Four Past Midnight

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'Took instant pictures.'

Pop smiled. 'Well ... not exactly. What I mean to say is you took your pitcher, and then you yanked on this flap to pull it out. It didn't have no motor, didn't make that squidgy little whining noise like modern Polaroids.'

So there was a perfect way to describe that sound after all, it was just that you had to find a Pop Merrill to tell it to you: the sound that Polaroid cameras made when they spat out their produce was a squidgy little whine.

'Then you had to time her,' Pop said.

'Time -?'

'Oh, ayuh!' Pop said with great relish, bright as the early bird who has found that fabled worm. 'What I mean to say is they didn't have none of this happy automatic crappy back in those days. You yanked and out come this long strip which you put on the table or whatever and timed off sixty seconds on your watch. Had to be sixty, or right around there, anyway. Less and you'd have an underexposed pitcher. More and it'd be overexposed.'

'Wow,' Kevin said respectfully. And this was not bogus respect, jollying the old man along in hopes he would get back to the point, which was not a bunch of long-dead cameras that had been wonders in their day but his own camera, the damned balky Sun 660 sitting on Pop's worktable with the guts of an old seven-day clock on its right and something which looked suspiciously like a dildo on its left. It wasn't bogus respect and Pop knew it, and it occurred to Pop (it wouldn't have to Kevin) how fleeting that great white god 'state-of-the- art' really was; ten years, he thought, and the phrase itself would be gone. From the boy's fascinated expression, you would have thought he was hearing about something as antique as George Washington's wooden dentures instead of a camera everyone had thought was the ultimate only thirty-five years ago. But of course this boy had still been circling around in the unhatched void thirty-five years ago, part of a female who hadn't yet even met the male who would provide his other half.

'What I mean to say is it was a regular little darkroom goin on in there between the pitcher and the backing,' Pop resumed, slow at first but speeding up as his own mostly genuine interest in the subject resurfaced (but the thoughts of who this kid's father was and what the kid might be worth to him and the strange thing the kid's camera was up to never completely left his mind). 'And at the end of the minute, you peeled the pitcher off the back - had to be careful when you did it, too, because there was all this goo like jelly on the back, and if your skin was in the least bit sensitive, you could get a pretty good burn.'

'Awesome,' Kevin said. His eyes were wide, and now he looked like a kid hearing about the old two-holer outhouses which Pop and all his childhood colleagues (they were almost all colleagues; he had had few childhood friends in Castle Rock, perhaps preparing even then for his life's work of rooking the summer people and the other children somehow sensing it, like a faint smell of skunk) had taken for granted, doing your business as fast as you could in high summer because one of the wasps always circling around down there between the manna and the two holes which were the heaven from which the manna fell might at any time take a notion to plant its stinger in one of your tender little boycheeks, and also doing it as fast as you could in deep winter because your tender little boycheeks were apt to freeze solid if you didn't. Well, Pop thought, so much for the Camera of the Future. Thirty-five years and to this kid it's interestin in the same way a backyard shithouse is interestin.

'The negative was on the back,' Pop said. 'And your positive - well, it was black and white, but it was fine black and white. It was just as crisp and clear as you'd ever want even today. And you had this little pink thing, about as long as a school eraser. as I remember; it squeegeed out some kind of chemical, smelled like ether, and you had to rub it over the pitcher as fast as you could, or that pitcher'd roll right up, like the tube in the middle of a roll of bung-fodder.'

Kevin burst out laughing, tickled by these pleasant antiquities.

Pop quit long enough to get his pipe going again. When he had, he resumed: 'A camera like that, nobody but the Polaroid people really knew what it was doing - I mean to say those people were close - but it was mechanical. You could take it apart.'

He looked at Kevin's Sun with some distaste.

'And, lots of times when one went bust, that was as much as you needed. Fella'd come in with one of those and say it wouldn't work, moanin about how he'd have to send it back to the Polaroid people to get it fixed and that'd prob'ly take months and would I take a look. 'Well,' I'd say, 'prob'ly nothin I can do, what I mean to say is nobody really knows about these cameras but the Polaroid people and they're goddam close, but I'll take a look.' All the time knowin it was prob'ly just a loose screw inside that shutter-housin or maybe a fouled spring, or hell, maybe junior slathered some peanut butter in the film compartment.'

One of his bright bird-eyes dropped in a wink so quick and so marvellously sly that, Kevin thought, if you hadn't known he was talking about summer people, you would have thought it was your paranoid imagination, or, more likely, missed it entirely.

'What I mean to say is you had your perfect situation,' Pop said. 'If you could fix it, you were a goddam wonder- worker. Why, I have put eight dollars and fifty cents in my pocket for takin a couple of little pieces of potato-chip out from between the trigger and the shutter-spring, my son, and the woman who brought that camera in kissed me on the lips. Right ... on ... the lips.'

Kevin observed Pop's eye drop momentarily closed again behind the semi-transparent mat of blue smoke.

'And of course, if it was somethin you couldn't fix, they didn't hold it against you because, what I mean to say, they never really expected you to be able to do nothin in the first place. You was only a last resort before they put her in a box and stuffed newspapers around her to keep her from bein broke even worse in the mail, and shipped her off to Schenectady.

'But - this camera.' He spoke in the ritualistic tone of distaste all philosophers of the crackerbarrel, whether in Athens of the golden age or in a small-town junk-shop during this current one of brass, adopt to express their view of entropy without having to come right out and state it. 'Wasn't put together, son. What I mean to say is it was poured. I could maybe pop the lens, and will if you want me to, and I did look in the film compartment, although I knew I wouldn't see a goddam thing wrong - that I recognized, at least - and I didn't. But beyond that I can't go. I could take a hammer and wind it right to her, could break it, what I mean to say, but fix it?' He spread his hands in pipe-smoke. 'Nossir.'

'Then I guess I'll just have to -' return it after all, he meant to finish, but Pop broke in.

'Anyway, son, I think you knew that. What I mean to say is you're a bright boy, you can see when a thing's all of a piece. I don't think you brought that camera in to be fixed. I think you know that even if it wasn't all of a piece, a man couldn't fix what that thing's doing, at least not with a screwdriver. I think you brought it in to ask me if I knew what it's up to.'

'Do you?' Kevin asked. He was suddenly tense all over.

'I might,' Pop Merrill said calmly. He bent over the pile of photographs twenty-eight of them now, counting the one Kevin had snapped to demonstrate, and the one Pop had snapped to demonstrate to himself. 'These in order?'

'Not really. Pretty close, though. Does it matter?'

'I think so,' Pop said. 'They're a little bit different, ain't they? Not much, but a little.'

'Yeah,' Kevin said. 'I can see the difference in some of them, but .

'Do you know which one is the first? I could prob'ly figure it out for myself, but time is money, son.'

'That's easy,' Kevin said, and picked one out of the untidy little pile. 'See the frosting?' He pointed at a small brown spot on the picture's white edging.

'Ayup.' Pop didn't spare the dab of frosting more than a glance. He looked closely at the photograph, and after a moment he opened the drawer of his worktable. Tools were littered untidily about inside. To one side, in its own space, was an object wrapped in jeweler's velvet. Pop took this out, folded the cloth back, and removed a large magnifying glass with a switch in its base. He bent over the Polaroid and pushed the switch. A bright circle of light