Shadows 7 (14 page)

Remember how rough it was when you were starting your career? All the prejudices to overcome, the learning to do, the constant display of proof that you really did know what you were doing and talking about? Sometimes, it's safer that way.

Jack C. Haldeman lives in Florida, and both his science fiction and fantasy have appeared in every major market in the country.

The old man came slowly into focus. Diffused shades of gray gradually became sharp images on the ground-glass screen. Robert framed the picture as the man stared into the camera with dead eyes. The shutter snapped, capturing what was left of his soul on Kodak Tri-X film, ASA 400.

The photographer smiled. He knew a good shot when one fell into his lap.

Robert Whitten was sitting on top of the world. Barely twenty-five years old, he had it all and he knew it. He moved to his left to get a different angle and the old man, bored, looked away. Robert refocused and adjusted his exposure.

The man was sitting in a cane-backed chair and staring out the window of the nursing home where he'd lived for the past ten years. The white curtains shifted in the meager summer breeze. Robert held still for a moment, and as the old man's eyes started to close he pressed the shutter release and fired off three quick shots.

The man turned around sharply and started to say something, but stopped. Instead, he shook his head wearily and turned his face to the wall.

The session was over. Robert let his camera hang on its strap as he jotted a few notes in his worn notebook: the date, shutter speeds, f-stops; all technical information, cold hard numbers, nothing about the man. After all, he'd already picked up the release forms from the nursing home manager. He was legally cleared to photograph the old man. What else did he have to know? The man was old and photogenic. That was all that mattered.

Robert lit a cigarette as he walked out onto the broad front porch of the old wood frame house. A woman, fanning herself as she rocked back and forth, looked up at him and smiled. He looked away from the broken teeth and wrinkled skin and started down the steps to the gravel driveway.

As he reached his car, he noticed two women sitting together on a swing hanging from the far end of the porch. He removed the 50mm lens from his camera and slipped on the medium telephoto he carried in a case on his hip. He raised the camera and focused. It was as if he were standing beside them. He let his cigarette drop and ground it into the gravel with his heel.

The women wore faded white cotton dresses and they had a sameness about them that could have come from being sisters or it could have come with the equalizing effects of age. Gaunt and white-haired, they were having an animated discussion as the swing slowly moved back and forth. Robert framed them dispassionately as they laughed, concentrating on the shifting light and depth of field.

One woman leaned over and whispered something in the other's ear. They giggled and clapped their hands together like schoolgirls. The expressions on their faces were perfect. Except for the passing of eighty years they could have been children. The chain on the swing was rusted, the paint was cracked and peeling in places. The age splotches on their hands and faces stood out clearly. Liver spots.

Only their eyes held life. It somehow shined through the ruin of the years. Robert snapped the picture and knew he had another winner. He opened the car door and set the camera on the front seat.

As he started his Mercedes, he reached down and flipped on the air conditioner. The face of the woman fanning herself was still fresh in his mind. Slipping the car into gear, he drove down the driveway and turned left, scattering gravel as he spun his wheels getting away from the nursing home as rapidly as possible. Old people depressed him. He felt trapped by them.

It was ironic, of course, since old people had brought him everything he had.

Five years ago Robert had dropped out of college to try his luck at full-time photography. He loved animals and had always wanted to be a wildlife photographer. For several months he lived alone in a cabin deep in the mountains. His days were spent following deer, birds, and bears with his camera. He would stand for hours waiting for the sun to be
just
right, waiting for the perfect picture. His nights were spent working in a makeshift darkroom. When he came back to civilization, he carried a thick portfolio of excellent prints. None of them sold.

In order to support himself, Robert took a job as staff photographer for a small local paper. The rest had been mostly luck as far as he could tell. It started with a shot he'd taken early one morning of an old wino rummaging through a garbage can. The man looked up just as Robert snapped the shutter, and the hopelessness and longing in the man's eyes vaulted Robert to the front page of a hundred newspapers.

Everything had grown from that one photo. Everything.

His editor suggested that he try a feature on the elderly street people in town, and although he didn't think much of the idea, Robert went ahead and shot it. Every bag lady and bum that he encountered depressed him, yet he couldn't deny the appeal the photographs would have. He could see the pathos that other people would see in his pictures, but he couldn't feel it himself. It was as if something was missing deep inside him.

The feature was enlarged and ran every Sunday for a month. Many of the pictures were picked up by the wire services, and UPI ran the shot of two old men sleeping in a doorway in over two hundred papers around the world.

Time
and
Newsweek
reprinted part of the series as did several foreign publications including
Paris Match
and
Le Monde. Esquire
ran a feature-length article on the young photographer just before his collection
Street People
was published by Doubleday in an oversized limited edition just in time for the Christmas trade.

The book sold well and the paperback edition did even better. Robert quit the newspaper, and with a healthy advance from Doubleday he began shooting the companion edition,
Ancient Eyes.
It was a natural follow-up with a built-in market and he hated every minute. He even hated it the instant he tripped the shutter capturing the old sharecropper leaning against the fence at twilight. That was the one that got him the Pulitzer Prize. It also locked him into photographing old people, seemingly forever.

It was also the time the nightmares started. First came the troubled sleep, the endless series of bad dreams. Then it was little things he started seeing at the edge of his vision, little creepy things with no real shape or form.

The psychiatrists were no help. For two hundred dollars an hour they came up with lots of words and theories, but no cures. He felt trapped by the very things that had brought him success. That much was clear. If he had to live with nightmares in order to live with wealth, he figured he could handle it. Money was a great buffer, the best. It could solve all kinds of problems.

He pulled the Mercedes into the circular drive in front of the condominium he'd bought last year out of royalties from
Ancient Eyes,
leaving the car to be parked by the attendant who opened the door for him. He didn't relax until the elevator let him out in front of the door to his condo, ten floors above and light-years away from the world of the old people.

He threw his jacket over the back of the white sofa and flipped through his mail. Nothing there. His telephone-answering machine held nothing important. Kicking off his shoes, he went to the bar by the balcony and poured himself a drink.

Robert's walls were covered with prints of all sizes. Some were matted, some were framed and covered with glass. They were all photographs of birds and animals. A large color print of a bald eagle dominated one wall, surrounded by smaller prints of hawks in flight. A study of a family of raccoons lined the wall to the bedroom. There were no pictures of people.

He sat for a minute sipping scotch and remembered the old man. The film was in his camera bag and he opened it, taking out the three canisters that held what he'd shot earlier.

For a moment he rolled the film around on the coffee table in front of him, trying to decide if he wanted to work anymore today or not. He faced no deadlines, but a couple of the shots had looked pretty good and he was curious.

Robert took the film into the large darkroom he'd had built off the bathroom and loaded it into the developing tank. While the tank slowly rotated, Robert got down his trays and filled them with chemicals. He took the protective cover off the enlarger and cleaned the lens and negative carrier with a few sprays from a can of compressed air. After the negatives had finished their final rinse, Robert hung them in the drying closet. It would take a few minutes for the film to dry, so he left the darkroom, stripped, and stepped into the shower.

The water felt good, hot and steamy. As Robert soaped himself up, he relaxed and felt the weariness from the nursing home wash away. He closed his eyes and let the hot water rinse them off.

Stepping from the shower, he dried himself and did a few deep knee bends. His body was in good shape and he exercised regularly. No fat, no flab, not so much as a single gray hair. After a day of looking at wrinkled and ruined people, it was good to remind himself of his youth. He touched his toes twice and slipped into a robe.

Walking into the darkroom, Robert's curiosity got the better of him. Rather than taking the time to run contact sheets of the day's work, he went directly to the roll that had the shots of the old man. He held it up to the dim safety light and found his place. There were only ten negatives, but they all looked good. He slipped the first one into the enlarger and pulled out a sheet of 8 by 10 paper.

The exhaust fan whirred softly in the darkened room as he focused the enlarger, cropping the picture as he went along. Blurs of black and gray became sharp lines, defined images. This was the part of photography he liked best. Everything that went before only led up to this final step. The print was all that counted.

He studied the old man carefully, with an eye for detail. Only when preparing the print did he notice the small things: a scar on the man's forehead, a wisp of hair from a small mole on his cheek. All these details were what made the photograph successful, but he never noticed them until this stage, always taking for granted that they would be there and they always were. He estimated the correct exposure and flipped the red filter out of the enlarger.

For seven seconds the black and white image of the old man stared up at Robert from the easel under the enlarger. The man had an intensity in his eyes—a strange mixture of hate and despair—that Robert hadn't noticed when he'd taken the picture. It burned through the milky film of the old man's cataracts with a surprising fierceness.

The man also had a faint area of skin discoloration on the side of his face that had escaped Robert. If he didn't like the effect, Robert could always eliminate the discoloration by dodging it out in the final print. He rubbed the side of his face absently as he stood by the enlarger, staring down at the old man staring back at him from a small square of light in the darkness.

Seven seconds passed, ticked away precisely by the large timer over the enlarger. Robert flipped the red filter back into place and slid the paper into the developer.

Handling it only by the edges with a pair of plastic tongs, he moved the blank paper gently around in the shallow tray, touching it occasionally at the corners to keep it under the fluid. After a few seconds the latent image started to appear; slowly at first, with only the darkest parts of the photograph appearing as a ghostlike outline.

Gradually, the print gained substance, the blacks became a deeper, almost absolute black. The white areas stood out in sharp contrast as the shades of gray supplied the detail. Robert watched the old man's eyes carefully, judging the stage of development by the grain of the print.

When the print was fully developed, Robert transferred it to the stop bath for a few seconds and moved it into the fixer. He swirled the print around for a couple of minutes and dipped it into the running water in the washer. Impatient to get a good look at what he had, Robert took the print out of the water and stepped out of the darkroom into the well-lit bathroom to examine it.

He flattened the print against the large mirror over the double sink, sticking it beneath the strong light. He stepped back to get a general idea of how the cropping had worked. It looked good, and he leaned in close to check the focusing and detail. He still couldn't decide whether or not he should dodge out the man's skin discoloration.

Robert decided it could use a little longer exposure and smoothed down a corner of the print with his finger. As he did, he noticed some small brownish blotches on the back of his hand. They looked almost like developer stains, but that was hardly possible. He'd been in up to his elbows in developer for years and it had never happened before. He rubbed at them, but they didn't go away.

Turning on the water, he rinsed off his hands. It didn't help. He ran the water as hot as he could stand it and scrubbed with soap, but the spots wouldn't go away. Annoyed, he shut off the water angrily. The damn things would have to wear away.

Robert took the print off the mirror and stopped for a second. Was that a spot of gray hair at his temples? He looked closer, rubbing his hair with his fingers. No, it was nothing. He hated the idea of gray hair, the first sure sign of old age. Gray hair marked the beginning of that inescapable slide into the world of old people, the people he couldn't stand, the people he made both his reputation and living from.

He went back into the darkroom and dropped the photograph back into the print washer. Even though it was a test print, he knew there were people who would pay a lot for it.

He moved the strip of film to the next negative and cropped the picture almost automatically. The old man had been looking away from the camera, his gray hair backlighted by the light from the window.