Camera Operator Wanted: No Experience Necessary

I’d been given the camera as part of the job. I didn’t know how it worked, and I didn’t really know what happened to those I took a picture of, but it was good money, and a man needs to eat. A man needs to go out to eat every once in a while. A man needs some way to get around town and a way that looks nice. That impresses those who see him. A man needs to be able to impress a possible partner, to see their eyes widen a little as they go from him to the car he drives, back to him with a smile.

The camera wasn’t digital. It was like a knock-off Polaroid. Instead of thick plastic sheaths sliding from the camera, what emerged were thin squares of paper. The paper was unremarkable, like cheap printer paper, but was near impossible to tear or even crease. My duties involved taking the photos, collecting the resulting paper, and mailing it off to the address I’d been given. I never had to replace that ‘film,’ if that’s what it was. Just an endless supply of it coming from the camera like bodily waste. Sometimes, waking up late at night, seeing the camera’s silhouette on my dresser, I wondered what it was eating to produce that waste.

The pictures didn’t develop like Polaroid film. Instead, the paper remained blank. At first, I thought something was wrong with the camera, that even though I was following the directions, taking the pictures I was assigned, and mailing them off at my own expense, that I wouldn’t be paid. That it was some sort of work-from-home scam that I’d never fully understand. I mean, they provided the camera. That had to be fifty to a hundred dollars right there off the top they were shelling out. And for what? Blank slips of paper?

The way it worked was this. I checked my email in the morning for an assignment. If I got an assignment, it was from a dark web .onion address with a nonsense name of random letters and numbers. The email would disappear after a day, no matter if I deleted it or not, no matter how I tried to save it, so I had to take notes. I destroyed the notes after each assignment, figuring there must be a reason the emails delete themselves. Each email included a time, a What3words location, and a picture. The picture would sometimes be of a place or a group of people, but it was usually a single person’s face or part of their face, as if the picture was snapped in a hurry, from the hip. Sometimes the photo was of a dog on a leash or a tree, once even of a cloud, one of those dark towers of curls and puffy layers, the kind that promises a heavy rain for hours. But mostly it was a person. My job was to go to the indicated location at the indicated time and take a picture.

The picture I had to take was always of a person, no matter what the photo in the email contained. Once I took a picture of a dog which had been in the email, mailed that off with the rest of the photos I’d taken that week, and a few days later found that dog, dead, on the sidewalk in front of my house. It looked like it had been a hit-and-run by a car. And maybe it wasn’t the same dog. It didn’t have a leash or a collar. It was possibly a coincidence. I didn’t have the assignment email anymore, nothing to reference. It was just a dog that shouldn’t have been let loose by its owner in the city. I wrapped the dog in a garbage bag and buried it in my trash can.

I took pictures of people. I mailed off undeveloped pictures of people to a series of ever-changing P.O. boxes located around the country. I received direct deposits to my bank from organizations based in Houston, but who I wasn’t working for. Houston Methodist. Kinder Morgan. Samson & Samson Associates. Advertising companies. PR companies. Names no one would question.

The money was good. It was good enough. I had college debt. I was still paying off expenses from my mother’s funeral. The money was good, but it was never enough. Or maybe it was just enough. It kept me from worrying about money but made it so I needed to keep doing the work. Outside of the pictures, my time was my own. I paid for a photography class I never finished. It was too strange to see the results of what I’d done, developing photographs so the details slowly faded in like a repressed memory.

Months later—the class all but forgotten except for the fellow student I started an off-and-on relationship with—I wondered how the photos I took were developed. They didn’t develop themselves, bathing in their own toxic chemical bodies like real Polaroids, but they weren’t negatives either. I took a few photos unrelated to any assignment to use as test subjects. I spent a week holding them up to different kinds of light. The sun. Candles. UV. Even brought one to the grocery store and used the self-checkout reader to bathe it in the red light of the laser scanner.

My failure to figure anything out should’ve discouraged me, just convinced me there was no point in investigating any deeper, but I found I needed to experiment further. I wasn’t sure why. Couldn’t help reaching into a gift horse’s mouth to see what its guts are made of? I was making enough money. But that money could dry up at any time. I needed the money, but couldn’t handle the uncertainty. This was gig work. One stretch I didn’t receive an assignment for nearly ten days. I know smart people would restrict themselves to rice and beans until they knew for sure one way or the other, but I couldn’t help going out to Oporto and Giacomo’s, nice restaurants, expensive restaurants, because I didn’t know when I’d ever be able to eat their like again.

Maybe if I figured out how the pictures worked I could understand what I was doing, how the camera worked, and reverse engineer it. If the assignments stopped coming, I could set up for myself. Put an ad on a dark web site or, hell, even Craigslist, and freelance for other people who knew what these pictures were for, what they were doing, what they were worth.

But I couldn’t experiment on the pictures I was assigned to take. And even though the camera never needed replacement film, I was still afraid of wasting it. Because what if the film ran out? How would I explain it? A picture or two couldn’t hurt, though.

So I took a picture of the woman I was dating from the photography class. Her name was Bergan. Even though we met in a photography class, she didn’t like pictures as objects, her apartment containing no photographs except for one of her parents from when they were young, before she’d been born. She believed in still lifes, photos empty of people, or so abstracted through focus or distance so the subjects were unrecognizable. Instead of trying to convince her to pose for a photograph, I waited until after sex, until after she was asleep, several hours into it when she was deep under, breathing slowly, so slowly and quietly she might as well have been a corpse. I took the picture just like any other and filed the slip of paper away in my wallet. I even made her breakfast in the morning.

At first, I was careful. I was afraid of destroying the paper. And I didn’t know what chemicals went into the thing. You burn plastics, they give off poison, you know? Not that I was planning on burning it. No, I went to the warehouse where I had taken the photography class. Late at night, no one was there, the door was easy enough to open. Every chemical that was in there, I tried, and nothing developed. Nothing at all showed up on the paper. My hands were burning through the medical-grade latex gloves, but the paper came out of every solution just as pristine and dry as it was going in.

The next day at a hardware store I bought industrial bleach, muriatic acid, all the heavy-duty chemicals I could find. The only result was damage to my bathroom sink, whatever surface they’d put over it to make it seem like real ceramic crackling like dirt in a drought. I researched online for scientific ways to reveal images but there was no way I was getting access to an x-ray machine. Angry, I burned it with a lighter, but it didn’t burn. I put it in the microwave. I put it in the oven. I tried to cut it with scissors. Stab it with a knife. Blend it up in a food processor. Nothing. No damage. Not even the slightest stain or indentation. I put the “picture” in the drawer of my bedside table.

Assignments came in and I completed them. Took a picture of a couple’s young son as he reached into a fountain to grab the coins people’d thrown in as wishes. A college graduate still in her robes, eyes closed, waiting at a bus stop. An old man leaning on his walker as he watched grackles swarm over a spilled city trash can, a vacant smile on his face.

After that night, Bergan ghosted me. No phone calls. I went to see her at her office job, but the receptionists always said she was “Out of the office” but I could tell they were just lying for her.

My mom always said I could simply never be happy. I couldn’t let well enough alone. She’d never have taken this job in the first place, as she’d never done anything without being fully aware of the consequences, not after my sister and me. I could have simply kept with the assignments. Taking pictures. Mailing off envelopes. Enjoying the flow of easy money without thinking about, I mean without just fucking thinking about it at all.

But you know how too much can be suspicious? Like those guys who’d give out flowers in airports back in the 70s and 80s, not wanting anything, they’d say, nothing except maybe ‘come to our house, come listen to a lecture, come join our cult.’ The way a company will give an undisclosed sum to someone suing them just to get them to shut up, to keep everything off the record. What was I being paid for? That’s all I wanted to know. What could be worth this much, when all it was was a blank piece of paper?

So I took a picture of myself.

I don’t know why. I thought maybe the camera did something. Changed the way you felt. I never noticed any difference in the people I took pictures of after I took their picture, but maybe the change was internal. Spiritual. But there was nothing. Just a blank piece of paper spat out of the camera’s ass and me there feeling silly and stupid. I even thought about mailing the photo of me off with the rest, but then I thought of that dog and put it in the drawer along with Bergan’s photo.

When I opened the drawer, I nearly screamed. Bergan’s photo was black. It wasn’t just black, it was rotting like old fruit. It glistened in the shadows of the drawer like the surface of a pimple ready to pop. There was something about the color of it, the blackness, like it was sunk into the wood. It smelled like the absence of smell, like death had already come and was already long gone. I wanted to touch the photo, my hand already reaching toward it, the slick, cool, muck of it already thick in my imagination. I kicked the drawer shut and backed out of the room, breathing heavy. The selfie I’d taken was still in my hand. I shoved it in my pocket.

Bergan didn’t answer her door when I knocked. Didn’t answer her doorbell. Still didn’t answer her phone. A piece of paper was half stuck under the door. I pulled it out to find a notice from the apartment manager that the rent was overdue.

Getting into her place was even easier than the photography studio. The lights were off. A stench came from the kitchen and bugs skittered away as I walked in, shining the light from my phone around. My heart stopped when I noticed someone sitting on the couch, but it was only Bergan, looking like she always had after a long day at work, sitting down to decompress by staring at the TV.

“Bergan,” I said, and I thought I heard something in response. A moan. A breath.

I walked over to her and saw her eyes were open, but shrunken. Shriveled. Her pupils looked like holes poked through paper. Her skin was thin and papery, wrinkles sharp as creases. I looked at her eyes again and the blackness of her pupils shined like tar, like the photo I’d taken of her and, I couldn’t resist, didn’t even know what I was doing until my finger touched her eye and kept going, her eye collapsing inward, and black oozing out. Her face crumpled. Her skull. Her body sagged and that black drooled from the opening wound of her face and I ran.

The stain hasn’t left my finger.

I’ve put the selfie in an envelope and am mailing it off with the other assignments.

I don’t know what happens to those I’ve taken pictures of, but it has to be better than this.