by Victor Yates
An hour later, as I’m eating another Danish, the entry alert device dings. I lower my head to the floor, listening. Shirtless and pantless, I become stone. Tap tap, I hear, from Father’s shoes. If I move, the floor will squeak. The door bells chime. Sweat drips down my stomach as I remember I opened the windows. The door dings and the burden of being discovered sinks to my feet into the floor. Rip, I hear. Triplicate paper, possibly. The mechanical whirring of a printer on its deathbed. Unclear. Tap tap. Church shoes. My nose tingles. I sneeze from breathing in dust. My hand slams down, and a staple rips through my skin. With tears in my eyes, I wait, listening, for the glass door to shatter. Instead, the door to the darkroom slams close. I pull the staple out, and my entire body unloosens. Blood surfaces.
Even with drywall and plaster separating us, in my head, I can see him. He ties a black apron around his neck and slips on goggles and gloves. I am in my underwear upstairs. The safelight lamp, with a red bulb, switches on. I imagine the light in the storage room turns red. Father first feeds the film, to be printed, onto the Paterson reel. He places the reel in the handheld tank, allowing the film to soak in Kodak HC 110. He flips the tank over several times for ten seconds. For thirty seconds, he lets the film rest, and then flips it over for five seconds, stops for thirty seconds, and repeats the last two steps five times. The storage room transforms into a darkroom and in the darkroom, I am standing beside him, watching everything. He pours the developer out of the tank using a funnel. Then, he holds the film under cold water, at sixty-five degrees, for half an hour. The chemical residue, splotches, and fingerprints wash away. And, finally he hangs the film in a drying tank. The process changes the film into negatives. From the negatives, the photograph can be enlarged and developed. An Ethiopian bride, veiled and virginal, appears under water.
The first time I developed a perfect photograph in the darkroom I was ten. The experience, seeing blank paper transform, I knew would change my relationship with my father. He kissed me on both my cheeks and my forehead. At ten, it was okay for him to kiss me. At eleven, it wasn’t anymore. At that age, he asked me, who my girlfriend was at school? I invented a girl’s name that sounded like the human version of a character from my favorite cartoon. Luckily, Father wasn’t well versed in the land of motionless childhood.
The urge to urinate comes, and I squeeze the muscle in my anus to stop it.
“Double D’s,” I say to myself.
Downstairs, Father whispers, double D’s, to himself.
During that same time when I was younger, he demanded I yell that out along with four P’s, for kitty-cat, to help me process prints. Much later, I learned kitty-cat wasn’t in reference to the furry-legged animal that purrs. The double D’s are: start developing and stop developing. The four P’s immediately follow the double D’s: fix the print, wash the print, dry the print, and make it. At any step, film or a print can be destroyed and each time I destroyed work, we had a talk-talk. Are you listening, he would repeat. If I didn’t nod like an excited puppy, he would hit me. Then, I had to demonstrate what I learned without failure. Failure meant bruises.
In the storage room, my foot kicks over a gallon jug, repurposed into a urinal. The cap prevents the urine from spilling. I press my ear to the floor, listening out for dropped sounds and running to prepare myself. Minutes go by and nothing. Father continues working. I reach for the jug and set it closer to my face. The yolk-colored liquid resembles Stop Bath. Photographers use Stop Bath to stop the development of film or paper by either washing off developing chemical or neutralizing it. The chemical bath is dark yellow. In the darkroom, we use emptied milk jugs for Stop Bath, Fixer, and Hypo Clear.
My legs shake as I glance at the yellow. I twist off the jug cap in a hurry, almost spilling the liquid on my feet. Hopefully, Father cannot hear the splash of urine against plastic.
Finished, I drop the container close to the wrappers. Twenty-five cents printed in red ink stands out on the packaging. I fan the wrappers around a store receipt, with the nutrition labels showing. Beads of sweat from my forehead drip as I shoot the summer wreath of waste. The word sugar is in bold on each wrapper. My eyes slide down the labels to the letter T, next to an A, followed by N and K. Somehow while in grammar school, I learned pouring sugar into a gas tank could ruin a car engine. The idea was that the heat would melt the sugar, sending granules into every nook. Four years ago, Junior and I poured sugar into our Father’s previous car, in retaliation for beating us for playing with a neighbor’s dog. After three weeks of disappointment, Junior forced me to ask my science teacher about the rumor.
“Sugar does not dissolve in gasoline,” he said. “What do you do if you want to have an effect? Put water in the tank.”
Pouring several cups of water into a car causes the fuel pump to fill the fuel lines with water instead of gas.
“The car would still function, but not as well,” he said.
After filling Father’s car with water, Junior and I observed: the car shook when idling and jerked when accelerating. He had to push the pedal to the floor to accelerate. When he pressed on the brake, the pads screeched. Watching it all happen was beautiful, but I felt guilty. I promised myself I wouldn’t allow Junior to talk me into anything unsafe again.
Before I convince myself not to, I ease into my wet shirt and pants. I tiptoe down the steps, listening for the studio door to open. I hurry to Father’s car parked in front and with a smile on my face I pour piss from the container into the tank. Looking around, I see the rat’s head on the sidewalk.
Chapter 28
Racing up the stairs, I stumble, catch the rail, and break into laughter. Something within my body has changed. Everywhere, all at once, I’m buzzing. My feet banging against the steps give the buzzing a sound. The knotted muscles in my arms that disable me relax. My arms wave like a piñata in the wind. To ground myself, I slap the rail as I run. Wham, the wood vibrates. I feel invincible. With each wobble of the stairs, I gain a newborn confidence. I know how to hurt him back: through a more cruel form of violence. And, where it’ll hurt him the worst, in his mouth.
On the street, I notice a blonde wearing a skirt suit, staring up at me. A question is on her lips. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. She looks terrified.
I rush into the warmth of the storage room and smash my hand over my mouth, smothering the boom in my laughter. My hand smells like dry earth. I laugh louder looking at the shoe prints on the car from the upstairs window. I count thirty. Stomp marks, dents, exposed metal, power, and hunger displayed for the world. I press harder. Even though I want Father to hear me laughing downstairs, he can’t hear me now. Although, seeing his nose scrunched up, would be more exciting than Brett’s raised eyebrow and open mouth. I could lie, and tell him I’ll marry my ex-girlfriend to spread out in the passenger seat the day his car jerks, possessed with the demon of urine. At that beautiful moment, I could reveal I ruined his payment. And after he rammed my head into the glove compartment, my self-hatred would liquefy and bleed out. I would endure everything he had, punches, elbows, teeth, spit, and insults to show him I’m strong. Then, when his body sunk into his seat, I’d crack him in the chest and listen to his power hiss out.
In my palm, goo drips; blood from a splinter I find. It must’ve come from the rail. I dig it out with my nails and place it on the windowsill. A thread of blood curls away from the splinter. I close the window, in front of me, and then the rest. When Father’s jaw drops seeing the stomp marks, he won’t see the open windows and run up here. I hear a chattering noise from the back of the room and stare through the glass. My Father glares back at me. The floor squeaks as I spin around. However, Father isn’t standing anywhere in the room. I freeze, listening for footsteps from downstairs. Fifteen seconds. Forty seconds. Five minutes. There’s only silence. I turn back to the window, and there he is. Is it possible that a chemical process occurred in my body? My eyes, my nose, my skin color, are his. I hold up my hands, a
nd his hands become my hands. Palm creases and veins rearrange themselves. Moles form on my hand in the same place where they are on his hand. A second thumb appears. My calves tingle. I yank my pants down. Fine black hairs spring up from my knees down to my ankles. Together, we, my father and I, bring a third body into the world. Carsten Reed Tynes is born out of memory and blood, immaculate. Carsten Reed Tynes’ specialty is violence: fists and rocks and crosses and sticks. His eyes, our eyes, are bloodshot. Beside my bloodshot eyes, there is a red streak on the window. I step right so that the streak hovers over my face. The high I feel fades watching myself distorted in the glass. There is an irrepressible anger inside my body waiting to turn me into a Tynes man. As pleasurable as it was destroying Father’s car, I cannot transform into him, the way he transformed into Grandfather. Grandfather’s violence is as talked about in our family’s village in Somalia as legendary folktales.
In the window’s reflection, behind the third body, is the room. The room, a perfect rectangle, has silences where furniture used to be. Before we dumped it, the room had an identity. They were in the world, and of the world, and now are closer to the materials they had been. Scooping my hand under the collar of my shirt, I pull it over my head and kick off my pants. The chattering continues, then I hear running water. Something flashes in the glass. Through the window, I stare at my face, hands, skin, and body. A heaviness washes over me; it vibrates the room. I’m light-headed. The ground beneath seems to be a window. I lean against the wall.
A blond teenager bites into a croissant sandwich on the street. The white paper bag, tucked under his armpit, reads Havington, in gold lettering. White stuccoed and dangerous, Havington is a froufrou delicatessen on the corner of Main and Beverly Road. For the cost of a croissant, a person living on the street could feast for four days. I wondered where were the homeless when Father and I toured downtown months ago. In Chicago, homeless people are downtown’s unofficial ambassadors. Ambassadors buzz around and swoop down on lost tourists to direct them in the appropriate direction, for a donation, of course. Looking at the teenager, I realize being homeless in a moneyed neighborhood is equivalent to laying down a glue trap for mice and lying down in the glue. Hunger is not the scariest part of homelessness; being snatched from the place where a person has rooted himself is. What if kicking Father’s car causes him to catch me tonight? As I ask myself that while watching the boy, my stomach growls.
Betray your mistress, I tell myself.
My imagined mentor, Avedon, would work from the start of the day to the fall of the blue hour shooting countless rolls of film, for one dramatic photograph.
“Stopping to eat even a morsel is a distraction,” Avedon told American Photo magazine in an interview previewing his exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978. That issue, with his black and white photograph of Sophia Loren on the cover, is one item I wish I could’ve packed. Avedon continued the interview saying, “I believe that you have to love your work so much that it is all you want to do. I believe you must betray your mistress for your work, you betray your wife for your work. And, she must betray you for her work. I believe work is the one thing in the world that never betrays you. That lasts.”
Father demanded that I memorize Avedon’s quote until the words became imprinted behind my eye, and I could picture the quote upside down, when I looked at the world behind the viewfinder. He called it training, seeing the real world as upside down and seeing the world in front of my camera as corrected. I like to think that Richard Avedon was speaking through my father.
“Stopping to eat,” I would hear Father say on shoots.
Those words are powerful.
“Even a morsel,” I say watching the teenager disappear.
My suitcase shows its inner contents: neatly refolded clothing around camera equipment. Inspired, I reach down, grabbing the long focus lens, and firmly screw it into my Nikon’s mount. I turn the lens clockwise, and when it stops, I give it an extra twist. Then I open the window in front of me. Anger, fear, and hunger are equally important to a photographer as an understanding of light; they can ignite the creative spark.
With the lens tightened, I point the camera out the window. I repeat Avedon’s trance-like words and take deliberate pictures of the street, changing out film rolls until the blue hour turns coal black, and I hear my father scream.
Chapter 29
The distance of Father’s car complicates the photograph I want. A traffic light casts its color onto a puddle. The car appears to be bleeding from its injuries. With my lens held out the window, I hope the camera captures what I’m after – evidence. The undeniable proof will enhance the picture in my head. Like how children wake from a dream and make-believe, it will be new again. The taillights vanish down the street, and I’m alone with my delight. I wallow in it, forming it into a physical object, then push it in my hand. I squeeze it and spit on the floor. The fluid sticks to the bottom of my feet.
After half an hour, the feeling flips and forms into heaviness. Junior would punch me in the arm while Brett would kiss me hearing I kicked in the car. Their absence increases the heaviness in my head. My body becomes weighted with stones as I slide down the wall.
Around the room, fingernail-like scratches expose layers of paint. A creamy prime coat covers up yellow paint, gray paint, and white paint. Paint chips dazzle the floor. Light from the double-headed lamppost illuminates where the previous owners positioned the posters. Those sections of the wall are brighter from being untouched by sunlight. The corners of the multicolored paper are stuck in time, between the forties and nineties, by heavy-duty staples and tape. I crumple up my shirt and pull two shirts from my suitcase. Placing the shirts behind my head, I practice how I’ll tell Junior and Brett about the car and the pictures. The urine was golden, I’ll start with and I’ll end with running up the stairs, but instead of running I’ll walk up the stairs. Walking sounds gutsier.
In the silence, I listen to myself, then I ask questions of myself. Then, I practice talking to myself out loud to become accustomed to how it feels. The words are masculine and massive, much larger than I anticipated. I know what a person says is the mirror to their soul, so I feminize the words, saying them slower and closer to the truth. The truth will lead me to the light. An innocuous humming from the street peels my back from the wall. Listening with intent, I move the mechanical noise into my body, holding on to it, and an unexplainable sorrow enters my bones. Bones in my back, wrist, and legs crack. Even though the room is spacious, the conditions feel coffin-like, cramped and permanent. In Somalia, there is a saying that sorrow is like azuki beans from the market. Take a bowlful a day, and it will come to a delicious end at last. Slipping down the wall, with my shoulders close to touching the carpet of dust, I close my eyes to eliminate a bowlful and fall back asleep.
Hammering outside jerks me awake. A sound like a baritone dolphin whistle reverberates in between the hand pounding. Brett’s watch, on my wrist, reveals the time is three thirty in the morning.
“Carsten, open the door,” Father yells.
The other way out of the storage room is through a window. Jumping from the second floor could be fatal. However, if Father is banging, then Junior swiped his key. Splitting the door open is the only way he will wrap his eleven fingers around my throat. Though a locked door has not stopped him before.
“Open it,” Father yells.
My legs tingle. I snatch the knife from inside the suitcase in preparation for his heel to kick in the door. The weakest part is its lightweight frame. Wood even speaks its own language. I press the bar on the handle and unlock the serrated blade. Gripping the knife tightly, I ram the blade in the air, practicing the movement, to allow it to become part of my body. Short and fast swats. The knife becomes my camera. Across my eyes, images from the other side of the door form. His hands, his position, his posture, they are separate images and critical to my safety.
“It’s your bro
ther,” the voice says.
As I peek through the crack, hiding the knife behind my back, Junior yells, “Reed came home cursing like a madman. Finally, you grew some balls.”
“It felt great.”
“I knew you had it in you. You’re just like Reed.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You can’t let him know you’re up here. I brought you a flashlight and my sleeping bag.” Then, from under his arm, he snatches a hidden bag of chips and says, “It ain’t easy being cheesy.”
Smiling, the way our father smiles, he shows the gap between his teeth on the side of his mouth. I never acknowledge the missing tooth, because that might remind him how it came out and why I have it in my pocket. Along with it, in my pocket, I have mother’s Bobby pin, her wedding band, and the coin that bookmarked a page in her Bible. The love I felt for my brother, as he shielded me from Father, multiplies and overwhelms me now, and I cry. From age five, I assumed Junior despised me for being the opposite of him. Perhaps aggression was his way of expressing love, but his idea of brotherhood was turned on its head and trapped in a chokehold. Although when we were younger, chokeholds were received as frequently as a late breakfast from our Father. And from our Father, we are floating, but it’s the brilliance of the morning sun that reminds us Father is predictable. He arrives at eight in the morning every day to work. We hug and don’t look at each other as we say goodbye in Somali. The brave interested in speaking Somali also have to understand poetry. Allusion, proverbs, and rhyme pepper the language. So our goodbye wasn’t goodbye; it was a flower wrapped in its bulb, like a root-vegetable and thrust into the light. The light will linger a little longer today. Then, I won’t be as lonely.
