In and Out of the Dark
By Cheryl M.
I hate the dark.
I should have thought about that before getting a job in a darkroom, but there hadn’t been much choice. It was either find a job or get kicked out of the house, and there were only two places hiring in the neighborhood: the ice cream store constantly overflowing with screaming kids and Hiruma Photo Lab. I chose the lesser evil.
It’s been three weeks since I started working in the darkroom as Mr. Hiruma’s assistant. Mr. Hiruma is about 90 years old, a quiet, frail being who just wanted another pair of eyes to help him see what he no longer can in the dark. Sometimes I think he also just wanted someone else to be in the shop in case he suddenly dies at work one day. I wonder why he doesn’t just close the shop and call it a day with life. On the other hand if he does that I’d have to move over to the ice cream shop or worse, get a real job. So this arrangement, while somewhat fragile, works out for me right now.
The only part I’m not keen on about working in a darkroom, is working in a dark room. Occasionally I surface out to attend to customers, but for the most part I’m inside here. It’s like someone mixed pitch black and the devil’s red and mixed them into this nightmare of a painting. The equipment and tables are just barely lit by this sinister glow I have to navigate around in.
I don’t like being around people. But I don’t like being alone here. I like being alone where I feel safe. Is that confusing? I’m often confused myself. My point is, being lonely is one thing. Being trapped in the dark is another. Being both is a tragedy. Mr. Hiruma doesn’t count because he’s nothing much more than a slowly moving shadow.
The only thing I find enjoyable is looking at the images I help develop. The lab is in a quiet neighbourhood and fewer and fewer people use film, but even so there’s still a steady stream of customers who come. They bring their rolls of film filled with people and moments, and leave it to us to grow them. This is human interaction at its optimum. I like getting to meet the people in these pictures, up close but still safely sealed in.
They’re in the darkroom with me, but they’re also not. They only start slowly fading into existence after I’ve lifted and hung them on pins to dry. People who were captured by a camera and are now in my hands. Dozens of them come in, and I am the first one to see them as they were at the very moment the lens found them. Until I pack them into their envelopes to be delivered to their respective owners, I have the freedom to wonder who they are.
I’m hanging up this week’s batch of prints. I pin them carefully along the wall. They’re lined up neatly, organized by the rolls that come from different customers. In the red light it’s difficult to make out but once I go closer the subjects come into focus. Children rolling upside down. Cats. Students clustered together in the identical uniforms. Old people who don’t know where to look at. More cats.
The darkroom is silent save for the hum of Mr. Hiruma’s shadow and the narratives forming in my head.
There’s a cat, white with rough grey patches splattered across its back. A small plastic bag hangs from its mouth. The cat—let’s call him Tom—pads across the grotty street looking left and right. Every time he sees a wad of rubbish he lowers his bag on the floor and nudges it in. Tom is a good cat.
Always cleaning up when no one notices. He’s not the most handsome one on the block but he has a heart for the greater good.
Tom runs into Yamato, a black cat surreptitiously scavenging out of a rubbish bin. He blends in well with the black bin. His head bobs in and out with admirable sleuth, but Tom easily catches those piercing green eyes.
Keep out of the rubbish, he warns Yamato. There’s nothing good to be found there no matter how long you look.
The black cat blinks.
The camera snaps the guilty moment and moves on to the next cat.
A child is emerging from a hole in the ground. Little girls usually wear two ponytails at maximum, but she has three. One sprouts from the top of her head like an antenna looking for a signal. Yes, this is Earth. There is no sign of her parents around. She is here to find the other children of her kind. She climbs out of her shuttle and into the playground.
Any of these children could be her friend. The boy drinking water upside down. The girl who doesn’t notice the grain of rice stuck to her cheek while she eats yakisoba. The baby practising the horse stance in his pram. They are all alien children and the three-ponytailed girl is the leader of the pack.
I remember the person who took this roll of film. Usually customers come in with it already out of the camera, but this man hadn’t rewound the film beforehand. He came in with a girl on his arm, and with his other arm handed me the camera. It was a Leica camera, a gorgeous body that seemed out of place in this shabby store. He took his time to rewind the film, shaking it out of the camera and slowly removing the canister to reveal a Portra roll.
When he was doing this he constantly paused to hold the Leica up to the light and squint at it as if hard in thought. Casually displaying the Ferrari of film cameras in my face. The girl on his arm just looked at him in awe and anticipation of the works of art that his expensive film would presumably birth.
Labour in the darkroom is over. I hold the developed prints out to see the world for the first time. I squint. Is that right? I can’t see anything. Everything’s blurry. I can make out smudges of grass and a vaguely female-looking entity awkwardly placed in the side of the image. Flowers that are unrecognisable beyond their fuzzy outlines. No, everything’s just out of focus. Even a Leica can’t save poor photography.
A class of high school students runs around and around this roll, their unbridled energy charging up the smiles on their faces. It’s fall, and they’re on their school trip to Kamakura. The girls are hitting peak excitement. With just two hands they manage to carry mobile phones and tapioca drinks and identical Utsurundesu disposable cameras that they take turns to use. Group photos are a messy mash of arms and peace signs. Occasionally the boys swagger in, eager to jump in together with the females. They merge seamlessly into a picture-perfect group of—
Never mind. I can’t continue. This is giving me social anxiety.
The last roll of the day stars no humans. I can’t quite make out what any of these images are supposed to be. Most of the photos show the same thing—a clothing line from which hangs one garment at a time. A white potato sack dress. Leather underwear. A cotton jacket with twenty pockets. The brightest yellow socks I’ve ever seen. The socks swing lazily on their pins, basking in sunlight. They are the opposite of me.
It’s a record of someone’s laundry on film. The last photo breaks the pattern in the series. It’s a lemon tree in the garden, but on closer look the lemons are marked with ink. On even closer look they’re faces. Every lemon has a different face on it. I wonder how it’s possible to cover such a wide range of emotions on a single lemon tree. I study every lemon the way I study every human I see. They’re more photogenic than I expected.
Every photo is bathed in warm golden sunlight. It should be hard to tell down here, but somehow the light is even stronger than the red tint of the darkroom.
It’s different from the other film rolls. I can’t make enough sense of the subjects in these images to create a coherent narrative. What did this person think when they took these photos? It must have been Mr. Hiruma at the counter when she dropped off her film. I didn’t see anyone who might have taken these.
At the end of the day I bring out the film negatives, neatly packed into envelopes ready for their owners to take them home. An old grey-haired man in a scruffy cleaning jumpsuit comes and picks up the folder of cats. A young mother collects the photos she took of her daughter and her friends at the playground. The Leica owner returns as well. He takes the negatives with airy confidence, and with that same confidence purchases another six-roll box of Portra 400. The high school students come in next. I quickly give them their pictures and dispel the flurry of giggles choking up the shop.
The last person is the one I am waiting for. I don’t like meeting people, but I am curious to see the person who took photos of her laundry and painted faces on a lemon tree. I am ready when she comes in. And when she comes in, I am surprised. She is a walking bobblehead doll, with a body too petite for her
head. Her expression, coupled with the grainy freckles spanning her whole face, reminds me of one of the lemons on the trees.
When she passes me her receipt in exchange for the film negatives I peer at her name.
Lemon Tachibana.
That makes sense if she grows her own lemons. She’s even wearing those yellow socks she’d pinned up on a clothesline. They’re almost blinding, a glorious source of light pulling me out of the darkroom. When she turns to leave my eyes remain on her yellow socks, following them until she disappears from the shop.
Maybe the next time she returns there’ll be a story ready for me.
