While seeking to discover the truth behind his best friend’s disappearance in Pinochet’s Chile, photographer Marten Sorensen ends up playing a game of life and death with the Devil.
Listen to the author reading
The Message from the Window
The Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Poets were gone. The people who inspired those eras had passed from the earth where they were soon remembered like a collection of fancy cameos.
The door had opened for change.
And so He immersed himself in the new populist democracy and its twin sister, populist fascism, something like a sporting event where the crowds succumb to the rapture of winning and losing until it becomes the new world-religion.
Right wing. Left wing. No wing.
It didn’t really matter.
In the spirit of supreme accountability, He tried to approach both sides equally. It was only fitting, after all, that His politics should be transcendent.
*
That evening, He stood waiting in an alley where garbage cans lined the backs of buildings like so many stunted doormen. The next morning, His newly designated host would see the garbage cans and their surprising contents from his window.
A wakeup call of a unique kind.
A hint that his life would never be the same.
But now, it was a night you could inhale. It smelled like earth even in the middle of Boston. Dust to dust, ground to ground, another death for the burial mound.
“Quid es homo, qui magnificas eum?
Aud quid apponis ergo eum cor tuum?”
“What is man that Thou shouldst magnify him?
And why dost Thou set thy heart upon him?”
He liked the old medieval Latin with its direct inquiry into the nature of sin.
It made Him feel more at home while He waited at the corner for the singer. She would emerge from the bar where she had just performed on her way to her Boston apartment. Conveniently for Him, she hated cabs and liked to walk, assuming it was less than a mile. And in just a few minutes, she would walk right in front of Him.
He knew this not only because He was a professional with so many professional connections from entertainment to politics to the secret service. But also, because He had connections of a wholly different sort.
Or was that a holy different sort?
*
Just an hour earlier He had seen her show, which was disappointing. A talent squandered for the convenience of image and packaging. Another example of Career Vanity. Hardly worth inviting her into the vastly overrated afterlife, except that her popularity obscured everything she pretended to champion by turning good and evil into clichés.
While His role was to do just the opposite.
And now her hypocritical influence was growing with sinful speed.
Moreover, she was filthy rich while pretending to be poor. She had a luxurious apartment in New York and a house in Foster City, near San Francisco. She wore rags when she sang and bounced across the stage, but she owned three horses and four cars.
When she wasn’t singing, she was always chewing gum. She was also putting on weight. But she styled herself around attitude and energy when she performed.
That night she did a bluesy imitation of Janis Joplin. He remembered the opening lines of her last song.
“You know it,
You know,
You can’t stop loving America.
It can’t stop loving you.
“Freedom is your one true goal,
Don’t sell it off. Don’t pigeonhole.
You’re not in Wall Street’s pocket,
Not in the devil’s hole.
So venture forth—fly like a rocket
Float free and free your soul.”
He extended the stanza in silence with –
“Don’t be a jerk—become a mole!”
*
Suddenly He heard her steps.
Then He saw the woman approaching.
She had a small nose and not much of a chin and a waist that had gotten thick from food and drink.
She couldn’t know that He had a present for her. A treat that would transform her evening into something far beyond the routine.
When He first caught her attention, her eyes gazed up at Him ever so cautiously.
But she wasn’t afraid.
He looked, after all, like a wise, old gentleman.
And this He was, in his own unique way.
But then, as she would soon find out, He was also so much more.
***
Marten Sorensen woke up at 5:15 a.m. to a medley of screams and yells. When he got to the bedroom window, he looked out at a team of orange-vested garbagemen moving in disarray across the mustard-colored alleyway behind Hemenway Street. Soon all three converged around the trash bin closest to his apartment where the lid was pushed askew. The two youngest stood stiffly and watched as the veteran took off the lid so they could peer inside. While Marten tried to decipher what lay beneath a spiderweb of shadow, the older garbageman made a frenzied phone call, nodding his head in exclamation points. Then all three hurried to clear a path for vehicles between the trashcans.
Almost instantly a police car arrived with flashing lights and a shrieking siren. The car stopped abruptly and two jumped out. The policewoman interrogated the garbagemen. The policeman walked through the alley taking pictures with an awkward urgency. When he reached the open bin he stopped, stared down, and began to take pictures slowly, like a surgeon performing an operation.
Minutes later an ambulance came by and two attendants emerged carrying a stretcher. They marched over to the trash bin, reached in, and lifted out first the feet, next the ankles, and then the calves and thighs, until the whole person was revealed before the bedazzled gaze of everyone in the alley. When she was laid out on the stretcher in her baggy jeans and tie-dyed vest she seemed to radiate a peculiar energy—someone who was once someone else. Marten gazed down like a figure on a medieval church wall watching the pageant below while the two attendants brought the poor woman’s still restless body to the ambulance.
With the doors wide open, another man came out holding three rubber traffic cones. He was joined by both of the police, who took out six more cones. Together, they put out two semi-circular arrays, one at the edge of the walkway, and one surrounding the designated trash bin, making the alley look like the set for a play. Once the stage was defined, the ambulance departed. The garbagemen exited in their truck. And the police got into their car and drove off with no sirens flashing. In a break from what Marten imagined to be routine, no one was left standing watch.
*
As a photographer Marten was always trying to frame the world. People paid him to do it. But what had just transpired wasn’t frameable. It felt like a distant, sardonic voice had orchestrated the entire event, and Marten wondered, quite implausibly, if the horrific spectacle was a way of getting his attention—pulling him into a story yet larger than the disjointed twelve-minute display in the alleyway. A nightmare on the very day when, twenty-eight years ago, he received the postcard that changed his life forever.
