Thomas F. Monteleone - Camera Obscura.pdf

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Camera Obscura
by Thomas F. Monteleone
Like a flower blooming, the explosion unfolded as Lieberman focused through the lens.
He rotated the barrel, fingers moving automatically, quickly, to imprison a crystal-sharp
image. Then a second, more violent eruption eclipsed the first. The air became a hammer,
shattering him. Pieces of hot metal ripping, slashing at him. Lieberman felt the camera torn
from his hands, white heat gouging at his eyes.
Pain.
And darkness.
Even his thoughts, graying into black. His last was of the shutter, and if there had been time
to depress it.
His shivered body was taken to the Biotechnical Division of the National Institute of Health in
Bethesda, Maryland, where they peeled back his flayed skin, aluminized the fractured bones,
implanted skin-regenerative cultures, sealed the ruptured organs, closed the terrible wounds.
Everything but the eyes.
They were lifeless knots of nerve and jelly, their pathways dark within his skull, leaving him
blind and dancing with thoughts of death. For truly Lieberman was dead without his
eyes—the most vital tools of his art. It was not like him to suffer so; he was not the fragile,
sensitive martyr type. In an age of laser-imaging, holography, and light-sculpture,
Lieberman had clung to old ways, beating new prophets at their game. His desire had been
as fierce as a desert wind, his energy like the sun, and he had burned himself a place among
the past masters: Stieglitz, Weston, Adams, Cartier-Bresson… and now—Lieberman. From
the beginning, his work had spoken eloquently of a medium without the machine. His prints
were more than mere two-dimensional phantoms. His visions, his images, screamed a
challenge to the New Arts, humbling them with multireversals, impossible colors,
compositions delicate yet outrageous, and technique as intelligent as it was avant . There was
no aspect of the art that Lieberman had indulged in and then not found wanting. He had
broken all the rules by establishing new ones; his work sang his message to the critics with all
the subtlety of a Beethoven symphony.
Their labels annoyed him: Classicist, Recidivist, Neoromantic. They wished to confine him by
defining him, to impale him like the dry husk of a butterfly beneath a pin. But Lieberman
would not be captured so easily.
 
And so he ignored them, even as he accepted their money and their praise. While the
light-sculptors and holographists struggled through commercial hackwork, Lieberman
created what and where he chose. His corporation, Image Design Unlimited, became
preferred stock on the Exchange, as much for its status appeal among the affluent as its
financial stability. Lieberman had become that rarest of all creatures: an artist recognized
within his own lifetime.
But now he lay in darkness, reliving his Promethean past, shuddering at the thought of his
dark future. He had always hated sleep, and so it was doubly ironic that he now live in the
half-world of the sleeper. To awake from dreamless oblivion, to feel his eyelids flutter, spring
open, greet nothingness, was a chilling thing. Déjà vu struck him like a solitary musical note;
as if he had breathed the darkness in retreating dreams.
In time, the doctors brought him hope. He would receive new eyes. Prosthetic optics were not
yet commonplace, but working models were in operation, with new designs and
modifications emerging from the labs steadily. Lieberman was scheduled to receive one of the
latest prototypes, and this was a great comfort to him. But he did not think much about the
new eyes, or the day when he would see again. He had discovered an unknown side of his
nature while blind: an inclination to self-pity, a pleasure in feeling sorry for himself. It was
from this feeling that he kept Elise from seeing him. By denying himself her presence and her
love he was more fully able to suffer.
Days passed, however, and the new eyes were brought to him.
Despite the local anesthetics, Lieberman felt the doctors probing, calibrating, anchoring the
things to his hollow sockets; he heard their monotonic voices coach and comment upon the
operation. What he received was the result of years of careful design and testing: two
monolithic microprocessors, grafted to the optic nerves by Soviet myoelectric synapses, which
accepted information through laser-encoded lenses. As a cosmetic concession, he received
fully orbiting, gel coverings that glistened like natural eyes. Tiny sensors and servomotors
moved them, once he had “learned” how to control them. Each time he shifted his gaze or the
iris changed diameter, Lieberman heard the resonant hum of the servos within his skull.
At last, when the adjustments were at an end, the final tunings made, the circuits tested, and
the switches thrown, did Lieberman see. His brain whited out as he fought to interpret the
rush of information. Slowly the light coalesced, quieted, assumed familiar configurations:
substance, depth of field, shadow. There were three people, dressed in white, standing over his
bed—a woman and two men—all smiling with self-satisfaction. He responded to their
questions, asked his own, cooperated with their tests. Yes, everything seemed right. Clarity,
resolution, even color was as it should be, as he had recalled it in the dark dreamtimes, and
before the accident at the Solar Furnace Exposition. Blinking his eyes, he felt moisture at their
corners; they had retained his lachrymal ducts. The gel was washed and lubricated although
it required neither.
 
As he became newly familiar with the new sight organs, doubts shimmered like specters only
half-perceived. Something seemed to be lingering just beyond the periphery of Lieberman’s
new vision. Something different. Something changed.
But when he searched it out, he found nothing but his fear.
He learned to ignore this as he gained mastery over the machine parts, as the scars healed
and his strength returned. The time had finally come when he allowed Elise to see him. He
hoped she had not minded the exclusion, since their relationship had always been an honest
one. He hoped she would know that there was a part of him—call it vanity, fear, or whatever
you wish—that could not let her see him disfigured or in pain.
It was a sun-bright morning when she came to him. The door opened quickly and she
suddenly appeared: an auburn splash of hair framing an oval face, eyes of polished
serpentine, Celtic nose over slightly pouting lips. She smiled as she touched him with pale,
almost translucent hands, delicately veined like Carrara marble. He kissed, held her close.
They talked and he was comfortable and serene—save the interrupting moments when the
servos hummed, when his gaze danced about her as she spoke.
Looking at her, he remembered. She had been one of his first models, and his only lover. She
had been the final, interlocking piece in the creative puzzle; after Elise, Lieberman had begun
his rise. Of all the women he had since photographed, he had wanted none of them, no
matter how fervently they had forced themselves upon him. Once immersed within his art
and his love, Lieberman’s passion flourished somewhere beyond, or perhaps on a parallel
path with, the needs of the flesh. Elise knew this, admired it. Both of them were happy with it.
He was neither surprised nor disappointed when she asked, “When do we get back to work?”
“We already have,” he said, smiling.
He spent the drive through Washington studying the familiar landmarks, calling back
remembered images, comparing them to new machine constructs. His mind was on these
things when they arrived at their town house in fashionable Georgetown and he barely
perceived her mention of the surprise.
“Surprise? For what?” he said as he palmed the lock and entered the foyer.
“For you, silly. You know—‘welcome home’ and all that.” She laughed and guided him
down the hall. “It’s in the den. Go on. Look.”
Lieberman walked slowly down the corridor, which was dark save for a solitary sconce at its
midpoint. A humming within his head spoke of the changed illumination and the automatic
adjustment to it.
A Tiffany lamp bathed the den in soft yellows, orange, magenta, complementing the warm
 
tones of the Persian rug and the barn-wood walls. On his desk sat a large package in white
paper, dressed in a green satin bow. “What is it?” he asked, playing the ritual-game of
picking it up, hefting it, before tearing away the poorly wrapped paper (Elise was never very
good at such things). Underneath lay a plastiboard freight cube, bearing the stamps of
overseas customs inspection. Lieberman pulled at the sealing tab, and excelsior flooded out
and into his hands. He opened the package slowly now, respecting the exquisite European
care with which the object had been packed, until he could lift the gift from its wrappings.
“My God, it’s beautiful,” he said, staring at the camera he now held in his hands. “Where’d
you ever find it?”
Elise answered him, but he did not record the answer—so intensely did he examine the prize.
It was a masterpiece of craft and design, form and function. More than thirty centimeters on
a side, hand-rubbed rosewood body, black fabric bellows on delicately oiled tracks. Across the
top he read the manufacturer’s name: deardorf. His fingers touched the black metal that
encircled the camera’s great lens—a gently convex dome of hand-ground glass. In white
letters, rimming the lens, were the words schneider-kreuznach, maker of the most perfect
optics ever produced. A more perfect camera had never been designed, and there were but a
handful left throughout the world. Lieberman held it carefully with both hands, walked
across the room, and selected a large sturdy tripod.
“I’d been looking for it a long time,” she said as he fitted the pod to the camera’s brass
bottom mount. “Long before the… the accident. It was just luck that it came when it did.”
“It’s really beautiful,” he said, standing up, taking her hand, and drawing her close. He
kissed her once. “Like you. Thank you very much.”
She kissed him with her eyes closed, but he kept his own open, studying the closeup detail of
her long lashes and trembling lids.
“Here,” he said, stepping back to pick up a focusing cloth—a large black rectangle of opaque
fabric. “Let me look at you.” The cloth was a relic from another age, but it was necessary to
appreciate the crystalline perfection of the Deardorf.
Elise sat in a Regency chair by the balcony window doors. Sunlight seeped through, became
entangled in her hair like the corona of an eclipse. Her lime-green body shift clung
approvingly to her.
Across the room, Lieberman positioned the camera and threw the black cloth over his head.
Beneath the shroud, darkness clutched at him as the eyes hummed their adjustments. He
tensed, for a moment, against the sudden blackness. Then, fingers groping for the catch on
the rear panel, he swung it down to reveal the image on the ground glass. He blinked his eyes
to see—
—a view from a great height. Looking down upon a murky sea burned by a blue-white sun,
where roiling mist boiled off into hot, still air. The sky was a metallic gray, and—
 
—Stumbling back, Lieberman threw off the cloth, which seemed to be clinging to him like
some live thing, choking him. His eyes refocused on the warmly lit room, quietly posed Elise.
“What’s the matter?” she said, reading his confused expression. She rushed to him.
“Frederick, what’s wrong. Are you all right?”
He waved his hand. “Yes, yes. It’s okay. It’s nothing. Just got dizzy for a minute there. I’m all
right now. Go on, now. Please, sit down.”
Frowning, Elise obeyed him.
Lieberman tented himself in the shroud, forcing his eyes to the ground glass where—
—something dark, indistinct, moved across the surface of the water, sending out a wake of
endless V’s. The alien sun flared above the edge of shoreline trees, but there was no strong
illumination. Everything bathed in shadow-light: a coldness, suggesting dampness, decay. He
panned, with camera, across the sea to a sheer-walled cliff. Something dark fluttered past the
lens, and he flinched. Some flying thing. Its afterimage flickered in his mind. Almost familiar,
oddly terrifying, as it lingered on the edge of memory. Twisting the lens, he attempted more
resolution, the metal growing slippery in his hand—
—“Frederick?” Elise touched his shoulder.
He backed out of the cloth, stood up, wiping the perspiration from his forehead, stared at her
blankly.
“What’s the matter with you?” Her voice was keen-edged; she sensed a terror within him.
Lieberman rubbed his false eyes, out of habit more than need. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Moving back from the camera, he pointed to it. “Look in there. Tell me what you see.”
Elise slipped beneath the focusing cloth, remained there as she spoke. “What am I supposed
to see? The chair. The window…”
“What about the water? Don’t you see the water?”
“Water?” She dropped the cloth, looked at him. “Frederick—”
He pushed out of the way, peered through the ground glass where the image danced, saw the
ripplings of the dark sea. “Elise, look at it! I’m not crazy! Look!”
But she saw nothing.
Gently she explained to him, listened to him. She was afraid for him, but not of him.
Lieberman turned her off, not hearing her words as soon as it was clear that only he could see
it. Looking again, he saw subliminal movements across the water. Almost hypnotic, its effect
upon him, until he forced himself away from it, to join Elise on the couch.
 

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