by Reed Karaim
Todd had recovered sufficiently that he and Christina could join me in the beer garden. We stood at a plank bar and everyone came by, Edith, Art and Louise, members of the city council, lifers from the Buffalo Bar, everyone, and everyone liked my cowboy hat and everyone was happy and triumphant and relieved and drinking too much and the carnival grew louder and then fireworks were exploding overhead in the colors of the American flag and they were brilliant, blinding, too loud, and invisible ash was drifting down through the night, landing on your shoulders, in your hair, and the lights were out and Todd and Christina had stolen away and the bartender was looking across the rough-sawn bar, saying, Time to go home, cowboy.
• • •
I WAS STANDING at the window of my apartment, looking at the labyrinth of shadows on the now-deserted street, and the more I stared, the more complicated and confused it seemed, a geometry of hidden spaces and crosshatched lines, lighter patches of gray like doors opening into nothing, triangles and bars of perfect black cutting off every escape. There was a terrible precision to the pattern, as if the nature of the carnival could only be revealed when the lights had gone out and all motion had ceased.
A flicker on the glass caught the corner of my eye and I looked up to see small creatures of light swarming in a playful tangle down the block. I was lost until I realized the carousel was being taken down and I was watching flashlights dance along the metal poles and ghostly wooden horses. A feeling that had been bothering me since Anna disappeared with her children, a sense of something essential escaping my grasp, something I needed to understand, settled on me like a final cinder of ash.
I’ll tell you about it someday, she’d said. Yes, there was that. But something more.
The dancing lights climbed into the air again, moving in a collapsing circle in the night as another ride came down. It was like watching a constellation disassembled. The disappearing form of the familiar world.
The phone on the wall rang. I looked at the clock radio on the counter. It was 2:14 a.m., and I don’t believe in this kind of thing, but it is a small, enduring mystery in my life that I knew they were calling to tell me my father had died.
Chapter 14
I WOULD HAVE SAID I HAD NOTHING from Anna, no letters, keepsakes, photographs, nothing beyond a few old copies of The Shannon Sentinel, buried somewhere in a banker’s box in the storage room. But I was cleaning out a different box a few years back, a jumble of stuff from all the moves early in my working life, and I came across a framed picture she had taken.
The photograph was of Shannon, taken from some distance outside of town at dusk, a full moon hanging in the sky above the grain elevators and water tower like a magic coin of good fortune. A timed exposure. Beautifully done. I was sure Anna’s eye had been behind the lens. I had no memory of deciding to keep the picture or framing it, but as I held it up into the light, I remembered the photograph appearing out of nothingness in the developing tray at the Sentinel.
Anna and I had been in the darkroom. I was teaching her how to develop and print photographs. These are nearly lost and largely useless talents these days, but this was when every photographer still retired to a curtained closet or windowless room to discover what suspended moments of life had been captured on each roll of film.
She was a natural photographer, but no one had ever taught her what to do in the darkroom, so I showed her how to mix the chemicals, spool the thirty-five-millimeter film into the circular wire guide that fit inside the canister, and let it develop. This was all housekeeping. The magical part came when you chose your shot and threaded it into the enlarger, placed the blank sheet of photo paper in the easel, and flipped the light to expose the frame.
There was the sudden, always beautiful appearance of the image on the paper, then the moment in the developing tray when the picture crawled back out of its brief sleep and took permanent form, the baths in the stop solution and fixer, and finally the photographs clipped at odd angles on the line, cubist scraps of the world hung out to dry like laundry. All of this satisfying, no matter how flawed the photographs themselves, a brief sense of creation, life out of nothingness, form out of darkness.
But there had been something else that day—something earlier that led us to retreat to the darkroom. Art had been showing one of his friends around the office. There was a piece of new equipment in the back shop. I can’t remember what, but Art was a big man in a small town with a social circle in which everyone seemed to have known each other since kindergarten. He liked to show off his new stuff. A kind of ceremony attended the visits from Art’s old friends, men his age, or sometimes a little younger. He stood taller, which elevated his belly, as if it were trying to fill in for his birdlike chest. A faint pink glow came into his round cheeks and his hands became even more nervous, quicker to take someone by the arm, holding on a little too long as he steered them from one room to another. Louise was never around for these visitations. She usually showed up later in the day, her own glow not quite so healthy, but just as hearty and far more redolent of either brandy or whiskey. On this afternoon, Art had finished the tour and was walking out the door with the owner of the funeral home, a slight and aristocratic silver-haired man with the rubbery pallor of someone who spent long days breathing in formaldehyde fumes, when they intersected with Louise marching up the sidewalk.
Anna and I were the only people in the newsroom. I was leaning over Anna’s desk to read something on her typewriter, and they were clearly visible in the window directly in front of us. They all stopped and there was this awkward pirouette as Art’s embalmed friend stepped quickly onto the grass to give Louise free passage and, with a strangely formal wave, hurried on down the sidewalk. Louise faced Art and, before she spoke, he glanced awkwardly at the window.
I was wondering if he could see us in the reflection of the June day on the glass when Anna spoke.
“You were going to show me how to develop pictures? Now would be a good time.”
We stepped together through the revolving metal door into darkness lit only by the single red light. The darkroom was little more than a closet, really, a long narrow space with shelves full of chemicals and a bench with the developing trays along one wall. The enlarger squatted by itself along the other wall.
“What was that about?” I asked.
She was leaning against the bench and my eyes were still adjusting to the dark, but I was aware of the hesitation, the stillness before her head moved imperceptibly from side to side.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Show me what to do.”
We went through the preliminaries and then came the first exposure, which was a little too dark, and I remember I was showing Anna how to lighten parts of a print by dodging, moving something, even your hand, back and forth above the paper; I was holding her hand at the wrist, leaning over her shoulder, and I could feel her pulse through her skin. Breathing, heartbeats, the warmth of someone’s skin, these things are more intimate parts of us than any words we say, any promises we make. For a moment I lost myself in the accelerated tick of her heart and when I returned my attention to the photograph it was too late.
“We’ve ruined it,” I said. “We have to try again. You do it this time.”
I stood back and watched her lighten the clouds across the top of the frame. Her hands were small and translucent in the light. She kept her nails short. Her fingers floated, slightly separated, above the reappearing sky, and there was something so vulnerable about this.
“You’re a natural,” I said.
She pulled her hand back and switched off the exposure. Her eyes rose from the print and the gratitude burning in them unsettled me. It was as if I had shown her fire.
“I love it. Thank you.”
“All right. Good. I’ll show you the rest.”
We stood side by side in the faint red light and watched the photograph reappear in the developing tray and I had her move it through the other baths, and when she attached it to the line, she stepped back to consider t
he print, her shoulder pressed against my chest.
“Voilà,” I said, to say something. “Magic.”
Anna was silent and then took a step forward, leaning over the photograph and separating us.
“Still a little too dark. I want this last flare of light in the sky. Not so much dark clouds.”
“They give some definition.”
“I don’t care. I want more light.”
“Okay.”
She placed another blank sheet of paper on the easel. When she looked back over her shoulder her already dark lips were blood-red in the light.
“Thank you for teaching me this.”
Again, a little too much.
“I’m just giving you more work, really. You’re now our darkroom tech.”
I remember she stepped close in the darkness and the silence, and I felt her hands just above my wrists, giving them a quick, soft, but somehow violent squeeze. I was briefly aware of her face so near mine the rest of the tiny room disappeared, and then she stepped back and I had a silhouetted view of her small, trim figure, the tangle of her hair lit with fire. The warmth of her hands lingered, seemed to move up my body.
“No, Eric, I love it,” she said. “I love how you can change things.”
When did this take place? Was it before or after the night of the carnival? I think it must have been before. Art and Louise on the sidewalk, Anna’s minute hesitation, her uncomfortableness with lying, would I have noticed any of that in the days immediately after my father died? I don’t think so. I think it must have been shortly before, a memory that still sparks with half-formed images of what might have been.
But I choose to place it here, to escape briefly the night of that two a.m. telephone call, when I would drive half drunk across the state, sobering up in time to stand outside my childhood home at dawn, afraid to enter, knowing there was nothing I could do to make anything better. The worst part of my year in Shannon was ahead of me that morning.
“—I love how you can change things,” she said.
“Sure,” I said, and I didn’t really understand, but today I have a lifetime of memories hanging on the line, all fixed and too late to shade with anything but lies, and of course I do. It would be a long time before the flattened horizon held the possibility of a new day. So forgive me if I move my hand gently across the page and place this scene here—Anna and I, alone in the darkroom, burning light into a dying sky.
Chapter 15
I WENT HOME FOR A WEEK. The funeral was the fourth day and I spent a couple of days helping my mother sort through my father’s papers and watching my brother and sister suffer without any idea what to do about it. On the sixth day the bell rang and my mother came back with a curious look to tell me there was someone at the door for me.
Emily was standing on the steps in a black dress and black stockings, a formal look undone only slightly by the scuffed black Converses she was wearing. Her sun-streaked hair had grown longer and more confused since I had last seen her. Her eyes were the same startling blue but rimmed by exhaustion and her skin looked oddly pale and uneven for midsummer. She was holding a card nervously in front of her like a child not sure she was welcome at a party.
Since the moment I had arrived home to find that my father was truly and forever dead, my mood had alternated between a blank, all-encompassing sense of loss and a strange gallows humor that seemed to be the only way I could feel anything.
“This is your idea of mourning wear?” I said, discovering I had swung again toward the existentially comic point of view.
“I didn’t know what to wear.” She looked down at her clothes, sounding more scared and uncertain than I could remember. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. We’re going to have a black-tennis-shoe wake later on. You’ll fit right in.”
“I mean, I’m sorry about your father. Terry told me yesterday. I’m sorry I missed the funeral. I would’ve come.”
I was still standing in the doorway. She’d never met my father. I had told her about his stroke. I couldn’t remember what else I’d told her, but it wasn’t that much and it was very strange to see her here, standing on my mother’s step, waiting to be let in.
“How are you?” Emily asked nervously.
I opened my mouth and discovered my mood had oscillated back. I shook my head in a way that could mean anything, but really meant: I can’t speak.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Not so great.”
I stepped out of the house and Emily followed me. My family lived in a quiet neighborhood of old Victorian houses not far from the university. It was a still day, the sky a formal Spode-blue, the street so hushed every house we passed felt as if it were listening in.
“You’re still in school?”
“Not really.”
“And you’re still with . . .” I couldn’t remember his name.
“Not really.”
“What happened?”
“He got me sick.”
I stopped to look at her. She shook her head impatiently and thrust the card into my hands.
“It doesn’t matter. I brought this for you.”
It didn’t matter. We continued walking. This street was where I had grown up and it was all strange: every window, every door, every glint of light on every mailbox was familiar and so alien I felt I had tumbled into a badly made movie set.
“How do you like that little town, Sharon, you’re living in?”
“Shannon. It’s fine.”
“I thought I might come out and visit you sometime.”
“It’s a long drive.”
“Not so long. Just an interstate. No traffic.”
“I live above the bank,” I said.
We came to the end of the block and it was time to turn around or take a much longer walk.
“I’m sorry, Ricky,” Emily said. “I really am.”
She turned and ran back down the street to her car, the last unexploded Ford Pinto in the universe. She had an awkward girlish gait, all knees and flying elbows, that made her seem younger than she was, and she was young. We were young. I remember, and I feel our youth like an ancient memory of lightness in the bones.
• • •
I HADN’T TOLD ANYONE at the Sentinel my father had died. I’d meant to, but when I left a message on Art’s office phone I couldn’t say the words. I only told him I had a family emergency and had to go home for a while. But when I came back they all knew. The obituary had run in several newspapers and maybe they found out that way. I never asked. I walked into the office on my first morning back and Edith was standing at the counter, editing a notice by firmly crossing out words with a blunt pencil. She set it down when I came through the door.
“Sorry to hear your news, kiddo.”
I nodded.
“We would have come for the funeral if we’d known,” she said with a hint of reproach.
“It’s a long way to go.”
“Not so long for a friend,” Edith said. “We would have come if we’d known.”
And, unexpectedly, I had come home. I nodded again, unable to trust my voice. The front office was deserted except for Edith.
“Where’s Anna?”
“She’s been feeling ill.” Edith picked up her pencil and crossed out an entire line without hesitation. “Headaches again.”
Anna almost always looked healthy. She was one of those people who move with a gentle precision that makes you think all is well. Only the tiredness that sometimes puffed the skin around her eyes gave her away. Yet in the time I knew her, she was ill more than she was well. It took me a long time to realize this because she rarely missed work, usually when one of her children was sick. But her body was where all the damage in her life claimed its toll. She had headaches. She had problems with her sinuses that would finally require surgery, and the arthritis, so bad sometimes I would see her wince as she reached for her ever-present coffee cup.
None of this I understood then. None of this I
took into consideration when I asked her to stay late, to take on a little extra work, none of this registered when I noticed with mild impatience how she seemed unable to get started some mornings. I see her at her desk, and one hand is extended and frozen in a half fist on the cold metal surface, and she is so still, so still, and I see now this was a struggle with pain. A crease appears above her closed eyes and I know. I hear the hesitation in the middle of a sentence and I understand. The only part of the wisdom that supposedly comes with age that I’ve found has any real value is learning to recognize other people’s pain. But standing at the counter as a young man whose father had just died I was too lost in my own loss, which existed in my mind as a vast and featureless plain, a Bonneville Salt Flats of the soul, with the sun glinting hard off the crystalline remains of the dead sea, to understand Anna’s absence.
“I left you with one of the biggest issues of the year, the anniversary issue,” I said, abstractly seeing how I had let them down. “How did you get the paper out?”
“Oh, Anna’s been in until today. Working with Louise.” Edith finished with the notice by penciling in a final apostrophe. “You might have a headache, too.”
I sat down at my desk. There was no one else in the office at this hour, just a day after the paper had been out. I really had nothing to do. After a few minutes, I stood up and walked outside. Edith raised an eyebrow as I passed, but went back to work without saying anything.
Todd was strolling across the street, yawning. He stopped when he saw me and covered his mouth awkwardly.
“Sorry, need coffee. Man, I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Thanks.”
“No, I mean . . .” He shook his head, considered me with sad, bewildered eyes, and then looked down the street. “You wanna, I don’t know, get a beer tonight or anything? Or maybe just hang out. Watch the game.”
“Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe.”
“All right. Anyway, hey . . .”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
I was a ways farther down the sidewalk when Todd shouted after me.
“Hey, I got you a card!”