Safelight Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Acknowledgments

  SAFELIGHT

  A Conversation with Shannon Burke

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song.

  OSCAR WILDE

  Compassion is perhaps the chief and only law of human existence.

  FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

  Praise for SAFELIGHT

  “Shannon Burke’s accomplished and haunting debut is a minimalist tour de force. . . . Safelight tells a surprisingly potent story.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A powerfully visual, oddly intimate experience . . . with cinematic, unflinching clarity . . . [Burke] has made brilliant metaphoric use of the photographic medium . . . to reveal the strange, healing beauty that can be found at the heart of ugliness and despair.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Pitch-perfect dialogue and [a] feel for male camaraderie give [ Safelight] an electric charge. . . . Burke’s evocation of a murky world, where savior and sinner come in one macho package . . . makes this an exhilarating standout.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (Best Books of 2004)

  “Edgy and hip . . . fast-paced.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “Burke is a deft writer. . . . Vivid dialogue and sharply rendered street scenes keep the pages turning.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Burke’s remarkable debut, which will arrest readers from the first paragraph, is direct, crisp, and cinematic, its prose matching the unadorned and chilled landscape in which the story takes place. Even with its minimalist quality, the novel manages to move the reader with unexpected swells of feeling.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “[A] dark, tender debut . . . Burke’s spare prose and sharp eye for the beauty in urban misery make this a moving tale of lost souls searching for permanence in a chaotic world.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Safelight, Shannon Burke’s novel of paramedics and violent death in New York’s tougher quarters, is provoking and disturbing. How could it be otherwise? What is startling and unexpected, however, is that despite the unblinking, bloodstained photorealism of its reportage, Safelight is above all a work of nerveless intelligence, disarming tenderness, and hard-won optimism.”

  —JIM CRACE

  “A powerful, hypnotic, and strangely beautiful vision of hell on earth. Burke’s voice floats out over our hemisphere amid the distinctive strains of Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, and Frederick Exley. But in the end, his frequency is all his own. A fearless debut.”

  — GARY SHTEYNGART

  “There is a dark side in all of us and Shannon Burke is not afraid of it. In Safelight, he explores our all-too-human instincts without pity, condescension, or romance. He creates characters who are real, who feel, and who make us feel—and he does so with formidable grace. This book will make you cry. But it will be worth it.”

  — ALLISON GLOCK

  “Burke immerses the reader in the urgent world of emergency medicine. Using photography sometimes as his weapon, sometimes as his moral eye, paramedic Frank Verbeckas explores the blurred lines between victim and victimizer, the criminal and the cop, as well as his own difficult past. Safelight is a stunning debut novel about what it is to be human, to feel.”

  —A. M. HOMES

  1

  She came into view at the top of the stairway and motioned to hurry us. Burnett, who wasn’t going to hurry for anyone, kept climbing at the same indolent pace. We found her on the third floor in an open doorway. Beyond her, an empty room—white walls, folded canvas tarps, a dried roller, stacked cans. I smelled paint.

  “We here for you?” Burnett asked.

  “No. Him,” she said.

  She shifted her eyes toward a shut door at the end of the newly painted white room. Burnett walked past her.

  “Locked,” she said. “It’s locked.”

  Burnett tried the knob, put his shoulder into it, then stepped back.

  “What caliber?”

  “I don’t know. Like this . . .”

  She showed the length of the gun with two hands.

  “Whatta you think?” he asked. “He ever tried before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You see him load it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, this is stupid. Don’t go near the door.”

  That was it for Burnett. He walked to the end of the hallway, jerked the window open, and felt for cigarettes. She leaned against the doorframe and watched him sullenly. I thought I ought to say something.

  “It’s not our job,” I said. “Some barricaded patient. What’re we gonna do?” Then, “You’re his girlfriend?”

  “I hardly know him. I’m part of his group.”

  “Group?”

  “I’m positive,” she said.

  I didn’t understand what she meant. Then I did.

  She looked as if she was just out of college. Brown hair partway down her back, olive skin, a navy pullover sweatshirt with dangling white cords coming out of brass sealed eyelets. With her shy demeanor, thin, nervous mouth, big eyes, and scrawny body, she wasn’t particularly attractive. The dispatched report said her name was Emily Pascal.
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  “What’s his count?”

  “Ten. So he’s got nothing to lose,” she said.

  We could hear sirens, far away at first, then closer. Down the hallway, Burnett stood with two hands on the windowsill. Emily Pascal leaned off the doorframe.

  “Don’t go in there,” I said.

  “I just want to check,” she said. “Before the cops. Maybe he’ll go willingly.”

  She started into the apartment, into the newly painted room. I reached out as if to restrain her but she gave me a sharp look.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  I pulled my hands away. Burnett glanced over, bored.

  “Don’t let her in, Frank.”

  But she’d already gone in. Then two things happened, one right after the other. The sirens outside the window wound down and stopped and in the sudden, unexpected silence afterward there was a loud pop from the inner room. I heard something fall.

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” Burnett said.

  He tossed his cigarette out the window and started back, not hurrying at all. He joined me in the doorway. The girl, Emily Pascal, now lay on her side, making little moaning noises. Her right leg was out straight, but her left leg was bent, and around the left knee I saw a hole in her jeans about the size of a pea. Around that hole there was a growing purplish stain.

  2

  Burnett stepped directly over the girl and walked to the door. Ran his finger around a little hole. Put his eye to it.

  “This’s just too perfect,” he said. “This’s six months of day care. This’s French class for toddlers.” He knocked on the shut door of the second room. “You got’m?”

  I said I did.

  I tried the knob and was surprised when it turned. The guy must have unlocked it just before he shot himself. A surprisingly considerate last gesture. The door opened inward, then came up against something solid—his head. I peered around to see his body at an angle and his arm to the side. The kid had fired with his left hand into the left side of his forehead. The entrance, which was only a small hole, was almost hidden in his hairline. The exit wound, at the back of his head, was about the size of a child’s fist. On the inner surface of the door there was a splash of blood mixed with bone. I knew I only had a minute, so I couldn’t waste any time. I locked the door, took a camera from my breast pocket, and began taking pictures. Of his slumped body. Of his head. Of his face. Of his blank eyes. Of the entrance wound. The exit. The left hand that still gripped the .38 loosely. The brilliant splash on the newly painted white door. I heard the cops in the front room. I took a close-up of the gun as one of the cops tried the knob. I unlocked the door, put the camera away, and was feeling for a pulse when one cop stuck his head in. Then they all came in, three of them—officious, gruff. One, two, three, they stepped over the oblong puddle. One murmured something, a joke I didn’t hear. Another had a notepad and was writing with particular intentness. I gave the time of pronouncement and stepped into that front room where the girl lay on her back, keeping herself very still, hissing when Burnett got close to her leg. The bullet had entered just below the kneecap and deflected downward, never going more than a quarter-inch beneath the surface of the skin. As I entered, Burnett said, “Where’d he take it?”

  “Left temporal.”

  “DOA?”

  I said it was. Burnett had cut the girl’s pants to the thigh. He looked down at the wound, which he had not bandaged.

  “I left this.”

  “Now?” I asked.

  I could hear the cops talking on the other side of the door.

  “Aw, they don’t give a fuck,” he said.

  I took eight or nine photographs of the girl: a close-up of the entrance wound just below the kneecap, a closer shot of the bullet visible as a lump beneath the skin, a bullet hole in the door, a long shot with Burnett kneeling next to her and some paint cans stacked in the corner. In all of these photographs Emily Pascal looked bewildered. You couldn’t really blame her for that. Five minutes before we’d been talking idly, waiting for the police to arrive. Now her friend was dead, she was shot in the shin, and a paramedic was hovering over her eagerly, taking pictures.

  3

  It wasn’t cold out or anything. Just a little cool. A brisk fall dusk. People lingering around the park. Others walking through. I moved on to Sixth Avenue and the basketball courts. Kids with fingers latched in chainlinks, waiting for a game. I wandered past the derelicts in the subway station, then back to the square, and sat against a wall near a guy in a wheelchair. He wore a green cap and had gray hair sticking out. A sign hung on one of the wheels read: DIABETIC HOMELESS. The top of the sign had two holes with masking-tape grommets and was looped to the wheel by gray shoestring. The guy shook his can at people going by. After a minute he turned on me, annoyed.

  “Whatta you want?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, you’re sittin there staring—it’s buggin me.” He shook his can again. “It’s gotta be somethin. What is it?”

  “I want a picture.”

  “Aw fuck,” he said. “A picture of the cripple.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “The fuckin cripple,” he said.

  “I take pictures of everyone. It’s not a big deal,” I said.

  “Gimme a dollar.”

  I gave him a dollar. He looked at the bill, surprised, then shoved it in his can. His attitude switched from annoyance to imperiousness. He took an old plastic bottle from a cotton sack that closed with a red drawstring. A mouthful of water sloshed at the bottom of the bottle.

  “Fill this,” he demanded.

  There was a water fountain across the street, but it had been turned off for the winter. I walked over to the bathroom at the south end of the park and rinsed the lid, which was crusted with yellowish debris. I filled the bottle with cold water, then brought it back. Without looking at it he stuck the bottle between his legs.

  “So what you waitin for?” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “Kid asks am I sure.”

  I began taking photographs. At first he looked stern. Then he smiled in a blissful, phony way, making fun of me. Then he turned to the side, sick of it, and that was the shot I wanted. When I finished I sat and rewound the film. He pretended to ignore me, but he wasn’t angry anymore. He seemed interested.

  “So what else?” he said.

  “What do you mean what else?”

  “You’re still sittin there. You want something else.”

  “Can I ask a question?”

  “Oh, now there’s questions.”

  “To write beneath the picture. To say who you are.”

  “I’m Stump. Call me Stump.”

  “Stump.”

  “That’s what they call me. At the shelter,” he added.

  “That’s not too nice.”

  “Yeah, well, you ever been in the shelter?”

  I went on and asked which shelter and how old he was and how long he’d been there and why he was in a wheelchair and he answered each question brusquely. I asked him what he did with his free time and he looked at me.

  “I mean besides this.”

  He just looked away. I could see he’d had enough of me.

  “I’ll bring you a copy,” I said.

  “I don’t give a fuck.”

  I put my notebook in my back pocket and shook his hand. As I left he yelled, “You sell that, you make any money off that, you bring me somethin.”

  I took a last shot of him against the wall. Then I kept walking.

  4

  I peered through the little square window. They were all hunched together in the blue surgical scrubs, heads down, hands working. A nurse saw me and one of the men in scrubs turned. He had a mask on but I could tell it was Norman. He motioned with his eyes, and I left the window, walked back down, and waited in the courtyard. Twenty minutes later he came out in just the scrubs, arms bare, pretending he wasn’t cold. He was a big guy, with an authoritarian air. The most
ordinary sentences came out with a tone of accusation. Basically, he looked like a thug, and had a grating, unpleasant personality.

  “I haven’t seen you,” he said, leaning against the bench.

  “I’m right across the street. I haven’t seen you, either.”

  There were three nurses at a picnic table in the corner— I watched them talking with one another, laughing.

  “So you got it?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t’ve bothered coming if I didn’t.”

  He placed a roll of film on the table. When he was younger he’d gotten in a lot of fights. He didn’t yell or make threats when he was angry, but his posture stiffened, and you could see the muscle on the side of his face near his jaw. An aggressive lowering of the head. The three nurses stood, cleaning their table. One of them looked at Norman, then looked away quickly. I could tell she did not like him.

  “You been sleeping?” he said.

  “Yeah yeah.”

  “Cause you look like shit,” he said, and I just took the canister off the table and turned it over in my fingers. The expiration date was October 3, 1987. It had been three years.

  “Don’t freak out,” Norman said.

  “Who’s the one freaking out?”

  “Gotta be me,” he said, and I didn’t say anything to that. I put the canister in my pocket, and he stepped from the table.

  “I only had a minute,” he said.

  Without shaking my hand he went back inside, and I sat there watching an older guy with a facial droop fumbling with the door. He tried to get the latch three or four times and then finally he lurched out, dragging the right foot. I took a shot of him, of his reflection in the dark glass, and then of birds going by in the reflection, crossing him. I put my camera away and went downstairs and locked myself in a bathroom. I turned off all the lights and sat on the tiles against the cool, porcelain wall. I felt better there, hidden in the dark. The eerie underground sounds of the hospital amplified, multiplied, overlapped, and I sat in the dark, very quiet and still, listening. After fifteen minutes I let myself out, walked to the locker room, and changed into my work clothes. It was exactly five o’clock.

  5

  Gil Hock, slender, unshaven, and pigeon-toed, with a wide nose and a little brown mustache, stood in the hospital loading bay in his Station Eighteen medic jacket, holding the photograph of the dead kid into the fading light. He studied the print, and then returned it with a sort of deprecation.