Take A Picture, It'll Last Longer

Nate

Sometime over the weekend came a text:

Dad gave me a camera yesterday. No idea what to do with it. You artist types know where to buy film, right?

Maybe it's just an excuse to hang out. They haven't seen each other since the beginning of February. Since he had just gotten out of the hospital and his eye was still blood-angry and healing from his adventure in the basement of a used bookstore that has since closed.

Not a lot of places in Denver are open late enough that a vampire and an insomniac can find a place to hang out that isn't potentially haunted or illegal. Hanging around one's apartment gets old awful fast. He suggests they meet at the main library at Denver University. It's where they met.

This oughtn't have any special significance but Lux doesn't know what the hell all Nathan has been up to lately. If and when Lux shows up the reporter is in the film and media section of the stacks but he's not studying. He had to drop his critical analysis course because he'd missed the first four weeks of lecture and could not possibly catch up while working more than forty hours a week.

He's looking at a photography book. He has his cheekbone propped on the heel of his hand and looks puzzled. This is why he always hired someone, man. Still photography is way different than videography.

Lux

Lux hasn't been out of touch although her contact is erratic. A text one night. A picture another night. Perhaps a whole text conversation another, and so on. Spaces between. Nathan does not know what Lux does with her time, does he? He hasn't a clue. She mailed him a valentine that showed up on February 17th. A little watercolor painting, in a frame of industrial tape, mailed through the US Postal System like trust.

As far as Nate knows, what the Hell is Lux? Lux is just a beautiful creature, gloom-haired, compelling, smile like a premonition of heart-break, smile like the drag of gravity, impulsive and who the Hell knows? A beautiful creature who has decided to shape itself out've the city to be his friend. Watch out for him, or try. Make him play games. Trust in me. [I (want to) love you.] A vampire, but one who's chosen to make him safe. Maybe she's just lonely. They've gotta get lonely; don't they in all the stories?

"'Sup!" Lux says, as she pulls a chair beside Nathan out of the table. Spins it neatly, with precision if you please. Straddles it, folds her arms across its top, rests her sharp little chin on her forearms, hides her mouth too.

She'd texted back the night after he sent that message. Oh sure we artist types stick together. Maybe I've got a line on a man who knows a man who knows a man who'll know where to find the goods if his gullet is properly greased. Capiche?

And now here they are.

Nate

Keeping him company at the table are a few professional journals he nabbed from the periodical room and a cup of coffee from a place on campus. Maybe he met up with his father before he came here. If they're both going to commit to this trying thing he might as well return the favor occasionally. It's not like you can see the old man's office window from the roof of the library or anything.

One of the journals is the Colorado Law Review. Tit for tat, right?

When Lux spins the chair and parks herself in it Nate's posture doesn't do a thing to change. He is still hunch-shouldered over the table to prop up his head but his dark eyes leave the book's pages to find her face.

Interesting fact: only two percent of the world's population has green eyes. This makes it the rarest eye color in the world. Both Lux and Theodore have green-ish eyes.

Another interesting fact: Nathan who is a crime reporter and budding investigative journalist doesn't notice shit like this. Amber on the other hand thought that Nate and Lux were siblings or cousins the first time she met them.

And now here they are.

He lifts his eyebrows at her greeting and then huffs out a laugh. It's the most energetic noise he's made in months. His eye is healed but the scar tissue now shadowing it hasn't settled into a lighter color yet. It's still pink.

"You're in a good mood," he says. Sounds confused.

Lux

He can tell that her smile just deepened even if her mouth is still hidden. The face isn't made of many parts; it is a whole thing. Animated, spirit. Movement of her cheeks, of her hair-line, even her eyebrows; it's all subtle, even the change in the shape of her eyes. After a second, Lux unfolds her forearms, laces her fingers together instead and keeps her elbows on the chair's back rests her chin on the cradle of her fingers, and the smile that animated her so is just a suggestion (bright), "You don't have to sound so surprised about it. You'll make me feel like a cloud of gloom and darkness and wouldn't that just be too fucking mean of you?"

Lux is in a good mood; she plants her soles into the ground. Scoots the chair forward and, straightening, reaches out with both hands, like: c'mere, give me a hug.

Nate

Oh her teasing and her suggestion of a smile. They strike him as being as funny as anything else usually does only this time he laughs that library-laugh again. It gets him to stop propping his head up on his hand like he's running on fumes and sit back in his chair.

He doesn't go for the coffee in the span between Lux planting her feet and coming forward like to collect him in her arms. And though the amusement lingers on his face which is so young despite his careening into his late twenties with all the abandon of a drunken bull in a haunted china cabinet he now appears suspicious.

Do they hug when they greet each other? He can't remember. They're friends but he isn't a physical person. Is one supposed to hug one's friends? What about one's immediate family? He and Hannah went through a period after he got back from Afghanistan where they didn't hug but that's because they were also thousands of miles apart.

Hannah ran away from home once. Told Nebraska to go fuck itself and got on a bus to come out to California but the cops found her at her first layover. Having a judge for a mother is the worst goddamn thing in the world.

It's awkward leaning across chairs to hug but Nate scoots his chair forward a bit and then wraps his arms around her.

"I know I'm fucking mean," he says. "But you're in a more-good mood than usual, so my meanness is irrelevant."

Lux

His suspicion doesn't make her laugh. But it could. Lux enjoys laughing, doesn't she? Does. The laughter's contained: everything's contained behind a certain insouciant poise - but he can certainly see the polished-up edge of amusement at his reaction. Lux's hair smells of cigarette smoke. Beneath that, bulgarian rose, ambrette seed absolute, saffron, white pear, a touch of oudh, clean skin. He wraps his arms around and she wraps her arms around and squeezes with her shoulders going up! And it is quite awkward; the chairs are quite woodenly against it. They say: nope, we're not moving or giving, we are shares, made of wood. We're also here. Lux doesn't care if the chair's top is digging into her ribs, though, the slats pressing hard against her stomach. Her grip loosens after only a couple of seconds; and then she's resting an elbow against the chair's top again, resting her chin in the palm of her hand, fingers curled so they could hide her mouth or they could not depending on the whim of the moment.

"Mayybe," says she, with a sluice-of-a-look; an almost dimple. "Mayybe I just think you're looking pretty good, so my mood's more than good. Mayybe I'm all twitterpated because you're going to do art."

Nate

Nathan carries a messenger bag with him because it's easier to fit his laptop into than a briefcase and because he can fit other things into it that he needs to lug around without sacrificing one of his free hands. Books or flashlights or whatever the hell else he might need during the day.

No comment as to whether he's looking good or not. He looked like hell last time she saw him. Was groggy still and barely beginning to heal. Nothing flirtatious in the comment even if Lux herself is a flirtation. She steered him away from that the first night they spent in each other's company and Nathan has never made a move anyway.

Sure as hell isn't going to make a move now that he knows what she is. He doesn't know if vampires have sexual appetites but he doesn't want to know either.

"If by 'do art' you mean 'go on a scavenger hunt for film for a camera that was produced when Truman was president,' then yeah. That's..." He coughs into the back of his wrist. "That's definitely something worth getting your twitters pated about."

Lux

Truth: Lux is a flirtation but doesn't mean to flirt with Nathan Marszalek. Put distance between them (a warning, rake-of-a-gaze) the few times she saw that interest in her rearing its head. Maybe if he ever wonders now he thinks it's just because that's what vampires do. If they don't intend to bite you. Lux doesn't intend to bite Nathan: Does she? Hasn't yet. Approaching a year of them knowing one another. They've both lost friends and been comforted (more or less) by the other. They've dealt together with strangeness. Been a rough year. Lux knows just how rough for Nathan even if he doesn't know hr whole story, but why the hell does he need to?

So: Lux is a flirtation but she doesn't mean to be. Her gaze sharpens with interest when he mentions the film and the camera here in flesh and blood. Same interest it had sharpened when he prepared her with that text.

"What," she says. "He gave you an antique? Well vintage never does go out of style, and isn't there something about fixing the present into the past using a relic out've that past? My twitters stay pated, Nathan baby. If it's that old might have to get the film online or from a specialty shop though. Why'd your dad decide to give you a camera of all things?"

Nate

"Why does my dad do anything?"

It's a rhetorical question. A thoughtless parry. Lux doesn't know his father and they've never met and it's entirely possible she doesn't remember her own father. He has never asked how old she is though he's asked where she's from and all other manner of feeling-you-out questions more related to plotting a course of friendship than hoping to get in her pants.

What has he even told her about his parents? Little. Only that on the scale of bad hospital visitors she doesn't rank up there with his editor or his father. Might have obliquely mentioned their divorce when he mentioned his sister staying with him over winter break.

He picks up his coffee cup and squints at the lid before taking a sip to lubricate his throat. It's not an evasion. He just wants to think before his foot jumps into his mouth.

"He was cleaning out a warehouse that's full of - okay. None of my grandparents are alive, they all died either before I was born or when I was little, so I don't know much about any of them. But after Dad's father died all his stuff went into a warehouse out in... I actually don't know which state it's in." This is a terrible story. "We didn't talk between middle school and me moving out here." Not 'much.' Just flat out didn't talk. "But he was at the warehouse recently and found this camera and was like 'Hey Nate needs a hobby, he hasn't been writing on his blog because his fucking photographer friend's dead, this old-ass camera will be good for him.'"

Lux

The rhetorical question is treated like a rhetorical question that needn't be parried by another rhetorical question or even worse an answer. Lux can spin a whole godamned conversation out've questions most people wouldn't bother answering, just because it's fun to try, just because why the Hell not? The nights are long. Nathan's father.

Lux wants to know about him. Wants to know he's happy. Wants to know -

Lux doesn't really want to know the things she wants to know. But she still seems amused (in a good mood) by his story, although her expression becomes a touch more inscrutable. No, inscrutable isn't the word. Lux is hiding nothing, but there are shadows in her eyes; there're always shadows in her eyes; they're always looking at something, and that something isn't always easy to explicate.

"Mayybe it will be, Nathan. Do you think so? What are you going to do with it once you've got film?"

Lux reaches out to pull the photography book he was looking at toward her, peering at it with the same intent interest a cat might give a goldfish swimming around in a bowl.

Nate

"He said he wants to, um..."

There is a lot that Nathan isn't saying about either his father or his relationship with his father or whether or not he thinks his father is happy. He doesn't know his father. When he was a child he loved his father very much and when he was a preteen he enjoyed spending time with him but didn't necessarily want to be seen in public with him too-too much because his father was one of those young-ish fathers who everyone else thought was so cool and no 12-year-old boy thinks his father is cool. Even when his father is a prosecutor for the district attorney's office and has gotten to hang out with cops and FBI agents and all these other cool people you only hear about on TV.

Lux doesn't want to know details and Nathan doesn't want to talk about them. They were both in a good mood before.

"You know. See whatever I end up taking pictures of." He hears himself sounding dour and distracted. So he changes his tone: "It's cool, you know, I just..." He flinch-frowns and rubs at his brow. "It was his father's, and his father I guess was really good at taking pictures. It seems like a waste of film since I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm a writer, not a photographer. Ask my editor, anytime I have to take a picture of a house or something for the paper it looks like a 97-year-old with DTs took it."

Lux

Lux does not believe that photography is easy. Lux does not believe that digital cameras have made photography easy. Not photography as an art form. Not photography as a way to make an image last forever. To elevate a second. Lux has all kinds of thoughts on photography and the art there-of. There was a time when she had a whole secret -- well. Perhaps Lux will tell Nathan that story.

Until then, she listens to what he says. That veering toward the dour, distracted. Has begun to thumb through that book she swiped, the one he was looking at, chin in palms, when she arrived. Oh, was he looking at a certain page? Ah well. Lost now. Does the shape her mouth makes appear wistful, or shadowed by something musing? Lux doesn't bite her lip or scrape her teeth across her lower lip or anything like that while she's listening, looking at that page, so who knows.

To look at the book she'd had to cant her body to the side since the chair is facing Nathan (well, backwards to Nathan, facing her) and not the desk. Had to lean across the chair's arms, elbow just touching the desk, see? And her hair's a mess tonight. Looks good on her, though. Doesn't look planned, but it looks good. Without coming out've that poise, her eyes flick up.

"As it happens, I am a dab hand with the photography, you know. When I was very young I had my own secret dark room where my mother would never find it. I may or may not have used Truman-era equipment, as well." Pause; suggestive lift of her eyebrows.

And then, so fucking pleased. "I did once use one of those really old cameras, you know, the what's it called, gosh, well you don't know either, those cameras that look like a birdhouse had a romantic tryst with an accordion and the plates are silver and you've gotta just be hunched over for an age."

Nate

Nothing in life is easy if one does not exert a bit of effort. Writing for example. Nathan is a writer. He was attached to a reconnaissance unit in Iraq and his job was to take video of what happened there but when he wasn't deployed Private First Class Marszalek's job was to write articles. Problem was he was deployed three times in six years. He was a Corporal when he was discharged. He could write but his writing was very dry and sometimes a typo slipped through.

His editor doesn't have the patience to mold him but he can see that the dysthymic quietly foul-mouthed kid has a passion. He genuinely gives a shit about his subjects. He believes in the justice system and in right and wrong and when he writes his news dispatches and follows up on crimes he humanizes everyone.

When Lux looks up from the book Nate looks back at her. Snorts at her supposition that he wouldn't know what the fucking accordion-looking camera is called either.

"What," he asks, "a daguerrotype camera? You used one of those? How old are you?"

It's a joke. He does not want to know how old she is.

Lux

"A thousand and one, just like Arabian Nights," Lux breathes, eyes closing to better hold the answer in her mind, before they open again. Is she fucking with him? Probably.

Nate

Nate huff-laughs again and then reaches out to grab another photography book. This one is not a tutorial. It's a collection of photographs other people have taken. It scatters the professional journals. The state Law Review and something called Journalism and Mass Communication Educator. Shit that nobody wants to read for fun.

As he flips to the first page he says, "Shut up." A few seconds to flip through the pages and recenter his thoughts. Without looking at her: "Are you offering to teach me how to do art?"

Lux

"If I say yes, do you feel that distinct twittery flutter in your pate that can only mean you're abso-fucking-lutely twitterpated about the idea?"

Nate

Nate blinks. Nate considers the question. Nate sits back in his chair again and rubs at the corner of his eye.

"I'm not a very good student," he says. "You're going to wish you could take it back after like the third night."

Nathan are you afraid that your photography is going to reveal your inner artist and people are going to start to have insight into your life and the way you think and that'll make you even more vulnerable than you already are because you really don't seem like the kind of person who is afraid of feelings and emotion and all that other crap that art evokes.

Lux

"I'm not a very good student either," Lux says, confessional. "Do you know what I did last time somebody tried to teach me something? I - "

a pause. Hold it. Hold it. Does the suspense rise? Is she trying to contain a smile? Fuck no. Why contain a smile? Lux isn't smiling, but oh doesn't a smile want to be a shadow again?

" - scowled at them. I might've also stomped," and she taps her fingers, tap-tap, musical. "So really, Nathan, I'm sure it will either be absolutely fine or just what I deserve. But only if you want."

A pause. Lux; some of that energy sluices away, leaving her serious (wist). "Don't you want?"

Lux

[WE PAUSE THIS, until which time Jamie's net gets not suck.]

Nate

Lux is definitely acting more buoyant than usual. Not so high as she would be were she on a cloud but the fact that she looks as if she's hiding every smile that wants to come unbidden to her lips is something even Nate notices. She isn't a stormcloud no but her intensity has always stricken him as focused. She wants something when she's talking to him.

She wanted a light the first time they met. The fact that she hasn't seduced him or fed from him and yet has an interest in protecting him has always stricken him as odd. Focused and odd.

Distracted and odd is what has his interest. And she can see the moment Nate decides that she has gotten laid or has a crush or something he doesn't want to hear about when he's sitting in the library with his books and nearly scowls himself.

And then that wist. Isn't she beautiful. Nate sighs heavy and turns more bodily in the chair towards her. Rests his arms across his legs. His posture is not demure. He is dressed in his business casual clothes still. Must have come straight from work or is on his way back to work.

"Fine," he sighs. It's a teasing sigh. He doesn't really feel beleaguered by this. "Yes. I want you to teach me how to take pictures."

Boom. Sorted.

Lux

"My heart just stopped," Lux drawls, and she wraps her arms around the top of the chair again, rests her chin on the wood. The Toreador (he doesn't know the name of her clan; just her description of it: the darlingest, the best, frivolous and useless, etcetera). "So where's the camera? Is it in your pockets? Can I investigate?" A pause. "Are you going to turn one of the closets in your apartment into a dark room?"

Nate

"Stay out of my pockets," he tells her.

Several of the women he's met in this city have not found his deadpan near-monotonous sense of humor to be humorous. It's hard to tell he's joking when the joke is delivered in a bar with classic rock playing on the jukebox and an air of barely-staved-off disaster hanging in the air. So many people drinking in such a closed space. Something is always bound to go wrong.

They're in a library. It's easier to hear him. He cracks a joke and then he turns in his chair to haul his messenger bag into his lap.

"I don't know if any of them are big enough," he says. "I'm thinking about moving when my lease is up anyway. It's really hard to sleep in that building." Ghosts. There's one that wanders the halls some nights. Lucy feels its presence and comes tear-assing through the apartment to either hide under his bed or underneath the covers. That wakes him up before the weeping and moaning can. "Maybe I can find a place that has a lot of closets I can sacrifice in the interests of art."

The camera came with a case. The case is new. He sets the messenger bag on the floor once he's found the case and hands the case over to her.

Lux

"Why, Mister," Lux says, all wide ingenue eyes, but mouth a firm line, corner of it curving up in a sharp smirk. Might've said more but he's talking about closets now so he's saved from whatever that smirk was herald of. The creature seems interested in his possible decision to move, and the sharp smirk returns at Nathan's tone when he says 'art.'

Then he's pulling the case out of his bag, handing it over. Lux decides to no longer straddle the chair. This maneuver is very interesting to the library tech who is over there; she's got long legs, but it's all in how (liquid measure [grace]) you use 'em, eh? Because she doesn't stand up like a normal person, but executes a pull a spin and at the end of it her back's against one of the chair's arms, her knees are crooked on the chair's other arm, shins against the table, and she's got one elbow on the chair's back still.

The camera case rests between her hips; the top of it bumps her thighs when she opens it; pulls the camera out and gives it a look. Nathan might realize that after a moment she does seem to be familiar with the make; a camera's a camera, but it's still technology, so takes a moment to remember. Remember, remember.

Lux checks for film, finds nothing, studies a couple letters scratched on the camera's body.

"What a thing," she says. "Just don't drop it in the shower. Anything else come with it?"

Nate

He frowns. Tries to remember the conversation that they had at dinner and what his father had told him about the circumstances in which he'd found the thing. A warehouse. In a box. Can't think of why anything else would come with it or whether his father had mentioned anything else.

Those kind of details are the details Nathan's brain picks up and stores. Not physical details. His situational awareness only applies to things moving fast and loud. Subtlety isn't anything he learned to hone in urban war zones.

"Uh," he says. "I don't think so. Why?"

Lux

"Mysterious Camera from the Truman days," Lux says, and she holds the camera up to her face so she can sight Nate through it. Then examines the lenses. She can see so clearly now each scuff, each mark, each fingerprint; difficult to look away. "Found in a box, decades later. No undeveloped negatives or notes or postcards or camera strap or," Lux frowns, consideringly. "I don't know. You said your dad's dad was supposedly a really good photographer?"

Nate

"I don't think I've ever seen any of his pictures. I never knew him."

Maybe if the divorce hadn't happened the way that it had. Joint custody or Theodore who was a very good prosecutor had managed to prove that Shira was not a loving caregiver and had fought her for them. These are details Nate was not privy to as a 13-year-old. His parents didn't want him to watch. He doesn't know if his father would have tried to get him turned onto photography as a teenager if he had been around. Showed him the photographs that Michael had taken and told stories about him. It's not out of the question and maybe in another universe that's how their lives went.

In this universe Nathan doesn't know if Michael Amherst was a really good photographer.

"My dad said he was though. So... you know. I believe him."

Lux

Her laugh is wickedness. "No pressure, Nathan." Then, flick to something less wicked: "I bet you'll take pictures that'll make other 97 year old whatevers swoon from the fucking glory. You know a good place to photograph at night?" Because any lessons Lux gives him will not be able to take advantage of the golden hour - and see, isn't there something that's almost - well, it's not wistful and it's not melancholy - there's just something. That was a rhetorical question. Partly a rhetorical question. "Downtown. Ooh, or the Red Rocks if there's a show going on, people's faces. Ooh, or down around East Colfax, you know, where the buildings are really mouldering. Ooh, or - "

Maybe he stops her; maybe she stops herself, clamming up to raise her eyebrows, like, oh, too much too far too fast?

Nate

Oh she's teasing him. Hah hah. One can't turn back the clock and un-become old but at least in his analogy he's still just a 20-something young man whose hands don't shake even when he's terrified.

He knew that about himself once. Never had attention drawn to it because no Marine will admit to his hands shaking because no Marine will admit to being terrified. But the thing that draws attention to it hasn't happened yet.

Right now he's sitting in a library with a woman who so far as he can tell has no reason to have cleaved herself to him like this. Who he will tell a powerful undead shadow-monger is his friend but if anything were to happen to him she would forgive the shadow-monger. Because she did it once before. No ill will for draining Nathan so thoroughly the kid ought to have gone to the hospital.

Nathan has no perspective. Unlike the friend who dragged him into this mess Nathan does not want to have perspective. He wants to learn about confluences and vanishing points and how to tell what's worth photographing and what isn't. He wants to laugh at the idea of taking pictures of coffee mugs and dust motes hung in sunlight on lazy mornings and yet as he thinks of these things he thinks of all the things Lux can't see anymore.

So he stands. Gathers up his books. He has to check them out and put the camera back into his bag but then they're off to the light rail station. As unburdened and almost-happy as she's seen him since before the car crash. Nathan is still a young man.

"C'mon," he says. "I've got a phone on my camera. Show me how to take pictures of people on the train without pissing someone off."

The next time she sees him this night will seem like a distant dream.

Lux

[AND WRAP]