Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(46)

I wish my heart would follow me into the dark.

* * *

Seriously, and I thought I had told you this story, I made my first camera when I was seven.

After my encounter with Bob and a long bus ride home in the snowy cold, I snuggle with my laptop to look at the pictures C has posted on his photography blog today. They are dark, black-and-white, with black edges, but the images of the marble-columned Lakefield Metropolitan Library in the middle are so sharp and crystalline they look almost three-dimensional.

You really took these with a camera you made?

Yeah, a pinhole camera with black-and-white film. I figured it was a good time to get some cool pictures because the new snow would throw the light in interesting ways for a picture of architecture. I made this camera with an empty oatmeal can.

Then he sends me a link with directions on how to make a pinhole camera so I can see what he means.

Why are the edges all around the library black?

That’s how the light entered the box. There are ways to prevent that, but I like how it looks. I like that it frames exactly what to look at, and that this was the only way this camera could see. Just what is right in front of it, without any other clutter.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to tell him about what is happening to me, the way the world is narrowing in, but what he’s told me gives me chills. C and I don’t talk about ourselves, not exactly.

We talk about his pictures.

We tell funny stories about our childhoods, but only the stories that could be from anyone’s childhood.

We tell each other where to put our hands.

All of it, by mutual agreement, though I know the online anonymity is only respectful deference on his part.

If I asked, we’d meet, we’d be more than pictures and stories. I don’t ask.

So I don’t say that the pictures make me genuinely uneasy and tell him why. Instead I write that they’re a little spooky, almost.

I’ve been kind of obsessed, lately, with what we see versus what we’re looking at. What do you mean?

You can look at anything, direct your vision at any part of the world around you, but it doesn’t mean you actually see anything. Notice it, think about it, take it in. I’ve just been thinking, lately, for lots of reasons, a few of them personal, that maybe it’s not really the mechanics or objective quality of the looking that’s important, but what is actually seen and noticed. I took these pictures with an oatmeal container. Objectively, much worse equipment than I’m used to. But my fancy camera would never have captured this image, isn’t even capable of seeing this image. Two cameras, pointed in the same direction, at the same thing. The pinhole camera really “sees” the library, I think.

These pictures are beautiful. The marble of the columns looks so tactile, almost like bone.

The pictures remind me, too, of the field of vision under a scope, how the dark circle around what you’ve focused on just bleeds out into infinity while you look at what’s right in front you, centered on the slide.

They remind me of me, of course, though my loss of vision at the edges isn’t some dark ring I can see, it’s just what isn’t there.

I can’t tell him any of this.

How do you get the pictures out of the oatmeal container? I have to develop the film I put inside.

Like, with a red lightbulb and the basins of chemicals and stuff?

Yeah, but I don’t have a special darkroom because everything’s digital nowadays. I just develop them in my bathroom. But I still screw in a red lightbulb.

That is very cool. It’s too bad that’s not the moment where the murderer’s face is revealed in movies, anymore.

Ha! True. Yet something else technology has stolen.

I smile, ready to play. I toggle away from his library pictures, though.

I print out C’s pictures, sometimes, to pin up by my kitchen sink, or in my office, and maybe I’ll someday want to look at these again, print them out, they’re so beautiful, after all.

Not yet, though.

Instead, C and I walk into a dark room together.

I beckon him, respond,

Exactly, because it was always kind of sexy, too. Or, it seemed like there were a lot of hard-bitten detectives and their pretty clients all close together in the tiny darkroom, waiting for the picture to magically develop in the basin thing, slooshing it around with the tong things, glancing deep into each other’s eyes trying to deny the inevitable.

That the murderer was SOMEONE SHE KNEW?

No, that the hard-bitten detective and his pretty client were IN LOVE. And also, that it was SOMEONE SHE KNEW.

Are you looking for a re-creation?

Of the darkroom scene?

Let me turn out the lights. Turn out yours, too.

I don’t have to, I’ve already turned out the lights. I balance my laptop on a stiff sofa pillow and lean against the back, ask him.