What the Dead Want(9)

“Don’t mind that,” Esther said. “I haven’t been stung once.”

Gretchen snapped a picture of the wasp nest, then turned around and startled. At the end of the hallway was an ornate mirror that had gone dark and mottled with age. Deep inside it she thought she saw something peering out intently at her, then dart suddenly and flicker away.





THE TROUBLING DISAPPEARANCE OF MONA AXTON

BY HEIDI NORTON

Mona Axton, a firebrand in lower Manhattan’s art scene and one of the most important figures in American spiritualist photography, has gone missing, opening a torrent of speculation.

Ms. Axton’s interest in the occult began in the 1980s when she lost many friends to AIDS. A photographer herself, she documented the disease’s impact on the art world, and then created “ghost images” of her friends walking in the city after their deaths. Her work from this period hangs in MoMA. Ms. Axton’s gallery also holds the rights to a majority of Victorian spiritualist photographs and ephemera. She had long been a subject of controversy in the art world, and her disappearance has been no less divisive, some calling it a tragedy, others a publicity stunt. Still others believe she has finally “crossed over” in order to document the lives of the undead.

Ms. Axton had been traveling on business. She was expected home three weeks ago and failed to return. Anyone with information on her whereabouts is urged to contact the police.





SEVEN


MONA BELIEVED IN SPIRITS, HAUNTINGS, HAD MADE A BUSINESS OF it. Gretchen spent her childhood sitting by Mona’s side—looking at photographs, going to the gallery after school, meeting artists and empaths and psychics and channelers. Gretchen knew her mother’s interest in ghosts went back further than her friends’ deaths; it was a part of her character. After her mother’s disappearance, she and her father were contacted by dozens of people who believed they could help, supernatural believers of all stripes.

For months Gretchen would actually see Mona out walking. And every time she did, her heart raced and she felt dizzy. She went looking for her mother in all her old haunts, went to the playground at Tompkins Square where they used to play when she was small. There were always women who looked just like Mona until they turned at a certain angle, or until Gretchen ran up close.

She never told anyone. Certainly not her father or the therapist her father arranged for her, but there were times when she clearly saw her mother in the apartment, sitting at the kitchen table looking through photographs.

Once or twice, she was almost sure she’d seen her father kissing her mother on the Eighth Avenue L subway platform. Or rather, her mother kissing her father—who seemed distracted and not to notice. The whole thing seemed crazy but true. One of those mysteries her mother would have been researching to prove or disprove. Maybe she was living in the city, right under everyone’s nose. Maybe she was living between worlds. Either way, these Mona sightings needed to be accounted for.

And then one Saturday, Gretchen understood what she needed to do: take her mother’s photograph. She needed proof. It was what her mother would want her to do. To prove that she was alive or to prove that she was a ghost walking the city. Either way, it was up to Gretchen now to carry on this kind of work.

It was October, her mother’s favorite month. Gretchen had her Leica X2 and she was in a fine mood to go shooting. That morning the sky was so astonishingly blue, the leaves on the trees so vibrant, it seemed they were painted with liquid neon. The air was crisp and she was wearing a long cashmere sweater of her mother’s that she hadn’t taken off since the first chilly day of fall because it still smelled like her mother. It was too big, flopping around her, slipping down her shoulders, almost dragging on the ground, but Gretchen wore it everywhere. She felt reassured by the thump of her camera against her chest as she headed to her mother’s gallery.

The gallery had always been a place of excitement, intense study, and speculation. The space was only really the size of a small shop, but there was always a new opening to plan for, or an artist coming into town from Amsterdam or Rio. Every day Gretchen had gone straight to the gallery after school, where her mother would be immersed in her work. She knew the place like the back of her hand.

Getting there was routine. She smelled the bus exhaust and felt the subway rumbling and thundering beneath her feet as she walked. She had fallen asleep every night of her life to sounds like these, so why, today, did the island of Manhattan seem to be rocking all around her—louder, stranger, more unstable than it ever had seemed before? It must be a sign of how alive everything was—how her mother was just around the corner.

And then she saw, across the street, with a clear purposeful expression, obviously headed to the gallery, her mother.

Mona wore a new black dress that morning, and it fit her perfectly. It was slim, a little clingy, maybe jersey material. A red purse dangled from her elbow, also new. She was carrying a large white box in her arms, and her wildly curly dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Gretchen knew the way that hair would smell—tea tree oil shampoo and chai tea—and she wanted to bury her face in it. To feel her mother’s arms around her.

Suddenly she felt dizzy and frantic, wanted to run to Mona and see her smile, hear her laugh. This was the closest Gretchen had gotten to her in months. Gretchen raised her camera to her eye with her trembling hands, found her mother in the viewfinder, aimed, and snapped the image. Her mother had kept walking, of course—she hadn’t noticed Gretchen—but that didn’t matter, because Gretchen had set her shutter speed at 1/900, and there was no way her mother could be blurred or lost with that setting. Through that viewfinder, her mother was brought so close to Gretchen’s eye that she even recognized the little gold charm bracelet her father had given her one year.