The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Read Online Free PDF

me I was lucky—I’d made it in
before the weekend crush. Wooly had given me Georgiana Copely’s
number. I called from the room. A man picked up, said he was Ms.
Copely’s assistant. I told him who I was, I’m doing a story on
Wooly Cornell and I’d like to interview Ms. C. He said 10 would be
fine but it couldn’t go on forever. She had to be out for an 11:30
appointment.
    Georgiana lived in the
same wealthy part of town that Wooly did, also in a house built on
the border of the woods. Only you couldn’t see hers from the road.
You had to pull into a concealed driveway camouflaged by bushes and
trees. Then you came to a massive Colonial that had to have been
standing unchanged for generations. Everything about it—the double
chimneys at each corner, the thick dark molding, the regal
isolation, even the vintage Jaguar XKE parked by the side—said
Classic.
    A bed of dahlias had been
planted in front of the porch—all white except for one red flower
in the middle. A rogue red seed.
    An Asian man who
identified himself as Marco Sung answered the polished copper
doorbell. He was tall and bony, with looping dark bags under his
eyes. Like any good photographer’s assistant, he was dressed all in
black.
    The foyer was heavy, all
mahogany panels and each one hand carved in designs so intricate
and complex they were impossible to follow. It was like a museum of
gloom. When Marco led me into the living room I was half expecting
to see a casket laid out in the middle.
    Not so. The room was
open-air clean and filled with sunlight, as bright as an atrium.
Georgiana’s photos were gallery-hung on all four walls. They were
all like the one Wooly owned—blurs of birch and moss, pearlized
lichen patterns, individual time/space warps created by some
alchemical amalgam of forest mist.
    “Pretty incredible,” I
said.
    Marco nodded—well of
course. “She had a photography career before she lost her sight.
Decent material, nothing outstanding. Then she began producing
these. She’s always said, my blindness gave me the courage to
fail.”
    “It freed her
up.”
    “It enabled her to grasp
forms in a new way, grasp the world in a different way. The trick,
she always says, is to capture nothing that isn’t there, and the
nothing that is there.”
    I stood before a
photo—smoky flower shapes, as murky as if they’d been shot
underwater, almost too impressionistic to be real. The flower forms
reminded me of something.
    “The dahlias out front.
Did you plant them?”
    Marco, who’d been very
accommodating up to now, suddenly wasn’t. “Yes?”
    “The red one fascinates
me. Was it intentional, or a mistake?”
    “The dahlias,” he said
firmly, “are no one’s business.”
    Okay…
    He walked over to another
photo. “Do you know what the tragedy of her work is?”
    “The tragedy?”
    “She’ll never be able to
see it. People tell her it’s beautiful—she can never see how
beautiful it is.”
    “How does she work? How
does she actually do this?”
    “By feel .”
    The voice came from
behind. I turned to see an attractive middle-age woman with
prematurely white hair that reached down to her shoulders. She was
wearing a pair of faded overalls and had the soft straight-ahead
stare of unseeing eyes. Her hair was fluffy yet stringy, like
cotton balls had been growing out of her scalp and somebody had
clawed at them until they stretched to her shoulders.
    “I can feel the light. I have a very
powerful feeling for light. I move the camera around until I can
feel the light at its strongest. That’s when I know I have a
shot.”
    Marco told her I was Quinn
McShane.
    “And you’re a journalist?”
she said. It wasn’t quite an accusation.
    “That’s me.”
    “We can talk in the study.
Marco, I think we’ll be fine.”
    “Just remember, we have an
11:30.”
    I’ve interviewed people in
all kinds of places, drug houses lit by candlelight, gone-bust
shacks with no electricity. Doesn’t matter—I’ve never worked a