Black Mirror by Gail Jones Page A

X-ray for feet. Jules inserted his feet into a small dark box, and looked down from above into a narrow viewing chamber that revealed the skeleton. He saw his own rather anaemic, knobbly, misshapen feet transformed to the most delicate pattern of bones; it was a glimpse, he said, of the inner beauty of things; it was like a vision. There they were, not ordinary and everyday, but gleaming, almost glassy, designs in white marble. This machine had little to do with the sale of shoes — and it was removed from stores not long after, when the dangers of recreational X-rays became apparent — but they were for a time immensely popular. Jules lined up again and again, to peer inside his own feet. To marvel. To be astonished. To see the hidden made visible in a wand of weird light.
    It was this machine, he said, that gave him an interest in photography. He loved the body on a screen, its aesthetic reproduction. He loved the world in tonalities of black and white: a face becoming mica, the negative space of any shadow. His first images, unsurprisingly, were of his mother, Hélène. He photographed her standing in front of a bright window, so that she was the mere shape of a mother, with no details at all; then he photographed her standing with the window to one side, so that she was a bright half-face, exemplified in each line and each specifically personal mark. Then, standing outside, Jules photographed Hélène through the kitchen window: she was here complete, and wholly visible, her face glowing like a lamp in its shady frame. This triptych seemed to the child an entire understanding. He recognised prematurely his own lifelong metaphysic.
    Nearly done, he called out, crouching behind the lens.
    Her face broke into a simple smile. His mother’s face .
    During his teenage years Jules photographed every single thing around him: the apartment in Lyon he shared with his mother was exposed hundreds of times, caught in prints whose lunar shine he kept stored, with fastidious care, inserted between layers of dark-coloured tissue paper. The almond tree in the square was also endlessly photographed; it was a tree proliferated and divided and remade like no other, captured in every angle, every light, every state of bloom or non-bloom. The old man who slept each dayby the Tabac, at a perfect angle to the open doorway. Bicycles leaning against the wall at school. Garbage. Flowers. Girls eating ices. The large toothless woman who cheerlessly served them. For Jules the photograph retrieved something from death, something unidentifiable but nevertheless essential. He felt an elation, a quickening, with every click of the shutter.
    At night he polished his camera as if it were Aladdin’s lamp. Then he kissed it, wrapped it, and placed it carefully under his bed.
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    Jules was lying beneath the piano, photographing his mother’s feet as they worked the brass pedals, when he had his first attack of an ailment he would describe as his shiver of mortality. He felt a sensation of constriction in the chest; his pulse began to beat at double its rate, and his pounding heart was so forceful that his whole body began wildly to tilt and sway. The attack lasted almost thirty minutes, during which time both Hélène and Jules were convinced he would die.
    The doctor diagnosed tachycardia — unusual speeding of the heart — and said that he should learn to live with it, that nothing much could be done. It was an ailment that would assail him, like a seizure, at unexpected moments, and each time his heart accelerated Jules wondered what secret parallel life he might elsewhere be leading. He wished too that there was a viewing device, something like the foot X-ray, by which he might examine from above his convulsing heart. This way, he felt sure, he would be less afraid.
    On the day of his first attack Hélène had been practising a Ravel piano concerto written for the left hand. She sat on her right hand, so that