His upbringing had been one of the worst Rachel had heard of—one of those chain-up situations, deep in Gulf County, Florida. Imagine getting shackled to your double-wide all night as a punishment for who knows what, while Mom is who knows where. Now imagine a croc climbing in through a busted screen door. You don’t come out of that intact even if you do keep all your limbs.
Fast forward a shattered lifetime and Daniel Ferrey, or DF as she referred to him for privacy, had wound up in supportive housing both HIV and Hep C positive and therefore, as allowed by certain funding streams which authorize extra support, her client. Since she was fresh out of college five years ago, she’d been a Care Navigator, which meant finding ways to bring the most traumatized go-it-aloners out there, housed and unhoused alike, into at least an oblique management of their healthcare needs. What she saw over and over were people burdened with so many wounds, all of which required multipronged approaches to care and healing, that they’ve been totally functionally overwhelmed.
Like a hammer sees everything as a nail, that kind of pain sees everything as potential medicine; all you want is some sort of Band-Aid. Daniel had tried every Band-Aid known to pharmacological man, but at some point crack cocaine became his everything.
“He’s dying,” his doctor said with a matter-of-factness that was almost comforting. “Of course, his COPD hasn’t gone anywhere, but now his liver and kidneys are failing.”
Rachel already had a row of urns on a shelf in her apartment, which she knew was a bit macabre but felt quite beautiful to her. Her boyfriend Adam didn’t voice his problem with them until one night a few months after he’d moved
in when he told her how lonely they made him, especially when she worked late and he was hungry for dinner, and maybe she could put them away in the closet. She had to admit, those oblong ceramic vessels were essentially effigies of human loneliness, but it was for that reason, she argued, that they needed to be part of her habitat along with her African violets and her ferns all vying for light near her rattling single-panes. Adam’s passion was photography, yet he’d basically stopped not long after they met. Still, he squeezed more than a dozen of his black-and-whites on her walls—architectural shots and super close-up nudes which, tipped at odd angles, often resembled landscapes.
“Aren’t these kind of like urns too,” she said, pointing their direction, “of moments you can’t get back?” She meant it in the best possible way—plus, they’d talked about Barthes’s Camera Lucida and the idea that photographs are a kind of temporal hallucination, offering a testament to the past and, at the same time, what he called an “imperious sign” of future death.
But Adam’s pout didn’t deflate until she’d promised to try and be home at a reasonable hour, even though part of her quietly felt that as long as she didn’t have kids she shouldn’t have to conform to such a tight schedule as he was demanding. In this way, he’d started to resemble a kid himself and she didn’t care for that one bit.
Thus, an unhealthy pattern commenced with her trying to get home early but often screwing the pooch. And now Daniel was dying at home, which was top of the list in his advance directive, but there was no funding stream she could find which authorized 24-hr home care. A hospice nurse could come by once a day. He needed more.
Why did she put herself in this impossible position? Sure, she’d lost her mother young, but a lot of people had. It just happened so fast: brain aneurysm at fifty-one. She’d always thought, if only we had a little more time at the end.
So a little more time is what she gave—to people like Daniel with Adam home waiting.
“But hospice isn’t really your job, is it?” he barked when she got back one night. “Well, this guy doesn’t have anyone else.”
“Or do you just want another urn?”
Adam was hungry and crabby so she gave him a pass and they ordered Chinese. Also, she realized that none of her clients were real to him in the slightest. So, over Kung Pao chicken, she caved and shared Daniel’s life story, including his lengthy incarceration for drugs. Again, she tried to explain her theory of pain—how for some people it can be so debilitating that even a ten- minute Band-Aid is a gift—but it fell on deaf ears. Adam was gripped by Daniel’s trouble with the law.
“Can I take Daniel’s picture?” Adam asked the next morning.
If he hadn’t been creatively blocked for so long, she might’ve refused. Plus, he’d never been a portrait photographer. Still, she said she’d ask.
A few evenings later it was arranged. Daniel had seemed flattered. But clearly he wanted to size Adam up as much as Adam wanted to him.
Upon meeting her at a bus stop after work, Adam started taking pictures right away, first of the dusky street, then of her walking, then of the moon as it rose. The moon had a ghostly ring of light around it, what Adam called the twenty-two-degree halo. It was a phenomenon, he said, having to do with the refraction of light through a medium, specifically ice crystals high in the atmosphere. He’d done a whole series on them, which sounded ethereal and exquisite until he said they always reminded him of a big tit in the sky with a bright silver nipple.
As they crowded into Daniel’s little SRO hotel room, Rachel could feel Daniel’s embarrassment at what amounted to his life while she cleared his only chair of the mountain of old clothes. Adam, for his part, couldn’t dress down if he tried; every garment was like the sleek skin of an underwater creature. Even his jeans were elastic and fitted. Daniel’s, by contrast, were about six sizes too big with ramen stuck to the crotch. Rachel felt the walls closing in.
“You got yourself a gem, brother,” Daniel said after introductions. His lack of teeth didn’t make it hard to understand him as long as you gave him your full attention. But Adam seldom gave people his full attention.
“Don’t I know it.” Adam surprised her with an unfamiliar twang, as if he hadn’t grown up with smiling waspy parents on a private golf course.
“I call her my black-booted angel.” Daniel grinned with the drapery of lips unbothered by the nuisance of incisors.
Rachel peeked down like maybe she’d worn something other than her Doc Martens, then she turned to Adam to move things along. “So where were you thinking of doing the photos?”
“Uh well, I guess there on the bed is good,” Adam said.
Daniel had sat back down on his twin mattress. “I ain’t showing you my junk, if that’s what you’re anglin.” He gave a big guffaw that had within it a note of condescension about artsy guys like Adam, but Adam had focused on his camera settings.
“This is because I’m dying, isn’t it?” Daniel added.
Rachel searched for a way to respond, but Adam was quicker. “Has anyone taken your portrait before?”
“Nah. Not centerfolds anyway.” He gave a smaller laugh and also a twinkling smile which Adam captured, Rachel hoped, hearing his camera’s shutter click for the first time and then in rapid succession.
Adam navigated that whole interaction well enough, but that night he got melancholy drunk and started hypothesizing how his final days might look. Also, it puffed up his photographer ego a taxing amount—acting like he was the next Diane Arbus shooting folks around the tents down the block. “You have to ask, at least,” she told him.
The other thing was that he developed, she felt, an unwarranted license to keep tabs on Daniel. It turned out the whole privacy thing didn’t just protect clients, it shielded her from prying by people so apparently unfamiliar with the concept of death. She knew she shouldn’t blame Adam for not having been exposed to much death before, but did he have to handle it like a boy handles his first car?
That Saturday night he went out with his guy friends and came back horny. But after he went down on her for all of five seconds, with her already in bed, he said something about wanting her to turn on her stomach and pretend she was dead. “I’m sorry, I’m kind of sleeping, here,” she managed, pulling away and rolling into a ball. “Maybe tomorrow?”
He stood without a word and went to his camera on the table, then, still semi-erect, started snapping shots around the room. A few minutes later, he must’ve thought she was asleep and tried to peel off her covers, but she held tight. Clearly some process had begun in him, but it was one she had little interest in being the artistic subject of.
Thus, regrettably, what she’d always thought would be a beautiful thing to watch when it did one day enter full bloom, Adam’s creativity turned out to be ghoulishly voyeuristic and altogether dehumanizing. One of his favorite quotes was from this poet who said that aesthetic awareness was the highest form of human awareness there could be. She knew the poet meant well—he was part of the diaspora from one ugly American war or another—but through the distorting lens of someone like Adam, it justified the exclusion of awareness of just about everything else.
Two mornings later, Adam said he wanted to do a night shoot on the street. “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful,” he said.
She wasn’t worried, and she didn’t object. Plus, it freed her up to check on Daniel.
That evening, Daniel was going through a very different process. There were wet pants on the floor which he’d peed through, and he was in the robe she’d snagged from the clothes pantry. He was dejected.
“Want something to eat?” She pulled a yogurt from his fridge. Now that he’d ditched his poorly fitting dentures, the menu was small, and the list of things that perked him up even smaller. “Or I can get you ice cream?”
He shook his head with a pained swallow. He hadn’t complained much about the discomfort he was in, but she knew it was there. So she sat on the bed beside him and they watched American Pickers on his TV. He’d never been a touchy feely sort of guy, but that evening he reached out and held her hand.
When she woke up, she saw him sprawled out and wheezing on the floor. “I didn’t want to wake you,” he croaked, pointing to the bathroom. “Could you help me?”
Afterwards, she checked her phone and saw the time: 2:03 a.m. And twelve missed calls.
“I’ve got to go home, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Tomorrow came too quickly and everything was too bright. She hadn’t slept much because of how upset Adam was. But when she realized he’d been out until 1:45 a.m. without texting her either, she looked at her phone and confirmed that all of his calls had come between 1:45 a.m. and 2 a.m. She put a stop to his harassment then and there. He slept on the couch—near the shelf with the urns. Around lunch, Daniel’s once-a-day hospice nurse called. Daniel wasn’t eating and his pulse was erratic. She’d put him in an adult diaper. Morphine might be soon.
All afternoon Rachel dealt with other appointments, other emergencies, before she could get to his place. This time she brought soft serves in cups. Daniel was propped up on special pillows the nurse had brought, but his breathing was congested. They call it air hunger.
She held out a spoonful. He liked that; the taste as much as the cold. But he didn’t swallow. She held more to his lips until both of theirs melted.
Adam texted a little while later, first with an apology for overreacting the night before, then with a where-are-you? She didn’t reply. So he started calling again and again. She took the fourth call out in the hall.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, even though she was well out of earshot. “Daniel’s getting close.” That last word was supposed to trigger Adam into empathy and support and most important: space.
Silencing her phone, she went back in. She hadn’t yet had to do for Daniel any of those most intense tasks of assisting the dying, like sponge baths and treating bed sores, but now she smelled he needed to be changed.
Afterwards, he stared at the wall and wouldn’t look her way. She microwaved one of his Cup-O-Noodles for her dinner, but he got mad. The smell was too much.
She took it out to the hall to eat, feeling bad about that. But when she came back inside he was smiling through tears. “I thought you left,” he said.
Thinking of his mother leaving him chained up way back when, she lay beside him and held his hand again until he fell asleep with his peaceful unshaven face full of acne scars on her shoulder. She didn’t care if it was crossing some line to be cuddling with him like this. She didn’t care one bit.
Eventually she dozed too, and right away she saw her own mother. “Don’t worry,” her mom said, holding her head in her hands. “I just need a nap.” But the bed she walked toward was made of ice shot through with cracks.
“Don’t!” Rachel shouted herself awake. Luckily, Daniel was in a deep sleep. She got up, leaving the remote and his phone within reach, then checked her own phone. Twenty missed calls.
Down the rickety elevator, she looked forward to some cool night air. It’d been years since she’d dreamt of her mother’s final hours.
When she got to the street, after the desk person gave her an odd look, she breathed in a massive gulp. She probably should’ve called a Lyft, but she didn’t want to wait. There were only a couple of sketchy blocks to push through before getting to the well-lit ones with regular buses.
Except someone was walking up behind her. Her heart went about as sideways as Daniel’s.
But it was Adam. His face was bloody. “God,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I got robbed.” He was breathless, almost laughing. “I got fucking robbed.” Then he pointed back toward Daniel’s building, his jacket torn at the shoulder. “I tried to come in, but the lady wouldn’t let me.”
“They took your camera?”
He nodded. She saw his knee was skinned too. Here on the street, he almost looked like he could be one of her clients. But she didn’t go to him. Now his body began to tremble; his whole being was charged with this wild energy.
Suddenly it struck her that Care Navigator was also what, for about a year now, she’d been to him—and really it was the last thing he needed. He might not see it yet, but this could be the most alive he’d ever been. If she let him sit with it, to see and feel the world around him through the refracting medium of this alien pain, he might yet become an artist.
“Okay listen, make sure to clean the cuts really well,” she said, steadying her voice. “And remember, the Band-Aids are in the kitchen drawer on the left.”
“What?”
“Daniel needs someone right now. I was just getting some fresh air.” Then she found Adam’s eyes. “I’m sorry but this isn’t working. And I need a couple weeks here, at least.” She exaggerated how long it might take with Daniel so that Adam got the point.
She turned back toward the building she’d come from, hearing Adam launch a whingeing fuck you then let out a sad caterwaul. But she lowered her head and pushed her hands into her jacket pockets for forward thrust. She knew it was over between them, but their work had only just begun.
A moment later, she was opening the door when she noticed something high above. It was another hazier version of that twenty-two-degree halo around the moon.
In the ensuing years there won’t be a time when she’ll see such a phenomenon and not think of Adam—how young they were, both out of their depths in their own ways—but it won’t strike her as laugh-out-loud funny until almost two decades later on an evening walk with her husband. When he gives her a puzzled look, she’ll ask: “What does that up there look like to you?”
“Um, the moon with a ring around it?”
“It doesn’t look like a big tit in the sky with a bright silver nipple?” “Well, now that you say so,” he’ll grin.
Before bed that night she’ll find a minute to look Adam up and discover that, to her surprise, he’d gone down the route of photojournalist, taking pictures of people in some of the most harrowing situations she can imagine. His website will include tabs like: Darfur Genocide, Ivory Coast Gold Mines, Syria Civil War, and Haiti Earthquake. At first she’ll question whether he’d merely swapped the super close-up nudes for super close-up suffering, but his portraits seem to be more about the human at the center—their spirit more than their circumstances. As her mind will reel that such work could possibly come from Adam, her husband will lean over and ask what she’s looking at. But she’ll already be up, beelining to Daniel’s urn on her now quite crowded shelves in their sunny cottage skirting the city. And there it’ll be, Adam’s portrait, the first of its kind he’d taken. Carefully, she’ll lift the curling print out of the coarse gray ash to see Daniel still smiling through a fine layer of his own dust. It will occur to her then that maybe whenever we smile for pictures, we smile with the knowledge, whether we want to admit it or not, that they will outlast us. Daniel’s last big smile for the camera was like that, a phenomenon comparable in brightness to that twenty- two-degree halo, and as transfixing, but also a way to say that whatever life of blunted pain he might’ve lived, that pain wouldn’t get the last word. He would.
Raised in Oakland, California, J.Z. Wyckoff has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. His work has appeared in the Hong Kong Review, the Santa Clara Review, Underwood Lit, Art Practical, and elsewhere. He was also an editor for Voice of Witness, a book series amplifying unheard voices from around the world. By day he is a paintings and sculpture conservator in private practice and has two young children. https://www.jzwyckoff.com