“Except for the hat,” I said. “That hat’s a giveaway.”
“I’m taking it out.” He held a small steel spatula into the beam of light and waved little circles over the area of the man’s hat, as if he were rubbing it out, which is exactly what he was doing. Photographers call this “dodging,” and the spatula was a “dodging tool,” though in all probability this one was something used in gallbladder surgery. When I was little I called it the Magic Wand.
The timer rang and he shut the projector off. I looked at his face in profile in the faint red light. Deep lines ran from his nose to the corners of his mouth. He didn’t look well, but maybe he never had. He picked up the print by its edges.
“You haven’t heard anything from Hallie, have you?”
He shook his head.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to tell her you’ve got, that you’re sick? I’m sorry to bring this up, but it’s hard to be the only one. I think she’d want to know.”
He appeared not to have heard me. I knew he had. Doc Homer never argued, he just didn’t participate in conversation that didn’t please him.
“So did the man’s hat go away?” I asked.
He slipped the paper into a dishpan of clear liquid. “We’ll see.” He seemed suddenly happy now, almost friendly, as he often did in here. The darkroom was the nearest I’d ever come to feeling like I had a dad. We stood without talking and watched a gray image grow on the paper like some fungus with a mind of its own. I thought about the complex chemistry of vision, remembering from medical school the textbook diagrams of an image projected through the eyeball, temporarily inscribed on the retina.
“I never thought about how printing a photograph duplicates eyesight,” I said. “It’s the same exact process in slow motion.”
He nodded appreciatively and my heart warmed. I’d pleased him. “Probably there is no real invention in the modern world,” he said. “Just a good deal of elaboration on nature.” He lifted out the slick print and slipped it into a second tray, the fixer.
“The stone has no head,” he pronounced, correctly; it looked like a rock wall with two extra rocks balanced on top. You’d think it was just a simple snapshot of what it looked like. His finest art defeated itself. God only knows what was the point, but it made him smile. When the timer rang again he took the photograph out and slid it into its final bath. He fished out several other prints and attached them with small clothespins to a wire. Then he dried his hands on a towel, one finger at a time. These gestures made me think of all the years he’d spent alone, doing his own dishes, his laundry.
I felt our visit drawing to a close, like a scientifically predicted death. We would go out into the light, find a little more to say, and then I’d go.
“There’s a pie for you in the kitchen,” I said. “From Uda. Who is she?”
“Uda Ruth Dell,” he said, as though that explained it.
“I mean, what is she to me? Did I use to know her?”
“Not especially,” said Doc Homer, still studying the photographs. “No better than you knew anyone else.”
“She knows all about me, and then some,” I said. “She probably knows what I had for lunch.”
“You’re in Grace,” he said.
“Well, I was embarrassed because I couldn’t remember her. She wasn’t very helpful. She just stood there waiting for me to rack my brain and come up with her name. She sure knew me right off the bat.”
Doc Homer didn’t care for expressions like “right off the bat.” He switched off the red light before opening the darkroom door, passing us through a moment of absolute darkness. He knew, but refused to accept, that I was afraid of the dark. The click and blackness plunged me into panic and I grabbed his upper arm. Surprisingly, he touched my knuckles lightly with his fingertips.
“You’re in Grace,” he said again, as if nothing had happened. “There is only one of you for all these people to be watching for. And so many of them for you.”
I’d lived all my life with a recurring nightmare. It would come to me in that drowsy twilight where sleep pulls on your mind with tempting music but is still preventable. When I let down my guard the dream would spring again, sending me back into weeks of insomnia. It had to do with losing my eyesight. It wasn’t a complicated dream, like a movie, but a single, paralyzing freeze frame: there’s a shattering pop, like glass breaking, and then I am blind.
Once, years ago on Crete, Carlo and I were driving on a badly rutted gravel road to get to a beach on the south of the island. A truck loaded with blood oranges kicked up a rock that broke the windshield in front of my face. I wasn’t hurt, the rock only pocked the glass and spun out a spiderweb of cracks, but I spent the rest of the day in mute hysteria. Carlo never did know what was wrong. Any explanation I could think of sounded like superstition. My dream was very much more than a dream. It had so much living weight to it, such prescience, it felt like something that was someday bound to happen.
The insomnia, on the other hand, wasn’t such a big problem as you might imagine. I worked around it. I read a lot. In med school I did my best studying while my classmates were in the throes of rapid eye movement. I still considered my night-prowling habits to be a kind of secret advantage I had over other people. I had the extra hours in my day that they were always wishing for.
Emelina would not understand this. The night before school started,
