The Photographer
Henry at twelve years old cannot fail noticing that, unlike his brothers, he has no innate talent or aptitude; nor does he have, despite the assurances of his guidance counselor, “hidden potential.” He is bulky, he sweats through his shirts, he has a soft mouth and pale freckles, and his predilections are still those of a boy. He likes the growl and roar of motors, be they lawn mower motors or trailer truck motors—but he is incurious about mechanics. He admires robots and light sabers, and if he holds one theory, it’s that the universe is big enough to accommodate other life-bearing planets whose inhabitants will surely, one day, pay Earth a visit. Naturally he likes science fiction movies and superhero comics—but he does not draw, paint, write, play music, dance, calculate, rhyme, or philosophize. His brothers, not he, construct the narrative arcs of their play.
With Mark he has nothing in common. His older brother writes and directs one-act plays for the drama club at his high school. He is thin and anemic and secretive, and his plays, to Henry, are inscrutably abstract. “My characters are symbolic—you wouldn’t understand,” says Mark. His upper and lower lips hardly move when he talks, and he has a few dark wisps of hair growing along his cheekbones. At Henry’s age Mark built two speakers and a primitive subwoofer for his stereo, which he’d scrapped together from the unwanted receivers and tape decks their father brings home from the repair store, where he works six days a week. At night, in the room they share, Henry tries to fall asleep listening to music he doesn’t understand—ambient, baroque, operatic—while Mark, in the top bunk, reads.
Henry hears his parents talking about him.
“He just needs to … apply himself,” his mother says. “Do something.” It is late and she is washing dishes. Henry’s father dries with a towel and stacks the plates and bowls on the counter.
“Apply himself at what? He’s still a boy.”
“He’s almost thirteen.”
“So? There’s more to growing up than what they teach at school.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.”
In moments like these—more of them these days—it seems to Henry that his parents have developed a reptilian way of hissing at each other, as if their words are too private to be spoken aloud but too urgent to be postponed. Something is brewing. If they were closer, Henry would ask Mark about it, but Mark is busy building props for a collection of one-act plays he’s written for the drama club’s end-of-the-year theatre festival. And Henry’s younger brother, James, is is oblivious to everything but what he can draw on paper: mazes, three-dimensional houses, juggling clowns.
So the house hisses along all spring, and Henry struggles through the thicket of sixth grade—pre-algebra, health, gym, music, Spanish, a novel about an orphan who swims with dolphins, and it all blurs together with the mysterious anxiety at home, Mark’s sharp glances in his direction, his parents’ sibilant arguments, until finally June arrives and, one night at dinner, without preamble or fanfare, Henry’s mother announces that she is pregnant. The two words hang in the air as she bites down on a forkful of mashed potatoes doused in ketchup. The fork scrapes against her teeth when she draws it out, clean. She has nothing else to say.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” says Henry.
“It’s a surprise,” says Henry’s father. “But one thing’s for sure: we need a bigger house. We’re packed in here like sardines in a tin.”
It’s true: Henry cannot remember when he and Mark did not share a bedroom, and James sleeps in their parents’ room, in a cot that folds into the closet during the day.
That night, and every night after until the second week of July, Henry’s father sketches in a pad of graph paper. Henry sits on the couch next to him and stares at the pad, at the dark pencil marks that seem forced onto the page from somewhere behind his father’s frowning eyes. The tiny squares resolve into defined spaces: two large bedrooms, a second bathroom, a narrow attic. A staircase off the hallway. A long sloping roof. Henry asks questions: “What’s that arrow mean? Which way does the door open? How high are these steps? Where will the windows go?”
“Quiet, Henry,” his father murmurs.
By August his mother’s belly begins to swell, and most evenings she locks herself in the bedroom and cries. “Your mother hates change, that’s all,” his father says. On the weekends his father and Mark drive to the lumber yard. They bring home heavy bundles of lumber, piles of shingles, boxes of nails. Mark hovers between mopey indifference and clenched hostility: he hates loading and unloading the station wagon, sighs heavily whenever their father calls, disappears to the basement when the hammering begins. Henry tries, when he can, to take his older brother’s place. There are support beams to reinforce, insulation to remove, and Henry loves standing below his father, handing up nails, holding a piece of wood in place. Every time the hammer strikes a nail, Henry’s eyes blink; he cannot help it.
And then, when the inside work is finished, Henry’s father tears the roof off the house. This happens on a Monday morning, the first day of his father’s one-week vacation, and Henry misses the spectacle of demolition because he has, of all things, a physical. The junior high school requires it. His mother waits outside while he stands in the examining room, in his underwear, while a doctor with white hairs growing out of his nose examines his ears, throat, eyes, stomach. The doctor places a stethescope to Henry’s chest, listens, says, “Your right nipple is larger than your left. Have you noticed this?”
Henry clenches, shakes his head, although he has noticed.
“Well, it’s normal,” the doctor says. “You might find these days that parts of your body grow more quickly than other parts. It’s called puberty. It’s perfectly normal.”
Perfectly normal, thinks Henry, struggling not to squirm as he stands, mostly naked, in front of this strange gloved man. Henry thinks of how, one school morning, he taped his penis up against his body, so it pointed directly at his belly button—and how the tape ripped at his skin when he removed it in the bathroom, early that afternoon, to urinate. His jeans frequently feel too tight; there’s not enough room, and the friction of walking or even sitting, it seems, gives him an erection. At school he longs to untuck his shirt, just to cover himself, but his mother thinks this is sloppy, forbids it. “You don’t need to look like all the other boys,” she says. So: a few strips of Scotch tape to keep himself still, only it doesn’t work, and he can hear the tape crinkling when he sits, or stands, or walks down the hallway near other boys, noisier and more confident boys wearing baggy jeans, tee-shirts, hooded sweatshirts emblazoned with the names of rock bands or sports teams.
“Turn your head and cough,” the doctor intones, and Henry feels his testicles in the palm of the doctor’s hand. “Cough louder.”
Henry and his mother are silent on the ride home. Once she starts to say something about the junior high school he’ll be attending in the fall, but she sighs halfway through the first sentence and abandons whatever idea had prompted her to speak.
At home, Henry finds the backyard strewn with shingles, and his father stands up on the roof, or what’s left of it, pulling off planks of wood with the claw end of a hammer. Mark, poor Mark, is in the attic, or what used to be the attic, weakly hammering to push out the planks his father pulls. Michael, meanwhile, is forlornly dragging the shingles into piles. His brothers turn to glare at him, and though he works alongside them as hard as he can, late into the afternoon, they continue glaring. He’d been spared the morning’s work: it isn’t fair.
That night, to make amends, Henry asks Mark what he’s reading, and Mark’s answer at first is surly and dismissive. But then he says, “Each book you read, it’s another idea of how to be. Maybe you’re a man who travels a lot, meets a lot of people. Maybe you live in the woods and never see anyone. There are different ways to be a man, and I can’t learn about them from anything else.”
Henry thinks this over. “Dad’s a good man,” he offers.
Mark is quiet. “Maybe. But I can’t learn anything from him.”
“We’re going to have our own rooms, though. He’s building it up. Not everyone can do that.”
Mark doesn’t answer, and soon Henry hears the pages turning again.
It takes two days to remove the roof. Scraps of wood and nails fall everywhere—so many nails that Henry’s parents pay him ten cents for every bent and rusted nail he can find. But Henry has an idea. He saves some of the nails and hides some of the wood behind the shed, and one morning, while his father and Mark are out renting a hydraulic nail gun, Henry takes his father’s hammer and begins nailing together the scraps of wood. He doesn’t know what he’s building, but he doesn’t think it matters, any more than it matters that Mark’s plays are cryptic and strange, any more than it matters why his mother cries at night. He takes in his hands two pieces of wood, lines them up on the ground at an angle that seems proper, and drives the nail in. He does not blink. He builds up, clicking his tongue and asking no one in particular, “Now, where does this piece want to go?” Saying this feels dramatic and intuitive, a profound piece of monologue performed for himself. Soon the structure is taller than he is—it looms over him, ungainly, splintered, jagged with bent nails, spangled with torn grainy shingles, but there, constructed, a thing that has been made.
His mother hasn’t woken, and his father isn’t home, so Henry borrows his father’s 35mm camera and photographs the structure. He lies on the ground and shoots up, so its pinnacle pierces the sky; he climbs a ladder and shoots down, to capture the breadth of its foundation. He shoots close, then wide, then repeats all the shots in case he’s flubbed them the first time. At the end of the roll the camera automatically rewinds the film, which Henry removes. He carries the film inside and—because he still holds the notion, formed in childhood and uncorrected by instruction or experience, that a roll of film is actually a sophisticated transmitter that beams its images electronically, perhaps by satellite, to a lab somewhere, where they are printed and mailed home—he tosses it into the trash.
Henry’s mother and father admire the tower, or whatever it is: they smile and say that he’s been inspired, finally. It’s his mother who says “finally.” But later, clearing the table after dinner, his father finds the film in the trash. “What is this?” he asks, holding the roll up for inspection, and Henry explains: he took pictures, the camera sent them in, the film is used up. He has to explain this several times, and then his father just stares at him, and Mark stifles a guffaw, and even James seems to sneer. “The film inside this case, that’s where the pictures are,” says Henry’s father. “We’ll mail this, it’ll get developed, and they’ll mail it back to us.”
And that’s what they do. But the photographs, when they arrive, are black: Henry, it is discovered, never removed the lens cap. Meanwhile, Henry has had to take apart his tower and toss it piece by piece into a rented dumpster. But at night, waiting for Mark to turn out the light, Henry closes his eyes, and he can still see his tower, its angles, its asymmetrical patches, the way it towered and hummed, each piece in the right place. Then he can sleep.
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