This was the old house we had bought: a vast and cumbersome island afloat upon the land, towers and cupolas and gables rendering the sky complex with their anfractuous horizon of darkness that galloped against the rose pink of twilights. Deep and heavy walls of liver rock held this circus of wood afloat, but one could see where the impossible weight had sunk even these rocks waist-deep into the clay. Weeds and grass and wild roses thickened everywhere about the house, the smoke-colored sheds and the roofed well.
A double wagon track was worn like a paradigm of memory into the depths of the yard. Otherwise, all was overgrown and blurred with desuetude and the brainless vigor of an inhuman and unwanted growth.
But it wasn’t the house itself that was the secret; rather, this house was only the vessel of – not simply the secret, but the inner vessel of life; and it was life that was the secret, only this particular and induplicable form of life.
On the third floor of the house, there were rooms complicated with the detritus of a century – old shawls draped over the backs of cold and dusty love seats, clothes forms made in the shapes of young women long turned to air and loam, scrapbooks containing the portraits of staring, somber faces without names … high-topped shoes, bent stiffly at the ankles, books and magazines, rolled-up blinds, clothes hangers, broken oil lamps, chairs with burst cane bottoms and splintered arms, chests heaped with diaphanous black garments and flowered hats, as strange as extinct birds … all of these things, covered with the oat-smelling dust of soil and time.
For three days, we cleaned and rearranged these objects, and there was such a multitude that after a while they all began to look alike – the books and the letters, the chairs and the photographs.
But not quite. There was one photograph – at least a century old – that caught my attention. Not at first, for I was sorting out different papers, and it merely lay among them; but later the thought of it came back to me so strongly that I returned to the room and looked for it. (The room was like the others – slanted beneath the gable and dim with a light that seemed peculiarly adapted to the thought of a long distant past.)
I found it again, and this time – holding it in my hands – I was troubled by the elusive strangeness before me. The photograph dated surely from the 1850s or 1860s, and it was simply the photograph of a large building. Apparently an apartment building. There were no human presences that I could detect in the scene, and yet the immanence of something human was as certain and palpable as an odor. Indeed, there was no tangible life in the picture at all, except for a sorry-looking horse standing in harness before a quaint little carriage. The head of the horse was blurred, obviously from a sudden movement in a day when photographic exposures required seconds rather than fractions of a second.
What was there about the picture that magnetized my attention? I stared at it in the darkness of that room until my eyes blurred and the everyday sounds of the world subsided into something half-unreal and half-silent. Then I closed my eyes and concentrated upon the scene that remained fixed in my mind.
The more I thought, the stranger it seemed. And yet, I was close to experiencing some sort of recognition in it. In some way the photograph seemed to be meant for me alone, in a sense that was obliquely mysterious. This photograph had been waiting for me, and for no one else.
Although I was not able to define this unsettling power, I did in fact learn something from all that thought: whatever the mystery was, it had to do with the windows.
In spite of this fascination, I had to put the photograph aside for several weeks while we settled in the house and made it fit our family the way new shoes or a new suit is made to fit the body.
But eventually I sought out the photograph again, and sat before it and stared into that strange scene of a building that had existed in an unknown city at least a century before, and was now undoubtedly disbursed into soil, mud, brick dust and air.
I decided to take it to a room in the basement, which I had set aside as my darkroom, where I intended to develop all my own photographs. I proposed to make a negative and enlarge it. I was aware of the problems, of course, and scarcely hoped to learn much from the photograph, for the techniques of that distant time were impossibly crude, and upon enlargement, the details of that scene would undoubtedly be lost in the hypertrophied grain – elements of vision that had an atomic absoluteness, and would wax thick and gross, like anonymous golf balls of gray and white inhabiting the expanded view.
But this was not so. For I was astonished to discover upon my first enlargement that the grain did not expand with the view, and that the images of people appeared in the windows of that building.
I did not really study that first enlargement at all. Someone watching me might have thought I was simply impatient, or in a hurry. All I did was throw the photograph aside, after that first discovery, switch out the light, and leave my darkroom to go upstairs and join my family.
The children were sitting around the television, eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches. My wife was preparing supper. Everything was normal, and as it should be. I went into the kitchen and fixed drinks for my wife and me. The children were laughing in the other room, and the TV was turned up too loud, as usual.
I have sometimes pretended that the people you meet in recurring dreams have an independent, suspended reality during the intervals between their appearances in your dreams. Not suspended entirely, perhaps, but only as actors. That is, I have fancied that between their appearances in dreams, they might live an existence as divorced from their roles in your dreams as it is divorced from the reality of everyday life. That they actually might meet for rehearsals somewhere, in some totally unknowable realm, and discuss the terms of what they will do on the stage of your next dream, memorize lines, and strive to control and predict certain effects upon the audience. In this situation, it is the dreamer who (like an audience) is the only unpredictable element, the only unrehearsed participant in what happens, the only uncertainty, as of jury or God.
It was this way with the people in that photograph. While I turned back to the daily affairs that called for my immediate attention, those people whose faces had just begun to emerge sat back in their darkened rooms and waited for me. They were waiting for that quiet and secret moment when I would come back to them, and enlarge their images until they became cogently human in the text of my attention. Perhaps they talked with one another, and lived lives beyond the scope of my imagining, imprisoned as they were in the crepuscular rooms of an ancient building … which in turn existed only in the flattened image of the photograph of a dead, past time.
Still, everything that could be said to be there once had access to the light, and this suggested to me that it was somehow accessible to the understanding. It might not be beyond recall. It was possible that the people in those rooms continued to exist with their own lucidity, no matter how intangible this lucidity might seem.
It was a week or ten days before I found time to go back. It was evening, and when the children turned on the TV, I descended the steps and went into the darkroom. I enlarged the upper right section of the photograph, showing one window completely, and two half windows to each side. When the image began to come forth, like something emerging from the deep water of time, rather than from the tray before me, I saw that there was the face of a young girl to be seen in the room beyond the window. It was perfectly clear; and the eyes of the face were fixed intently, unmistakably, upon mine. That is to say, upon the lens of the camera.
Whoever had been taking that photograph over a hundred years ago, he had been watched by this young girl. Probably without knowing it.
In the two half windows that showed at the side of each window, there was nothing at all. Merely the darkness of unlighted rooms.
I studied the face of the girl. It was a beautiful face, but somber. She must have been only nine or ten years old; but already, I could imagine, there was something old in her features.
I could see dark combs in her light hair. Her chin was slightly raised, and
one hand was cupped softly on her throat, almost in a theatrical gesture of surprise or fear. Whatever it was, the emotion on her face was clearly one of some force. There was something of unease upon it, but there was fascination, too.
It occurred to me that she might not have seen a camera before this instant, and she was staring out through the window at a man leaning over, seeming to peer absorbedly into nothing but a shrouded black box.
Nevertheless, she probably knew what the camera was, even if she had never seen one. Possibly she saw something else that disturbed or frightened her.
Then I considered the strange impossibility that she might have seen into the lens, into the camera itself, and even into that very future to which the camera would bring her image. In other words, that she might be looking at me, just as I was looking at her.
A whimsical idea, which I put out of my mind immediately. Then I studied her face closely for several minutes before going back upstairs, having had enough of such communion for a while.
But of course I returned, and enlarged that single window with the girl in it. There was surely some revelation in that face, if it could be brought closer. The closer it came, I was thinking, the more lifelike it would be. And I even fancied that I might eventually see the face grow to life-size, and feel something like a breath on my hands as I worked with it.
Ridiculous, of course. But all of this was part of the hypnotic effect the photograph had upon me. And my wild fancies were not discouraged when I found that, upon this latest enlargement, the girl’s face actually began to show something almost like color. As did her hair, which might have been a pale gold with slight rednesses in it.
The eyes, of course, were even more lifelike. And behind the girl I could now identify an asymmetrical shadow. This was the back of a man who appeared to be stooped and leaning forward with his face in his hands, weeping. It was impossible to see clearly, but he appeared to be elderly.
Whatever condition he was in, or whoever he was, the girl continued to stare in fascination out upon the world, and into the camera lens, and even (as I have suggested) at myself, as if I were a voyeur god gazing upon her over so great a distance and so much time.
Beyond the man, there was something else, a long horizontal shadow that he seemed to be facing. But at this stage of the enlargement, I could not tell what it was. Still, I studied it very closely for a long time, and then I looked once more at the man. I was almost certain that his hair was silver and long, curling over the collar of his dark coat.
And when I finished studying these two things, I looked back once more at the face of the girl as it continued to gaze at me. I am sure I imagined it, but the face seemed older. The girl might have been as old as twelve or thirteen. It was very difficult to tell.
And there was a slight mole on her right cheek. No larger than the tip of a lead pencil, but there it was, clear before my gaze. I was sure it was not a defect in the photograph, but an actual mole on the girl’s cheek.
With the next enlargement, I discovered that the long shape beyond the old man was a casket. No figure was visible in it, but the ornate satin upon the lid glowed faintly in the dim light, and the shape of the lid was unmistakable.
Therefore, the photograph had caught this old man in a moment of grief, weeping into his hands before a loved one who had just died. And it had caught the girl, too.
However, the girl had happened to turn around and look outside, where she had seen something that surprised or puzzled or terrified her, so that she had clutched vaguely at her throat while the shutter opened and closed, fastening their image permanently by the witnessing of light upon a chemically treated plate.
But what was it the girl saw? What precisely was the landscape of her fear or grief? That window she was staring through was not so different from the lens of a camera, I told myself. Nor so different from the images I busied myself with, enlarging them without either attenuating or fragmenting them, in contradiction of all law. It was as if one could increase the power of a microscope without destroying the surface appearance of that which he regarded, but only rendering it clearer and more unmistakably itself with each enlargement.
Only in this, the mystery grew with each enlargement, precisely as the human discoveries increased, defying all expectations.
And yet the girl’s face was no different; merely more human, in its strange way, and perhaps still a little older than even that second discovery had suggested.
There was something else, however: her lips were slightly parted. The realization was beyond question. Her lips were open just a fraction of an inch, and I realized that the camera had caught her in the act of speaking a word.
But how could this be? The camera of that day had disastrously slow shutter speeds, as I have said. The horse harnessed to the cart outside the building gave evidence that this was so, for his head was blurred. So why didn’t I conclude that the girl’s lips were simply parted … from an adenoidal condition, perhaps, or because of something else? But no. This was not so, and I could see it was not so. Although I could not have proved it to anyone else, I was certain that the girl had been caught in the act of saying something.
Possibly something to the old man behind her. Her grandfather, perhaps; speaking a word of consolation to him as he stooped before the casket weeping for the loss of a loved one.
But this would not do either. The girl was looking out the window. Her eyes were focused. She was looking at the anonymous cameraman, at the camera itself ... at the lens, at me.
And she was speaking a word. Not only her lips, but her eyes gave testimony to the truth of this hypothesis.
It was the next and the last enlargement that conveyed to me the final revelation. And this was the revelation I had been waiting for, although it might in itself seem arcane and impossibly ambiguous. For the answer is really, in one sense, a nonanswer. But even a nonanswer is an answer of sorts … or it can be, as when it signifies that no categorical answer is possible because the terms of the question are wrong, or the implications of the question are somehow unthinkable.
This happened on the very next night, and I was excited when I descended the steps to my darkroom and prepared my enlarger.
When the image grew before my eyes, it was almost like the entrance of someone I had known all my life. The girl’s face, looking still older than I would have thought possible the first time, appeared between my hands, and her lips were now so clearly parted that no one could have doubted that she was in the act of speaking a word ... as no one could have doubted the deep, unequivocal focus of her eyes upon the person who gazed upon her.
As I studied her image, it came to me – suddenly and irrefutably. I mean, the word she was speaking (whispering, I think, so that the old man behind her could not possibly have heard).
The word was, “No.”
That was all. “No.” Nothing else at all.
For who else might have seen this possibility, or might have understood the burden of her prescient fear? What strange Cassandra was this girl? And what dreams might she have had before and after this one instant, when she stared outwards into time as well as into space?
These are questions that undoubtedly deserve nonanswers. Whatever they might have led to, however, I decided that evening to destroy all my enlargements, along with the original photograph.
Good and evil had nothing to do with it. Although it seemed to me to be an act of cleansing, as well as liberation. I mean the act of destroying everything that had to do with the photograph.
Sometimes I wake up in the night and wonder about the girl – and fear for her, and feel pity for her.
Did she, I wonder, worship the future, or the judgment of the future, as a kind of God? Was she, in short, as poisoned by this error as we are? (I speak of the error of believing that the future is wiser, or more nearly infallible, than we are; an error that is an inevitable corollary to the myth of progress.)
Was I like a god to her, to the extent that she guessed at, or imagin
ed, my presence? Consider this: if she were mad, she might have dreamed that some unknown man was staring at her through a glass, and that this man lived a hundred years beyond that instant. The man might have been her great grandson, or the great grandson of people she had never known. All would be the same to her.
What I am asking is this: if one might have a glimpse of the future, might it not occur in such a manner as this? Wouldn’t the camera still seem to her in that day a marvelous, a magical invention? And if something of her could pass through the lens of the camera in one direction, might she not conceive that something, or some vestige of someone, pass in the other direction?
But it isn’t simply the girl who is at the heart of this mystery (although God knows she embodies enough!). For I am thinking of all those other windows. And I am thinking of the poor horse and the strange little carriage it was harnessed to. I wonder if they belonged to the photographer.
And the photographer himself. What was he like? Who was he? And the camera. I would have liked to have a photograph of this man. I would have liked to see him as that girl saw him.
As it is, I only conceive of him as huddled behind the old camera, his head covered with the stiff dark cloth that kept out all the adventitious light of day. He is gazing into the lens before him, and the building he sees is inverted and upside down. All the windows are upside down. The horse and the carriage are upside down. The horse moves his head, but the girl speaks the word “No,” and already the picture has been taken.
From the story collection Dubious Persuasions (1981)
Three Times Time Page 7
