In Camera
by Sarah Leipciger



Jen’s hope was that her films might be respected by that esoteric crowd that was familiar with the art of independent shorts. That would have been good enough. Fame was an ornament. Her motivation was simple: she wanted to make her audience perceive the familiar like it was foreign. Like a haiku. She used obscure details to define her fantasies: cracking an egg into a porcelain bowl, threading a worm onto a hook, cigarette butts in the sand.

“Nice camera,” the guy standing next to her said. He spoke to her because there was a scrum at the bar and they pushed into each other, and it seemed absurd not to talk. Her forehead came up to his chin. “Are you a photographer?”
“I’m a teacher. A teacher’s assistant really. I teach film making.”
He kept looking at her.
“It’s someone’s leaving party tonight,” she said, held the camera up a little higher and shook it.
“Do you make films too?”
She answered that question with a hopeful shrug.
This guy at the bar was insignificant, but one of her work mates recalled him to the police later, and they spent weeks trying to track him down.

For a laugh on a Friday afternoon, she showed the students the first film she ever made. She wanted to illustrate for them the tendency for films to end up reflecting the maker’s state of mind, and how over time, you could follow one person’s films and if you read the details right, could map that person’s life, like how you could with Picasso and his art. “Not everyone puts such a personal mark on the content like this,” she had said. Then thought more about what she was saying, “Maybe it’s only me. And Picasso. Watch this, and you can laugh after I’ve left the room.” It was a black and white, filmed on a VHS recorder. It lasted four minutes and 22 seconds, and showed a girl (played by her cousin) stuck in a room with no furniture or windows. Over the four minutes and 22 seconds, the girl became increasingly agitated and frightened, pushed on the walls and tried the door again and again. She finally flopped on the floor in a histrionic death, where at that point by some mysterious hand the door slowly opened – too late of course.
“My parents had grounded me,” she told her class, and they all laughed. “And I missed a party or something. At the time, you know, this is what moved me. You can stop laughing now.”

She got home from the movies on a Tuesday night. A thin letter on the hallway floor told her that her latest project – a 16-minute dialogue between two friends in an airport – had been rejected by the Shawn Festival. She stood in the hallway with her jacket still on and her bag still over her shoulder, read the cordial rejection slip a couple of times then folded it up, put it in her desk drawer and shut the door firmly. She would tell the crew tomorrow.

She sipped a cup of lemon and honey tea – could feel a head cold coming on – and stared out the window. She traced her teeth with her fingertip and got lost in the bricks of the houses across the street, heard a car alarm wailing at the end of the road and wondered how long it had been going before she noticed it. She would go for a jog in the morning, run the bugs out of her system. The streetlights coloured the world yellow.

It was cold in the morning so Jen put on a long-sleeved shirt and a fleece, and thick jogging pants, her small form nearly lost in the layers. She wore a wool hat and gloves. She left her apartment building at 7:00 and cut across the road, deeking past a compact Vietnamese man who rapidly unloaded milk and sliced bread at the front of the corner shop. She could see her breath, could feel the cold on the hairs in her nose. The morning was grey but the sky was a certain white that would inevitably melt to blue.
When Jen ran, she kept her head in her head and stopped her sensors from connecting to her lungs or legs or wherever the pain was. This cleavage gave her clarity. Running was like dropping a few millilitres of vinegar into a murky cup of orange juice, and each second existed for itself, independent of the one before or after it. Each gulp of air was like food. All those details that she cared so much about sifted through her brain and settled somewhere else, to be picked up later, when it was time to work. Now was the time to be numb.

She entered the park through the south gate, and didn’t notice the red-billed ducks in the pond, or the sleeper on the bench wrapped in a blue tarp. She planned to do two laps of the park, and would cut through the rose garden in the middle each time to make a figure of eight, adding on about two extra kilometres. One woman cycled past her, wearing a skirt and alligator-skin high heels.
Jen passed through the rose garden; lines of stickly rose bushes with no roses. High walls of shrubbery. She pushed through and did another lap. On her second approach of the rose garden she had been running for over forty minutes and her muscles were tight. Another cyclist passed her. She began to walk through the garden, and would start running again when she got through the other side. She stopped – no roses to smell – her heart beat in her throat. She regretted the layers. A tall man in a lime green jacket stood in the middle of the garden, stood in the way of the cyclist so that the cyclist had to swerve out of his way. The man in the green jacket stared at her. He had a hollow face in a penumbra of wild, greasy brown hair. He scratched his left calf with his right foot, and lost his balance, and seemed harmless. But she walked with her head up, watched him from the corner of her eye. He watched her as she passed him, and she could smell cat piss. He wore chunky glasses that magnified his eyes. Her instinct was to not run; running from a dog induces the chase. She approached the gap between the hedges at the far end of the garden and could see the cyclist now, about five hundred metres away and getting smaller.
He yanked her back, by her neck, with a force that stole her breath. Something cold touched her neck and slipped under the skin, like the hand of a pickpocket. She tried to scream but choked on something warm. Cat piss? She heard hissing and bubbling. His whole body touched her, from hair to toe. He took the knife out of her neck and threw her on the ground and straddled her, put his knees on her wrists. Her fear was paralytic, started in her teeth and shot out her fingertips. She felt every single hair root stiffen.
This is the dream you always have, she thought, when you can’t run. She opened her throat to scream and more blood poured down. It does taste like iron, she thought. The second button of his jacket was missing and the threads still hung there. His enlarged pupils seemed to spin like record albums but no creases lined his face. I don’t even know his name, she thought. His face became red with the effort. He stuck his short knife into her chest eleven times, and she felt the punching pressure of every plunge. This doesn’t hurt, she thought, and could actually feel the grating of metal on bone, but this was no longer her flesh. He looked up then, to the left like an animal caught, and jumped off her and ran. She felt her arms rise up, like after the game she used to play when she was little: to stand in the doorframe and push as hard as she could on either side with the backs of her hands for a minute. Then walk away from the doorframe and watch her arms lift up, ghosts of displaced energy. She turned her head to the side and saw one rose growing, curled up tightly on the underside of one of the bushes. The grass next to her was long and thin, waved a little. She turned her head to the other side and saw a crispy leaf lift off the cement on a rolling current of something crimson. It bobbed and swung like a paper boat. Her tears felt hot, followed her face as she turned it. There was a tingling in her fingers, but they weren’t her fingers. A knobbly bicycle wheel stopped just short of the blood, a foot, then more feet. Muddy shoes, she thought. The bicycle was thrown down but made no sound. They crowded around her like a crown and the sky tunnelled away, blue now. A string of audio cassette tape fluttered from a tree branch. How ironic, she thought.

Because she was a foreigner to this country and because she lived alone, it took the police a day and a half to trace her identity. For a day and a half the media called her Dead Jogger. Then she was Dead Filmmaker, and one of the tabloids published a still from the film she had shown the students for a laugh, and suggested that maybe she foretold her own death.

A filmmaker, at last.