16. Riley
RILEY
Aron drives off the road and onto the grass, its diseased yellow shade a stark contrast to the lush green of the valley we have just driven through. We come to a stop by an ancient castle ruin, nothing but a few crumbling walls still standing close to the edge of a large outcrop.
The blue hour is just starting, which means the light is perfect. I’m off the bike before Aron kills the engine, worrying the straps of the helmet.
“How do I get this thing off?” I snap at him as soon as the roar of the motor dies down. “Help me!”
He gets off the bike leisurely, kicking the side stand in place.
“Always so fucking impatient. Kill me, Aron, help me, Aron ...” he tuts, but he does as I asked before removing his own helmet.
“Where’s my camera?” I demand. “Give it to me. Quickly!”
He crosses his arms, and the leather jacket creaks as it stretches around his broad form. He laughs at me instead of responding, mahogany eyes burning into me. Everything looks better in this light—even this idiot—and he’s going to make me miss my window!
“Did you not bring me here to take pictures?” I throw my arms wide. “I only have about twenty to forty minutes before ... what?”
“Look at you bossing me around!”
He’s making fun of me. Of course. And talking so slowly it’s infuriating.
“Aron, there’s no time—”
“You’re scared in confined places, you’re scared on motorbikes—”
“Because I saw too many accidents and—”
I want to lunge at him when he cuts me off again. “You’re scared of all that, but you take photos of active war zones for a living.”
The shift in his tone throws me off, and I blink a few times to regain my bearings, before dismissing the this-sounded-almost-like-a-compliment. “Sorry to disappoint, but I’m shitting it there, too. I’m a complete wimp. Scared everywhere of everything. Happy? Can you let me do my thing now?”
He shrugs nonchalantly. “You’re a daft bitch is what you are. Wimps don’t keep doing things they’re scared of, do they?”
He opens the black saddlebag with a violent tug and hands me my camera sling bag.
It’s only when it’s safely in my hands that I finally explore our surroundings. I walk to the edge of the outcrop. Even though I’ve already seen it coming here, I can’t stop a voiceless gasp from slipping past my lips. The Radiation Rift lies below in all its bleak glory.
A bare, rocky valley stretches over the horizon, the grass thinning into nothingness, like sparse tufts of hair on an old man’s balding head.
And there, in the dusty ash-coloured terrain, is the nearest crater from a nuclear explosion.
Moon-like and serene, almost beautiful in its tragic way.
Further away is another one, amid the rubble of what once was a city.
And then another and another, as far as the eye can see, like a string of beads on a necklace.
A tall, barbed wire fence runs through the valley like a vein, the yellow of the radiation warning signs faded, but their message clear: do not enter beyond this point.
There’s barely any wind and almost no sound, no chirping of birds, none of the indeterminate little sounds made by wildlife and nature. Below us lies nothing but death.
I take my camera out of its bag, screw the telephoto lens on, and start snapping pictures as I walk along the edge.
I crouch at the perfect spot, leaning over.
I’m so absorbed in getting the frame just right that I don’t detect Aron’s presence behind me until his fingers close firmly around my waist.
“What are you doing?” I yelp, lowering the camera and turning around to look at him.
He’s sitting on his heels behind me, wind gently tousling his hair, the bulk of his shoulders and chest crowding his leather jacket.
“What do you think? Spotting you. No way in hell do you get to fall off a cliff.”
Ah, right. Makes sense. That would be too nice a death for me.
Not that he needs to bother. I’m used to leaning over the roofs of buildings, familiar with my body’s centre of gravity and immune to vertigo.
But I don’t tell him to get his hands off me.
What’s the point? It’s not like he’d listen to me.
If anything, my protests would likely encourage him to put his hands where I want them even less than around my waist.
Before I can stop them, my thoughts return for the hundredth time to what happened yesterday.
His glistening cock between his fingers, the feel of his balls in my hand, his hungry eyes ...
and my embarrassing, purely physical reaction to it all.
I escape the memory by fleeing into one that is newer and even worse.
That moment of complete weakness I had during the drive here. I can’t believe I held his hand. He is my captor. My enemy. A man I’ve been terrified of for years.
But we were going very fast, the road whipping underneath the wheels in a blur. I was scared and desperate for comfort, starved for a sliver of solidarity from another human being. When he touched my hand, I reacted on pure instinct and without thinking. I couldn’t help myself.
My eyes water until I can hardly see anything through the viewfinder. I miss Corrado so damn much. More than I’ve missed fresh air and my clothes, more than I miss normal food and a bed to sleep in and hot showers. I miss having a friend. I miss contact with someone who doesn’t hate me.
So much so that my heart can no longer take it, and my mind has started to protect me by playing tricks on me, convincing me in my weakest moments that there is some twisted kinship between Aron and me.
I know I mustn’t give in to that illusion, not even for one minute. Aron hates me for what I’ve done, for what I represent. And I resent his cruelty just as much as he revels in it.
But why didn’t he swat my hand away? Why did he reciprocate the touch?
Probably to fuck with my head even more than he already has. Just as there’s no light without darkness, there’s no darkness without light. There’s no better way to prevent me from growing numb to my misery than to grant me occasional respite from it.
I wipe my face off inconspicuously as I stand up. Aron nods at me and leads me around the moss-covered castle ruin to his newest creation.
“It’s not my best work,” he tells me as a rhythmic creak reaches my ears. “Just something quick and simple this time. There’s only so much you can do with two patrolmen.”
We round the corner, and my eyes finally land on the source of the noise.
“Oh wow. That’s new for sure.”
“As I said, it’s not my be—”
“Careful.” I give him a pointed look that stops him in his tracks. “I could almost think it matters to you that I like it.”
“Well ...” He shrugs, the hint of a coy smile playing on his face. “Do you?”
I scan his creation with my eyes, already thinking of angles and framing.
A wooden swing bar, still smelling of fresh construction.
The two men—long and thin, and short and rounder—hanging from hooks underneath their ribs.
With wires running along the length of their legs, they are fixed in a sitting pose like they’re on a swing.
Blood is leaking from their mouths—punctured lungs most likely.
Both their eyes are closed. They’re either unconscious or already dead.
“I do. It’s playful and horrifying. It will make a good image.”
“A pile of shit would make a good image in your photos,” he remarks with on-the-nose nonchalance, like he wants to make it extremely clear he’s not trying to flatter me.
Not knowing how to respond, I step away from him and screw on the correct lens.
I get started, trying this angle and that, until I decide that the best one is from the ground looking sharply up.
I lie down on my stomach, so close to the hanging corpses that I can smell their blood as well as their soiled pants.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” Aron’s voice sounds from behind me, pulling me out of the zone just as I’ve found my groove.
“Doesn’t what bother me?” I turn around sharply, only to find him staring at my ass without even bothering to hide it.
Am I imagining it, or is the front of his trousers tenting? Oh my god, why am I even thinking about that?
“Dead people. Mutilated people. People in pain,” he elaborates without lifting his eyes, licking his lips.
“Once again, I’ve been doing this for years,” I snap impatiently.
“Doesn’t it bother you now?”
So that’s what this is about. I seem too at ease, and he doesn’t like that. Well fuck him.
“Not at all,” I assure him and return to my task.
What I don’t say is that the camera has always been like a shield to me. Looking through the viewfinder, I don’t see horrors. I see angles, frames and composition. It’s the only way I can do what I do.
I’m expecting him to keep bugging me. But he just chuckles, and soon I hear his heavy footsteps walking away from me.
When I glance at him a bit later, I find him sitting on the ground with his back against the ruin’s wall, reading a paperback.
He detects my gaze, and our eyes meet. I whip back around so quickly that something gets pinched at the side of my neck.
For some time after, I finally manage to focus on nothing but the tableau and the camera in my hands, lost in my craft until the shadows grow long and an unfamiliar female voice pulls me out of my trance.
I secure the camera in the sling bag and head towards Aron and the woman who’s joined him and is currently squeezing him like she never wants to let go.
She’s taller than me and dressed all in black. Her long honey-coloured hair laced with silver is up in a messy ponytail. She steps away from Aron, but he holds her by the elbows, and he looks her over with a frown.
“Wipe that concern off your face before I do it for you!” She pats his cheek, and I burst out laughing, realising that I don’t remember the last time I laughed.