by A. S. King
When I got home I took a deep breath and approached Dad.
“You’re staring at me,” Dad said.
“Yes,” I said.
Transmission from Dad: His great-great-grandfather came to America from Tipperary after losing his land to the English during the 1888 evictions. His name was Pádraig O’Brien and he played the tin whistle and made a living out of that and thieving in the Philadelphia area until he settled down with Mary Helen, a woman who had fourteen children, one of whom was Dad’s great-grandfather John. John O’Brien was a banker… or a thief, depending on which way you looked at it.
He said, “Did you find the dress?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. I did.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
He smiled at me. “You’re still staring,” he said.
Transmission from Dad: His grandmother stopped talking to her sister after the farm got split up and she didn’t get as much money as her sister did.
I got no transmissions from the future. All I saw were distant cousins and grandparents and even ancestors from the fifteenth century eating a skewered, smoked pig with their dirty hands.
No future. Because maybe I had no future.
I looked down at my hands.
“Do you have something to say?” Dad asked.
“Yeah.” Silence. “I know you said no before, but can I… can I have the key to Mom’s darkroom?”
He looked surprised when I asked, as if I hadn’t been taking pictures nonstop for the last few years, filling his biannual sketchbook gifts. As if I hadn’t been having to take my black-and-white negatives to the local photo lab to get them sent out to be developed rather than doing it right downstairs where there was a place to do it myself.
I decided to stop all eye contact and look into space while talking to him. I didn’t care about ancient O’Briens and their weird family issues.
“I want to develop some film and it seems dumb to send it out.”
Dad said, “I haven’t been in that darkroom since—uh.” He stopped and sighed. He really thought about it as if I’d just asked him to do something huge rather than hand over a key. “I know she kept all her notebooks on the shelf above the sink. Sketchbooks… kind of like yours. You should find a lot of info in there. Recipes and stuff.” He fidgeted, looking frazzled by this. “Chemical recipes. Not cakes. Your mother was very private about her chemistry.” He gestured to the prints on the walls. “If you get into those notebooks, you can’t tell anyone what’s in there, okay? Especially not that Wilson dick.” Mr. Wilson was the photo teacher in school. Since he got a bank of computers for his graphic arts lab, he only kept one tiny old darkroom for the history of photography class. I knew Dad hated the guy. They knew each other before. Before.
“No problem,” I said. “I don’t have any more classes with him anyway.” I cleared my throat and said this last part loudly and slowly. “Because I graduate from high school tomorrow.”
He stopped working on his laptop and looked at me.
“Wow,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, how did that happen?” he asked. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his T-shirt. “Come here.”
I sat next to him on the couch and he put me in a loving headlock. “How the hell are you graduating from high school already?”
“I did this thing called growing up. What happens is your body and brain get larger. It’s an amazing process. You should try it.”
“Smartass.”
“And?”
“And I’m proud of you,” he said. He let me out of the headlock.
“Is something wrong with your eye?”
He cleaned his glasses again and blinked back tears that welled in his eyes. “I worry.”
I shrugged.
“No college. No plans. What the hell are you going to do here with your old man?” I didn’t say anything because I didn’t have an answer. “You’re not sticking around for my sake, right? You better not be sticking around for my sake.”
“I have a plan,” I said, thinking of how I didn’t really have a plan.
How could I tell Dad that I didn’t make plans because I was Glory O’Brien, girl with no future? A year ago when my classmates were perusing college catalogs and course descriptions, I was just thinking about freedom. Freedom from everything. I didn’t know what that was yet, but I knew it meant something.
I used to think it meant I was going to follow in Darla’s footsteps. I knew it, you know? I knew it. But now it might mean Free yourself. Have the courage.
He handed me the key off his key ring. “Be careful down there.”
“Bears?”
“Stop it. I’m being serious. You can’t spend too much time in a darkroom, kid. It can get to you.”
Why people take pictures
Zone 5. It’s called middle gray. That’s how I felt in Darla’s darkroom.
Middle gray.
Not black, not white. Just middle gray.
Zone 5 is 50% gray. If I metered me, middle gray, in Darla’s darkroom, I would be 50% Darla. Halfway toward putting my head in the oven, I guess. I mean, I’d never felt suicidal. Was that how she felt? Not-suicidal? Because maybe she didn’t and maybe I wasn’t and maybe we weren’t anything alike.
Once I got into Darla’s darkroom, I turned on the big light, not the darkroom amber, and hoisted myself onto the countertop where I could just sit and breathe and forget about everything I’d seen that morning. Maybe if I stayed in the darkroom forever, I’d never have to see anyone’s infinity ever again.
I was finally here. It smelled like a mix of chemicals, but mostly a pungency that reminded me of the way the locker room smelled at school. Bad, but not strong. Or strong, but not bad. Pick one.
On one shelf there were huge flat boxes of photo paper that would now be over thirteen years old. Darla used all high-quality fiber paper—nothing resin coated or plastic. I knew from Dad that her recipes were attempts to double the lifetime of her images.
Ironic, isn’t it?
Darla worked tirelessly to make pictures live longer and all of her pictures outlived her.
Oh well.
So, there were boxes of old paper, big jugs of old chemistry and all the darkroom equipment a girl could want. Three enlargers—one huge one that had its own stand and two regular-sized enlargers on the counter. Trays to fit up to 20 x 24-inch prints and tiny ones for 4 x 5-inch negatives. Squeegees. Tongs. Film tanks. Aquarium heaters for keeping developer warm. Plastic graduates of every size. A print washer. A print dryer that she’d made herself.
Everything. Everything was here. Darla was here.
The sketchbooks watched me from their shelf above the big steel sink.
I stared at them and wondered why I’d really care about crazy recipes for selenium toner or platinum developing or whatever. I stared at them and wondered what images she chose to paste into hers. Would they be anything like mine? It was scary suddenly having the answers accessible to me. I just wanted to work in here. Make it my own. Make it Glory’s darkroom. Wipe out the one secret place of Darla’s in this house. I wanted her gone so I didn’t have to wonder anymore. I wanted her here to show me how to do it. I wanted both things.
I wanted neither thing, really. I’d rather have been part of a boring family of suit-wearing certified public accountants. A mother and a father. No secret darkroom necessary.
My phone rang.
“Do you have it?” Ellie asked.
“Oh shit,” I said. “Yeah. Sorry. It was a weird day.”
“I know, right?” she answered. I didn’t know what she meant by this, but I wondered if maybe she was seeing things, too. The future. The past. Bat-vision.
“Come over and get it, okay? I can’t stop what I’m doing.”
“Are you seeing it? When you look at people?” she said.
“Just come over.”
I reached up to a stack of Darla’s notebooks and pulled them down onto the counter. Ther
e were three of them. Two had mostly notes about chemistry. Metol, sodium hydroxide, potassium bromide, hydroquinone, sodium thiosulfate, acetic acid, boric acid, etc. I can’t say I was all that interested in chemistry.
Her other sketchbook was just like Dad’s and just like mine. Pictures taped in, captions written underneath. I set it aside because I wanted to read it later. Not now. Not with Ellie coming over.
I walked around the room and touched things knowing that I was touching what she would have touched. I opened the door to the print dryer. I closed it again. I opened the two cabinets under the sink and found thirteen years’ worth of dust and scattered mouse droppings. I turned the knobs on the enlargers and made the bellows open and close. I saw a cabinet mounted high on the wall behind the enlargers and I stood on the stool to reach it. It was mostly more darkroom equipment. More chemistry. But then I saw the corner of something black poking out from behind the cabinet.
I had to stand on the edge of the countertop to reach over and feel for it, but there was a gap between the wall and the cabinet—a sketchbook-wide gap. And into that gap was shoved another black sketchbook like the others. Except this one had been hidden.
It took me a minute to pry it out and then get off the stool and inspect it. It had a title taped to the front. Why People Take Pictures. I ran my finger along the black darkroom tape that held the title in place.
It was a weird title.
The implied question seemed as hard to answer as why Darla devoted her short life to making pictures last longer when she, herself, didn’t.
Why do people take pictures?
I am no one special
Why People Take Pictures started with a page of scrawl that looked like my own. True story: Darla’s handwriting was exactly like mine. Great.
It said:
I am no one special.
I am tortured by the fact that I am no one special.
I am comforted by the fact that I am no one special.
Can you handle that?
Can you handle that you are most likely no one special too?
Most people can’t handle it.
Shit.
Everything opened up in front of me like a giant railway. The woman from the mall whose grandson will pass the Fair Pay Act was there. My Irish pig-eating ancestors were there. The mourning dove was there. Ellie was there. Max Black was there, wings like frail, crispy meringue.
This is where the runaway train started down the track. I was inside the dining car enjoying a plate of cookies or something. I didn’t feel it then. But the train had been boarded on Saturday night when we drank the bat. And this was the beginning of its journey. Right here.
I am no one special. You are no one special.
Most people can’t handle it.
I felt a panic—an urge to run. I remembered that Ellie would soon be on my back porch awaiting commune-contraband lice treatment, so I left the sketchbooks and left the darkroom. When I got upstairs, Dad had accidentally knocked over my shopping bag because I’d left it on the edge of the couch. He found the dress… and the lice treatment.
“Is there something you need to tell me?” he asked, pointing to the box, which he’d left out on the coffee table.
“Ellie’s a slut,” I said.
He nodded. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, then.”
Which was the last thing I wanted to hear after reading Darla’s crazy notebook.
Jupiterians
I didn’t want to see Ellie.
As I waited for her on my back porch, staring out at our barn, I knew I had no logical reason to be mad at her. I didn’t know why I was calling her a slut, either. All she did was sleep with Rick, who just happened to have crabs. It was just her bad luck.
“Hey,” she said as she came around to the back door.
“Here,” I said, handing her the plastic bag with the lice kit in it. I didn’t look at her.
“Can I use—um—your barn?”
“Uh.”
“Are you seeing weird shit too? Is that why you’re not looking at me?”
I looked at her. No transmission. “Seeing what shit?” I stared right into her eyes. Nothing. She stared into mine and I could tell she was disappointed, too.
“I don’t know how to describe it. Just weird shit. I was talking to Kyla this morning while we made some trail mix for the party and I looked at her and could see all kinds of strange shit.”
I just shrugged as if this wasn’t happening to us. As if I didn’t have anything to talk about. As if ignoring it would make it go away. I shrugged because I didn’t trust Ellie and I didn’t want to share a weird accidental superpower with her. I shrugged because so far, shrugging had worked for me in every other weird aspect of my life.
“Hello?”
“What did you see when you looked at her?” I asked.
Ellie frowned. “A bunch of people related to her—like her grandparents or something.” She paused. “Maybe I’m just hung over, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go to the barn.”
The barn wasn’t like Ellie’s barn on the commune. No animals. No hand tools. No lice-infested hippie families moving in or out. It was an artist’s studio. It was well lit with skylights on the north side. It still smelled of oil paint even though Dad hadn’t painted there for thirteen years.
I flopped myself on the couch and Ellie pulled the lice treatment box from the bag and read the instructions while making a gag face the whole time. “You know what I thought about last night?” she said. “I was looking at the stars and I thought that maybe they’re actually Jupiterians.”
I looked at her like I didn’t follow. Because I didn’t follow.
“The lice, I mean. Maybe they’re really aliens from Jupiter or another planet and they gather information from human beings by hanging out on their heads or, in this case, in their crotches.”
I laughed and shook my head.
“Seriously. Are crotches not the most important parts of human beings?”
“I thought you said heads and crotches.”
“Exactly. Heads and crotches. The most important parts of human beings,” Ellie said.
“So they go from human to human gathering information about what?”
“Everything! I mean, isn’t everything they need to know in those two places?”
“Does this mean you aren’t going to kill them?” I asked.
“Shit no. I’m killing them right now. I just think it’s possible. Right? It’s possible that lice are really aliens from some other planet.”
“Sure,” I said. Anything was possible, even lice-spies from another galaxy.
And though we were both laughing and joking, all we were really thinking about was the transmissions.
“Are we going crazy?” she asked.
I still didn’t trust her. I don’t know why. It was like some curtain had dropped between us and I couldn’t really see her or remember who she was or why we were friends or why I ever liked her. I just wanted to get back to Darla’s darkroom.
“Are we?” she asked.
“Maybe the Jupiterians are driving you crazy.” I waved her off. “Go kill them. You’ll feel better.”
She stopped at the bathroom door and said, “I saw Rick with a woman yesterday.”
“Shit.”
“It was Rachel’s mom,” she said.
“Shit,” I said. “Were they, like, together? Like, together?”
“Yeah. I saw them making out through the window of Rachel’s RV. The guy is a scumbag.”
I said, “He’s a scumbag who probably just passed those Jupiterians on to Rachel’s mom.”
“Who will then pass them on to Rachel’s dad.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I guess it’s all one big karmic circle.”
“Shit,” she said. Then she bit her lip in that way she would when she was thinking hard about something. “Do you think I’m a slut?”
“No!” I said. With an exclamation point. I protested
. I exclaimed. I lied.
“I feel like a slut,” she said.
“That’s bullshit. You slept with one guy.”
“A bunch of times.”
“So?” I asked.
“While he probably slept with a bunch of other people,” she said, her lip quivering a bit. “Well, not probably. I mean—uh—obviously, right?” She held up the box of Jupiterianicide.
“And this makes you a slut how? As I see it, it makes Rick a slut.”
“But he’s a guy, so that’s okay,” she said. “And now it’s ruined, you know? I should have waited but I didn’t and now… this!” She shook the box.
“You are not your virginity. You are a human being. The state of your hymen has nothing to do with your worth. Okay? They’re fucking with us. They’ve been fucking with us since the beginning of time.”
“Hymen? Shit, Glory. That’s deep.”
“The world is fucked up,” I said. “Go. Get rid of the infiltrators.”
She closed the bathroom door and I could hear the water running. She swore and ran a lot of water. I took a picture of the empty box she left on the coffee table. I called it Be Careful What You Wish For.
I wondered if I looked at a Jupiterian if I could see its future and its past like I could see the future and the past of the mourning dove and the people at the mall. I wondered if I looked at Jasmine Blue Heffner if I could see Ellie’s future.
And why couldn’t we see each other? Why was Max Black the bat doing this to us?
Ellie came out of the bathroom walking as if she’d been riding a horse.
“So what did you see?” I asked. “When you looked at Kerry?”
“Kyla.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what I saw. I saw some weird movie in my head—like in my imagination or something.”
“You said you saw her grandparents?”
“I don’t know who they were. They were related, though. They looked like her. They were dancing. And then I saw Kyla holding a baby. I don’t know if it was her baby. She was older. It looked like her baby,” Ellie said. She laughed. “It’s just the beer, right? I got pretty tanked last night.”