will you finish?”

“Finish. I’m finished. The book’s been done for two years. But I rewrite pages and then revise in detail. I write to survive now, to keep my heart beating.”

“Show someone else.”

“Scott is smart and totally honest.”

“He’s only one opinion.”

“Any judgment based strictly on merit is going to sound like his. And how it hurts when you know the verdict is true. And how you try to evade it, twist it, disfigure it. And word could get out. And once that happens.”

“You finish, you publish and you take what comes.”

“I will publish.”

“It’s simple, Bill.”

“It’s just a question of making up my mind and going ahead and doing it.”

“And you’ll stop redoing pages. The book is finished. I don’t want to make a fetish of things are simple. But it’s done, so you stop. ”

She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets. She moved in closer and refocused, she shot and shot, and he stood there looking into the lens, soft eyes shining.