The Silver Age (4 page)

Just like that, they exchanged phone numbers. He moved
his thumb over the keypad of his phone, pressing the buttons in a deliberate,
careful way, as if keying in a nuclear code.

A moment later she was gone, and he was alone again in
the shadows.

Chapter 3

The sun was already high overhead when he opened his eyes
the next morning. It beamed through the bedroom window so hot and bright that
his shabby green curtains, purchased at Value Village, looked as if they might
spontaneously combust. Stephan’s suit lay bunched up on a chair in the corner
of the room, soiled and bereft. It was good that he’d bought it in black – the
champagne that Jenny Wynne had splashed on the lapels wouldn’t leave much of a
mark. He stayed in bed for several minutes after waking, replaying the previous
night’s events in his mind and smiling at several of his recollections.

Eventually he trundled out to his basement apartment’s
spartan galley kitchen and set about making himself a late breakfast of eggs,
toast and tea. Butter spat and crackled in the frying pan as the eggs cooked.
Water hissed in his stainless-steel kettle, which shrieked as it came to a
boil, taunting his hangover. Taped to the door of the nearest overhead
cupboard: an ancient black and white print of a pier in the midst of a storm,
waves swirling all around it.

As he was finishing the eggs, his orange tabby cat,
Gamblor, wandered in to see what the commotion was about. He’d named her that
while still in university – it was a Simpsons reference that had seemed
hilarious at the time. Despite her ill-temper and indifference to him, he
adored her.

“Good morning, my dear,” he said. “Sleep well?”

Gamblor purred and, with uncharacteristic affection,
rubbed her flank against his calf.

“Nice to see you too.”

He poured some water into a bowl and placed it in front
of her. She gave it a few sniffs, whiskers twitching, and then drank, her pink
tongue lapping at the water in dainty slurps.

That night, recovered from the previous evening’s excesses
and feeling restless, he left his apartment, which was situated on a quiet side
street near the university, and went downtown to do some black-and-white
printing. Located in a converted warehouse in the east end of downtown, his lab
of choice was a small, independent facility run by an ex-newspaper
photojournalist. He’d outfitted the place with modern colour-film developing
machines and was phasing in more and more digital processing equipment. But the
lab also housed several old-school darkrooms, appointed with vintage equipment,
which Stephan loved to use. There was something about the manual process,
laborious though it could be, that yielded photographs of astonishing depth and
richness, Stephan believed. He worked in black and white whenever a project was
special enough to warrant the extra effort.

When he arrived at the lab that night, at around eleven,
he found a couple of other photographers just packing up to go home. The owner
kept the facility open 24 hours a day, with key access after 9 p.m., on the
principal that insomnia and inspiration went hand in hand. Only a minority of
customers took full advantage of this policy, however, and usually the place
was deserted by around midnight. Sure enough, within a few minutes of his
arrival, Stephan was alone, with nothing to disturb his concentration but the
humming of ventilation ducts in the ceiling. It was perfect.

His favourite darkroom was number three, a tiny black
cubbyhole in an out-of-the way corner of the facility, where interruptions were
least likely. He’d already developed the negatives of the shots he wanted to
work on tonight, made up contact sheets and circled the best images with a
grease pen, so now he filled three plastic trays with chemicals: developer,
stop and fixer. Each chemical had its specific, essential role to play in the
developing process. The trays filled, he plugged in the enlarger, rolled up his
sleeves both literally and figuratively, and started printing.

Of course, the first print he made that night was crap.
The first print of the session always was, like the first pancake off the
skillet, as his father used to note on Sunday mornings when Stephan was a
child. But it was a starting point, a foundation upon which he could now build.
That was how he worked when printing his photographs, through grinding trial
and error over dozens of iterations. It wasn’t that he lacked the skill to do a
decent job on the first or third attempt – after more than ten years and many
thousands of prints, that wasn’t the issue. But to achieve real excellence –
not perfection, which was impossible, but something completely thought through
– you needed to test and retest every conceivable approach. And so he took this
first, feeble effort and clipped it up on the wall in the lounge for inspection.
He stood back a few feet and surveyed it in a detached way, noting the most
obvious problems, before returning to the darkroom to try again.

The tangy odour of the developing chemicals filled the
cave-like darkroom, inundating his clothing, as he continued his attempts. Soon
he had a rhythm going, and his movements became a sort of dance, every action
in time. An hour slid by, then another, as the recycling bin out in the lounge
filled up with discarded prints, most of them not half bad, but none quite good
enough to keep. Slowly and inexorably, he honed in on his object: a
near-perfect tonal spectrum, from tarry black to the half-gloss white of the
paper. Just one more try, he thought, and he’d have it nailed. He was in a flow
state, focused and energized. Maybe it had something to do with the weather,
the summer burgeoning, the city green and alive with sun and colour. Or perhaps
this sudden burst of vitality was born of last night’s encounter with Jenny
Wynne – and of his sense of anticipation of what might happen next.

Out in the lounge, he clipped up one last print and
looked it over. It was good, he thought, a warm glow of satisfaction spreading
across his chest. The slight change he’d made to the cropping of the image had
improved the overall composition. And the dodging he’d done around the centre,
holding his hand above the paper to stop some of the enlarger’s light from
getting through, had lent a soft glow to the focal point of the composition.
Yes, he’d finally gotten it. The night’s work had not been in vain.

As he stood there gazing upon his handiwork, smiling to
himself in satisfaction, he heard a metallic thump from off down the hall. He
thought at first that it must have come from outside, or been a figment of his
tired mind. But it was followed by a metallic clatter, louder and unmistakably
nearby. The noise seemed to be coming from one of the lab’s storage closets,
the shelves of which were filled with broken tripods, plastic bleach bottles
filled with expired chemicals, and ancient lenses unlikely to fit on any camera
built after 1950. Since the lab was open all night to those with a key, it was
possible that another photographer had come in – but the noise sounded too
violent and careless for it to be that. Alarmed, Stephan looked around for some
heavy piece of gear with which to defend himself in case there was a burglary
in process. It was after 2 a.m. now, and it was unusual to see anyone else in
the studio this late.

He found an old 35 millimetre camera body in the lounge,
made of steel judging by the heft of it. Swung on its shoulder strap, it could
do some damage, he figured, as he tiptoed out into the hall. Before he’d gone
more than a foot or two, however, a heavy-set, rumpled figure in a ratty
Guatemalan sweater appeared at the far end of the hall, lugging a cardboard box
of old gear. Stephan saw that it was Bill, the owner, and immediately loosened
his death-grip on the old camera.

“Bill – thank god. I thought you were a burglar.”

“A cat burglar, I presume.” Bill wheezed out a laugh as
he lumbered nearer. “I can see why you might.”

Bill followed Stephan back into the lounge, where he
dropped his box carelessly to the floor and flopped down on the couch. Bill
subsisted on a diet of Big Macs, black coffee and Oh Henry bars, and he had a
physique to match his appetite.

“You do have a sort of cat-like grace about you,” Stephan
said, as the couch heaved beneath Bill’s weight.

Bill Plisskins was something of a legend in local
photography circles. A camera nerd of the old school, he’d been a newspaper
photojournalist in the 1960’s, when he was still in his twenties. He had
covered the Vietnam War, as well as the protests against it, with the Monterey
Pop Festival thrown in for seasoning. He’d won a couple of prestigious awards,
done some compelling work, but eventually burned out, as he told it. (Stephan
found it equally likely that Bill’s slothful side had simply put its foot down
one day, calling a moratorium on globe-trotting to exotic locales where
fast-food outlets were scarce.) That was when he had started running the lab, a
vocation that seemed to suit him well. It allowed him to keep a hand in the
world he loved without the bother of travel or daily deadlines.

“So what brings you in here at this hour?” Stephan asked.
“Doesn’t seem like it’s your style to burn the candle at both ends, Bill.”

“Couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d come down and sneak in
a little work,” Bill said.

“Insomnia?” Stephan was surprised.

“I suppose so,” Bill admitted. “Never been an issue
before. I don’t know. Business is down. Rents are up.”

“Maybe you should look into doing some, uh, advertising
or something, track down some new customers,” Stephan offered. It was a vague
and lame suggestion, he realized.

“Perhaps,” Bill said, with a sigh. “But I think the
problem could be deeper than that. The industry is changing, my friend. Digital
photography is taking over. I’m not sure there’s a market for this place anymore.”

“Oh come on, Bill,” Stephan said. “There will always be a
huge contingent of serious photographers who prefer film.”

“I’m not so sure. The new generation of digital SLRs that
are hitting the market? Sure, they’re expensive now, but the quality isn’t so
bad, and the prices are coming down all the time. The professionals are already
switching, doing their post-production on Macs. It’s just so much more
efficient than...” He swept his hand in a wide arc, taking in the darkrooms and
the suite of colour developing machines. “...all of this.”

Disgusted, Stephan considered wielding his camera as a
weapon after all.

“Well, Bill, I don’t agree,” he said, after taking a
moment to compose himself. “Digital is just... inferior. There’s no
comparison.”

“Sure, it’s different, no question.”

“Look at this print,” Stephan went on, waving the
evening’s crowning achievement under Bill’s nose. “Look at how the water here
is almost luminous.”

“It’s a good photo, Stephie,” Bill said. “You’re a
talented kid, no question.”

“Thanks, but that’s not the point at all.”

“Go ahead then,” Bill said, with a not unkindly sigh.

“What I’m saying is that digital will never even come
close to that level of subtlety, and the serious photographers will need the
real thing. You know, silver nitrate – that’s where the beauty comes from, not
some… pixel.”

“Your confidence is reassuring,” Bill said, with a weary
smile. “And I sincerely hope you’re right. Because otherwise... well, something
will have to change around here is all I’m saying.”

*  *  *  *  *

He had decided to wait three days after the magazine
awards before contacting Jenny Wynne. It was the traditional time buffer,
neither so narrow as to make you seem needy nor so wide that she would have
forgotten the intensity of their connection. But she preempted him on the
second day with a text message:

Hv a bsness prop 4 u. Meet nxt thrs after wrk?

He spent several minutes analyzing the message for clues
as to what she had in mind. The “4 u” was subtly flirtatious, wasn’t it? And
the word “prop” could have any number of connotations. Then he caught himself,
laughed it off, and thumbed out an affirmative reply.

He had a week and a half to kill before the appointed
day. It seemed like an eternity under the circumstances, although fortunately
he was busy with work, which would help pass the time. He had a new assignment
for a local architecture magazine that was sure to consume him once he got
started on it. There were also inquiries to deal with from three potential
clients who’d taken note of him at the awards event. It had all worked out just
as he’d hoped, and now June was shading into July, the air growing sultry.

The northern summers were short and hot. You had to take
advantage of them while you could. Over the next couple of days, despite his
workload, he got out in the afternoons to do some shooting outdoors, his own
stuff. He was happy, as he usually was, to be busy.

But he soon grew restless, even with everything going on
– especially with everything going on. Casting around for fresh diversions, he
phoned up an old friend from university, Pete Dickerbee, and arranged to meet
for drinks and dinner at their usual spot, Pete’s favourite pub, the Olde
Trout. The two of them hadn’t gotten together in a couple of months and Stephan
was eager to do some catching up. Pete had gotten married to his long-time
girlfriend, Sally, back in the fall, and Stephan wanted an update, now that the
honeymoon was a few months in the past.

Stephan and Pete had been in the same cohort at the
smallish, nondescript university in the west of the province where they’d each
earned a bachelor’s degree. They’d first encountered one another in their third
year, when they’d both worked for the student newspaper. Pete had dabbled in
music reviewing, while Stephan had been photo editor. Though that was about all
there was to it – casual meet ups at rock shows they were both covering, a few
rounds of Jaegermeister at the paper’s Christmas party – their friendship had
endured while many others that Stephan had made during those years fell by the
wayside. It was hard to say why. It didn’t seem to have much to do with shared
goals, for example. Pete’s lifestyle was more mainstream than Stephan’s, a
characterization that Pete himself would have supported.