Animals

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—No blunt-force trauma?

—No …

—Have you drawn it?

Funny that it never occurred to me to draw it. That I used the pen to poke rather than draw. That what you would have thought of as my natural instinct had been somehow redirected towards touch.

—Eh, no. No. I don’t have a sketchbook. Or a … I have a sketchbook. I don’t have a pen.

—Well, have you got your camera?

—Yes.

—Then take a photo.

—Why?

—What do you mean, why? You’re transfixed by it. Record it. You might use it for something.

—I’m not transfixed by it.

—Yes you are. You’ve called me up to tell me you’re standing in the street staring at a dead mouse and you’ve gone all metaphysical. Of course you’re transfixed. Now take a photograph of it and go and have lunch with Michael. You’ll be late.

The truth was that I didn’t want to take its photograph. It didn’t seem right. But I couldn’t say that to K, who would have laughed.

—All right.

—All right. Call me again later. Minus dead things ideally. OK?

—Yeah. OK. Sorry.

—I love you.

—I love you too.

I didn’t want to take a photograph. His photograph. Something about the scene was irreducible. To take out my camera and point and click would be an act of censorship. I would be editing out the noise of the traffic, the voices, the shuffle of feet on the pavement, the high rumble of the airplanes, the sound of the world as it is. I would be editing out the spring confusion of a clear fresh day and exhaust fumes; the low lumpen scent of the burger bar at my back; the ineffable musk of the city, never mind of the mouse itself. I would also be editing out my own reaction to this scene, which was, now that I had talked to K, beginning to strike me as immensely strange. I would be editing out the sadness. I would be reduced, I knew it even then, to showing a photograph of a dead mouse to the people I love, in an attempted explanation. For all of this blurred impossible. This life.

To say it even now sounds ridiculous.

But K had told me what to do. Not to do it would mean having to explain not doing it. I couldn’t quite grasp the explanation for taking a picture or the explanation for not taking one. Perhaps they were the same explanation, differently sized. Proportionate. But proportionate to what? To what they explained, or to our capacity for explanations like that? Maybe it’s better to reduce. To short-circuit the direct experience, to minimise memory’s chances of messing things up. If I had a photograph, maybe I would only have a photograph. A picture of a dead mouse. What could be simpler, smaller, more stupid, less significant? Really, it was nothing.

I took out my camera. There was an amount of fumbling. Doing this always makes me feel like a tourist, like a visitor here. It is one of those cheap but clever digital cameras – it looks like a toy. The size of it is supposed to make it compact, discreet, easy, but it seems to me always awkward, unwieldy, and I feel I’m forever on the verge of dropping it. It has a bag that is not really a bag at all, more a jacket, an overcoat, which has to be taken off, the Velcro ripped and then the thing itself slipped out, balancing it in one hand, and the so-called bag in the other, and then the lens cap, which is just badly designed, and is attached to the body of the camera by a silver string, and all of this is important because it was distracting me, it was shifting my mind two thoughts away from where it was properly supposed to be. I put the camera around my neck. Hung it there. I think I still held the cover in my hands. I think my shoulder bag was hanging from my shoulder. Not what you’d call the relaxed demeanour of a regular photographer. I sorted it out somehow. Maybe I clenched the cover between my knees, or under my elbow. Maybe I put my bag at my feet. Somehow. All of my accessories, arranged and disassembled. I switched on the camera, heard its reassuring mechanical whirring and its patter of soft beeps. I raised it to my eye. I looked through the viewfinder. There was the mouse. I zoomed a little, let it focus, snapped. Did the mouse flinch? I looked at it naturally again, the camera lowered. I didn’t think so. But I seemed to be involved in something oddly resuscitative. I felt like a television doctor. I mouthed clear as I focused again, and felt the electricity, the shock of the exposure, travel the air between the mouse and me.

The pen made it look like I had staged it, that I had put the pen down there to give the whole thing some scale. I took four photographs of the dead mouse beside the pen before I reached down, gingerly picked up the smeared pen, moved it, put it somewhere else, and took another seven photographs. That is all I can say that I remember. That I put the pen somewhere else. There I am, crouching in the street with a camera, documenting the death of a mouse, with my bag and the camera cover and my coat all getting in the way, and the badly designed lens cap swinging this and that way, and I picked up the pen because it made the scene look staged, and I put it somewhere else. I put the pen somewhere else. Even now, especially now, after all that has happened since, I find it hard to believe that my mind was so deflected, so absent, that I put the pen, the pen that had poked the mouse, the pen that had touched death – the death-stained pen – into my bag. But that, it seems, is exactly what I did.

Seven or eight more photographs. I think. About that. I took them as simply as I could, framing the dead mouse against the grey of the road, against the scattered blotches of faded yellow paint that went to form a double line. They look so clear, so solid, from a distance – those yellow lines. Up close though, they’re ruined. I filled the frame with the dead mouse. Then I zoomed out to lend more context. In one of the shots you can see the tip of my left shoe. Then I zoomed in as close as I could on the face, the claws, the limbs, the tail, the head, the snout, the eyes, the feet, the mouth, the whiskers. I documented fully the mouse in death. Perhaps it was by way of a compromise between my fear of strong memory and its associations – and my knowledge that the photograph subverts and undermines such memories. I wanted, I think, the least bad thing. The possibility of appropriate placement, of getting everything in perspective, eventually. That’s probably how we live.

Look at me. I met a dead mouse in the street. I stared at it. I prodded it with my pen. I called K. I photographed the mouse. I stared at it a little more. I glanced at my watch, and my shoulders rose and fell, and I went and had lunch with Michael.

Afterwards, after lunch, I passed that way again. I looked carefully, and in several places in case I was mistaken, but the mouse was gone.

That was it. That was how it started.