The Monsoon Ghost Image

Martin Ritter was ready, as ready as he’d ever be. Ritter was ready to die.

He’d collected and paid his debts. He’d made peace and hard choices. In a few moments, the ocean would take him away, into its impenetrable depths, or into a new life. The thirty-eight-year-old combat photographer was calm and focused. He’d played the life lottery many times, had stared into the abyss over and over, and had reemerged, loaded with tales of horror, triumph, and despair. Congo, Cambodia, Afghanistan, he’d seen it all. This was just another trip to the bottom of everything.

There was no land in sight, no matter which way he turned. The sun was about to come up and the slight breeze, fresh and salty, would presently give way to merciless tropical heat reflecting off the water from here to the edge of the world. He’d prepared everything and now stood at the stern of the Carabao, the luxury fishing yacht that had got him here, amongst neatly coiled ropes, buckets for the burley, and the seat which his best friend and assistant Fat Fred had broken a couple of days earlier while trying to pull a huge marlin from the great wet.

Deep sea fishing could be so much fun.

But Fat Fred had caught his last fish. Ritter’s life was compromised. He’d made the deal at the crossroads and all who’d traveled with him had to go. It was time for a purge. The common term describing the likely fallout from Ritter’s next move was collateral damage.

A few years earlier, in the wake of civilian killings in Kosovo, a bunch of German linguists had named collateral damage the un-word of the year. Too right, Ritter thought. Yet everyone was living in an un-world, talking to each other in un-words. Most people just didn’t know. Anything. He knew. He was about to kill seven people, including his corpulent friend.

He knew.

He inhaled deeply and tried to listen to his inner voices. There were none. He was calm enough, all things considered. He’d never killed anyone. In fact, he’d saved quite a few lives in his time. Perhaps now, things would even out.

The point of arrival and the moment of departure were close. Martin Ritter was ready to let go – of his career, his friends, his routines and aspirations, his half-baked ideas about life and love and justice and the loss thereof, all the big questions. He was ready to let go of Emilie.

Even of Emilie.

This was radical stuff. In some ways, he’d be killing her too. And he was ready to let go of everything he’d seen through his view finder.

He smiled vaguely into the dawn and took stock the way his father, a reliable accountant from Düsseldorf, would have done.

Martin Ritter had been one of the good guys, one of the heroes of his time, a familiar face on television, a man who encapsulated the Zeitgeist, a winner. He’d taken great risks and had done great things. He’d witnessed history in all its beauty and terror and then some. He’d rolled with more punches than the great Ali and he’d enjoyed his victories.

At the height of his career as one of the world’s most committed conflict photographers he’d loved and married a great woman. And yet, despite all the tales of heroism and the ensuing success, financial and otherwise, he had, as only a post-war German could, fastidiously held on to the fact that he was but one tiny cog in a giant matrix, a player with an exaggerated sense of self, stumbling through an age that had begun to frown upon the cult of individuality.