Dead Shutter

This is one of those stories whose truthfulness simply cannot be proven or disproven, and none of my subsequent experiences with the items involved in our transaction has lent any credibility to the suggestion that these things really happened. What is beyond doubt, however, is that I got a particularly good deal on my acquisition.

It all began with an advertisement in the newspaper. Professional camera equipment—bodies, lenses, flash lights, tripods, batteries—for sale. Everything must go. Will accept any reasonable offer. It gave the address of a coffee shop in Taipei’s Songshan District. As a budding amateur photographer, I had recently wanted to upgrade my mid-range digital camera to something more advanced, but the prohibitively high prices of the models that I was interested in had forced me to put such dreams on hold. Perhaps secondhand was the better alternative.

I visited the coffee shop the following day during lunch break. Heavy rain was pelting the windshield as my taxi turned into the small alley and came to a stop in front of the store. The five seconds it took me to dash from the vehicle to the front door were enough to leave me completely drenched. I opened the glass door, which triggered a small bell, and stepped in. To my left, antique camera equipment was on display along several shelves. There were also piles of old photography magazines. On the right was the coffee shop proper. After spending what I thought was an appropriate length of time perusing the items on the shelves, I turned around and saw that the ten tables or so were empty of customers. some indistinct music was playing faintly off a hidden speaker in a corer. In the far corner, one man whom I assumed was the owner of the store was seated at a large wooden table upon which various camera items had been arranged by category—bodies to one side, various lenses, from micros to telephoto, all standing vertically, to another. The sheer quantity of equipment was astounding, and my first thought was that those were perhaps stolen goods.

My apprehensions were not helped by the appearance of the man himself, who with his long, unkept salt-and-pepper hair, thick mustache and goatee, and nicotine-stained stubby fingers, looked like someone who slept in a park at night. He looked like he should smell bad, but in actuality he didn’t. As I walked toward the table, the man looked up and stared at me with eyes that spoke of a lifetime lived, despite the fact that he could not have been older than in his late forties. His skin was dark copper, suggesting long hours spent in the sun, and the crows’ feet on the sides of his eyes traced what I could only describe as a map of pain. I put all these observations aside and approached the man.

“You’re here about the ad?” the man asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Have a seat.” His voice was deep and disquietingly emotionless. “There’s a little of everything, and more at the back.”

The sheer quantity of items on teh table made it difficult to focus on a single item. The number of bodies alone, with the wide assortment of Nikons, Canons, Sonys, Olympuses and other, more obscure brands, was stunning. I picked a Nikon and weighed it, cradling it in my hands to see whether it felt right. All the bodies were relatively worn, with scratches and dirt, which dispelled the notion that what we had here were stolen goods. I deposited the Nikon with the care reserved a sacred object and picked up a second one. Meanwhile the man was barely paying me any attention. He just sat there, staring somewhere at the back of the dining room. I assessed a few more bodies and eventually chose a beaten up but still serviceable D5, a model I had long hankered for but knew I could never afford. I still expected the asking price would be beyond my means, but I put it aside nonetheless and tuned my attention to the serrated forest of lenses.

“May I ask why you are selling all this?” I inquired as I carefully handled a 200mm telephoto lens that weighed a ton.

It took him a while to respond, and I was starting to think that he may not have heard me when he broke the silence. “I’ve moved on,” he said. “Don’t need that high performance stuff anymore. I only do weddings, family portraits, pets, that kind of stuff.” The tone of his voice was unquestionably one of resentment, and his eyes stared vacantly at the objects on the table as if they did not recognize what they were looking at.

“And what did you do before that?”

The man scoffed and abruptly got up, his chair hitting the wall behind him. “Before that,” he said, “I did real photography.” He walked away and went to the window to stare outside, leaving me fearful that I had offended the man and possibly lost a good deal in the process. I continued to browse in silence, feeling that I probably should not stick around for much longer now that the mood had soured. Not to mention the fact that the man’s behavior made me highly uncomfortable.

After a while his voice, no longer at the window but now close to me, startled me. “That’s a great model.”

“Uh?”

“The D5,” he said, his chin nodding at the body that I had set aside. “A real workhorse that’ll perform in just about any situation… Just about any. I loved that camera.” I noticed the past tense.

“How much are you asking for it?” I asked, bracing for disappointment. 

He stood there for a while, seemingly lost in thought. He then named a price, and I nearly fell off my chair. I could not have heard him right.

“Let me tell you what,” he continued. “Not only will I let you walk out of here with that beauty, but for the price of a cup of coffee you can throw in whatever lens you want to go with it.”

“Surely…”  But I could tell from his stare that he meant business, and the absurdly low price he was asking for the combo rekindled my suspicions that there was something untoward about the whole affair. The man must have perceived the look of incredulity on my face, for he then added: “Don’t worry, this is all perfectly legitimate. All of this was mine, the sediments of nearly three decades of work in the trenches.”

I had to ask. “But, don’t these have some sort of emotional value to you? Why are you practically giving them away?” If he was in dire straits financially, then certainly he could have asked for a more favorable price and still secure a sale. It just didn’t make sense. At the same time, I could also see that he was a broken man, and that whatever bond had existed between his instruments and his art had somehow been broken. Trying to rationalize the whole thing, I briefly thought that by basically stealing his stuff I was somehow doing him a favor.

“Pick one,” he said.

“What?”

“Pick a lens—any lens, and let’s conclude our business.” He was fidgety, impatient.

I returned my attention to the table and my eyes rested on the oversized telephoto lens that I had assessed earlier. 

“Good good good,” he hummed. “With that, nothing will ever escape you.” He finished that sentence with a grunt, as if he did not believe a word of what he had just said. My doubt returned.

“Those are all in good order, aren’t they?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Try them if you want. His large hands grabbed the body and lens, connected them, and he handed the weighty affair over to me.

“Battery’s new and charged. Shoot.”

I took different shots, and the device worked just as I had dreamed.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

“Very much.”

“Perfect. That’ll be six thousand New Taiwan Dollars.” The amount was even less than what he had asked for earlier. But if the man was so keen on parting with such gems, then that was his problem. By that point I just wanted to complete the transaction and get the hell out of that place. I took my wallet out, counted six one thousand dollar bills, and handed them to him. He did not even look at them before folding and inserting them into the side pocket of his denim jeans. I noticed that his nails were bitten to the quick.

“You’ll need a bag with this,” he said, and walked to the counter. A minute later he returned with a fabric bag, put the camera and lens in their protective shells, and then put those in the beg. “I’m afraid I no longer have the original boxes for those.”

“That’s fine,” I said, taking the bag and standing up. “Well, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Mr.—?”

“Chu,” he said. I nodded, bowed slightly, and turned around. As I was opening the door and preparing to step outside, his voice called out behind me.

“One small thing,” he said, approaching me hurriedly, as if he had forgotten something. The earlier sternness had left his visage, and now sadness seemed to have filled it completely. Even the timber of his voice had changed, sounding somewhat less severe.

“Yes?”

He hesitated, looked down at his feet, then up again, his eyes averting mine. The transformation was shocking. One moment he had been this cold impenetrable stone that made me want to flee, and now he was this vulnerable man who seemed on the verge of tears, who seemed to be begging me not to leave.

“Do you—do you think you might have a moment more to spare?” he asked. 

I looked at my watch and then outside. The rain had not abated and the sky had gotten considerably darker. I could smell ozone in the air, the promise of those sudden, summer storms.

“Well,” I said.

“You seem like a nice young man,” he cut in. “Tell you what. Let’s approach this deal as if I were selling you a house.” Before I could interject, he continued. “Let’s assume that the same rules that apply to selling a house apply to this transaction here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If it were a house,” he said, “I would, by law, be under the obligation to reveal to you that something bad had happened in it.” 

I was too dumbfounded to respond and just stood there as the winds and rain gathered on the other side of the still-opened door.

“Let me buy you a coffee,” he said. I hesitated, then closed the door and followed him inside. I don’t know by what compulsion I did so. Perhaps it was simply because I could tell that Mr. Chu needed to get something off his chest. Something inside me also felt that I somehow owed him this in return for the extraordinary price he had charged me for the objects that I could now call my own.

Mr. Chu, it turns out, had been a top photographer for one of Taiwan’s largest newspapers. In his early twenties, he had cut his teeth on the crime beat, fearlessly venturing into gang wars and documenting murder scenes that made other photographers turn away in disgust. This imperviousness to repulsion, combined with his ability to put emotional distance between himself and his subject, had made him a much sought-after photojournalist. Within a decade, he had added foreign wars, humanitarian catastrophes and other calamities to his portfolio. Mr. Chu was on top of this game. He was unstoppable.

“I became drunk with success,” he said. We were sitting at an uncluttered table, two cups of coffee between us. Outside, the storm had picked up and panels of rain were whipping against the windows.

“It was like a drug. I’ve never done drugs, but I know enough about myself now that had I been a substance abuser, no chemical would ever have been good enough for me. I’d have needed something more…always more, down the rabbit hole with no light on the other side. I was in Afghanistan in 2001, stringing for The Associated Press. Then Iraq, the tsunami in Thailand, the Congo, Sudan, Mexico—I was there. Death and destruction, that’s the drug that kept me going. A family? Relationships? I had no time for any of this. I was married to the dead, my children were the tens of thousands of maimed, burned, massacred and drowned women, children, and elderly. There I was documenting reality for an audience that could not—should not—experience these things, and yet the more I did it the less real it all became to me. Little by little, I was losing my grip on reality. Maybe that was some self-preservation mechanism—I like to think that this is what it was—I don’t know. 

“And you know what this led to? I eventually discovered that I was no longer seeing the dead for what they were. I’d lost my respect for the dead because I had come to regard them as mere commodities. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

A loud thunder clap reverberated outside, and I jumped in my chair. Mr. Chu, who did not seem to have heard the detonation, his mind somewhere else, kept staring somewhere distant.

“When did you, uh, realize that this was happening to you?” I asked, a low grumble like that of a gigantic beast made the floor vibrate as thunder rolled in the distance. 

“It was during Typhoon Morakot, in 2009. You are probably old enough to remember Morakot, right? Yes, I thought so. Like many other journalists, I had been dispatched to the south, near Kaohsiung, as the powerful typhoon that hit on Father’s Day dumped nearly two meters of water within twenty-four hours. We knew the destruction would be serious, and sure enough bridges and houses were swept away, and then entire villages located on mountain slopes—many of the victims were Aboriginal people. Within days, the entire south was a churning ocean of graphite colored, angry waters that devoured everything in their path.

“Days into the storm, a group of us journalists and photographers were gathered on the top balcony of a temple overlooking a river that had swollen three times in size within a day or so. We saw cars, buses, even houses go down that river. And then…”

Mr. Chu had gone silent again and was kneading his hands as if he had suddenly been overtaken by an attack of arthritis. He sighed deeply, looked up from the table, and continued.

“And then we saw them. On the opposite bank of that…river, white shapes were emerging from the raging waters and began to climb the steep elevation into the trees. There were dozens of them, and every one of us who was there that day saw what I saw—what appeared to be women in long white dresses, too distant for us to see any facial features, impossibly emerging from that furious water and just…just…crawling, bent in half, up into the trees, where they disappeared. 

“After our initial shock, we all came back to reality and ran for our cameras so that we could capture the scene. We didn’t know who—or what—those were, but we damn well knew we had to have this on tape. We rushed back to the balcony, elbowed each other for the best spots and angles, tripods clanking and mingling, and we began shooting. For some reason that day, everything went wrong for me. In my first shot, my lens was doused with water just as I was pressing the shutter. Then the wind blew one of the yellow flags on the balcony right into my shot as I was preparing to capture one of the white crawlers on film. At another time, a burly cameraman next to me—a highly competitive man from a rival paper—bumped my elbow and I nearly dropped my camera. I unleashed on him and felt my impatience growing inside me. I aimed again, seeking another one or a group of the white denizens, aiming here and there, seeking details amidst the rain and dirt and kaleidoscope of destruction. One shape appeared momentarily, only to vanish before I could capture it. Come on, you stupid ghosts! Show yourselves motherfuckers! I hollered. It was an affront! Mockery! I cursed them and became so loud that the other photojournalists moved a few steps away from me, which was perfectly fine by me. What are you afraid of? Cowards! From that moment on, my camera encountered a series of malfunctions. The shutter became stuck, as if rust had suddenly accumulated in the mechanism. The focus didn’t work—not even in manual mode. The battery died. Then my telephoto lens inexplicably fell off and dropped several meters into the river, dragged away along with the million other pieces of detritus to be pulverized by the immense forces of the waters. At the end of the day, every photographer present but me had documentation of that strange phenomenon, of those ghostly figures that were crawling up the riverbank. 

“As you can well imagine, my editor wasn’t all too pleased pleased with my inability to bring back evidence of that strange occurrence. None of us knew what those were, but their strangeness was enough, and it certainly was newsworthy. We ended up buying photos from a competing newspaper, which made us all look bad. I was despondent and couldn’t come up with a good explanation for what had happened.”

I could not help but ask. “Is the camera…” I said, pointing at the bag on the table. “That one? Ha! No. Morakot was a Canon. That one I smashed to smithereens. The D5 here—your D5—that was later.” 

“And after that came the slow decline. I’d seemed to have lost my self-confidence, or that magic touch that before that incident had made me the star photojournalist on this island. No—come to think of it, I don’t think I ever lost my touch. Something else happened, something that I cannot explain. You see, after Morakot, I was never able to ever again take a shot of a dead person. Oh I could aim, frame, properly light and all, but whenever I pressed the shutter, something would malfunction. Everything would be blurry, or the dead subject would somehow lie outside the frame, as if it had crawled away within the space of a few milliseconds. Or the speed light wouldn’t go off. That’s when I destroyed that Canon. I bought a variety of other cameras, spent a fortune on them—digital and film. It became an obsession. But no matter what I did, the result would invariably be the same. 

“Before being fired by the newspaper that had employed me all these years, they’d shunted me over to a different beat—I don’t even care to remember what it was. That was soon after Fukushima, where my output was a complete disaster in a terrain replete with perfect…opportunities. I tried stringing for a while, but the contracts dried up as I was unable to provide what they wanted from me and what my reputation had promised them I was capable of. So I gave up, started a small studio where I eke out a living taking photos of young couples, children, and the pets between them. This does nothing for me. I opened this coffee shop, and as you can see it’s not exactly a resounding success. My last resort is to sell all this. Perhaps by getting rid of it all I can finally put all that behind me and move on, I don’t know.”

I shifted in my seat. “Mr. Chu,” I said. “If I may. I don’t think getting rid of all this equipment is what needs to be done here.” To me it was clear that the solution, if there was one to such matters, lay somewhere else. “I do not know what your spiritual beliefs are, but if I could make a suggestion—have you been to the temple?”

Mr. Chu, who had been staring at his hands, suddenly looked up. His eyes were completely empty, his visage that of a condemned man.

“Oh I could not,” he moaned, and began sobbing. “I could’t possibly…I am too ashamed. Too ashamed!”

I hesitated before gently putting a hand on his shoulder across the table. “I believe you have to, Mr. Chu. You need to ask them for forgiveness. It appears to me that whatever you saw on that day was angered by your…disrespect. I believe you have known this for some time now.”

Outside, the storm had abated, and bright light was casting away the earlier darkness. I had to go. I stood up, grabbed the bag with the camera and lens in it, and walked away. As I opened the door, I turned around and looked at him. His face was in his hands, and I could tell he was still crying. 

“Goodbye Mr. Chu. You know what you have to do.”

Weeks later, out of curiosity, I returned to the neighborhood to see what had happened to Mr. Chu. But the store had been closed, and already laborers were busy rebuilding the interior in preparation for whatever business came next. Whether he had summoned the courage to do what I had suggested I will never know. But I do think that, for some reason, he had sensed something in me that led to this compulsion to open up to a complete stranger and tell the story of his fall from grace. Maybe by sharing with someone, someone who did not judge, he hoped to prove to himself that he was not completely crazy, that there was some logic to it all, however nightmarish that logic might be. That alone was an important first step. But that other one he will have to take on his own.