Safelight: A Novel - Hardcover

Burke, Shannon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400062012 ISBN 13: 9781400062010

Publisher: Random House, 2004

Synopsis

It’s 1990, and New York City is in shambles: unemployment reigns, crack wars rage, and whole neighborhoods burn as delinquent landlords cash in. Struggling to come to terms with his father’s death, paramedic and photographer Frank Verbeckas descends into the chaos and misery of upper Manhattan, taking photographs of the ill, the wounded, the dying, and the down-and-out. Accompanying him on his wanderings are his loudmouthed partner, Burnett; his best friend, Hock, who boosts drugs from the hospital; and his brother, Norman, a surgeon who can’t understand why Frank is in such pain. Frank’s ruin seems inevitable, but when he meets Emily, a professional fencer whose days are numbered by a fatal illness, his world changes. Against everyone’s advice, Frank and Emily fall in love. Together, they try to find a way out of the murk of guilt and sadness and learn to draw meaning and beauty from despair.

In short, cinematic scenes, with not a word wasted and nothing told that can be shown, Shannon Burke leads us on a powerful journey through the darkest precincts of the street and of the soul. Honest, terse, and enormously moving, Safelight is a debut of remarkable depth, a stunning, clear-eyed, and sympathetic portrait of American life and death–a love story not for the faint of heart.

About this title

About the Author

SHANNON BURKE is a novelist and screenwriter. Before moving to his current home in Knoxville, he worked as a paramedic in Harlem and lived in Chicago; Chapel Hill; New Orleans; Los Angeles; Prescott, Arizona; Bryan, Texas; and Mexico. Safelight is his first novel.

Reviews

In this dark, tender debut, Frank Verbeckas is a young paramedic patrolling the mean streets of Manhattan. Frank's real passion, however, is photography; he's constantly snapping pictures of injured and dead bodies while on his rounds. "I don't like healthy people," he tells his brutish partner, Burnett. Though Frank treats his photographs as just a harmless hobby, the obsession runs much deeper. What he's really after is photography's ability to give him "a clarity and precision" that he lacks in real life, where the violence of his job punctuates an ever-present loneliness. His father is dead; his mother's in another state; his surgeon brother treats him with contempt. Frank's only refuge is the homemade darkroom in his apartment, where he spends hours under the "weightless, red glow" of a safelight. His emotional numbness gets him into trouble when he joins up with Burnett and another medic to sell stolen drugs from the hospital. But his relationship with 21-year-old Emily Pascal, a fencer infected with HIV, finally shakes him out of his detachment. The doomed romance is rather sentimental (like a minimalist, edgy Love Story), but Burke's spare prose and sharp eye for the beauty in urban misery makes this a moving tale of lost souls searching for permanence in a chaotic world.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In the free-fire zone of early-1990s Harlem, emergency medical technician Frank Verbeckas drifts from one fresh horror to the next. Numbed by his father's suicide, Frank falls in with a rough-and-tumble ambulance crew that is as willing to deliver bruising blows to a rummy frequent flier as it is to provide top-flight care to hopeless trauma cases. When he isn't boosting narcotics or encouraging insurance scams against the city, Frank snaps photos of the dead, the dying, and the down-and-out. His cowboy-surgeon brother, Norman, berates Frank for wasting his life. And he does seem headed for disaster--until he meets Emily Pascal, an HIV-positive competitive fencer. Against his better judgment, Frank eases into a romance. In punchy, cinematic chapters, Burke tenderly illustrates the transformative powers of love between people riding out tough emotional times even as he keeps the medical lowlight reel rolling. As Frank opens up, he imagines how the photos might improve his life instead of just allowing him to morbidly relive the past. Sometimes, redemption can be claimed in the heartbeat of a tripping shutter. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

She came into view at the top of the stairway and motioned to hurry us. Burnett, who wasn’t going to hurry for any- one, kept climbing at the same indolent pace. We found her on the third floor in an open doorway. Beyond her, an empty room—white walls, folded canvas tarps, a dried roller, stacked cans. I smelled paint.

“We here for you?” Burnett asked.

“No. Him,” she said.

She shifted her eyes toward a shut door at the end of the newly painted white room. Burnett walked past her.

“Locked,” she said. “It’s locked.”

Burnett tried the knob, put his shoulder into it, then stepped back.

“What caliber?”

“I don’t know. Like this . . .”

She showed the length of the gun with two hands.

“Whatta you think?” he asked. “He ever tried before?”

“I don’t know.”

“You see him load it?”

She shook her head.

“Well, this is stupid. Don’t go near the door.”

That was it for Burnett. He walked to the end of the hallway, jerked the window open, and felt for cigarettes. She leaned against the doorframe and watched him sullenly. I thought I ought to say something.

“It’s not our job,” I said. “Some barricaded patient. What’re we gonna do?” Then, “You’re his girlfriend?”

“I hardly know him. I’m part of his group.”

“Group?”

“I’m positive,” she said.

I didn’t understand what she meant. Then I did.

She looked as if she was just out of college. Brown hair partway down her back, olive skin, a navy pullover sweatshirt with dangling white cords coming out of brass sealed eyelets. With her shy demeanor, thin, nervous mouth, big eyes, and scrawny body, she wasn’t particularly attractive. The dispatched report said her name was Emily Pascal.

“What’s his count?”

“Ten. So he’s got nothing to lose,” she said.

We could hear sirens, far away at first, then closer. Down the hallway, Burnett stood with two hands on the windowsill. Emily Pascal leaned off the doorframe.

“Don’t go in there,” I said.

“I just want to check,” she said. “Before the cops. Maybe he’ll go willingly.” She started into the apartment, into the newly painted room. I reached out as if to restrain her but she gave me a sharp look.

“Don’t touch me.”

I pulled my hands away. Burnett glanced over, bored.

“Don’t let her in, Frank.”

But she’d already gone in. Then two things happened, one right after the other. The sirens outside the window wound down and stopped and in the sudden, unexpected silence afterward there was a loud pop from the inner room. I heard something fall.

“I don’t fucking believe it,” Burnett said.

He tossed his cigarette out the window and started back, not hurrying at all. He joined me in the doorway. The girl, Emily Pascal, now lay on her side, making little moaning noises. Her right leg was out straight, but her left leg was bent, and around the left knee I saw a hole in her jeans about the size of a pea. Around that hole there was a growing purplish stain.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400062012
• ISBN 13: 9781400062010
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 211