The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [102]
It made Paul uneasy, the money and his thefts and the not being caught. It was the same feeling he had when he stood here with his father in the dark, images taking shape before their eyes. There was not only one photo in a negative, his father said; there were multitudes. A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how. Paul listened to his father talk, feeling a pit open up inside him. If all this was true, his father was someone he could never really know, which scared him. Still, he liked being there amid the soft light and the smell of chemicals. He liked the series of precise steps from beginning to end, the sheet of exposed paper sliding into the developing fluid and the images rising out of nowhere, the timer going off and then the paper slipping into the fixer. The images drying, fixed in place, glossy and mysterious.
He paused to study them. Strange swirling shapes, like petrified flowers. Coral, he realized, from the trip to Aruba, brain coral with its flesh receded, leaving only the intricate skeletal framework. The other photos were similar, porous openings blooming in white, like a landscape of complex craters transmitted from the moon. Brain coral/bones, said his father’s notes, placed neatly on the table by the enlarger.
On that day in the cottage, in the instant before he felt Paul’s presence and looked up, his father’s expression had been utterly open, washed with emotions like rain—some old love and loss. Paul saw it and longed to say something, to do something, anything that would make the world right. At the same time, he wanted to break away, to forget all their problems, to be free. He glanced away, and when he looked back his father’s expression was distant again, impassive. He might have been thinking of a technical problem with his film, or diseases of the bone, or lunch.
A moment might be a thousand different things.
“Hey,” Duke said, pushing open the door. “You ever coming out, or what?”
Paul slipped the cool bills into his pocket and went back into the larger room. Two other boys had arrived, seniors, who hung out in the vacant lot across from the school during lunch, smoking. One of them had a six-pack and handed him a beer, and Paul almost said Let’s go downstairs, let’s do this outside, but it was raining harder now and the boys were older than he was and bigger too, so he just sat down and joined them. He gave Duke the money and then the lit ember moved around the circle. Paul became fascinated with Duke’s fingertips, how delicately they held the joint, remembering how they flew over the keys with wild precision. His father was meticulous too. He mended people’s bones, their bodies.
“You feeling it?” Duke asked after a while.
Paul heard him from a long way off, as if through water, past the distant whistle of a train. This time there was no wild laughter, no giddiness, only a deep interior well through which he was falling. The well inside became part of the darkness outside, and he couldn’t see Duke, and he was scared.
“What’s wrong with him?” someone asked and Duke said, He’s just getting paranoid, I guess, and the words were so big, they filled the room up and pressed him against the wall.
Long rolls of laughter filled the room, and the faces of the others grew distorted with mirth. Paul couldn’t laugh; he was frozen in place. His throat was dry and he felt his hands getting too large for his body, and he studied the door as if at any moment his father might burst through, his anger shattering over them like waves. Then the laughter was gone and the others were getting up. They were going through the drawers, looking for food, but they only found his father’s careful files. Don’t he tried to say as the oldest one, the one with a beard, started pulling files out and opening them up. Don’t: it was a scream inside his head, yet nothing came out of his mouth. The others were standing up now too, taking out folder after folder, spreading the prints and the negatives, so carefully