snapshot

I
He was wearing his “Trying To Get Into College” T-shirt with a camera slung around his neck. You could take a photograph of anything and it would be a photograph, but real photographs elicited emotions from their viewers. Nothing ever happened around here that was captivating enough to elicit any emotions from people, let alone photographs.
A photographer knows you need the light to see the dark in people. And so Kyle sat on the street-curb in front of the local bowery, off Canal St., waiting for a couple to start screaming at each other. Only truck drivers did drugs around here, and they mostly smoked them to keep themselves awake during long drives.
It wasn’t much of a bowery.
He threw a Diet Coke can at a tree, causing all the pigeons to fly out of it. He tried to snap a picture of them flapping in a gust upwards out of the tree but it came out blurry. He’d bought his camera five years ago for eight-hundred dollars; it was now worth three-hundred. It wasn’t even an SLR, but he prided himself to think that he still took better photographs than those his age with parents that spoiled them with cameras they used to take pictures of fucking benches. You don’t need three thousand dollars to take pictures of a goddamn bench. No matter who was sitting on it, he thought.
Just to spite himself, he raised his camera to take a picture of a nearby empty bench. When he looked through the lens he saw a couple on the bench, dapperly dressed, eating each other. At first it looked like they were kissing each other, but then Kyle noticed the woman gnaw off the man’s lower lip. She then chewed it voraciously as the man bit the skin off her cheek.
When Kyle raised his head from the lens in shock to look at the bench, it was empty as it had been before.
II
Hurrying home, nearly tripping over himself, he looked through his lens again at another bench on a whim; he might have been hallucinating; it might have been a delusion, a mirage. But when he looked through the lens the same couple were still gorging on each other. He focused in, steadied himself, and clicked. When he looked up from the lens again, the couple were both on the bench, mutilated from devouring each other. When Kyle looked at the photograph he’d taken, the couple wasn’t there; just an empty, bird-shit lathered bench. Looking back up from his camera again, the couple were still there.
Aghast, he sprinted the rest of the way home, tossing his camera into the nearest garbage can.
III
For his nineteenth birthday his parents bought him a new camera; he’d lied, saying his was stolen from his backpack in the swimmer’s locker-room. Unable to improvise any viable excuses, he thanked them with feigned enthusiasm, quickly hiding the camera under his bed when he returned to his room.
As the weeks passed by, his parents began to wonder why he never used the camera. He certainly was talented, and they needed a photograph of them to stuff into Christmas cards. He begged them to let someone else do it for them; he was awful with portraits; but they insisted, claiming something about his innate skill would reflect on their son’s precociousness. Plus, why waste money on a pervert? They badgered him about it until he reluctantly agreed to taking the picture, only one, and only if he wasn’t in it. They thought it strange he refused to be in the picture, but conceded anyway.
His parents stood together exactly as they did as they got married; hand-in-hand, grinning superfluously. When he looked into the lens, perched on the coffee table, what he saw caused him to drop the camera. They were…his father was shoving a chef’s knife in-and-out of his mother’s vagina as she giggled and moaned with delight.
He left the camera on the floor, scrambling up the stairs to his room, locking himself inside until his parents promised that they would get someone else to take the photograph.
IV
He stared into a mirror through the lens; he saw himself skinned alive, a plantlike root sprouting from his cranium, blooming into a Bible. Something inexplicable drew him to the camera; something anathematic and guileful. He carried it with him everywhere, slung around his neck; when he walked through ghettos, miscreants wouldn’t even glance at it, as if they couldn’t see it. Whenever he looked through the lens he’d see something absurdly and exaggeratedly gruesome. If he saw someone killing someone else, it wouldn’t be via strangling, but a method extravagantly bizarre and particular. He saw people kill themselves, but he couldn’t think of any bizarre ways to kill oneself off the top of his head; maybe dressing up as a pig and being butchered? Every time he saw someone kill themselves he yelled out to them, only to remind him that they weren’t and wouldn’t actually kill themselves unless he took the picture. He often saw people shoot themselves, fall off buildings having jumped, dive in front of traffic, light themselves on fire and stand still, impassively burning to death.
He couldn’t seem to rid himself of the camera, either. Whenever he smashed it, threw it into the river, or placed it somewhere random, it would always show up on his bed when he got home. If he ignored the camera, the light would begin to blink that signaled the camera was going to take a picture within ten seconds. He’d rush to it, slinging it around his neck before it could take a picture of himself.
On the street, couples would often ask him to take a picture of them with their camera, seeing that he was a photographer. He always denied, to their perplexity.
“What, you don’t want to take a picture of us? What, do you think we’re ugly? Aw, are you lonely?”
He was losing his mind. Eventually he saw a heroin addict, splayed out on the street. When he looked through the lens, the addict had overdosed; in reality, she was still alive. Kyle complied to the camera’s demands and took the picture—the woman died instantly. In the picture, once again, the victim was still alive. He vomited in a nearby garbage can. The photograph seemed to be smiling at him.
He continued this way, killing what society would consider its dregs and degenerates: drug dealers, drug addicts, pimps, prostitutes. Every time he killed someone the camera seemed to allow him a temporary relief, in which it didn’t insist or haunt him.
Kyle stopped going to school. He began stealing into his parent’s liquor and medicinal cabinets. Anything to alleviate the guilt he harbored. He was a murderer, an assassin, and he had no control over his affliction. The camera was not satisfied with vermin, birds, landscapes, any kind of animal. Its lust was insatiable. He realized, inevitably, that disobeying the camera was futile; he was impotent, and there were only so many degenerates to take pictures of.
Unable to take his own life, he began to take pictures of what he first never wanted to; to capture the moment, in the photograph. For when he took the picture, the person in it died, but they lived on in the photograph. He began to take pictures of the girls he desired in school; instantly they would be attacked by everyone around them and killed. He savored the pictures, hiding them in a secret compartment beneath his nightstand.
V
The local authorities couldn’t make heads or tails of it. All they had for evidence was an old woman who lived nearby where Kyle took pictures of prostitutes. She claimed that whenever he took a picture, whoever he was taking it of would die. Having no other evidence, they tagged her as a loony. By this time half the town’s population were dead ever since Kyle started taking pictures.
Kyle attempted to program the camera to take a picture of itself. He placed it in front of a mirror and clicked the ten second timer. When the camera took the picture, the mirror shattered. Filled with consternation, he snatched the camera off the stand he’d used to prop it to take the picture of itself.
Kyle never lived to see what was in the picture the camera took of itself. His heart stopped beating the second he saw it. When the coroners arrived to assess the body, one of them turned on the camera.
It was blank.