Indescribable

A story about words and pictures without words and pictures

It was just meant to be a couple of photos. One lawyer wanting leverage over another lawyer. Shady perhaps, but in Theo’s experience shady paid better. So, he parked opposite the apartment where the indiscretion was supposed to take place and waited.

The guy arrived on time, gray suit sharply pressed, red tie flaring. Theo zoomed in on the window he’d been told to watch, saw the lawyer enter the room. And then…

#

Afterwards, his hands shook. He almost crashed twice on the drive back to his apartment. When he finally slewed to a stop, he barely managed to spill from the car, before his stomach contents spilled from him.

#

“Babe? Babe!” his girlfriend was shocked by the state of him. She helped him into the bathroom, splashed water on his face, eased him into bed.

“What happened?” Her concern was writ large upon expressive features.

“I went to take some photos. I saw-”

He tried to tell her. He wanted to tell her. But what language could encompass the horrors that had unfolded in that small room? The things that lawyer had done? He could think of none, only mouthed empty syllables at her.

“What?” she said. And he could not answer.

#

He saw it again and again in his dreams. It was as if his camera kept on zooming in and in, revealing fresh details, new colors. No aspect of the scene was left unexplored. Nothing was allowed to be blurred by the mist of memory.

He woke screaming, and his girlfriend asked him what was wrong, and he tried to hawk up just a single word, but his throat revolted, refusing to give sound to the things he could still see even in that moment, like a flickering after-image implanted on his retinas.

And if only, he thought, he could say something, it would get the images out his body. He could excise them one by one with words. But he could not, and so he wept, and shook, and babbled, and nothing came out of him.

#

He tried to develop the photos. He thought perhaps that would do it. If he could not say what he saw, he could at least perhaps reveal it. But he couldn’t even unspool the film from the cassette. He barely even got it out of the camera he was shaking so badly. It was as if foulness emanated from the small yellow and black kodak logo.

He wanted to call his girlfriend in, make her seal the film away in a cannister, but he couldn’t stand the thought of her being infected by what was captured on those silver-halide crystals.

In the end, he burned it. He smashed the camera too, lest any residual images lingered upon its lenses or mechanisms.

It didn’t make anything better.

#

He went to tell the lawyer who had hired him, to explain that he couldn’t do the job. He hadn’t eaten. He felt feverish.

“The fuck you mean you can’t do it?” the lawyer said. “You know who I work for Theo? These aren’t guys you say no too. I’m not a guy you say no too.”

“I’ll give you the money back,” Theo said.

“I don’t give a fuck about money,” the lawyer said. “Get me my photos, or some very bad men are going to do some indescribable things to you and that girl of yours.”

Indescribable things. Theo started to laugh. He couldn’t stop.

#

Theo told his girlfriend to stop coming over. He couldn’t stand the thought that she might be infected by what was inside of him. That somehow, without words, the images would slip into her, multiply inside her frontal lobes while she slept, leave her as ruined as him.

He didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t stop seeing it. Not for a moment. It just kept playing out over and over and…

#

The lawyer sent goons to see what was going on. The court date was approaching they exlained. They made some very serious threats of very serious harm. Theo welcomed them. He told them that if he thought removing his eyes would stop him from seeing things, he’d have done it long ago. But the images were trapped inside him, and there was no way to let them out.

They didn’t show any sympathy. They dragged him back to the apartment block, pressed a camera into his hands, told him to get the goddamn photos.

And it happened again. All of it. The man arrived in his gray suit and red tie. Theo framed the window in the view finder. The only difference: Theo closed his eyes. But, still he knew exactly when to press the shutter, knew exactly how the scene played out. It was still inside him. Still unspoken.

He gave the camera to the goons, and went home.

#

The lawyer who’d hired Theo knocked on his door. The lawyer was white-faced, slick-skinned. He and Theo looked at each other.

“You saw it too?” Theo asked.

The lawyer’s spasm might have been a nod, and something in Theo leapt. Because this man knew. And so, surely they therefore now shared a common language of horror and despair. Surely they could speak to each other, and each of them would understand. Already, he saw, they shared the same desperate hope. Already they shared the same haunted dreams.

They both opened their mouths.

And nothing emerged.

And then Theo understood that nothing ever would. Nothing ever could. That what was within him, would always remain unarticulated. Would always remain trapped.

And so, he and the lawyer both spoke in the only way left to them, in the only language left in the devastation of what they’d seen: eternal, soul-shredding silence.