This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental.
Darkroom by Michael Bailey
eBook
First printed in limited edition hardcover (Oversight 978-1-7752544-6-1)
Copyright © 2018 UNNERVING
DARKROOM
Michael Bailey
“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than
walking alone in the light.” – Helen Keller
“You’re really going with me,” Grace said, not as a question, and tied a bandana to cover her sister’s eyes. She made the knot tight, centered it behind her head.
“I can see through the material,” Alice said.
“You’re supposed to be able to see through the material. A little or a lot?”
“A little. Shapes of things, mostly. I see a silhouette of you, and can tell you’re wearing a bandana, too, but I can’t make out your face. You look, I don’t know, undeveloped.”
Grace thought the reference was clever, as she’d had much experience developing film in the darkroom she had made out of her basement. The ground-level windows had been blacked out with paint, and the one bulb dangling from the ceiling was amber and only used while developing film. Grace had no use for light otherwise.
“Is this how you see the world?” Alice asked.
Under her own bandana—one Alice said was white skulls over black—Grace’s eyes were covered with gauze, taped to her face. She’d lived sightless for the most part, wearing the bandana in public and toting a cane for the blind so as not to frighten anyone. Grace’s eyes wanted nothing to do with the world. She’d rather not see. Only in the darkroom would she take off their coverings, only while developing.
“Sort of,” Grace said. “In the light everything’s lost in red-hued black, and in the dark everything’s simply… gone.”
In the dark, we all look the same, she thought, and this pleased her.
“Where are we going, anyway? I mean, when are we going?”
“Two thousand four.”
“We were what, seven and eight?”
“Nine and ten, and Dad was thirty-four,” Grace said, knowing the math.
Ten had been such a bad year, or so she remembered.
“How did we get so old? And so fast?”
Their dad would have been ninety-four if he were still alive, but he had died from a hemorrhagic stroke. She needed her little sister with her this time, to not see, to not hear, but to be there for moral support; even now, seventy years old, she needed her.
“You’ll wear this too,” Grace said, feeling for the headphones. They were noise cancelling, and she found and placed them over her sister’s ears.
“Can you hear me?” she said. “Alice! Can you hear me?” she said louder, and so she temporarily removed them and said, “Nothing?”
“Nothing what?”
“You couldn’t hear me,” Grace said, again not a question. “Good.”
“How will we get around, without sight and without sound?”
“You remember the house as much as I do. All I have to do is remember what I want to remember, a certain time, a certain place, and that’s where we’ll go now, where I’ll take you, to that time. Remember mom and dad’s bedroom, the nightstand where dad used to keep his pile of books? How he used to read three or four at any given time? We’re going to shift into their bedroom, next to that nightstand. The year the furnace in the attic broke and we used space heaters next to our beds. It doesn’t have to be an exact date and time, just an approximation of when and where. A memory. That’s where we’re going, to the winter of two thousand four, and we’re going to take Dad’s picture while he’s sleeping.”
For sixty days Grace had traveled blindly to the past. She’d found a way to shift, to be there without actually being there, and she was getting better at it every visit, even without her sight, the meditations easier to slip into, and with each shift she could further travel through years that had seemingly taken forever to pass.
Grace held up an old camera, a Nikon Nikkormat FTN 35mm, even though her sister couldn’t see it. “We’re going to take Dad’s picture,” she said again.
“Like the ones in the book?”
“Yes, while he’s still asleep, in the early morning, a time light enough for the picture to turn out.”
Before adorning the blindfolds, Grace had pushed a book across the table to her sister—a stack of photos bound together at the spine by a metal clasp. Inside were a collection of fifty-nine eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of their father, each taken from a different year, starting with 2064 and stepping backward through time, the earliest dated 2005. Each photo was of her father in bed, early in the morning before rising, and each photo had been taken on a different day over the last two months to cover a particular year. The idea was for dad to age in reverse as you flipped from first page to last. He’d always slept in the same position, on his back, which is why he often snored, and why Grace knew the photos would be similar, despite his reverse aging.
“You’ve never seen these,” Alice had said.
“I don’t want to see them until I’m finished.”
“And when will that be?”
“When I can’t remember enough of dad to go back, I guess.”
Grace could remember as far back as kindergarten, but not much farther than that. She would be ten years old this time, in 2004, so maybe only five or six more photos of her father at most before she’d consider the book complete.
The photos of their dad sleeping were the only ones Grace had shown to Alice so far, and this time around she’d take the one of him sleeping and add it to the back of the book, and use the rest of the Fuji film to document home as she and her sister sightlessly and soundlessly moved from room to room. They were raised in that home and their father had died there, so she knew the house inside and out, could roam around and snap photographs at will, despite lacking two of her senses. And this would be her sixtieth day doing it blindly.
Grace had taken entire rolls worth of photographs of the past, and each time she’d start with one of her father asleep in bed—that way she’d always know the first shot developed was the one to add to the reverse-aging book—and then she’d take as many photos as her budget would allow, each day a focus on a different year. She’d gone back to her past often, not only in the early morning hours, but all hours.
The darkroom housed stacks of photographs, filed in boxes prearranged by year: 2063, 2062, 2061, all the way back to 2005. There were perhaps thousands upon thousands of black-and-white photographs. Later they could develop the photos from 2004 together, in the darkroom, and then maybe she’d start looking through them, really looking through them—no longer concerned about contrast or quality, the way film developers never truly care about anything but the process. Then maybe she’d look through photos from the other years, having Alice there with her for support. The last sixty days had been spent shooting and developing sixty years of the past, not necessarily reliving what she’d captured along the way.
She wanted Alice to understand how the process worked before she’d allow her sister to become more involved, before Grace would even consider removing the coverings permanently from her eyes in order to see what she’d accomplished blindly these last two months. She was too afraid to go at it alone. There were too many unknowns. Too many frightening senses in the past she’d perhaps never come to understand, hence the precautions. The entire process of shifting back through time was so utterly strange.
Grace could take things with her, she’d learned through experimentation, physical things: the blindfold, the headphones, her camera, and hopefully now even her sister.
“So we�
��ll be blind, basically, and deaf because of the headphones,” Alice said.
“I’ll be right next to you,” Grace said. “We can lock elbows.”
“What happens if we wake Dad, or Mom?”
“They won’t be able to see us or hear us because we aren’t really there. They won’t be able to hear the camera, because the camera’s not really there. And no, they won’t be able to run into us either, if it comes to that, or feel us. You have to remember that where we’re going is in the past. We’re not really there. We’re on another plane entirely. At least I think that’s how it works. It’s all so confusing to me.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it. The photographs, I mean.”
Alice, Grace knew, had only agreed to go with her this time because of the photobook of their father sleeping, the captured memories too real and too precise to have been modified by computer program. Flipping through the book would be like watching him struggle in his sleep, Grace imagined, every little twitch sending him another year younger.
“What happens if I lose a shoe? What if—”
“You’ll be fine.”
Grace had tried leaving items in the past as well—anything she touched during the shift could be taken with her, hypothetically: a pencil, a note to her mother, and on another occasion, a handwritten note to her younger self to see if she’d remember the words as her older self, but whenever she shifted back, the items would still be with her, as if they’d never left the present. Remember Google, one note had read. When you’re old enough, buy stock in Google, as much as you can, and of course when she returned she remembered the words, but only because she’d written them down moments before going back; her bank account unchanged, the handwritten note not left in the past but on the floor next to her, even though she’d placed it on her bedside table in her existence as a thirteen-year-old before shifting back to the present.
She’d also tried taking items from the past, physical items, but they always stayed where they belonged, in their own time, in their own plane of existence.
You can’t change the past; you can only take it with you, she thought, the it in this case meaning memories. You can only change outcomes of the future.
But why could she bring physical things with her to the past? She wondered this often. Perhaps because these things were not yet memories. Perhaps—
“Bring something with you, something you can break, or something you can alter.” She knew her sister well, knew she’d want to experiment as Grace first had.
Behind the blindfold, behind her gauze-covered eyes, Grace could see nothing, and imagined her sister, also blindfolded, searching around the room with her hands. She heard Alice take something from the table.
“A piece of paper,” Alice said. ‘I’ll tear it in half when we get there, and I’ll try to leave half there and bring the other half back.”
Grace smiled, knowing what would happen: nothing. She’d return with two torn halves of a piece of paper.
The camera could break the rules, she’d discovered after trial by error. Perhaps it had something to do with the film, the fact it would remain undeveloped until she returned. Grace could use the old Nikon to snap photos, could develop the film in the basement by feel alone, if she’d wanted to—or needed to—could see the captured past through these photographs after their final water rinse and hanging them up to dry. If she wanted to see them.
She’d tried a Polaroid months before blinding herself and using the Nikon, snapping pictures from her past and letting them develop there, directly from the camera—and they had—yet when she’d return the snapshots were the same fuzzy black of her blinded sight, as if she’d never taken them, despite that the camera had spit them out. She’d attempted snapping a shot with the Polaroid and shifting back before the film had developed, but the results were the same. Grace had tried digital as well, but those shots returned fuzzy-black, albeit sequentially numbered by date/time on the memory card and taking up space, and she couldn’t help but wonder why; something had to be hiding in the pixels, otherwise each file would be 0K and unreadable by both the camera and her laptop. Only black-and-white film seemed to do the trick.
The Nikon had belonged to her father, one of the few things Grace had kept after he died; perhaps that’s why it was able to capture the past.
“Why do we even need the blindfolds, or the headphones?” Alice asked.
“It’s the only way this works,” Grace said, not wanting to scare her with what she already knew. “I’m sure there’s something paradoxical about seeing one’s past while still existing in one’s present, or seeing one’s earlier self.”
“I haven’t thought of that. Seeing us when we’re younger. I mean, I’ve seen pictures of us when we were younger, but to be there, to take those pictures, to take our own pictures of us… I can’t believe you’ve never looked at those photos of Dad.”
The first time she’d successfully shifted to the past, Grace had seen things moving in the dark, impossible shadows, black shapes teasing her peripherals. And there were sounds.
“I stopped wanting to see Dad a long time ago,” Grace said, killing the moment. “Okay, put on the headphones and breathe deeply, in and out. Think about the winter of two thousand four and only think of that, and if this works like it always has, we’ll shift there.”
“I don’t like that word: shift.”
“It’s the only word that seems to fit.”
“How long does it take?” Alice asked.
“Not long, maybe a couple minutes at most. I’ll hold your hand and will squeeze twice when I know we’re there, and then we’ll lock arms. We’ll start with the picture of Dad, and then Mom. And we’ll go from there.”
She asked after a moment if Alice had put on the noise-cancelling headphones, but she didn’t answer, and so she put on her own.
Grace thought of her parents’ bedroom as she’d remembered it sixty years ago, when her father was thirty-four and she and Alice were nine and ten, when they’d both get scared from night noises and together they’d walk down the hall, hand-in-hand, knocking ever so softly against their parents’ bedroom door. She thought of Mom and Dad—never Dad and Mom for some reason—sleeping in the early hours of the morning, even though she couldn’t see them, the sun beginning to rise, its light permeating through the open-curtained window. She thought of her father’s snoring, the repetitive sawing, and even though her ears were now covered, she could somehow hear him in her mind, as though hearing him through the bedroom door all those years ago, waiting to be let inside. She thought of Alice next to her, walking through the door, hand-in-hand, the two of them watching over their parents while they slept: Mom on the left, Dad on the right. Mom, one of them would so often say, can we sleep with you? but they wouldn’t wake their parents this time because they weren’t really there; the Grace and Alice of 2004 were sleeping sound in their beds in the shared room down the hall. She could feel Alice standing with her now, not as a child, but as a sixty-nine-year-old adult woman.
Alice squeezed Grace’s hand, twice, instead of the other way around. She knew they were there, in the past. Grace squeezed back, twice, and then locked arms so she could hold the camera in front of her.
She imagined Alice could see darkened silhouettes of her parents on the bed, as she had the first few times she’d shifted before double-blinding herself, remembering the simple cloudy outlines under the blankets and head-like shapes on the pillows.
Behind the gauze, and behind the bandana, Grace opened her eyes, knowing exactly where her father would be, even though she couldn’t see a thing.
Undeveloped.
Grace held the Nikon in front of her, wound the roll of film, and raised the camera, chest level, pointing the lens. The bedspread would be white, she knew, their parents covered like corpses in a morgue, the early morning light making the mostly empty room look much like a black-and-white photograph.
Because she’d imagined herself—and Alice—next to her father’s side of the
bed, as she always had, looking over him, that is where she and her sister had shifted, she knew, and so she took a photo of their father sleeping, and counted one.
She wound the camera, took the next photo of her mother, counted two.
Twenty-two remaining on the roll.
Alice pulled her in close. Even with the bandana, perhaps she’d seen unknown shapes moving about, the camera flashes like lightning over their covered parents, black tendrils creeping in corners and giving the dead room life.
Grace felt a chill on her back and she and her sister spun in unison.
Flash.
Three, she counted, taking a picture of the room behind them.
I don’t like this, she imagined her sister saying into the dark. I don’t like this.
They moved around the room in silence, all but for the soft drone of the noise-cancelling headphones. And they moved around in darkness, all but for the strobes of light provided by the camera every time she took a picture.
Four, five, Grace counted as they continued down the hall, winding the camera between shots. Six. Along the walls would be multi-photo picture frames. A few of the photos she took would be of older photos. New pictures of old pictures, she marveled, but somehow not nearly as time-distant as they should be. She could almost feel the shag carpet beneath her feet as they moved along. Halfway to their room, Grace reached to her left for what should be the bathroom door, but it either wasn’t there or was wide open; she stopped long enough to take a picture of what she remembered would be a combination mirror and medicine cabinet, wondering if the photo would capture their reflections, or the reflections of something worse. Seven.
At the end of the hall she took another, counted eight, which she knew would be their closed bedroom door. Sixty years ago, the door would have had a hand-drawn keep out sign with Crayoned flowers sprouting from the edges.
Alice pulled her in close, and Grace imagined she was thinking No! to not go in there, to not take photos of the two of them sleeping. Alice pulled against her arm, to turn her back so they could instead go into the kitchen or the living room, but Grace forced her like any daring sister would, and together they faced the closed door for a long moment, taking deep breaths.
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