Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
— “Imagine,” John Lennon (1940-1980)
POP!
FLASH!
Whrrrrr…
“Did you just take a picture of me?”
“Hmm?” He pulled the Polaroid photo from the front of his camera, and looked up at an indignant undergrad. She had one hand on her cocked hip, the other holding her book bag.
“You took a picture of me.” From his crouched position, her stern face looked like the judgement of an angry saint on the side of a Cathedral.
“No, I... I was looking through my viewfinder.” He pointed at his camera. “I didn't even know you were there until you said something.”
She cocked a skeptical eyebrow.
“I wouldn't even want to take a picture of you.”
She scrunching her face.
“No, not like... You—” he stammered, then regrouped, standing up and holding out a calming hand. Now he was six inches above her instead of eighteen inches below. “You're perfectly photogenic, but I'm doing an art project on urban decay.”
He gestured at the graffitied wall that ran beside the sidewalk. “I was waiting for the plane to pass just the right place. You know, compositionally.”
She looked up. There was no airplane in the sky.
“Well, yeah, it's not there now. It passed behind the building. But the contrails are still there.”
She looked up again and, sure enough, saw two parallel streaks of white leading beyond the edge of the building's roof. She softened slightly. “So you didn't take a picture of me?"
“Absolutely not.” He crossed his heart with the hand holding the Polaroid photo.
“Can I see it?” she asked, holding out her hand.
He flipped the photo around, revealing a black square inside a white frame. She furrowed her brow in confusion.
He smirked. “You've never seen a Polaroid before.”
“In, like, movies and stuff. How long does it take?”
“These used to be called ‘instant cameras,’ you know. Until everyone got a digital camera attached to their phone. Now five minutes seems like forever. Where are you going?”
She hesitated, but only momentarily. “The library.”
“I'll walk you over, and it'll be clear enough to see when we get to the steps.” He tucked the Polaroid into his rear jeans pocket, then smiled genuinely and held out his hand. “I'm Marcus.”
She returned his smile and took his hand. “Katee.”
Katee walked with the quick steps of someone used to having legs several inches shorter than most everyone else's. Marcus matched her pace, still only taking one step for every two of hers.
They exchanged the typical college banalities—What’s your major? Hers was literature; his, photography. What year? She was a sophomore; he, a junior. Which dorm? Birnkrant, off campus.
“Oh, you have a car?” Katee was always interested to meet students with cars.
“Not that far off campus. I had a bike. Like this guy…” They happened to be passing a bike rack in front of the dining hall. Marcus gestured at a single front wheel chained to it, the rest of the bicycle having been absconded with long ago.
Katee tsk’ed at the sight. “I'm sorry. That's got to be frustrating.”
“It was, at first.” He looked at the lonely wheel, remembering. “But then I thought, whoever it was probably put a lot of effort into stealing it. I couldn't ride off without a front tire, you know? He must've really needed it.”
“But it was yours,” she objected.
“Yeah, but I didn't need it. I was slightly inconvenienced, but it probably helped him a lot. So the total happiness in the world increased.” He squatted down to find the right angle of the bike wheel. “And besides, if he hadn't done that, I wouldn't have been walking today, and I wouldn't have met you.”
“So this is fate, then?”
Marcus shrugged, raised the camera to his eye.
POP!
FLASH!
Whrrrrr…
As the camera spit out the picture, Katee asked, “Are you, like, into retro stuff?”
“That's part of it, sure,” he said. “But it's more about... ephemerality.”
She gave him an inquisitive glance as they continued towards the middle of campus.
“It doesn't last—”
“I know what the word means.” She rolled her eyes and held up a giant tome: Great Works of English Literature. “What do you mean?”
“There's only one picture. That's it.”
“That seems more permanent than pixels on a screen.”
“Sure, but there is only one. There's no copy. If something happens to it, or I lose it, it's gone forever. And that will happen eventually. The chemicals will break down, the paper rots, whatever. Entropy. The sun expands to engulf the whole solar system, the galaxy spins apart, the heat death of the universe.”
“That's depressing.”
“No, it's not.” He smiled. “It’s freeing.”
She stopped. He looked up, and realized they were at the foot of the steps leading up to the university library. It was built in a brutalist style, all steel and concrete and sharp angles. It looked less like a temple of knowledge than a bomb shelter designed to keep safe the fragile paper inside.
After that conversation, to Katee, it looked futile.
To Marcus, it looked funny.
“Nothing we do lasts,” she asked, “does it?”
“There is nothing either good or bad...”
She smirked, and finished the line: “...but thinking makes it so.”
“Do you care what your grandparent did when they were your age? Your great grandparents? Some mud-farming ancestor in Mesopotamia? They weren't thinking about you. There's no such thing as forever. There's only now.”
Katee wasn't sure what to say to that, so instead she asked, “Can I see the picture?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, and dug into his front pocket. The colors were still developing, but Katee could plainly see the graffitied wall.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Burn it.”
She laughed. “Well, of course it's ephemeral if you burn it.”
“Most people who take pictures of old buildings, it’s to preserve them in some way. I photograph urban decay, and then I stand them up together as a new, structure.”
“Like a house of cards, but with Polaroids?”
“Exactly! Then, on the last night of the exhibition, I light it all on fire.”
Katee didn’t know what to make of that, so she just awkwardly handed the photo back to Marcus.
“Aren’t you going inside?” he asked.
“Seems kinda pointless, now.” She looked down at the photo, then up into his eyes. Dark blue, and lively, always looking, always seeing. No wonder he was a photographer. “Do you want to take a picture of me?”
He smiled. “Can I burn it, after?”
“I think it depends on the picture.”
Marcus took more than just one photo, of course. The makeshift studio he had setup in his apartment was both casual enough to be comfortable, and advanced enough to seem professional. Katee felt like she was in good hands, despite never having modeled before.
Soon, almost without her realizing it, she was literally in his good hands. It began with lightly brushing her hair away, or gently repositioning her elbow. He examined the light reflecting in her eyes so closely she could almost kiss him.
So she did.
He was as surprised by her forwardness as she was, and just as delighted. He pulled her in tight with one arm, and she wrapped hers around his waist.
POP!
FLASH!
Whrrrrr…
He had extended his other arm and snapped a selfie. Katee laughed despite herself.
“I couldn't resist,” he said sheepishly.
“Are you going to burn it after?” She grinned playfully as she sunk her hands into his rear pockets.
“Maybe.”
Her fingertips grazed something strange in his pocket, and her brow furrowed. It felt like a stiff, square card. Realizing it was a Polaroid picture, she slid it out of his pocket.
It was a picture of her, but not from this photo session. It was earlier in the day, when she was walking past the graffitied wall. The photo was taken from a low angle, and she was gazing past the camera obliviously. An airplane was flying just behind her, leaving contrails in its wake.
Katee suddenly remembered that the photo Marcus had shown her in front of the library didn't have any contrails.
She looked up to see his deep, dark eyes peering into her, observing her thought process as clearly as if it had been written on her face. “I wish you hadn't seen that.”
He raised his fist and her world went dark.
POP!
FLASH!
Whrrrrr…
Katee's eyes fluttered open. She tried to scream, but her mouth was taped shut. She tried to raise her hands, but they were tied at the wrists. She tried to sit up, but her body was strapped to a hard surface.
Her eyes darted wildly around the room. A garage, with fluorescent lights on the ceiling, and plastic sheeting covering the walls. Plastic sheeting!
She tried and failed to scream again.
Suddenly, Marcus popped into her view.
“Man, I am so sorry about this,” he said. And meant it. That was the worst part—that he meant it. “Normally, normally, I don't move this quick. I like to take time with projects, develop them. This is a little too instant, you know?”
He waved the black Polaroid in front of her face, then backed away. A wire was strung across the width of the garage, pictures clipped to it by metal clothes pins. Marcus pinched one open and slipped the developing photo into its teeth.
“Listen, I know you're scared. But I want to assure you, as much as it's going to hurt you, I'm going to enjoy it much, much more. So you see, the total pleasure in the world will increase. Isn't that what's really important?”
Each one of the hanging pictures was of a woman screaming in agony. Many of them were bloodied or bruised, missing teeth, missing eyes…
“Remember, on a long enough time line, we're all going to die. You're just a little ahead of the curve. In a hundred years, no one will remember how much pain you suffered before you died. Nothing we do lasts. Everything’s ephemeral.”