The first time Dane Alden noticed The Spot it was the summer of 2008. He couldn't say when specifically – it had seemed insignificant at the time – but he knew it was between the opening ceremonies and the closing ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. He had been watching the media coverage, although not of the games themselves. He was more interested in the controversy over the alleged unrestricted access to journalists and the growing concern that this access was far less open than the Chinese government had originally claimed.
On his television, a foreign correspondent pointed towards a small crowd gathering in the background waving the blue, red and gold flag of Tibet, and discussed the growing unrest and the rise of similar protests around various Olympic sites. That day he was reporting a short distance away from the Beijing National Stadium, better known as "The Bird's Nest."
"Jesus."
Dane clicked the TV off and pried himself out of his leather armchair. This was a sad excuse for coverage. He could barely see the protest, let alone the protesters, and of course, they, the people, were the heart of the matter.
He stretched, thrusting his shoulders back, and pressed his hands to his lower back until he felt a soft pop. Aging was doing him no favors, and he was only 42. His back was already crap, and an hour in the armchair had left him stiff, even with the massaging rollers turned on. He stepped on the footswitch, turning off the chair and listened as the five thousand dollar motor shut down with a sputter.
Piece of crap chair.
Dane needed a distraction. Something to get his mind off of his fucked up back and that piss poor excuse for news coverage; the whole thing was killing his mood. Not one close-up on the protestors, he thought. They just kept the camera right on that smiling jackoff, Anderson Cooper wannabe. The whole thing disgusted him.
Dane was a photojournalist, and despite the fact that he wouldn't be working on any Olympic coverage that summer – they'd sent that damn Sorenson kid and everyone knew he didn't have the experience, though he did have the connections – he hadn't been able to get his mind off of it.
Yet, at the same time, he didn't really have much interest in the job. He didn't need a glamour shot of some sixteen-year-old gymnast - twelve if she was on the Chinese team - in a victory pose. Sporting events were not his usual subjects. Of course, if the Tibetan protests were to turn violent, then there might be some allure.
Dane grabbed his Coke from the coffee table and took a long chug. He hoped a jolt of caffeine would wake him from this lazy Saturday malaise. Coffee probably would have done the trick better - though in all honesty, Dane needed a different type of stimulation. Perhaps he should call that Suzie chick he'd met last Thursday passing by the Dalai Lama protest rally. He'd been capturing shots of the crowd, when he first caught sight of her in his lens. Her wavy auburn hair and porcelain skin had stood out against a crowd of largely Asian protestors.
He slid his hand in his pocket, groping for his phone.
"Fuck."
His phone wasn't there. He began searching his apartment, starting with his armchair, then moving to the couch, and on to the mantle, then the kitchen and everywhere else that he could think to check. Every time he looked up from the search, his eyes would catch on one of dozens of horrific black and white photographs that adorned his walls.
They were portraits of catastrophe and loss. From every wall and every shelf, these images stared down at him through the eyes of the downtrodden and the suffering. Some of these photos were his work, others were prints from his favorite photographers. His shots, however, were always displayed in positions of prominence.
In his apartment's small foyer, visitors were greeted by the image of a soot-covered fireman aiding a middle-aged woman with a head wound through concrete debris as ash rained down. Above his fireplace, a large framed photo displayed a young African child of no more than thirteen lying in the street, pressing one hand to a bullet wound in his thigh, while the other hand aimed an AK-47 at an unseen assailant. Even in his bedroom, the tear-laden eyes of a young woman scarred by acid looked out from a black and white panoramic on the verge of tears. Emaciated children, the dead of war (casualties of war always seemed too distant of a phrase), and the victims of disaster surrounded visitors to Chez Alden.
This always seemed right to Dane. This was his way of both taking pride in his work, and reminding himself of the pain and misery hidden beneath success – even his own. These victims were the dust swept under the rug of an uncaring world, a populace distracted by the glitz of the movie stars and the next shiny gadget from Silicon Valley.
Dane flocked to tragedy, traveling to far away disaster zones to catch (not take, he was very forceful on that issue) the portraits of the survivors and of the dead. This was not due to any pleasure attained in the misery of others, even if such misery had paid for his New York loft, but a necessity of his greater purpose. Photography for Dane was an art of capturing that illusive truth beneath the surface of reality. If truth had a greater clarity in moments of tragedy, then he had no choice but to seek out that suffering in order to illuminate his subject of choice.
Of course not all photos on display in his apartment were quite as horrific. Occasionally, a family photo or a portrait of a friend would sneak onto his wall or hide away on one of the bookshelves; albeit, these were always smaller prints, and far outnumbered by the larger images of calamity.
The Spot was on one such photo.
Dane's search for his phone led him to a bookshelf tucked away in a far corner of the apartment. Home to his sparse collection of pop literature, this shelf was the shame of his collection, a spot of guilty pleasures, and it was the last place he thought to check. He scoured it from top to bottom, starting at Michael Connelly and moving down past Kathy Reichs on to his even smaller true crime collection of used paperbacks. His back ached from leaning over to check the low shelves, and Dane was about to call the whole damn thing quits, when he saw it.
The phone was tucked behind a shiny Target frame enclosing a picture of Dane and an old fling, Ellen Veers. Dane had his arm wrapped around her shoulders and was sporting a huge, though vaguely false, grin; and Ellen smiled as she looked up at him, a look in her eyes somewhere between adulation and love. The photo was in a black and white, unlike many of his other pictures of family and friends. This one had a shallow focus on Dane and his paramour and had been taken with great care. He had used a tripod and a timer to get the shot, and had set it against a backdrop of Christmas lights blurred in the out-of-focus background.
Dane smiled for a moment as he remembered the night that he took that photo, then grabbed his phone and dialed Suzie. On the second ring, however, a feeling of unease crept over him. Something was off. A thought was pulling for his attention, as if something forgotten but on the tip of the tongue.
On the third ring, it hit him. A spot. In the picture, on his left forearm, the arm draped over Ellen's shoulder, Dane thought he saw a tiny blemish in the photo. This spot, a spot that would later come to be thought of as The Spot, was at the time no larger than the tip of a pen. Dane could have overlooked this in the past quite easily, yet this photo he had developed by hand. Had he made a mistake in the dark room, had a blemish appeared in the print, he would have made another.
All of this Dane thought in just a moment, the span of two rings of a telephone. Then Suzie picked up on the other line and Dane forgot about The Spot. At least temporarily.
YOU ARE READING
The Darkroom ✔️
Short StoryDane Alden was a photo journalist whose livelihood depended upon tragedy; yet he wasn't prepared for that tragedy to meet so close to home. Then, one summer on assignment in Baghdad, he met Ellen Veers and his life would never be the same. Now years...