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was nearly thirty-five when Clavius threw her back into the pond, and consumers certainly didn’t want to look at a spokesperson that old unless it was to siphon off money to save dolphins or build puppy shelters or feed retards in Africa with no fingers or toes.
    For an hour in the historical time line, she had been a goddess.
    Then, in the hospital, she was my key to the future.
    After Skorpia came Nasja, about eighteen months after my first meeting with Clavius. He asked me to shoot the removal of Nasja’s breast implants, making a sidelong joke about how it could be another triumph in my “series.”
    Nasja was packing old-school silicone bags that had ruptured and migrated, the material intermeshing with fat and muscle tissue to produce ungainly lumps that were gathered by gravity into the undercurve of each breast. Excision of this annoyance was very time-consuming, very cut-and-paste; the threat of metasticization was very real. What concerned Clavius was not the issue of survival, but the sculpting of the beautiful, or in this case, the resurrection of beauty as he defined it.
    Hence, the scarring, which I could not unsee through my lens, earlier today. The skin under her breasts was as taut and furrowed as beef jerky.
    Clavius next sent me to the city morgue to photograph dead people, which is where I learned what little I knew about how the dead should look.
    I embraced digital photography at the same time as everyone else, but I maintain my love affair with photochemical processing—light and alchemy versus pixels. Silver gelatin positives from mystic broth rather than output from a printer. Clavius liked that. He introduced me to some people, I got a loft and a studio and a minor reputation, I did some arguably successful shows, and I branched into style spreads for commercial advertising clients, but all of it in Clavius’s shadow. I was, at best, a protégé, not to become a fully formed human in my own right until the Master died, or had a gender reassignment, or gave up his materialistic life for Buddha, or something.
    Nasja really had nothing to complain about. She had gotten a green card and citizenship out of her deal with Clavius; she would rebound from the divorce and no doubt become some kind of grande dame of fashion opinion.
    But back there in my narcotic-festooned bathroom, before the sex, during the shoot, I couldn’t kick the thought that I needed something different. I needed a clean breath. I needed out. Maybe I just needed a break from serving the Master, and an opportunity had presented itself earlier the same day.
    A movie pal of mine named Tripp Bergin had called to suggest I might experiment with broadening my retinue by taking on a unit photography job on a film that was to start shooting in New York and Arizona in less than a month. The designated picture-taker had been benched, or gotten a better offer. Tripp was what they called the UPM, or unit production manager, one of those guys still waiting for his first chance at directing, which never seemed to come because he was such a good UPM. Bills arrive regularly whether you get paid or not. Tripp advised that there might be a delay, or more dramatically, a push forward for “commencement of principal,” which is movie-speak for when they actually begin filming.
    I had about forty seconds to mull this over before the shoot with Nasja absorbed the rest of my day. I backfiled it, weighing the flavors of such a new and different assignment. Whether I could be beckoned.
    After that, I think you’re caught up on what happened next.
    *   *   *
    I shot eight rolls of Cognac having simulated sex with the late Dominic Sharps. The Professor, who seemed to be some kind of defrocked mortician, applied makeup cagey enough to satisfy the camera. The bullyboys twisted and turned Dominic into various positions, mostly female-superior in deference to the dependent lividity. Dominic was starting to