“How far away were you when you took this?” Sajid asked.
“Ten feet, give or take,” Dan said.
“Sure about that?”
“Positive. What’s wrong this time?”
Sajid stopped taping the mouse and zoomed in on the lower left quadrant of the grid near that boy’s hair. He highlighted a box and zoomed in again. “Nothing’s really wrong, it’s just...” He squinted. “And you used the Mark Six we lent you?”
“Yep,” Dan answered again. “And the tripod, and the lights.”
Sajid chewed on the end of his pen, studying the screen, then said: “Well that just doesn’t make sense.”
“Why’s that?”
“Look, that’s a twenty-five megapixel camera. It’s resolution tops out at seven thousand by five and some change.”
“You’re losing me,” Dan said. He hated it when Sajid spoke in jargon, like some TV scientist spouting off knowledge in some arcane area of expertise. It had taken Dan countless hours to study the digital side of his profession and that was almost a decade ago, back before Google became a verb and tablets were still something your doctor prescribed. These days he considered fumbling his way through PowerPoint an accomplishment in its own right.
“Okay Prof, think of it like this. It’s the amount of clarity an image has. Higher the resolution, the more you can zoom in, like this.”
Sajid clicked the mouse and opened up another file. It was a portrait, seventeenth century, French, Dan guessed from the clothes and muted color tones. Sajid zoomed in on a somber face of an aristocrat staring at the viewer.
“At four hundred percent, it gets blurry, we see the pixels and artifacts.” Sajid adjusted the zoom until it read 1600%. The picture lost all clarity and became a series of colored pixels. “Now it’s like Tetris. See what I mean?”
“Yeah. Megabytes.”
“Megapixels.”
“Right.”
“Anyways, this picture of yours,” Sajid said, switching back to the painting. “Notice anything?”
Now Dan understood it. “His hair...”
“Exactly!” Sajid cut in. On screen he had zoomed in on that brooding boy’s hair and yet it was still perfectly clear. There were no pixels, no artifacts, no Tetris blocks. Just dark brown strands of hair greased and combed to the side. He tapped the screen with his pen, where the zoom level read: 3200%. “This shouldn’t even be possible. Not with the Hubble telescope, and definitely not with that Mark Six.”
“I don’t understand,” Dan said.
“I don’t either, I really don’t,” Sajid answered with genuine confusion and took a deep breath. “I’ll get some coffee and we’ll dive into this. Sugar?”
“Black,” Dan answered and reached for the mouse. “May I?”
“Be my guest,” Sajid answered and got up.
Dan scooted his stool closer to the computer, hand falling on the mouse, which gave off a small static shock. He zoomed back out until the zoom level read zero and the painting filled the screen. That whole unbalanced composition: the window, the field, the two little kids.
He focused on a new area, highlighting the clock and zooming in. It had always bothered him for a reason that sat on the tip of his tongue like a drunk memory. The painting had been rendered very realistic, and while he knew the living subjects, the boy and girl, were figments of the artist’s imagination, he held a suspicion that the clock had been drawn from reality.
He zoomed further in on the clock face, those two brass gilded hands bisecting the face at 5:55 with the missing numbers from nine to eleven o’clock. Centered above the twelve was a crescent slit that displayed a small picture that Dan suspected changed based on the time of day. The current picture, a lazy yellow sunset, displayed the silhouette of a dog leaping in the air after a bird that had just taken flight.
The coffee pot gurgled. Somewhere else in the lab Sajid spoke on the phone with who Dan assumed was his girlfriend based on the hushed whispers and repeated mumblings of: “Mmm, baby.”
Dan scrolled down the image of the clock, stopping on the left side where he’d seen the brass plate and those indecipherable markings. At home, they were mere hairlines of paint on the canvas. Yet on the screen at that clarity they appeared cleaner and more three dimensional than when he’d stood an inch away from the paint. It was impossible, as Sajid had said and Dan now agreed. Impossible, yet there it was in front of him, an undeniable glitch.
He zoomed in further on the writing etched into the brass. Two words, with something between them. An ampersand, just as he thought.
Cobald & Sons.
It was a name. He took out his notepad and wrote it down. As he closed the notepad the screen shimmered for a second and the hard drive emitted a furious clacking. He zoomed out until the whole clock filled the screen, and clicked print. Nearby, a photo printer hummed to life, grinding out the selection. If the clock had a name it would take them one step closer to finding the artist, if indeed that was the intention of the donor.
And if it wasn’t, then what?
He put that thought out of his mind as he scrolled around the image, settling on the open window and the hill beyond. He zoomed in on that hill. Again, it seemed even larger, as if the earth had grown. Another click and he was zooming in until he saw tall blades of green grass, overgrown and wild, yet the clarity of the image never changed. It was like seeing the world through a perfect pair of glasses.
As he scrolled up the hill the blades of grass changed, growing browner, lifeless, until scattered patches of dead grass and weeds surrounded that lonely tree. From afar the tree had looked healthy, but when magnified another reality emerged. It was sick and dying. A dark moss engulfed the right side of it, spreading downward to the trunk and upwards to the branches. Leaves hung, wilted and curled like a thousand dead insects. In the center of the moss, where it was darkest and most gangrene, lay a single handprint.
The shadow stood, frozen in motion. Like the hill, Dan was certain it too had changed since he last saw it. It was no longer behind the tree but in front of it, as if it had taken another few steps towards the viewer. The form was not just dark, it was a void of light, an absolute black on the color scale. There were no subtle transitions, no carful shades or blends or brush lines where the shadow met the colors of the landscape it was painted on. Instead, only a sharp divide, a razor’s edge between the browns and greens of the hillside and the consuming darkness of the shadow.
Dan scrolled up the shadow further. The elongated arms disproportionate to its body, the thin waist line that hinted at nudity or starvation, and the gumdrop bump atop its shoulders that suggested its head was hunched forward. He clicked the mouse again, zooming in on that darkened lump until it didn’t so much as fill the screen but swallowed all the color from the world around it.
Staring into that shadow, that perfect black, Dan thought of an ocean, endless and deep. Not an ocean of water but an ocean of time. Where dense kelp forests of memory and emotion shimmered. Where abstract shapes lay dormant and asleep like bugs that waited a dozen cycles of the seasons before waking.
Found you, the broken glass said as it rattled and hummed.
Dan didn’t know how long he had stared at the void, but at some point, minutes or seconds ago, it had shifted. The darkness bled apart like a child's book of tricks, an optical illusion, and between the shadow two shapes emerged from the shade.
Two eyes.
The computer screen flickered, the hard drive stuttered, and a pop echoed out. For a second the darkness bled out of the computer screen like a flower blossoming. It broke the two dimensional borders of the monitor as it unfolded like ink on cotton.
The pop was the sound of the hard drive dying, followed by a flash of light from inside the computer tower. Then the lights in the lab died, and in the darkness Dan smelled smoke, the faint odor of burnt metal. A dim blue light cut through the darkness.
“Not again,” said Sajid, as he held up his cell phone and walked over to the cabin
et. “Call you back babe.”
He produced a flashlight, tapped it a few times and then clicked it on. The beam cut through the darkness in clear, crisp light, and pointed at a nearby breaker box, already open.
“Sorry professor, this sometimes happens. Bleeding edge hardware and they have us on Edison’s own circuit. We’ve learned to set the auto-save to every other minute. Okay, here we go.”
Sajid counted down three switches then flipped the breaker back on. A spring loaded click rang out and the darkness was chased off by the cold white of florescent lights. Sajid pointed to the computer. “Turn her back on will you?”
Dan pressed the power button on the computer tower. It emitted three distinct beeps and flashed a red light. The monitor read: NO INPUT.
“Nothing’s happening,” Dan said.
“That’s not good,” Sajid grumbled and he pressed the button again, receiving the same series of three beeps and a red light.
“Huh,” he frowned. “That’s not good at all.”
The surge, as Sajid called it, fried the computer and everything in it, including Dan’s memory stick. The contents, once a list of photos, now showed only an unreadable folder and a list of random file names, each only 555 bytes in size. When pressed, Sajid explained that Dan’s data was still on the memory stick, it had just forgotten where it was since its table of contents had been damaged.
“Sort of like amnesia,” he had said before mumbling: “Fucking piece of shit,” and slapping the computer tower.
It wasn’t a total loss. Dan still had the printout of the clock and the name: Cobald & Sons, which raised more questions than it answered. But the day was over and those questions would have to wait.
He left the printout on his office desk, then locked the door. He stopped before The Turtle and pressed the call button several times until it lit up. The gears groaned in protest as the old elevator awakened. Waiting there, he thought of that image he’d seen in the shadow before the surge: had there really been eyes in the darkness? Or had they been his own, reflected back in a trick of light?
There was an explanation, a reason behind it. Computers didn’t bleed darkness and eyes didn’t open from shadows. They were machines made by men, and men were imperfect. There were always glitches, he thought, and it was silly to think otherwise, considering it had taken a two hour class at the Apple Store just to teach him how to use his smartphone.
The elevator gave another sound, a rusty rumbling belch from that old, cold shaft. He thought of the circuit breaker and the darkness, of men and their imperfect machines. One power failure was enough for the day, he thought. One too many, especially with a whopper of a migraine brewing.
He decided to take the stairs.
Special Needs
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL day, seventy-three degrees with a slight breeze and the occasional fat cloud drifting across the sun. The kind of day that had made Linda fall in love with Northern California over a decade ago.
She spent the better part of the afternoon pulling dead weeds and grass from the backyard gardens. Most of the roses had some strange form of rose canker that had spread faster than she’d ever seen. To fight it she bought several bags of compost and some Osmocote and spent the late afternoon on her hands and knees mixing the two into the soil until her back throbbed and her thoughts drifted to the cigarettes.
Pleased with her work and hopeful it would save the rose garden, she returned to the house to check on Jessica. A half-hour earlier, she had sent her off to start on her homework and review her vocabulary. Her teacher, a petite girl hardly in her twenties, had said Jessica was a respectful student who never misbehaved yet hardly ever spoke in class. She asked if Jessica had had any schooling before kindergarten, a question that upset Linda when she thought about all the hours they’d spent reading and preparing during the summer.
The she dropped the real bomb.
“I hope this doesn’t come off the wrong way,” she had said in the parking lot, “but has she ever been tested for learning disabilities?”
“What?” Linda laughed, studying that presumptuous young girl, no more than a kid really. “No, of course not. Why? Do you think...”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have thrown that out there so lightly. I was just curious.”
“Curious? Should she be tested? Do you think she has--”
“No no, of course not. She’s probably just a little shy, that’s all. Forget I said anything, okay?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Linda nodded, annoyed and already watering that seed of doubt that girl had carelessly planted.
She spent the remainder of the afternoon bouncing between gardening and Googling early childhood learning disabilities, wondering what signs she should be looking for. As Jessica finished her snack and got ready for her afternoon studies Linda analyzed each of her actions.
“Need some help?” she asked Jessica.
“No thanks mommy. If I get stuck I’ll ask you for help, okay?” Jessica answered before clomping off upstairs.
“Good girl,” Linda said.
This week her phonics words included consonant-U-consonant-E patterns, words like TUBE and CUBE. After a half-hour Linda expected to find Jessica seated at her table upstairs, surrounded by her toys and busy on her spelling practice. Instead, she found a darkened bedroom and her daughter at the window, standing on a chair and drawing on the glass.
“Jessica, be careful honey!” Linda gasped. “Don’t do that!”
Jessica didn’t respond, only continued scribbling against the glass, her blue felt tip marker squeaking.
“Jessica! Listen to me!” Linda shouted.
But she didn’t listen, a defiance that made Linda flush with anger. She crossed the room, noticing pages of drawings on the children's table and knew that, not only was Jessica disobeying her now, but that she had disobeyed her earlier. She had hardly begun her homework.
“Jessica!” Linda said, hands falling on her daughter’s shoulder, yanking the felt marker from her hand. “Honey why aren’t you listening--”
Linda stopped mid sentence. Jessica stared back at her with glazed eyes as tears ran down her cheeks and pooled on the fabric collar of her dress. Linda went from fury to worry in an instant.
“Oh my God, honey what’s wrong?”
Jessica stared at her mother through empty eyes, no different than a lifeless doll. Linda checked her for signs of injury, running her hands over her daughter’s tear-streaked cheeks.
Then, at her mother’s touch, a broad smile spread across Jessica’s face and she said: “No thanks mommy. If I get stuck I’ll ask you for help, okay?”
She hopped down from the chair, dragged it over to the table, pushed the drawings aside, and resumed her workbook lesson. Linda watched, perplexed, as her daughter picked up where she had left off in her phonics work.
“Jessica,” Linda asked and picked up the stack of drawings. “Honey? What were you doing?”
“Drawing silly.”
Linda studied the drawings. They were all the same general composition: a dog, a bird, and a woman with black hair, all playing on a hill top by a tree. Linda understood it at once. She crouched next to her daughter and held the pictures out.
“Sweetie, is this the bird you found at school?”
Jessica nodded without looking at the picture.
“And is this Ginger?”
Jessica nodded again, filling in question five in her workbook.
Linda pointed to the woman with black hair. “Who’s this honey? Is this your teacher?”
Jessica shook her head.
“No? Who is it?”
“That was daddy’s friend,” Jessica said with a smile. “Now she’s my friend.” She then held out her hand and counted: “Rhymes with ‘at.’ Bat, Cat, Fat, Hat... Mat!” She filled in question seven with a smile.
Linda turned back to the window, streaked with blue felt lines like a half finished stained glass. A single figure, nothing more than a shadow made of uneasy blue scribbles, stared ba
ck at her from the glass.
“I’m worried about our daughter,” Linda later said as Dan lay on the ground, legs protruding from the side of the painting in the study. He pushed further behind the canvas, an X-acto knife in his hand and a small pen light in his mouth. Linda had worries. It seemed like she often did. He learned long ago to tell the difference between when she wanted his opinion, or wanted to decompress.
“Would you tilt the light over?” he asked and she felt a spike of frustration but tilted the light closer to that hideous painting of his.
“Perfect,” he said from behind it. He ran his fingers along the inner rim of the painting, feeling the seams along the stretcher’s edge.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Of course,” he lied. “What about it?”
“She’s acting odd. Daydreaming more than usual.”
“Well, what’s an appropriate amount of daydreaming for a six year old?”
“I don’t know. Her teacher thinks...” Linda said, then decided against passing the speculation on, knowing how it had infected her thoughts all afternoon. “I think she’s having trouble dealing with Ginger’s disappearance.”
“Really?” Dan asked to buy more time. He ran his fingers over the nails. They were evenly spaced, holding the canvas to the simple wooden stretcher in precise, half inch gaps that kept it taut. He found a spot in the lower left corner where one of the nails had come loose. He wedged a screwdriver beneath it and pried it upwards. The paint gave a hissing crack as the nail popped free.
“Dan, are you even listening?”
“Of course I’m listening, I just, I don’t know what you want me to say hon. She’s six years old. Losing a dog, it’s a big hit to take, at any age. But it’s part of life. And it’s been, what, five days? We need to come to terms with the fact that Ginger, you know, she might not be coming home.”
“So, that’s it? We should all just move on?”
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