When my cat, Bunny, died of a seizure, I wanted a way to preserve her image. She had helped me escape my loneliness during Chicago’s imitation of fall, my hand deep in her snowy fur, its black and orange tufts akin to monarch wings, shards fragmenting her small back. Fuzzy with sleep, I would awaken to her chewing the ends of my hair. From my studio by Lake Michigan, I watched as the drifts fell down unceasingly, thick piles atop cars, as though the entire world were on tilt. We were no more than shades in the cold daylight. Every evening, I would write, the words blurring together, her accompanying me like a sentinel.
At the Green Room, where I learned to sing, I sat by the bar and told a new friend what Bunny had meant to me, living at home with my mother for the pandemic, running home from my New York City dream with my tail between my legs. How I had taken a photograph of Bunny’s body in her space bubble carrier; how my boyfriend at the time had witnessed my lack of grief and seemed both frightened and disturbed by it.
Truth to be told, I thought of Bunny often, of the bookmark the cremation service sent me about pet heaven, tucked between my readings of Coetzee on veganism. I thought about her miniature preserved paw print in river-bottom clay, the 35mm photographs I had made on my Leica, purchased with a red envelope from my grandfather that was intended for graduate school.
As she did in life, Bunny reappears in these scenes like a prima ballerina, leaping across the film grain in gestural motion, sentience stilled for a fraction of a second. My mother couldn’t bear to look at photographs of her. As the mourning hour ended, I set to fill my negative sleeves with a new sightline. This one, not mired so much in finality as release.
That’s a really nice camera, I said as John, my good-humored camera shop owner, tapped away at his computer. I straightened up from gazing at a Rolleiflex, housed in a rectilinear case of metal and glass, an Olympus point-and-shoot in the row below. The imaging tools beckoned to me, their still repose enticing in the periphery.
It could be yours one day, said John.
Maybe. I smiled, meeting his eyes for the first time. He was recovering from an injury, his foot in a heavy black brace. Collecting my prints, I said see you later, not without parting shots and my girlish laugh, a rare sound those days.
As I began to process Bunny’s death, I adopted a distant, privileged position, pouring all of my time into a paper on animal studies that I was submitting for my PhD application. The topic was my mother’s vegan belief system. She braced herself on the wicker bed in a meditative posture every night, beneath fluorescent lights that my father once installed with care. This was before they divorced.
Animals carry a significance to me due to my parents’ longstanding disagreement over veganism. My paper reflected that to some degree. Late nights at the kitchen table, I buried myself in reading about new religious movements whose vegan followers were set apart, about the abstracting away of the nonhuman. It was my way of creating detachment from what was immediate, by immersing myself in literature on a subject a species apart.
Bunny wanted to be reincarnated as my daughter in her next life, my mother intoned.
She blankly stared for hours on long walks alone. She left the apartment to wander the dirt paths on the nearby hilltop, in the middle of the night, walking up and down the crests in her bare feet. She slept even less than before. Then she slept with all of the lights on. Then she didn’t sleep at all. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day passed. I packed my bags.
Upon leaving, I drove to the camera shop in Costa Mesa, cajoling John into selling me the not-for-sale Hasselblad that lived on the bottom shelf. I wanted a Bolex, but this would do. As I set off for the dusty road, driving my car with my broken Leica and most of my earthly belongings—including my entire library of unfinished books about the post-human turn—my new camera companion rode shotgun. Loneliness, I could understand. The object of my love wasn’t Bunny any longer. For now, it would do.
My mother stayed, untranslated.
An omniscient narrator took long shots of the karaoke bar where I set up camp for two months, a social club not so far from the curvature of the mountainside, beneath a bitter moon. Laptop in my lap in my parked car, I poured all of my energy into writing a book. It would be a memoir, intended for a man who refused to sing but had a speaking voice like light, whom I associated with security, woodsmoke, and the gold-flecked backcountry of California. Breathe Easy. Shiitakes, eggs, books and a yellow Lab who rode shotgun in his pickup truck.
I texted my writing to him in installments while driving back and forth between the romanticized rural and Wheeler Hall, a second home. I had once pledged to smoke a cigarette with his friend there, on the mezzanine level by the faculty offices. Beside the campus darkroom, whitish flowers fell from their stems onto soft loam. I had learned to develop there, amid springtime exhalations of petrichor: a picture of innocence, of frolicking on a remote hillside with my former housemates.
My camera offered security in the absence of the constancy of old friends. Silent and steady, undoubtedly solid, it withstood what I couldn’t. Raising the heavy object to the level of my chest, I claimed agency, at least for a while. I had the ability to capture distance, record duration, and determine the life I had to live. I studied, for a change, two camera manuals on my phone, on the barstools. Night after night, I returned to where the trucker and I met: a town’s karaoke bar, just down the street from Mel’s Diner—a musical place-name out of time. A shelter.
The plain song of the small town was suspect, deceptive; its musical valences were amplified by tenfold, a murmur turning different tonal values into a shout—a soft breeze—a caress—the many voices together resembling birdsong, a lovely melody of the country. Singing the chorus to the secret of a place where nobody goes, where everybody knows everybody and everybody is somebody. I own fifteen acres of land, my new friend had announced, shortly after my arrival. I’m a farmer. What do you grow? Weeds, mostly. He halted, with a rueful smile. Business has been slowing down.
As we fanned the flames of town gossip, I learned to love all the subjects that came before my lens, breaking free of the premeditation that accompanied newness, shyness. I was self-conscious as could be in my disguise of a black trench coat, Italian watercolor scarf, and platform boots. Next door, I was told by the leather punk faction that theirs was a red town. I saw it as a symbol of the country. A friend of mine had once written of this place beautifully in a story about deer he knew well. As for me, I appeared to be a China doll, desirous of some pastoral ending. Singing of heartbreak and waste in my first language, onstage, like I had as a child at the voice lessons my mother had enrolled me in.
Bunny seemed so far away here.
In the unseasonal winter, Hangtown resembled a layered fruit cake, creamy white snowfall in the viewfinder, its residents playing along in their winter formal clothes and sweetly posing in the window of the diner. As I planned angles over refillable coffee and waffles, the waitresses called me out in birdsong. I got all dressed up for you. I hunched over my laptop, writing to my friend from the karaoke bar. You should call your Mom, the trucker, farmer, boxer had said, warmly.
My mother, she was a journalist.
Absent snow chains, self-reliance cedes to sanctuary. I practiced exposure and reading light, photographing restless creatures at the karaoke bar, them lively in the spirit of the beat, me running after their lithe dancing feet, aiming with wild abandon at the green overhead lights. Their voices: rippling streams of musicality and jouissance, cutting through air. It made me feel alive, the way they clutched at song and the beauty of the ephemeral. Dancing, singing along to songs of my generation, and their own. Performers being entertained.
Human in their grace.
I ran through many rolls of film that came out blurry, reflecting bold flashes of lightning. And I regained the confidence to depict new bodies, to line them up, transforming them through a set of invisible framelines that only I could see. Spending the time to compose what images I wanted to keep, and cherish, and pass along, I began to feel a newfound hope, as though the future were malleable, and still in the making. Everything’s malleable, my new friend had said to me with his arms crossed, as though needing to convince himself of it.
At the outset, I believed the expectation was to be an expert. I was less than a novice, calling a photographer from home to ask how to load film, again and again. Learning to finger-paint, this time composing with light, shadow. Figure, void. And space, demarcated into presence and absence of form. I posed in the foreground of town, hand on the shutter, as I wrote its inhabitants this song.
Driving to and fro, I had my rolls developed at my old laboratory in Berkeley. Still, I left the city for the town, something of karaoke calling me back. The sun was shining down in brilliantine rays, shafts of light searing the dirt road and coming warmly through the forest foliage. As I neared the mountains the road became lovely in its spareness, the canyon view opening up onto fruiting trees. I drove through the apple orchards, laughing as my harvest moon friend finished my sentences over the phone. Replenishing and outside of time, the natural world felt like a river we could drink from unburdened.
It was the country, and for what it was worth, we were of it.
I hope this gets your mind off things, read the handwritten note from a friend from karaoke, the inked letters smeared and nearly illegible. I had totaled my father’s Honda, his last purchase before Beijing. He came to deliver the book Bunny, an apt present, to me while I lay in the trauma unit.
I laughed. I was alive.
How I wanted to alter the process around my practice, around conceptions of what made for good writing, proper living, recovering finally at my father’s apartment after my mother’s eventual loss of house and home. How I hadn’t wanted my art to be stillborn, or pulled from sepia memory, but full of immediacy and new life. I landed on home, again, sweetly in stasis. There, writing letters that received no replies, I had become a butterfly encased in a glass box, splayed, newly sutured. One akin to the overstock at my mother’s first job in the U.S., at the antiques store, amidst all of the porcelain teaware and the Christmas ornaments made of straw.
Pawn shop, the farmer had corrected my English, teasing me. It’s pronounced “unrequited.”
In Placerville, I played the Carpenters’ “Superstar,” my karaoke tune, on the piano at the inn where I was staying. Softly, under my breath, I sang the melody, making my own music.
The way you wanted me to, before you left.
The owner, hearing me, stayed to listen.
***
Artwork by Alex Andrews
